Lords of the Seventh Swarm (7 page)

Gallen looked at Felph suspiciously. The hair rose on the back of Gallen’s neck. On Tremonthin, the Inhuman had downloaded memories of past lives into Gallen. And somewhere, Gallen felt he had lost a bit of himself in a sea of otherness. He dared not put on the mask.

“What do the masks do?” Gallen said.

Felph frowned in thought. “The methods for making a spirit mask are kept secret from humans, so it is difficult to explain precisely how they work. The means for producing them is taught by the `ancestors,’ the Qualeewoohs’ word for gods. I cannot explain it any better than to say this: you and I would say that these masks are receivers. The masks let the Qualeewoohs’ dead ancestors speak to them.”

Gallen said, “But earlier tonight, Herm said that wearing the masks drives you insane.”

Felph smiled secretively. “Some would say that it drives you
divine
. It is true that long-term exposure to alien thoughts might … confuse some. But there is little harm in short-term exposure. Please. You said you wanted proof of the Waters. This is part of the evidence.”

Gallen immediately stiffened. Felph seemed more than a bit mad himself. He had worn the masks, of that Gallen felt certain. Perhaps the mask had made him insane. Certainly a normal man would not have howled for his guests to leave his party, would not have bayed like a wounded hound almost as soon as they entered his home. Felph was insane, and possibly dangerous. Gallen didn’t trust his judgment, didn’t want to don the mask. Yet a certain morbid fascination gripped him. Gallen wanted to know for certain that Felph spoke the truth.

Gallen went to the case, pulled out the mask that Felph had indicated—a mask of deep purples with threads of red among the silver writing. He took a deep breath, then held the strange birdlike mask up to his face with both hands. Almost immediately he stiffened, as if bracing himself for a blow. Wearing the mask somehow seemed suffocating—though Gallen could breathe easily enough. It was an odd sensation. He felt as if—his head had elongated, as if it were pulled into a far place.

Almost immediately he saw something—a vision one might call it, and the oddity of it repelled him. At first, his mind could not make sense of what he saw. A world as flat and featureless as a sea of molten lead, skies in banded shades of yellow and crimson, and green birds of light wheeling through the skies. One of the birds was flying toward him, growing larger and larger in his field of vision, and its thoughts seemed to pummel Gallen. Half-formed questions formed in Gallen’s mind—questions that he felt, curiously, must be answered once posed.

He choked back a sob, then drew the mask away, shoving it toward Felph. He found that he had dropped protectively to one knee.

He blinked rapidly and shook his head, as if trying to wake from a disturbing dream, then said weakly. “All right. I believe you.”

“What, what did you see?” Orick nearly shouted.

“It is not so much what you see,” Felph said. “It was what you think and feel. The ancestors speak to your whole soul—your hopes and desires and dreams.”

Orick asked, “What did they say?”

Gallen shook his head. “They asked me …” he struggled for words, “if I could seek for the Waters of Strength. To seek with my whole being. They told me to find … peace?” He frowned, as if uncertain of the message.

Maggie looked to Gallen, then to Felph, incredulous.

Felph said, “Would you like to try it, Maggie, Orick? Do you want to hear the voices of the ancestors?”

Maggie shook her head vigorously. Orick and Tallea declined the offer.

“Such a shame,” Felph said. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind. Here: this mask is for you, Gallen, since you had the courage to wear it. It’s quite valuable. It dates to the thirty-third ascendancy, a historical period that ended about three thousand years ago. The finest masks were made then.” He presented the mask to Gallen with a bow. Gallen took it, gingerly, put it under his arm.

“I—I don’t get it,” Orick said. “You said that the Qualeewoohs had conquered time and space. If that’s true, why don’t you bring us one?”

Felph smiled broadly. “Well, Orick, that is hard to explain, and I don’t know the answer for sure myself. The Qualeewoohs say that the ancestors are `flying between the stars.’ I think that phrase means, quite frankly, that they do not exist in the physical universe. They have been transformed into something else, something that travels to another dimension, where time and space as we know them no longer exist.”

Maggie seemed astonished at this. She pushed up at her mantle, as if to shove it from her head. She did that at times when it was downloading too much information to her. “That would require a more sophisticated level of technology than even
we
have!” she said. “We’ve never crossed dimensional boundaries.”

