Seeds of Earth (27 page)

Theo moistened his lips and tightened his grip on the handset. He could hear the agonised cries from the window.

'Do what you can, but get any weapons out of sight Rory's on his way, Benny too . . .' He glanced up to see Benny following Rory out of the room at a run. 'Emergency services should be along soon so the story is you were enquiring about rooms to let when it went up, okay?'

'Got that, sir.'

'And tell me - who was it that screamed?'

'A woman opened the door across from Denisov's flat and must have seen our guns - after that everything went to hell.'

Alarms were ringing, some in the burning building, others in adjacent houses. Then came the pulsing wail of fire trucks. is Rory with you yet?'

'He's here now, sir - he's got all the guns and radios.' 'Right - give him yours when I sign off and don't forget to stick to the script.' 'Yes, sir.'

'Rory - local police will be here any minute so you and Benny get over here and wait at the back door. I'll pack the gear and meet you there.'

'Got ye, Major. We're on our way.'

Theo put down the handset, slipped the binoculars into his pocket and began to dismantle the telescope.

The man in the blue workgear was Denisov,
he thought grimly.
It had to be. When he got to a safe distance he must have watched my men go in then waited a few moments before triggering the boobytrap, just to maximise casualties.

So what had Benny been watching for the last couple of hours? Some kind of hologram projected by an offworld device, maybe? If so, it was probably rigged for self-destruct when the main detonation went off, leaving no traces, no evidence.

With everything stowed in a heavy backpack, Theo slung it over his shoulder, picked up the red lamp and headed for the stairs. Rory and Benny were waiting just inside the back door and as they slipped off into the night, he wondered how he was going to explain all this to Sundstrom. And, more importantly, to the families of his dead men.

26

GREG

Even wrapped in his wool-lined jacket, he shivered as he leaned on the ancient, cracked rampart and stared down at the misty coastal plain. It was a grey morning, the air cold and moist from the night rains.

'So how bad is it?' he asked his brother.

Captain Ian Cameron, wearing full field camouflage, rested one booted foot on a low notch in the wall.

'There's a lot of suspicion,' he said. 'Folk in the towns just won't trust travellers or strangers, anyone who's noticeably out of the ordinary.'

'That accounts for most of the faraway hunters and trappers I've ever met,' said Greg.

Ian smiled. The eldest of the three brothers, he was taller and rangier than Greg and had always been the most physically active of them all.

'Aye, some of them have been on the receiving end of it. I mean, the bombings are bad enough, but there was a street protest in Gagarin last night in support of this Free Darien Faction, which really got some locals angry.'

Greg shook his head. 'Who were they?'

'Just some college hotheads waving placards, a few dozen of them, but they made plenty of noise going down Tylermans Walk, upsetting the locals, who started arming themselves, but at least the police were quick to escort them out of the area.' He rubbed his neck. 'Then that house went up in High Lochiel last night. Not good.' Both were silent for a moment. it's hard to believe that community spirit is that fragile,' Greg said.

'Things could be worse,' said Ian. i was talking to some old Norj trappers yesterday, real hill-viking types, and they were telling me a few tales from the time of the Winter Coup. Reminded me of some of the stories Uncle Theo used to tell - didn't take them seriously back then, but now . . .'

'So where is he?' Greg said. 'I've not heard from him since the shooting up here, neither has Mum, and she's worried sick.'

Ian nodded. 'Officially, he is a special adviser to the president's office, but there's no doubt that he's been getting up to some skulduggery with the Diehards, something to do with the bombings.' He swept his gaze around the temple site. 'The Office of Justice has stepped up security at several locations as well as here, and not just because of your guests.'

Greg glanced over his shoulder at the grassy area well to the rear of the main site. Several awnings had been set up for the dozens of Uvovo who were gathering there to await the arrival of the Listener who was to lead this new offshoot, the Artificer Uvovo. Greg knew that it was supposed to be Chel, but he also knew that the husking ritual radically altered the Uvovo physique and sometimes the personality too. Would he be anything like the Chel he had come to know, and would he even recognise Greg?

