Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) (27 page)

Chapter 21

For two hours that morning the giants ran west along the coast as Gallen drove the wagon. When the road abruptly turned south, heading between two low hills, the giants stopped to rest. All four of them went down to a calm sea, as blue and sparkling as sapphires, and waded into waves up to their chests. For ten minutes they stooped and slowly drank their fill. Afterward, each of them bathed, then clambered back up the long sandy beach, looking refreshed, but as bedraggled as if they’d washed up in a flood.

Then the group headed south through the wooded hills. Tallea was healing nicely, and she and Orick took advantage of the opportunity to rest, while Ceravanne only sat gazing out the back of the wagon.

Maggie had time to wonder. According to Gallen, during the previous night his mantle had begun picking up memories in short bursts, so she put on her own mantle of technology and questioned Gallen about the problem.

“Gallen,” she whispered as the travelbeast charged down the dirt road, rounding a corner, “you said that the Inhuman is switching frequencies, trying to communicate with you. Did it do that only last night, or has it continued today?”

“It kept up until just past dawn,” Gallen said, “then it stopped.”

That was good news, at least. As she’d imagined earlier, the Inhuman’s ability to transmit seemed hampered in daylight, so it would be safer to travel by day. But she didn’t like the fact that the frequencies were changing at all. “Dammit, Gallen, the Word is more complex than I thought: at the very least, it is equipped with a transmitter so that it can communicate with the Inhuman.”

“But how much can it communicate?” Gallen said. “Is it just telling the Inhuman ‘I’m here,’ or does it send more information?”

Maggie considered. She’d thrown away the broken Word she’d had in camp yesterday. If she had it in hand, she might have been able to find its memory. Most likely, it would have been a small crystal, and by knowing its size, she would have been able to calculate exactly how much information was stored in the Word. But she knew that it couldn’t have stored much.
If
the Word’s memory was large at all, she’d have noticed its crystal earlier. Which meant that it wasn’t equipped with much memory—probably just enough to walk and move and recognize potential targets. It was probably not much smarter than an insect, and it might have had a transmitter in it just so that it could let the Inhuman know when to begin sending messages and whether they had been properly received.

But what bothered Maggie was that the Word didn’t
need
much memory to do some rather devastating things. With its transmitter, it
might
be able to download Gallen’s memories, his thoughts and ideas, and inform the Inhuman. It
might
be able to send direct transmissions to let the Inhuman know what he saw, what he smelled, what he heard.

In other words, without his knowledge or approbation, Gallen could very well lead them all into a trap, all the while believing himself to be fighting the Inhuman’s sway.

“Gallen, I don’t know how much the Word in your skull might be able to communicate with the Inhuman,” Maggie said hopefully. “But from what I’ve seen, the agents of the Inhuman don’t work in concert. Information doesn’t seem to be transferred directly between people. So that transmitter can’t be sending much.”

“But …” Gallen said, “I can tell that something worries you.”

Maggie leaned close to Gallen and a wave of dizziness passed over her. What she was about to say was so horrific, so undesirable, that she could hardly express her fears. “If the Word has a transmitter built into it, I’ve got to believe that it was put there for a good reason. I don’t know how much memory the Inhuman has. It couldn’t possibly hope to control a million or fifty million people all at once, so it downloads thoughts to you and lets you all act as if you were autonomous. But what if you’re not? What if the Inhuman
could
read your mind? What if it could take control of your body the way that Karthenor’s Guide took control of me? It wouldn’t take a lot of memory for the Inhuman to control a couple dozen people.”

“That can’t happen to me,” Gallen said. “My mantle is blocking its transmissions—at least during the daytime.”

Maggie looked meaningfully at Gallen and considered the problem. She didn’t want to speak so openly of such possibilities in front of Gallen and the others. She wanted to believe—she needed to believe—that the Inhuman had weaknesses, controllable limitations.

She whispered to her mantle,
You have transmission capabilities. Can you help Gallen block the Inhuman’s signals?

Done
, her mantle whispered.
Static will be transmitted in a steady burst
. Maggie understood that as long as she stayed within three meters of Gallen, the mantle would add an extra layer of protection.

