The Sound of Seas (13 page)

“I don't believe so,” he said. “From the research, I believe there were densely populated pockets across the continent. I would imagine that population, if not controlled, was strictly determined by the food supply.”

“Obviously, they would have had fish, sea mammals, birds—”

“Possibly each other,” he added. “I know nothing about their interment practices.”

“That's an unpleasant thought, though you're right. I have heard about isolated pockets that practiced cannibalism along the Amazon.”

“The Galderkhaani were big on jasmine,” Mikel said. “Drank a lot of warm tea, I'd imagine.”

“I like that better,” Dr. Cummins said. “The practice, not that flavor of tea. Dr. Jasso?”

“Yes?”

“Am I whistling past a graveyard?” she asked.

“It's quite possible,” he said. “I'm uneasy here too. I would be interested in going back through reports from this region, see if other researchers have experienced anything—” he stopped as he sought an appropriate word.

“Off? Ripe? Gray? Oppressive?” Dr. Cummins contributed.

“All of that,” he said.

There was a high, warbling rush of sound. The two of them stopped at the same time. Dr. Cummins pulled her parka from one side and turned her ear toward the pit.

“That's not the wind,” she said. “Did you hear anything like that below?”

Mikel shook his head. Whatever it was, the sound came from inside the pit, soft and melodious, modulating slightly and echoing on its way up and down.

“It could be an ice flute,” she suggested. “Wind through a hollow icicle—”

“That's not whistling,” Mikel said. He had heard those in Norway, frozen “panpipes.” Wind passing through a hollow tube of ice has a shriller quality. “That's humming.”

“Can't be,” Dr. Cummins said. “Can it?”

“I have learned to dismiss nothing where Galderkhaan is concerned.”

Dr. Cummins shook her head as if to say,
I'm just not ready for that
.

They started walking again, cautiously, when the frozen water on the lip of the pit nearest them, the northeastern rim, began to darken. It was like watching bread turn moldy in time lapse: something unhealthy was moving toward them.

“Doctor?” Mikel asked.

“I don't know what it is, I've never seen anything like it,” she said. “Let's go back to the truck.”

She started to move but Mikel stayed where he was. He had an idea what it was . . . and what might stop it.

“Dr. Jasso?”

“Something may be trying to communicate.”

“
That
is an optimistic take on a mass moving beneath the ice!”

The shadow rolled toward them unevenly, like an incoming tide, until Mikel could see for certain what it was made of.

“God
damn
him,” Mikel said.

“What?”

“Get back in the truck.”

“What is it?”

“Please
go
!” Mikel yelled. “They're being controlled by a tile in New York!”

Dr. Cummins did not need to be told again. She backed away then ran as fast as her boot-heavy feet could take her.

Snatching off his glove, the archaeologist grabbed his cell phone from the pocket of his parka and punched a button.

CHAPTER 10

I
n New York, at the subdued headquarters of the Group, the call came as expected.

Downstairs in the laboratory, Casey Skett winked at Flora, who was seated in a folding chair, her hands tightly knit on her lap. Adrienne Dowman was on the other side of him, in an old, thickly cushioned chair, sitting supernaturally still and just staring. Skett had one hand on the keypad controls of the acoustic levitation device. He had his eight-inch knife in the other. He slipped the blade into a sheath attached to the back of his belt. “I can get to it quickly,” he cautioned Flora.

“I have no doubt,” she replied.

Skett answered the phone. “Hello, Dr. Jasso. I'm glad to see you made it.”

“I said I would!” he yelled. “Now call them off! You didn't have to do this!”

“I was testing the acoustic suspension,” he said. “Consider it a dry run and also a little bit of insurance.

“They are
Belgica Antarctica
, flightless midges. On average, only a sixth of an inch long . . . but there are a lot of them, eh? They were awakened from hibernation by a frisson of ancient Galderkhaani power, following the arc from here to there.”

“I know the mechanism, damn you, Skett. Cut it.
Now!
”

“But they're harmless,” Skett assured him. “Unless they gum up your engine or crawl up your pant legs, nibbling and nesting. Which they will do, seeking the warmth they've been deprived of.”

“I swear to you—”

“What, Dr. Jasso?
What
will you do?” Skett's tone lost its affected bonhomie. “I know—perhaps you'll keep in touch with me instead of hopping about on your own, leaving me blind?”

“Yes, fine. We just got here by truck and were reconnoitering the pit.”

“We?”

“Myself and Dr. Victoria Cummins.”

“The glaciologist?”

“That's right! Now
cut
the link!”

“How did you get there?” Skett asked.

“Toyota Tacoma.”

“Excellent,” Skett said. “Very good. Makes things easier.”

Skett was facing the monitor that controlled the acoustic levitation waves. He punched the numbers up. In front of him, the stone Mikel had recovered from the Falklands was crushed by sound, its energies dampened.

