A Dream of Ice (18 page)

With no warning, Mikel was suddenly looking into a pair of hazel
eyes. White eyebrows sat close above them and a white beard displayed dozens of carefully made ringlets, swoops, and curls.

Mikel Jasso was looking at Pao, the hesitant, recalcitrant man from the stone and fire chamber. Only now the man was very, very different.

He was somewhat translucent, the images of the real world blurring slightly when he passed. The man was pale and gaunt and moved with strange, ethereal sweeps of his arms. He seemed to control objects around him without touching them.

This man was dead.

Q
uestions flooded Mikel's mind as he watched the spectral figure.

Years before, he had attended a séance at the Group's headquarters. It was an exercise to contact any surviving spirit of the ancients. Artifacts had been positioned around the table and Arni, the synesthete, had served as a very effective medium. Though the effort had failed in terms of opening a useful pathway, everyone felt a shift in the character of the room. There was a weight, a slight pressure of energy like shallow water. It was as if someone—or several someones—had been present who wasn't present before. Flora, ever the one for empirical proof, declared it a form of group hypnosis and that was that.

Mikel had not been convinced. For him, the sensation had remained in the room for days after. Now he knew the truth: she had been wrong. The previous “recording” offered up by the tiles had shown living people. This one showed a soul, a ghost, a poltergeist, whatever label one wanted to attach to it.

This man and his colleagues believed in souls
, Mikel told himself.
They tried to bond them, to unify, to rise to some other plane.
Had they succeeded? Had this one intentionally remained behind?

Or is that the fate of a soul that did not bond?
he wondered.

Argh!
To be so close yet unable to communicate with this man
, he thought.
To not have the chance to study the room personally—

“Talk to me!” Mikel yelled.

The figure went about his wraithlike business. With a frustrated cry, Mikel drove the side of his fist into the tile. The image jumped ahead. Now there were two specters in the chamber: Pao and another, an aged woman.

“All right,” Mikel said to the tile. “Why did you stop here?”

There didn't seem to be anything exceptional about the moment.
Had the projection jumped to this spot because there was some kind of bookmark
? Then, suddenly, Mikel realized something that sent a jolt through his belly.
Or—

Is it real? Is this happening now?

His chest felt heavy under the weight of the thought even as his heart and mind raced.

He hit the tile again. The image did not change.
That could only mean that this was no longer an image.
Was he watching figures who were present
now
, behind the tiles. Were the stones relaying activity that was taking place behind them: the actions of spirits in the present day who had been here, he surmised, for untold millennia. He recognized one as Pao, the other was in shadows, barely visible.

As his eyes adjusted to the scene he saw more that confirmed his assessment. There were skeletons on the floor, close to one another. The bones had crumbled almost completely away, but Mikel could still make out the supraorbital ridge of a skull defining the hollow of an eye, and the arch of a pelvis. He felt the cold shock of realization. The skeletal remains belonged to these two souls.

Looking closer, he saw that the spirits were moving among scrolls and piles of stones with markings that appeared to shift and move, like animated drawings. Each time they did, Mikel noticed a
barely perceptible flicker among the tiles before him: here and there a glow brightened slightly, as if they were acknowledging—or recording?—the change. That did, after all, appear to be their function.

The two spirits were speaking. Though Mikel was still trying to understand the mechanism by which living spirits were visible to him, the words they spoke were clear and comprehensible. Pao paused to look at a petroglyph.

“We cannot afford to spend more time,” he said.

“We cannot afford to leave,” said the other—a woman, bent and small, her voice low and grave. It took Mikel a moment to realize that this was Rensat, the woman who had seemed much closer to Vol in the last “vision.”

This Pao, too, was much older than he'd been in the chamber. The beard was still lush but age had whitened it even more. His face was etched with deep lines and his voice cracked.

Suddenly Rensat moved from the shadows.

“I will not go without knowing what happened to Vol,” she said. “And we still have work to do, a traitor to locate.”

