Look to Windward

The Seastacks of Youmier

“And was Tersono equal to the task?”

“More than equal physically, Hub tells me, despite its protestations that it risked tearing itself apart. However I think that whatever empowers its will is also charged with maintaining its dignity and so is normally pretty much fully occupied with that.”

“But was it able to free your car from the tree?”

“Yes, finally, though it took its time and it made a terrible mess of things. It shredded the car’s mainsail, broke the mast and cut away half the tree.”

“And what of Ziller’s pipe?”

“Bitten in half. Hub repaired it for him.”

“Ah. I was wondering if I might have made him a present of a replacement.”

“I’m not sure he’d take it in the spirit it was meant, Quil. Especially as it’s something he would be putting in his mouth.”

“You suspect he might think I was trying to poison him?”

“It might occur to him.”

“I see. I still have a way to go, don’t I?”

“Yes, you do.”

“And how much further do we have to go here, on our walk?”

“Another three or four kilometres.” Kabe looked up at the sun. “We should be there nicely in time for lunch.”

Kabe and Quilan were walking along the cliff tops of the Vilster Peninsula on Fzan Plate. To their right, thirty metres below, Fzan Ocean beat against the rocks. The haze horizon swam with scattered islands. Closer in, a few sailboats and larger craft cut through the spreading patterns of the waves.

A cool wind came off the sea. It whipped Kabe’s coat about his legs and Quilan’s robes snapped and fluttered about him as he led the way along the narrow path through the tall grass. To their left the ground sloped away to deep grassland and then a forest of tall cloudtrees. Ahead, the land rose to a modest headland and a ridge heading inland notched with a cleft for one branch of the path they were on. They were taking the more strenuous and exposed route along the cliff top.

Quilan turned his head to look down towards the waves falling against tumbled rocks at the cliff’s base. The smell of brine was the same here.

~ Remembering again, Quil?

~ Yes.

~ You’re close to the edge. Mind you don’t fall.

~ I will.

Snow was falling in the courtyard of the monastery of Cadracet, sinking gently from a silent grey sky. Quilan had brought up the rear of the firewood foraging detail, preferring to walk in solitude and silence as the others trudged up the trail ahead. The other monks had all gone inside to the warmth of the great hall’s hearth by the time he closed the postern door behind him, scuffed through the light covering of snow on the courtyard’s stones and dumped his basket of wood with the rest under the gallery.

He dallied a moment, soaking up the fresh, clean smell of the wood — he remembered a time when they’d taken a hunting cabin in the Loustrian Hills, just the two of them. The axe that came with the cabin was blunt; he’d sharpened it with a stone, hoping to impress her with his handiness, but then when he’d come to swing it at the first piece of wood the head had sailed off and disappeared into the trees. He could still exactly recall her laughter, and then, when he must have looked hurt, her kiss.

They had slept under furs on a platform of moss. He remembered one cold morning when the fire had gone out overnight and it was freezingly cold in the cabin and they had coupled, him straddling her, his teeth nipped gently in the fur at the nape of her neck, moving slowly over and in her, watching the smoke of her breath as it billowed in the sunlight and rolled out across the room to the window, where it froze in curving, recursive motifs; a coalescence of pattern out of chaos.

He shivered, blinking away cold tears.

When he turned away he saw the figure standing in the centre of the courtyard, looking at him.

It was a female, dressed in a cloak falling half-open over an Army uniform. The snow fell between them in soundless spirals. He blinked. Just for an instant… He shook his head, brushed his hands together and walked out to her, putting up the hood of his griefling robe.

He realised as he made those few steps that he hadn’t even seen a female in the flesh for half a year.

She did not look like Worosei at all; she was taller, her fur was darker and her eyes looked more narrowed and wizened. He guessed she was ten or so years older than him. The pips on her cap identified her as a colonel.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked.

“Yes, Major Quilan,” she said in a precise, controlled voice. “Perhaps you can.”

Fronipel brought them both goblets of mulled wine. His office was about twice the size of Quilan’s cell, and cluttered with papers, screens and the ancient fraying string frames which were the holy books of the order. There was just enough room for the three of them to sit.

Colonel Ghejaline warmed her hands round the goblet. Her cap lay on the desk at her side, her cloak across the seat back. They had exchanged a few pleasantries about her journey up the old road by mount and her role during the war in charge of a space artillery section.