“Back the truck away roughly ten meters,” Skett said. He glanced at a laptop on the laboratory table. “The insects won't come any closer as a group . . . the line vectors off there. Unless I amp up the power.”

Mikel's voice was muffled, no doubt shouting instructions to his companion. The scientist was definitely outside the truck; Skett could hear the wind's raspy brush against the audio.

After a moment Mikel came back on the line. “Is that why Flora screamed, Skett?” Mikel asked. “You were flexing your long-distance muscles?”

“Poor dear overreacted,” Skett said. “I think she thought that allowing the tile to power up, you would be attacked by penguins or whales.”

“How did you know I
wouldn't
be?”

“You're well enough inland,” Skett replied. “There are two tiles—
I
brought one to the party, you see. Two tiles, two separate but proximate lines of power, one weak, one stronger—the stronger one being the one I presently control. Sections of the coastline may be covered with penguin feathers thanks to the other . . . a whale or two might have butted a ship . . . and I think I heard some dogs baying on this end. But that's all. The arcs from here to there are very precise. You will notice, I think, that the insects left their nesting ground and lined up pretty much in a southwesterly direction, well, westerly to you, since south has little meaning where you are. Are they disbursing?”

Mikel was silent for a moment. “If you could call being buried by icy snow disbursing.”

“Don't worry about them,” Skett said. “Most will get away. They are very, very hardy. They will dig down and hibernate. It is remarkable though, isn't it? The fact that the slightest variation in the acoustic modulation being employed here can impact a life-form at the end of the earth. It's a shame Arni didn't know that, eh?”

“We've all had a very steep learning curve,” Mikel replied. “All right, Skett, it's cold where I am. What am I doing here?”

“You're going down into the pit.”

There was a brief silence. “With a broken wrist?”

“I didn't say you were going to climb,” Skett said. “Good God, I'm not a lunatic. The Tacoma must have a winch and you can rig a sling. In any case, you
are
going into the pit.”

“And once I'm there?” Mikel asked.

“You will send me video of whatever is there as you see it.”

“That's not going to happen,” Mikel said.

“Oh?”

“That one's not me being obstinate, Skett. I could barely get a signal the last time I was there. I'll record images and send them later.”

Skett considered that. “As insurance for you, no doubt?”

“That too,” Mikel said. “If anything happens to me, to any of us, you get nothing.”

“That's not true, you know,” Skett said. “All it means is that I'll have to send someone else, and that will mean a delay. And Flora will be dead: I will kill her and burn her with my various rodents and pigeons. Anyway,” Skett went on, “I don't think you'll be uncooperative.”

“You're sure of that?”

“I am,” Skett said. “You can stonewall and posture all you want, Dr. Jasso, but you want to probe the knowledge of that civilization. Why else would you be in the South Pole? Why did you risk death?”

Skett had a point. Mikel did not answer.

“To do all that before you freeze, you will need my help,” Skett went on.

“Skett, you
do
understand what you're playing with?”

Skett snickered. “Do
you
understand who you're talking to? Dr. Jasso, I've spent decades studying this subject . . . waiting for global warming to catch up to my needs, to show me what hacked satellites and outpost communications could not, to reveal Galderkhaan. I have waited patiently for this moment. I need eyes on—
now
, if you please.”

There was another short silence on Mikel's end. Skett's careful eyes slid toward Flora. He was accustomed to watching everything from the shadows: studying the reactions of people on the street to the dead animals he collected for the city, watching how other animals responded to death, even watching how people responded to their own death, like Yokane and the others he had been forced to murder for his people. He knew fear and defeat, compliance and docility, when he saw it. All those qualities were present in Flora Davies. It hadn't been necessary to restrain her: as long as he controlled the acoustic monitor, he controlled the two tiles and their fearful power—even the near-dormant artifact in the freezer. Flora knew what his colleague Eilifir Benediktsson and the team in Connecticut knew. They had all seen what those unbridled forces did to poor, fumbling Arni Haugan in this very room . . . and to Caitlin O'Hara in the park. The reason she
hadn't perished was not known to Skett. That too was something he needed to uncover.

All in its time
, he told himself.

Flora knew all of that too. She sat quite still-not because she feared for her life, but because she did not want to distract Skett needlessly. Not with the forces at his fingertips. And as heartless as it was, she too was curious. Adrienne was already in the thrall of the stone in the laboratory; Flora had noticed her fingertips stiffen when Skett boosted the power slightly. They were relaxed now. She suspected that Adrienne was the target of the experiment on this end. She had no idea what he was expecting on the other end.

“How is it going out there, Dr. Jasso?” Skett demanded.

“The truck is getting into position.”

Skett glanced at his watch. “You have another minute. One. That's how long it should take.”

Mikel went silent and Skett saw Flora glaring at him.

