“We won’t know till we look, will we?” she said coyly.
“Why, Miss Kelly, I do believe you’re running me a ragged circle.”
The house was intriguing: strange furniture, and startlingly human utensils. But there was little technology, the builders had obviously been given instructions on how to utilize wood. They were excellent carpenters.
Rain drummed on the walls, adding to the sense of isolation and displacement as they mounted the ramp. Vassal castes had their own rooms; Kelly wasn’t sure if they could be called stables. Some rooms, for the soldiers, she guessed, had furniture. There was only a thin layer of dust. It was as though the tower had been set aside rather than abandoned. Given her current circumstances, it wasn’t the most reassuring of thoughts. The neural nanonics drank it all in.
They found the first bodies on the second floor. Three housekeeper castes (the same size as a farmer), five hunters, and four soldiers. Desiccation had turned them into creased leather mummies. She wanted to touch one, but was afraid it would crumble to dust.
“They’re just sitting there, look,” Shaun Wallace said in a tamed voice. “There’s no food anywhere near them. They must have been waiting to die.”
“Without the breeders, they are nothing,” Pat said.
“Even so, ’tis a terrible thing. Like those old Pharaohs who had all their servants in their tombs with them.”
“Were there any Tyrathcan souls in the beyond?” Kelly asked.
Shaun Wallace paused at the bottom of the ramp to the third floor, his brow crinkling. “Now there’s a thing. I don’t think there were. Or at least, I never came across one.”
“Different afterworld, perhaps,” Kelly said.
“If they have one. They seem heathen creatures to me. Perhaps the Good Lord didn’t see fit to give them souls.”
“But they have a god. Their own god.”
“Do they now?”
“Well, they’re hardly likely to have Jesus or Allah, are they? Not human messiahs.”
“Ah, you’re a smart one, Miss Kelly. I take my hat off to you. I’d never have thought of that in a million years.”
“It’s a question of environment and upbringing. I’m used to thinking in these terms. I’d be lost in your century.”
“Oh, I can’t see that. Not at all.”
There were more vassal-caste bodies on the third floor. The two breeders were together on the fourth.
“Do they have love, these beasties?” Shaun Wallace asked, looking down at them. “They look like they do, to me. Dying together is romantic, I think. Like Romeo and Juliet.”
Kelly ran her tongue round her cheeks. “You didn’t strike me as the Shakespeare type.”
“Now don’t you go writing me off so quickly, you with your classy education. I’m a man of hidden depths, I am, Miss Kelly.”
“Did you ever meet anyone famous in the beyond?” Pat asked.
“Meeting!” He wrung his hands together with fulsome drama. “You’re talking about the beyond as if it’s some kind of social gathering. Lords and ladies spending the evening together over fine wine and a game of bridge. It’s not like that, Mr. Halahan, not at all.”
“But did you?” the mercenary scout persisted. “You were there for centuries. There must have been someone important.”
“Ah now, there was that, as I recall. A gentleman by the name of Custer.”
Pat’s neural nanonics ran a fast check. “An American army general? He lost a fight with the Sioux Indians in the nineteenth century.”
“Aye, that’s the one. Don’t be telling me you’ve heard of him in this day and age?”
“He’s in our history courses. How did he feel about it? Losing like that?”
Shaun Wallace’s expression cooled. “He didn’t feel anything about it, Mr. Halahan. He was like all of us, crying without tears to shed. You’re equating death with sanity, Mr. Halahan. Which is a stupid thing to do, if you don’t mind me saying. You’ve heard of Hitler now? Surely, if you’ve heard of poor damned George Armstrong Custer?”
“We remember Hitler. Though he was after your time, I think.”
“Indeed he was. But do you think he changed after he died, Mr. Halahan? Do you think he lost his conviction, or his righteousness? Do you think death causes you to look back on life and makes you realize what an ass you’ve been? Oh no, not that, Mr. Halahan. You’re too busy screaming, you’re too busy cursing, you’re too busy coveting your neighbour’s memory for the bitter dregs of taste and colour it gives you. Death does not bestow wisdom, Mr. Halahan. It does not make you humble before the Lord. More’s the pity.”
“Hitler,” Kelly said, entranced. “Stalin, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Helmen Nyke. The butchers and the warlords. Are they all there? Waiting in the beyond?”
Shaun Wallace gazed up at the domed ceiling partially lost amid a tapestry of shadows thrown by sparse alien architecture; for a moment his features portraying every year of his true age. “Aye, they’re all there, Miss Kelly, every one of the monsters the good earth ever spawned. All of them aching to come back, waiting for their moment to be granted. Us possessed, we might be wanting to hide from the open sky, and death; but it’s not paradise we’re going to be making down here on this planet. It couldn’t be, there’ll be humans in it, you see.”
It wasn’t true daybreak, not yet. The sun was still half an hour from bringing any hint of grizzled light to the eastern horizon. But the rain-clouds had blown over, and night had sapped the wind’s brawn. The northern sky glowed with a grievous fervour, blemishing the savannah grass a murky crimson.
Octan watched the dark speck moving along the side of the river, heading upstream towards the Tyrathcan tower house. Heavy moist air stroked the eagle’s feathers as he dipped a wing, curving down in a giddy voluted dive. Pat Halahan gazed out at the lonely nocturnal wanderer through his affinity bonded friend’s narrow peerless eyes.
Kelly came awake at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, and the sound of feet rapping on the hard dry floor of the second storey, where the team had rested up for the night. Neural nanonics accelerated her fatigue-soaked brain into full alertness.
The last of the combat-boosted mercenaries were disappearing down the ramp.
“Someone coming,” Shaun Wallace said.
“Your people?”
“No. I’d know if it was. Not that Mr. Malin asked, mind you.” He sounded cheerful.
“Good heavens, anyone would think he doesn’t trust you.” She shoved back the foil envelope she’d been sleeping in. Shaun Wallace offered his hand to help her to her feet. They made their way down the ramp to the ground-floor hall.
The seven mercenaries were clustered round the hole in the door, red light shining dully off their artificial skin. Fenton and Ryall were on their feet, growling softly as they were caught in the backwash of agitation coming from their master’s mind.
Reza and Sewell slipped through the hole as Kelly reached them.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Horse coming,” Pat told her. “Two riders.”
Kelly peered round him just as Reza and Sewell activated their chameleon circuits and flicked into the landscape. For a few seconds she tracked them thanks to the circular medical nanonic package on the big combat-adept’s leg, but even that was soon lost amongst the unsavoury coloured grass.
It was one of the plough horses favoured by the colonists. A young one, but clearly on its last legs; the neck was drooping as it plodded gamely along, mouth flecked with foam. Reza worked his way unobtrusively down the slope from the tower house towards the animal, leaving Sewell to cover him. His optical sensors showed him the two people on its back; both wore stained poncho capes cut from a canvas tarpaulin. The man was showing the first signs of age, stubble shading heavy jowls, temples touched with grey; and he’d recently lost a lot of weight by the look of him. But he had a vigour animating his frame which was visible even from Reza’s position across the swaying grass. The young boy behind him had been crying at some time, he had also been soaked during the ride, and now he was shivering, clinging to the man in a wearied daze.