Elder race, p.1
Elder Race, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Dedicated to the memory of Gene Wolfe, one of the great masters, whose story “Trip, Trap” was a major inspiration for this book
Lynesse
NOBODY CLIMBED THE MOUNTAIN beyond the war-shrine. The high passes led nowhere and the footing was treacherous. An age ago this whole side of the mountain had flaked away in great shelves, and legend said a particularly hubristic city was buried beneath the debris of millennia, punished by forgotten powers for forgotten crimes. What was left was a single path zigzagging up to the high reaches through land unfit for even the most agile of grazers, and killing snow in the cold seasons. And these were not the only reasons no one climbed there.
Lynesse Fourth Daughter was excluded from that “no one.” When she was a child, the grand procession of her mother’s court had made its once-a-decade pilgrimage to the war-shrine, to remember the victories of her ancestors. The battles themselves had been fought far away, but there was a reason the shrine stood in that mountain’s foothills. This was where the royal line had gone in desperate times, to find desperate help. And young Lyn had known those stories better than most, and had made a game attempt at scaling the mountain which myths and her family histories made so much of. And the retainers had chased after her as soon as people noticed she was gone, and they’d had cerkitts sniff her trail halfway up the ancient landslip before they caught up with her. That had been more trouble than she’d got into in any five other years combined. Her mother’s vizier raged and denounced her, and she’d been exhibited before the whole court, ambassadors and servants and the lot, made to stand still as stones in a penitence dress and a picture hung about her neck illustrating what she’d done. Her mother’s majordomo, still smarting from when she’d stolen his wig, had overseen her humiliation. And her sisters had mocked her and rolled their eyes and told one another, in her hearing, that she was an embarrassment to her noble line and what could be done with such a turbulent brat?
And her mother, in whose name all those functionaries had hauled her back for public punishment, had just watched, and Lynesse Fourth Daughter had looked into her eyes and seen . . . not even anger but sheer exasperation. Lynesse, a child with three Storm-seasons behind her and one more to go at least before anyone might consider her grown, had done a thing nobody else cared or dared to do. Disobedient, yes; irresponsible, yes; more than that, her mother’s look said, I cannot understand what would even kindle such a thought in your head. As though Lynesse was not badly behaved but actually sick with something.
That had been two Storm-seasons past. The sting of it had faded; the memory of that ascent had not. Which means it was worth it, the now-grown Lynesse Fourth Daughter decided.
They had only caught her that time because she had stopped climbing. She had only stopped climbing because she’d finally seen of what was up there: the Elder Tower. She had been the first human being to lay eyes on it for a very long time.
It hadn’t looked like the pictures. In the tapestries and the books, they drew it like a regular tower of brick, with windows and a door and a pointed roof, just there amongst the mountains. Some artists had even placed it on the very peak, and sometimes drawn it bigger than the actual mountain in that way they did. They drew queens the same way, with the lesser folk only coming up to their knees. Lyn had been quite old before she had even questioned the practice, so widespread was it. That had been when an artist seeking patronage had illustrated a family history, ending with a picture supposedly of Lyn’s mother and offspring, a little sequence of diminishing, facially identical figures. Lyn had complained bitterly that she was already taller than Issilesse Third Daughter, and been told, That is not the way pictures are made. She was smaller, under the artist’s hand, because she was less important. Fourth is less than Third.
She had given their tutor ulcers for half a short-season after that, insisting that four was smaller than three when made to do her sums.
The Tower of Nyrgoth Elder, last of the ancients, was built into the mountainside. It had no sign of join or masonry. Some grand magic had just excised a great deal of the stone until all that was left was the tower, jutting from the new line of the mountainside, overhanging a chasm, reaching for the sky. The day had been crystal clear when she’d gone on her unauthorised jaunt all those seasons before, and she had good eyes. The image had stayed with her ever since.
Now she was looking on it again. Quite possibly she was standing just where her younger self had halted, though her memory didn’t quite preserve that much. It was evening rather than yesteryear’s bright midday, but the skies remained clear. According to the few communities that lived in the foothills, the skies over the mountain were often clear even when rain came in from the sea to trouble everywhere else. If you were the greatest sorcerer in the world then you probably got to say whether or not you got rained on, she decided. Assuming Nyrgoth still dwelled in his tower, as the legends said. He was very old, after all; he had been very old a long time ago. Even if he had not died, why should he not have travelled to some other land, or some netherworld that only wizards could access, or some other fate, bespoke to the magical, that Lynesse Fourth Daughter could not even imagine?
“You’re just going to stand there, then?” her companion asked. “It’s me making camp again, is it?”
Lyn was aware that, yes, it was entirely her right to demand that Esha do all the camping and cooking and the rest of it, because Lyn was royalty and Esha was not. Simultaneously she had only secured Esha Free Mark’s help on this journey by explicitly promising she wouldn’t act the pampered ass.
