The Bonesinger glided away. Already, her voice had begun to hum and simmer, and in response the wraithbone vibrated like a lightly tapped drum. The beauty of the song was such that it seemed to clasp and entwine with the very living construct of the ship around her.
And yet it could not dispel the unease which had hovered over Te Mirah for long cycles now. As though some black bird were fluttering at the edges of her vision, never to be fully glimpsed, its wings beating in time with her heart.
The black bird, the fetch of Morai-Hag, the black crone of the eldar, who held fate itself in her withered hands.
‘Farseer.’
Te Mirah turned around, her cloak moving with her so that the sigils and stones upon it caught the far-off light of the stars.
She was one of the eldar, a race more ancient than mankind’s dreams. Two metres tall, but as slender as a young willow of Old Earth. Her limbs were long, elongated, and her skull was as fine and smooth as ancient ivory. Her blue-black hair was drawn back in a topknot, and her ears drew up to finely sculpted points.
Her eyes were as blue as the flicker of a far-off star, and she seemed hardly to be flesh and blood and bone at all. Like the starship in which she stood, she was a thing of strange, unsettling beauty.
That which had spoken her title was another cut from the same cloth. Sexless, but taller, and slightly more broad about the shoulders. This one had hair as red as arterial blood, and eyes to match. A male of the species, it had a long, intricately crafted weapon strapped to its back, so ornate that it might well have been a mere affectation. But the blade, where it glittered out of the spine-scabbard, had a cruel, monomolecular edge that would slice through ceramite.
The eyes of this one were no less cruel than the blade, but it bowed as Te Mirah turned round, and there was a flicker of respect in them. More than that; there was something akin to love.
‘Ainoc, I sense you have something for me.’
‘News, farseer. It may be of interest, it may not. I would ask you to accompany me to Steerledge.’
He was hiding something, or attempting to. Behind Ainoc’s usual half-mocking manner there was a dreadful, burning eagerness which she had never seen in him before.
‘Lead on, Ainoc,’ the farseer said, intrigued and disturbed in equal measure.
She turned back once, to look upon the graceful needle-leaf trees, the black earth in which they thrived, and her own folk strolling under them as though they walked a world of their own, without fear. It brought back memories – not her own – but those of her forebears in the spirit stones.
There had been a time when the Void was a place without fear, an ocean to be travelled and explored. There were still memories of that impossibly distant era buried in the Infinity Circuit that beat at the heart of her craftworld, and the yearning of the souls in the stones communicated itself to all of her race, so that they were forever searching, forever dissatisfied with this rootless existence.
They were exiles, and had been for untold millennia, but they never reconciled themselves to the fact.
The two eldar travelled smoothly through the length of the great ship like ghosts, their minds reaching out and touching in welcome and salutation those they passed in the arcing, soaring swoops of passageways which connected up the compartments within. They felt the song of the Bonesingers in the hull, a comforting threnody.
Unlike the brutish vessels of lesser species, the Eldar cruiser speared through space with the smooth, silent efficiency of a living thing wholly in harmony with its environment. There was a low-level consciousness to the ship, and the very stuff of which it was made was in tune with the thoughts of its crew. It fed upon the affection and reverence of the Bonesingers, growing stronger as they communed with it.
Steerledge opened out before them, a curve of white wraithbone with void-shielded windows open to the bright dark of the stars. It soared up in ribs and vaults high above their heads, so that it seemed they were within the very anatomy of a vast, placid organism which protected and sustained them. And that was indeed the case.
The eldar crew were silent; there was no need for chatter here. They set their hands on the stones embedded in the protruding wraithbone and felt the course and speed of the ship, its needs and wants. And in turn they gave it commands with the simple slide of a hand across a gleaming stone.
Te Mirah felt the touch of their minds glide across hers as she entered. Steerledge was the place a human, one of the contemptible mon-keigh, might try to label the bridge of the ship. It was here that the nerve-endings and filaments of wraithbone were brought to a single distilled essence, where the vast length of the beautiful Brae-Kaithe could be controlled. Where the weapon-banks had their settings.
‘Anandaiah wishes to speak,’ Ainoc said. ‘She has sensed something which should be of concern to us.’
Te Mirah waited. A young eldar craftseer stepped forward. She was clad in the black, green-limned livery of the Il Kaithe Craftworld, as were they all, and she was barely of an age to be standing upon Steerledge. But Te Mirah sensed at once the latent power in Anandaiah’s mind. This one, she had felt before. There were the makings of a Bonesinger in her, or even something greater.
‘Of late I having been casting our scans out as far as I can, my lady, at first, merely to see how far I could remain attuned to the farseeking of Brae-Kaithe.’
‘That was… enterprising of you,’ Te Mirah said, her voice without inflection.
‘Forgive me. I overreached my station and my training. But I was able to chance upon something which had to be brought to your attention. I have brought it to the sand-table, if you–’
‘Show me,’ Te Mirah said. She felt the trouble in the girl’s emotional tone, and it was not merely that she had gone beyond her station to interlink with Brae-Kaithe’s farseeking scans. Something else there, darker. It was akin to the keen eagerness she had sensed in Ainoc.
They repaired to a wide flat platform of wraithbone, and here Anandaiah closed her eyes and began an intricate series of hand movements which left momentary glimmers in the air of Steerledge. Te Mirah looked at Ainoc, and the warlock tilted his head to one side and smiled.
I still know what best piques your interest, after all these centuries, my lady.
You sense how jaded I have become.
Perhaps. She is impressive, is she not?
She is beautiful also. Did that occur to you?
Most things which occur to you have also occurred to me. And Ainoc smiled, deep memories in his eyes.
Te Mirah did not smile in return. She did not much care for humour, or the flippancy which Ainoc occasionally continued to cultivate. He was a warlock of the Path of Khaine, and she had seen him slaughter thousands of foes with the Witchblade that hung always on his back.
And they had loved once, long ago, when such things still seemed to matter.
But she was the farseer of the Brae-Kaithe, wedded to her beloved ship, and she had watched almost a millennium of the universe come and go. She no longer appreciated his subtle jibes and rallies.
The craftseer was talented. Other eldar gravitated round the sand-table as the echoes of what Anandaiah was doing resonated throughout the chamber.
She was building a model of star-systems – she had not called them out of Brae-Kaithe’s memory stones, but was constructing it from her own memory and intuition. Te Mirah was impressed despite herself, and as the floating lights and novae grew in profusion, hovering above the sand-table like some fireworks display caught frozen in mid-burst, so she began to recognise them, to see familiar patterns in the jewelled glimmer of the stars the young eldar was summoning.
At last it was done.
‘Impressive,’ she said. ‘But to what end is this display?’