Five
Sunrise over the Sea
of Grass was a thing of beauty. The Consul watched from the highest
point on the aft deck. After his watch he had tried to sleep, given
it up, and come up onto deck to watch the night fade into day. The
stormfront had covered the sky with low clouds and the rising sun
lit the world with brilliant gold reflected from above and below.
The windwagon’s sails and lines and weathered planks glowed in the
brief benediction of light in the few minutes before the sun was
blocked by the ceiling of clouds and color flowed out of the world
once again. The wind which followed this curtain closing was chill,
as if it had blown down from the snowy peaks of the Bridle Range
just visible as a dark blur on the northeastern
horizon.
Brawne Lamia and
Martin Silenus joined the Consul on the aft deck, each nursing a
cup of coffee from the galley. The wind whipped and tugged at the
rigging. Brawne Lamia’s thick mass of curls fluttered around her
face like a dark nimbus.
‘Morning,’ muttered
Silenus, squinting out over his coffee cup at the wind-rippled Sea
of Grass.
‘Good morning,’
replied the Consul, amazed at how alert and refreshed he felt for
not having slept at all the night before. ‘We have a headwind, but
the wagon still seems to be making decent time. We’ll definitely be
to the mountains before nightfall.’
‘Hrrgnn,’ commented
Silenus and buried his nose in the coffee cup.
‘I didn’t sleep at
all last night,’ said Brawne Lamia, ‘just for thinking about M.
Weintraub’s story.’
‘I don’t think . . .’
began the poet and then broke off as Weintraub came onto deck, his
baby peering over the lip of an infant carrier sling on his
chest.
‘Good morning,
everyone,’ said Weintraub, looking around and taking a deep breath.
‘Mmm, brisk, isn’t it?’
‘Fucking freezing,’
said Silenus. ‘North of the mountains it’ll be even
worse.’
‘I think I’ll go down
to get a jacket,’ said Lamia, but before she could move there came
a single shrill cry from the deck below.
‘Blood!’
There was, indeed,
blood everywhere. Het Masteen’s cabin was strangely neat – bed
unslept in, travel trunk and other boxes stacked precisely in one
corner, robe folded over a chair – except for the blood which
covered great sections of the deck, bulkhead, and overhead. The six
pilgrims crowded just inside the entrance, reluctant to go farther
in.
‘I was passing on my
way to the upper deck,’ said Father Hoyt, his voice a strange
monotone. ‘The door was slightly ajar. I caught a glimpse of . . .
the blood on the wall.’
‘Is it blood?’
demanded Martin Silenus.
Brawne Lamia stepped
into the room, ran a hand through a thick smear on the bulkhead,
and raised her fingers to her lips. ‘It’s blood.’ She looked
around, walked to the wardrobe, looked briefly among the empty
shelves and hangers, and then went to the small porthole. It was
latched and bolted from the inside.
Lenar Hoyt looked
more ill than usual and staggered to a chair. ‘Is he dead
then?’
‘We don’t know a damn
thing except that Captain Masteen isn’t in his room and a lot of
blood is,’ said Lamia. She wiped her hand on her pant leg. ‘The
thing to do now is search the ship thoroughly.’
‘Precisely,’ said
Colonel Kassad, ‘and if we do not find the Captain?’
Brawne Lamia opened
the porthole. Fresh air dissipated the slaughterhouse smell of
blood and brought in the rumble of the wheel and the rustle of
grass under the hull. ‘If we don’t find Captain Masteen,’ she said,
‘then we assume that he either left the ship under his own will or
was taken off.’
‘But the blood . . .’
began Father Hoyt.
‘Doesn’t prove
anything,’ finished Kassad. ‘M. Lamia’s correct. We don’t know
Masteen’s blood type or genotype. Did anyone see or hear
anything?’
There was silence
except for negative grunts and the shaking of heads.
Martin Silenus looked
around. ‘Don’t you people recognize the work of our friend the
Shrike when you see it?’
‘We don’t know that,’
snapped Lamia. ‘Maybe someone wanted us to think that it was the
Shrike’s doing.’
‘That doesn’t make
sense,’ said Hoyt, still gasping for air.
‘Nonetheless,’ said
Lamia, ‘we’ll search in twos. Who has weapons besides
myself?’
‘I do,’ said Colonel
Kassad. ‘I have extras if needed.’
‘No,’ said
Hoyt.
The poet shook his
head.
Sol Weintraub had
returned to the corridor with his child. Now he looked in again. ‘I
have nothing,’ he said.
