Lords of the Seventh Swarm (21 page)

Chapter 20

When Maggie woke shortly after dawn, she lay abed for a long time, missing Gallen, staring at the spirit mask he’d left propped in a corner.

Such an odd thing, with its vacant eyeholes, watching her: the surface of the mask seemed to be of leather, lacquered and painted. A base of dark browns and blacks lay under silver, filigreed in fascinating curlicues. Tiny pictographs were filigreed above the silver lines. Over all this lay splotches of dark blue and purple paint, weaving about in confusing jumbles.

Other bits of silver had been engraved into “teeth” on the mask, where it fit over a Qualeewooh’s own teeth, lending them strength. These little metal teeth were carefully notched, forming serrated edges, and were then filed to incredible sharpness. Maggie thought the teeth cruel, frightening.

On inspecting the mask, Maggie could not decide what color she thought it to be—blue, purple, silver. The odd mix of colors made it so that the hues seemed to meld and flow, rivers of color, blending together. The mask seemed alive with movement.

As she stared at the mask, perhaps she slept. Perhaps it was only the gradual sinking of her tired eyes, but suddenly she thought the mask did move, that it wrenched aside. She imagined dark eyes, staring from the holes.

Maggie found herself suddenly alert, heart pumping madly, terrified of the mask. This is silly, she told herself. I shouldn’t be lying here, frightened of some piece of leather. But it was more than leather. It was a receiver. Gallen had put it on, seen … something.

I should investigate
, Maggie thought.
What kind of technologist would I be, if I didn’t investigate?

Strengthening her resolve, she grabbed her mantle from beside the bed, put it on, then grabbed the mask, examined it.

The sensors on her mantle could detect no emanations of heat or light coming from the mask. Maggie studied it under magnification. She could discern wood and pulp mixed into a heavy black resin. The base of the mask was leather, with tiny dimples in it, the remains of small feathers.

With a jarring sense of revulsion, Maggie realized the leather was not just a piece of some dead animal—the leather was Qualeewooh skin. This poor bird’s face had been plucked, then the mask painted on in the form of a black resin. Once the mask hardened, the silver had been inlaid over the resin, and the whole thing painted again. Maggie detected no electronic components, no nanoware. She had her mantle test the air around the mask, listening for electronic signals on every frequency. She picked up radio traffic from AIs sending bursts of binary language, music and holovision signals from Devil’s Bunghole. She listened desperately for some message from Gallen, though she knew he was far to the north, out of her range.

Nothing more.

Maggie picked up the mask, looked inside.

Skin. Nothing in the mask but dried skin that smelled faintly oily. Maggie held her breath, put on the mask.

Think nothing, expect nothing
, she told herself, clearing her mind. She didn’t want to imagine she’d received a message. She inspected the mask’s interior, saw the wrinkled gray leather within the mask, smelled its oily scent, like the dried skin of a snake. Nothing should happen, she thought. This isn’t real technology.

Yet as she drew the mask on, time seemed to slow. The act of pulling it over her face seemed almost impossible, as if she moved through honey. She could breathe easily enough, found her heart beating at the same pace. Her muscles moved normally.

But her thought quickened. That seemed the answer. Her mind seemed to race far faster than it ever had before, as if she suddenly had all the time in the universe to ponder.

The mask felt too narrow to fit her face—but the leather stretched wide enough when she pushed. She heard an odd buzzing, or, more precisely, she imagined she felt movement in her head, felt motors turning or gears tumbling through the slow muck of her consciousness.

She sat on the bed, gazing through the mask’s eyeholes, which were not quite aligned for human eyes. She could not see things just in front of her.

Her heart pounded.
I shouldn’t do this
, she thought.
I shouldn’t wear this. It’s too much like the Inhuman. I’m leaving myself open to alien ideas. Felph had said this was dangerous, wearing a mask too much drove one mad.

Yet she wore it now precisely because she had been invaded by the Inhuman. She’d lived over a hundred lifetimes in different bodies, none quite human. She did not fear the spirit mask.

She sat for a long moment. Nothing seemed to happen. She looked about the room, thinking, This is a waste.