Fronipel settled himself slowly into his second-best curl-chair — the best had been given to the Colonel — and said, “I asked Colonel Ghejaline to come here, Major. She is familiar with your background and history. I believe she has a proposal for you.”

The Colonel looked as though she would have been happy to have spent rather more time approaching the reason for her visit, but gave a shrug of good grace and said, “Yes, Major. There is something you might be able to do for us.”

Quilan looked at Fronipel, who was smiling at him. “Who would the ‘us’ here be, Colonel?” he asked her. “The Army?”

The Colonel frowned. “Not really. The Army is involved, but this would not strictly speaking be a military assignment. It would be more like the one you and your wife undertook on Aorme, though even further afield and on a quite different level of security and importance. The ‘us’ I refer to would be all Chelgrians, but especially those whose souls are currently held in limbo.”

Quilan sat back in his seat. “And what would I be expected to do?”

“I can’t tell you exactly yet. I am here to find out if you will even consider undertaking the mission.”

“But if I don’t know what it is…”

“Major Quilan,” the Colonel said, taking a small sip of her steaming wine and then — after a minimal nod to Fronipel to acknowledge the drink — putting the goblet down on the desk, “I’ll tell you all I can.” She drew herself up a little straighter in the seat. “The task we would ask you to undertake is one that is very important indeed. That is almost all I know about that aspect of it. I do know a little more but I’m not allowed to talk about it. The mission would require that you undergo a considerable amount of training. Again, I can’t say much more about that. The clearance for the mission comes from the top of our society.” She took a breath. “And the reason that it doesn’t matter too much at this stage exactly what it is you are being asked to do is that in one sense what’s being asked of you is as bad as it gets.” She looked into his eyes. “This is a suicide mission, Major Quilan.”

He had forgotten the sheer pleasure of staring into a female’s eyes, even if she was not Worosei, and even if that pleasure, like some emotional internalisation of physical law, created an equal and opposite feeling of grief and loss and even guilt. He gave a small, sad smile. “Oh, in that case, Colonel,” he said, “I’ll definitely do it.”

“Quil?”

“Hmm?” He turned to face the tall, triangular bulk of the Homomdan, who had bumped into him.

“Are you all right? You stopped very suddenly there. Did you see something?”

“Nothing. No, I’m fine. I just… I’m fine. Come on. I’m hungry.”

They walked on.

~ I just recalled. The Lady Colonel told me this is a one-way mission.

~ Ah, yes, there is that.

~ It is all coming back, isn’t it?

~ Unlike us, yes. That’s the way they’ve arranged it. That’s what we both agreed to. It seems to have worked so far.

~ You knew, too, then.

~ Yes. That was part of Visquile’s briefing.

~ Which is why they kept you backed-up in that substrate.

~ Which is why they kept me backed-up in that substrate.

~ Well. I can’t wait for the next instalment.

He reached the summit of the cliff path and saw the town; a scimitar of white towers and spires lying cradled in a bowl of wooded valley bordered by rising chalk cliffs, its bay protected from the sea by a spit of sand. Waves beat whitely on the strand. The Homomdan joined him, standing massively at his side and all but blocking out the wind. There was a hint of rain in the air.

The following day she left her mount in the monastery stables with her uniform. She dressed in the waistcoat and leggings of a Handed; he was to impersonate a Grafted, so wore trousers and an apron. They both put on nondescript grey winter cloaks. He said goodbye to Fronipel but to nobody else.

They waited until all the work parties had departed before leaving the monastery, then they walked down the lower path through the falling snow and the bare husks of spall trees, past the distant wood-gatherers — their songs heard through the quietly falling snow, as though they were the voices of ghosts — down through a level of wispy cloud where the Colonel’s grey cloak seemed almost to disappear at times and then through the drumming rain beneath and the dripping forest of dark leaves that descended towards the valley floor, where they turned and followed the deeply shaded track above the river rushing whitely in the chasm below.

The rain slackened and ceased.

A group of Tallier caste hunters in an old All-Terrain on their way back from the forests after stalking jhehj offered them a lift, but they refused politely. The trailer behind the All-Terrain was piled with the carcasses of the animals. It bounced down the track into the gloom with its cargo of the dead, so that from then on they followed a line of fresh blood-spots.

Finally, in the foothills of the Grey Mountains, towards sunset, they came out onto the Girdling turnpike, where cars and trucks and buses hummed past, trailing spray. A large car was waiting for them by the roadside. A young male who looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes opened the door for them and completed three-quarters of a salute to the Colonel before remembering. The vehicle’s interior was warm and dry; they took off their cloaks. The car swung out onto the road and set off down the route towards the plains.