‘No,’ said the
Consul. He had returned the deathwand to Kassad when his shift
ended two hours before first light.
‘All right,’ said
Lamia, ‘the priest will come with me on the lower deck. Silenus, go
with the Colonel. Search the mid-deck. M. Weintraub, you and the
Consul check everything above. Look for anything out of the
ordinary. Any sign of struggle.’
‘One question,’ said
Silenus.
‘What?’
‘Who the hell elected
you queen of the prom?’
‘I’m a private
investigator,’ said Lamia, leveling her gaze on the
poet.
Martin Silenus
shrugged. ‘Hoyt here is a priest of some forgotten religion. That
doesn’t mean we have to genuflect when he says Mass.’
‘All right,’ sighed
Brawne Lamia. ‘I’ll give you a better reason.’ The woman moved so
fast that the Consul almost missed the action in a blink. One
second she was standing by the open port and in the next she was
halfway across the stateroom, lifting Martin Silenus off the deck
with one arm, her massive hand around the poet’s thin neck. ‘How
about,’ she said, ‘that you do the logical thing because it’s the
logical thing to do?’
‘Gkkrgghh,’ managed
Martin Silenus.
‘Good,’ said Lamia
without emotion and dropped the poet to the deck. Silenus staggered
a meter and almost sat on Father Hoyt.
‘Here,’ said Kassad,
returning with two small neural stunners. He handed one to Sol
Weintraub. ‘What do you have?’ Kassad asked Lamia.
The woman reached
into a pocket of her loose tunic and produced an ancient
pistol.
Kassad looked at the
relic for a moment and then nodded. ‘Stay with your partner,’ he
said. ‘Don’t shoot at anything unless it’s positively identified
and unquestionably threatening.’
‘That describes the
bitch I plan to shoot,’ said Silenus, still massaging his
throat.
Brawne Lamia took a
half step toward the poet. Fedmahn Kassad said, ‘Shut up. Let’s get
this over with.’ Silenus followed the Colonel out of the
stateroom.
Sol Weintraub
approached the Consul, handed him the stunner. ‘I don’t want to
hold this thing with Rachel. Shall we go up?’
The Consul took the
weapon and nodded.
The windwagon held no
further sign of Templar Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. After an
hour of searching, the group met in the stateroom of the missing
man. The blood there seemed darker and drier.
‘Is there a chance
that we missed something?’ said Father Hoyt. ‘Secret passages?
Hidden compartments?’
‘There’s a chance,’
said Kassad, ‘but I swept the ship with heat and motion sensors. If
there’s anything else on board larger than a mouse, I can’t find
it.’
‘If you had these
sensors,’ said Silenus, ‘why the fuck did you have us crawling
through bilge and byways for an hour?’
‘Because the right
equipment or apparel can hide a man from a heat-’n’-beat
search.’
‘So, in answer to my
question,’ said Hoyt, pausing a second as a visible wave of pain
passed through him, ‘with the right equipment or apparel, Captain
Masteen might be hiding in a secret compartment
somewhere.’
‘Possible but
improbable,’ said Brawne Lamia. ‘My guess is that he’s no longer
aboard.’
‘The Shrike,’ said
Martin Silenus in a disgusted tone. It was not a
question.
‘Perhaps,’ said
Lamia. ‘Colonel, you and the Consul were on watch through those
four hours. Are you sure that you heard and saw
nothing?’
Both men
nodded.
‘The ship was quiet,’
said Kassad. ‘I would have heard a struggle even before I went on
watch.’
‘And I didn’t sleep
after my watch,’ said the Consul. ‘My room shared a bulkhead with
Masteen’s. I heard nothing.’
‘Well,’ said Silenus,
‘we’ve heard from the two men who were creeping around in the dark
with weapons when the poor shit was killed. They say they’re
innocent. Next case!’
‘If Masteen was
killed,’ said Kassad, ‘it was with no deathwand. No silent modern
weapon I know throws that much blood around. There were no gunshots
heard – no bullet holes found – so I presume M. Lamia’s automatic
pistol is not suspect. If this is Captain Masteen’s blood, then I
would guess an edged weapon was used.’
‘The Shrike is an
edged weapon,’ said Martin Silenus.
Lamia moved to the
small stack of luggage. ‘Debating isn’t going to solve anything.
Let’s see if there’s anything in Masteen’s
belongings.’
Father Hoyt raised a
hesitant hand. ‘That’s . . . well, private, isn’t it? I don’t think
we have the right.’