She closed her eyes, wondered if she should take off the mask. Something drove her to leave it on one moment longer. The buzzing in her head grew louder, louder, insistent.

And the room disappeared.

Maggie looked about, found she wore no mask. She stood on a distant world where there was no sun, moon, or stars. Only a midnight sky without an apparent source of light. Yet Maggie could see. The ground beneath her provided light, like a pane of clouded glass. Pure white light welled from deep in the ground. The land around her was perfectly flat. No mountains or hills marred the skyline, no crevices. The ground felt too hard to hold so much as a footprint.

Maggie felt so fascinated by this, she knelt, gazed deep into the heart of the earth, struggling to see the source of light.

Her breath fogged the glassy surface, and she rubbed her arm over the condensation, wiping it away. She held her breath, staring deep into the ground, watching.

There, below the glass, she saw movement—small figures walking. She recognized herself, standing in a green field. Gallen held her, dressed all in the black of a Lord Protector, clinging to her for support, as if terribly ill. Both of them gazed up at the horizon expectantly, nervously, and something dark wriggled there, something black and horrible.

Suddenly a dronon Vanquisher hurtled toward them. Its wings rumbled, and it held its battle arms high for attack. It felled Gallen in one deadly stroke, then hurtled past. Maggie shrieked and leapt, fearing the Vanquisher would burst from the earth.

Yet nothing came for her. Maggie stood on the plain of glass, backing from that horrible spot in the ground. Certainty filled her:
it is coming. It is coming for me.
Terror filled her.

She gazed into the ground, hoping to see more. Around her, light shifted from white to various colors. It was as if bubbles began rising from the ground, bubbles of color that burst against the air, then dissipated. Within each bubble she saw a scene, so that no scene remained for more than a split second—she saw herself as a child, her mother comforting her after a fall; in another place, she sat outside the circle of fire at Mahoney’s Inn while old John Mahoney himself led the local fishermen in a rousing song; in another scene, she piled dung in a rich man’s garden back in Clere, while Father Heany stood on, watching; in another she was an infant, and her father tossed her in the air.

It was as if moments of her life were surfacing, moments she’d forgotten, moments half-remembered, moments she had not yet seen—all foaming over, here for her to see.

In one bubble, she and Gallen lay dead while a dronon Vanquisher tore at their corpses.

“Save me! Why doesn’t someone save me?” Maggie shouted, her heart drumming. She knew this was no vain threat.

Then Maggie heard a dim whispering voice, “We are here.”

As if on its own volition, her chin tilted up, and she saw a light, a green flame, hurtling through the midnight skies like a comet.

As it neared, the flame enlarged, till for a moment she thought she saw an X in the sky. As it drew close, she saw it was a bird, a great bird of light, flying on wings of green fire.

“I hear you,” a voice whispered. “I come.”

The bird of light was upon her, so close she could touch it. The Qualeewooh was a creature of flame, the darkest emerald. It wore a spirit mask, and Maggie recognized the whorls and pictographs engraved there.

A bird six thousand years dead. On the horizon behind it, flocks of Qualeewoohs, dazzling like stars, rushed toward her.

Maggie shoved the mask from her face so hard it clattered to the floor, and she leapt up on the bed, suddenly afraid the bird of her vision would come for her.

She stood a long ten minutes, scared witless. Everything she’d seen was clearly impossible. Yet she had felt the coolness of the smooth earth, had seen the lights and heard voices. She could no more deny it than deny her own existence.

It seemed impossible.

Magic. The Qualeewoohs’ technology was so different from man’s, she’d have thought it magic. Yet Maggie knew she’d seen the owner of that mask. He lived, beyond human understanding, in a place where past and present fused with future. And he is coming. He—she felt certain this Qualeewooh was male—had promised to come, and others were coming with it.

Maggie stood on the bed, trembling so badly she finally let herself collapse, fall to the bed, and curl in a ball to think.

She wasn’t certain. She wasn’t certain what she’d heard and seen. It all seemed too incredible, so far outside her experience she could not put faith in it. She realized she had not physically “spoken” to anyone in the vision. Her mouth had not moved, her tongue had not formed words.