“And . . . a mysterious savior, perhaps,” Pao said, more resigned than hopeful. He turned back to the stones moving again from one petroglyph to another.

But something else was different, something more than just the jump forward in time. The air around Mikel himself felt hollow, like the low-pressure system created by an approaching storm. Someone, some
thing
, was also present in his time, in the chamber. He wanted to look around but he did not want to take his eyes from the living history. The only experience Mikel could compare it to was the séance, the way the atmosphere in the room had shifted: it felt empty of life, even their own, yet full of something else.

Mikel pulled off his mask, took a deep breath, unzipped a pocket, and stowed the mask inside. He hesitated, preparing himself
for the onrush of that feeling again before placing his hands on either side of the tiles. His fingers fidgeted, until he realized there was something for them to fidget with. The bank of tiles was loose. With a quick push and pull, the tiles came off as one whole section in his hands. It didn't feel accidental. The panel was designed to be removed, and there were tiles around the back as well.

He looked again at the projection of the room. The two people inside seemed suddenly uneasy.

“What was that?” Rensat asked.

“I don't know,” Pao said. “But we must go. It is time.”

Rensat shook her head and returned to her work. With a glance toward Mikel—and eyes that appeared to be searching, seeking—Pao sighed and then also resumed his studies.

What are you looking for . . . still, after all these eons?
Mikel wondered.

He looked at the panel of tiles in his hands. They were pulsing and burning, not just with heat but with light. He had the sense that if he screamed at them, into them, the ghosts would hear. But Mikel was methodical. He was not there yet, not ready to act rashly . . . irrationally.

If any of this can be called rational
, he thought.

Mikel set the tiles down and rooted his fingers into the empty slots where they had been fixed. The ghosts didn't change, reinforcing the idea that they were present in the moment. But by accident, fumbling around in the opening and perhaps activating another tile, he revealed a map. Ancient, it seemed, with unfamiliar contours. It appeared like a scrim between himself and the specters, and then was gone.

“Damn it—I
want
that!”

He jabbed his fingers in all directions, but nothing. And then he hit a sweet spot. Images flashed this way and that like minnows. Airships with nets strung between them, plumes of lava shooting into the sky, crops growing in clouds, seagoing vessels, faces, pyres,
alabaster buildings, plans for buildings and then—the map was back. Mikel froze his fingers. Relaxing his hand slightly without so much as moving his fingertips, he glided the map into a prominent place. Swelling—seeming to
anticipate
what he wanted before he struggled to achieve it—the map filled his vision, layering across the tunnel and glowing blue. It was beautiful. Its key elements were ten black dots or points grouped in one area—settlements, towns, cities, hunting grounds . . . he had no idea which. There were also orange dots clustered around one region. He memorized the pattern. If he could figure out where he was, he could find the others.

Mikel took a moment to regard the image in its entirety, continental contours familiar in some spots, utterly unrecognizable in others. Still, there was no doubt what he was looking at.

Galderkhaan
, he thought. After all these years, after
centuries
, the Group would have it.

Mikel Jasso did not have an ego, not in the same way Flora did, but there was pride of accomplishment: he would be the one to bring it home.

The emotion of the moment was overwhelming but there was no time to savor it. Not far from the orange spots was a fine, fine series of lines in red, blue, and black. He concentrated on the network and it expanded.

So you
can
read my mind
, he thought incredulously. The mechanism didn't matter right now, but he couldn't help but wonder what else the tiles could do. And
how
they did it. Clearly, the infinite possibilities in the arrangement of the stones brought up different information—an impossibly complex but brilliantly compact data storage system.

In one spot on the map he recognized the path he had taken. It was black. He pinpointed his location generally and mentally marked the spidery legs of the tunnels. He assumed that blue meant water, red—magma? He wondered if those substances still flowed there.
Probably not; tens of thousands of years would have altered the pools or bodies of water from where they'd originated. Mikel let go of that spot on the wall and the map disappeared.

