Empire: Book 2, The Chronicles of the Invaders (The Chronicles of the Invaders Trilogy) (24 page)

CHAPTER 44

T
he red-clad Sister sitting nearest to Syl was watching at her curiously. Syl looked back, keeping her features bland while inwardly stacking up the blocks and barriers in her head.
I am one of you
, she willed.
I am with you. Look at me, and see your own
. But she felt none of the probing she associated with Syrene or Oriel, for few shared their psychic abilities.

“Why are you just standing there? There is no time to lose,” said the Sister finally. “The cleaning must be finished before the tutors return from class. It is imperative today of all days.”

“Yes, ma’am,” muttered Syl, ducking her head and bumbling passed her.

Service Sisters were darting all around, scrubbing and shaking and puffing and spritzing, busy white corpuscles in the giant organ of velvet and blood. Syl’s presence went unremarked as she joined their ranks, for they vastly outnumbered the smattering of red-robed Illyri who reclined on chairs and cushions, reading and making notes, or earnestly talking, occasionally lifting their feet automatically so the floor beneath them could be swept. From behind the trailing end of her headscarf, Syl could make out Amera, the biology lecturer, chewing on her fingernail as she studied a screen in front of her. Syl slipped silently by, looking in the other direction, reading the plaques on the doors as she made her way through the chamber. Most bore names she knew or vaguely recognized from among the vast teaching staff who had made the education of would-be Sisters their life’s work, and some were even her own tutors. Seeing them all together like this, Syl found herself newly in awe of the enormity of the Marque. If this was just the
teachers, what lay beyond in the other Realms on Avila Minor? Somewhere in this underground maze were Ezil and the other elders—the First Five. Somewhere was hidden the secret of the Sisterhood.

With fresh determination, she moved on.

In the center of the room she passed a vaguely foreboding double door. It was unlabeled, but clearly these were the largest quarters of all, and easily accessible for an older Sister, one who might be less than steady on her aging legs. They could only be Oriel’s, and Syl’s skin prickled under her robes as she went by. She hadn’t seen Oriel since the incident in Elda’s rooms. At first the head of these three Realms had been declared ill, and then it was said that she had been called away to important meetings, but Syl had not mourned her absence. Far too often thoughts of the old witch invaded her head, unbidden and unwanted, and she wondered if the Grandmage was close by, was scrutinizing her, trying to unlock her mind. Whenever it happened she felt physically ill, and afterwards she had a headache, but Syl saw nothing of the crone in the actual flesh. Fitfully she wondered if she imagined Oriel’s presence, yet still she knew she must always remain vigilant.

Syl walked passed two white-clad Sisters who were deep in conversation, and she heard Oriel’s name. Trying to look inconspicuous, she stopped, bent down, and used the edge of her cloth to rub at a make-believe mark on the edge of a rug.

“She’s due back around lunchtime, I believe.”

“Before the end of Novice classes? But there’ll hardly be anyone to welcome her.”

“That’s how she wants it. You know Grandmage Oriel.”

“Not well, thankfully.”

“I know what you mean.”

The pair laughed as they moved on toward the farthest reaches of the gallery. After a heartbeat, Syl followed.

They came to a wide door, sealed shut, and the smaller of the women held down a button beside it, set deep into the wall. The door slid open. They went through it, and after a few seconds Syl followed, unhindered, although her throat felt as if it would close with nerves.
Before her wound another long corridor. A third Service Sister approached, but she went by with a mere nod of greeting, and Syl nodded back as casually as she could.

The pair that she’d followed stopped some way ahead and opened a door carved into the wall. As Syl watched, they took off their dirt-smeared white robes, revealing simple red vestments underneath, tossed the soiled garments into what appeared to be a cupboard, then opened a second and withdrew freshly laundered white clothing. They slipped these on with barely a break in their conversation, and then moved away. One of them glanced at Syl as they left, but didn’t raise as much as an eyebrow of recognition, and Syl breathed out deeply.

I am one of you
, she repeated over and over in her head.
We are the same
.

