Look to Windward (28 page)

A group of Tallier caste hunters in an old All-Terrain on their way back from the forests after stalking jhehj offered them a lift, but they refused politely. The trailer behind the All-Terrain was piled with the carcasses of the animals. It bounced down the track into the gloom with its cargo of the dead, so that from then on they followed a line of fresh blood-spots.

Finally, in the foothills of the Grey Mountains, toward sunset, they came out onto the Girdling turnpike, where cars and trucks and buses hummed past, trailing spray. A large car was waiting for them by the roadside. A young male who looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes opened the door for them and completed three-quarters of a salute to the Colonel before remembering. The vehicle's interior was warm and dry; they took off their cloaks. The car swung out onto the road and set off down the route toward the plains.

The Colonel plugged into a military com set in a briefcase on the rear seat and left him to his own thoughts as she sat with eyes closed, communicating. He watched the traffic; the outskirts of the city of Ubrent sparkled out of the gloom. It looked in better repair than the last time he'd seen it.

Within an hour they had reached the airport, and a sleek black sub-orbiter sitting on the mist-curdled runway. He was about to reach out and touch the Colonel to let her know they'd arrived when she opened her eyes, slipped the induction coil from the back of her head and nodded at the aircraft as though to say, “We're here.”

The acceleration pressed him firmly back into the frame-seat. He saw the lights of the coastal cities of Sherjame, the mid-ocean islands of Delleun and the small sparks of oceanic ships. Above, the stars became bright and steady and looked very close in the ghostly silence of near-vacuum flight.

The sub-orbiter plunged back into the atmosphere in a gathering roar. There were a few lights, then a smooth touchdown and deceleration. He dozed in the closed transport which took them away from the private field.

When they transferred to a helicopter he could smell sea. They flew briefly in darkness and rain and clattered down into a great circular courtyard. He was shown to a small, comfortable room and fell promptly asleep.

•   •   •   

In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling around a jagged coastline fifty meters away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty meters or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.

He recognized this place. He had seen it in books and on screen.

•   •   •   

The seastacks at Youmier were part of an extensive cliff system on Mainland, one of the Tail-Quiff Islands which lay in a long curved line to the east of Meiorin. The cliffs dropped between two and three hundred meters into the ocean and the seventeen seastacks—the remains of great arches that the ocean's swells and waves had first created and then destroyed—rose like the fingers of two drowning people.

Local legend had once held that they were the fingers of a pair of drowning lovers who'd thrown themselves from the cliffs rather than be forced to marry others.

The stacks were named as though they were fingers, and the last and smallest of them, which was only forty meters above the waves, was called the Thumb. The others ranged between one and two hundred meters in height and were about the same circumference where the sea washed incessantly around their bases, tapering slightly to their basalt summits.

Building had begun upon them four thousand years earlier, when the area's ruling family had constructed a single small stone castle on the stack nearest the cliff top and linked the two by a wooden bridge. As the family's power had grown, so had the castle, until work was started on another stack, and then another and another.

The fortress complex spread across the various rocky pinnacles, linked by a succession of bridges—at first wood, later stone, then later still iron and steel—and became a center of government, a place of worship and pilgrimage and a seat of learning. Over the centuries and millennia every stack except the Thumb
had been permanently settled in some form or another, and it had even been a fortress for a while, equipped with heavy naval guns for a century or so. Gradually the seastacks had grown to become a city with its greatest part ashore, spreading out over the heathland behind the cliffs.

It had duly suffered the same fate as a handful of cities around the globe during the Last Unification War fifteen hundred years earlier, falling to a scatter of nuclear warheads which demolished one stack completely, halved the height of another, and had left a crater shaped like a giant 8 scooped out of the cliffs where most of the mainland districts had been.

The city was never rebuilt. The seastacks, cut off from the mainland by the twin craters, were derelict for centuries, a place for ghoulish tourism and home only to a few hermits and a million sea birds. Two of the stacks became a monastery during one of Chel's more religious phases, then the Combined Services had commandeered all of them as a training base and rebuilt almost everything save for the bridges to the mainland before moving off-world before the whole complex was finished and leaving the Stacks mothballed with only a caretaker staff behind.

Now it was his home.

Quilan leaned on a parapet and looked down to the white ruff of surf washing the Male's Middle Finger's base, three hundred meters below. The water looked slow from up here, he thought. As though each wave was tired from its long journey across the ocean, from wherever waves were born.

He had been here for a two-moon month. They
were training him and assessing him. He still knew no more about the task beyond the fact that it was supposed to be a suicide mission. It was still not certain that he would be going on it. He knew that he was one of several contenders for the dubious honor. He had already agreed that if he was not chosen he would submit to a memory wipe which would leave him, apparently, just another war-traumatized monk in Cadracet Retreat struggling to come to terms with his experiences.

Colonel Ghejaline was present about half the time, overseeing his training. His principal instructor in the arts and crafts of most things martial was a scarred, stocky and taciturn male called Wholom. He seemed obviously Army or ex-Army, but would admit to no rank. Quilan's other tutor was called Chuelfier; a frail, white-furred old male whose years and infirmity seemed to drop away from him when he was teaching.

There were a few Army specialists he saw every few days who obviously also lived in the complex, a handful of servants of various castes and a number of Blinded Invisibles who had remained faithful to the old ways through the Caste War.

Quilan watched the Blinded go about their duties, their upper faces covered by the green band of their rank, feeling their way with an easy familiarity or using the high-pitched clicks they made with their claws to navigate their way amongst the concrete and rock-carved spaces of the stack. To be Blinded here, with the drop to the rocks and the ocean, was, he thought, to put your faith forever in walls and thoughtful design.

