Six Moon Dance (28 page)

She, in the meantime, had been left to her own devices. She frequently remarked as much to her attendants, intrigued by the phrase, for it was literally true. Her memory, her maintenance machines, her elaborately miniaturized equipment, her IDIOT SAVANT, the syncretic scanner she used in her attempt to find patterns where none were apparent, all were her own devices with whom she was frequently left.

Just now, she needed her maintenance machines. She always put off maintenance until the need for it became what she thought of as painful. Though she was not designed to feel pain, the intense unease occasioned by delay in response, by inability to remember immediately, by mechanical parts that did not function precisely or systems that did not mesh, must, she felt, come close to what mankind meant by pain. It could be avoided by getting maintenance more frequently, and she could never remember between maintenance sessions why she did not do so. Nonetheless, she always put it off, without knowing why.

This time, she took with her into the booth the data cube that the trader had sent. She inserted it into the feed mechanism, and directed that during maintenance it should be entered into permanent memory. Then everything went gray, as it always did during maintenance. Time stopped. All thought stopped as well. Only after her linkages had been disconnected, only after her memory as Questioner was off line, was the cause of her discomfort made manifest. Then, and for a brief time afterward, her mankind brains, those three with which she had been endowed, remembered who they were. Mathilla remembered, and M’Tafa, and Tiu. During that time, the separate entity that was the Questioner knew why she judged some societies as she did, and why she felt about them as she did, and how deep her prejudices went, even though they never showed.

When her usual maintenance was complete, after the linkages were reestablished and the memory hooked up with all its shining achievements on display, Questioner did not move, did not utter, did not recollect, for she was still holding fast to Mathilla and M’Tafa and Tiu, unwilling to let them go and they, within her, were holding fast to life once more, unwilling to be gone. Then, usually, the booth door opened automatically, and the stimulant shock was provided, and she wakened, as one wakens terrified from dream, only to feel the terror fade, and shred, and become as gauze, as a thing forgotten, as it always had before.

Not this time. This time she found the memory remained with her, firmly planted inside her files, their names and faces, the stories of their short lives, and how they had died.

Mathilla. M’Tafa. And Tiu.

O
rnery Bastable arrived in Gilesmarsh when the
Way-good
came in to unload a cargo of gold-ash and dried Purse fish. Since it would be some time before the
Way-good
had discharged its cargo and been loaded once more, Ornery had a whole tenday to herself.

She intended to spend part of it in Sendoph, where Pearla had recently achieved statistical normalcy by bearing a living daughter after a run of one stillborn daughter and two sons. First, however, she intended to spend a day or two in the Septopod’s Eye in Naibah, seeing what she could find out about the thing she had seen, or almost seen, when she had been marooned in the wild. Though she was not imaginative enough to have frightened herself into a funk over the experience, she had resolved to ask some questions next time she had time in port, and now seemed as good a time as any.

She had just received her pay, and she spent a good bit of it buying drinks for those who had stories to tell. When she had listened for several evenings, she had accounts of the setting of stone pillars and questioning sounds and shadows moving, all of them making a reasonably consistent catalogue. One talkative old type, who had at one time kept the library at the Fortress of Vanished Men, said the records described creatures seen in the wild by the second settlers, quite monstrous things that seemed to have disappeared for no one had seen them for several hundred years.

As for stone pillars, they had been often seen on beaches and plateaus, always in groups of three or more, always in the clear where the shadow pattern could be seen under sun or moon, the nighttime patterns depending upon which moons were where. The pillars sometimes appeared at dawn in places where they had not been at dusk, and therefore were assumed to have been set up by creatures, people, things, or beings who worked at night and intended to remain unseen. Two informants had used the word “Joggiwagga,” and Ornery recognized the word from her infancy.

