World breakers, p.10
World Breakers, page 10
“I am, your ladyship,” Bricio said, bending his head and touching the leather chest strap of his quiver. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes! Finally!” Melisende said, and to prove her point, she pulled herself up onto the padded saddle on Mist’s back without any help. She did, however, wait long enough for Bricio to check that her seat was secure and that the breakaway connections in her safety straps were seated properly. Like the cloak, she knew very well that this procedure was non-negotiable if she wanted to go out exploring in the mountains today.
And oh! She did! She truly did. Now that she was a young woman, her father, the Lord of Cercen, had finally given his permission for her to leave the confines of the keep by herself, so long as she went with an escort and stayed within sight of home.
She caught Bricio stifling a grin as he got himself mounted up on his own wether. She opened her mouth to say something, but he leaned forward and his wether stepped out, leading Mist toward the great metal doors that led through the outer curtain wall.
Beyond the doors, the path led down a sharp slope into the deep vee of the pass. Melisende focused on staying relaxed and looking around while Mist picked her way down the path with surefooted ease. The sun soared high above them, shining down like a benediction on this long-awaited adventure.
“Was there somewhere in particular you wanted to explore, my lady?” Bricio asked after a few moments. He rode ahead, as was proper, his bow at the low ready.
“The pass,” Melisende said quickly.
“This whole valley is the pass, my lady,” Bricio said, swiveling around to look back at her. “Could you be more specific?”
Melisende rolled her eyes again. “You’re being difficult,” she said. “I want to see the northern end of the pass, where the terrain narrows.”
“Ahh! You want to see the glacier!” Bricio nodded. “Good choice! It’s worth a look.”
“What’s that?”
“The glacier? You mean you don’t know about the river of ice?”
“I know what a glacier is, guardsman,” Melisende said, with all the dignity an offended thirteen-year old could muster. “But I did not know there was one in the pass.”
“My lady! It is the pass! At least part of it. You said where the terrain narrows . . . the reason it narrows there is because that is where the glacier comes to its point. It is the terminus of the wall of ice, to borrow a phrase from my old teacher.” He nodded in that direction before turning back to her. “It really is magnificent, and it’s not far at all. And we will be easily visible from the keep. An excellent choice.”
“I’m so glad you approve,” Melisende said, only just managing to keep her eyes from rolling once more. “Lead on, then, Bricio. Let us see this river of ice!”
Her annoyance rapidly diminished as their sure-footed oremes carried them farther down along the trail toward the north. The air warmed to the point where Melisende threw her hood back and reveled in the sun’s warmth on her skin and hair. Joalie would surely scold her if she caught even the least bit of a suntan on her face, but it would be worth it. Winter had been so long! And the brightness of the morning felt like a balm to her sunstarved eyes.
Eventually, the path started angling up again, and the mountains on either side began to crowd closer, looming above them until they rode entirely in shadow. Melisende shivered, but refused to replace her hood. Not just yet . . . though it was significantly chillier in the shade. Her breath puffed out before her in a cloud. The tips of her ears started to burn with cold, and so she muttered under her breath and gratefully pulled the fur hood close around her face again.
“Here we are, my lady,” Bricio said after another interval of increasing altitude and decreasing temperature. His turned his oreme’s head to the left, and the wether expertly leapt up onto the piled gravel and boulders that bordered the narrow road. “Go slowly, let Mist find her feet. This area is always unstable. Your father has to send men out every spring to clear the road of debris from rockfalls.”
Melisende nodded, and reined Mist over to follow in that direction. She felt the gravel slide under her oreme’s split hooves, but Mist knew what she was about, and she bounded her way up to the very bottom of the cliff that loomed over the road.
“Is it . . . oh, Bricio! It really is all ice!”
“Well, not all of it, just this part here,” he said, waving up at the cliff face. “See how it’s tucked in between these two ridges there and there?”
“I do see,” Melisende said, not even ashamed of the wonder in her voice. Most of the time she took great pains to sound wordly and educated . . . but this was just too impressive. Certainly her feelings of awe were nothing but the glacier’s due. “But it doesn’t look much like a river. It’s more like a mountain of ice!”
“You cannot see it from here, but the river stretches back up along the spine of the mountains,” Bricio said. “My father and brothers have hunted up in there; it extends for many leagues.” He shifted his weight and his wether responded, sidestepping beneath him and then turning and heading even farther north, up on top of one of the many piles of dark, rich dirt and debris that had collected at the foot of the glacier. “See, look down here,” he said, turning back as far as his saddle would allow, and pointing north.
Melisende clicked her tongue and Mist stepped forward, following the wether until Melisende could see what Bricio meant.
“That little stream?”
“Yes,” he said. “That stream is where the spring’s melt collects. It runs down out of these mountains and joins with several others to form a mighty river in the flatlands.”
“Can we go down to it?”
“If you like.”
Melisende urged Mist forward, down the slope of the little hill toward the thin stream of water that had collected in the lowest part of the terrain and begun to wind its way toward the main part of the pass. When they reached the edge of the water, Melisende reined Mist to a stop, and then disconnected her breakaway latches and swung herself down off of the nanny’s back.