Maggie silently asked her mantle to provide a schematic for the Word’s transmitter, and the mantle provided her with an image. The transmitter, it indicated, would most likely still be inside the metal body of the Word that had burrowed into Gallen’s skull. Because it was powered by a biogenic cell, the transmitter would have to be very weak, and would best communicate at ultralow frequencies, lower than those normally used by mantles. Maggie’s mantle was unable to read any such frequencies emanating from Gallen’s Word. And Maggie wondered if the Word was conserving energy. Perhaps it recognized the futility of trying to communicate during the day.

So Maggie sat next to Gallen, her mantle leaning up against his shoulder, and she rested as he drove.

During the late morning they began to pass others on the road—farmers with handcarts traveling to markets, old men with barrows carrying bundles of firewood, children herding pigs along the road.

Each time they passed such folk, the travelbeast was obliged to slow for safety’s sake. And on the occasions when they passed some small hamlet in which buildings made of stone seemed almost to stoop out into the streets, the beast was brought to a walk.

But once they passed such villages, the race would begin anew, and the giants ran. They startled herds of wild pigs sleeping under the oaks by the roadside, and often deer would bound away at their approach, crashing through the brush.

Thus in the early afternoon they topped a long grassy hill, and rested under the shade of an oak. The wooded valleys spread out wide below, thick with oak and alder. As far as they could see, the land looked barren of habitation.

With heavy hearts, three of the giants stopped, begging Ceravanne’s pardon for leaving. “You will have to go in the care of Fenorah from now on,” one young giant apologized, “though he’s not much good for anything but eating your stores.”

The giants were covered with sweat, but Ceravanne stood in the back of the wagon and leaned out, kissing each on the forehead. “Go with my blessing,” she said, “and know that I am grateful for your service.”

The travelbeast was winded, and it lowered its shaggy head and began tearing great clumps of grass from the ground. One of the giants took a bag of rotting pears from the back of the wagon and fed them to the beast, explaining that if it was to run all day, it would need something better than grass to eat.

Then the giants turned as if to walk back toward the sea, but they were slow to leave. And for her part, Maggie was sad to see them go. With them at her side, she’d felt safe, like a child in its father’s arms. One of them told a joke that Maggie could not hear, and the three laughed.

Gallen stood in the wagon and shouted in a strange tongue, “Doordra hinim s Duur!”

The three giants turned as one, raising their fists to the sky, and cried, “Doordra hinim!” Then they smiled, as if with renewed energy, and raced away.

Fenorah chuckled. “Stand tall in Duur! Indeed. Where did you learn that old battle cry? The Im giants abandoned the ancient tongue centuries ago.”

Gallen took a seat, but his eyes flashed, and he looked up into Fenorah’s face. “I learned it a few hours ago,” he said softly. “From a man who has been dead for five hundred years. He served beside the Im giants, and with them he hunted Derrits in the mountains of Duur until he swore fealty to the Swallow, and for her slew the Rodim.”

Gallen fell silent and his eyes lost their focus as he gazed inward. It was a magical thing for Maggie to see him as a boy one day, then suddenly turning into an old man the next, with too much pain and too much wisdom in his eyes.

Gallen began to sing, and though Maggie had heard him sing a few tavern songs, in the past she’d never thought him to have a fair voice. But now he sang in a voice that was both beautiful and startling, like the scent of a fresh rose filling a room in late autumn, and Maggie realized that it was a talent he’d learned from the Inhuman.

“In Indallian, the peaceful land,
among dark pines glowering,
the hilts were hollowed by Inhuman hands
in the days of the Swallow’s flowering.”

“Hold,” said Ceravanne from the back of the wagon, and she reached out and touched Gallen’s hand, silencing him. “Please, Gallen, do not sing that song. It is long forgotten by those who dwell here, and … it hurts too much. Perhaps if it came from the voice of another bard—but not you. You remind me too much of Belorian.”

“He has been dead for many centuries,” Gallen said. “I would have thought that time had brought you peace.”