Joggiwagga, whatever they were, were busier at certain lunar configurations than others, and these were also the times when the loud questioning or challenging sounds were most likely to be heard. Because she was a sailor, Ornery recognized the times as coincident with exceptionally high or low tides. Six sizeable moons, leaving aside the two orbiting rocks, could produce quite a complicated schedule of tides. A two big-moon neap, full or dark, was low, but a three big-moon neap was lower, and an all-moon low sucked the water out of the bays to leave mud flats extending to the horizon. A rare five dark-moon high, on the other hand, would bring water over the piers in Gilesmarsh, high up the levees of Naibah, and send the River Giles over its banks all the way to Sendoph.

Six big-moon highs came about every seven or eight centuries. Though the more extreme lunar configurations were rare, they were the ones during which stones were set.

Once Ornery had satisfied herself that she wasn’t crazy, that she could assume the things or beings or creatures were real, she put her notebook in her pocket, finished her ale, bade her friends and associates farewell for the nonce, and went out to confirm arrangements for the trip to Sendoph. There was a steam-powered mail launch headed upstream within the hour, and it was owned by Ornery’s brother-in-law. By the gift of a bottle and a little banter with the captain, Ornery had earned an invitation to ride to Sendoph in style. Travel by engine was still rare and might get rarer, considering the firemountain had buried most of the mines and about half the railroad. There was still more reliance on horses than on horsepower, and riding in a launch was, therefore, a treat.

Ornery regarded it as such, sitting at her ease on the rear deck, watching the paddles of the stern wheel fall toward her as the reed bed and marshes and watermills went by. Low in the eastern sky the misty bulk of the scarp seemed to float upon the lower clouds as it blew ominous bars of smoke across the higher ones. Ornery turned her back to it, not wanting to be reminded of the tremors that were coming closer and closer together. People were beginning to get really jumpy about it and would have been more so if they could have seen the damage. Though there had been a good many more disasters like the one that took Ornery’s family, all the destruction thusfar was behind and among the Ratbacks, invisible from the cities. Most everyone in the more populated areas believed or wanted to believe that they were not in danger.

Ornery thought everyone was in danger, whether they believed it or not. Anyone could see that the summit was blacker than it had been, meaning either that ashes were falling atop the snows, or the snows had melted, revealing the dark rock below.

“There’s been shakings and shiverings for a time now. She’s goin’ to blow,” said the captain, around the splinter of chaff he was chewing. “Been a long while accordin’ to the wise folk. I say it doesn’t matter how long, it’s still alive and it’ll blow again.” He laughed a phlegmy laugh, hawked and spat over the side. “Warm up all them Haggers in Sendoph, won’t it?”

His tone angered Ornery, but she kept a neutral tone as she said, “You’re cheerful about it, considering you may be there when it goes.”

“If I am, I’ll be in company, and if I’m not, I’ll rejoice. Whatever the inscrutable Hagions provide.”

Ornery made a noncommittal noise. If the scarp decided to blow, it really wouldn’t matter what had been said about it either way. Either it would reach all the way to the Giles or it wouldn’t. She turned the conversation in another direction, and the hours went by more comfortably until, along about evening, they were in sight of the city, the domes of the Temple district shining in the rose-amber light.

“Where do you tie up?” Ornery wanted to know.

“We’ll stop at the post pier to pick up and drop off mail and valuables. Then we’ll go on up to the old wharf just the other side of Brewer’s Bridge, and we’ll tie there for tonight. I’ve half the forward hold full of stuff for House Genevois, and the other half grain for the brewers. We’ll unload in the morning, then go farther upstream to the market district to pick up special orders for Naibah. Will you leave us tonight or tomorrow?”

Ornery thought about it. Her sister lived not far from the Temple district, which was just a few blocks west of the river, but it was late to drop in on her. “I’ll help you unload and sleep aboard, if you’ve no objection, Captain, then I’ll go on to my sister’s place in the morning.”

So it was agreed between them. The boat thrust itself upstream past a tanner’s yard and a printing house—both identifiable by the smell—then for a brief stop at the post wharf. Then onward once more, past a lumber yard and a dyers yard and a clutter of old houses, then past a tall wall with two odd little towers at its corners and the remains of a rotted wharf at its center, and finally beneath the high central arch of Brewers Bridge to the pier beyond, where, with much shouting and maneuvering, the captain, Ornery, the deckhand and the stoker brought themselves tight against the timber pier built out from the edge of the stony trough in which the river ran.