“I’m sure it’s my turn,” she said vaguely, eyes still upwards. “Do you think he’s watching us?”
Esha squinted balefully up towards the tower, but her eyes were bad at that kind of distance. The tower was just like a little toy to Lyn; likely Esha couldn’t make it out at all.
“He hasn’t magicked us up to his front door yet,” she pointed out. “Disrespect to the princess of the blood, if you ask me. Disrespect to my aching feet, too.”
“The road to the Tower of Nyrgoth Elder is long and hard because he decreed it so,” Lyn recited. “That it not be trodden lightly by fools, but only by earnest heroes when the kingdom is threatened by dire sorcery.”
“I would have magicked up a bell, or something, and I’d just turn up out of nowhere when it was rung,” Esha pointed out. “That way nobody would have to do all this uphill nonsense.”
Esha was of the Coast-people, who fell outside Lannesite’s strict reach, and maintained a tenuous independence along the sea’s edge and the banks of rivers and lakes. An independence bought with cartloads of fish and defended by the general difficulty of the terrain; hard to subjugate a people who could just go into the water at a moment’s notice, and then come out of it with spears and poison darts when you least wanted them to. Her skin was pale like most of her people, greenish white and heavily freckled with blue about the bridge of her nose and cheekbones. She had a hard, square chin and her straw-coloured hair had obviously been trimmed with the aid of a bowl. She was shorter than Lyn, compact of frame, wearing a wayfarer’s layers of wax-cloth and weft, with a cuirass of hard scales over it all in case of trouble.
Esha was a traveller, for all her complaints about the “uphill nonsense.” She was two full Storm-seasons Lyn’s senior without actually seeming much older. Lyn remembered her turning up at court at random intervals with her travellers’ tales and outlandish souvenirs, and only later worked out that much of Esha Free Mark’s journeying had been clandestine errands for the throne. That hard-won suffix attached to her name was the Crown’s guarantee of her right to go where she wanted without exception, and there were precious few foreigners who’d earned it.
Except, as Lyn grew up, the political landscape of Lannesite had grown more intricate, locked into a series of treaties with neighbouring states and non-states, so that Esha Free Mark’s anarchistic style of impromptu diplomacy had become a little embarrassing for the throne, and she had been called on less and less. One day, so said Lyn’s sisters, Esha would go pick a fight with someone, cross a border somewhere, and the writ of Lannesite would not bail her out.
When Lynesse Fourth Daughter had come asking for her help with a journey where nobody went and, after, to where nobody was currently returning from, Esha had jumped at the chance.
“I think,” she told Esha now, “that it is a good thing Nyrgoth Elder did not give my family a bell to ring, to summon him.”
“That so?”
“I think,” Lyn went on, “that if such a bell existed, I’d have rung it with all my might before my third season just to see what happened.”
* * *
The next morning they decamped with the dawn, ascending a mountain pass that seemed devoid of life, no song of beast, no chirr of creeping thing. The clear sky above shifted imperceptibly from
“The Elder doesn’t much want visitors, does he?” the Free Mark said. “Doubtless he is considering some matters of philosophy and does not wish to be disturbed, by man or beast. What makes you think he’ll even open his door, let alone help?”
“The ancient compact still stands,” was Lyn’s only answer to that. She was aware that Esha probably thought it was more myth than matter, but she had grown up on the stories; they were a part of her as much as her bones and sinew. And if not now, then when?
And soon enough, through the silent, vacant land, they had come to the tower’s door, which was round and had no furnishing, not handle nor bell. The utter quiet seemed greater there, in the tower’s shadow, as though there was some sound the building itself was making, inaudible to the ear and yet loud enough to resound insensibly from every rock. Looking up the tower’s height towards its apex, Lyn decided that those old artists had the right of it after all. The tower was greater than its mere physical dimensions. It reached all the way past the sky to the stars.
When she’d seen the tower before, all those years and Storm-seasons ago, she’d felt nothing but excitement. The thrill of the forbidden, something made physically appreciable that had previously only existed in stories and ill-proportioned illustrations. Child Lynesse had just been thrilled that she’d made it so high, seen so far. The Tower of the Elder Sorcerer!
Child Lynesse had also known that her mother’s servants were right on her heels at that point. Obviously, she’d been ready to press onwards to the wizard’s very door. Obviously. An easy thing to swear to when you were thirteen heartbeats away from some harassed functionary’s hand landing on your shoulder to haul you back.
And here she was, and there were no court menials at her heels to restrain her. She was at the very portal to the sorcerer’s domain, where no other had ever stood since her ancestor had come, to beg the help of magic to fight magic. Just as she now needed to fight magic. She, the princess of the blood. The one whose duty it was to do such impossible things. Go to the forbidden places. Strike bargains with the unknowable.
I don’t think this was a good idea. And this was a poor time to have such a thought. In Lyn’s experience, that particular regret only slunk into sight after she’d done something her mother wouldn’t approve of. To find it turn up ahead of schedule was profoundly inconvenient because it meant she couldn’t just do and then lament in hindsight.
