Eternity Row (22 page)

“I know, but I wish- I would so very much
like
to remain with my father’s people.” He inspected the sand painting again, then reached out and swept his hand over my brother’s image. Rico’s, face dissolved into a scramble of flower petals and sand. “I cannot dwell in my memories forever.”

“Then let’s wait and see what’s down there.” I patted the top of his right wing. “It’s probably such an outright nirvana that they have to beat immigrants away with a stick.”

Twenty-eight hours later, I decided the stick wouldn’t be required. Whatever universal powers responsible for creating nirvanas had bypassed Taerca completely.

From the air, Taerca looked a little spooky. I’m sure Reever would have pointed out the bountiful vegetation, and how lucky the inhabitants were that it paved the continental basins and framed the snowcaps of round-topped mountains. Lots of veggies and veggie-eaters to supply food.

Yet something about the planet spooked me. Random topographical patterns, I thought as I looked down at the surface, should not resemble heaps of skulls rising out of muck.

Planetary sweeps indicated the Taercal were the most highly developed species on the planet, and occupied areas of mountainous tundra high above the valleys and plains. Their cities weren’t highly populated, and located far apart from each other.

“So how many people live in this place again?” I asked Reever.

“Our sweeps picked up three hundred and forty-two individual readings within the capital city.” He raised a brow. “You did not review the pre-sojourn data again.”

“I wanted to be surprised.” For a city that was twenty kilometers across, three hundred and forty-two wasn’t much. “How big are they?”

“Aside from their wingspans, their physical size is comparable to ours.” Reever checked his wristcom. “It could be that the natives spend much of the time in the air. Like the Meridae.”

“Uh-huh.” I frowned as Xonea began to descend, and the city seemed to expand below us.

A high, glassy stone wall with outward-curving white spikes on it encompassed the place, and served as a notice to “Stay Out!” better than anything I’d ever seen. Someone had painted a strange, purplish pattern on the polished stones. Inside the city, dozens of black structures rose high above the wall, but they didn’t resemble any buildings I’d ever seen. They looked more like openmouthed muzzles with protruding teeth.

Scary, nightmarish protruding teeth. “What are those ugly jagged black things?”

Hawk peered through the viewport beside mine. “Part of the mountain, perhaps?”

Reever looked, too. “Too symmetrical. They’re artificial, whatever they are.”

The launch touched down on a small flat plateau just beyond the all-encompassing wall, and Xonea signaled Ortsac of our arrival. There was no response for several minutes, then a crackling relay came through, audio only.

“Present yourselves at the ingress,” I heard the Taercal say.

Xonea requested directions, and the impatient official snarled, “Look for Sadda’s Maw!”

“The Welcome Wagon sounds real jovial.” I picked up my sojourn pack and nudged a frowning Hawk with my elbow. “I’m just kidding. Once they know we’re not here to invade and raid and scorch everything into dust, I’m sure they’ll be much more neighborly.”

Climbing out of the shuttle made me retrieve my jacket from my pack. The outside air temperature was a frosty degree or two above freezing, and our breath made white puffs in the air as we hiked across the plateau toward the city wall. A foot of mist lay over the ground, and swirled up in sluggish drifts as we moved through it.

“Ugh.” Something slid under my footgear, and I lifted it to see a wide, flat smear on the bottom. On the ground lay the writhing remains of an equally attractive worm. “Sorry.”

The air incongruously seemed very damp for such a high altitude, and after several hundred feet my face was wet and my hair dripping into my eyes, which should have frozen, but for some reason didn’t. The frigid dampness quickly invaded my jacket and garments and increased my discomfort exponentially.

“No wonder your people are feathered,” I muttered as I pushed my soaked hair back and watched enviously as water beaded and rolled harmlessly off Hawk’s wings. “This place is like one big cleansing unit on continuous cold rinse.”

Xonea and Reever were keeping at opposite ends of the sojourn team, with the Captain in the lead and my husband bringing up the rear. I dropped back to see if our portable translator was being affected by the humidity.

“The housing is designed to withstand immersion in most fluids,” Reever said. “Did you notice the sky?”

I looked up. There wasn’t much to see, besides thick foggy clouds and a couple of patches of gray beyond that. “What’s wrong with it?”

“There are no Taercal flying in it.”

That
was
a little weird. “Maybe they went back to the city to welcome us.” Even as I said that, a chill inched down my spine, one that had nothing to do with the water dripping down from my hair into my collar.

Reever examined the lethal wall again. “Welcoming strangers does not appear to be a social habit.”

The ground, while shrouded in mist, was heavily populated by worms like the one I’d stepped on, and the sound of them squashing under our footgear only added to the ambience of the planet. Which, to me, was basically icky.

“Are these parasites?” I asked Reever as I scraped another one off my footgear.

“No, they are like Terran earthworms, I believe.”

“Then why don’t they stay in the earth?”

By that time Xonea had located “Sadda’s Maw,” which turned out to be some kind of stone door recessed in the wall. A huge sculpture formed the entrance, with outcroppings that made me think of a toothy Sword of Damocles. Each of the stylized teeth had been hewn from curved, white stone carefully shaped and polished to appear like the real thing.

Worms were one thing; fangs were another.

“Duncan, what kind of animal has a mouth the size of three launches stacked on top of each other?” I murmured to my husband as I watched the white sun’s faint light glitter on the points of the stone fangs.