Brawne Lamia crossed
her arms. ‘Look, Father, if Masteen’s dead, it doesn’t matter to
him. If he’s still alive, looking through this stuff might give us
some idea where he was taken. Either way, we have to try to find a
clue.’
Hoyt looked dubious
but nodded. In the end, there was little invasion of privacy.
Masteen’s first trunk held only a few changes of linen and a copy
of Muir’s Book of Life. The second bag held a hundred separately
wrapped seedlings, flash-dried and nestled in moist
soil.
‘Templars must plant
at least a hundred offspring of the Eternal Tree on whatever world
they visit,’ explained the Consul. ‘The shoots rarely take, but
it’s a ritual.’
Brawne Lamia moved
toward the large metal box which had sat at the bottom of the
pile.
‘Don’t touch that!’
snapped the Consul.
‘Why
not?’
‘It’s a Möbius cube,’
responded Colonel Kassad for the Consul. ‘A carbon-carbon-shell set
around a zero impedance containment field folded back on
itself.’
‘So?’ said Lamia.
‘Möbius cubes seal artifacts and stuff in. They don’t explode or
anything.’
‘No,’ agreed the
Consul, ‘but what they contain may explode. May already have
exploded, for that matter.’
‘A cube that size
could hold a kiloton nuclear explosion in check as long as it was
boxed during the nanosecond of ignition,’ added Fedmahn
Kassad.
Lamia scowled at the
trunk. ‘Then how do we know that something in there didn’t kill
Masteen?’
Kassad pointed to a
faintly glowing green strip along the trunk’s only seam. ‘It’s
sealed. Once unsealed, a Möbius cube has to be reactivated at a
place where containment fields can be generated. Whatever’s in
there didn’t harm Captain Masteen.’
‘So there’s no way to
tell?’ mused Lamia.
‘I have a good
guess,’ said the Consul.
The others looked at
him. Rachel began to cry and Sol pulled a heating strip on a
nursing pak.
‘Remember,’ said the
Consul, ‘at Edge yesterday when M. Masteen made a big deal out of
the cube? He talked about it as if it were a secret
weapon?’
‘A weapon?’ said
Lamia.
‘Of course!’ Kassad
said suddenly. ‘An erg!’
‘Erg?’ Martin Silenus
stared at the small crate. ‘I thought ergs were those forcefield
critters that Templars use on their treeships.’
‘They are,’ said the
Consul. ‘The things were found about three centuries ago living on
asteroids around Aldebaran. Bodies about as big as a cat’s spine,
mostly a piezoelectric nervous system sheathed in silicon gristle,
but they feed on . . . and manipulate . . . forcefields as large as
those generated by small spinships.’
‘So how do you get
all that into such a little box?’ asked Silenus, staring at the
Möbius cube. ‘Mirrors?’
‘In a sense,’ said
Kassad. ‘The thing’s field would be damped . . . neither starving
nor feeding. Rather like cryogenic fugue for us. Plus this must be
a small one. A cub, so to speak.’
Lamia ran her hand
along the metal sheath. ‘Templars control these things? Communicate
with them?’
‘Yes,’ said Kassad.
‘No one is quite sure how. It’s one of the Brotherhood secrets. But
Het Masteen must have been confident that the erg would help him
with . . .’
‘The Shrike,’
finished Martin Silenus. ‘The Templar thought that this energy imp
would be his secret weapon when he faced the Lord of Pain.’ The
poet laughed.
Father Hoyt cleared
his throat. ‘The Church has accepted the Hegemony’s ruling that . .
. these creatures . . . ergs . . . are not sentient beings . . .
and thus not candidates for salvation.’
‘Oh, they’re
sentient, all right, Father,’ said the Consul. ‘They perceive
things far better than we could ever imagine. But if you meant
intelligent . . . self-aware . . . then you’re dealing with
something along the lines of a smart grasshopper. Are grasshoppers
candidates for salvation?’
Hoyt said nothing.
Brawne Lamia said, ‘Well, evidently Captain Masteen thought this
thing was going to be his salvation. Something went wrong.’ She
looked around at the bloodstained bulkheads and at the drying
stains on the deck. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The windwagon tacked
into increasingly strong winds as the storm approached from the
northeast. Ragged banners of clouds raced white beneath the low,
gray ceiling of stormfront. Grasses whipped and bent under gusts of
cold wind. Ripples of lightning illuminated the horizon and were
followed by rolls of thunder sounding like warning shots across the
windwagon’s bow. The pilgrims watched in silence until the first
icy raindrops drove them below to the large stateroom in the
stern.
