Orion Shall Rise (17 page)

Thus the streets of Dulua remembered how hostile hoofbeats and trumpets had racketed, hostile lances swayed and glittered, again and again; but only once had they seen a bloodbath, only twice a sack, and they had seen nothing but commerce for the past two hundred years or more. Peace had descended on the plains like a twilight; a generation ago its blueness spread up the mountains of the West, and mothers no longer told unruly children, ‘If you do not behave, the Norrmen will come get you.’

Vanna Uangovna had encountered war nowhere but in history books, reminiscences, and fragmentary news out of distant realms. Rather, she had when young gone into Yuan herself, on a regimental scholarship, to complete her study of physics at the Grandfather University in Chai Ka-Go; in that same country, in the House of Revelation, she had had an experience of Gaea that decided the whole meaning of her life, and later spent years as a disciple of a Yuanese ucheny. Back in her homeland, gaining the name of a proróchina, a seeress, she had no few seekers of enlightenment come to her in their turn across the border. Merchant caravans – wagons in summer, sleighs in winter – from the neighbor were an ordinary sight here, as were freighters and fishing boats from those southeasterly shores of Ozero Visshi that Yuan held. Friction occurred occasionally, but never – by radio, journal, letter, or word of mouth – had she received any hint of serious trouble between the two nations.

Hence it was a double-pronged stab through her when a Yuanese troop rode unheralded into Dulua, armed for battle.

She heard the noise and came forth to see what was happening. This was a summer day of a brightness rare in these parts. Her eyes needed a moment to regain full sight, her mind the same time to understand. At first she was mainly aware of warmth that streamed from overhead, drawing resiny odors out of a nearby lumberyard.
The second-floor balcony on which she stood overlooked a paved street kept clean by the slugai; the two regiments that shared ownership of this community made a habit of neatness. Likewise well-scrubbed were the cottages of those workers, from steep red tile roofs to painted frame walls. Here and there reared the townhouse of an officer family, dragon-raftered, or the bulk of a mercantile establishment, or the heaven-blue onion dome of a temple. Beyond were the docks, and then the lake reached past the horizon, its glitter of hot silver broken by idle sails or by cargo barges striding along on their oars. Inland, at Vanna’s back, close settlement gave way abruptly to pasture, vegetable fields, and timberlots, with pine woods in the distance, but the Library building hid that.

Fleetingly she grasped familiarity to her, before she focused on the intruders. They numbered about a hundred horsemen, trailed by pack animals and remounts in charge of boys – a full company. Tunics and trousers were gray-green, helmets crested, which was not true of any Krasnayan unit. Bodies tended more to stockiness, faces to flatness, eyes to obliqueness than was the case in her country. The gonfalon borne in the van did not display a white star on black, but a golden sun on crimson. Otherwise the gear was the same as what she was used to, everyone carrying a sword, principal weapons divided equally among lances, bows, and costly rifles, a radio transceiver on the back of a mule. … Well ahead, Vanna spied a squad of local troopers, quietly reined in. Alarm began to drain from her.

And yet – why have they come?

Hard by the standard, a man who had seen her emerge brought his horse around for a closer look. He was as roughly clad as the rest, but insignia on his shoulders flashed beneath the sun, actual metal. His voice boomed at her: ‘Ho-oh, greeting! I want the Librarian.’

Somehow that sent the last fright out of Vanna. Indignation came in its place: deplorable, no doubt, but she was not just a Gaean, she was a daughter of the Soldati and charged with duties that had been sacred long before Karakan Afremovek had his first Insight. She stiffened where she stood, kept her own voice low but projected it in the way she had learned as part of her Gaean body-consecration: ‘This
is
the Library at Dulua, open like all Libraries to any who come in desire of knowledge, and the honor has befallen me that
I
am its Librarian.’

The man sat for several heartbeats, erect and motionless in the
saddle. Was he ashamed, or did he resent being reproached – by a formula, and on the lips of a woman – before his soldiers? When he spoke again, his tone was level: ‘No disrespect meant, reverend lady. I’ve got urgent business here, and it’s important to Krasnaya too. We aren’t invaders, we’ve come by invitaion.’

