Ancient Light Read online

  ANCIENT LIGHT

  Mary Gentle

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Principal Characters

  Part One

  1. Rooms Without Doors

  2. The Spoils of Kel Harantish

  3. An Echo of the Lightning

  4. Old Friends

  5. The Customs of Orventa

  6. A Far-Off Cloud

  7. Heirs of an Empire Long Passed Away

  Part Two

  8. War Damage

  9. Canals

  10. Upon Such Fragile Links

  11. The Legacy of Kasabaarde

  12. Dreams of Gold and Silver

  Part Three

  13. Violence and Vision

  14. Exiles

  15. A Mirror Seen in Mist and Pearl

  16. Domino

  17. In a Bright Day, In a Time Of War

  18. The Heartland of Corruption

  Part Four

  19. Recognizable Strangers

  20. A Visitor to Westhill-Ahrentine

  21. Midsummer-Eightyear

  22. First Strike

  23. Night Conference at the Wellhouse

  24. A Mortal Coldness

  25. Traitor’s Gate

  Part Five

  26. The Tower

  27. Silence, Stillness, Light

  Part Six

  28. Ashiel Wellhouse

  29. The Last Nineteenth-Century War

  30. Turncoat

  31. The Viper and Her Brood

  32. The Woman Who Walks on the Sky

  33. Mutable Shadows

  34. Waiting for the Morning

  Part Seven

  35. The Passing of Fire

  36. That Bright Shadow

  37. Dust and Sunlight

  38. Past-Memory

  39. The Child of Santhendor’lin-sandru

  40. Carrick V

  Appendices and Maps

  Appendix 1 – Glossary

  Appendix 2 – Ochmir

  Appendix 3 – The Calendar of the Hundred Thousand

  Appendix 4 – Maps

  Website

  Also by Mary Gentle

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Principal Characters

  Lynne de Lisle Christie, special advisor to the PanOceania Company

  Douglas Clifford, Earth envoy on Carrick V

  Molly Rachel, PanOceania’s Company Representative

  David Osaka, Company Commercial Liaison officer

  Pramila Ishida, Company Administrative officer

  Rashid Akida, Head of the PanOceania research team

  Dinu Machida, climatology

  Chandra Hainzell, xeno-biology

  Jan Yusuf, xeno-demography

  Joan Kennaway, medic

  Ravi Singh, xeno-physicist

  Corazon Mendez, Commander of the Company Peace Force

  Ottoway and Jamison: lieutenants, her aides

  Stephen Perrault, acting head of the PanOceania Liaison Office on Earth

  Dannor bel-Kurick, Emperor-in-Exile at Kel Harantish Calil bel-Rioch, the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile Pathrey Shanataru, aide to Calil

  Sethri-safere, of the hiyek-family Anzhadi, a leader of mercenaries

  Jadur, Wyrrin-hael and Charazir-hael: members of Sethri’s raiku

  Hildrindi, of the hiyek-family Anzhadi, a keretne mystic Feriksushar, of Hildrindi’s raiku

  the Hexenmeister, of the Brown Tower of Kasabaarde

  Tethmet Fenborn, of the Tower

  Annekt, a Kasabaarde trader

  Haldin Damory, a mercenary of the Medued Guildhouse

  Branic, her aide

  Haltern n’ri n’suth Beth’ru-elen, a politician of the Hundred Thousand

  Blaize n’ri n’suth Meduenin, an ex-mercenary

  Nelum Santhil Rimnith, T’An of Melkathi province

  Cethelen Khassiye Reihalyn, the Andrethe of Peir-Dadeni

  Howice Talkul, T’An of Roehmonde province

  Bethan n’ri n’suth Ivris, T’An of Kyre province

  Geren Hanathra, T’An of Ymir province

  Bekily Cassirur Almadhera, an Earthspeaker

  Achil, an Earthspeaker

  Jaharien Rakviri, s’an of Rakviri telestre

  Haden Barris Rakviri, his arykei

  Roxana Visconti, WEBcaster for the Trismegistus WEB

  Mehmet Lutaya, WEBcaster for the Ariadne WEB

  PART ONE

  1

  Rooms Without Doors

  The alien settlement merged with the desolate earth on which it stood, half a mile away. As I stepped down from the shuttle’s ramp, I couldn’t help thinking: Is this the great discovery?

  Nothing but cleft and gully and hillock surrounding me; rock and stone and dust. To the south were cliffs, and a hint of mountains in the haze. And to the north, the Inner Sea.

  The hot, bright winter light washed over me, shattering into dazzles on the sea. Too sharp and subtle, this white sun, Carrick’s Star – and the pressure of the world underfoot, gravity slightly different … All but imperceptible in these equatorial regions, Orthe’s daystars shone. Orthe: Carrick V, whose sky is full of the Heart Stars, that cluster at the galaxy’s core.

