“A recording?” Maggie said, astonished. “These grooves are an audio recording?”
“More than just audio!” Felph said. “It’s an audiovisual recording from the second expansion, approximately thirty thousand years ago. This predates nearly every civilization on Earth. Our ancestors were just learning to shape stone, while these people were developing laser technology and recording studios, performing brain surgeries and actively terraforming their own planet to make it more suitable. You should see the stone aqueducts on Fire River-over four thousand miles of covered aqueducts in all-and most of it is still usable.”
Felph brought a small device from the pocket of his robe, something that looked like a high-tech top-a spindle on a round spool with a thin, curved handle. He placed it in one of the grooves on the lower right-hand corner of the metal plate, and twisted. There was a snapping sound as a lock snicked open. A heavy rumbling followed.
A hole opened in the stone floor, and a statue began rising up, revealing the shape of a birdlike creature sculpted from colored glass. The figure was corroding, miserable in appearance, but Gallen could sense the general appearance of the being.
The Qualeewooh had light-colored feathers on its chest, while the longer plumage on its wings was mostly tan with some green tips at its wings. The statue showed the creature with its wings upraised, and Gallen could distinctly see the tiny hands-each with four long fingers, at the apex of each wing. The Qualeewooh’s brownish neck was long and slender, with a blaze of white at the throat, and its head held a large beaklike snout, with many teeth that were needlesharp, including two large pairs of upper fangs that reminded Gallen of a boar’s tusks. As with any bird, the eyes were set on each side of its head, so that the Qualeewooh could see in any direction above, below, or to either side. Somehow, even from only this crude icon, Gallen would have recognized that this creature was sentient.
But this creature seemed more than intelligent. It carried itself with a pride, with a majesty, few humans could have aspired to. Perhaps it was the spirit mask that the statue wore. This particular mask was formed of platinum, inlaid with cabochons of dark blue azurite. The spirit mask flamed up and outward into some mystical crown, and the glass eyes of the statue stared deeply from this mask, secretive, wise-but mostly, most frighteningly, malevolent.
There were other oddities about the statue. On its fingers the Qualeewooh wore heavy rings, each shaped like a long, raking claw. On its chest it wore a bandolier with many tiny implements that might have been tools or keys.
There, in the dark room, gazing at this ancient glass statue that barely caught the light in the darkness, Gallen felt a primal, palpable fear. Something about this creature made him step back. He suspected this was no representation of a Qualeewooh lord or philosopher. This was a demon.
The sight of the statue affected the others in the same way. Everyone had moved back from it. Felph appeared not to notice. He still had his little device in the track on the platinum wall, and now he placed an identical device into a groove on the lower right side. “These are models of the spindles a Qualeewooh used. I’ve motorized these, so that they’ll play over the recording. In ancient times, there were no motors. A nest mother would have stood here, a spindle in each claw, flapping her wings to play the recording. You can imagine what it would look like.”
He pretended to grab both implements and begin running them through the narrow grooves, pulling them toward him, raising them slightly, then pushing them back out along their tracks, then pulling them back in.
The result of his odd motions was that Felph suddenly looked as if he were a bird, mimicking the motions of flight, flapping his wings.
When he finished his demonstration, he reached down to the spindles, pushed a button on each one, and the spindles actually began to move.
A quavering sound issued from the spindles, remarkably loud. It was a song-reed pipes, thunderous drums, some strange instrument that might have been a wood paddle scraping over stone.
It was a marvelous melody-rich, exotic, completely alien and yet immediately recognizable as music. One could hear high winds whistling through crevices, the music of flapping wings and beating hearts.
Qualeewoohs were singing in that song, too.
The ancient Qualeewooh language was raucous, with many squawks among its frantic whistling. It was a dramatic weaving of sound, like voices crying in a jungle over the peeping of frogs. The Qualeewoohs’ cries reverberated throughout the chamber-a challenging tone that might have been voicing curses or deprecations.
Orick shouted in astonishment, “Look in its eyes!”
Gallen stared into the eyes of the statue, and saw that somehow-he could not see the source-an image was being projected through the statue. In the black depths of the statue’s eyes Gallen could discern five Qualeewoohs winging over the red deserts of Ruin, soaring over rocky bluffs. From overhead, a second flock of Qualeewoohs plummeted with deadly grace from cloudy skies, diving into their fellows, talons stretched out, apparently fitted with metal spurs. The attackers slashed the necks and wings of their adversaries. A squawking roar filled the room, as if a hundred Qualeewoohs shrieked in pain and terror, then the image focused on two Qualeewoohs who soared and dived, battling in the sky.
The sounds softened, almost breathless, and Gallen suspected this recording recounted the tale of these two Qualeewoohs. It must have been an epic battle, for it lasted more than ten minutes, and Gallen was astonished at what he saw-Qualeewoohs flying in complex loops, twisting dives, terrifying strikes and heroic dodges.
In the end, one Qualeewooh plummeted in a dazzling pattern, as if trapped in a whirlwind, spiraling down. In the last second of its attack, it reached out with one wing, where its tiny hand carried a thin blade, and smote off the head of its adversary.
Thus the adversary tumbled to earth, end over end, its head somersaulting in the air.
The vanquishing Qualeewooh soared on over the plains, master of all it surveyed.
For the next several minutes of the recording, all one could see was a lone Qualeewooh flying through endless empty skies, accompanied by a ringing song that could only have come from some type of pipes or whistles, unaccompanied by other instruments, until at last the remaining Qualeewooh reached a mountain aerie and entered a cave.
In the back of the cave, Qualeewooh chicks huddled in downy feathers, shaking amid the shells of their eggs, snaking querulous peeps as the dark lord approached, beak open, displaying his razor-sharp teeth.
There the tale ended.
Gallen’s logic told him that this recording showed a major battle between good and evil. If so, something was certainly amiss. This was not a heroic tale as he understood it: of the Qualeewoohs who had fought, the loser was not the aggressor, but the defender. The defender, a smaller Qualeewooh, had worn a simple spirit mask of bright silver, unadorned with any gaudy stones. In all the encounters, it had heeled away, retreating with great speed and desperation toward a distant line of hills. True, it did rake its attacker on occasions, but only in self-defense.
And the song, the strange song at the end that sounded like reed pipes, seemed to Gallen not to be trumpeting victory, nor sounding an anthem of peace.
Instead, it was a bewailing tune, a howling. I am the dark god of the skies, the icon had cried. Through victory I am diminished.
When Felph’s spindles reached the lowest bottom corners of the panel, the song ended. The glass statue receded down into the floor, where the stone doors slid back in place with a snick.