Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  Eventually the entire core would cool and go essentially dormant. Nothing short of a solar flare at close proximity might restart it. Such a flare would also wipe all life from Orisha, so the subsequent matter/antimatter explosion would be redundant.

   “Najem,”she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “There’s a problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “ I think my suit is failing,”she said. “I’m becoming visible.”

  Jaza swore. It was so obvious he should never have missed it. The rad levels around the core were high enough to kill a humanoid in short order, so it wasn’t unlikely they would play hob with an energetic system as delicate as the stealth field.

  “You have the flux regulator?” he said, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.

   “One,”she said. “But not the backup.”

  “Good enough,” he told her. “Get back here, now.”

  “ Najem,”she said in a voice so small he was surprised the badge was able to broadcast it. “Two Orishan soldiers have entered the crash site.”

  He had a vague image of her position in his head. To get at the manual step-down controls she would have had to climb to the top of the core, some ten meters above the ground. If she was still there, the Orishans might walk beneath without ever looking up.

  “Be still,” he said. “Let them pass.”

  There was silence for longer than he liked, enough time for him to mouth a silent prayer that the boon the Prophets had provided him might extend to Modan for just a bit longer.

  The clock ticked in his mind. The Ellington’s sensors and defensive systems hummed dispassionately around him. If he didn’t look out the forward viewport, if he ignored the aches that remained from his recently healed injuries, he might be back in Titan’s shuttlebay running an odd but simple survival scenario.

  Of course he saw very well the giant vermillion fronds draping over the front of the vessel and caught tiny glimpses of the copper-colored sky through the breaks between. This wasn’t Titan. Titanwas dead.

  The clock ticked. Jaza waited and meditated. A full three minutes passed and he found himself eyeing the remaining isolation suit and the phasers. He didn’t know what the stun setting might do against the Orishans’ dense chitinous exoskeletons, but he knew the kill setting could not be employed under any circumstance.

  If he was forced into a choice between saving her life and killing one of these beings, he knew what it would have to be. He prayed that it wouldn’t come to letting Modan die to preserve the timeline. The Orishans, of course, were under no such proscriptions.

   “They’ve gone,”she whispered suddenly.

  “Good,” he said. “Come back.”

  “ Not yet,”she said. “I think I can get the backup unit.”

  “Modan,” he said, suddenly more nervous for her than when she had been silent. “Come back now. Right now.”

   “You sent me for both units, Najem,”she said. “What if this one fails?”

  “Ensign Modan,” he said. “I am ordering you to come back now. Now.”

   “One moment,”she said. “It will take only a few more seconds to-”

  She never finished. At that moment the sensors all went haywire and the ship begin to scream multiple alarms simultaneously.

   “Warning,”it said. “Unquantifiable energetic field effect in proximity. Take evasive action. Gravitic conditions in flux.”

  “Computer,” he yelled over the din. “Record all sensor data for analysis.”

   “Acknowledged,”said the voice.

  There was the sound of thunder overhead, as if two impossibly massive hands had been clapped together, sending ripples of concussive force in all directions. All around him the ground began to shake violently.

  The shuttle continued its attempt to smash him into the bulkheads, but he held fast. As the data came through he began at last to understand what had happened. He wasn’t sure of the how, and the whywas completely obscure, but he felt he now knew what.

   Time, he thought. Of course.

  The revelation distracted him enough that he relaxed his grip on the control console. The shuttle lurched violently, hurling him to the floor. He groaned from the impact and immediately thought of Modan.

  “Jaza to Modan!” he yelled. “Ensign Modan! Report!” Maybe she tried. There was the awful grating sound of static with what could have been her voice underneath. Or maybe he imagined it in the chaos.

  The quake stopped abruptly, and for a moment, the entire world, within the shuttle and without, was unnaturally still and silent. It was, he thought, as if the entire universe had held its breath for fear that the release would inspire another of the violent temblors.

  It never came. Jaza let himself relax by degrees, pulling himself back into the pilot’s cradle. He watched as the shuttle’s systems recalibrated themselves and performed the analyses he’d ordered.

  “Modan,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “ Najem?”she said after a terrible moment. Her voice was distressingly weak and her speech was slurred. “I fell. Hit my head.”

