Snare

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s going to happen if the Kazraks come here to hunt for old machines and books?’

  ‘That’s probably when they come, and it’s my worst fear. They’ll slaughter any Chof who stand in their way.’

  ‘Not if the Chof share their religion. Zayn’s told me a lot about his beliefs. If the Chof convert, the Kazraks will have to respect them as part of the ummah, I think the word is. The community of believers.’

  ‘I’ve heard about that.’ Loy smiled, but wryly. ‘All right, so religion might have its compensations. Daccor. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as hard-headed practical as you.’

  ‘Probably not. Out on the grass you have to be.’

  ‘Still, when we get home I’m going to consult with the people down at the synagogue. Their church should have a chance to convert the Chof, too, just to keep things fair.’

  ‘And that would be just as good. You’re people of the book, Zayn tells me, so the Kazraks will still have to respect the Chof if they join you.’

  Loy’s mouth suddenly slackened, and she looked away, staring at the empty air.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Ammadin said.

  ‘I just had this horrible thought, well not horrible, I suppose, but I’ve got the strangest feeling that Rozi’s going to end up out here, preaching to the Chof. She’d be perfect for the job because she can hear them. She gets that talent from me.’ Loy sighed and shook her head. ‘I wonder what Oskar would say if he knew. It’s probably better he doesn’t.’

  The warparty had camped among Midas trees near another canal, this one narrow and silt-choked. After a restless night, they woke early. The valley still lay in shadow, but dawn had turned the sky pale when Stronghunter Man led his men back out to the open grass.

  ‘Soutan, the boy, six Chof, horses.’ Stronghunter Man pointed his spear at the cliff face. ‘There be few-many caves big enough to hide them.’

  The other spear Chur thrummed their agreement. In the silver light they clustered around their leader, who paused often to allow Fifth Out to translate for Zayn.

  ‘Tracks, they show they go-must north,’ Stronghunter Man continued. ‘North lie many trees and the big gate into N’Dosha, where he have power to hide. We go north, too, but carefully. I trust-not Yarl Sorcerer and his spirits.’

  Zayn remembered Loy’s rifle and the headless yap-packers. ‘I don’t trust him, either,’ he said. ‘He might have magic weapons with him, ones that can kill you from a long distance away.’

  Stronghunter Man made a sharp noise, a whuff! of air from his throat sac, and spoke directly. ‘We go-must carefully,’ he said. ‘Maybe circle round to reach the North Gate. I decide-soon, when we arrive-next there.’

  ‘I take it that the North Gate’s more than just a cave or tunnel,’ Zayn said.

  ‘Much more. You see-soon when we get there.’

  They set off again, heading north. Zayn made a quick mental inventory of his saddlebags and realized that he had only one weapon that could strike from a distance, the bolas, and those had never been designed to stand up to guns that could spit fire and explode a target from several hundred feet away. He rummaged through the bags, found the bolas, and laid them right at the top. Something was better than nothing, but he wished he’d thought to beg Loy to let him borrow her rifle.

  Loy had never thought of herself as afraid of heights, but travelling down the spiral ramp in semi-darkness proved an ordeal. For a change Water Woman had got her people on the road early, and they arrived at the way down at noon, when the sun stood directly over the sheltering dome and covered the ramp below with shadow. All the H’mai decided to dismount and walk, but it still took the combined efforts of Ammadin and the two Kazraks to get the horses onto the ramp and down.

  Loy had no attention or energy to spare for the stock. As soon as she walked under the dome and looked down at the ramp, spiralling into darkness without guide rail or wall, she broke out in a cold sweat. The Chof all charged right onto the thing and dashed down, booming and thrumming, but Loy held back until the horses and H’mai had begun their descent. Finally she forced herself to step onto the ramp by promising her anxieties that she’d only take a few steps, then return to solid ground. Once she’d got on, she told herself that she’d only take four steps more, then four after that, and so on all the way to the midpoint, when going down would bring her to ground faster than going back. By the time she trotted out into the sunlight to join the others, her shirt was soaked through.

  Ammadin turned to her and sniffed the air. ‘You were frightened,’ she said. ‘I can smell it even with all the Chof around.’

