A statuesque woman with a braid of auburn hair came forward "My greetings, Manager Miesa"
"It's good to see you, Jasina." Savina presented the woman to Kelric. "This is Jasina, Senior Guardian of the Children's House." She indicated the others. "And her staff."
They all bowed deeply to him. Jasina said, "You do us great honor with your presence."
Kelric nodded, silent.
They visited the parks first. Toys clustered everywhere: sculpted boulders, giant Quis structures to climb on, huts tucked away in the trees. As they walked along the shore of a lake, Jasina indicated a large building across the water, hidden among trees, a house with a peaked roof and blue shutters. "That's the Parents' House. Parents may choose to live there, in a suite in the Cooperative, or in a Common House in the city." She spoke to Savina, respecting the custom that set Calani apart, but Kelric knew her words were meant for him. Savina needed no introduction to the Miesa Cooperative. She had lived in it
"Parents who stay in the city are still expected to visit the Cooperative at least twice a day," Jasina said, "for their children and for their work detail." She glanced at Kelric "Except for Calani, of course."
He wondered what she would think if she knew how much he wanted to forgo that exception.
The Children's House was a low building with many windows and playrooms, designed on the same plan as a Calanya, with suites arranged around common rooms. The younger children lived in skyrooms or sunrooms,_but the older ones decorated their rooms themselves, with a wide range of styles, particularly for the teenagers. Although the Cooperative was large enough so every child could have a private suite, many chose to share with friends or kin. Interspersed with the children's rooms were suites occupied by parents or Cooperative guardians.
In a playroom filled with toddlers and sunshine, Jasina paused to describe how the children were supervised. A boy toddled over and peered up at Kelric. After considering the matter in great depth, he sat next to Kelric's foot and proceeded to unload dice from his toy cart onto Kelric's shoe.
Jasina's face blazed red. When she reached for the child, Kelric touched her shoulder and the guardian straightened up with a snap, as if his touch had sent a shock through her body.
Kelric picked up the boy himself, feeling awkward worried that his huge grasp might frighten the toddler The child nestled comfortably in his arms. "Lani?" the boy asked.
Savina spoke gently to the boy. "Yes. Calani."
He wiggled in Kelric's arms. "Dow."
Smiling, Kelric set him on the ground. The boy reloaded his cart, companionably patted Kelric's shoe, and then ambled away, pulling his cart behind him.
A spurt of angry voices erupted in the hall. Two teenage girls stalked into the room, their clothes muddied and their hair disheveled. The bigger one waved her fists at the smaller one. "I saw you change that dice stru—"
"Call me a cheater again," the second girl yelled, "and I'll—ai!" Her mouth dropped open as she saw Kelric. Both girls gaped until Jasina cleared her throat. Then the brawlers remembered themselves and bowed bumping into each other in the process.
Savina's mouth twitched upward. "Our greetings."
The duo stammered in unison "We are honored, Manager Miesa."
Jasina spoke. "Perhaps you two can settle your quarrels in a more civilized manner than using your fists?"
"Yhee, ma'am," they answered.
Kelric grinned at Savina As Jasina ushered the girls to the door, he spoke to the Manager in a low voice. "Do they remind you of someone?"
She glared at him. "I never got into fights."
Jasina came back over. "Would you like to finish the tour privately, Manager Miesa?"
At first the question puzzled Kelric. Then he realized Jasina was offering to withdraw so he and Savina could talk if they wished.
Savina nodded. "My thanks, Jasina. We appreciate the time you gave us."
"It is our pleasure, ma'am."
So Savina took Kelric on her own tour, his guards walking far enough away so he could converse with her. They strolled through the sunlight that slanted through the windows, talking about their childhoods. Eventually they came to a foyer where a youth sat reading a book.
He looked up. "Manager Miesa. We've been expecting you." He opened a door in the inner wall of the foyer. "She's in the dayroom."
The room beyond was filled with plants and sun. An old woman sat by the window, dozing in a wicker chair. Savina bent down and kissed the woman's cheek. "My greetings, Nonni."
Nonni opened her eyes, blinking. "Little Vina?"