‘This was in his robe
pocket,’ said Brawne Lamia, holding up a slip of paper with the
number 5 on it.
‘So Masteen would
have told his story next,’ muttered the Consul.
Martin Silenus tilted
his chair until his back touched the tall windows. Storm light made
his satyr’s features appear slightly demonic. ‘There’s another
possibility,’ he said. ‘Perhaps someone who hasn’t spoken yet had
the fifth spot and killed the Templar to trade
places.’
Lamia stared at the
poet. ‘That would have to be the Consul or me,’ she said, her voice
flat.
Silenus
shrugged.
Brawne Lamia pulled
another piece of paper from her tunic. ‘I have number six. What
would I have achieved? I go next anyway.’
‘Then perhaps it’s
what Masteen would have said that needed to be silenced,’ said the
poet. He shrugged again. ‘Personally, I think the Shrike has begun
harvesting us. Why did we think we’d be allowed to get to the Tombs
when the thing’s been slaughtering people halfway from here to
Keats?’
‘This is different,’
said Sol Weintraub. ‘This is the Shrike Pilgrimage. ’
‘So?’
In the silence that
followed, the Consul walked to the windows. Wind-driven torrents of
rain obscured the Sea and rattled the leaded panes. The wagon
creaked and leaned heavily to starboard as it began another leg of
its tack.
‘M. Lamia,’ asked
Colonel Kassad, ‘do you want to tell your story now?’
Lamia folded her arms
and looked at the rain-streaked glass. ‘No. Let’s wait until we get
off this damned ship. It stinks of death.’
The windwagon reached
the port of Pilgrims’ Rest in midafternoon but the storm and tired
light made it feel like late evening to the weary passengers. The
Consul had expected representatives from the Shrike Temple to meet
them here at the beginning of the penultimate stage of their
journey but Pilgrims’ Rest appeared to the Consul to be as empty as
Edge had been.
The approach to the
foothills and the first sight of the Bridle Range was as exciting
as any landfall and brought all six of the would-be pilgrims on
deck despite the cold rain which continued to fall. The foothills
were sere and sensuous, their brown curves and sudden upthrustings
contrasting strongly with the verdant monochrome of the Sea of
Grass. The nine-thousand-meter peaks beyond were only hinted at by
gray and white planes soon intersected by low clouds, but even so
truncated were powerful to behold. The snow line came down to a
point just above the collection of burned-out hovels and cheap
hotels which had been Pilgrims’ Rest.
‘If they destroyed
the tramway, we’re finished,’ muttered the Consul. The thought of
it, forbidden until now, made his stomach turn over.
‘I see the first five
towers,’ said Colonel Kassad, using his powered glasses. ‘They seem
intact.’
‘Any sign of a
car?’
‘No . . . wait, yes.
There’s one in the gate at the station platform.’
‘Any moving?’ asked
Martin Silenus, who obviously understood how desperate their
situation would be if the tramway was not intact.
‘No.’
The Consul shook his
head. Even in the worst weather with no passengers, the cars had
been kept moving to keep the great cables flexed and free of
ice.
The six of them had
their luggage on deck even before the windwagon reefed its sails
and extended a gangplank. Each now wore a heavy coat against the
elements – Kassad in FORCE-issue thermouflage cape, Brawne Lamia in
a long garment called a trenchcoat for reasons long forgotten,
Martin Silenus in thick furs which rippled now sable, now gray with
the vagaries of wind, Father Hoyt in long black which made him more
of a scarecrow figure than ever, Sol Weintraub in a thick goosedown
jacket which covered him and the child, and the Consul in the
thinning but serviceable greatcoat his wife had given him some
decades before.
‘What about Captain
Masteen’s things?’ asked Sol as they stood at the head of the
gangplank. Kassad had gone ahead to reconnoiter the
village.
‘I brought them up,’
said Lamia. ‘We’ll take them with us.’
‘It doesn’t seem
right somehow,’ said Father Hoyt. ‘Just going on, I mean. There
should be some . . . service. Some recognition that a man has
died.’
‘May have died,’
reminded Lamia, easily lifting a forty-kilo backpack with one
hand.
Hoyt looked
incredulous. ‘Do you really believe that M. Masteen might be
alive?’
‘No,’ said Lamia.
Snowflakes settled on her black hair.