  He tried not to picture her lying there in the wreck of the starship, perhaps with a broken appendage, perhaps with something worse, unable to move or-

  Her scream cut through the cabin like a laser through a sheet of silk. She had obviously meant to continue talking, leaving their channel open, and now, because of that, he could hear her grunting and perhaps growling as if in the midst of some struggle.

   “The soldiers,”she managed to say before the link died. “They’ve come-”

  It was obvious what had happened and just as clear what he had to do. He snatched up the remaining isolation suit, a phaser, and a tricorder by which to track her comm signal.

   I’m coming, Modan, he thought. Just hang on.

  He slid down the ladder from the crew cabin into the hold and grabbed a second phaser as he made for the rear access hatch.

  The shuttle’s stealth field was still intact, thank the Prophets, still making it look like an innocuous bit of jungle. All he had to do was get to her, free her, and get back here. Then they could go and maybe, just maybe, send their friends in the future a beacon that could stop all this from happening.

  He wouldn’t even need luck. This was something from the old days, the dark days, the time of blood and retribution. He would come at them invisibly, blast them away from her, and make the dash before they knew what hit them.

  It wasn’t even a plan, just the application of lessons learned and perfected years before when his world was black and white and all his enemies were obvious and uniformly without pagh.

  It would be quick and easy and-

  Just as he crossed the threshold, the ground rippled with another quake. He was smashed down again, this time into the more yielding dirt and crystal of Orisha’s soil. He landed on his back and found himself staring up at something his mind could only barely comprehend.

  The sky was on fire. Lateral columns of flame and force leaped and danced there from horizon to horizon, obscuring even the sight of the planet’s sun. The ground rumbled and churned beneath him like a living thing. He saw something like lightning bolts rip down from the heavens, boiling the landscape wherever they struck and, at the center of it all, like an eye gazing down on the destruction, was an undulating sphere of forces and energy that could only be what the Orishans had called the Eye.

  Jaza Najem had another name for it, now that it had shown itself, and it was neither godlike nor demonic.

   Tesseract, he realized, and then, as the effect subsided, and something else.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the apparition was gone and the world was quiet again.

   That’s what’s wrong with the sky, he thought. It’s flooded with enough highly energized chronometric particles to affect the visible spectrum. That didn’t explain the massive tidal forces ripping across Orisha when the “eye” opened. It didn’t even explain how the damned thing existed at all outside a laboratory, but it explained enough, perhaps just enough to salvage this disaster. First, though, there was Modan to rescue.

  When he was sure there would be no further upheavals he gathered up the weapons, activated his isolation suit, and stopped dead, frozen in place by the scene before him.

  There was the flat orange disk of the Orishan sun, dipping low in the sparkling copper sky, a sky that had seemed both familiar and strange the first time he’d seen it.

  There was the shimmering afterimage of the massive tesseract that trailed behind the planet mostly unseen. There in the dirt, unearthed by the rumbling ground, were nine of the ubiquitous blue crystals clustered either by chance or design into a pattern that recalled a Tear of the Prophets.

  The air was ozone and ice around him, but he knew the cold was not from anything so mundane as a change in the local weather.

  This was his vision. This was the place and time of his death.

Chapter Eight

ORISHA, STARDATE 58449.5

   It was difficult tracking Keru through the chaos of giant vines and towering violet stalks. The pace Ra-Havreii’s abductors set was ferocious, eating up meters the way a horde of locusts devours a field of grain.

  Despite his size and the trillion natural obstructions offered by the unfamiliar and hostile landscape, the big Trill tore through the jungle as if it were an open, level field.

  Once the women lost sight of him completely and were forced to rely on Troi’s empathic abilities to stay on his trail. Troi could feel Keru’s grief, so similar to her own, burning white hot somewhere ahead of them. He masked it well, but there was fire raging under that calm, efficient exterior. If he did catch the ones who’d taken Ra-Havreii, she wasn’t sure if he or they would survive the encounter.

  Though Troi was too intent on maintaining her fix on Keru’s emotional aura to notice much else, Christine Vale continued to marvel at the woman’s ability to bear up.

  The death of her husband had obviously stripped her of every shred of hope she had once possessed, and yet here she was, doing her duty, doing her utmost to save the engineer.

   I’d be catatonic if I was in her skin, thought Vale. Catatonic or worse.