A wryness brought the corners of Vanna’s mouth slightly upward.
Invitation by demand,
she thought.
The last peace treaty may have recognized our tight to independence, but it deprived us of our richest holdings. Ever since, we have been a country of meager grazing and niggardly farmlands. Our sole real wealth is in the forest, but timber and furs will not support a large population. Whenever mighty Yuan whistles, Krasnaya wags her tail. … Mostly they’ve left us alone. They wouldn’t
arrive like this without strong cause.

‘You shall be received, then,’ she called. It would have been more impressive to go inside at once than to linger, but she could not resist watching for a while. The officer gave orders to a subordinate, who passed them on to his sergeants. Bugles sounded, gongs clanged. The company formed ranks and trotted on up Minyasota Street, preceded by the Krasnayans. Probably they were off to a field close by town where they could pitch camp. The commander spoke to a couple of men who had stayed behind, and dismounted. Timidly, Mericans began to emerge from the cottages and mingle with the Soldati who already stood and stared.

For a moment the Yuanese leader himself paused to gaze. Well he might. The Library at Dulua was old, famous, and well endowed. Including the garden and shrine, its grounds spread over a hectare. They were dominated by the main building, huge, gracefully colonaded, its whitewashed brick inlaid with the words of sages, the Eye of Wisdom above its portal as a mosaic of marble, jade, lapis lazuli, onyx, and gold.

But this was mere housing. What counted was within. Of the estimated million books, some were physical relics of civilization before Death Time and the Migrations – whether Old Merican or imported later from abroad. More were reprints, meticulously done from originals in other collections. Most represented the art and scholarship of later generations, especially of the past two or three centuries. And there were maps, periodicals, indices, drawings, photographs, charts, research facilities – even, nowadays, a computer shipped the whole way from N’Zealann.…

Vanna left the balcony. In the cool dimness behind, she summoned her assistants and acolytes. The first group she reassured; they were mainly slugai, albeit of professional status, and therefore bone-terrified of anything warlike. ‘Go about your tasks,’ she said. ‘You have nothing to fear.’ (Inwardly, she wondered the least bit.) The acolytes were Soldat-born, serving in the Library and learning its skills incidentally to their search into the Gaean mysteries under her direction. They numbered a dozen or so, young men with a few young women among them. In Krasnaya, oftener than elsewhere on the plains, girls who showed aptitude were sometimes encouraged to become something other than wives.

‘Assume the Excellent Formation and follow me,’ she ordered. A robed and slowly gliding party at her back would help put the foreign officer in his place.

He waited in the foyer. Sunlight through stained-glass windows splashed the stone floor with color. As she and her followers swept down the grand staircase, he saluted. She decided he was not a bad man. His manners were coarse, but that wasn’t his fault. Already her linguist’s ear had identified him by his accent as hailing from Yo Ming Province. Quite likely he had been in the final border skirmishes with the Northwest Union when he was a youth; very likely he had led hunts for bandits in the foothills.

‘Greeting, reverend lady,’ he said. ‘My name is Orluk Zhanovich Boktan, and I’m noyon of the Bison Polk.’ The brass hawks on his tunic repeated it; he ranked just below the colonel of the entire regiment. While he had brought no more than a company with him, his presence bespoke the seriousness of his mission.

‘I hight Vanna Uangovna Kim, Librarian of Dulua, who bid you welcome and offer assistance,’ she replied. They both bowed.

Thereafter they considered each other. She saw a middle-aged man, compact and leathery, shaven-headed and fork-bearded. He saw a woman in her late thirties, small, almost childlike in her slenderness, but with a large head bearing a sharply delicate face. Her gown of office was gray, unadorned save for an embroidered Sinese ‘Knowledge’ character in gold; but at her throat hung a disc of jade, a cross carved into it, the emblem of a Gaean adept.

He smiled rather stiffly. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going to paw through your books. Your Major Kharsov said that if anybody here can help us, it’s you. Could we go off by ourselves and talk?’

‘Certainly.’ Dismissing her attendants, Vanna led the way to her sanctum. He seemed a bit surprised by its austerity, amidst an ornateness of murals, but settled down, in cross-legged Western fashion, on the bench in front of her desk. She took the tall, uncushioned stool behind it, raised her brows inquiringly, and waited.