“Oh, poor Flora, sidelined and denied her place in the modern Galderkhaani pantheon.”

“It's nothing like that,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was learn, to work with the tiles. You want to control them.”

“Like love and marriage, you can't have one without the other,” Skett said.

“It's your mind-set that is objectionable,” she said. “All these years, these centuries of exploration and struggle, and this is how it finishes. With a prize in the hands of some Technologist.”

“Not ‘some,' ” Skett said. “ ‘The.' He is
the
senior surviving Technologist. His name is Antoa.”

“And what are you?” Flora asked. “A hireling.”

“You cannot humiliate me, if that is your intent,” Skett said.

She snickered. “You still have blood on the side of your hand . . . like a butcher.”

“It's honorable blood, blood spit from the mouth of Yokane, the blood of a Priest,” he said.

“Lunatic hatreds,” she sneered.

“Which
you
have helped to perpetuate.”

“Not true!” she said. “I rejected the overtures of Priests, of those like Yokane. I knew they existed but I refused to communicate with them. I only served one cause: knowledge.”

“But you took their funding,” Skett said. “You had to know.”

“I didn't know and I would have stopped, at once, had anyone interfered,” Flora said. “Whatever was arranged was set up long before my grandparents were born. And never did I kill, or advocate killing.” She raised a chin toward the tile. “Mikel was very careful about obtaining that. Stealth and thievery, not murder.”

“What about Arni? What about two decades ago, Dr. Meyers, who was killed in Hong Kong trying to buy an artifact from the Triad.”

“Unfortunate,” she admitted. “We all know this is dangerous work. I'm not naïve, Skett. We've robbed museums, private collections. People have gone to prison.”

“Not you, though. You are careful and pragmatic, and I salute that. But you also have no right to judge me.” Skett squatted to face her, held the side of his bloody hand to her cheek. “In the old days, I'm told, before ‘civilization' came to Galderkhaan, human blood was a means of communication, of writing, of art.”

“Of sacrifice.”

“That too,” he admitted. “There was barbarism. The adolescence of an ancient people.”

“Galderkhaan banished it,” Flora said.

“Did they?” Skett said. “Even after violence was outlawed, bloodletting continued under the aegis of the Priests. Blood caused words to grow, quite literally.”

“That's not been proven.”

“We have writings that verify it,” he said. “They describe how the mosses and molds that sprouted from paintings executed in blood gave rise to the accents, the hand movements, of the Galderkhaani. The ancients believed that the Candescents were speaking to them . . . through blood.”

“Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs,” she said.

“Questioned, yes. Disproved? Never quite that. Mosses grew differently, more eloquently, on certain stones. These stones. The ones that vibrated. If they were not special, why would we all have sought them these many centuries?”

“Not because we believed that a god was trying to talk to us through fungus sprouting naturally from biological material,” Flora said. “We were looking for deeper secrets that were locked in the stones, in matter that we believe dates to the dawn of the universe.”

“Then we should agree on what is about to transpire,” Skett said. “That is what I am looking for—more proof of all those ‘we believes.' ”

“Skett?” a voice said in his phone.

“Here,” Skett replied.

“We're ready to move on this,” Mikel informed him. “Do you know anything about that—hold on. Dr. Cummins, do you hear that?”

Skett heard a mumbled response.

“Mikel, what is it?” Skett demanded.

“I hear a sort of cooing. Definitely not a geologic sound,” Mikel said. “Skett, the thing that created this pit—could that entity still be down there?”

“It's possible. What do you know about that?”

Mikel didn't answer. Skett hadn't expected him to. Always and still the careful Group agent.

“We're setting up a rope,” Mikel said. “I'm going to keep this line open. If I need information, you will give it to me.”

“Of course,” Skett replied. “We both want the same thing. To understand.”

“I don't believe you,” Mikel told him. “If you wanted to pool our resources, you would have done it long before this.”

“As would have Flora and her people.”

“Then you're all stupid,” Mikel said.

“Save the editorializing, highwayman. You brought something to
a city of more than eight million without vetting it, without quarantine. That, Dr. Jasso, was stupid. It caused death. Not just Arni, but Andreas Campbell, a mailman down the street. Maybe others. All
I'm
asking you to do is observe and report. Innocent stuff. Now, do you want to stand there and freeze or will you do what you went to the South Pole to accomplish—just for a different chief executive?”

“I've already agreed,” Mikel said. “Let's get on with it.”

Skett was standing again, looking at the stone. It didn't seem to have changed, nor had the digital numbers gone up or down on the monitor. Peripherally, he saw sudden anxiety on Flora's face. It wasn't just for Mikel Jasso: she was also no doubt starting to be concerned about her stone and the future of the Group. For all her faults, Flora had always been about the work.

Maybe that's why she's so good at this job
, Skett thought.
Her agenda is unbiased toward Priest or Technologist.