  Troi faltered suddenly, uttering a short ragged cry as she stumbled forward to the ground. Vale was with her in an instant, supporting her, keeping her on her feet.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Feedback,” she said. “It’s Keru. He’s unconscious.”

  “But alive,” said Vale. She couldn’t take any more deaths today, and certainly not Keru’s. “He’s still alive?”

  Troi nodded. “There are two of them there, Christine,” she said. “Just over the next rise.”

  “Only two?”

  “I can sense them,” she said, rising. “They’re the same type of beings we encountered in space. I assume they’re Orishans.” Troi winced. “Their emotions are so alien,” she continued. “They’re getting easier to sort, but I think they’re waiting.”

  “For?”

  “Us,” said Troi.

  “Their mistake,” said Vale.

  Ch’ika’tik was unhappy. It was bad enough being out here in the open lattice with the midday sky peaking through the vault of vines above, but to have to approach the Shattered Place? To get there and to find these creatureswandering among the ebony Spires, creatures that were both as bizarre and as hideous as something from a hibernation fantasy?

  And the weapons these creatures had. The funny noises they made when they fired was a weak herald to the destruction of the wave they produced. The first one they had taken had been no trouble, but the second, the one who tracked them, caught them and attacked, that one was deadly.

  Ch’ika’tik was not taken out of the Dreaming caste, but she knew an ill omen when she saw it. This omen was as ill as they came.

  It was soft like a tk’sit, though nearly hairless and with too few arms. It made noises like a tk’solthough neither as loud nor as deep. It had no armor, no spikes, no venom, no acid. The ugly little monster didn’t even have wings for escaping. For all that, it had taken three of her sisters to bring the creature down without killing it.

  A’yujae’Tak had been quite clear about that.

  “Find it,” she had said about the one who had dared to direct a wave at Erykon’s Tear. “Find it and bring it to me alive.”

  As caste Maters went, A’yujae’Tak could be somewhat eccentric at times. She had come from the Dreamers and sometimes, when a thing should be clear as sparkle stone-killing anyone or anything that entered the Shattered Place, for instance-A’yujae’Tak would often find ways to make things foggy.

  Still, she was the Mater and her will was Ch’ika’tik’s law, as it was for all the others in the caste. Though she was just a soldier, just a scout, she knew this latest eccentricity of the Mater would prove to be trouble.

  She could still taste Tk’ok’iik’s pain as the alien wave had smashed into her, instantly stealing her consciousness. The Children of Erykon had nothing like this wave weapon.

  The second creature had been so much trouble that Chk’lok’tok had told her and Kk’tik to wait behind and break the final two before returning to the Spire.

  “These may be killed, yes?” said Kk’tik.

  “No,” Chk’lok’tok had told them and added a command chemical to her scent for emphasis. “Only break them and bring them to the Spire. And any of their wave devices as well. A’yujae’Tak desires them.”

  Kk’tik had been taken out of the Weaver caste and had difficulty with too much complexity. She was a done-or-not-done sort of drone. Still, she offered no protest, only mixed a hint of disappointment into her chemical aura.

  Now, waiting for the second set of ugly creatures to make their appearance, Kk’tik’s scent was full of questions.

  “Patience,” said Ch’ika’tik. “They will come to us or we will go to them. Then we break them and go home.”

  As if on cue, one of the creatures climbed up over the ridge of vines and stood there, its upper appendages extended above what Ch’ika’tik was fairly sure was its head. It was different again from the first two examples of whatever they were, smaller than both and with more of a mane than the second one though less than the first.

  “I [surrender/reveal myself] to you,” it said. It spoke strangely, with no real chemical mixture under the words for clarity or emphasis. In fact, its scent was unpleasantly static. Another mark against these things. The creature seemed to wish to go on speaking, but Kk’tik had her wave lance up and trained on its face.

  “Be still, ugly thing,” she said, and flooded her scent with a locking chemical. Whether command scents would work on these creatures remained to be seen, so Ch’ika’tik hung back, keeping her own lance targeted on the newcomer while Kk’tik took a closer look.

  Ch’ika’tik’s scent advised caution, but it was clear that Kk’tik was secure in their superiority over this thing. Unlike the last one, this creature seemed fairly docile. There might not be a need to break it before returning to the Spire.