“Esh’,” she breathed, teetering perilously at the brink of a common sense decision. Let’s just go back. Except her friend looked at her, and there was just enough of We came all this way in Esha’s expression that Lyn reached out with the iron pommel of her knife and rapped hard on the metal of the circular door.
She had wondered if the sorcerer had servants, and what form they might take. No form at all, apparently, for a voice spoke from the air, or perhaps from the door itself. It used sounds she did not know, although the rhythm of them, and the questioning lilt at the end, told her they were words.
“A spirit,” Esha said, wide-eyed. “A spirit as his doorman.”
“Howe comyst vysitingen thys owetpost?” demanded the door, its tone the same but its words now halfway familiar, sounding like Lyn’s tutor when she read the old, old books.
“Did it ask who we were?” Lyn was hanging on to her nerve by a thread.
Esha shrugged, her hand on her sword hilt. “Just barble-garble to me.”
“Who has come to visit this outpost?” And now the words were strangely accented but fully comprehensible, as though the voice had been listening to their conversation and reminding itself how people spoke.
A moment, in which Esha’s look made plain that, of the two of them, it wasn’t her place to answer that. And there was strength to be had, in the reciting of names to an old formula. “I am Lynesse Fourth Daughter of the Royal Line of Lannesite,” Lyn declared. “I call upon the ancient compact between my blood and the Elder.” Because that was how you did it. The road of those words had already been trodden, so she could force herself to follow it.
A little mouth opened in the stone beside the door, round as a lamprey’s. “Substantiation of your heritage is required,” the door voice told them pleasantly.
“Shouldn’t have mentioned blood,” Esha cautioned. Lyn stared at the mouth, knowing that there was no good way forwards.
Why else did I come? The recklessness that had brought her to the door in the first place—that would have had her child-self ring the bell, if bell there had been—had put her finger in the opening. True to form, it bit her, a pinprick jab from its single tooth. She hissed and yanked her finger out, seeing a bead of the vaunted blood royal on the tip.
“Your heritage is acknowledged,” the door pronounced, and then opened, separating into six segments like triangular fangs that slid into its stone frame. The hall beyond was smaller than Lyn had expected, because surely a sorcerer could make great rooms within the bounds of a tower. Apparently, such grand chambers were not for casual visitors, though.
She stepped in, Esha following reluctantly at her heels.
“Outpost, Lyn,” she noted. “Outpost of what? And where’s the sorcerer?”
“He’s not likely to be just standing about in his own entrance hall in case of visitors,” Lyn pointed out, but the invisible voice had picked up Esha’s question.
“Remain here. My master is awakening.”
“Sleeping till noon,” Esha observed. “There’s luxury for you,” but everyone knew that sorcerers could sleep for many years, replenishing their powers and sending their minds out to explore magical realms beyond the understanding of mere mortals. And Nyrgoth Elder was the last of the ancient race that brought life and people across the sky to these lands. If there was any living thing in the world that could help them, it was he.
Something within the foundation of the tower groaned, deep and tormented. In the next moment Lyn changed her mind: not a living thing at all, but as though the tower contained vast moving parts only now stirring into motion.
Nyr
MY NAME IS NYR ILLIM TEVITCH, anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps. I am centuries old and light years from home.
* * *
I come to an awareness of myself in the half state between suspension and true waking. Information drip-feeds to me at a precisely calibrated rate, guaranteed comprehensible without being overwhelming. I feel my brain and systems bootstrapping themselves into functionality.
“What messages?” I query the satellites above, as soon as my cognition is complex enough to make the query. There are very few circumstances now under which the caretaker routines would wake me, but the most sought-for is contact from the Explorer Corps.
A quick scan of the contact log reveals no such message. Absurdly quick, in fact, because the log is still empty. No word from home at all, just like last time. No word received for . . .
I am awake enough, mind and body, to clench about the thought. No word for two hundred and ninety-one years, most of which I’ve slept through in the outpost’s suspension facilities.
At first I had myself woken at regular intervals to do my job. I came out here buoyed by the great tide of enthusiasm for rediscovering the old colonies. Humanity had seeded the stars with its generation ships over the best part of a thousand years, and those colonies had been developing on their own for a thousand more, cut off from an ecologically bankrupt Earth. But when we rebuilt, returning to space on the back of improved technology our ancestors could never have dreamt of, everyone had been keen to find the colonies and see how our lost relatives had got on.
That initiative put me out here, on Sophos 4. There was a team of us, although I actually have to query the database before the names and faces of my colleagues come back to me. They left. Things were going wrong at home and I volunteered to hold the fort here, for the love of anthropology, while they headed back. It was only supposed to be a stopgap measure. But the gap grew and grew, and I had to sleep more and more to stop myself growing old in my study here.