Kassad waved to them
from the end of the dock and they carried their luggage off the
silent windwagon. No one looked back.
‘Empty?’ called Lamia
as they approached the Colonel. The tall man’s cloak was still
fading from its gray and black chameleon mode.
‘Empty.’
‘Bodies?’
‘No,’ said Kassad. He
turned toward Sol and the Consul. ‘Did you get the things from the
galley?’
Both men
nodded.
‘What things?’ asked
Silenus.
‘A week’s worth of
food,’ said Kassad, turning to look up the hill toward the tramway
station. For the first time the Consul noticed the long assault
weapon in the crook of the Colonel’s arm, barely visible under the
cloak. ‘We’re not sure if there are any provisions beyond this
point.’
Will we be alive a
week from now? thought the Consul. He said nothing.
They ferried the gear
to the station in two trips. Wind whistled through the open windows
and shattered domes of the dark buildings. On the second trip, the
Consul carried one end of Masteen’s Möbius cube while Lenar Hoyt
puffed and panted under the other end.
‘Why are we taking
the erg thing with us?’ gasped Hoyt as they reached the base of the
metal stairway leading to the station. Rust streaked and spotted
the platform like orange lichen.
‘I don’t know,’ said
the Consul, gasping for breath himself.
From the terminal
platform they could see far out over the Sea of Grass. The
windwagon sat where they had left it, sails reefed, a dark and
lifeless thing. Snow squalls moved across the prairie and gave the
illusion of whitecaps on the numberless stalks of high
grass.
‘Get the material
aboard,’ called Kassad. ‘I’ll see if the running gear can be reset
from the operator’s cabin up there.’
‘Isn’t it automatic?’
asked Martin Silenus, his small head almost lost in thick furs.
‘Like the windwagon?’
‘I don’t think so,’
said Kassad. ‘Go on, I’ll see if I can get it started
up.’
‘What if it leaves
without you?’ called Lamia at the Colonel’s retreating
back.
‘It
won’t.’
The interior of the
tramcar was cold and bare except for metal benches in the forward
compartment and a dozen rough bunks in the smaller, rear area. The
car was big – at least eight meters long by five wide. The rear
compartment was partitioned from the front cabin by a thin metal
bulkhead with an opening but no door. A small commode took up a
closet-sized corner of this aft compartment. Windows rising from
waist height to the roof-line lined the forward
compartment.
The pilgrims heaped
their luggage in the center of the wide floor and stomped around,
waved their arms, or otherwise worked to stay warm. Martin Silenus
lay full length on one of the benches, with only his feet and the
top of his head emerging from fur. ‘I forgot,’ he said, ‘how the
fuck do you turn on the heat in this thing?’
The Consul glanced at
the dark lighting panels. ‘It’s electrical. It’ll come on when the
Colonel gets us moving.’
‘If the Colonel gets
us moving,’ said Silenus.
Sol Weintraub had
changed Rachel’s diaper. Now he bundled her up again in an infant’s
thermsuit and rocked her in his arms. ‘Obviously I’ve never been
here before,’ he said. ‘Both of you gentlemen have?’
‘Yeah,’said the
poet.
‘No,’ said the
Consul. ‘But I’ve seen pictures of the tramway.’
‘Kassad said he
returned to Keats once this way,’ called Brawne Lamia from the
other room.
‘I think . . .’ began
Sol Weintraub and was interrupted by a great grinding of gears and
a wild lurch as the long car rocked sickeningly and then swung
forward under the suddenly moving cable. Everyone rushed to the
window on the platform side.
Kassad had thrown his
gear aboard before climbing the long ladder to the operator’s
cabin. Now he appeared in the cabin’s doorway, slid down the long
ladder, and ran toward the car. The car was already passing beyond
the loading area of the platform.
‘He isn’t going to
make it,’ whispered Father Hoyt.
Kassad sprinted the
last ten meters with legs that looked impossibly long, a cartoon
stick figure of a man.
The tramcar slid out
of the loading notch, swung free of the station. Space opened
between the car and the station. It was eight meters to the rocks
below. The platform deck was streaked with ice. Kassad ran full
speed ahead even as the car pulled away.
‘Come on!’ screamed
Brawne Lamia. The others picked up the cry.
The Consul looked up
at sheaths of ice cracking and dropping away from the cable as the
tramcar moved up and forward. He looked back. There was too much
space. Kassad could never make it.