  “It has no wave devices,” she said, still looking the creature over. “It smells…”

  “I can smell it, you stupid slug,” said Ch’ika’tik. “Just break it and let’s go.”

  “Wasn’t there another one of them?” said Kk’tik.

  “Yes,” said Ch’ika’tik. “Go get it and bring it back here. I will watch this one.”

  Kk’tik’s scent aura contracted until it was nearly imperceptible. As Ch’ika’tik took her position next to the new creature, she leaped up over the rise to capture the other. She didn’t have the sharpest mandibles when it came to planning, but when it came to following orders, she was perfect.

  Ch’ika’tik took a better look at the alien while she waited. Not enough eyes (if that’s what they were). No armor that she could see to protect that soft, mushy flesh. No scent variation. And its face continued to twist in that odd and unsettling manner.

  “Stop doing that, creature,” she said after a moment of watching it.

  “What?” it said.

  “That thing you do with your face,” she said. “The twisting. Showing your ugly teeth.”

  “It’s called [facial contortion/expression of pleasure],” it said.

  “Well, stop it.”

  But the creature didn’t stop and suddenly all Ch’ika’tik could think of was how awful, how terrifying it was to be outside, under the sky with the Eye looking down in displeasure at everything below. It could see her, she realized. It could see her and, in seeing, know that she had hoarded nutrient jelly that had been meant for the larvae, that she had made sport with one of the breeder males when she should have been guarding the Spire.

  The Spire! It would know about the Spire and their plans and then-and then-

  The merest thought of the Eye’s wrath over her and her people’s misdeeds sent Ch’ika’tik into a paroxysm born entirely of fear. She fell to the ground before the ugly creature, taking no comfort that it had at last stopped twisting its face that way. All she could think of was the Eye, the Eye, the Eye and its awful righteous anger if it ever found the Spire.

  She pulled her carapace close around herself, folding up into the same sort of ball she’d made during the first days of her martial training when the bigger pupae had scared her so. All she could think then was, Hide! Hide! Protect!Now, in the face of this new terror, it was all she could think again.

  As her conscious mind began to shut down, she heard the ugly creature say, “All right, Christine. Go!”

  Then there was that funny sound that had accompanied the use of the alien’s wave weapon only somehow louder and less amusing.

  Then there was nothing. For the time being at least, Ch’ika’tik’s mind had gone away.

  “Wow,” said Vale as she slid down the rise and saw the enormous and formerly fairly intimidating soldier curled up in something very much like a fetal ball. “What did you do to it?”

  “Exactly what you asked,” said Troi.

  Vale held up the two phasers. Neither of them had wanted to kill these creatures unless it was warranted. Vale guessed that two phasers set on maximum stun might take them down without killing them, and she was right.

  Deanna’s part was harder, requiring her to use her empathic abilities in a way she normally didn’t or even couldn’t.

  “I wish you’d told me before that I was shunting my emotions into you when I got stressed,” said Troi. “It’s a possible side effect of the fertility treatments I’m undergoing with Dr. Ree.”

  “Sorry,” said Vale. “At first I didn’t know exactly what was happening, and then I didn’t want to pry.”

  “We’re family, Chris,” said Troi in a tone that pierced Vale to her core. “Whatever else happens, you should know that.”

  “Thanks,” said Vale, hoping she wasn’t actually blushing. “It’s a hell of a trick, but it looks like it worked too well.”

  “How so?”

  “Look at this thing,” said Vale. The Orishan was almost literally folded up into itself, having gone into some version of shock from the emotional overload. “It’s not going to be able to tell us where they took the others.”

  “It doesn’t need to,” said Troi. “I might not be able to read minds as well as a full Betazoid, but when one is screaming at me, I can certainly hear it.”

  “The Orishan told you the location?”

  “Some place called the Spire,” said Troi. “It’s not far from here, but I don’t think we would have found it on our own.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll see,” said Troi. “Come on.”

  Troi was right, they would never have found it on their own. Yes, it was massive, effortlessly towering over the jungle as well as its nearest neighbor. Yes, now that they were close, the tricorder could easily pick out the strange energy emanations pouring off the thing at intervals. But they would never have found the Spire on their own.

  The stalks that rose up out of the chaos of vines were many times the size of the biggest redwood on Earth, their uppermost reaches not only standing well above the jungle canopy but seeming to disappear into the clouds above.