He was not allowed off this stack. He strongly suspected that some of his unseen comrade-adversaries—the others who might be chosen to go on the mission rather than him—were on some of the other stacks, across the long, locked bridges the Combined Services had thrown between the rocky columns.

He held up one arm and studied his unsheathed claws. He turned his arm left and right. He had never been so muscled, so fit. He wondered if he really needed to be at such a physical peak for this mission, or whether the Army—or whoever was really behind this—just trained you up like this as a matter of course.

A large circular parade ground was located high up on the seaward side of the stack. It was open at the sides but roofed by white awnings like old-fashioned ship sails. There they had taught him fencing, trained him with a crossbow and with projectile weapons and early laser rifles. They inculcated in him the finer and less fine points of fighting with knives, and with teeth and claws. The point had been made that close-in fighting would differ when you tackled species other than your own, but it had been left at that.

A small team of medics flew in one day and took him to a big but obviously rarely used hospital hollowed out of the rock deep beneath the stacks buildings. They equipped him with an improved Soulkeeper, but that was the only implant they touched or introduced. He had heard of agents and people on special missions being fitted with brain-linked communications rigs, poison-detection nasal glands, poison-producing sacs, subcutaneous weapon systems … the list was long but he, apparently, was
going to receive none of these. He wondered why.

At one point there was a hint that whoever undertook the mission might not be entirely alone. He wondered about that, too.

Not all his training and education was martial; at least half of each waking day was spent being a student again, sitting in a curl-chair learning through screens or listening to Chuelfier.

The old male instructed him in Chelgrian history, in religious philosophy both before and after the partial Sublimation of the Chelgrian-Puen, and in the discovered history of the rest of the galaxy and its other sentient beings.

He learned more than he'd ever imagined wanting or needing to know of what Soulkeepers did and how they did it, and what limbo and heaven were like. He learned where the old religion had been overly fanciful or just plain wrong in its assumptions and tenets, where it had inspired the Chelgrian-Puen and so been made real, and where it had been superseded. He had no direct contact with any of the gone-before, but he came to understand the afterlife better than he ever had before. Sometimes, knowing that it was almost beyond doubt that Worosei would never experience anything of this created glory, he felt that they had chosen him only to torture him, that all of this was an elaborate and cruel charade to find the knife of Worosei's loss that was forever buried in his flesh and twist it with all their might.

He learned all there was to know about the Caste War and the Culture's involvement in the changes that had led to it.

He learned about the personalities who had contributed to the War's background, and listened to some of the music of Mahrai Ziller, at turns so achingly full of loss he cried, at others so full of anger he wanted to smash something.

A number of suspicions and possible scenarios began to form in his mind, though he kept them to himself.

Sometimes now he dreamt of Worosei. In one dream they were being married here on the seastack, and a great wind off the sea whipped people's hats away; he went to grab hers as it flew toward the parapet and then crashed into the whitewashed concrete, tipping over it with her hat still just out of reach. He started to fall toward the sea, and felt himself gather in the breath for a scream, then recalled that of course Worosei wasn't really here, and could not be here; she was dead, and he might as well be. He smiled at the waves as they rushed up to meet him, and woke before he hit with a feeling of somehow having been cheated, the salty dampness on his pillow like sea.

•   •   •   

One morning he was walking across the parade ground beneath the snapping white tents of the awnings, heading toward Chuelfier's class room for the first lecture of the day, when he saw a small group of people directly ahead. Colonel Ghejaline, Wholom and Chuelfier were standing talking to the white-and black-clothed figure in the middle of the group.

There were five others, three on the right of the central group, two on the left. All were males dressed as clerks. The male in the middle was small and old-looking,
with a sort of sideways hunch to his stance. It was something of a shock for Quilan to realize that the male was dressed in the black and white striped robe of an Estodien, one of those who went between this world and the next. He wore a lop-sided smile and held onto a long mirror staff. His fur looked slick, as though it had been oiled.

Quilan was about to greet the Colonel, but as he approached the three people he knew dropped back to let the Estodien take a couple of small steps forward.

“Estodien,” Quilan said, bowing deeply.

“Major Quilan,” the old male said in a soft, smooth voice. He reached his hand out to Quilan, who had become aware that the male standing on the extreme right of the group bulked out his clerical robes differently to the rest, and that this same male had started moving around to the side, as if starting to circle behind him. When the male disappeared from his view, the semi-shadow he cast by the attenuated light coming through the white awnings suddenly moved faster.

What finally made Quilan certain he might be about to be attacked was something about the way that the old Estodien stretched when he reached out his hand. He was frail, and could not help but keep his distance from something that might prove violent.

Quilan made as though to take the older male's hand, then ducked and spun, went back on his haunches and brought his midlimb and hands out in the classic pounce-defense stance.

The bulky-looking male dressed as a clerk had been
about to strike; he had rocked back on his haunches and his sleeves were rolled back to reveal tightly muscled arms, though his claws were only half exposed. There was a radiant, almost feral look on his white-furred face that lasted for a moment and even brightened for an instant as Quilan turned to confront him but then he glanced at the Estodien and relaxed, sitting back and lowering his arms and his head in what might have been a bow.

Quilan stayed exactly as he was, his head turning slightly to and fro, his gaze flicking as far behind him as he could manage without losing sight of the white-furred male. There did not appear to be any other movement or threat.