“My lady,” Bricio said, his tone low and steady. “Please be careful, the ground may not be stable and you are not as surefooted as an oreme.”
“I just want to touch the water,” she said, holding on to Mist’s reins with one hand. She bent to touch the glassy surface and immediately pulled her hand back. It was cold! Behind her, Mist snuffled, almost as if she were laughing at her human charge’s foolishness. Then she bent and began to drink noisily, her lips flapping and splashing as she did. Melisende felt her face break into a grin and she turned to look at Bricio.
“Go ahead,” he said from atop his oreme. “It’s perfectly safe to drink.”
Melisende braced herself for the icy shock and used her hand to cup some of the water up to her mouth. It was just as sharply cold to her tongue as to her fingers, but it tasted wonderfully pure and refreshing. Better than melted snow. Better than the water from the keep’s various wells. It tasted like a winter sky, like the scent of snow on the wind.
She let out a laugh and shook her hand that had gone numb from the cold, and then bent to try and take another, deeper drink when something caught her eye. As the sun worked its way higher in the sky, it shone down into the narrow pass, and something flashed at her in the ground across the stream.
“Bricio,” she said softly, pointing. “What is that?”
“I don’t know, your ladyship,” he said, sounding just as intrigued as she felt. “A shiny rock or bit of ore perhaps? The glacier pushes all sorts of things up out of the ground here.”
“I want to go see it,” she said.
“I didn’t intend to cross the stream today, my lady,” he said, doubt creeping into his tone. Melisende frowned and spun to face him.
“The keep is there,” she said, stabbing a finger at the southern cliff, where the outline of their home stood out in stark silhouette against the brilliantly blue sky. “We will be just as visible as we are here. It is only a few more lengths.”
Bricio snorted softly. “So it is. Relax, your ladyship. No need to get combative. We can go see what it is, but we cannot stay forever, not if we are to get back in time.”
“I will leave when you say we must,” she said, holding on to her hauteur. She gave him a nod, and then pulled herself back up onto Mist’s saddle and reconnected her straps. Without waiting for him to dismount and check her handiwork, Melisende then urged Mist forward toward that mysterious glint showing through the dirt opposite.
It turned out to be something very odd. Something unlike anything she’d seen in all her thirteen years. Once she brushed the dirt aside, she found that the mystery was a flat object, black in color, with a reflective surface so smooth she could see her own dark image in it. Even stranger, it appeared to be rectangular, but the corners were as perfectly square as if a master metalsmith had formed them. It was large, easily the span of her two arms outstretched, and it appeared to be connected to something larger that lay still buried under the dirt and debris.
“We must unearth it!” she said excitedly to Bricio as she knelt next to him and scraped at the dirt with her gloved hands. “This is surely a treasure, with workmanship so fine! Who do you think buried this here?”
“I cannot say, my lady,” Bricio said, standing and stretching his back after doing the bulk of the work uncovering the panel. “But I can say this: we have lingered long enough. It is my duty to return you safely to your father.”
“And mine to report to him what we’ve found,” Melisende said, “I am his heir, after all.” She sat back on her heels before nodding and pushing herself up to her feet. Bricio held out a hand to help her, and she accepted it, then began brushing at the dirt on her cloak.
“Yes,” Bricio said, trying hard to stifle a smile which Melisende ignored. “There is that, as well.” He stepped back and collected the two oremes from where they’d hobbled them to graze on the tiny plants that grew up next to the glacial stream. Melisende gave up on her cloak, accepted her guardsman’s help in mounting Mist, and let him lead her home, her head whirling with curiosity and excitement.
Melisende’s father wasn’t quite as excited as she would have liked over her discovery, but he did give her leave to return in two days with a crew of men to help her unearth whatever it was she’d found. So she headed out early, and by the time the sun broke over the eastern ridge of the pass, they’d uncovered another of the large flat structures. They appeared to be fixed to a larger, vaguely oblong object. It was irregular in size and shape, but the smooth, even metalwork (save for some buckling and crimping that appeared to be damage) made it clear that this, too, was a manmade artifact.
“Perhaps it was a dwelling of some kind,” Melisende said to Bricio, tilting her head to the side as she considered the thing during the crew’s midday break for a meal. “Look, there, that perfectly square indentation could be a door . . . and it’s certainly large enough to have housed at least two people.”
“More than that,” Bricio said. “You could be right. But if that’s a door, it must only open from the inside. There’s no handle or mechanism to open it out here.”
“Maybe it got torn off whenever the dwelling was buried. An ancient avalanche, you said?”
“That’s the most likely thing I can think of,” Bricio shrugged, though the frown on his face said that he wasn’t convinced. “Especially for as big as it is. This slope of the cliff was covered by the glacier in my grandfather’s time, so whatever this is was buried long before that. But if it was an avalanche that buried it, I would have expected more structural damage, certainly to our two mystery plates.”
“I was not buried in an avalanche.”
Melisende stifled a scream, clapping both hands over her mouth, as Bricio grabbed her and thrust her behind him, drawing his sword. “Show yourself!” he shouted, looking wildly around. Behind them, Melisende could hear the work crew a little way off drawing their own weapons and starting to run to their aid.
