They vanished.
Joy vanished as well, and with it the beginnings of an awful understanding.
Dee came to her senses, alone in the dank reality of the cave, standing in water up to her ankles. The tide had turned and the sea was streaming slowly into the Geodh Ghille Mhóire. The memorecall of the old traumatic experience was dim, confused, troubling. There had been no catharsis. She inspected the innermost portions of her mind with redactive scrutiny and discovered that the deep mental inhibitions were still in place. Reliving the old nightmare had apparently accomplished nothing.
A few gulls wheeled overhead, their melancholy cries echoing from the walls of the chasm. She wanted to shout her disappointment and anger to the soaring birds. Somehow she had managed to bungle the initial part of her healing journey. Understanding had slipped away from her at the last moment—or else she had let it escape.
Very well. She’d try again.
But not immediately. There was no real danger in the rising tide, but she would have to leave the cave at once. The high-water mark on the wall was above her head. She went splashing out, using her stick, and climbed onto dry rocks above the inundated bench. The sea was still nearly calm, heaving gently up and down as she began the ascent of the blocky “steps” leading to the moorland above the cliffs.
Now the cave would be inaccessible for nearly twelve hours, and to start over at the beginning she would have to wait until long after nightfall for the next low tide. She could see in the dark, of course, but that required continuing mental effort that would seriously detract from the experience.
“Damn!” she said as she reached the chasm’s top. “What am I going to do?”
A wry female voice seemed to say: First you try dry out da boots an’ socks, eh?
Dee had to laugh, and bent her creativity to the task. Then she made the only possible decision. She would ignore her apparent failure and proceed along the north-shore path as she had originally planned, retracing the route she and her family had taken on the fatal hike. Whatever happened would happen.
First, though, a bit of prudent reconnoitering.
She traveled a few hundred meters northeast, circling the steep slope above the geodh, and climbed to the top of Cnoc Uamh nam Fear, a small hillock that was the highest point on this part of the island. From its vantage point she let her ultrasenses range out. Westward was only open sea that stretched all the way to Canada. North across the water lay little Colonsay and Oronsay, and Mull, where the invading MacLeans had launched their invasion force centuries earlier. A few scattered bright emanations indicated the presence of harmless nonoperant human life. She turned, scanning Islay itself, and found the northern parts of the island almost deserted. At this time of year, only a handful of hardy visitors came, and the locals stayed mostly in snug villages on the southern and eastern shores. She found no operant minds nearby, no threat to her safety.
… But what was that?
As she faced in the direction she must travel she felt for the merest fraction of a second the weird aetheric disturbance that had frightened her when she visited Islay as a child. It was neither an aura nor the metapsychic resonance of minds working together. It was certainly not farspoken communication. It touched only the emotions, not the intellect, wordlessly urging her to fear for her life … run away … give up the journey before it was too late.
As swiftly as it came, the ultrasensation disappeared.
She cried out: I’m not afraid of you! I won’t run from you, Hydra!
But was it Hydra? She replayed the elusive fragment, analyzing it with all the skill of a Grand Master Creator. Its source was not Hydra, not even Fury, but something else.
Something. Many things? Not threatening, only warning.
A frisson of unease touched her as she found herself remembering certain stories Malama had told her, frightening accounts of genuine “ghosts” whose unquiet spirits the Hawaiian woman had laid. One of them had been the unfortunate mother of Jack and Marc Remillard. With a dismissive shrug, the kahuna had admitted that the more sophisticated metapsychic practitioners of the Human Polity did not acknowledge the existence of “malignant personality aspects” that were able to survive death and bedevil the living. But kahunas knew better.
Standing on top of the hill, Dee let her mind range out again, seekersense honed to the keenest. This time there was no evocation of deadly danger, no warning.
She thought of farspeaking Malama, even briefly considered asking her angel for advice and reassurance. But then a hot rush of resentment welled up in her, sweeping away any temptation that smacked of continuing childish dependence.
No one could help her except herself.
