Dumarest looked at the wine and saw in the ruby liquid images of an ancient horror. A planet riven with suicidal madness. One shunned, proscribed, set apart by those fearful of the contagion of insanity. One forgotten. A world deliberately lost.
Earth.
It had to be Earth.
"It's gone." Ishikari shook his head radiating his disappointment. "Everything I'd hoped to find. Now there's nothing left but a crater filled with radioactive slag."
"You blame me?"
"No, of course not."
But he would be blamed, Dumarest knew, if not now then in a week, a month, a year. When Ishikari had brooded long enough over the votive offerings now lost, the books, the gems, the cunning artifacts. The history which the Temple must have contained. The secret knowledge which he would be certain had been there to find. The power he yearned to obtain.
By that time they would have parted-already the Argonne was heading to a nearby world. One where he could take a choice of vessels.
Leaving the salon Dumarest made his way down the passage. Ellen was within her cabin, wine at her side, a plate of small cakes resting beside her on the bed. She smiled as he knocked and entered; then reached for the bottle, halting the movement of her hand as he shook his head.
"No? Well, you know best. I thought you could use it. I guess Rauch has pretty well sucked you dry."
"There wasn't that much to tell."
"I agree-if you told me all there was."
"You doubt it?"
"Does it matter?" Shrugging, she held onto the bottle and filled her glass to the brim. "Some secrets should remain just that-secrets. You know what I'm doing?"
"I think so. You're holding a wake." He saw she didn't understand. "A party to say farewell to the dead."
"You'd know about such things. Just like Kroy. He told me how mercenaries operate. How to stop your enemies haunting you and how to settle with your friends. The few I had are still around. I was too close to them for too long. Help me, Earl. What should I do?"
He reached for the bottle and filled an empty glass and lifted a cake from the plate at her side.
"You do as I do. You sip and take a small bite and eat and swallow and take another sip. Each time you do it you say farewell." To Kroy and Ahmed and Pinal the assassin. To Ramon Sanchez and the man he had killed. Watching the woman, counting, Dumarest wondered why she had included him also. A man she had never seen and could know nothing about. Who else had died? "Where is Karlene?"
"Earl-"
"Take me to her!"
She lay on her bed like a woman carved from alabaster, white, pristine, pure, with the face of a child. She lay on her side, knees drawn up to her chest in the fetal position, one hand at her mouth, the lips closed around her thumb. Her eyes were open, wide, as vacuous as the windows of a deserted house.
"Karlene?" Dumarest stepped toward her. "Karlene?"
"It's no good, Earl." Ellen drew him back as the woman made no response. "She can't hear you. She's locked in a world of her own. Her talent drove her to it."
"The Temple?"
"It dominated her when young and stayed with her all her life. She knew what was going to happen. She knew it! It kept coming closer and in the end she had to run from it. But it was always there and Rauch, the fool, had to bring her back. She couldn't rest. All the time you were away I kept her under sedation but it wasn't enough. When the Temple blew-Earl, can you guess how she must have felt?"
An entire community of men and women-how many he could only guess. All dying in a furious blast of ravening energy, seared, blinded, torn, broken-death had been fast but thought would have been faster. Each victim would have had a fraction of time to know the shock and fear of extinction.
The scent which had blasted Karlene's mind.
"She could only escape into the past," explained Ellen. "But, for her, the past was never a happy time. So she kept regressing until she went back into the womb. Catatonia. I may be able to do something with her eventually but she'll never be the woman you remember."
Another ghost to add to the rest. One who had smiled and held out her arms and embraced him with a fierce and demanding passion. A woman who had led him to the place where he had found the secret for which he had searched for so long.
The golden figures incised on the grey, metallic walls of the Holy Place.
Figures which he knew beyond question were the coordinates of Earth.
Soon, now, he would be home.