  ‘Frightened? Heavens, no. Scared shitless.’

  ‘If you’d said something I would have walked with you.’

  ‘I made it, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you sure did. And from what Water Woman tells me, we’re not all that far from the cave.’

  Sibyl better be worth it, Loy thought to herself, but long before they reached Sibyl she had her recompense for her time on the ramp. Despite the war with the Chof, a fair amount of information about N’Dosha had survived in the Cantons. When they rode up to the river of green spreading from the canyon’s mouth, Loy’s only surprise lay in finding the gardens still alive.

  ‘They broke the Treaty about fifty times over,’ Loy said to Ammadin. ‘I guess they must have smuggled seeds and starts down from one of the ships to grow all this.’

  ‘These are all Old Earth plants?’ Ammadin said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. The colonists came from a variety of worlds, after all, and I gather that plant life tended to be green on most of the planets where it grew at all.’

  ‘That’s odd. Why?’

  ‘I don’t have the slightest idea. The Settlers didn’t bother to tell us that, the bastards.’

  Still, the canyon itself came as more than a surprise. Surviving lore had told Loy that the research facilities had been built underground, but no one had mentioned that here ‘underground’ also meant ‘up in the air’. The H’mai all slowed their horses and lingered, riding with their heads tipped back to stare at the handiwork of their ancestors. A few at a time, impatient Chof passed them and trotted on ahead, but Water Woman lingered as well.

  ‘So this is N’Dosha,’ Jezro remarked. ‘I can see why it’s legendary.’ He glanced at Loy. ‘More tunnels, right?’

  ‘Miles of them,’ Loy said.

  ‘Shaitan!’ Warkannan shook his head in disbelief. ‘I don’t see how the Chof managed to drive the Settlers out of here.’

  ‘My people manage-not,’ Water Woman said. ‘Our lore say some H’mai continue-then to live in there for years and years. They sneak-then in and out through secret tunnels, get-then food somehow. This be-may silly of me, but I be-not surprised to learn some live-still there.’

  Here was the opening Loy had been hoping for. ‘One of these days, I would love to sit down with you and discuss the war.’

  Water Woman’s throat sac turned grey, and she lowered her head. ‘We talk-must, yes, but it be such sad lore, even now. Our children they die-then, but our Chur – they kill-then children of the H’mai. Not good, this, horrible it be.’ She shook her massive head hard, then strode off to hurry on ahead.

  ‘Merde!’ Loy said. ‘I’ve just made a faux pas.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ Ammadin said. ‘She was willing to talk about the war with me.’

  ‘That’s because you’re comnee.’ Jezro turned in the saddle to look at Ammadin. ‘It wasn’t your children they killed.’

  ‘That must be it, yes.’

  ‘Fascinating!’ Warkannan said. ‘They really do have true consciences. No wonder she wants to hear about the Lord.’

  ‘Idres, my dear old friend!’ Jezro paused for a sigh. ‘There’s something going on here that you’re not seeing. We’ve had a double dose of Chof politics just lately, and I’ll bet you vrans to breadmoss that it isn’t piety blooming in Water Woman’s six-chambered heart. If she brin
gs a new religion to her people, she’ll be way ahead of her rivals when the Great Mother dies.’

  ‘What a damned cynical remark!’ Warkannan looked genuinely distressed, so much so that Jezro winced.

  ‘Well, I could be wrong,’ the khan said.

  As they rode free of the canyon, Warkannan and Jezro urged their horses forward and pulled ahead of the two women to continue their talk in Kazraki. Loy turned to Ammadin.

  ‘Think Jezro’s right?’ Loy said.

  ‘Of course,’ Ammadin said. ‘And I think he’s going to make a fine ruler, assuming he can fight his way to the throne.’

  After N’Dosha, the eastern valley appeared profoundly ordinary – another stretch of drying grass, dotted here and there with Midas trees. Small maroon birds broke cover and rose shrieking with a flap of naked wings as the Chof loped through, hurrying east. Booming in excitement, Water Woman came trotting back to meet the H’mai.