Fedmahn Kassad was
moving at an incredible speed when he reached the edge of the
platform. The Consul was reminded for the second time of the Old
Earth jaguar he had seen in a Lusus zoo. He half expected to see
the Colonel’s feet slip on a patch of ice, the long legs flying out
horizontal, the man falling silently to the snowy boulders below.
Instead, Kassad seemed to fly for an endless moment, long arms
extended, cape flying out behind. He disappeared behind the
car.
There came a thud,
followed by a long minute when no one spoke or moved. They were
forty meters high now, climbing toward the first tower. A second
later Kassad became visible at the corner of the car, pulling
himself along a series of icy niches and handholds in the metal.
Brawne Lamia flung open the cabin door. Ten hands helped pull
Kassad inside.
‘Thank God,’ said
Father Hoyt.
The Colonel took a
deep breath and smiled grimly. ‘There was a dead man’s brake. I had
to rig the lever with a sandbag. I didn’t want to bring the car
back for a second try.’
Martin Silenus
pointed to the rapidly approaching support tower and the ceiling of
clouds just beyond. The cable stretched upward into oblivion. ‘I
guess we’re crossing the mountains now whether we want to or
not.’
‘How long to make the
crossing?’ asked Hoyt.
‘Twelve hours. A
little less perhaps. Sometimes the operators would stop the cars if
the wind rose too high or the ice got too bad.’
‘We won’t be stopping
on this trip,’ said Kassad.
‘Unless the cable’s
breached somewhere,’ said the poet. ‘Or we hit a
snag.’
‘Shut up,’ said
Lamia. ‘Who’s interested in heating some dinner?’
‘Look,’ said the
Consul.
They moved to the
forward windows. The tram rose a hundred meters above the last
brown curve of foothills. Kilometers below and behind they caught a
final glimpse of the station, the haunted hovels of Pilgrims’ Rest,
and the motionless windwagon.
Then snow and thick
cloud enveloped them.
The tramcar had no
real cooking facilities but the aft bulkhead offered a cold box and
a microwave for reheating. Lamia and Weintraub combined various
meats and vegetables from the windwagon’s galley to produce a
passable stew. Martin Silenus had brought along wine bottles from
the Benares and the windwagon and he chose a Hyperion burgundy to
go with the stew.
They were nearly
finished with their dinner when the gloom pressing against the
windows lightened and then lifted altogether. The Consul turned on
his bench to see the sun suddenly reappear, filling the tramcar
with a transcendent golden light.
There was a
collective sigh from the group. It had seemed that darkness had
fallen hours before, but now, as they rose above a sea of clouds
from which rose an island chain of mountains, they were treated to
a brilliant sunset. Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime
glaucous glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a
red-gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and
rock. The Consul looked around. His fellow pilgrims, who had seemed
gray and small in the dim light of half a minute earlier, now
glowed in the gold of sunset.
Martin Silenus raised
his glass. That’s better, by God.’
The Consul looked up
at their line of travel, the massive cable dwindling to threadlike
thinness far ahead and then to nothing at all. On a summit several
kilometers beyond, gold light glinted on the next support
tower.
‘One hundred and
ninety-two pylons,’ said Silenus in a singsong tour guide’s bored
tones. ‘Each pylon is constructed of duralloy and whiskered carbon
and stands eighty-three meters high.’
‘We must be high,’
said Brawne Lamia in a low voice.
‘The high point of
the ninety-six-kilometer tramcar voyage lies above the summit of
Mount Dryden, the fifth highest peak in the Bridle Range, at nine
thousand two hundred forty-six meters,’ droned on Martin
Silenus.
Colonel Kassad looked
around. ‘The cabin’s pressurized. I felt the change-over some time
ago.’
‘Look,’ said Brawne
Lamia.
The sun had been
resting on the horizon line of clouds for a long moment. Now it
dipped below, seemingly igniting the depths of storm cloud from
beneath and casting a panoply of colors along the entire western
edge of the world. Snow cornices and glaze ice still glowed along
the western side of the peaks, which rose a kilometer or more above
the rising tramcar. A few brighter stars appeared in the deepening
dome of sky.
The Consul turned to
Brawne Lamia. ‘Why don’t you tell your story now, M. Lamia? We’ll
want to sleep later, before arriving at the Keep.’
Lamia sipped the last
of her wine. ‘Does everyone want to hear it now?’
Heads nodded in the
roseate twilight. Martin Silenus shrugged.
‘All right,’ said
Brawne Lamia. She set down her empty glass, pulled her feet up on
the bench so that her elbows rested on her knees, and began her
tale.