The Myst Reader (96 page)

“It’s some kind of virus,” he began, then, seeing that the other made to unmask himself, shook his head. “No! Keep that on!”

The guildsman let his hand fall away from the strap, then looked about him. “Are they all dead?” he asked, a note of hopelessness entering his voice.

“Yes,” Aitrus answered bleakly. “Or so it seems.”

THE GRAVE WAS NEW, THE EARTH FRESHLY
turned. Nearby, as if surprised, a guard lay on his back, dead, his hands gripping each other as if they fought, his jaws tightly clenched.

Aitrus stared at the guard a moment, then, looking to his fellow guildsman, Jiladis, he picked up the spade once more and began to dig, shoveling the last of the dark earth back into the hole. They really were all dead—guildsmen and guards, servants and natives. Not one had survived the plague, if plague it was.

And himself? Was
he
now infected with it?

The last book of commentary told the tale. They had found it open on a desk in one of the other buildings, its scribe, an ancient of two hundred years or more, slumped over it. The body had come through a week ago, only two days after the evacuation of D’ni. They had burned it, naturally, but the damage had been done.

“What will you do?” Jiladis asked, his voice muted through the mask he still wore.

“I suppose I will go back,” Aitrus answered. “To D’ni, anyway.”

And there was the problem. If he
was
infected, he could not go back to Gemedet, for he could not risk infecting Gehn and Anna and his mother. Yet was it fair not to let them know what had happened here?

Besides which, he needed to get back, now that he knew what was happening, for he had to return to the mansion and get the Linking Book. Gemedet at least would then be safe.

If he was not already too late.

“I shall come with you,” Jiladis said finally. “There’s nothing here.”

Aitrus nodded, then looked up at the open sky and at the sun winking fiercely down at him.

The surface. He could always make his way to the surface.

Yes. But what about any others who had survived? Could he persuade Jiladis, for instance, that his future lay on the surface?

Aitrus set the spade aside, then knelt, murmuring the D’ni words of parting over the grave. Then, standing again, he made his own, more informal farewell.

“Goodbye, my father. May you find peace in the next Age, and may Yavo, the Maker, receive your soul.”

Aitrus lingered awhile, his eyes closed as he remembered the best of his father. Then he turned and slowly walked away, making his way back to the linking cave, Jiladis following slowly after.

THE DOOR TO THE FAMILY BOOK ROOM HAD
been smashed open, the shelves of the room ransacked. On the podium the Book of Ko’ah lay open, its pages smeared, a clear handprint over the panel.

Aitrus stared at it in shock.

Signs of desecration were everywhere—smeared footprints in the hallways and in almost every room—but had they gone upstairs.

His heart almost in his mouth, Aitrus slipped and skidded up the stairs in his haste.

His workroom was at the far end of the corridor. Footsteps led along the corridor toward it. Aitrus stopped dead, staring at them in horror.

So they had been here, too.

In the doorway he paused, looking about him. A circle of footprints went halfway into the room then came away.

He frowned, not understanding, then rushed across the room. The Book of Gemedet was where he had left it on the desk. The open pages were undisturbed, the thin layer of pasty residue untouched.

Aitrus sighed with relief. Taking a clean cloth from a drawer, he cleaned the cover carefully, then tucked it into the knapsack beside the other things he had packed for the journey.

He had taken extra cylinders from the Hall of the Guild of Miners and food from the sealed vaults in the Hall of the Caterers—enough for an eight-day journey.

If he had eight days.

And Anna? Would she keep her word? Would she stay in Gemedet and not try to come after him? He hoped so. For if she linked here, there would be no linking back for her. Not to Gemedet, anyway, for the book would be with him, and he was going to the surface.

Aitrus went to the front door and looked out across the darkness of the cavern.

He had seen them, yesterday, on his return, or thought he did: the ghostly figures of A’Gaeris and Veovis, pushing their cart of death. And, seeing them, he had known that nowhere was safe from them: not in D’ni, anyway, nor in any of the linked Ages.

If he and Anna and the boy were to have any kind of life, it would have to be up there, on the surface. But were the tunnels still open? Or had the great quakes that had flattened so much in D’ni destroyed them also?

He would have to go and see for himself. If he lived that long. If sickness did not take him on the journey.