The Colonel plugged into a military com set in a briefcase on the rear seat and left him to his own thoughts as she sat with eyes closed, communicating. He watched the traffic; the outskirts of the city of Ubrent sparkled out of the gloom. It looked in better repair than the last time he’d seen it.

Within an hour they had reached the airport, and a sleek black sub-orbiter sitting on the mist-curdled runway. He was about to reach out and touch the Colonel to let her know they’d arrived when she opened her eyes, slipped the induction coil from the back of her head and nodded at the aircraft as though to say, “We’re here.”

The acceleration pressed him firmly back into the frame-seat. He saw the lights of the coastal cities of Sherjame, the mid-ocean islands of Delleun and the small sparks of oceanic ships. Above, the stars became bright and steady and looked very close in the ghostly silence of near-vacuum flight.

The sub-orbiter plunged back into the atmosphere in a gathering roar. There were a few lights, then a smooth touchdown and deceleration. He dozed in the closed transport which took them away from the private field.

When they transferred to a helicopter he could smell sea. They flew briefly in darkness and rain and clattered down into a great circular courtyard. He was shown to a small, comfortable room and fell promptly asleep.

In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling round a jagged coastline fifty metres away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty metres or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.

He recognised this place. He had seen it in books and on screen.

The seastacks at Youmier were part of an extensive cliff system on Mainland, one of the Tail-Quiff Islands which lay in a long curved line to the east of Meiorin. The cliffs dropped between two and three hundred metres into the ocean and the seventeen seastacks — the remains of great arches that the ocean’s swells and waves had first created and then destroyed — rose like the fingers of two drowning people.

Local legend had once held that they were the fingers of a pair of drowning lovers who’d thrown themselves from the cliffs rather than be forced to marry others.

The stacks were named as though they were fingers, and the last and smallest of them, which was only forty metres above the waves, was called the Thumb. The others ranged between one and two hundred metres in height and were about the same circumference where the sea washed incessantly around their bases, tapering slightly to their basalt summits.

Building had begun upon them four thousand years earlier, when the area’s ruling family had constructed a single small stone castle on the stack nearest the cliff top and linked the two by a wooden bridge. As the family’s power had grown, so had the castle, until work was started on another stack, and then another and another.

The fortress complex spread across the various rocky pinnacles, linked by a succession of bridges — at first wood, later stone, then later still iron and steel — and became a centre of government, a place of worship and pilgrimage and a seat of learning. Over the centuries and millennia every stack except the Thumb had been permanently settled in some form or another, and it had even been a fortress for a while, equipped with heavy naval guns for a century or so. Gradually the seastacks had grown to become a city with its greatest part ashore, spreading out over the heathland behind the cliffs.

It had duly suffered the same fate as a handful of cities round the globe during the Last Unification War fifteen hundred years earlier, falling to a scatter of nuclear warheads which demolished one stack completely, halved the height of another, and had left a crater shaped like a giant 8 scooped out of the cliffs where most of the mainland districts had been.

The city was never rebuilt. The seastacks, cut off from the mainland by the twin craters, were derelict for centuries, a place for ghoulish tourism and home only to a few hermits and a million sea birds. Two of the stacks became a monastery during one of Chel’s more religious phases, then the Combined Services had commandeered all of them as a training base and rebuilt almost everything save for the bridges to the mainland before moving off-world before the whole complex was finished and leaving the Stacks mothballed with only a caretaker staff behind.

Now it was his home.

Quilan leant on a parapet and looked down to the white ruff of surf washing the Male’s Middle Finger’s base, three hundred metres below. The water looked slow from up here, he thought. As though each wave was tired from its long journey across the ocean, from wherever waves were born.

He had been here for a two-moon month. They were training him and assessing him. He still knew no more about the task beyond the fact that it was supposed to be a suicide mission. It was still not certain that he would be going on it. He knew that he was one of several contenders for the dubious honour. He had already agreed that if he was not chosen he would submit to a memory wipe which would leave him, apparently, just another war-traumatised monk in Cadracet Retreat struggling to come to terms with his experiences.

Colonel Ghejaline was present about half the time, overseeing his training. His principal instructor in the arts and crafts of most things martial was a scarred, stocky and taciturn male called Wholom. He seemed obviously Army or ex-Army, but would admit to no rank. Quilan’s other tutor was called Chuelfier; a frail, white-furred old male whose years and infirmity seemed to drop away from him when he was teaching.

