Singer from the Sea (65 page)

“What would the Lord Paramount have been doing in the darkest corner of the bottommost cavern? And how did he get there?”

“Maybe your friend Zebulon Coffin put him there.”

“We found Zeb where the pile of stuff fell on him—poetic justice, since he’s the one who stacked it off balance in the first place! There was nothing left of him but lizard-gnawed bones, so he died long before this one. And all the access routes were locked, so no one could have gotten in….”

“Probably the Lord Paramount got in before the computers locked. Probably he’s the one who locked them,” Veswees mused.

“That would explain the code book,” Jeorfy agreed, “though I didn’t know the Lord Paramount had anything to do with the files personally …”

The tiny notebook, though it was full of codes for this and that and the other thing, had not included any reference to the secret elevator. The Lord Paramount had never, ever written down anything about the elevator, and only one person now living knew anything about it.

“… but whoever he was, the book gives us total access to the files,” crowed Jeorfy, as he’d been doing since discovering it. He straightened the crown and posed before the mirror. “Oh, what we’ll find out.”

“I think what we’ve already found out will be more than adequate.” Veswees yawned hugely. “We’ve already found out all we needed for the machines to do their job. And we’ve kept the cargo machines to bring stuff out of the caverns.”

Jeorfy stopped posing and sat down, his face serious. “Right until the last, I doubted we’d find enough citations to cover the whole Tribunal. I can’t understand how they could have let things like that become a matter of record.”

Veswees grinned, showing his teeth. “They had to record it. Their continued lives depended on bookkeeping. So much blood credited to this one, so much blood for that one. The names and dates of each and every woman who had been furnished by this or that member of the Tribunal, every daughter, every wife, every abducted housemaid they sent off to be slaughtered …”

“Sickening,” Jeorfy said, making a face.

“It’ll be behind us soon. Then we can go on to something else.”

“Like what?”

Veswees glanced at Jeorfy from the corner of his eye. “The first thing I want to look into is seafaring technology.”

“Seafaring? Why do that?”

“Haven’t you noticed we’re losing a lot of dry land? The seas are rising.”

“Not all that much,” said Jeorfy, tilting the crown over his other eye and rising to take another look at himself.

Veswees shook his head reprovingly. “I do hope you’re not considering starting a new monarchy?”

“I’m amusing myself,” said Jeorfy. “And why not!” He bent and turned, trying to get a good view of the rest of himself in the mirror. King Jeorfy, he muttered to himself, enjoying the idea. King Jeorfy the First! “But if you don’t want amusement, then you do whatever you like, partner. Whatever you like.”

“I’ve already done most of that,” Veswees murmured. “These last few days, I’ve had fun enough for anyone.”

In a hamlet near Havenor, the populace—only recently retired for the night—was awakened by a brazen voice calling, “Oyez, oyez, oyez, draw near and hear what it is right you should know, draw near and hear, draw near and hear …”

Men rolled out of bed cursing or frightened, as their characters dictated, drawing on their trousers and boots while they urged their women and children into hiding. The more belligerent among them picked up pitchforks or scythes or whatever other sharp or heavy implements were at hand and plunged out of their houses toward the village square. When they arrived, however, they found a device, one more exotic than threatening, occupying the steps of the town hall as it trumpeted its invitation. A few of the men shook their heads and turned back, only to be stopped by a voice like a trumpet.

“Fetch your wives, your children, your aged parents,” the machine Matted. “Hurry up, for I must take this message to twenty other towns by dawn….” Seeing several who shook their heads and seemed determined to return to bed, the machine allowed bolts of lightning to spit from its eyes as it stamped its foot, crushing the stone of the steps.

So encouraged, the populace was hastily assembled, though at first it made little sense of the machine’s message. Only when the words “disappearing women” focused their attention did they begin to understand what was being said. On the third reiteration, as the brazen
voice repeated the names of specific women and the names of the men who had taken the women and the reason the women had been taken, even the machine had difficulty outshouting the uproar. During every lull in the tumult, however, it went on repeating the message until every person present understood each and every fact that Jeorfy and Veswees, by use of the Lord Paramount’s code book, had extracted from the files: Such and such a noble had abducted such and such a woman and had provided her to the Mahahmbi for such and such a purpose. Such other noble had taken such other woman, and this daughter had been sent for that father, and this young mother for that grandfather, and these several ones for the Lord Paramount, and that one for the Shah of Mahahm, and so on and so on.