"I brought Sevtar to see you." Savina smiled at Kelric. "Nonni was my nurse when I lived here."
The wrinkles around Nonni's eyes crinkled as she looked up at him. "Such a big fellow." She peered at Savina, then Kelric. "You have to watch that one," she told him. "Wild clawcat, she was. Always getting into fights."
Savina turned red. "Winds above."
"You keep her behaved," the nurse told Kelric.
Kelric smiled. "I'll do my best."
The nurse's eyes widened. "He spoke to me, Vina."
"I heard," Savina said.
Nonni patted his hand. "A Fourth Level at Miesa. There hasn't been one for over a century." She nodded her head. "The last would have been Mevryn Miesa. He died before I was born."
They stayed with Nonni until the sun dipped behind the roofs outside the window. When they finally headed back to the Estate, evening had brought a chill down from the mountains. People thronged the streets as day shifts came home and night crews left for work. Kelric didn't know if it was the cold or the crowds that bothered him, but he felt ill at ease until he fastened his robe and wound the scarf around his head. So they passed through Miesa, a shield of guards around a tall figure hidden in robe and Talha.
At the Estate, an aide hurried out to give Savina a letter. "A rider came in with this, ma'am. The pilot said it was urgent."
Savina waited until she and Kelric were in the privacy of her suite before she read the scroll. When she finished, she went to a window and stared out at Miesa, her brightness muted, her smile gone.
"What is it?" Kelric asked.
She turned to him. "Jahlt Karn is dead."
Rashiva Haka sat on the carpet in her suite, playing Quis with Jimorla, her seven-year-old son. The Akasi Raaj lay next to them, studying the dice. When Raaj set a truncated cone into one structure, Jimorla looked up in bafflement, blinking his violet eyes. Rashiva smiled and kissed his forehead, evoking an embarrassed blush from the boy, and Raaj tousled his hair.
A knock sounded on the door.
Rashiva sighed. Not now. She treasured these moments with her family. But as Manager, she had no choice. She went to the door.
A guard waited Outside. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am. But this came in by rider." She handed Rashiva an envelope. "The messenger said it was urgent."
"Very well." Rashiva nodded to her. "You may go."
After the guard left, Rashiva read the letter. Then she exhaled, her hand dropping by her side.
Raaj came Over to her. "What's wrong?"
"Jahlt Karn." Quietly she said, "She's dead."
Avtac Varz despised her seasonal tour of the research facility. Boring people, messy labs. They waste my funds, she thought. If they don't produce, results soon I will put them on maintenance crews.
Today she visited the chemists. When her retinue arrived, Avtac saw Iva and her assistant Senti leaning over some contraption on a table. Avtac stopped in the entrance, regarding the room with distaste. Bottles crammed the shelves. A hood overhung a ledge along one wall and air hissed from a hose by the sink.
When Avtac's aide knocked on the door, Iva looked up. "Manager Varz." She hurried over. "My greetings, ma'am."
"I understand you have a demonstration for me," Avtac said. "That I do. I'm working on a synthesis. We've just set up the distillation." Iva handed her a pair of safety glasses and ushered her over to the contraption. Avtac listened while the chemist explained
her work. It sounded like she was just boiling dirty water. Games. All games. Useless. She should put them both on maintenance.
Mercifully, the demonstration soon ended. With relief, Avtac took her leave of the chemist and her dull assistant.
"Thank Khozaar that's over with." Senti settled onto a stool by the distillation apparatus. "We won't have to see that old podbag for another season."
"Senti," Iva admonished.
"Do you want me to keep labeling these bottles?"
"Yes." Iva frowned as oil sputtered in the pan on a hot plate under the distillation apparatus. A clamp held a round flask partially suspended in the oil.
"Where is the thermometer?" Iva asked. "This oil bath looks too hot."
Senti glanced up, a bottle of white crystals in one hand and a label in the other. "It's on your desk." She held up the bottle. "What's this?" .
"Potassium nitrate." Iva turned down the hot plate, then went over to her desk. "There's no thermometer here."
"It's on the shel—ai!"
