Elder Race(3)

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.