Quickly she went over to the cupboard and removed her own faded off-white robe, slipping on another from the fresh stock behind the second door before anyone saw her own telltale Novice undergarments. She took the keys from her pocket before she shoved the old robe that had once been Elda’s into a large laundry basket behind the first door, and then, emboldened, she opened the third cupboard. Inside were piles of neatly pressed and folded headscarves. Syl could have clapped. There was no way she could risk removing her own makeshift one here, in the open, so she simply knotted the new scarf over the top. Already she felt that she blended in better.

The Sisters she was following had now disappeared from view and so Syl hurried on, passing doors and windows that revealed what lay beyond. Here was an exercise room of sorts, or perhaps a health center, fitted with equipment and body-function monitors. Inside, a lone Service Sister was languidly washing the floor, drawing slow, looping pictures on the stone with her mop. She yawned widely and scratched her cheek.

Farther along there was a clutch of meditation rooms, all open and welcoming, their cushions plumped and ready, fragrance cubes in nooks by the door waiting to be lit. Haunting Illyri music played from inside one, and Syl glimpsed the Sisters whom she trailed. The
taller of the pair was halfheartedly cleaning but the other had called up a screen and was leaning against the wall, washrags hanging forgotten at her side, laughing rudely at whatever it was she watched.

“Hush, Eya,” said the first. “You’ll get us in trouble.”

Syl tiptoed by.

The pathway rose upward, a steep ascent, and another glass-fronted room appeared. Syl slowed as she passed, marveling at the long, golden pool inside. It was clearly some sort of bathhouse, for a fountain steamed at one end and a brace of Sisters reclined in the water, bubbles rising large as plates around them. Three Service Sisters waited on them at the side of the pool. The first held towels while another sprinkled shards of shining soap over the water. The third bent over a figure in the pool, expertly pumicing a proffered foot. As Syl stood and stared, one of the bathers looked up and glared at her. Quickly, she turned and left.

Now the corridor she was following split. Syl was about to take the wider path, which veered to the right, when she heard voices, and saw a reflection of red bounce off the walls around the bend ahead. Swiftly she skipped up the narrower passage to the left and scurried away, her heart thudding.

The route twisted and turned sharply for a while, then porthole windows opened up high in the walls, revealing the sky. There were no entrances or exits, so Syl guessed that she was traveling down a connecting tunnel to somewhere different, perhaps to a new Realm. Or rather an old Realm, for the walls around her were dark and shiny, rubbed that way with age, and the floor was grooved as if many feet had walked this way over the years, eroding a pathway into the rock. At points it was patched with flat stepping-stones, also shaded with wear. The air felt thin and Syl shivered, for it was colder here. Wherever she was, it was very old indeed.

Syl knew that the oldest areas of the Marque predated even the arrival of the Sisterhood. It had never been entirely clear who carved out the original primitive tunnels, for they were without decoration and their creators had left no trace of themselves behind: no pots, no animal bones, no Illyri remains. The annals of the Sisterhood suggested
that the moon’s caves had originally provided a refuge for those seeking to escape some form of persecution back on Illyr, just as the first Sisters had done. This was disputed by some of the Sisterhood’s own historians, who claimed that the age of the tunnels indicated they had been constructed
before
the invention of interplanetary travel. It was, it seemed, one of those mysteries destined to remain unsolved.

Finally Syl came to two descending staircases. Both had steep, worn steps carved from the rock, gray on the outer edges yet black in the middle, stained and worn down by aeons of footfalls. Syl took the steps to the left, for it seemed like the most sensible course of action: if she kept going left and then on her return she reversed this, and stayed to the right, she’d have less chance of becoming lost, or so she hoped. Down she went, spiraling and twisting, deeper and deeper into the moon. The light was dim, no more than flickering service bulbs, and the air smelled stale as she descended, fusty and forgotten. The stairs petered out into a narrow, uneven passageway, the walls rough-hewn but the edges of the rock cuts smoothed by time. It was very quiet, and her feet left vague prints in the dust on the floor as she tiptoed along, hearing herself breathing in the silence, hearing the blood thundering in her ears.

