The power inside the tile wasn’t conscious but it was sentient. It wasn’t artificial but it wasn’t alive. It was a result. A result that was invulnerable to time, impervious to destruction, merely waiting as it had always waited.
But before it went entirely quiet again, the olivine tile briefly experienced a flash of power, someone reaching for it from nearby… someone whose energy it recognized from the night before…
Someone who would certainly seek it again, for she had been hungry.
CHAPTER 17
As a child, Qala had lived in the deep, lush valley of western Codurazh. There, a river carried jasmine to and from the processing farm operated by her several guardians. With soil rich in nutrients from ancient volcanism and long periods of shelter from icy winds provided by the surrounding mountains, it was there that the tea leaves and jasmine plants, along with other medicinal herbs, were born. Floated to the airships in Falkhaan, they were taken aloft to be nourished by the moisture in the clouds, to grow healthy and large in the pure, plentiful, even brazen sunshine. Like the airship personnel themselves, they thrived beyond the smoke of the magma towers, beyond the foggy dampness of coastal mornings. When they were ripe, the leaves were returned to Codurazhkhaan to be blended into tea or bottled for therapeutic and aromatic uses. From there, the river carried the finished product everywhere along its route, from the western coast to the eastern ice boundaries.
Because she grew up surrounded by high peaks—including the majestic Zetora, legendary home of the first Galderkhaani—it had always been Qala’s ambition to soar above them. She occasionally saw the largest of the airships pass high overhead, and when the flier recruitment boat came along the river, this girl still shy of womanhood implored Femora Ninma to allow her to apply. The old commander later told Qala that what he saw in her then was not just desire and poise. It was awe. He believed that one who flew on an airship should never lose a feeling of wonder for the skies—and whatever lay beyond.
“What does lie beyond, do you think?” the youthful Qala had once asked during training.
Ninma had answered, “Some say it is the true home of the Candescents, but I don’t know. And there is some beauty in not knowing.”
“How do you mean?” Qala asked.
Ninma had smiled warmly. “Your young thoughts are as valid as my old ones, possibly even more so. Ideas should always remain fresh. And,” he began, then stopped.
“Yes, Femora?”
He had looked at Qala then and said, “And I hope we never find out. That would make someone right and someone wrong.”
“Isn’t knowledge worth that?” Qala had asked.
“Questions are always more valuable than answers,” Ninma had replied. “I suppose if answers encourage new questions, they are valid. But this one? I do not think any of the major participants would receive the truth kindly, or willingly.”
By “major participants” Ninma meant the Priests and Technologists. Even as a child, Qala recognized the rising dislike and mistrust between the two groups that supposedly served the general well-being of Galderkhaan.
The importance of questions was one of the most valuable lessons Qala had ever learned: always to seek, to ask, to look, and then to look beyond—if possible through different eyes, younger eyes, older eyes. In that way, Qala had always maintained her balance. To stop and “gloat” about being correct was the stagnating act of a future imbecile.
Sitting with the physician as he spoke with Vilu, Qala could not help but remember dear Ninma and her own years apprenticing on larger and larger airships. Because she spent so much time on the ground in Falkhaan, Qala had formed a special bond with Vilu and had always understood and even encouraged the boy’s enthusiasm for flight. He was only slightly younger than she had been when she left the valley, and every bit as obsessed. In the many coastal cities she had visited, Qala discovered that those Galderkhaani who plied the seas felt a similar respect and love for that vastness: What was below, they wondered? What was beyond? It used to perplex Qala that a sailor or flier could feel the same humble love for two very different mysteries, two different places, above and below. Yet a Priest had once asked her, during a long, moody night flight: “How strange is it that among people we can have many loves, each special and deep in its own way? Yet for fliers and sailors, affection can only be for one or the other, the sea or the air?”
Qala had no answer for that. She felt, though, that those two worlds were in many ways the same: the mysteries of one reflected the mysteries of the other. Answers to one showed the way to answers in the other. The Galderkhaani called this concept Raque, and it was one of the oldest concepts in the civilization: the idea that there was a sublime and perfect balance in the differences of all things, one-to-one and many-to-many.
It was not known whether it was the ancient concept of Raque that gave rise to the legends of the Candescents, or the other way around. The Anata-Raque, who later became the Priests, believed that if there was life in the sea, there must be life in the skies, beyond the highest clouds, beyond the hovering phosphorescence. The future Technologists, the Eija-Raque, felt that because all things come from above, including the waters that made the seas, a great power they named Tawazh had to have been the primal cause.
The great debate had begun, but there was one thing the early Galderkhaani believed. Before they had mastered flight, the thunder that occasionally rose from Zetora convinced them that the Candescents actually dwelt there. The mountain that glowed, the peak that rumbled with life from time to time, the cliffs that gave Galderkhaan their first Yua, the olivine tiles that spoke to those who were the first Technologists—there was no other conceivable cause. The Anata-Raque and the Eija-Raque agreed on that, and that only. No one then, or now, addressed the mammoth flaw in the split between the groups: believing that all things came from above, the Technologists nonetheless tapped power from inside the world to create the Source. While the Priests, believing in balance, embraced the idea that there was a hierarchy to Candescence.
Qala was not a devoted student of such matters, certainly not like the Priests and their followers, who believed in deeply reflective prayer as a means to understand the Candescents; or the Technologists and their acolytes, who believed in the Yua as the medium for direct communication.
Torn by conflicts, no longer asking questions of each other, neither group had proved anything. The zembo, the nighttime lights far above even the highest airship, were still as mysterious as ever. The world after death was still unknown. And the bottom of the sea was stubbornly elusive.
Qala herself did believe that there is life above, even though those who had tried to reach it failed. Their balloons ripped or exploded and the fliers perished, just like those who attempted to use weighted, airtight conveyances to journey deep below the waters. She believed it because the spots of light hovered and watched with a friendly familiarity, in the way sand or stone, fire or molten rock, did not. Something must be behind them. Sometimes the lights flashed by, like leaves dropping from trees. Perhaps they too became extinguished.