Malama had done all she could. The angel, that preprogrammed Lylmik artifact, had also told her she was on her own. Her mother, her uncle and aunt, even the other murder victims were quite dead and beyond communicating with her. She was alive and strong and ready to begin her life as an adult. If irrational fears or even genuine enemies stood in her way, she would have to remove them.
She set off for the Tòn Mhór headland a couple of kilometers to the northwest. As she strode along in the sunshine, she realized with a sudden burst of hopefulness that the Tòn, not the death-cave, marked the proper starting place for her journey. Perhaps she had not failed after all. Perhaps she had been a fool to think that she could accomplish her goal before completing the full pilgrimage.
When she reached the headland she sat for a time, resting against the same rock that had sheltered her and Ken and Gran Masha. She relived the original gyrfalcon dream in memorecall once again, this time without empathy, as though it were some fantasy drama and she an objective critic. She suffered no pain or fear, made no attempt to analyze the experience.
Next she retraced her panicky flight down the steep path where she had met Throma’eloo Lek. Before returning to the clifftop, she scanned the blackened ruins of Sanaigmore Farm and the lands around it. There was nothing unusual to be found. The nearest human beings were at Loch Gorm, six kilometers due south, and her farsight showed that they were only biologists taking a census of the swan population.
Staying as close to the precipitate shore as she could, she hiked down to sandy Sanaigmore Bay, passing roofless, abandoned crofts with stone walls that seemed to be slowly sinking into the ground. There was still hardly any wind, but the air seemed colder and more damp. Haze was slowly bleaching the blue sky to milky gray. Far offshore the horizon was beginning to blur. As she continued her resolute tramp through sand dunes, small bogs, and areas of dead bracken, she marked the absence of seabirds that had been so abundant on her childhood trek. Even the ubiquitous “peeps”—the shorerunners that should have been rather common in winter—seemed to have disappeared.
After walking for over two hours she stopped to scan the sullen sea. It had turned leaden as the high overcast moved in. When she extended her farsight she encountered a bank of fog about a dozen kilometers offshore.
“Uh-oh,” she muttered, and switched her wrist-com to the weather channel. As she had feared, the fog was expected to move inland within a few hours. Still, if she stepped along briskly she might still reach the beach picnic shelter at Tràigh Nòstaig, completing the journey before visibility was too badly impaired.
She had not yet stopped for lunch. The other sea-cave, where she had seen the white gyrfalcon, was not far off.
When she came to the area above it she sat at the rim of a small gully and unwrapped her peanut-butter sandwich and orange. While she ate, her childhood musings over the splendid Greenland falcon drifted back into her mind. The bird had killed in order to live, and that had troubled her young conscience very much. When Dee grew older, she chose to minimize her consumption of flesh in order to spare the lives of higher animals. Janet and the nonborns had mocked her resolution, and most of her fellow students at Dartmouth had thought her a squeamish sentimentalist.
But she had felt that the abstinence was necessary.
At this time
in the Galactic Age, the majority of philosophers and ethicists had rejected as illogical the idea that humans should not kill and eat living things. Milieu physics had demonstrated that all life, not merely that of higher animals, was enmeshed within the vital lattices. Even so-called inanimate objects were known to have a minimal share of vitality, and so if one avoided the consumption of life, one would consume nothing. Logic dictated that the proper food for the human species was that which had nurtured it throughout its evolution. Dee’s moral preceptors taught her that “Thou shalt not kill” really meant “Thou shalt not kill thine own kind—those who think.” The stewardship of other lifeforms and prevention of their needless suffering was properly regulated by prudence and logic; only the lives of sapient beings, whether human or not, fell under a solemn commandment.
Now, for the first time, Dee thought to ask herself why she was so anxious to spare animal life, when at the same time she would have gladly killed the humans who comprised Hydra.
Hydra is a murderer! A torturer who deserves to die.
… Is that why you’re trying to trap it?
I want to bring it to justice. Stop it from killing again.
