“I’m Gar-Reestee,” said the charioteer. “I’ve got Sal-Afsan with me. He’s hurt.”
Afsan heard Mondark’s heavy footfalls as the healer hurried to the chariot. “God,” he said. “How did this happen?”
“He tripped and fell into the roadway. My hornface kicked him in the head before I could stop my chariot.”
“Those are massive wounds.” Mondark leaned closer, his voice reassuring. “Afsan, you’re going to be all right.”
The charioteer’s voice, incredulous: “Healer, your muzzle—”
“Shush,” said Mondark. “Help me bring him inside. Afsan, we’re going to pick you up.”
Once again, Afsan was carried. He felt cold in the side of his head. After several moments, he was placed face down on a marble tabletop. Mondark had treated Afsan kilodays ago on a similar table after Afsan had plummeted to the ground from the top of a thunderbeast’s neck. The surgery chamber, Afsan knew, was heated by a cast-iron stove burning coal. He also knew that the roof above the table was made largely of glass, letting in outside light, illuminating the patient.
“Thank you, Gar-Reestee, for bringing Afsan in,” said Mondark. “I will do everything I can for him, but you must leave. The physical contact for treating his injuries is something you shouldn’t see.”
The charioteer’s voice was full of sorrow. “Good Sal-Afsan, I’m terribly sorry. It was an accident.”
Afsan tried to nod, but daggers of pain stabbed through his muzzle.
The charioteer left. Mondark went to work.
“Land ho!”
Captain Var-Keenir stopped pacing the deck of the sailing ship Dasheter and tipped his muzzle up to the lookout bucket, high atop the foremast. Old Biltog was up there, his red leather cap and the green skin of his head and shoulders stark against the purple sky. Keenir’s tail swished in sadness. He’d seen it happen before on long voyages, and lookout officers, who spent inordinate amounts of time in the sun, were particularly susceptible to it. Biltog was hallucinating. Why, Land—the single known continent—was half a world away.
“Land ho!” called Biltog again, his green arm extended toward the northeast. The red sail attached to the foremast snapped in the wind. Two Quintaglios moved to the starboard side of the vessel to see what Biltog was pointing at.
Keenir looked up again. The sun, brilliant and white, was climbing in front of them. Behind, covering half the sky between zenith and rear horizon, was the Face of God, its leading edge illuminated, the rest of its vast bulk in shadow. Also visible were three moons, wan shapes in the sun’s glare. But along the northeastern horizon there was nothing but waves touching sky.
Near Keenir was a ramp leading below. Kee-Toroca, a young Quintaglio male, came up it. He moved closer to Keenir than Keenir was comfortable with and said, “Did I hear a shout of ‘land ho’?”
Keenir had known the young savant all his life; indeed, Toroca had taken his praenomen syllable in honor of him. “You’ve sharp hearing indeed, to have heard that below deck,” he said in his gravelly voice. “Yes, Biltog shouted it, but, well, I think he’s had too much sun. There can’t be any land out here.”
“Ah, but undiscovered land is exactly what we’re looking for.”
Keenir clicked his teeth. “Aye, the final stage of the Geological Survey. But I don’t expect to find any, and doubt very much we have now.”
Toroca was carrying the brass far-seer his mother, Novato, had given to his father, Afsan, the day after he had been conceived. It glinted in the fierce sun, its green patina counterpointed by purple reflections of the sky above. Toroca scanned the horizon once with his unaided eye.
Nothing.
Or was there something?
He brought the far-seer to his face and slid the tube’s components apart until the horizon was in focus. There was a slight brown line dividing the waves and the sky.
Keenir could see it, too, now. Biltog’s greater height had let him spot the land sooner than those on deck.
“Will you look at that?” said Toroca softly, passing the far-seer to the captain.
“An unknown country,” said Keenir, head shaking in disbelief. Then, rotating on his heel, he shouted, “Starboard ho! Turn the ship!”
An ark.
A space ark.
Wab-Novato leaned back on her muscular tail, placed her hands firmly on her slender hips, and looked up at the vast blue structure protruding from the cliff face.
She’d spent most of the last two kilodays here in Fra’toolar province, studying this alien spaceship, trying to fathom its mysteries. But figuring out this ship was like tracking a wingfinger: you could follow the footprints in the sand, fooling yourself that you were getting closer to a tasty meal, but just when you thought you had your quarry within reach, it would take to the air, leaving you far behind. There were almost no gears or levers or springs used in this ship’s construction, no pumps or wheels, nothing that Quintaglios were familiar with.
It had seemed like a Godsend, this ship of space. The Quintaglio world, innermost of fourteen moons, was doomed: within a few hundred kilodays it would be torn apart by the stress of its orbit around the giant, banded planet called the Face of God. Twenty kilodays ago, when Afsan had figured out that their moon was doomed, no Quintaglio had ever flown and the idea of traversing the void between worlds was the stuff of the wildest fantasy stories. But now the government was devoted to the exodus, the project Novato herself was in charge of.
Before this ship had been found, the Quintaglios had been making good progress on their own: after studying wingfingers and the long-extinct creatures known as birds, Novato had built the first glider, the Tak-Saleed. In the two kilodays since, more efficient gliders had been developed. Perhaps she’d been a fool to turn over that line of research to someone else, although back then this ark had seemed to be a shortcut to the stars. But despite the best efforts of her team, no one yet had a clue as to how the ship operated.
The cliff it was embedded in was more than a hundred paces tall, showing the best uninterrupted sequences of sedimentary rock on all of Land. Toroca had uncovered the ship while studying these layers, looking for fossils. He found lots of them above a certain point—the lowest chalk stratum, known as the Bookmark layer—but none below. It had been as if the Bookmark indicated the point of the divine creation of life. But most scholars now agreed that it was instead the arrival point, marking where transplanted lifeforms had first been released by other arks onto this world.
But this ark had crashed, its five-eyed crewmembers killed, its cargo of plants and animals never released. The ark had been buried in sediment that later turned to rock, but it had not been crushed: the blue material of the ship’s hull was harder than diamond and impervious to corrosion. The part now projecting out of the cliff had been exposed by blasting, and, big though it seemed, it was only a tiny fraction of the total ship.
It was noon. The purple sky was shot through with silvery-white clouds. To Novato’s left were choppy waves—the world-spanning body of water. In front of her, running along the edge of the cliff, was a narrow strip of beach, crabs scuttling amongst the rocks. Leading up the cliff face to the blue ark were webs of climbing ropes left over from the early excavations as well as scaffolding made of adabaja wood, added later to make getting up to the ark easier. Oil lamp in hand, Novato began climbing the rickety stairs of the scaffolding.
As she ascended, she could see, far overhead, the green forms of several Quintaglios working with picks at the sides of the giant ark. Others, Novato knew, were likewise hacking away at the rock on top of the ship. To date, only one entrance to the ship had been found, and passage through it was hampered because its outer door was jammed partway shut. Miners had been working steadily at uncovering more of the ship in hopes of finding another way in. So far they had failed, but as they exposed more of the ship’s roof, they had found that much of it was covered with black hexagonal cells. No one knew what the black honeycomb was for, but Novato had noticed one startling thing: rather than heating up in the sunlight, as dark objects normally did, these cells remained cool, as if—Novato couldn’t fathom the mechanism involved—as if the heat falling on them were somehow conducted into the ship.