Endymion

42

It took us a little more than a day to walk the ice tunnels to Father Glaucus and the buried city, but there were three short sleep periods during that time, and the voyage itself—darkness, cold, narrow passages through the ice—would have been quite forgettable if the wraith had not taken one of our party.

As with all real acts of violence, it happened too quickly to observe. One second we were trudging along, Aenea, the android, and I near the back of the single-file line of Chitchatuk, and suddenly there was an explosion of ice and movement—I froze, thinking that an explosive mine had been set off—and the robed figure two forms in front of Aenea disappeared without a cry.

I was still frozen, the plasma rifle in my mittened hands, but useless, its safety still on, when the nearest Chitchatuk began ululating in rage and helplessness, the closest hunters throwing themselves down the new corridor that opened where none had been a second before.

Aenea was already shining her handlamp down the nearly vertical shaft when I pushed next to her, my weapon raised. Two of the Chitchatuk had hurled themselves down that shaft, braking their fall with their boots and short bone knives throwing ice splinters above them, and I was about to squeeze in when Cuchiat grabbed my shoulder. “Ktchey!” he said. “Ku tcheta chi!”

By this fourth day I knew that he was ordering me not to go. I obeyed, but brought out the flashlight laser to illuminate the way for the shouting hunters already twenty meters below us and out of sight where the new tunnel curved away to the horizontal. At first I thought it was an effect of the red laser beam, but then I saw that the shaft was coated—almost totally painted—in bright blood.

The ululation among the Chitchatuk continued even after the hunters returned empty-handed. I understood that there had been no sight of the wraith, and no sight of its victim except for blood, shredded robe, and the little finger from her right hand. Cuchtu, the one we thought of as the medicine man, knelt, kissed the severed digit, brought a bone knife across his forearm until his own blood dripped on the bloody finger, and then carefully, almost reverently, set the finger in his hide bag. The ululation stopped immediately. Chiaku—the tall man with the bloodstained robe that was twice bloodstained now, since he had been one of the hunters who had thrown himself down the shaft—turned to us and spoke earnestly for a long moment while the others shouldered their packs, set their spears away, and resumed the trek.

As we continued up the ice tunnel, I could not help but glance back and see the wraith’s jagged entrance hole fade into the blackness that seemed to follow us. Knowing that the animals lived on the surface and came below mostly to hunt, I had not been nervous. But now the very ice of the floor seemed treacherous, the ice facets and ridges of the walls and ceilings mere hunting blinds for the next wraith. I found that I was trying to walk lightly, as if that would keep me from falling through to where the killer waited. It was not easy to walk lightly on Sol Draconi Septem.

“M. Aenea,” said the robed figure of A. Bettik, “I could not understand what M. Chiaku was saying. Something about numbers?”

Aenea’s face was all but lost under the wraith-teeth of her robe. I had known that all these robes were taken from wraith cubs—infants—but the one glimpse of white arms the thickness of my torso coming through the ice wall, black talons the length of my forearm, made me realize how large these things must be. Sometimes, I realized, the safety off on my plasma rifle, trying to walk lightly in the grinding weight of Sol Draconi Septem, the shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

“… so I think he was talking about the fact that the band no longer comprises a prime number,” Aenea was saying to A. Bettik. “Until she… was taken… we had twenty-six, which was all right, but now they have to do something soon or… I don’t know… more bad luck.”

As far as I could tell, they solved the prime-number jinx by sending Chiaku ahead as a scout. Or perhaps he just volunteered to be apart from the group until they could drop us off in the frozen city—twenty-five, as an odd number, could be tolerated briefly, but without us their band would be back to twenty-two, still an unacceptable number.

I left behind all thoughts of the Chitchatuk’s preoccupation with primes when we arrived at the city.

First, we saw the light. After just a few days, our eyes had grown so accustomed to the ember-glow of the “chuchkituk”—the miter-shaped bone brazier—that even the occasional flash of our handlamps seemed blinding. The light from the frozen city was actually painful.

At one time, the building had been steel or plasteel and smart glass, perhaps seventy stories tall, and must have looked out at a pleasant green terraformed valley—perhaps facing south toward where the river flowed half a kilometer away. Now our ice tunnel opened onto a hole in the glass somewhere around the fifty-eighth floor, and tongues of the atmospheric glacier had bent the steel frame of the building and found inroads on various levels.

But the skyscraper still stood, perhaps with its upper stories protruding into the black near vacuum of the surface above the glacier. And it still blazed with light.

The Chitchatuk paused at the entrance, shielding their eyes from the glare and ululating in a different tone from that of their earlier mourning wail in the tunnel when the woman had been taken. This was a beckoning. While we stood and waited, I stared at the open steel-and-glass skeleton of this place, at the dozens upon dozens of burning lamps hung everywhere here, floor after floor, so that we could stare down beneath our feet through the clear ice and see the building dropping away beneath us, windows brightly lit.