Felph shrugged. “Qualeewooh technology differs from ours, yet I doubt it is ‘more sophisticated.’ “

Maggie said, “This is incredible. My mantle has no information on these masks; as a Lord of Technology, I should know something of them.”

Gallen’s own mantle whispered to him. “The nature of the artifacts discovered here has been classified as secret. It is vital that such technology not fall into dronon hands.”

Until now, Gallen had thought it exceedingly odd that the government would conspire to hide an entire world. Now he got an uneasy feeling that they had stumbled onto something darker and more important than he ever would have imagined.

Softly, Maggie asked, “What proof do you have of such a level of technology?”

“Ah,” Felph smiled. “I see your reservations. A technologist doesn’t want dreams and alien voices whispering in her ear. She wants hardware.” He bent his head. “Unfortunately, not much has survived the past twenty thousand years. You can search the aeries—the Qualeewoohs call them cloo holes, but all you will find are cave paintings. But some evidence exists. Come back here, into this passage.”

Felph hobbled to a hole that had been excavated in the back of the chamber, then led them through a corridor that sloped down, then suddenly opened into a far larger chamber, an almost perfect oval.

Here, things were far different from the room above. Felph had installed a very dim continual light on one wall. Mounted on the wall opposite from the light was bolted a metal panel with graceful lines etched deeply into it. Whereas the previous walls had all been covered with exotic pictographs, these loops and whorls were clearly different. They didn’t seem to be writing. They didn’t represent anything.

“Can you guess what this is?” Felph asked.

Maggie drew close and studied the metal panel. “This isn’t the low-quality silver we’ve seen on Qualeewooh spirit masks. This is a solid sheet of platinum.” The panel was nearly two meters tall and ten long. “Something this big had to have been milled in a foundry.” She studied the grooves in the metal. They followed two separate tracks, mirror images of one another, that led from the floor to the ceiling and back down again in graceful sweeps. “It looks like writing etched into the metal,” Maggie said, uncertain.

But even Gallen guessed that these weren’t pictographs, not representational characters at all. “These etched tracks are so narrow and deep: the grooves must have been cut with a laser.” When she examined the etchings closely, she suddenly bolted backward in surprise.

“A recording?” Maggie said, astonished. “These grooves are an audio recording?”

“More than just audio!” Felph said. “It’s an audiovisual recording from the second expansion, approximately thirty thousand years ago. This predates nearly every civilization on Earth. Our ancestors were just learning to shape stone, while these people were developing laser technology and recording studios, performing brain surgeries and actively terraforming their own planet to make it more suitable. You should see the stone aqueducts on Fire River—over four thousand miles of covered aqueducts in all—and most of it is still usable.”

Felph brought a small device from the pocket of his robe, something that looked like a high-tech top—a spindle on a round spool with a thin, curved handle. He placed it in one of the grooves on the lower right-hand corner of the metal plate, and twisted. There was a snapping sound as a lock snicked open. A heavy rumbling followed.

A hole opened in the stone floor, and a statue began rising up, revealing the shape of a birdlike creature sculpted from colored glass. The figure was corroding, miserable in appearance, but Gallen could sense the general appearance of the being.

The Qualeewooh had light-colored feathers on its chest, while the longer plumage on its wings was mostly tan with some green tips at its wings. The statue showed the creature with its wings upraised, and Gallen could distinctly see the tiny hands—each with four long fingers, at the apex of each wing. The Qualeewooh’s brownish neck was long and slender, with a blaze of white at the throat, and its head held a large beaklike snout, with many teeth that were needlesharp, including two large pairs of upper fangs that reminded Gallen of a boar’s tusks. As with any bird, the eyes were set on each side of its head, so that the Qualeewooh could see in any direction above, below, or to either side. Somehow, even from only this crude icon, Gallen would have recognized that this creature was sentient.

But this creature seemed more than intelligent. It carried itself with a pride, with a majesty, few humans could have aspired to. Perhaps it was the spirit mask that the statue wore. This particular mask was formed of platinum, inlaid with cabochons of dark blue azurite. The spirit mask flamed up and outward into some mystical crown, and the glass eyes of the statue stared deeply from this mask, secretive, wise—but mostly, most frighteningly, malevolent.