Just then a corporal approached with a clipboard of supplementaries which Ian read over and signed.

'There's a dirij headed our way from the north,' he told Greg as the soldier hurried off. 'Should be their Listener. I'll just have our comms operator let company HQ know.'

As Ian strode off, Greg steeled himself and straightened. At least there were no reporters present by order of the Institute, for which he was grateful. Lee Shan's coverage of the shooting of the Sendrukan Assister had depicted the security arrangements as amateurish and ineffective, despite the involvement of Kuros's bodyguards. It had also included a shot of Greg's encounter with the Ezgara commandos, complete with his every barbed witticism. The Ezgara and other offworlders might not understand the sarcasm but the Darien audience and those back on Earth could not have failed to pick it up. Not long afterwards, of course, the bullets had started flying.

Nor
exactly a crowd-pleaser,
he thought, heading over to his hut to change.

Fifteen minutes later, a cigar-shaped dirigible drifted in towards the zep station, the drone of its engines tailing off as mooring cables were made fast. It swayed gently by the platform, its bulbous gasbag looking pale grey in the morning haze. Greg could make out a small huddle of hooded figures as they disembarked, some making their way up the wide path by foot while a few others went ahead in one of the motorised buggies. By the time the buggy arrived at the entrance to the site,

Greg and his brother were standing alongside Listener Genusul, expectancy of one kind or another in all their features.

Three hooded figures emerged from the vehicle, the last of them Chel, who looked unchanged and unaltered, much to Greg's relief. But the reaction of the Listener at his side was noticeably different, concern to the point of distress visible in his gaunt, long-jawed face. Chel met him halfway, said something in a low, urgent voice, then turned to Greg.

Greg's positive feelings cooled and his smile faltered. Physically, Chel seemed the same but his features were drawn and his eyes had a bleak, sharp quality as if he was under tremendous strain. Just above the eyes a strip of dark cloth was stretched tight across the forehead, and Greg wondered if it was a dressing for a wound.

'Greetings, friend Gregori,' the Uvovo said with a faint smile. 'I've learned about these bomb attacks -1 do hope that your family is safe.'

'They are, Chel - my mother has been giving me almost hourly updates. My brother Ned has been helping at one of the hospitals where a lot of the injured were taken.' He hesitated. 'How about you? You look pretty much the same, apart from needing a couple of days' sleep, maybe.'

A look of amusement softened the Uvovo's weary, strung-out expression. 'Yes, the husking did not proceed quite as I or anyone else expected. Yet it has left its mark ...' Chel paused as one of his cowled companions signed to him; he nodded and continued. 'Gregori, regretfully we must resume our talking later - I have a very important forgathering to attend.' i understand - I look forward to hearing about your travels.' i promise I will explain what I can,' Chel said cryptically. 'Till then.'

For the next three hours or more Greg went over a bundle of field reports filed by teams of Uvovo scholars who had been surveying the valleys northwest of the Kentigerns. Periodically he had to go over to the large eco-samples hut to examine this or that specimen - he would have asked the reports' authors but they were attending the conclave of this Artificer Uvovo. As he shuttled back and forth he could see that the numbers were growing steadily as newcomers arrived via the densely forested ridges rising to the west. There seemed to be a lot of discussion, groups walking to and fro, lone speakers addressing small crowds, knots of Uvovo milling about. Fortunately the weather was mostly dry, with just one light passing shower which freshened the air and made everything gleam in the cloud-fractured sunlight that followed.

At last a young, wide-eyed Uvovo brought a message from Chel asking Greg to meet him in the excavated area known as the Stairwell in half an hour. He spent the time eating a snack of baroham and gramato sandwiches while catching up on the news headlines on the radio, then, with minutes still to spare, he decided to head over anyway.