  ‘Ride faster!’ she said. ‘We camp by water, and then we be at Sibyl’s cave.’

  The water, another canal, lay only a few miles from the canyon’s mouth. While the servants made camp, Water Woman led Ammadin and Loy back to the traps. Out of a scatter of rocks, the cliff here rose sheer and high. Although pitted with caves in its upper reaches, from the valley floor up to some hundred yards it presented a smooth pale face, stippled here and there with black stone. Water Woman stamped both feet in a brief jig.

  ‘There be Sibyl’s cave. You see not see it?’

  ‘We don’t,’ Loy said, smiling. ‘That’s a pretty convincing holo.’

  ‘Yes.’ Water Woman tipped back her head and thrummed a command.

  A long, low stripe of cliff shimmered once and vanished. About twenty feet up, a dark slit appeared, flanked by two black pillars, shaped like stacks of flattened spheres. This close Loy could see that they were not rock but some artificial substance, gleaming and perfectly smooth. She swore under her breath in sheer awe. Ammadin’s carefully composed face revealed no feeling at all.

  ‘That’s clever,’ Ammadin said. ‘Can I go in now?’

  ‘You want-not eat first?’ Water Woman said.

  ‘I can wait for food, if it won’t offend you.’

  ‘You come-now many long miles. I see why you want to enter right away. Loy Sorcerer, Sibyl like-always to see new persons one at a time. It be best that Ammadin go first.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ Loy said. ‘I’ve got to write up our trip through N’Dosha.’

  Water Woman led Ammadin up the path, cut shallow into the side of the hill, to a landing directly in front of the overhang of rock protecting the entrance. In the shadows Ammadin could see a pair of metal doors. Water Woman inflated her throat sac and thrummed one long high note. The doors clanked, groaned, and slid open.

  ‘They stay open-next-soon till I command-again. It be safe to enter.’

  The sunlight illuminated the beginnings of a narrow hallway leading deeper into the cliff. At the moment Ammadin walked in, ceiling panels began to glow with a pale silver light. Down at the far end of the hallway, other lights turned themselves on in a circular room, some twenty feet in diameter. Floors, walls, freestanding metal screens propped between flexstone pillars, a collection of sleek blue boxes the height of a man, a square dais sitting in the centre of the room – they all glittered silver in the light from above.

  Ammadin hesitated at the door to the circular room. She was afraid, she realized, and the fear stretched the hallway behind her until the exit seemed to stand miles away. Outside lay everything she knew. In the room ahead of her she would learn new truths, perhaps even more dangerous than the ones she’d already faced. She took a deep breath and walked in.

  At each corner of the dais stood an oblong blue box, and in the centre sat a chair made of the same blue crystalline substance as Zayn’s imp. Sitting in the chair was a woman, dressed in a pair of narrow blue trousers and a loose shirt of the same material, decorated with squares of coloured metal on the pocket and gold leaves clipped to the collar points. She looked no more than thirty, with her smooth, pale skin and long, brown hair, but her haunted dark eyes marked her as old, so weary that one could think her as old as the cliffs themselves. She looked Ammadin over with a bitter smile.

  ‘Well, Lisa adin, I suppose you’ve come to gloat over your damned horses.’ She spoke Tekspeak, and her words crackled with anger. ‘I never thought Chursavva would be stupid enough to let you have them.’

  ‘What? I’m not Lisadin. My name is Ammadin, the spirit rider of Apanador’s comnee, and I’m here because you wanted my help.’

  The woman vanished. Ammadin stood gaping until, just as suddenly, she reappeared.

  ‘I malfunctioned,’ Sibyl said. ‘My memory banks at times make incorrect connections. I beg your pardon. You look almost exactly like Lisa adin Bar, Mother of Horses. Considering the small size of the Tribal gene pool, this is not surprising.’

  Faced with greater marvels Ammadin had no interest in whom she resembled. ‘How did you disappear like that?’

  ‘I’m not really here. I am what is called a REV, a name that comes from the Old Vranz phrase retrouver et voir, a databank made up of electronic circuits housed in a variety of devices. Part of me exists here, in the Analysis Lab. The rest exists in some of those objects you call the Riders. If I have any body at all, it exists only as polyquartzine and other such materials. This is why the indigenes call me the stone woman.’