There were a few Army specialists he saw every few days who obviously also lived in the complex, a handful of servants of various castes and a number of Blinded Invisibles who had remained faithful to the old ways through the Caste War.

Quilan watched the Blinded go about their duties, their upper faces covered by the green band of their rank, feeling their way with an easy familiarity or using the high-pitched clicks they made with their claws to navigate their way amongst the concrete and rock-carved spaces of the stack. To be Blinded here, with the drop to the rocks and the ocean, was, he thought, to put your faith forever in walls and thoughtful design.

He was not allowed off this stack. He strongly suspected that some of his unseen comrade-adversaries — the others who might be chosen to go on the mission rather than him — were on some of the other stacks, across the long, locked bridges the Combined Services had thrown between the rocky columns.

He held up one arm and studied his unsheathed claws. He turned his arm left and right. He had never been so muscled, so fit. He wondered if he really needed to be at such a physical peak for this mission, or whether the Army — or whoever was really behind this — just trained you up like this as a matter of course.

A large circular parade ground was located high up on the seaward side of the stack. It was open at the sides but roofed by white awnings like old-fashioned ship sails. There they had taught him fencing, trained him with a crossbow and with projectile weapons and early laser rifles. They inculcated in him the finer and less fine points of fighting with knives, and with teeth and claws. The point had been made that close-in fighting would differ when you tackled species other than your own, but it had been left at that.

A small team of medics flew in one day and took him to a big but obviously rarely used hospital hollowed out of the rock deep beneath the stack’s buildings. They equipped him with an improved Soulkeeper, but that was the only implant they touched or introduced. He had heard of agents and people on special missions being fitted with brain-linked communications rigs, poison-detection nasal glands, poison-producing sacs, subcutaneous weapon systems… the list was long but he, apparently, was going to receive none of these. He wondered why.

At one point there was a hint that whoever undertook the mission might not be entirely alone. He wondered about that, too.

Not all his training and education was martial; at least half of each waking day was spent being a student again, sitting in a curl-chair learning through screens or listening to Chuelfier.

The old male instructed him in Chelgrian history, in religious philosophy both before and after the partial Sublimation of the Chelgrian-Puen, and in the discovered history of the rest of the galaxy and its other sentient beings.

He learned more than he’d ever imagined wanting or needing to know of what Soulkeepers did and how they did it, and what limbo and heaven were like. He learned where the old religion had been overly fanciful or just plain wrong in its assumptions and tenets, where it had inspired the Chelgrian-Puen and so been made real, and where it had been superseded. He had no direct contact with any of the gone-before, but he came to understand the afterlife better than he ever had before. Sometimes, knowing that it was almost beyond doubt that Worosei would never experience anything of this created glory, he felt that they had chosen him only to torture him, that all of this was an elaborate and cruel charade to find the knife of Worosei’s loss that was forever buried in his flesh and twist it with all their might.

He learned all there was to know about the Caste War and the Culture’s involvement in the changes that had led to it.

He learned about the personalities who had contributed to the War’s background, and listened to some of the music of Mahrai Ziller, at turns so achingly full of loss he cried, at others so full of anger he wanted to smash something.

A number of suspicions and possible scenarios began to form in his mind, though he kept them to himself.

Sometimes now he dreamt of Worosei. In one dream they were being married here on the seastack, and a great wind off the sea whipped people’s hats away; he went to grab hers as it flew towards the parapet and then crashed into the whitewashed concrete, tipping over it with her hat still just out of reach. He started to fall towards the sea, and felt himself gather in the breath for a scream, then recalled that of course Worosei wasn’t really here, and could not be here; she was dead, and he might as well be. He smiled at the waves as they rushed up to meet him, and woke before he hit with a feeling of somehow having been cheated, the salty dampness on his pillow like sea.

One morning he was walking across the parade ground beneath the snapping white tents of the awnings, heading towards Chuelfier’s class room for the first lecture of the day, when he saw a small group of people directly ahead. Colonel Ghejaline, Wholom and Chuelfier were standing talking to the white- and black-clothed figure in the middle of the group.

There were five others, three on the right of the central group, two on the left. All were males dressed as clerks. The male in the middle was small and old-looking, with a sort of sideways hunch to his stance. It was something of a shock for Quilan to realise that the male was dressed in the black and white striped robe of an Estodien, one of those who went between this world and the next. He wore a lop-sided smile and held onto a long mirror staff. His fur looked slick, as though it had been oiled.