… And if it tries to kill you?
I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to strike back with all of my mental strength! Kill it in self-defense. It’s perfectly justifiable.
… And if you captured it and it didn’t try to harm you?
It would try. Of course it would. I’d have to kill it. KILL IT EVEN MORE PAINFULLY THAN IT KILLED THEM!
… There. Now you understand!
The section of orange she had just taken seemed to turn to dust in her mouth, half choking her and setting her to coughing. She had to drink quickly from her canteen to restore herself. Still breathing raggedly, her heart thudding in her breast, she stared at the stony ground.
Understanding.
Knowing the truth not only about her culpable witness to Hydra’s crime in the sea-cave, but also the truth about the promise she had given her father. There were mitigating circumstances for the first sin: overwhelming fear, and the egocentrism of a very young child. But the second action, back on Caledonia, had been quite different. Hearing her father’s agonized plea, she had decided just what she would do when she found her mother’s murderers. She would not simply capture them and bring them before the Milieu authorities, but—
“Oh, God,” Dee whispered, and covered her face with her hands.
Later, when the last fragment of the thing that had shattered inside her was gone, she was amazed to discover that it was late afternoon. Fog was stealing over the water, into the bays and coves, and making its first tentative foray onto the land. Dee packed up her things and climbed to her feet, aching all over, realizing that she must have been sitting there without moving for over two hours.
“Right,” she said aloud. “Definitely time to leave.”
It was a little over three kilometers to her journey’s end, where her car would be waiting. Once beyond Falcon Cave (and the ravine where she once thought she had seen the Kilnave Fiend) the walking would be fairly easy. She would have to stay close to the cliff edge in order to avoid bogs, but her farsight would keep her safe in the thickening fog.
When she had passed this way as a child, she and the others had remained on the height above the beach and obtained only a partial view of the bird-cave. This time there was no surf, and she decided to take the low route to get a look at the cavern’s interior. A strong air current streaming from the large opening in the rocks blew the encroaching mist away. It was still very quiet except for the sound of her boots squeaking on the sand. Inside, the grotto was spacious and deep, much more impressive than Gilmour’s. The doves had unaccountably abandoned the place but their guano whitened many of the rocks protruding from the sandy floor.
The wind from within the cave was steady and it bore a peculiar musty scent quite unlike bird droppings. Dee progressed to a point where the fading daylight did not penetrate. Her farsight seemed to show that the cave ended another thirty meters or so further in, but when she reached the back of the chamber she noticed that the airflow had become stronger and had changed direction. It was now blowing from somewhere above her head. When she “looked” up she saw a ledge about six meters high interrupting the sloping, rough-surfaced wall. Above it was a crevice that seemed wide enough to admit a human body. A nonoperant person exploring the cave with artificial light when the cave-wind was not blowing would likely have missed the crack entirely because of the way it was shadowed.
There was a way up. Using her stick and her PK, she negotiated the climb, then pushed her way through the tight crevice. Its sides were unpleasantly wet from dripping groundwater. After she had penetrated ten meters or so the passage opened into another large chamber. Dee straightened and stepped inside, scanning upward with her farsight to see how high the ceiling was.
And stepped on something brittle that crunched beneath her boot.
She did not scream when her mind’s eye discovered the bones. The only sound she made was a low moan of sorrow.
So many bones! Skulls and rib cages, the long bones of legs and arms, perforated pelvic basins, disarticulated small bones that had been the framework of hands, feet, and vertebral columns. The skeletal remains were white and clean, and all of them were human. Dee counted the skulls. There were thirty-three, some adult and some belonging to children.
Inspector Chaimbeul had told her that the presumed victims of the “Kilnave Fiend” still unaccounted for numbered twenty-nine. Dee wondered who the other four had been. Lonely day-trippers from the mainland with no one to report them missing on Islay? Boaters who had come unsuspecting to shore for a picnic and instead found death lurking on the pretty beach of Falcon Cave?