The catalog was in mid-repetition when one very large, red-faced farmer (a sometime-malghaste on duty in Haven) lifted his scythe and cried loudly, “Enough. We know enough! To the home of the Duke of Merdune! Follow me!”

There was sufficient outrage that virtually the entire village did follow him. The machine, left behind, noted that its first mission had been a success and trundled itself off to the next village on the list.

In Havenor, Gardagger and Alicia, Duke and Duchess of Merdune, were at late supper with a number of guests—among them Prince Thumsort and the Prince’s son, Edoard—when they heard a great clamor outside. It was not the orderly sound of an Aresian clamor, which regardless of purpose always included a thunderous tramp, tramp, tramp plus an uproar of drums, a bray of trumpets, or at the very least a loudly shouted marching song. The current clamor sounded, Gardagger thought, like a bunch of peasants in a fury, and he stalked wrathfully out onto the terrace to put an immediate end to the insolence.

Curious as to the cause of the event, Prince Thumsort and Edoard followed, though other guests remained at the table. Among them, the Duchess Alicia sat quite still for a long moment, her eyes wide as she experienced what was almost a vision for the first time in her life.

The peasantry had climbed the fence and assembled at
the foot of the terrace, well armed with implements and torches, but the Duke Merdune felt no terror as he raised his hands and demanded silence, which he received. The quiet was immediately broken by the voice of the very large red-faced man who came to the front of the mob and shouted:

“Gardagger, Duke Merdune, we require you to answer for the deaths of our wives and daughters and your own! You, Gardagger, gave women to the Shah of Mahahm to be sacrificed on the sands of Mahahm, and in return you were granted extension of life by the Lord Paramount. You, Gardagger, are now one hundred thirty years old. Deny or affirm.”

Gardagger, very red in the face, shouted, “I deny …”

The large man scarcely paused: “Morion, the daughter of Hesbet, the baker, had her throat slit on your behalf.”

Hesbet and his colleagues screamed for Gardagger’s blood.

“I am the son of Morion. When she was killed, your name was spoken aloud as the man who would profit from her blood, and this was overheard by those who rescued me as a baby from death on the sands of Mahahm.

“Forty years ago, she died, and you have had five other women killed since then, including Sybil, daughter of your wife, Alicia Bellser-Bar …”

Gardagger, ashen-faced, raised his hands, patting them outward as though to push away the crowd assembled below him, but the threat came from behind him as Alicia lunged wild-eyed onto the terrace, a carving knife from the table glittering in her hand.

“Gardagger,” she screamed, “you said no. You said not. You said she died in childbirth …” And she flung herself at him while Prince Thumsort vainly tried to stop her.

The Prince would have been better advised to look to his own safety, for the horde waited no longer. It poured up onto the terrace to make a short and bloody work of Duke Merdune and then flowed away again, leaving Thumsort and Edoard bruised and battered behind them.

The trumpet-voiced man turned as he departed. “Prince Thumsort, Duke Edoard, the people from Sealands will be
seeking you. They know which of the women of Sealands you have used. We leave the exacting of justice to those to whom justice is due….”

The crowd went cheering into the night, waving their torches and leaving behind Gardagger’s body, bleeding onto the marble as Alicia kicked at it, over and over, first with one foot then the other. Only when her shoes were sodden with his blood did she turn screaming toward the house.

Behind her, Prince Thumsort and the Duke Edoard, much bruised, crawled toward one another in terror.

“Father …” Edoard cried.

“They can’t prove it. There’s no proof …” Thumsort looked around for someone to confirm this fact, one he had always been assured of, one he had always believed.