‘This
is
secret,’ he warned. ‘If word got out to the wrong people that we know what we do, and if matters are as buggered up as they maybe are, why, such demons might be loosed that Oktai himself couldn’t chase them back to hell.’

Momentarily, irrelevantly, she wondered if he was a pagan, or simply used the name of the Stormbringer to
give
force to his words. In either case, his sincerity was unmistakable; beneath his toughness gnawed a rat of dread. Her skin prickled with cold. ‘Say on,’ she murmured.

He scowled and tugged his beard. Doubtless he wished he could light one of the cigars she saw in a breast pocket. After half a minute, he got it out: ‘Has anyone come by looking for … uranium, plutonium … nuclear explosives?’

It was like a detonation in her brain. Appalled, she could only stare while he slogged relentlessly on:

‘We’ve got reason to think someone’s been collecting them, and for a lot of years. Unexpended missiles from Death Time, their sites forgotten and overgrown – because Maurai agents, you know, tracked down every gram of fissionable they could, around the world, long ago, and I believe their claim is true, that they encased it and sank it in the deepest pan of the sea.

‘Nevertheless, lately – and I’ve not been told, but I’d guess it’s because the Maurai warned the Imperial Court – lately we in Yuan have had expeditions out, hunting for overlooked missiles, whether big ones in launch holes or mobile units left behind by the Old Merican army when it scattered and died. We’ve found a number; and the warheads were missing. Stripped –
not
by Maurai hundreds of years back, but by somebody else within the past decade or two. You can tell by signs like scratches on the metal, how oxidized. … Well. Somebody seems to have plans, like maybe for putting his saddle on the world. And Yuan occupies just one of the territories where the ancients kept their weapons.

‘No offense, reverend lady, but Krasnaya doesn’t have the manpower or the organization to go into this as thoroughly as must be.
We’ve got to ransack your wildernesses, find the lost hellmakers or at least, we hope, get an idea of who those graverobbers are. The Tien Dziang wrote personally to your Supreme Gospodin. They agreed Yuanese search parties should come. I’m leading the first.’

He stopped, hoarsened, and now Vanna suspected he most wanted a drink from the canteen at his hip, which surely did not hold water.

But am I mad?
she wailed to herself.
Japing about a thing as terrible as this!
She willed ease into her muscles, drew several long breaths, silently voiced a mantra while calling up, before her mind’s eye, a mandala. After a few seconds she could reply steadily:

‘I understand, Noyon, and with my whole being wish I could help. If that cancer on Gaea recurs, the Life Force may be driven to a more radical cure than another Death Time. But I fear I have no information.’

‘You may. Somewhere, buried in that mass of material you keep, somewhere may be a lead to some of those sites.’

‘I doubt that. Naturally, I’ll start my staff investigating on a priority basis, but after all the centuries that it’s been maintained, the ancient collection
is
well catalogued and indexed. And newer acquisitions will be of no use, will they?’

They might. Who knows? Mention, maybe, of something curious that a trapper noticed, far off in the woods. And you, reverend lady. You get a good many people here, wanting to find out about this or that. You must supervise them, especially if they borrow old books.’

True.’ Vanna frowned, harking back, until she sighed and spread her hands. ‘No. I’m sorry, but I’m sure no one has done research that might have been aimed in that direction. If you think about the matter, Noyon, you may agree it’s implausible anyone would. Why leave precisely the sort of clue for you that you’ve mentioned?’

Instead,
she thought,
the searchers will have traveled inconspicuously through the forests and along the lakes, always alert, ready to ask certain innocent-seeming questions of every local person they met. You might try to find such persons, Noyon, but to me it looks hopeless. Among isolated, naive backwoods folk, the searchers can have passed themselves off as practically anything, anybody, they chose.

Twenty years of purpose, did you estimate, Noyon? We may well already be too late.
She could not repress a shudder.

2

Abruptly, while visiting a holding of his Clan in the Vosges, Talence Donal Ferlay gasped, caught at his chest, and fell dead.

It was totally unexpected. Though he had entered his seventy-first year, he continued hale, without need of other artifice than reading glasses, and Ferlay men often survived thus into their nineties. Unspoken but unquestioned had been the assumption that the Clan Seniors would soon elect him Captain, when aged Toma Sark passed away.