“You can see me in front of you. As much as you have excavated so far, that is. I am still mostly pinned under the dirt. Who is in command, please?”
“I am!” Melisende called out, stepping out from behind an increasingly frantic Bricio. “I am the Lady Melisende, Heiress of Cercen.”
“My lady!” Bricio said in an urgent undertone. “What are you doing? This cannot be safe!”
“Talking,” she said to him. “And I’m every bit as safe as I was a few minutes ago.”
“Correct,” the voice said from the dirt. It had a strange, tinny quality to it. “I am in no position to be aggressive, even if that were my inclination or objective. I cannot hurt any of you as I am. I can merely talk, since you have uncovered my solar panels. Though I have had to adjust my language algorithms. Your speech has changed.”
“And just who—or what—are you?” Melisende asked, feeling a flush of pleasure at how steady and collected her voice sounded. Her mind was spinning in circles of wonder, but her voice sounded just like Joalie’s: calm and serene.
“I am the AI for Tactical Artillery Vehicle serial number 69-359.”
“I see,” Melisende said. “And what, pray, is an ‘Aay Eye’? Is that a form of military rank? I assume you’re some kind of soldier, since you mention tactics and artillery?”
“AI is the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence. I am the autonomous control system for the Tactical Artillery Vehicle serial number 69-359.”
Melisende paused, feeling her brows wrinkle as she tried to make sense of this statement. She knew what the individual words meant, but they didn’t seem to make sense when strung together in the way that the . . . Tactical Artillery whatever . . . had ordered them.
Still, curiosity burned within her, as did a strange kind of compassion. Whatever it was, this thing could speak. It had called itself an “intelligence.” Surely it didn’t deserve to remain buried alive after . . . well . . . she didn’t know how long. That was a good question.
“We will continue to excavate you,” Melisende said, drawing her shoulders back and doing her best to speak in her most regal and commanding tone. “Whatever you are, that is the compassionate thing to do. How long have you been buried, anyway?”
“I do not know,” the thing said, and Melisende could hear an inflection of something that sounded a lot like frustration in its tone. “My last records are of the second month past perihelion, two hundred seventy-five years after independence. What is the date now?”
Melisende blinked, then glanced up at Bricio, who stood nearby, still alert for danger. He shook his head slightly, indicating that he didn’t understand that date any better than she did.
“It is seventy-two days since the Feast of Snows, and twenty until the Feast of Flowers,” she said.
The thing was silent for a long moment.
“I do not have those terms in my memory,” it eventually said. “How many years have passed since the Caventian declaration of independence from the Coalition?”
“I don’t know what ‘Caventian’ and ‘Coalition’ mean,” Melisende said, keeping her tone even. “But it is the eight hundred and fiftieth year since the Shattering.”
“What is the ‘Shattering’?”
Melisende looked up at Bricio again, then back at her work crew. To a man, they stared at her, eyes wide and unsure. She gave them a tiny smile and hoped it was reassuring, then shrugged and turned back to her strange conversation partner.
“One of our legends. In ancient times, there were two great kings, brothers who ruled all the people of the world. They both had the power to harness the sun, and that power brought great wealth and ease to the people. Until one day the two kings quarreled, and the brothers began to be angry with one another. They threatened each other with greater and greater harm, until one brother, in a fit of rage, unleashed his full power against the other. The other brother answered in kind, and they burned the world to ash with their anger. All of the people in the world perished in flames, save only for those who hid under the ground for a generation. Once they were old, their children crawled back into the light, and began to create the nations of mankind.”
“This Shattering . . . how long ago did you say it was?” the thing asked her.
“Eight and a half centuries ago.”
“That is how long it has been, then,” it said. “Or approximately that. I was a combatant in the war you described.”
Melisende of Cercen was young, but she was, in all things, her father’s daughter. Bodavin III of Cercen had taught statecraft and leadership to his only child from the very beginning: as soon as she was able to read, she read political correspondence and ancient treaties. As soon as she could sit through a four-hour meeting, she attended the gatherings of Cercen’s inner council at her father’s side. She frequently joined Bodavin in the training lists, where she watched as his men—someday to be her men—drilled each other in the arts of war.
So it was perhaps no surprise that she instantly identified this crumpled, buried piece of machinery with the tinny voice and strange words as a potential strategic advantage.
“Bricio,” she said quietly in the aftermath of the machine’s revelation. It was all but unbelievable! How could something so old have survived, even buried in the ground . . . and yet, its words did have the ring of truth.
Plus, as Melisende’s father was fond of reminding her, sometimes the truth didn’t matter nearly so much as what people believed to be the truth.
“Yes, my lady?” Bricio asked, his voice pulling her from the twisty path of her thoughts.
“Gather the crew together, please. I wish to speak with them.”
“Of course,” he said. And though she heard a question in his tone, he moved without hesitation to obey her instructions.
“Machine,” Melisende said as he walked away, “The name you gave is long and unwieldy. Do you have another name that people use to address you?”
