Artemis Invaded (9 page)

“I agree,” Adara said, pleased that Griffin had confirmed her own speculations. “Believe it or not, scavengers might not have dragged the bodies very far from where they fell. They would only do so if there was competition.”

Terrell added, “I notice that each of Adara's finds was in a relatively sheltered area. Perhaps these seegnur hid in those places, rather than near the temple, but were discovered, slain, and their bodies left to rot.”

“We'll look more closely tomorrow,” Griffin said. “I believe the solution to our puzzle is at hand.”

Adara was less certain, but why ruin Griffin's excitement? He had been brave in the face of so much disappointment. Could she blame him for being excited that, perhaps, at last, he was one step closer to returning home?

*   *   *

Griffin contentedly settled into the familiar routine of excavation. He found his two apprentices easy to teach. Terrell had done some excavation before, since the loremasters (under whom the factotums did much of their early training) were fascinated by the seegnur's culture, especially anything that might give a hint as to the mystery of their beliefs and ethics. From her training in tracking, Adara understood the need not to destroy traces before they could be examined. Neither were in the least squeamish about the occasional fragment of bone.

I could have done much worse. At least, unlike the Old One, their thoughts are not cluttered with notions about what is important and what is not.

One evening, as they rested after a long day that had turned up mostly dirt and rocks and only a few more artifacts, Griffin posed a question.

“Maybe we're approaching this the wrong way. What do we know about the seegnur and how they built here on Artemis?”

Terrell said, “Anything technological was hidden—often under water.”

Adara added, “The seegnur were like foxes; they always built with a hidden exit. If what we found in Spirit Bay is anything to go on, that exit could usually be opened with nothing more than a knowledge of how to operate the locks and fail-safes. It wouldn't even take a great deal of muscle.”

Griffin nodded. “So why build the temple? Why make Maiden's Tear such a noticeable shape? If this area was intended to be forbidden pretty much from the creation of the planet, then why draw attention to it?”

Terrell intoned in his best imitation of a loremaster, “The ways of the seegnur are mysterious to these humble ones they created.”

Griffin threw a pheasant bone at him. “Misdirection. I think they knew that eventually there would be curiosity about this place—about why it was forbidden when there was no obvious reason for it to be so. I bet that whatever was here was something they did not want the locals to even get a sniff of…”

“So they created in a fashion that anyone coming here would not look in the right place,” Adara cut in excitedly, “the way a mother bird pretends to have a broken wing to lure a predator away from her nest.”

“Precisely. So I think we're going after this all wrong. Adara, where's the map you and Sand Shadow made? The one that showed the areas where Artemis is ‘blind'?”

Adara reached into her pack and pulled her notebook out, then held the map where firelight would illuminate the details.

Griffin stared at carefully drawn lines, considering, then rejecting, possibilities, sometimes for reasons he wasn't certain of himself. Finally, he pointed to the mountain that more or less dominated the reaches above the meadow and lake.

“You've shaded that mountain very oddly. As I recall, you said that Artemis is aware of the mountain when she traces along the surface of the range. There isn't a gap in the midst of the chain.”

Adara nodded. “Yes. She sees it, but we worked out that there is a large portion near the base that simply isn't there for her. This upset her badly because, by comparing this peak to those of similar height, she is aware the mountain must have more slope than it does. However, she could only trace a portion of it. It was as if it was both there and not there at the same time.”

“I can understand why that would be upsetting,” Griffin said. “The more I think about it, the more I feel sure that Artemis's blind spots are our most reliable clue. The rest—especially the lake and the temple—are misdirection.”

“The bodies?” Terrell asked.

“Those weren't planned,” Griffin said, “so I don't think they're part of the misdirection. My initial enthusiasm may have been all wrong. They may not be significant.”

“So,” Adara asked, “do we stop our digging?”

“Let's give digging one more day,” Griffin said, “for luck. How about Terrell and I dig while you and Sand Shadow scout the base of the mountain for anything significant? Have you ‘heard' from Artemis lately?”

Adara shook her head. “Our link is still more her to us, than ours to her—and she finds it difficult to touch us here. Occasionally, in a dream, there is a whisper. I believe she is busy spinning her net wider, spreading out so that she will at the very least know where her blind spots may be.”

*   *   *

If there was ever a time Adara was reminded that Griffin had not been born on Artemis, it was when he said something like “scout the base of the mountain.” Clearly, he had no idea how complicated the base of a mountain could be.

Mountains were not neat triangles topped with snow, as they were so often drawn on maps, nor were they simply defined by their elevations, although this way of drawing them came closer to the reality. Real mountains were more like the figures children made when they draped their bedding over their knees and let it cascade into ripples and folds. Those bedclothes ranges did not include the complexities of caves and ridges, of streams that barred passage, of undergrowth and overgrowth that made it impossible to see the underlying rock, but they did come closer.

So it was that Adara did not set out on this very generalized search with a great deal of confidence.

“We will start,” she sent to Sand Shadow, shaping her communication into images, although she spoke the words aloud as well—she'd long suspected the puma grasped more spoken words than was obvious, “by restricting ourselves—at least at first—to the portion of the mountain that faces this lake meadow. True, all of the base was blocked from Artemis's sight, but I think this was more to keep her from realizing that something was missing than because all of the area was significant.”

Sand Shadow buzzed approval. Not for the first time, Adara was grateful that pumas were the largest purring cats. That one sound made communication so much easier.

“We will begin at the base because, although the seegnur had devices that enabled them to fly, that does not mean that they always would have had such devices with them when they came here. Indeed, flitting in the air would have raised the chance of their being seen by someone on a neighboring part of the mountain.”