There were other oddities about the statue. On its fingers the Qualeewooh wore heavy rings, each shaped like a long, raking claw. On its chest it wore a bandolier with many tiny implements that might have been tools or keys.

There, in the dark room, gazing at this ancient glass statue that barely caught the light in the darkness, Gallen felt a primal, palpable fear. Something about this creature made him step back. He suspected this was no representation of a Qualeewooh lord or philosopher. This was a demon.

The sight of the statue affected the others in the same way. Everyone had moved back from it. Felph appeared not to notice. He still had his little device in the track on the platinum wall, and now he placed an identical device into a groove on the lower right side. “These are models of the spindles a Qualeewooh used. I’ve motorized these, so that they’ll play over the recording. In ancient times, there were no motors. A nest mother would have stood here, a spindle in each claw, flapping her wings to play the recording. You can imagine what it would look like.”

He pretended to grab both implements and begin running them through the narrow grooves, pulling them toward him, raising them slightly, then pushing them back out along their tracks, then pulling them back in.

The result of his odd motions was that Felph suddenly looked as if he were a bird, mimicking the motions of flight, flapping his wings.

When he finished his demonstration, he reached down to the spindles, pushed a button on each one, and the spindles actually began to move.

A quavering sound issued from the spindles, remarkably loud. It was a song-reed pipes, thunderous drums, some strange instrument that might have been a wood paddle scraping over stone.

It was a marvelous melody—rich, exotic, completely alien and yet immediately recognizable as music. One could hear high winds whistling through crevices, the music of flapping wings and beating hearts.

Qualeewoohs were singing in that song, too.

The ancient Qualeewooh language was raucous, with many squawks among its frantic whistling. It was a dramatic weaving of sound, like voices crying in a jungle over the peeping of frogs. The Qualeewoohs’ cries reverberated throughout the chamber—a challenging tone that might have been voicing curses or deprecations.

Orick shouted in astonishment, “Look in its eyes!”

Gallen stared into the eyes of the statue, and saw that somehow—he could not see the source—an image was being projected through the statue. In the black depths of the statue’s eyes Gallen could discern five Qualeewoohs winging over the red deserts of Ruin, soaring over rocky bluffs. From overhead, a second flock of Qualeewoohs plummeted with deadly grace from cloudy skies, diving into their fellows, talons stretched out, apparently fitted with metal spurs. The attackers slashed the necks and wings of their adversaries. A squawking roar filled the room, as if a hundred Qualeewoohs shrieked in pain and terror, then the image focused on two Qualeewoohs who soared and dived, battling in the sky.

The sounds softened, almost breathless, and Gallen suspected this recording recounted the tale of these two Qualeewoohs. It must have been an epic battle, for it lasted more than ten minutes, and Gallen was astonished at what he saw—Qualeewoohs flying in complex loops, twisting dives, terrifying strikes and heroic dodges.

In the end, one Qualeewooh plummeted in a dazzling pattern, as if trapped in a whirlwind, spiraling down. In the last second of its attack, it reached out with one wing, where its tiny hand carried a thin blade, and smote off the head of its adversary.

Thus the adversary tumbled to earth, end over end, its head somersaulting in the air.

The vanquishing Qualeewooh soared on over the plains, master of all it surveyed.

For the next several minutes of the recording, all one could see was a lone Qualeewooh flying through endless empty skies, accompanied by a ringing song that could only have come from some type of pipes or whistles, unaccompanied by other instruments, until at last the remaining Qualeewooh reached a mountain aerie and entered a cave.

In the back of the cave, Qualeewooh chicks huddled in downy feathers, shaking amid the shells of their eggs, snaking querulous peeps as the dark lord approached, beak open, displaying his razor-sharp teeth.

There the tale ended.

Gallen’s logic told him that this recording showed a major battle between good and evil. If so, something was certainly amiss. This was not a heroic tale as he understood it: of the Qualeewoohs who had fought, the loser was not the aggressor, but the defender. The defender, a smaller Qualeewooh, had worn a simple spirit mask of bright silver, unadorned with any gaudy stones. In all the encounters, it had heeled away, retreating with great speed and desperation toward a distant line of hills. True, it did rake its attacker on occasions, but only in self-defense.