  Then the smell hit me: an odour of heat and rock and rank water. That is the most ancient sense, and it bypasses rationality. For one second I felt hollow in the chest, as if I had been punched under the ribs, and I thought, Orthe, this is Orthe, I remember –

  And then, like seeing a face once so familiar, that now you can’t name, ten long years reasserted themselves and I thought, I don’t know this world at all.

  Which is unfortunate, girl, because that’s what they’ve brought you back here for.

  As if she were a mind-reader, the representative of the PanOceania multicorporate Company said, ‘You were never on this southern continent, were you, Lynne?’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘Briefly. But that was a good few hundred miles west along the Coast from here. At least there they could scratch a living out of the dirt.’ And, looking round, I though
t, No species should be able to survive here, this land is sterile as a moon –!

  On other continents of this world, things are different.

  The Pacifican woman left the shuttle-ramp and walked over to join me. The scrape of her boots on rock was louder than the lapping waves.

  ‘The Earth-station on the northern continent must have more extensive records.’ She glanced across at me. ‘Do you want to stay in the ship? You look as if the heat’s too much for you.’

  I glared at her. Molly Rachel’s total lack of tact is something I find disconcerting and pleasing in about equal measures. Only the young can be so honest.

  ‘Molly, you think this is bad? You want to be here in the hot season. And shall we assume that a few years’ difference in our ages doesn’t make me either decrepit or mentally deficient?’

  ‘Or even bad-tempered?’

  ‘Oh, very witty.’

  I don’t know why I like this woman when she irritates me so much. No, that’s a lie. What I do know is that I have to dislike her, because I dislike what her people are going to do. And – God help me, being special advisor to her Company – her people are my people too.

  Molly Rachel craned her neck, looking at the nearest settlement-structures. ‘I still find it difficult to believe we’ve found any kind of alien technology here. Either relics, or functional.’

  ‘I don’t believe it’s functional –’

  Orthe’s technological past is dead. The Golden Witch-breed are a dead race, perhaps as alien to this world then as we are now … and the high-level technology they had was destroyed, millennia past. Not without consequences: witness this desolate land.

  ‘– but I know what you mean, Molly. This is a post-technological world, and pre-tech and post-tech societies don’t look that different on the surface. Primitive. The difference –’

  ‘Maybe there isn’t much difference anyway. If the Ortheans allowed the necessary infrastructure for technology to decay, it’s no wonder they’re reduced to this.’

  I winced. She didn’t notice. Orthe is more than this, I silently protested. Much more. But do I want the Company to realize that?

  ‘Maybe things have gone too far,’ I said, ‘and then it won’t matter if we do find a few artifacts that still function. Unless we’re very lucky, that won’t tell us the nature of the alien technology that built them.’

  And what if the artifacts that the xeno-archeology team found, so recently, tell you no more than the shells of ancient Orthean cities, that Earth has had ten years now to study? Or the ruins of the Rasrhe-y-Meluur, dead these three thousand years? What then?

  ‘Maybe the Company needn’t have come here,’ I suggested, but she shook her head, negating that.

  She stood silhouetted against Orthe’s pale blue sky: Molly Rachel, tall, angular and black, with a mass of fine-curled hair, and the flattened features of her Aborigine mother. Like most people from Earth’s Pacific Basin area – Asia, India, South America, Australasia – she is possessed of a certain impenetrable self-confidence. It comes from knowing that history is on your side. And since Earth’s economic centre shifted there, we all take good care to be on the Pacifican side.

  Dear God, I thought, was I ever that young? But come to think of it, she’s thirty, and I was four years younger than that when I first set foot on Orthe.

  A world must be vast, one thinks, taking in cities and mountains, ancient civilizations, strange skies and suns. But it shrinks. The whole bright gaudy carnival shrinks to a coloured dot in the night sky. And feels to me now like an achievement of youth, recognized and remembered, but put aside for other things.

  A warm wind blew off the sea: sparky, salty, electric. Carrick’s Star dazzled. The world touched me, alien and unfathomable, too real to be safely locked in a memory.

  ‘One of us should stay here with the shuttle,’ Molly said. ‘David Osaka, or you?’

  ‘David. The multicorporate’s seconded me here to be advisor. Let’s say I need a refresher on some points of alien culture.’

  The woman gave me a shrewd look. ‘I’ve studied your old reports. Let’s say wild horses couldn’t keep you out of that settlement.’

  I laughed, but it was wry humour. Here, in the early light of the sun, the native settlement towered above us.

  It is a settlement without streets or city walls.

  Flat-roofed stone buildings clung together. Five- and six-sided, like the cells of a beehive; three storeys tall. All faced us at ground level with blank white walls; windows were fifty feet above us, black slots. Squinting up, I could see where wooden steps led from one roof level to another, and from there two or three different stairways led to different roofs, and in turn from them to others …

  Long shadows fell towards the west. I saw no movement on those roofs. Multiple layers of a celled alien city, a city like a scatter of sun-bleached dice.