  ‘But you look so solid.’

  ‘What you are seeing is a hologram that preserves the appearance of the flesh-and-blood woman I once was. All organics have been stripped away. I exist only as a collection of data. Never make the mistake of thinking of me as a living H’mai. The hologram exists only to make my functions easier to access.’

  ‘Did they take pictures of you, you mean, before you died?’

  ‘No, I died in order to become a REV. You will not be able to understand how this was achieved. My ancestors developed the process of transferring a H’mai mind into what were known as artificial intelligence units. It was not widely used, as the actual person died once its flesh-and-blood neurons were catalogued and replicated. I remember the process as very painful, but fortunately I have no physical nervous system left to actualize that memory.’ Sibyl leaned forward and held out one arm. ‘Try to touch me.’

  When Ammadin laid her fingers on what appeared to be Sibyl’s wrist, they felt nothing. She waved her hand back and forth, passing it through the apparently solid flesh.

  ‘Very well,’ Ammadin said. ‘So you’re a ghost. I believe you now.’

  ‘Good, but the accurate term is REV. Let me remind you that I am fully interactive. I will answer questions if you have any. My prime functions are to act as a repository of knowledge and to answer questions.’

  ‘You brought me here to stop Yarl Soutan from finding the Ark of the Covenant. Is that right?’

  ‘Not precisely. When I sent Water Woman to the grass, I wanted to stop him from trying to find it. The Ark as he has conceptualized it no longer exists. As you now know, I have no true physical existence. Thus, I could not stop him personally. Water Woman is enmeshed in the politics of her kind. Thus I thought it wise to ask for human help.’

  ‘All right. You know about Zayn Hassan. He’s a highly trained soldier, and at the moment he and some of the Chur are hunting Soutan down.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear that, but it is too late to prevent all negative consequences. Yarl has already told other H’mai about the items and lore that may be found here. I have reformulated what I want thusly: help me minimize the damage Yarl has caused.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, certainly.’ Ammadin hesitated, debating where to start. ‘You’ll answer my questions?’

  ‘One of my functions is to answer questions provided the answers are stored in my memory banks.’

  ‘What if the questions are about things the Landfall Treaty says we shouldn’t know?’

  ‘I will answer. The time has come for the truth.
The Treaty is now eight hundred years old. The concerns it was meant to address have changed since that time.’

  ‘Good. I know that we’re all on Snare because of some kind of mistake. What was it?’

  ‘A jumpshunt accident that damaged the astrogation unit, which Soutan calls the Ark. I see that you don’t understand. Travel between stars is difficult. Given the state of your general knowledge, I cannot possibly explain how ships manage to cover vast distances in small amounts of time. You will have to take it as a given in this discussion that there are places in space that make such travel possible. These locations are called jumpshunts. Travelling through them is dangerous. Something happened while our fleet was in the shunt. No one ever discovered the cause, and thus that answer is not in my databanks. But it resulted in our being thrown off-course.’

  ‘So we fetched up here, and you decided to come to terms with the Chof.’

  ‘This is correct.’

  ‘So your people drew up the Landfall Treaty.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And one of the terms was that we’d all lie to each other, the Cantonneurs, the comnees, and the Kazraks. You set up lies right in the Treaty.’

  ‘We did so in an attempt to protect the indigenes. We wished them to develop in their own way in their own time. Sibyl Davees, the person from whom I was created, was a xenobiologist. I was trained to protect sapient species wherever she found them. Our species, the H’mai, in its early days interacted very poorly with other species. We learned to defend against such self-centred actions with time.’

  ‘But why the lies? I’ve been told that my ancestors wanted them.’

  ‘Yes, precisely.’ Sibyl leaned forward, and suddenly her eyes, her voice, took on life. ‘Your ancestors signed on to the migration because they wanted to live simple lives as wandering nomads. They needed myths for their new culture, and so they created some. The Treaty protects those myths.’

  ‘Like, the Tribes shall believe they have always belonged to the grass?’