The Stairwell was a perfect example of the problems inherent in excavating Giant's Shoulder. It did have some stairs, two flights descending beneath the flagstoned expanse, but after that further steps had been improvised out of broken masonry uncovered by earlier explorers during their excavations. However, due to the unstable, cavity-riddled nature of the interior, those pioneers found that the baulk sides of their digs quickly became prone to serious collapse the deeper they went. After several cave-ins and one fatality a couple of decades ago, the bottom ten metres of the twenty-metre hole were filled in and planked over. Further investigation was restricted to stratification studies and a few cautiously shallow side trenches.

Chel was already there when he arrived, seated on a bench in one of the older side trenches, just out of the fitful sunlight. He raised a hand in greeting as Greg descended the few steps and joined him on the bench.

'Chel, I could say that you're looking great,' he said. 'But that wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true.'

'The truth, friend Gregori, is that I feel worse than I look,' the Uvovo said with a tired smile.

'Was your gathering a success?' in the end, yes. There was much doubt to overcome, and more distrust and pessimism than I anticipated.' He gazed up at the ragged clouds. 'They were expecting a fully-fledged Listener but instead they got... something else.'

Turning to face Greg, he launched into an account of his visit to the daughter-forest Tapiola. Greg listened intently, fascinated at first by the husking ritual and ensuing hallucinatory trance. But when he spoke of having visions of the past and hearing the voice of Segrana in his head, Greg began to wonder if the drug had affected his mind - Chel seemed convinced that these experiences were not fanciful creations of his mind but came from outside, from Segrana.

Chel paused and regarded him a moment. 'Earlier, many of my brothers and sisters thought that part of me was still in thrall to the husking sap - do you think that I have lost my reason?'

'You seem quite rational, Chel - I'd be reluctant to judge until you've finished your tale. What happened to you in there? Why didn't you turn into a Listener?'

Chel gave him a considering smile. 'Because I became something else.'

He pushed back his cowl, reached up to untie the dark grey bandage and lifted it away.

Greg stared, open-mouthed, at the row of four closed eyes on Chel's forehead. As he watched the outer pair fluttered open while Chel kept his own, original pair tightly shut, along with the centre pair. The new eyes swivelled to look at Greg, who smiled uncertainly.

'What do you see?'

The eyes looked around the shallow trench, its sloping sides of compacted soil and masonry debris, then up to the sky for a moment of searching before gazing down at the Stairwell and its gloomy depths. i see Umara's hidden face,' Chel murmured. 'I can see glimpses of lost and forgotten histories. That block for example—' He pointed to an irregular piece of stone with a smooth outward surface,'—was once part of an archway, and that one just along from it was part of a supporting wall. Or I can look at your face, Gregori, and see your mother and father, very clearly . . . and also a thin-faced man with an ear missing, and a woman with long black hair and a white streak through .. .'

Greg could suddenly feel his heart pounding. 'My grandfather Fingal was a hunter who lost an ear to a cragwolf, and the woman with the white in her hair can only be my great-grandmother Moira - Chel, how . ..'

The Uvovo regarded him with those eyes, their darkness a mingled hue of brown and green. 'Segrana's gift, with which to carry out Segrana's work.'

Greg could not help noticing the undertone of resentment in Chel's voice, but now that the initial shock was past his mind was focused on the Uvovo's new abilities and what they implied.

'And the other eyes,' he said. 'What do they do?' i am not entirely certain,' Chel said, replacing the strip of cloth then opening his ordinary eyes, i have not yet learned how to interpret what they show me - sometimes it is as if I can see a kind of language underpinning things around me, then if I look at symbols or written words or even pictures it feels as though part of my mind is trying to wrench a different kind of meaning from them.'

'Are all these eyes meant to work together, perhaps?'

Chel gave a bleak smile, i have attempted that once. The effect is ... hard to describe, as if my head is filled with a thousand arguments except that it is not voices that war with each other but meanings! When I came out -
crawled
out of the
vodrun
I really thought that my mind was going insane, like a storm flooding and tearing apart a town, a city, while all I could do was watch the destruction from a nearby hill. If Listener Eshlo had not acted to cover these eyes ...' He left the sentence unfinished.

Could it really be true?
Greg wondered.
Is Segrana actually an aware entity, some kind of distributed sentience capable of radically altering individual Uvovo}