The underground wind still blew, this time from another opening at ground level that was less than a meter in diameter; but Dee was too distraught now to do anything but retreat. She turned and re-entered the cramped slot leading to the main cavern.
A light was shining at the other end.
With a sharp intake of breath Dee stopped to focus her farsight in the darkness.
Not one light, but six! Small brilliant pinpricks like three pairs of stars … or glowing eyes.
Two women and a man were standing shoulder to shoulder on the ledge just beyond the tunnel’s end. The Hydras—Madeleine, Celine, and Parnell Remillard—dressed in ordinary outdoor clothing, were waiting for her to come out.
“Oh, dear Jesus!” she whispered, nearly paralyzed with dread.
Whatever confidence she possessed had evaporated at the sight of those pathetic bones. She was no longer a brilliant, highly educated young woman, a grandmasterclass metapsychic nominated to the Galactic Concilium, but only a panic-stricken fifteen-year-old girl who had grossly overestimated her own bravery. Pressing back the way she had come, she staggered into the bone-room heedless of the relics crackling underfoot. The old sense of dire warning thundered in her brain, urging her to flee for her life.
They came after her then. One at a time and slowly, because they were larger than she and the passage very narrow.
The wind still blew.
Dee ran to the entrance of the next tunnel, threw off her backpack, dropped her stick, and crawled into the opening on her hands and knees. Where did the passage lead? Desperately, she probed ahead with her ultrasenses, not expecting to learn much. Seeing through expanses of solid rock was formidably difficult even for a Grand Master Farseer—and yet she accomplished the task now with an ease that astounded her. The tunnel she was in slanted steeply upward and entered another underground chamber having two other exits. The larger passageway, which was the source of the wind, angled off, twisting and turning, for nearly half a kilometer until it abruptly plunged into unknown depths. The smaller tunnel, up near the ceiling, was only three or four meters in length. It terminated at the surface.
Dee wriggled madly up the incline, dislodging loose chunks of rock that rolled and rattled behind her. Why w
eren’t the Hydras combining in metaconcert, trying to stop her with their mind-devouring ploy? Working together, they might be able to kill her with psychokinesis or some bizarre manifestation of creativity. Instead, they seemed determined to apprehend her physically.
One of the Hydra-women, Celine, was more slender and agile than the others. She came eeling up the passage after Dee with incredible rapidity, uttering monotonous telepathic obscenities.
Dee reached the third cave-chamber and began to scramble up the steep wall. She struggled onto a rocky shelf eight meters above the floor and tried to gather her shaken wits to decide what to do next. The exit shaft was another four meters up and there were no more footholds.
Celine Remillard appeared, screaming vulgar insults out loud. For a moment she paused, irresolute, staring up at Dee. The Hydra was fair-haired and sweetly pretty and the mind that looked out through her turquoise eyes was mad. Giving a final maniacal cry, she changed into a soot-black monstrosity with glowing eyes, a serpentine neck, and multiple arms—a smaller version of the metaconcerted Hydra. A split second later the thing conjured up a hissing ball of energy and flung it at Dee.
Without thinking, the girl spun a psychocreative shield. The lightning-ball hit the barrier and disintegrated into a shower of embers that rained onto the cavern floor. Roaring, the Hydra lifted a broken piece of rock the size of a small desk and hurled it without effort. Dee’s shield held and the deflected missile fell with a great crash, cracking apart into sharp-edged fragments. The Hydra shrieked in frustration. An inhuman leap carried it across the rubble-strewn floor to the base of the wall. It began to climb like a huge spider, slowly and carefully.
At that moment the head of Parnell Remillard appeared in the opening of the lower tunnel. Crawling awkwardly into the chamber, he shouted, “Get her quick, Cele! That’s the way out!”
By now the creature was nearly halfway to Dee’s precarious perch. It seemed unable to climb as fast as a human. As Dee cowered behind her mental shield her farsight perceived the third Hydra-unit, the woman she had first known as Magdala MacKendal, enter the chamber and speak urgently to her male companion.