source of the trilling sound. He hadn’t heard any noise quite like it before. It sounded like some curious, metallic bird call.
He noticed a soft green light blinking on and off, not in the sleeping compartment itself but through the ajar door into the carriage’s study and reception chamber. Xessice, the girl he’d favoured most since he’d been here in the Settlement, stirred but did not wake. He slipped out of bed, shucking on a robe and taking his gun from underneath the head bolster.
The light and the sound were coming from a delicately ornate and beautifully turned World model sitting on the desk in the study. It was one of the few ornaments Oramen had kept from when the carriage had belonged to the Archipontine; he had admired it for its exquisitely executed fashioning and been almost physically unable to throw the thing out, even though he suspected it was in some sense a foreign religious artifact and therefore not wholly suitable for a good WorldGod-respecting Sarlian to possess.
Now the object was emitting this strange, alien-sounding warble, and a green light was pulsing from its interior. It had changed, too; it had been reconfigured, or it had reconfigured itself so that the half-open cut-away parts of each of the shells had aligned, creating a sort of spiky hemisphere with the green light pulsing at its heart. He looked round the study — the green light gave quite sufficient illumination for him to see by — then quietly closed the door to the sleeping chamber and sat down on the seat in front of the desk. He was thinking about prodding the green central light with the barrel of the gun when the light blinked off and was replaced by a soft circle of gently changing colours which he took to be some sort of screen. He’d sat back when this had happened; he leant tentatively forward again and a soft, androgynous voice said, “Hello? To whom do I speak? Are you Sarl, yes? Prince Oramen, I am warned, is so?”
“Who is talking?” Oramen answered. “Who wishes to know?”
“A friend. Or, with more accuracy, one who would be friend, if so was allowed.”
“I have known many friends. Not all were as they might have seemed.”
“Which of us is? We are all mistaken against. There are so many barriers about us. We are too separated. I seek to remove some of those barriers.”
“If you would be my friend it might help to know your name. From your voice I am not even sure you are male.”
“Call me Friend, then. My own identity is complicated and would only confuse. You are the prince of Sarl called Oramen, are you?”
“Call me Listener,” Oramen suggested. “Titles, names; they can mislead, as we seem already to have agreed.”
“I see. Well, Listener, I express my fine good wishes and utmost benevolence to you, in hope of understanding and mutual interest. These things, please accept.”
Oramen filled the pause. “Thank you. I appreciate your good wishes.”
“Now, that clarified, our anchor embedded, as it were, I would talk with you to give you a warning.”
“Would you now?”
“I would. In this, I do; there is caution needed in the burrowings you make.”
“The burrowings?” Oramen asked, frowning at the softly glowing screen. The colours continued to shift and change.
“Yes, your excavatory workings in the great city. These must be approached with caution. Humbly, we’d petition to be allowed to advise on such. Not all that is hidden from you is so hidden from us.”
“I think too much is hidden here. Who would you be? What ‘us’ do we talk about? If you would advise us, begin by advising who you might be.”
“Those who would be your friends, Listener,” the asexual voice said smoothly. “I approach you because we believe you are untrammelled. You, Listener, are believed to be capable of ploughing your own course, unrestricted to the furrows of others. You have freedom to move, to turn about from incorrect beliefs and unfortunate slanders directed against those who would only help, not hinder. They mislead themselves who accept the traducement of others by those who have only their own narrowed interests at heart. Sometimes those who seem most funnelled are most free, and those who are most—”
“Hold there, let me guess; you are from the Oct, are you not?”
“Ha!” the voice said, then there was a pause. “That would be mistaken, good Listener. You doubtless think I am of that kind because it might appear that I seek to deceive you. This is an understandable mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. Oh, their lies go deep, to the core, they are most fastly tunnelled. We have much to untangle here.”
“Show your face, creature,” Oramen said. He was becoming more and more sure of the kind of being he was talking to here.
“Sometimes we must prepare ourselves for important meetings. Ways must be smoothed, gradients negotiated. A blunt, front-on approach might suffer rebuff while a more curved and gentle path, though seeming less honestly direct, will break through finally to success and mutual understanding and reward.”
“Show your face, being,” Oramen said, “or I’ll think you a monster that dares not.”
“There are so many levels of translation, Listener. Are we really to say that a face is required to be a moral creature? Must goodness or evil be configured about eating-parts? Is this a rule that persists throughout the great emptiness surrounding us? Many are the—”
“Tell me now who you are or I swear I’ll put a bullet straight through this device.”
“Listener! I swear too; I am your Friend. We are! We seek only to warn you of the dangers—”
“Deny you are Aultridia!” Oramen said, jumping up from the chair.
“Why would any deny being one of that misunderstood, maligned race? So cruelly slandered—”
Oramen pointed the gun at the World model, then put it up again. The shot would terrify Xessice and doubtless bring Neguste hurtling through from his quarters, tripping over himself, and probably wake or galvanise any nearby guards.
“…by those who theft our very purpose! Listener! Prince! Do no violence! I beg you! This prefigures what we wish to warn you about, talismans our worries that—”
He clicked the safety catch, held the gun by the barrel and brought the butt whacking down on the exposed centre of the World model. It crumpled and shot sparks; some tiny pieces flew skittering across the surface of the desk, though still the cloudy screen pulsed with slow strange colours and the voice, though weakened now, warbled on, incomprehensible. He hit it hard again. It seemed wrong to strike a model of any Shellworld, wrong to destroy something so beautiful, but not as wrong as allowing himself to be talked to by an Aultridian. He shivered at the very thought and slammed the gun down again on the still glowing World model. A blaze of tiny sparks and a puff of smoke and it was finally silent and dark. He waited for Xessice or Neguste to appear, or make some noise, but neither did. After a few moments he lit a candle then found a bin, pushed the smashed World model into it and poured a jug of water over the remains.
He went back to bed beside the gently snoring Xessice. He lay awake unsleeping, waiting until it was time for breakfast, staring into the darkness. By God, they had been proved even more right to have smashed the Deldeyn. And he no longer wondered at the mass suicide of the brethren, sending themselves over the Falls. There were rumours in the Settlement that it had not been suicide; some people even spoke of a few surviving monks who’d been washed up far downstream with tales of treachery and murder. He had started to doubt tyl Loesp’s account of mass suicide, but he doubted it no longer.
The wonder was that the wretches had lived with themselves at all rather than that they had chosen death, if this was what they had buried in their conscience all the time. An alliance with the Aultridia! Contact with them at the very least. With the foulness that conspired against the WorldGod itself! He wondered what conspiracies, lies and secrets had passed between the Archipontine of the Hyeng-zharia Mission and whatever Aultridian master had been on the other end of the communication channel that ended at the World model he had just destroyed.
Had that hideous race even directed matters here at the Falls? The monks of the Mission had controlled the workings, supervised and licensed all the excavations and largely policed them; certainly they had kept a tight hand upon the main, official excavations. Had the Mission been in effect controlled by the Aultridia? Well, they were in control no longer, and would remain so disempowered as long as he had any sort of say in matters. He wondered who to tell about what had passed between him and the nameless — and no doubt faceless — Aultridian he had spoken to. The very thought turned his stomach. Should he tell Poatas, or General Foise? Poatas would probably find a way to blame Oramen for what had happened; he’d be horrified he’d broken the communication device.