“Not today,” Ceravanne whispered. “The memories of him seem fresh today, and the pain still hot. If you must tell your friends of Indallian in its days of glory, I beg that you do not sing of it around me.”

“What’s Indallian?” Orick asked.

Gallen waved toward the wild hills before them, golden with fields of grass, green with forests. “All of this is the land of Indallian—from the rough coast to the ruined halls of Ophat beside the city of Nigangi, and beyond, even to the deserts south of Moree where the Tekkar dwell. Long ago Ceravanne ruled the empire from the great city of Indallian with her consort the good King Belorian, until the Accord fell. Even today if I judge right by Fenorah’s account, their love is remembered as the stuff of legend.”

“It is spoken of,” Fenorah said beside the wagon, “though I must confess that I have not heard that song. And the Land of Indallian is no more, while its capital is spoken of with dread.”

“Belorian was more than a consort,” Ceravanne said as if to correct Gallen. “He was my lover, my husband in all but name—for by the laws of his people, we could not marry. Yet our love was fierce, before he died.”

“I do not understand,” Orick said to Ceravanne. “Your people can bring the dead back to life. Why is he not beside you now?”

“Because,” Ceravanne said, “a man is more than his flesh. He is also his memories, his experiences, his dreams and ambitions. And shortly after Belorian died in battle, the crystals that stored his memories were destroyed, and that is a far truer and more permanent death than the sloughing off of the flesh. We could rebuild his body, but we cannot remake the man.” She looked sharply at Gallen, as if to censure him for bringing up such a painful subject, then turned away.

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Gallen urged the travel beast forward with some strange words foreign to the human tongue. The beast responded as if Gallen had spoken in its own language, and it rushed through the hills.

And as Maggie rode that day, she watched the land roll by. Often she would see ancient lichen-crusted stones tumbled in the grass as they passed some ruin, and twice they passed ancient fortresses that sprawled upon the hills, covered with moss, with oaks growing in the courtyard, their branches reaching over the stone walls like great hands.

As the day drew to its close, a brief squall blew over, and Fenorah, unwilling to risk that his travelbeast should injure itself by slipping in the mud, decided to set camp in an old fortress, in a great hall without doors or windows. So they brought the travel beast inside.

The walls were made of huge stones, a meter thick, carved so that various grooves fit together. Maggie suspected that the stone might not deter the Inhuman’s signal as well as a dozen feet of solid dirt, but she hoped it would serve nearly as well. She found the most secluded corner and directed Gallen to sit there and rest.

Dried horse dung left by the mounts of previous travelers served as ample fuel to set a small fire, and Fenorah brought out stores for dinner. They had not had a formal meal since early morning, and everyone was tired, and the poor giant was most weary of all. He curled into a corner while Maggie cooked dinner, and he fell asleep before it was done.

After a brief dinner Ceravanne withdrew from the group, going out a back hall that led to a tower. Outside, the rain was falling steadily, hissing as it struck the leaves of trees, and the heavy scent of moisture pervaded the room. It was chill and dreary.

“That song you began to sing today,” Orick said. “Will you sing it to us now?” And Maggie hoped that he would, for the sound of music would do her heart good.

Gallen sang in a low voice the same time he had begun earlier in the day, and Maggie was amazed at his voice, at the easy grace and power in it, as if he’d been born to sing.

He sang of Indallian, the riches and glory that made it the envy of all the world. He sang of the peaceful peoples drawn by the Swallow to form the great Accord, where each species had equal voices in the open counsels.

But then the Rodim came, a greedy race lured by tales of the rich deposits of emeralds and gold found in Indallian, and they ravaged whole villages, looted and burned the caravanserais.

The Swallow’s love, Belorian, was a strong man, and he sought to protect his people by arming them. But the Swallow urged him to counsel with the Rodim peacefully, to reconcile with them, bring them into the Accord.

Yet when Belorian met with the savage chieftains of the Rodim in their mountain camps, they slew him and put his body upon a pole, then danced through the night, proclaiming victory over the land of Indallian, and they sent their armies to Belorian’s throne at the city of Indallian, where they heaped contempt upon the dead by destroying the crystal that held Belorian’s memories.