Look to Windward

“But if I don’t know what it is…”

“Major Quilan,” the Colonel said, taking a small sip of her steaming wine and then—after a minimal nod to Fronipel to acknowledge the drink—putting the goblet down on the desk, “I’ll tell you all I can.” She drew herself up a little straighter in the seat. “The task we would ask you to undertake is one that is very important indeed. That is almost all I know about that aspect of it. I do know a little more but I’m not allowed to talk about it. The mission would require that you undergo a considerable amount of training. Again, I can’t say much more about that. The clearance for the mission comes from the top of our society.” She took a breath. “And the reason that it doesn’t matter too much at this stage exactly what it is you are being asked to do is that in one sense what’s being asked of you is as bad as it gets.” She looked into his eyes. “This is a suicide mission, Major Quilan.”

He had forgotten the sheer pleasure of staring into a female’s eyes, even if she was not Worosei, and even if that pleasure, like some emotional internalisation of physical law, created an equal and opposite feeling of grief and loss and even guilt. He gave a small, sad smile. “Oh, in that case, Colonel,” he said, “I’ll definitely do it.”

“Quil?”

“Hmm?” He turned to face the tall, triangular bulk of the Homomdan, who had bumped into him.

“Are you all right? You stopped very suddenly there. Did you see something?”

“Nothing. No, I’m fine. I just… I’m fine. Come on. I’m hungry.”

They walked on.

~ I just recalled. The Lady Colonel told me this is a one-way mission.

~ Ah, yes, there is that.

~ It is all coming back, isn’t it?

~ Unlike us, yes. That’s the way they’ve arranged it. That’s what we both agreed to. It seems to have worked so far.

~ You knew, too, then.

~ Yes. That was part of Visquile’s briefing.

~ Which is why they kept you backed-up in that substrate.

~ Which is why they kept me backed-up in that substrate.

~ Well. I can’t wait for the next instalment.

He reached the summit of the cliff path and saw the town; a scimitar of white towers and spires lying cradled in a bowl of wooded valley bordered by rising chalk cliffs, its bay protected from the sea by a spit of sand. Waves beat whitely on the strand. The Homomdan joined him, standing massively at his side and all but blocking out the wind. There was a hint of rain in the air.

The following day she left her mount in the monastery stables with her uniform. She dressed in the waistcoat and leggings of a Handed; he was to impersonate a Grafted, so wore trousers and an apron. They both put on nondescript grey winter cloaks. He said goodbye to Fronipel but to nobody else.

They waited until all the work parties had departed before leaving the monastery, then they walked down the lower path through the falling snow and the bare husks of spall trees, past the distant wood-gatherers—their songs heard through the quietly falling snow, as though they were the voices of ghosts—down through a level of wispy cloud where the Colonel’s grey cloak seemed almost to disappear at times and then through the drumming rain beneath and the dripping forest of dark leaves that descended towards the valley floor, where they turned and followed the deeply shaded track above the river rushing whitely in the chasm below.

The rain slackened and ceased.

A group of Tallier caste hunters in an old All-Terrain on their way back from the forests after stalking jhehj offered them a lift, but they refused politely. The trailer behind the All-Terrain was piled with the carcasses of the animals. It bounced down the track into the gloom with its cargo of the dead, so that from then on they followed a line of fresh blood-spots.

Finally, in the foothills of the Grey Mountains, towards sunset, they came out onto the Girdling turnpike, where cars and trucks and buses hummed past, trailing spray. A large car was waiting for them by the roadside. A young male who looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes opened the door for them and completed three-quarters of a salute to the Colonel before remembering. The vehicle’s interior was warm and dry; they took off their cloaks. The car swung out onto the road and set off down the route towards the plains.

The Colonel plugged into a military com set in a briefcase on the rear seat and left him to his own thoughts as she sat with eyes closed, communicating. He watched the traffic; the outskirts of the city of Ubrent sparkled out of the gloom. It looked in better repair than the last time he’d seen it.

Within an hour they had reached the airport, and a sleek black sub-orbiter sitting on the mist-curdled runway. He was about to reach out and touch the Colonel to let her know they’d arrived when she opened her eyes, slipped the induction coil from the back of her head and nodded at the aircraft as though to say, “We’re here.”

The acceleration pressed him firmly back into the frame-seat. He saw the lights of the coastal cities of Sherjame, the mid-ocean islands of Delleun and the small sparks of oceanic ships. Above, the stars became bright and steady and looked very close in the ghostly silence of near-vacuum flight.

The sub-orbiter plunged back into the atmosphere in a gathering roar. There were a few lights, then a smooth touchdown and deceleration. He dozed in the closed transport which took them away from the private field.

When they transferred to a helicopter he could smell sea. They flew briefly in darkness and rain and clattered down into a great circular courtyard. He was shown to a small, comfortable room and fell promptly asleep.

In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling round a jagged coastline fifty metres away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty metres or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.

He recognised this place. He had seen it in books and on screen.

The seastacks at Youmier were part of an extensive cliff system on Mainland, one of the Tail-Quiff Islands which lay in a long curved line to the east of Meiorin. The cliffs dropped between two and three hundred metres into the ocean and the seventeen seastacks—the remains of great arches that the ocean’s swells and waves had first created and then destroyed—rose like the fingers of two drowning people.

Local legend had once held that they were the fingers of a pair of drowning lovers who’d thrown themselves from the cliffs rather than be forced to marry others.

The stacks were named as though they were fingers, and the last and smallest of them, which was only forty metres above the waves, was called the Thumb. The others ranged between one and two hundred metres in height and were about the same circumference where the sea washed incessantly around their bases, tapering slightly to their basalt summits.

Building had begun upon them four thousand years earlier, when the area’s ruling family had constructed a single small stone castle on the stack nearest the cliff top and linked the two by a wooden bridge. As the family’s power had grown, so had the castle, until work was started on another stack, and then another and another.

The fortress complex spread across the various rocky pinnacles, linked by a succession of bridges—at first wood, later stone, then later still iron and steel—and became a centre of government, a place of worship and pilgrimage and a seat of learning. Over the centuries and millennia every stack except the Thumb had been permanently settled in some form or another, and it had even been a fortress for a while, equipped with heavy naval guns for a century or so. Gradually the seastacks had grown to become a city with its greatest part ashore, spreading out over the heathland behind the cliffs.

It had duly suffered the same fate as a handful of cities round the globe during the Last Unification War fifteen hundred years earlier, falling to a scatter of nuclear warheads which demolished one stack completely, halved the height of another, and had left a crater shaped like a giant 8 scooped out of the cliffs where most of the mainland districts had been.

The city was never rebuilt. The seastacks, cut off from the mainland by the twin craters, were derelict for