“One we should avoid.”

I shuddered. “Amen.” I stepped closer to see the painted pattern on the stone, then reached out to touch it. Flecks of sticky purple came off on my fingers, and a pungent, unpleasant smell hit my nose. “This isn’t paint. It’s some kind of plant.”

“Fungi,” my husband said.

“It stinks.” I took out a sterile wipe and cleaned off my hand. “Maybe we should leave them a couple of vats of disinfectant and fungicide.”

The door beneath it swung outward, scraping stone against stone as it abruptly divided itself in half and slid sideways, parallel to the wall. A small group of beings emerged, stopped several feet away, and said nothing. Their garments were a cross between robes and togas, and since their heads were shrouded with odd, cowl-like drapes, there was no way to know what they were thinking. Finally, one of them, the largest, said something.

My vocollar didn’t translate the clipped, toneless words, but Duncan translated at once. “They wish us to present ourselves to them.”

On closer inspection, I saw more of the purple mold staining their toga-robes, and worm-splatters around the hems. Didn’t these people understand the concept of laundry day?

Xonea stepped forward to make the introductions, which he kept brief and businesslike. “I am Xonea Torin, Jorenian, Captain of the
Sunlace
. This is Healer Cherijo Torin, Linguist Duncan Reever, and
hataali
Hawk Long Knife, all of Terra.”

Reever translated that into Taercal, but I noted his accent was far softer and more melodic. As the officials listened, a couple of them shuffled back a step. I could tell from the squashing sounds.

Could it be that he was interpreting this whole thing wrong?

When my husband finished speaking, the biggest Taercal pulled back the shrouding hood of his toga-robe, and revealed himself as Tadam Ortsac, the official who had contacted the ship. He looked

even fatter and wartier than he had on the vid.

Large and In Charge snapped something that Duncan translated as “Why do you come here?”

Hawk stepped forward, arching his wings for the first time. “Tell him I am the son of Fen Yillut, born of Charla Long Knife.”

Reever obliged, but I don’t think any of the Taercal were listening. Every single one of them, including Ortsac, were staring at Hawk’s powerful wings. Which made me notice the bulges under the back of their robes. I’d seen that before, when Hawk had concealed his alien blood on Terra by binding them down and pretending he was a hunchback.

Could it be that his father’s people also had to disguise their own wings? Why would they, on their own world?

Xonea picked up the sudden shift in mood as well. “Duncan, what say you? What disturbs them?”

“You’re intimidating them.” Reever went up to Hawk and put a hand on his arm. “Fold back your wings,
hataali
.”

“I mean no disrespect.” The crossbreed looked perplexed. “I don’t understand why my wings would frighten them.”

“Neither do I, but fold them back anyway.” Reever had picked up on the same thing I had, because he added, “Do not attempt to fly until we can learn why these people do not use their wings.”

Once Hawk had folded his extra appendages, Ortsac uttered something short and went back through the door. After a momentary hesitation, so did the rest of the group. A trail of dead worms led to the door, which remained open.

Not much of an invitation.

“Reever, I’m getting a bad feeling about this place.” I glanced back at the launch, then at the growing misery on Hawk’s face. “Then again, I’ve been known to be wrong. Frequently.” I put my arm through his. “Come on, let’s go see if we can locate your dad.”

CHAPTER NINE Among the Faithful

Within the walls were some of the starkest, most unattractive structures I’d ever seen. Built from the same stone as the outer city walls, they hadn’t been polished, and seemed almost heaped together. Worms and mold were everywhere, under our feet, on the walls, and seemed to increase in quantity the farther we moved into the city.

“Think they’re allergic to architecture and cleanliness?” I asked Reever in a low voice.

He stopped to scrape off the bottom of his footgear. “Evidently they have other priorities.”

Aside from the swirly mold, the only architectural ornamentation were crude pictographs hacked in the stone above each open doorway. They were all the same thing-an image of a stick figure with two bumps on its head. Nothing else softened the bare walls, and the ground beneath our feet was simply soil carpeted with thousands of squashed worms.

Not a drone or a glidecar or so much as a public access terminal lay anywhere within sight.

“Where’s their tech?” I unbuttoned the front of my now-saturated jacket. “They have to have something, or they wouldn’t have been able to signal us.”

Xonea peered around. “It may be kept inside the buildings, to protect it from the environment.”

Where the dirt streets intersected, triangular trenches had been dug around groups of large stone blocks. There were holes in the top of the blocks, but I wasn’t tall enough to see if they went all the way through. Behind them rose the towering black edifices we’d seen from the air. Each one had four splinter-shaped towers at each corner, and only a single open entrance at the base.

Something screeched nearby, and I jumped. “What was that?”

Xonea pointed to a small, darting shadow moving around the jagged points of one black structure. “Some sort of animal.”

Some sort of bloodsucking animal, I’d bet. Or worm eating. The white mist rolling around the base of those black things made me expect to hear wolves howling at any moment.

“These must be communal centers.” Reever looked in through one of the entrances, but the interior was as black as the outside. “Perhaps meeting places for the local population.”

I didn’t know who would meet there. The city seemed completely deserted. The only sound we heard was the damp wind, the trickle of condensate running down the stone walls and, as we walked on, the regular squish of the worms we stepped on. There should have been voices, music, kids running around, whispers,
something
,