  The first exultation of arrival faded. This is not the same world and I am not the same person – and the reason I’m here is not the reason for which I would have chosen to return.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Molly Rachel said.

  ‘Sure.’

  The morning sun glittered on the sea, and the white buildings shone, embedded in the rocky coast, and I took a sudden sharp breath.

  Once I might, just might, have believed I would come to Orthe again. But I should never have believed this – that I would come to this backwater settlement on the shores of the Inner Sea, to the rumoured and disputed last stronghold on Orthe of the race called Golden Witchbreed … to the city of Kel Harantish.

  A metallic note rang out. Flying rock-splinters stung my ankle.

  I exclaimed sharply; simultaneously Molly said, ‘Wait –’

  Nothing but silence and sun.

  ‘That’s close enough,’ she observed. ‘We’ll consider ourselves warned.’

  A white chip scarred a boulder just ahead, and the sun picked out a metal dart that lay in the rubble. My heart hammered. I felt foolish, tricked. And at the same time irritated by the young woman’s confidence.

  ‘Some of the xeno-archeological teams have had this problem,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve read the same reports that you have.’

  She gave me a very straight look.

  Heat made movement an effort, slowed thought. The half-mile walk from the shuttle exhausted me. Now I looked up from the broken ground to the blank walls of the city that rose up like cliffs. I tasted dust on my lips. Walls and rock seemed all one colour, as if the sun had bleached them together for uncounted thousands of years; vertical slabs that leaned over us.

  A foot scuffed rock.

  ‘Lynne –’

  Movement drew my eye: a humanoid figure that bent to pick up the fallen dart. Swift and economical action – but disorientating: the human eye reads alien musculature as wrong. As the figure turned, I saw the crest-like mane growing long on the narrow head and down the spine. Skylined, the proportions of his limbs subtly different from the human. I saw bleached skin with an almost imperceptible scale-pattern, as six-fingered hands gripped a crossbow-like weapon.

  For a moment his glance caught mine, an almost triangular face, wide at the brow, narrow at the chin. His whiteless eyes blurred now with the movement of the nictitating membrane, that third eyelid of the Orthean race. A glance unfathomable and clear: ophidian.

  Without the slightest forethought, I said, ‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’tai.’ A greeting and offer of hospitality, in a northern dialect of the language of the Desert Coast. And it was nothing to do with thirty-four days shiptime spent revising Orthean culture, but with that overpowering shock of familiarity.

  The Orthean male didn’t speak, but wound and reloaded the bow. A small group of Orthean natives appeared from the deceptive gullies. Molly Rachel walked forward until she could talk without raising her voice, and in a southern Coast dialect said, ‘Give you greeting. You need not fire on us, we’re not armed. Our weapons are in our ship.’

  That’s a nice blend of conciliatio
n and threat, I thought. Now why not try the Orthean for ‘take me to your leader’?

  Despite the heat, I felt cold. In the northern continent’s settlements, I might know what to expect. But even there, time has passed. Here …

  Orthean faces turned first towards the harbour, and then to the shore where the shuttle was visible, regarding it without detectable change of expression. There was a silence that made my mouth dry. They stood each a little distance from the next, and, as far as it is possible to read the signs, were both alert and afraid.

  ‘There are just the two of us, at present,’ Molly Rachel added.

  I saw two Orthean males and three females, with dyed-white manes that lay lank over tunics, and what looked to be a brown metal scale-mail. These carried winchbows. A fair-maned female leaned on a thin spear, her exposed lower torso showing the paired nipples of vestigial second breasts.

  If I could read their faces, I would be terrified, I thought.

  ‘Give you greeting, shan’tai.’ A sleek, plump male stepped forward. Light glinted from his brown skin. His mane was braided elaborately, and chains and belts wound round his tunic-robe, but for all that, there was something indefinably seedy about him. Like the others, he stood a good handspan shorter than Earth-standard.

  More comfortable now, I stepped up beside Molly. ‘Shan’tai, this is the representative of the Earth multinational corporate Company PanOceania –’ at least half of that had to be in Sino-Anglic and not Coast dialect ‘– who is called Molly Rachel. Our people have visited your city, a half-year ago.’

  The Orthean male seemed confused. I put it down to my imperfect memory of tenses.

  ‘Our people came to study the ruins of the ancient Witchbreed civilization,’ Molly Rachel said. ‘Shan’tai, I believe we have business with the authorities in your settlement. We have come entirely without threat, and dependent on your goodwill. When will it be possible to discuss these matters?’

  I mentally crossed “assistant interpreter” off my list of duties. While the plump Harantish male spoke to his companions, I said: ‘You’re fluent enough, aren’t you? Hypno-tapes?’