He carefully replaced the panel and positioned his hands in their previous place on the tiles. Pao and Rensat filled his vision as before, the room reappearing as if the tiles had gone transparent—or, more likely, were projecting data like the big TVs at sporting events, only at a far greater level of detail. He wondered if they were doing the same thing on the other side, feeding data to the Galderkhaani. The two were in slightly different positions; of course they were. The present day had unfolded while he studied the map.

Once more mentally present, Mikel was swept up in the shuddering feeling of unearthliness. The tiles also felt it, felt something, or maybe they were causing it: the glow intensified slightly.

What's going on?
Mikel thought uneasily.

He looked into the ghostly room. Rensat was closing a door in the glass panel behind her, having just come from the massive chamber.

“I do not understand,” she said. “You felt it, I felt it, yet the tiles tell me there is no one else out there.”

Are they feeling it too?
Mikel wondered.
Or are they somehow sensing me?

“Is it possible?” Pao asked, a trace of hope in his voice. “After so much time, their eternal silence—is it
possible
?”

“I would like to think that devotion is rewarded,” Rensat said with a bitter smile. “But why would the Candescents wait until now to reveal themselves? Now, when we are very nearly beaten.”

“Perhaps that is the reason,” Pao suggested. He raised his shoulders weakly. “Who can know the mind and will of the Candescents?”

Unlike Pao's, the woman's voice and expression seemed utterly without hope. “Everyone has been so elusive for so long. The traitor.
Our dear Vol. This witch or ascended soul or demonic Technologist—whatever she was who tore the rest apart at the end.” She looked at Pao. “Maybe it
is
time to depart.”

Pao looked around. “Our existence mattered, though, Rensat. We have failed to save Galderkhaan but we proved the
cazh
, finally. We remained bonded.” His eyes sought hers lovingly. “That is not a small thing.”

“I still feel as though I have failed.” Rensat smiled thinly. “We are denied the higher planes. We are denied the fellowship and richness of others, of rising to the cosmic plane.
That
was the reason for the
cazh
. That was the reason you joined us that first time when we were much younger.”

“I stayed because I loved you as I loved Vol,” Pao said, gently correcting her.

Rensat hugged herself. “I am afraid to leave, Pao. I am afraid to face an eternity in this way.”

“At least we are transcended, not merely ascended,” Pao pointed out. “We are not in silent isolation.”

Mikel recognized the words from the library. Ascendant . . . transcendent . . . Candescent. Was there a hierarchy, like angels? Was this the root of all faith? There was still so much he did not understand in just the few things they had said. A witch—what kind of aberration was that?

Without realizing it, Mikel's hands had moved, like they were resting on the planchette of a Ouija board. Suddenly another image, this one clearly a window into the past, swept across his field of view. Momentarily disoriented, then horrified, he was looking at a courtyard, hearing human screams. The floor of the courtyard was full of carvings—and stones. Olivine tiles. All around him people in yellow and white robes were engulfed in walls of fire. They were shrieking in anguish as they died a torturous death. Feeling sick, Mikel forced himself to keep looking, to see the volcano erupting in the distance.

A caldera filled with lava
, he thought.
One of the orange spots on the map?

As he let his mind absorb the spectacle of people burning, their souls clinging to their tortured, disintegrating bodies, their hands linked and their melting tongues trying hard to utter words, he experienced some of the fury of the volcano. But this was not just a window to a disaster. It showed more: bodies falling from ethereal shapes—
souls
? Some were only there for a moment before blinking out. Others rose away in pairs.

He looked desperately through the image for the Galderkhaani Pao and Rensat had been discussing: the witch, the demonized figure, the one who would not seem to belong. His eyes were drawn to a dim figure above the flames, above the city, hovering in the sky like a banshee of Irish lore. He tried to bring her into focus but lost the image when his fingers returned to their previous position.