Quilan was about to greet the Colonel, but as he approached the three people he knew dropped back to let the Estodien take a couple of small steps forward.

“Estodien,” Quilan said, bowing deeply.

“Major Quilan,” the old male said in a soft, smooth voice. He reached his hand out to Quilan, who had become aware that the male standing on the extreme right of the group bulked out his clerical robes differently to the rest, and that this same male had started moving round to the side, as if starting to circle behind him. When the male disappeared from his view, the semi-shadow he cast by the attenuated light coming through the white awnings suddenly moved faster.

What finally made Quilan certain he might be about to be attacked was something about the way that the old Estodien stretched when he reached out his hand. He was frail, and could not help but keep his distance from something that might prove violent.

Quilan made as though to take the older male’s hand, then ducked and spun, went back on his haunches and brought his midlimb and hands out in the classic pounce-defence stance.

The bulky-looking male dressed as a clerk had been about to strike; he had rocked back on his haunches and his sleeves were rolled back to reveal tightly muscled arms, though his claws were only half exposed. There was a radiant, almost feral look on his white-furred face that lasted for a moment and even brightened for an instant as Quilan turned to confront him but then he glanced at the Estodien and relaxed, sitting back and lowering his arms and his head in what might have been a bow.

Quilan stayed exactly as he was, his head turning slightly to and fro, his gaze flicking as far behind him as he could manage without losing sight of the white-furred male. There did not appear to be any other movement or threat.

There was a frozen moment when nothing happened, save for the distant calls of the sea birds, the far-away thudding of the waves. Then the Estodien clicked his staff on the parade ground’s concrete once, and the white-furred male rose and turned in one fluid movement and went to stand where he had before.

“Major Quilan,” the old male said again. “Please, stand.” He held out his hand once more. “No more unpleasant surprises, at least not for today, I give you my word.”

Quilan took the Estodien’s hand and rose from his crouch.

Colonel Ghejaline came forward. She looked pleased, Quilan thought. “Major Quilan, this is Estodien Visquile.”

“Sir,” Quilan said as the older male released his hand.

“And this is Eweirl,” Visquile said, indicating the white-furred male to his left. The bulky-looking male nodded and smiled. “I hope you have the wit to realise you passed two little tests there, Major, not one.”

“Yes, sir. Or the same one, twice, sir.”

Visquile’s smile broadened, revealing small, sharp teeth. “You don’t really have to call me ‘sir’, Major, though I confess I rather like it.” He turned to Wholom and Chuelfier, and then to Colonel Ghejaline. “Not bad.” He looked back to Quilan, looking him down then up. “Come along, Major, we’ll have a talk, I think.”

“We are told it is very unusual for them to make such a mistake. We are told that we should feel flattered they took such an interest in us in the first place. We are told that they respect us. We are told that it is an accident of development and the evolution of galaxies, stars, planets and species that we meet them on less than equal technological terms. We are told that what happened is unfortunate but that we may eventually gain from it. We are told they are honourable people who only wished to help and now feel that they are in our debt because of their carelessness. We are told that we may profit more through their crushing guilt than we might have gained thanks to their easy patronage.” The Estodien Visquile smiled his thin, sharp smile. “None of this matters.”

The Estodien and Quilan sat alone in a small tower perched out over the side of one of the stack’s lowest levels of superstructure. Air and sea showed on three sides and the warm wind blew in through one glassless window and out another, laden with the scent of brine. They sat curled on grass mats.

“What matters,” the old male went on, “is what the Chelgrian-Puen have decided.”

There was a pause. Quilan suspected he was supposed to fill it, and so said, “And what would that be, Estodien?”

The old male’s fur had the odour of expensive perfume. He sat up and back on his mat, looking out of a window towards the long swells of the sea. “It has been a consistent article of our faith for twenty-seven hundred years,” he said casually, “that the souls of the departed are held in limbo for a full year before being accepted into the glory of heaven. That has not changed since we — our gone-before — made heaven real. Nor have many of the other doctrines associated with such matters. They have become rules, in a sense.” He turned and smiled again at Quilan before looking away through the window once more.

“What I’m about to tell you is known to very few people, Major Quilan. It must stay that way, do you understand?”

“Yes, Estodien.”

“Colonel Ghejaline does not know, and nor do any of your tutors.”