A crash punctuated Senti's cry and Iva looked in time to see the nitrate bottle Senti had dropped smash into a bottle of sulfur on the lab table. Brilliant yellow powder flew across the nitrate while the broken bottles spun in circles. As Iva ran across the room, squeezing between the lab benches, one bottle crashed into the hot plate and knocked over the pan, sending hot oil flying over the mess.
"Semi," Iva shouted. "Get away from there."
Flames erupted in the oil, tongues of fire that ate away the supports of a shelf above the table. An edge of the shelf slipped and bottles of charcoal absorbent toppled, raining dark powder everywhere. Just as Iva reached Senti, the entire shelf collapsed, slamming into the fiery chaos, confining it under pressure—and the table exploded with a force that hurtled them into the wall.
Zecha Varz, Captain of the Varz Hunters, found Avtac taking a glass of jai rum in the library. The Manager was reading, as she often did in the evening. The text surprised Zecha. Chemistry? The subject bored Avtac stiff. All it seemed good for was causing lab accidents. Iva and her assistant were lucky they survived that explosion with treatable injuries. Now here was Avtac, reading about potassium nitrate, of all things.
Avtac glanced up at her. "Yes?"
Zecha handed her the letter. "This came in by rider."
After Avtac read the scroll, she leaned back in her chair, a thoughtful expression on her angular face. "So. Untried youth replaces experience."
"Untried youth?" Zecha asked.
Avtac smiled. "Jahlt Karn is dead."
28
The Column of Time
Torch in hand, Elder Solan led Ixpar through the maze of catacombs beneath Karn, until they reached a dead end where engravings covered the stone wall. Solan pressed the engravings in a complex pattern and the clink of cold stone tapping stone answered her. When she leaned her weight into the wall, a tall block slid inward and scraped to the side, revealing a cubical chamber that brought to mind a hollow Quis die.
The Elder turned to Ixpar. "Jahlt told me about this room as a precaution." She paused. "In case anything happened before she brought you here herself."
Ixpar nodded, trying to keep her face composed. For two tendays now, since Jahlt's death, she had held on to her grief, afraid that if she let go, its immensity would overwhelm her. She lifted her torch, peering into the cubicle. "What is it?"
"All I know is this: Jahlt taught you a rhyme when you were a child, one about a hawk—l don't know the words. Do you remember it?"
"I think so."
"Then you know how to open the door." Solan bowed and then left, her robes whispering as she disappeared into the catacombs.
Ixpar walked into the cube. Directly across from her, a portal of old iron stood embedded in the far wall, like an ancient sentinel. Feeling rather foolish, she went to the portal and said the nursery rhyme:
From desert to peak,
The great hawk did fly,
For came he to seek
A war queen on high.
Not surprisingly, nothing happened. She peered at the door. Although engravings covered it, none showed a desert, peak, hawk, or anything vaguely resembling a war queen.
From desert to peak. What did it mean? Haka to Varz? Haka hadn't existed when these catacombs were built. From Kej to Varz, then. So. Why would a hawk seek a war queen? Presumably because of the bond that formed between bird and human. On high probably referred to warriors riding hawks through the skies.
Ixpar studied the engravings. Squares. Circles. Lines. A dot above a circle, two slashes over a rectangle. The marks were accents, symbols from the ancient language Ucatan, sometimes called Tozil, which predated even Old Script. Originally Ucatan had been purely hieroglyphic, but over the centuries the glyphs had become stylized, breaking into two parts, a Quis shape and an accent. Jahlt had insisted she learn Ucatan even though almost no writings survived in it.
Dot. It meant blue. Slash indicated higher dimension. Dot and slash over circle could be the lapis lazuli ring of a seeker. The engravings were Quis patterns, cruder than modern glyphs but readable. She saw the topaz octahedron of Kej and the obsidian of Varz. From Kej to Varz. The room itself, the oversized cube, symbolized the word great. It was all there, the entire rhyme depicted in Quis symbols.
Except nothing denoted a war queen. Maybe the portal was the final symbol, standing to protect whatever lay beyond. Ixpar pressed the engravings, using the pattern outlined by the rhyme. A series of clicks rewarded her efforts, but when she pushed the door nothing happened.