“They’ll find proof,” cried his son. “They do say who, out on the sands, when the throats are slit. They do say who the blood is for. When I was a ritual master, I heard them! If someone was listening, if they found out about Gardagger, they’ll find out about you. You’ve had dozens. You had my first and second wives, and both their daughters, and some of those you used had sons, and if the sons lived … why, I didn’t know they ever lived. No one told us any of them lived! And the maids from our place in Tansay that you took … And the women I got you from those raids into Dania, and …”

“You, too,” his father snarled. “You’ve had your own candidates!”

“You told me it was safe. You said they’d never find out!”

“Leave it! It doesn’t matter. We have to decide what to do now. Where we can go. To be safe …”

Alicia stood in the doorway, cackling like a witch. “There is no place to be safe, Prince Thumsort. They’ll find you, and they’ll find Duke Edoard. I know who set this in motion and believe me, she’ll find you all.” Then she fell to keening as though she could not stop, a hideous noise that drove the rest of the guests out of the house, into the dangerous night.

When Genevieve leapt from the serpent rock, she and Dovidi fell as one, as one entering the waves, arrowing
downward as the light faded behind them. She drove them deeper with thrusting legs. The child struggled, freed his limbs and swam with her, kicking with his tiny feet even within the circle of her arms. The pudgy folds at the sides of his little neck swelled, then opened. Seeing this, Genevieve gave a great gulp of relief, and the almost invisible tines that circled her own neck opened to let the fringed tissues inside extrude like a great, frilly collar that drew the oxygen from the water flowing through it. She blinked and transparent lids lowered to protect her eyes. Oh, it had been so long since she had done this. Only that once since mother died, before she went to Havenor. So long since those endless exercises in the pool beneath Langmarsh House. So long since Mother went away.

Dovidi moved his jaw with a clicking noise, like a question, and she turned her head in the direction he was staring. Almost touching them were scores of skeining dolphins, weaving patterns in the water, talking among themselves in a series of snaps and pops, their cheerful faces and bobbing bodies encouraging their descent. As they went deeper, the dolphins were replaced by black-and-white oreas with great teeth in their smiting jaws, and then by bigger creatures yet, huge whales, some with pointed heads and others with great, broad faces above enormous mouths. Beyond these familiar shapes were others she could not recognize, deep dwellers of races she knew nothing of, huge and writhing, with multiple eyes, the leviathans of Haven.

The sparkling blue changed to bright sapphire and that darkened to lapis and that to purple and that, soon, gave way to an ebon realm of endless space glittering with living galaxies, with luminescent constellations moving and spinning in the dark as they hummed and clicked and sang. As they went deeper yet, the water began to glow, and they looked down upon a golden continent, the largest of all the sea shapes, one that shone with its own tight, the great golden creature Genevieve had seen in Merdune Lagoon, now rising toward them, turning beneath them, to bring the tip of its huge dorsal fin within reach of her hand.

She grasped the apex, like grasping the tip of an ornamental spire at the top of a great tower above a vast city.
Her eyes swooped down across the creature-scape of the being, a distance so great that she could not see its end. Behind her, the mighty tail waved in powerful thrusts that drove them deeper yet. She should have been swept off, but she was held to the surface of the fin as though glued to it, surrounded by an intention that would neither let her go nor harm her while she stayed.

Inside her a half familiar discomfort built as something shifted, as an inner pressure built to match outer pressure, as air bled from certain cavities, releasing inert gases. The pools at Langmarsh had not been deep enough for this, but she had been told to expect it. She looked intently at Dovidi to see if he felt any distress, but his tiny hand rested easily beneath hers on the great fin and he chortled at their going.

The sound of his joy released her. All her anxieties fell away like weights dropped from a diver’s belt, leaving her free in the great ocean. Here was where she belonged and where she had been meant to come.

“So, daughter,” the voice spoke all around her in the sea. “You have come.”

“I’ve come,” she replied with her mind, her lips still sipping the sea, her gills still breathing for her. “Oh, yes. I didn’t believe in you, but still, I’ve come.”

“You have refused to believe in me,” said the voice, with a hint of laughter. “You have been a doubter?”

Genevieve floated, spirit and mind, untroubled. “You seemed unlikely,” she said. “You seemed … invented.”

“Ah, well, yes. Invented by time, made likely by space. We living things work so hard to acquire knowledge. Surely you wouldn’t suppose it wasted?”