And not being seen—at least our not being seen—is another good reason to stay low. The plant cover is much thicker. We were fortunate that all three of those places we've been excavating were near some feature that blocks direct view from other mountains. What failed to shelter the seegnur from death at least shelters us from observation.

Although Adara didn't articulate this last, Sand Shadow caught the gist of it. She sent back a cheerfully arrogant image of a shepherd catching a glimpse of the puma's tawny magnificence, then fleeing, driving his flock in front of him.

Probably exactly what would happen,
Adara thought,
if a shepherd saw a puma, but humans in violation of the prohibition? That might be another thing entirely.

As they began their search, Sand Shadow was a bit peevish. Explaining to her why they were searching for nothing Adara could precisely define had been difficult. All the puma had gathered was that the end result of their quest would be Griffin's departure. Since Sand Shadow liked Griffin—she had adopted him as her favorite playmate when they were in Spirit Bay—a search that would end up with her losing her “toy” did not seem worth the effort.

She cooperated because Adara asked her to do so, because Adara had been her friend since she was a small, foundling kitten, the last left of a litter whose mother had been killed and who were being used as a sort of cannibal larder by a male puma who may or may not have been their own father. Sand Shadow had cried out, although whether only with her kitten mew or with her mind as well, neither were sure. Adara had heard. The rest began their private legend.

Despite her reluctant participation in the search, Sand Shadow was the first to find something interesting. An impression awash with sensory detail flooded into Adara's mind. The odor of slowly moving water, of minerals, of algae scum caught in corners. The plink-plink of water dripping into water, the shrill complaint of air sighing through crevices. The tightness of rock around the puma's shoulders, releasing into an open place lit only with what gleams slipped through crevices.

Adara hurried to join her demiurge, found the narrow crevice hidden from view by a facing slab of lichen-streaked stone that had slid down the mountainside to nearly—but not quite—close off the narrow passage that opened like a night-blooming flower into a cavern almost completely filled by the sullen waters of an inky black lake.

Despite the fact that it differed in almost every way, Adara was reminded of another seegnur facility she had located. That one had been hidden behind a deceptively small waterfall. The passage had been narrow, although always large enough, and had eventually opened into wonders. She felt in her gut that this place was what they sought.

She went to fetch her canoe and to tell the men what Sand Shadow had found. It would not do if both she and Sand Shadow vanished, for Adara knew that even though the canoe was too small to hold them both, the puma would explore with her. The great cat was even now padding cautiously along the narrow ridge that bordered the subterranean lake, but if the ridge would not hold her, pumas were strong swimmers.

As Adara expected, Terrell and Griffin both protested. She overrode their protests by the simple expedient of not listening. She let their voices wash over her as she stripped the covering skins from the canoe's frame, for the passage would be too narrow for her to take the vessel through completely assembled.

When Adara had readied her burden, she paused, ticking off points on her fingers. “The canoe will only hold one. You cannot see in the dark as we can. We are not leaving you behind, we are only scouting. Now, if you would speed our search along, you could help me carry the parts of the canoe to the cave entrance. I will bring back a report and we will plan from there. It could be that this cavern is as much a false lead as the temple and the lake.”

But Adara didn't think it would be. She was even more certain a dozen paddle strokes deep into her voyage. Early on, stalactites had hung so close to the water's surface that she had to dodge among them. Later, she had been forced to lie flat and push herself along. Following the edge of the cavern, Sand Shadow reported that the ridge became a ledge of sorts, although one interrupted with gaps that a human could never leap.

(Sand Shadow, of course, could, but then pumas excelled at leaping.)

Then, with a suddenness like nothing in nature, the stalactites ceased to provide a barrier. The air chilled the dampness on Adara's skin, proving that despite the darkness, there were openings through which air, if not light, could enter. Adara straightened and paddled ahead. She knew she shouldn't be able to see—for her adaptation let her see where there was little light, but not where there was none—but somehow she sensed the pebbled shore ahead of her and was backing water even as her canoe ground to a halt.

Sand Shadow leapt beside her, excited and alert. Unlike Adara, she was not accustomed to relying on sight as a primary sense. Her hearing, sense of smell, even the caress of her long whiskers and the prickle of a breeze along her fur oriented her. Adara found herself wondering if her own confidence came from a filtering of the puma's senses through to her own.

However, she had not planned on relying on her ability to see in the dark. After making sure the canoe was secured against drifting away, Adara pulled a candle and a box of expensive sulfur matches from her pack. The light flared, momentarily too much, then just enough to enable Adara to see as clearly as a normal human would at the moment when twilight is fading into full night.

“Ah…”

The sound was not so much a word as a sigh of deep satisfaction. No doubt remained that this was what the seegnur had hidden. Gone was the illusion of a normal cavern. The walls were straight, either coated with or made from the same hard material she had seen in the facility beneath Mender's Isle. What surprised her was the size. Based on what Griffin had told her, one could dock an interplanetary shuttle here. Indeed, molded into the fabric of the ceiling were rails and other devices that vaguely reminded her of those she had seen in the landing facility the Old One had called his Sanctum Sanctorum.

Yet, even more than these technological artifacts, one other thing told Adara that this place was not some remnant left from the days when the seegnur had created Artemis, but was instead a place they had done their best to hide. The walls were blackened with marks she recognized as having been left by the energy weapons carried by the seegnur. Time and scavengers had done for the flesh and bones, but scattered artifacts told of the men and women who had been slaughtered here.

Together, woman and puma used the light of the single candle to prowl about, looking for an open passage. Adara was unsurprised when they did not find one, although she did find something that might be a closed and locked door. If the seegnur had gone to so much trouble to hide this place, they would not have made it easy for some overly curious Artemesian to find her way in. That there would be a way in, she felt certain.