  They were like the beanstalks in the old nursery story but without leaves or angry giants living in castles at the summit. This one, the Spire, had a few unique additions to separate it from its fellows.

  “The metal looks woven,” said Vale softly. “Like the watchdog ship.”

  “The tricorder says it’s some kind of resin,” she muttered, still trying to make sense of the readings.

  The Spire was important to the Orishans. After their terrible deity this might be the most important thing on the planet, but she still had no idea why.

  They had taken pains to camouflage the Spire, somehow making the technological additions to the stalk’s structure mimic as closely as possible the foliage around it. The woven metal Vale spoke of seemed to rise up out of the earth, winding around and through the great stalk, conforming to its color and contours, until she lost sight of it in the upper distance. There were openings dotting the thing all around that could be windows or lights or exhaust chimneys or even missile tubes, but each sported a sort of hood of artificial fronds, clearly technological from below but, at least on those she could see, from above the hoods were indistinguishable from the surrounding flora.

  She wondered if all their structures were made this way and if that might not be the reason for the absence of the obvious industrial footprint Orishan civilization had to have left on its planet.

  Looking down on the Spire, indeed, looking at it from any angle that wasn’t directly below, there was no way to make a distinction between it and the hundreds of thousands of other stalks jutting up from the sea of vines that covered most of the world.

  “Sneaky buggers,” said Vale. “What are they hiding it from?”

  “God,” said Troi. “I think they’re hiding from their god.”

  It was easy getting into the Spire. There were several apertures at the base of the stalk, one so large they could have flown the shuttle in had they been able to find it.

  There were no sentries, not on the ground level at least, and no warning system that they could detect. Inside, the place was alternately a maze of wide corridors and a series of large domed chambers into and out of which the corridors led. All of them were empty. Their good fortune made Vale nervous, but Troi thought she understood it a little.

  “They don’t have crime here,” she said softly. “They don’t have wars. They don’t even have any of the social chaos that we take for granted even on the most advanced worlds in the Federation.”

  “Hive mind?” asked Vale. The interior of the Spire, with its thousands of hexagonal facets and openings within the facets, did remind her very much of a wasp’s nest or possibly an impossibly large ant colony.

  “Possibly,” said Troi, fretting with the tricorders. “The known sentient insectile species do tend toward order and rigid social structures as a rule. There’s something more going on here. One moment.”

  There was indeed more to the Spire than met the eye. Though at the base level it seemed to be empty and its technological aspects were only hidden if looking down from the sky, the entire inner structure supported a network of force fields of some sort. The place almost hummed with the energy of these fields, though the tricorders could make no sense of their composition or purpose. It made scanning for Keru and Ra-Havreii very difficult.

  “Faith,” said Troi as they entered the third of the giant domed rooms. “Their faith in this Eye, their fear of it, it’s shaped their whole society.”

  “What society?” said Vale. “I watched the same footage you did. Those signals had to bleed off from somewhere. There should be cities here. There should be farms and, from the size of that space vessel, there should be a pretty large shipyard somewhere. There’s nothing out there but open jungle.”

  “I don’t know,” said Troi, frustrated with the device she held. She handed the tricorder to Vale to see if she could get something useful out of it. The lattice of force fields continued to confound her scans. “I think there’s something obvious here and we’re missing it.”

  As Vale adjusted the settings on the tricorder, Troi ran her fingers lightly along the nearest curved wall. It was not metal and it was not like any plant life she’d ever touched, even here on Orisha. It was a strange mixture of both.

   They fear their god, but they revere it just the same, she thought. They don’t care about exploration, but they built a giant space vessel. They built this tower, hid it, and then left it empty. Where did they go? Where could they have taken-

  “Deanna,” said Vale, her tense whisper breaking in on her thoughts. “I think I know where the Orishans are.”

  Turning away from the wall, Troi was about to ask Vale where when she also knew. They were impossible to miss after all.

  On the far side of their chamber several of the hexagonal facets had opened and from them a swarm of Orishan warriors, each with its own glowing lance, flooded in. In seconds there were fifty of the creatures there, training their weapons on the two women.

  “I don’t suppose you can do that fear trick on all of them,” said Vale. Troi shook her head. “No. Of course not.”

