As the Warden's body and movements came together, so, apparently, did its thoughts. It began to speak in complete sentences rather than broken fragments. “In the darkness of your mind, you imagine what is not there, Ondo Lagan. I do not know what this dream-journey you describe is, nor where it may take you. But you may take a metakey. This one however, must remain under my guard. The gateway it controls is to remain sealed until the end of days.”
With a sweep of one of its arms, it set the winding row of plinths into sudden motion. Selene flung herself back from them, pulling Ondo with her. The line of objects slid past at a greater and greater rate, as if the white floor were a conveyor belt, although she could see no join, no mechanism by which the meandering line could be moving.
The columns picked up speed, faster and faster until only her left eye could resolve each in the millisecond moment they were in front of her. More and more unfathomable objects, small and large, their nature mechanical, organic, unidentifiable. She caught Ondo's look: his senses were enhanced, too, but not as highly as hers. She could count the objects, image each, but to him they would be nothing more than a blur.
Through them, in staccato freeze-frames, the featureless black form of the Warden looked on.
Abruptly, the plinths stopped, seemingly untroubled by their former momentum. The plinth directly before them bore another silver totem like the one they were seeking. Stepping forwards, Selene could see that the single bead it contained occupied a different circle within its design. The good news was, the island it corresponded to on Coronade was another that had survived the planetary bombardment.
The Warden did something to the mechanism, sent instructions to it, and the stasis field around the object dissipated, exposing the totem to the air. The invitation was clear. Not waiting to be asked, Selene picked it from its pedestal.
It was surprisingly weighty, constructed from a dense metallic substance she couldn't identify. The Warden made no attempt to stop her removing the object.
“Can we take this?” she asked. “You'll let us walk out of here carrying it?”
“I will. The night must have a dawn.”
“How do you know you can trust us to do the right thing?”
“The ship that carries you is weak, torn by the rigours of your journeys here. Still, in its broken state, it vouches for you, croaks to me who and what you are. It tells me you should take the metakey.”
It took them both a moment to work out the meaning of the Warden's words.
“You've been in communication with the Radiant Dragon?” she asked.
“I hear him. He bleeds into the void, but still he fights for you.”
“He? Who is he?”
The Warden ignored them, and the line of plinths began to move again, streaming in the opposite direction until, in a few moments, the originals were in their former place in front of them. In seven seconds, she counted 3,212 items flying past. The doorway they'd come through slid into existence. The meaning of that was clear, too. They were to leave.
But, before they did so, Ondo turned to address the Warden once more. “This long night you talk about, how long has it been precisely?”
Spiderweb lines appeared on the Warden's body, white, dividing its surface into a series of geometric shapes. Then its hard form fractured to return to the cloud of spinning mirrors and planes, its integrity apparently unsustainable. At the same time, it reverted to talking in its vague metaphors and half-sentences. “The long night.”
Ondo tried again. “Please, the moving object, the four-legged spider. What is that?”
“The night without a morning. The eternal darkness.”
“This whole place, all these artefacts. Who placed them here, and when? And why did they do so?”
This time, instead of answering, the shards of the Warden's form swirled and glinted blue for a moment, then blinked out of existence.
“I think we've had all the help it's going to give us,” said Selene. “Do you think this eternal darkness is Concordance? A metaphor because it couldn't find the right words?”
Ondo was looking around, clearly longing to remain in the hall of artefacts. Remain and maybe never leave. “Or it was describing the weapon Vulpis encountered, some technology capable of fearsome destruction.”
“We should go.”
“Yes.”
Their visors resealed, they returned to the outer chamber and then out into the searing radiation of the blue sun. She carried the totem they'd retrieved, the metakey, in her gauntlet. Her breath rushed in her ears as they hustled back to the lander. Neither of them spoke. When they reached the safety of the Radiant Dragon, Selene placed her hand onto the airlock bulkhead for a moment, seeking the ship's core Mind. It was also, perhaps, a gesture of contact or gratitude. The entity remained locked away from her. Whatever the Warden had done to establish contact, she could not reproduce it.
But she did detect, as they rose from the planet and accelerated away from the star for metaspace translation, a sense of something like relief. Whether it was hers, or an emotion she was picking up from the ship, she couldn't say.
Ondo, meanwhile, was clearly having trouble tearing himself away from the system and its mysteries: his attention was now consumed by telemetry from the mesh that surrounded the star and its planet.
“You say you passed through the gap in the mesh last time?” he asked.
“Ten or twenty metres, no more. You see something?”
“Hard to be sure. Odd energy signatures. So far as I can tell, the gap is having a lensing effect, diffracting the radiation from outside in unusual ways. Either that or