“I understand.”

The old male turned to him suddenly. “Why do you want to die, Quilan?”

He rocked back, thrown. “I — in a way I don’t, Estodien. I just don’t particularly want to live. I want to be no more.”

“You want to die because your mate is dead and you are pining for her, is that not the truth?”

“I would put it a little stronger than pining for her, Estodien. But it was her death that took the meaning out of my life.”

“The lives of your family and your society in this time of need and restructuring; these mean nothing to you?”

“Not nothing, Estodien. But not enough, either. I wish that I could feel otherwise, but I cannot. It is as though all the people I care about but feel I ought to care about more are already in another world from the one I inhabit.”

“She was just a female, Quilan, just a person, just one individual. What makes her so special that her memory — forever irretrievable, apparently — outranks the more pressing needs of those still alive for whom something can still be done?”

“Nothing, Estodien. It is—”

“Nothing indeed. It is not her memory; it is yours. It is not her specialness or uniqueness that you celebrate, Quilan, but your own. You are a romantic, Quilan. You find the idea of tragic death romantic, you find the idea of joining her — even if it is joining her in oblivion — romantic.” The old male drew himself up as though getting ready to go. “I hate romantics, Quilan. They do not really know themselves, but what is worse they do not really want to know themselves — or, ultimately, anybody else — because they think that will take the mystery out of life. They are fools. You are a fool. Probably your wife was a fool, too.” He paused. “Probably you were both romantic fools,” he said. “Fools who were doomed to a life of disillusionment and bitterness when you discovered that your precious romanticism faded away after the first few years of marriage and you were left to confront not just your own inadequacies but those of your mate. You were lucky she died. She was unlucky it was her and not you.”

Quilan looked at the Estodien for a few moments. The old male was breathing a little deeper and harder than should have been necessary, but otherwise he was controlling any fear he felt very well. He would be thoroughly backed-up, and as an Estodien he would be reborn or reincarnated as and when he wished. That, however, would not prevent the animal self from contemplating being bundled through a window and falling to the sea with anything other than terror. Of course this assumed the old male wasn’t wearing some sort of AG harness, in which case he might simply be afraid of Quilan ripping his throat out before Eweirl or anybody else could do anything about it.

“Estodien,” Quilan said evenly, “I have thought of all of that and been through all of that. I have accused myself of all of these things that you mention, and in rather less temperate language than you have used. You find me at the end of the process you might have wished to initiate with such assertions, not the start.”

The Estodien looked at him. “Quite good,” he said. “Speak more honestly, more fully.”

“I am not to be riled into violence by someone who never knew her calling my wife a fool. I know she was not, which is enough. And I think you just wanted to find out how easy I might be to anger.”

“Perhaps not easy enough, Quilan,” the old male said. “Not all tests are passed or failed as one might expect.”

“I am not trying to pass your tests, Estodien. I am trying to be honest. I assume your tests are good ones. If they are and I do my best and fail while somebody else succeeds then that is better than me succeeding by telling you what I think you want to hear rather than what I feel.”

“That is calm to the point of smugness, Quilan. Perhaps this mission requires somebody with more aggression and cunning than that reply indicates you to be in possession of.”

“Perhaps it does, Estodien.”

The old male kept his gaze locked on Quilan for some time. Eventually he looked away out of the window again. “The war dead will not be allowed into heaven, Quilan.”

He had to listen to the comment in his head, replaying it, to be sure he had heard correctly. He blinked. “Estodien?”

“It was a war, Major, not a civilian disturbance or a natural disaster.”

“The Caste War?” he asked, and immediately felt stupid.

“Yes, of course the Caste War,” Visquile snapped. He composed himself again. “The Chelgrian-Puen have told us that the old rules apply.”

“The old rules?” He thought he already knew what was meant.

“They must be avenged.”

“A soul for a soul?” This was the stuff of barbarism, of the old cruel gods. The death of each Chelgrian had to be balanced by the death of an enemy, and until that balance had been achieved the fallen warriors were held from heaven.

“Why ought one to leap to the idea of a one-to-one correspondence?” the Estodien asked, with a cold smile. “Perhaps one death would be all that might be required. One important death.” He looked away again.

Quilan was silent for a while, and motionless. When Visquile did not look back to him from the window and the view, he said, “One death?”

The Estodien fixed him with his gaze again. “One important death. Much might result from that.” He looked away, humming a tune. Quilan recognised the melody; it was by Mahrai Ziller.