Then Father Glaucus ambled toward us across the space that was half ice cavern, half office-building room. He wore the long black cassock and crucifix that I associated with the Jesuits at their monastery near Port Romance. It was obvious that the old man was blind—his eyes were milky with cataracts and as unseeing as stones—but that was not the first thing that struck me about Father Glaucus: he was old, ancient, hoary, bearded like a patriarch, and when Cuchiat called to him, his features came alive and he awoke as if from a trance, his snow-white brows arching up, plowing wrinkles into his large forehead. Chapped and weathered lips curled up in a smile. This may sound grotesque, but nothing about Father Glaucus was bizarre in any way—not his blindness, not the blindingly white beard, not the weathered, mottled old man’s skin or withered lips. He was so much… himself… that comparisons fail.

I had many reservations about meeting this “glaucus”— afraid that he would have some association with the Pax we were fleeing—and now, having seen that he was a priest, I should have grabbed the girl and A. Bettik and left with the Chitchatuk. But none of the three of us had that impulse at all. This old man was not the Pax… he was only Father Glaucus. This we learned only minutes after our first encounter.

But first, before any of us spoke, the blind priest seemed to sense our presence. After speaking to Cuchiat and Chichticia in their own tongue, he suddenly swiveled our way, holding one hand high as if his palm could sense our heat—Aenea’s, A. Bettik’s, and mine. Then he crossed the small space to where we stood at the boundary between encroaching ice cavern and encroached-upon room.

Father Glaucus walked directly up to me, set his bony hand on my shoulder, and said, loudly and clearly in Web English, “Thou art the man!”

It took me a while—years—to put that comment in the proper perspective. At the time I simply thought the old priest was mad as well as blind.

The arrangement was for us to stay a few days with Father Glaucus in his subglacial high-rise while the Chitchatuk went off to do important Chitchatuk things—Aenea and I guessed that settling the prime-number problem was their highest priority—and then the band would check back on us. Aenea and I had succeeded in communicating via signs that we wanted to take the raft apart and carry it downriver to the next farcaster portal. The Chitchatuk seemed to understand—or at least they had nodded and used their word for assent—“chia”—when we pantomimed the second arch and the raft passing through it. If I had understood their signed and verbal response, the trip to the second farcaster would require traveling across the surface, would take several days, and would pass through an area of many arctic wraiths. I was sure that they said we would discuss it again after they acted on their immediate need of going off “to seek insoluble balance”—which we guessed meant finding another member of the band—or losing three. The last thought gave one pause.

At any rate, we were to stay with Father Glaucus until Cuchiat’s band returned. The blind priest chatted animatedly with the hunters for several minutes and then stood at the opening of the ice cave, obviously listening, until the glow of their bone-brazier had long since disappeared.

Then Father Glaucus greeted us again by passing his hands across our faces, shoulders, arms, and hands. I confess that I had never experienced an introduction quite like it. When he cupped Aenea’s face in his bony hands, the old man said, “A human child. I had never expected to see a human child’s face again.”

I did not understand. “What about the Chitchatuk?” I said. “They’re human. They must have children.”

Father Glaucus had led us deeper into the skyscraper and up a flight of stairs to a warmer room before our “introductions.” This was obviously a living area for him—lanterns and braziers burned brightly with the same glowing pellets that the Chitchatuk used, only there were hundreds more here, comfortable furniture was set around, there was an ancient music-disc player, and the inner walls were lined with books—which I found incongruous in the home of a blind man.

“The Chitchatuk have children,” said the old priest, “but they do not allow them to stay with the bands that roam this far north.”

“Why?” I said.

“The wraiths,” said Father Glaucus. “There are so many wraiths north of the old terraforming line.”

“I thought the Chitchatuk depended upon the wraiths for everything,” I said.

The old man nodded and stroked his beard. It was full, white, and long enough to hide his Roman collar. His cassock was carefully patched and darned, but still frayed and threadbare. “My friends the Chitchatuk depend upon wraith cubs for everything,” he said. “The metabolism of the adults makes their hides and bones worthless for the bands’ purposes…”

I did not understand this, but I let him continue without interruption.

“… the wraiths, on the other hand, love nothing more than Chitchatuk children,” he said. “It is why Chitchatuk and the others are so puzzled by our young friend’s presence this far north.”

“Where are their children?” asked Aenea.

“Many hundreds of kilometers south,” said the priest. “With the child-rearing bands. It is… tropical there. The ice is only thirty or forty meters thick and the atmosphere is almost breathable.”

“Why don’t the wraiths hunt the children there?” I asked.

“It is poor country for the wraiths… far too warm.”

“Then why don’t all the Chitchatuk play it safe and move south…” I began, and stopped. The heavy g-load and cold must have been making me more stupid than I usually was.

“Exactly,” said Father Glaucus, hearing comprehension in my silence. “The Chitchatuk totally depend upon the wraiths. The hunting bands—like our friend Cuchiat’s—risk terrible odds to provide the child-rearing bands with meat, hides, and tools. The child-rearing bands run a chance of starving before the food is provided. The Chitchatuk have few children, but those few are precious to them. Or, as they would say—’Utchai tuk aichit chacutkuchit.’”

“More… sacred, I think the word is… than warmth,” translated Aenea.

“Precisely,” said the old priest. “But I am forgetting my manners. I shall show you all to your quarters—I keep several extra rooms furnished and heated, although you are my first non-Chitchatuk guests for… ah… five standard decades, I believe. While you settle in, I shall start wanning our dinners.”