Ahead, dual archways opened into the walls, and Syl stopped and peered inside. Each room was a mirror image of the other, two large, gloomy caves, both with shelves piled onto boulders, each shelf stacked with higgledy-piggledy piles of books and documents, some held down by rocks, others fallen over and shuffled accidentally across the floor. Everywhere was grime and grit, and a small rockfall seemed to have flattened an old cabinet in the middle of the room on the left. Crushed exhibits spilled from it: frayed fabric, torn leathery parchment, and chunks of sinewed brown matter that Syl preferred not to think about too much. Instead, she went into the room on the right and peered at the nearest pile of documents.

“Damn it,” she said, jumping slightly as her voice hissed back at her,
damn it, damn it, damn it.
The documents were in an unfamiliar language. No, not just an unfamiliar language but a completely foreign script; an alphabet she had never seen before, the jagged symbols
set down in spiral form, utterly incomprehensible. She brushed the dirt from another document. While different, it too was completely alien in the truest sense of the word, clearly from another world entirely. The parchment felt almost sticky under her fingers, as if it was sucking at her skin, and she quickly pulled her hand away. She moved farther into the room, blowing dust off here, wiping away grime there, but it was all much of the same: impenetrable, and clearly packed away here to be all but forgotten, an archive created by Sisters long since dead.

Then she saw a garniad scurrying up a nearby wall, and she almost screamed. She only recognized it because they’d studied these armored, spiderlike creatures in biology, staring into a glass case while inside a lone garniad tapped its hard legs angrily against the glass, and she knew they had a nasty bite. The biology lecturer, Amera, had explained that garniads were the scourge of the Marque of old, but now their numbers were controlled.

“Yet beware, for you will still find them in the most ancient parts of the Marque. Even when you become full Sisters, with wide access to our buildings here, I recommend you stay away from the disused tunnels, for a garniad sting hurts, and several garniad stings in tandem can be deadly, particularly to small children, and the elderly,” Amera had said.

With a shiver, Syl took her leave. She headed up the corridor a little farther just to be sure she’d missed nothing, but the light faded away around the next curve, and up ahead Syl could clearly make out the reason why: a massive roof collapse blocked the way ahead, boulders the size of cars piled from floor to crumpled ceiling. She’d heard how some older parts of the Marque had caved in a long time ago, and suddenly something occurred to her: hadn’t Elda said her friend had been killed by a rockfall too? What was she called? Kosia, yes, that was it, Kosia. Now Syl wondered where exactly Kosia had been when she had died, for the Realms where the Novices and Half-Sisters resided were relatively new, and free of such dangers.

So first Kosia died, and then her apparent friend, the otherwise solitary Elda, was killed too, one in a rockfall, the other by suicidally leav
ing the Marque at night. The first death was no doubt categorized as an unfortunate accident, while the second had been covered up with lies about a young Novice who was unhappy, so was allowed to go home. And yet Syl had seen what had spilled from the cascid’s belly. Clearly Elda had been so much more than she seemed.

Could Kosia have been a spy too?

And rockfalls would surely take place only in the oldest sections of the Marque, the deepest, darkest ones such as this. What would Kosia have been doing nosing around in the ancient Realms? As she looked at the barricade of boulders laced with frayed “caution” tape, Syl felt she was finally getting somewhere, although where exactly that might be she could not say.

Anyway, this was the end of the line, for now. She must return to her quarters, for she had been away too long.

Syl retraced her steps, past the forgotten archives and up those wretched stairs again, being sure to keep her hands tight to her sides for fear of garniads. At the top she stopped to catch her breath, and found herself staring down the second set of steps. They were wider than the ones she’d just come from, and the light seemed brighter—or perhaps that was just her imagination.

Tomorrow she would be ill once more, she decided; tomorrow she would return.

CHAPTER 45

I
t was all very well that the universe appeared to be peppered with wormholes, thought Paul—at least relatively speaking—but their existence was useless without a minutely accurate map of their locations.

When the theory of wormholes—or Einstein-Rosen bridges, to give them their proper name among human scientists—was first proposed, the very idea of them was extraordinary enough without anyone giving thought to what they might actually look like. The reality, as it turned out, was that they were inconsistent in appearance, to the extent that many were not visible at all. True, the largest of them—but not necessarily the most stable—distorted the fabric of space, like a lens placed against the stars, but the smaller ones were virtually undetectable unless one was in their immediate vicinity, which in terms of the size of the universe, meant less than a million miles away. Even then, one had to know where to look, and so a ship could pass within a stone’s throw (again, in universal terms) of a wormhole without actually knowing that it was present.