  After the fight-there was no way they could be taken without one-Vale struggled to remain conscious as she and Troi were carried off in different directions by their insectoid captors.

  As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she tried to get a sense of what was happening.

  She was being carried. The bug held her close in two of its four arms, pressed tight to its abdomen, as it scrambled along what looked like an access tunnel of some sort. The dimensions were only slightly bigger than those of her captor, forcing it and its fellows to run single file.

  She could hear them all chattering, skittering along the hard smooth surface– chikkachikkachikkachikka-and was happy when the darkness pulled her down away from the sound.

  She woke again, briefly, now slung like a sack over the soldier’s shoulder. It might have been the same one that had carried her down (she felt it was down somehow) or it might not. They really did all look almost exactly the same.

  This time she got a flash of a huge empty space, a high vaulted ceiling made of the same ceramic that entwined the Spire. Purple and black Orishans crawled everywhere along its surface, climbing in and out of more hexagonal openings, some carrying bundles of some sort, some stopping briefly to chatter at one of their fellows. Some were bigger than the others. Some had wings, clear and veiny, that reminded her of dragonflies.

   I’m underground, she realized, still fighting the losing battle to remain conscious. That’s where the cities are. They built down to get away from the sky. Then the darkness took her again.

  The first thing she thought when she woke was, Deanna! Where have they taken Deanna!?

  The second thing she thought was, Why am I still alive?

  “Do not fight, creature,” said a voice that reminded her of a handful of nails being scraped across a sheet of metal. “Stand, but do not fight.”

  With difficulty she pushed herself off her belly, up to her knees, and then finally to her feet.

  She was not prepared for what she saw. This creature towered over the other Orishans by a good two meters. It was a darker shade of the ubiquitous violet that seemed to be the theme on Orisha. It had the same extra arms and the same armored exoskeleton, but there were bright markings on this one and, in places, protrusions that looked like small bulbous inverted bowls. Its face was more angular than the rounded ones of the soldiers, and both sets of its eyes blazed yellow instead of white.

  “I am A’yujae’Tak,” it said. “I am the Mater of the [possible meaning: guardian] caste. What are you?”

  On every visible surface, Orishans scuttled between giant viewing screens depicting at least two of the Spire’s siblings-one rising from the center of a lake and the other was near what looked like a volcano.

  Notations of some sort appeared and vanished at regular intervals beside each image. Elsewhere in the chamber technicians manipulated what were so obviously power control systems, she almost laughed. The technology was alien, certainly, partly ceramic, partly organic, and partly utilizing the unknown force fields for various purposes.

  Vale could actually see some of the fields flash briefly into the visual spectrum, shift color, and then vanish again.

  Still, as alien as all of it was, she had been in rooms like this regularly for most of her adult life.

  This was the power control center, the same as the engineering deck on any starship. The giant Orishan version of a warp reactor protruding from the distant ceiling was the final giveaway. The oscillating blue-white plasma flowing from two sources into a single pulsating reactor core was also familiar.

   What the hell were these people doing?

  When she didn’t respond right away, one of the soldiers that flanked A’yujae’Tak prodded Vale’s ribs with its lance.

  “Speak when spoken to, creature,” it said. “Obey the Mater.”

  She gave her name, her rank, and the name of her vessel. She tried to answer the flurry of obvious questions that followed as best she could, but she was never certain that the Orishans grasped all of it. There was some aspect of their communication that the universal translator couldn’t grip.

  “You are from above?” said A’yujae’Tak at last. “From another of Erykon’s creations?”

  “In a way,” said Vale. It was obvious this creature believed that the universe and everything in it had been created by its god. “We travel from creation to creation, seeking understanding.”

  “Travel, how?” said A’yujae’Tak. “My seekers found you in the Shattered Place using this device to direct waves at Erykon’s Mirror.”

  The device was obviously Ra-Havreii’s tricorder, but Erykon’s Mirror? Did she mean the warp reactor? These creatures had moved fast, naming both the crash site and the wreckage and folding them into their mythology in only a few days.

  That didn’t stack up in Vale’s mind somehow, but she couldn’t say why. “We were only examining it,” she said.

  “How did you come there?” said the Mater. “The Shattered Place is [possible meaning: taboo] except to those the Mater allows.”