It seemed too quiet. Ornery stared all around, finding no reason for the silence, which was soon broken in any case, when people came with carts from House Genevois and from the breweries. They unloaded by torchlight, the carts departed, and the strange silence returned. Later that night, as Ornery spread her blankets on the deck she heard a scurrying, like small animals moving, and she looked up to see a skulk of shadows vanishing along the river path in a lengthy stream, like a migration. It was too dark to see who they were, though Ornery thought them too small for mankind, and they had been in a most dreadful hurry. She resolved to tell someone about it tomorrow, perhaps, if it seemed important.

T
hat same evening, which was a few days after Marool Mantelby returned from her trip into the mountains, Marool made a visit to the Temple of the Hagions, most particularly the office of the High Crones, where she was assured a polite welcome by virtue of her frequent and generous gifts to the Temple. She met with women who knew her better, perhaps, than she supposed: D’Jevier and Onsofruct Passenger, who remembered the fourteen-year-old Marool well, though Marool had been too preoccupied at that time to remember anyone.

“Revered Hags,” Marool announced as she entered the throne room cum office. “Thank you for seeing me.”

D’Jevier and Onsofruct had changed little in the almost twenty years since Marool had come to the Temple to find the Hagion Morrigan. The two Hags had never mentioned that incident to anyone except one another, preferring to forget it as nearly as possible. Over the years, both had cultivated the impersonal manner and voice suitable for use in Temple when emotion was inappropriate, and it was this voice D’Jevier used to greet Marool.

“You are welcome, Marool. Is there something needful?”

Marool shook her head as she took the seat she was offered, then sat there with her lips pursed out in uncharacteristic uncertainty. Her hostesses did not encourage her, but merely waited, as though she could tell them nothing that would surprise them.

“I have been into the hills,” said Marool, at last. “I went to look at the place where my parents and sister died.”

“Ah,” murmured Onsofruct. “You had a natural curiosity.”

Marool shook her head with an annoyed expression. “It wasn’t that! It’s as though something about their deaths has been nagging at me for years. I wanted to see for myself. However …” She went on to describe her own experience, and that of her driver and Man of Business. “I suppose their bodies are there still,” she concluded. “The guard reported what happened to the guard post, but I’ve heard nothing more about it.”

D’Jevier cast a glance at her cousin, which Onsofruct returned, furrowing her brow and clenching her jaw before replying, “We have all heard stories of Wilderneers and monsters. Such are common tellings during the Long Nights.”

“You mentioned picking up something, some artifact?” D’Jevier queried.

“I have it here,” said Marool, taking a packet from her bag, laying it upon the table and unrolling it. As she did so, a stench spread throughout the room, and both the Hags caught their breaths.

“You smell it?” demanded Marool, looking at their faces.

Both nodded. D’Jevier held her breath and took the article into her hands, keeping a layer of the wrapping between it and her skin.

“It looks more organic than manufactured,” said Marool. “Like a giant fingernail. That shape, at any rate, though far too huge. The bottom is ragged, as though it had been ripped away….”

D’Jevier rewrapped the article, obviously troubled. “It’s a scale,” she said. “From some sort of squamous creature.”

“It would have to be enormous!” said Onsofruct, her eyes wide.

D’Jevier grated, “I have no doubt it is. We are only now growing numerous enough that we can explore the wilderness in any systematic way, and as we do so, we hear more frequent tales about things or beings in the badlands. Did you see any kind of trail while you were there? As though something very large had been dragged along, pushing up the dirt at the sides?”

Marool nodded, though unwillingly, for she had thought to do all the enlightening herself. “I did, yes. Both an old trail and a newer one. So new that nothing was growing on it.”

D’Jevier went on, “We have had reports of such in the hills to the west. As though a very large serpent had crawled there, though the paths are straight or angular, not sinous. The witnesses are sober persons whose word I am inclined to accept, and there have been too many disappearances of livestock for peace of mind.”