So that they might remember their arrangement, the Birdmaker gave them useless, clawed wing-stubs—enough to remind them of what they had forsaken, and enough to enable them to begin writing down their history. Fire burned in their minds too, but this was the unquenchable fire of being. That light would always burn, the Birdmaker told them—so long as they did not try to defy the Birdmaker’s will by once more returning to the skies. If they did that, it was promised, the Birdmaker would take back the souls they had been given on the Day of Burning Wings.
It was, Sylveste knew, simply the understandable attempt of a culture to raise a mirror to itself. What made it significant was the complete extent to which it had permeated their culture—in effect, a single religion which had superseded all others and which had persisted, through different tellings, for an unthinkable span of centuries. Undoubtedly it had shaped their thinking and behaviour, perhaps in ways too complex to begin guessing.
“I understand,” Pascale said. “As a species, they couldn’t deal with being flightless, so they created the Birdmaker story so they could feel some superiority over the birds which could still fly.”
“Yes. And while that belief worked, it had one unexpected side-effect: to deter them from ever taking flight again: Much like the Icarus myth, only exhibiting a stronger hold over their collective psyche.”
“But if that’s the case, the figure on the spire…”
“Is a big two-fingered salute to whatever god they used to believe in.”
“Why would they do that?” Pascale said. “Religions just fade away; get replaced by new ones. I can’t believe they’d build that city, everything in it, just as an insult to their old god.”
“Me neither. Which suggests something else entirely.”
“Like what?”
“That a new god moved in. One with wings.”
Volyova had decided it was time to show Khouri the instruments of her profession. “Hold on,” she said, as the elevator approached the cache chamber. “People don’t generally like this the first time it happens.”
“God,” Khouri said, instinctively pressing herself against the rear wall as the vista suddenly expanded shockingly; the elevator a tiny beetle crawling down the side of the vast space. “It looks too big to fit inside!”
“Oh, this is nothing. There are another four chambers this large. Chamber two is where we train for surface ops. Two are empty or semi-pressurised; the fourth holds shuttles and in-system vehicles. This is the only one dedicated to holding the cache.”
“You mean those things?”
“Yes.”
There were forty cache-weapons in the chamber, though none exactly resembled any other. Yet in their general style of construction, a certain affinity was betrayed. Each machine was cased in alloy of a greenish-bronze hue. Though each of the devices was large enough to be a medium-sized spacecraft in its own right, none exhibited any indication that this was their function. There were no windows or access doors visible in what would have been their hulls, no markings or communications systems. While some of the objects were studded with what might have been vernier jets, they were only there to assist in the moving around and positioning of the devices, much as a battleship was only there to assist in moving around and positioning its big guns.
Of course, that was exactly what the cache devices were.
“Hell-class,” Volyova said. “That was what their builders called them. Of course, we’re going back a few centuries here.”
Volyova watched as her recruit appraised the titanic size of the nearest cache-weapon. Suspended vertically, its long axis aligned with the ship’s axis of thrust, it looked like a ceremonial sword dangling from a warrior-baron’s ceiling. Like all the weapons, it was surrounded by a framework which had been added by one of Volyova’s predecessors, to which were attached various control, monitoring and manoeuvring systems. All the weapons were connected to tracks—a three-dimensional maze of sidings and switches—which merged lower down in the chamber, feeding into a much smaller volume directly below, large enough to contain a single weapon. From there, the weapons could be deployed beyond the hull, into space.
“So who built them?” Khouri said.
“We don’t know for sure. The Conjoiners, perhaps, in one of their darker incarnations. All we know is how we found them—hidden away in an asteroid, circling a brown dwarf so obscure it has only a catalogue number.”
“You were there?”
“No; this was long before my time. I only inherited them from the last caretaker—and he from his. I’ve been studying them ever since. I’ve managed to access the control systems of thirty-one of them, and I’ve figured out—very roughly—about eighty per cent of the necessary activation codes. But I’ve only tested seventeen of the weapons, and of that number, only two in what you might term actual combat situations.”
“You mean you’ve actually used them?”
“It wasn’t something I rushed into.”
No need, she thought, to burden Khouri with details of past atrocities—at least, not immediately. Over time, Khouri would come to know the cache-weapons as well as Volyova knew them—perhaps even more intimately, since Khouri would know them via the gunnery, through direct neural-interface.
“What can they do?”
“Some of them are more than capable of taking planets apart. Others… I don’t even want to guess. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of them did unpleasant things to stars. Exactly who’d want to use such weapons…” She trailed off.
“Who did you use them against?”
“Enemies, of course.”
Khouri regarded her for long, silent seconds.
“I don’t know whether to be horrified that such things exist… or relieved to know that at least it’s us who have our fingers on the triggers.”
“Be relieved,” Volyova said. “It’s better that way.”
Sylveste and Pascale returned to the spire, hovering. The winged Amarantin was just as they had left it, but now it seemed to brood over the city with imperious disregard. It was tempting to think that a new god really had moved in—what else could have inspired the building of such a monument, if not fear of the divine? But the accompanying text on the spire was maddeningly hard to unscramble.
“Here’s a reference to the Birdmaker,” Sylveste said. “So chances are good the spire had some bearing on the Burning Wings myth, even though the winged god clearly isn’t a representation of the Birdmaker.”
“Yes,” Pascale said. “That’s the graphicform for fire, next to the one for wings.”
“What else do you see?”
Pascale concentrated for a few long moments. “There’s some reference here to a renegade flock.”
“Renegade in what sense?” He was testing her, and she knew it, but the exercise was valuable in itself, for Pascale’s interpretation would give him some indication of how subjective his own analysis had been.
“A renegade flock which didn’t agree to the deal with the Birdmaker, or reneged on the deal afterwards.”
“That’s what I thought. I was worried I might have made an error or two.”
“Whoever they were, they were called the Banished Ones.” She read back and forth, testing hypotheses and revising her interpretation as she went. “It looks like they were originally part of the flock who agreed to the Birdmaker’s terms, but that they changed their minds sometime later.”
“Can you make out the name of their leader?”
She began: “They were led by an individual called…” But then Pascale trailed off. “No, can’t translate that string; at least not right now. What does all this mean, anyway? Do you think they really existed?”