Put simply, decided Paul, it was a little like trying to fit a pin through a previously existing pinhole in a sheet measuring millions and millions of square miles. No, make that a three-dimensional sheet, although he figured that all sheets were three-dimensional, so that particular analogy didn’t work. Science had never been one of Paul’s strong points in school.

He was standing in what had once been the captain’s quarters on the
Nomad
. The small room contained a bed, a desk, and not much else. The artificial intelligence system kept a screen permanently activated over the bunk, displaying system details alongside real-time
images from every section of the ship, allowing the captain to monitor all activity from his cabin. The screen could be dimmed with a sweep of a hand, but Paul had not found a way to deactivate it. Perhaps it couldn’t be shut down. He had tried to find mission information on the system, but to no avail. He suspected that no such information existed, just in case the ship was captured.

Now, once again, he was lost in the middle of a section of the wormhole map, marveling at the intricacy of it. This map was the basis for the Illyri Conquest. Without it, the Illyri would just have been a more advanced version of humanity, limited to their small corner of the universe, even with their combination of advanced fusion engines coupled with localized mining of hydrogen, helium, and sulfur for fuel, like little filling stations dotted throughout galaxies. The knowledge of the wormholes had made them conquerors, but how had they come by it?

He traced a wormhole with his finger. It reminded him of something, but whatever it was danced away like a butterfly every time he tried to grasp it. For some reason, the image brought Syl to mind: the grace of her, the exoticism. With it came an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. He wanted to rescue her, but instead he was stuck on a strange ship about to enter a series of wormholes, a journey that would, if they survived, lead them to a cordoned-off system, and no one isolated an entire planetary system without both good cause and a means of protecting it from intruders.

Paul turned in a slow circle. Wormholes swirled around him like frayed threads in the fabric of the cosmos.

Threads. Filaments.

He had arrived in the cellars of Dundearg just in time to see Consul Gradus destroyed by what was inside him, but Syl had told him of the consul’s transformation beforehand: the images of an insectoid organism attached to his brain stem, and his body’s reaction to his captors’ attempts to probe it. The filaments that the organism had spread throughout his system erupted from Gradus’s skin until his entire form was masked by them, his every pore extruding a fine thread.

What if . . . ?

Paul closed his eyes, even the beauty of the wormholes now becoming a distraction to him. He recalled his grandfather Jim, whose pride and joy was his council garden. Unlike his neighbors, Granddad Jim did not grow vegetables on his little patch of land. Instead he bred roses, and the bane of his life was spider mites, tiny reddish creatures that spun their webs beneath the rose leaves and merrily wreaked havoc on his blooms. According to Granddad Jim, spider mites could be found almost everywhere in the world. They were hitchhikers, floating on wind currents to find new plants to colonize. They were also able to detect the coming of winter, which caused their systems to enter a period of dormancy called diapause, from which they emerged only when the weather improved. Paul had a vague memory of certain spiders being able to do something similar, and mud-dwelling fish too, shutting down their systems in order to survive the most inhospitable conditions.

From this, Paul made another mental leap. Before the coming of the Illyri, and the subject races that fought for them, most human scientific speculation had centered on the likelihood of the first alien life being discovered in the form of microbes. He had a strong memory of a dispute arising over a fragment of meteor in which microscopic filaments had been found, with the scientist responsible for its discovery arguing that they represented some form of extraterrestrial life, now long dead.

But what if—and there were those words again—a similar life-form were capable of surviving in space, semidormant but somehow aware, storing the details of its travels through the universe, information that could later be retrieved? Was such a thing even possible? How could a primitive organism retain such knowledge?

A primitive life-form could not, but an advanced extraterrestrial life-form could, perhaps the kind that could also latch on to an Illyri brain stem and experience the outside world through the responses of its host.

Paul opened his eyes. Rizzo stood before him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes. No. Possibly.”

Rizzo cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Are you sure you should be in charge?”

“Yes. No. Possibly. What is it?”

“We’ve arrived at the first wormhole.”