IT WAS THE EVENING OF THE SIXTEENTH
day, and Anna sat at Gehn’s bedside, listening to his gentle snores in the shadows of the room. A book of D’ni tales lay beside her, facedown where she had put it. Worn out by a day of playing in the woods, Gehn had fallen asleep even as she read to him. Not that she minded. Anything that took his mind off his father’s prolonged absence was welcome, and it was good to see him sleep so deeply and peacefully.

Leaning across, she kissed his brow, then stood and went outside. The stars were out now, bright against the sable backdrop of the sky. Anna yawned and stretched. She had barely slept this past week. Each day she expected him back, and each day, when he did not come, she feared the very worst.

Tasera, she knew, felt it almost as keenly as she did; maybe more so, for she, after all, had both a husband and a son who were missing; yet Tasera found it much easier to cope with than she did, for she was D’ni and had that rocklike D’ni stoicism. Had it been a thousand days, Tasera would have waited still, patient to the last.

Am I so impatient, then?
Anna asked herself, walking over to the rock at the head of the valley.

She smiled, knowing what Aitrus would have said. It was the difference in their life expectancy, or so he argued. She was a short fuse and burned fast, while he …

Come back
, she pleaded silently, looking out into the star-filled night.
Wherever you are—whenever you are—come back to me, Aitrus.

If they had to spend the rest of their years on Gemedet, she would be content, if only she could be with him.

And if that is
not
your fate?

It was her father’s voice. It was a long time since she had heard that voice—a long, long time since she had needed the comfort of it.

He has been a good man to you, Anna.

“Yes,” she said quietly, speaking to the air. “I could not have wished for a better partner.”

But now you must learn to be alone.

She blinked. There was such certainty in that voice. “No,” she said, after a moment. “He will come back. He promised, and he always keeps his promises.”

The voice was silent.

“Ti’ana?”

Anna started, then turned. Tasera was standing not ten paces from her, just below her on the slope. She must have been walking down by the stream. Coming closer, Tasera looked at her and frowned.

“Who were you talking to?”

Anna looked aside, then answered her honestly. “I was speaking to my father.”

“Ah …” Tasera stepped closer, so that Anna could see her eyes clearly in the half-light. “And what did he say?”

“He said I must learn to be alone.”

Tasera watched her a moment, then nodded. “I fear it might be so.”

“But I thought …”

“Kahlis is not there. I cannot feel him anymore. No matter where he was, no matter
when
, he was always there, with me. So it is when you have lived with a man a century and more. But suddenly there is a gap—an absence, if you like. He is not there anymore. Something has happened to him.”

Tasera fell silent.

“I did not know. I thought …” Anna frowned. What
had
she thought? That only
she
felt like that? That only she and he were related to each other in that strange, nonphysical manner? No. For how could that possibly be? Even so, sometimes it felt as if they were the books of each other—to which each one linked. And when one of those books was destroyed, what then? Would there no longer be a connection? Would there only be a gap, an awful, yawning abyss?

The thought of it terrified her. To be
that
alone.

“I am sorry, Tasera,” Anna said finally. “I do hope you are wrong.”

“And I,” Tasera said, reaching out to take her hands. “And I.”

AITRUS WOKE. THE DARKNESS IN HIS HEAD
was matched by the darkness in which he lay. It was damp and cold and his whole body ached, yet the air was fresher than he remembered it.

He put his hand up to his face, surprised. The mask …

And then he remembered. The air had given out. He had had to take off the mask or suffocate. And that was when he had linked—linked back to Gemedet.

Aitrus lay there a while, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness of the cave. It had to be night outside, for not a trace of sunlight filtered down from above. He listened, straining to hear some sound, but it was hard to know whether he was imagining it or not. For eight days now he had known nothing but silence. The awful, echoing silence of the rock.

All of his life, he realized now, there had been noises all about him—the faint murmur of the great fans that brought the air into the caverns, or the dull concussion from a mining rig, busy excavating in the deep; the noises of the city itself, or of boats out on the lake; the bells that sounded out each hour of every day, and the normal noises of the household all about him. Such sounds had formed the continuum of his existence, ceaseless and unnoticed. Until now.

Now death had come to D’ni. Yes, and to every part of its once great empire. Even in the tunnels he had found the dead—Miners at their work, or Maintainers, whose job it was to patrol the great perimeter.