Her plea for help had been the cry of her soul, of something so deep within her, her bones would have screamed though her mouth was struck silent.

And the bird of light had not spoken. It had not said, “I come.” it had said both less and more, speaking mind to mind. It had said, “I come. We come. It comes.”

What did that mean? We come to save you? The future comes? Was the creature counseling her to prepare for the inevitable?

All of this seemed right, she decided. And more.

Everything inside her cried out to put the mask back on, to commune with this creature till she gained complete understanding. But she recalled Felph’s warnings. Those who wore the masks too much faced madness.

She’d met one of those unfortunate souls at Felph’s party. Not only had he gained no understanding from the masks, he’d lost touch with reality.

So Maggie curled in a ball for two long hours till she calmed.
I can’t let this mask control me
, she decided.
I can’t let it influence me. If the vision of the Vanquisher I saw lies in my future, who knows when it will come? I cannot spend my life running from it. And perhaps it means nothing. Perhaps it is but one possible future.

Once Maggie got up, she decided to throw herself into work, take her mind off the mask and its strange message. She spent the morning working in Felph’s technological wing. The events of last night had unnerved her—the way Zeus had groped her, the way she’d found herself considering the extremes she might have to go to in order to free Felph’s children. She’d even fantasized about killing Felph, and that notion seemed so … irrational.

This morning she needed to get away from Zeus, think about this in the clear light of day. She entered the palace’s technological wing under the guise of planning to download some of the memory crystals from her mantle into Felph’s system, but she stayed long after she finished, studying Felph’s files. His security systems were hopelessly inadequate to keep her off his terminals.

The information she found disturbed her. Security in the palace was nonexistent. Last night Zeus talked longingly of his hope for escape. Before studying the files, Maggie had imagined that Felph must have killer droids circling the palace. Though Felph did have four security droids posted outside, he hadn’t programmed them to keep his children in, nor to keep strangers off the grounds. They only destroyed stray predators.

On reflection, Maggie saw that Felph didn’t need any high-security measures. His primary defense was simpler than killer droids: it was the vast seething desert, separating his oasis from any tangle within three hundred kilometers.

So Zeus’s fears seemed unwarranted. Leaving the palace would be as simple as flying out. Felph’s droids cared for dozens of florafeems; they would accept any human request for use of the beasts. A quick check of the beast handlers’ memory showed that Zeus himself often took the florafeems to visit Devil’s Bunghole.

Maggie thought, But Zeus intimated to me last night that he’d never left the palace, that Lord Felph held him prisoner. Maggie retrieved video images the droids had filed of Zeus’s most recent trips. Maggie confirmed that the young man had been lying.

What she found left Maggie heartsick. She’d suspected that Felph was some kind of monster. Now she realized he was nothing more than an old man, an errant old man who had long ago fled society, and yet had not given up on mankind. She’d judged him harshly, more harshly than one person should ever judge another.

Yet Zeus had lied to her. Maggie recalled being the victim of hundreds of seduction attempts in past lives—many of which failed, some of which succeeded. Just as often, she’d made such attempts. But never had she run across someone like Zeus—handsome, clever, manipulative, rife with pheromones, and apparently lacking any moral compunctions whatsoever.

Zeus was dangerous. So dangerous, Felph had felt compelled to destroy his clones in order to keep the young man in line.

Yet Maggie had fallen for Zeus’s smooth talk. He’d seemed so sincere. The thought made her boil.

Maggie wondered: she knew that a Guide could send audial or visual hallucinations. Perhaps Zeus’s Guide had done this to him. Perhaps he hadn’t known the truth about the lack of palace security—as difficult as Maggie found this notion to credit. Perhaps his memories had even been edited, so that he didn’t remember his trips outside the palace.

She checked other records, questioned Felph’s AI about the programming of Zeus’s Guide. Zeus had complained he’d been held captive, made a slave, but the programming she found told a different story: Felph had programmed the Guide to forbid Zeus from murder. Beyond that, it kept Zeus from endangering himself, from lying when confronted by Lord Felph, and from rape.

That was it. Zeus had been free to leave the palace any time. He’d done so, often.