She studied the symbols One looked like a forest, another like a mountain. Or a mountain cat—
Clawcat. Of course. The ancient warriors fought with the ferocity of those huge mountain beasts She pressed the cat pattern and heard the clink of stone hitting metal. This time the portal slid inward under her push, with a grating protest, and then creaked to the side. As a gust of stale air assaulted her nose, she walked into a round room.
Ixpar looked around. The curved walls were made from white marble veined with black, and black and white tiles shaped like diamonds covered the floor. Had Jahlt left a message here for her? The thought made her eyes burn with unshed tears. If only she could have said goodbye to Jahlt, perhaps her grief would be bearable.
She searched the room but found no hidden niches or other exits. Finally she sat cross-legged on the floor and rested her chin on her hand, trying to fathom the purpose of a room made like a hollow cylinder. Cylinder on flat tiles; it was a Quis structure for the passage of time, the past portrayed by the flat base and time's passing by a column reaching up to the future.
Ixpar looked up.
Far above her head the ceiling vaulted to a point. Black and white tiles shaped like althawks were inlaid in it, with a gray hawk in the apex. The tiles made interlocking circles around the center; as she looked away from the apex she saw widening circles of smaller and smaller hawks, until at the edge where the ceiling met the walls the birds were no more than dots.
Hawks. She tried to imagine the ancient architect who built the room. What had hawks meant to her? The future. Travel in the Teotecs was difficult on foot, both now and in the Old Age. Without the giant althawks, the ancient warriors would have been confined to the Estates. Their way of life would have died.
As it did. When the althawks became extinct the wars ended. Peace endured in this era of windriders because centuries of isolation had established Quis as the dominant means of conflict. Before invention of the rider, the Estates had learned to fight with Quis, which could be sent through treacherous mountains far more easily than conventional warfare. It only took one person and a pouch of dice.
She ran her hand over the floor. Why diamonds for the past? Was it their shape? Perhaps it meant the crystal itself, hardest of all substances, enduring for all ages, as the past endured regardless of the future. But why black and white? White, as the mixture of all light, and black, as its absence both ranked high in the color hierarchy of Quis. Entir
ety and absence. Past and future? Without one, the other had no meaning.
Our ancestral memories live in Quis, Ixpar thought. And Quis is our future. Coba was a dice game, always evolving from what came before. She smiled. Maybe this room was meant to remind Ministers they were just Quis players with a fancy title.
She considered the gray althawk in the ceiling. Gray: a blending of black and white. The present, where the past blended with the future? But if the floor was the past, the walls the passage of time, and the ceiling the future, the present should have been down here, where the floor met the walls.
Ixpar studied the diamonds under her, rubbing her handsmover them—
The tile directly below the ceiling's gray hawk moved.
She pushed harder and the tile slid into the floor. Across the room, a clink came from the cube chamber, followed by the grinding noise of old gears. Startled, she jumped to her feet and ran to the door.
Her knee hit its lower edge.
Ixpar tensed. When she had entered this cylinder room, the door had been flush with the ground. Now, while she watched the floor was sinking away from it.
As Ixpar lifted her foot, intending to climb into the cube room, a grate of stone on stone came from inside that chamber. Then, across the cube from her, the door where she had first entered the chamber crashed shut, leaving a blank wall. Beneath her. the floor of the cylinder room continued to sink.
"Winds above." Ixpar dropped her torch and grabbed the bottom edge of the door. The floor dropped out from under her and then she was hanging with her feet dangling in the air.
Now what? If she let go, she would fall into a slick well of marble with unscalable sides. If she climbed into the cube, she was putting herself in a sealed box with smooth walls. What if it didn't open from inside? She saw no air vents in the chamber and Solan was the only one who knew she was here. She could suffocate long before the Elder came looking for her.
Several clicks came from inside the door, followed by the ominous grind of gears. Then, with Ixpar hanging from it, the portal began to swing closed. She braced her legs on the wall, straining to hold the portal open, but she couldn't stop its inexorable motion.