Serpent's Reach

He asked no more.

xiii

Moth,the voices shouted, Moth, Moth!

Eggs,she thought back at them, and mocked them for what they were.

A different sound came through the speaker, the shrilling of majat voices, the crash of metal and wood.

From the vents came a curious paper-scent. Human voices had ceased long ago.

Moth poured the last of the wine, drank it.

And pushed the button.

BOOK TEN

i

The hatch opened, let in the flood of evening air, the gentle light of the setting sun.

“Stay put,”Tallen heard, “Sir, we’re picking up movement out there.”

“Wouldn’t do to run,” he said into the com unit. “Whatever happens—no response, hear me?”

“Be careful.”

Majat. He heard the ominous chirring, and walked forward, very slowly.

Newhope had stood here. Weeds had taken the ruins. At centre rose a hill, monstrous, where no hill had been. He had seen the pictures smuggled out, heard the reports and memorised them, along with family tales.

And in the long passage of years, in the fading of the Wars, thiswaited, where no Outsider dared trespass, until now.

We were wrong, the one side argued, ever to have relied on them.

But governments rose and fell and rose again, and rumours persisted…that life stirred in the forbidden Reach, that the wealth which had made the Alliance what it had been was there to be had, if any power could contrive to obtain it.

And the hives refused contact.

There were human folk on Istra, farmers, who lived out across the wide plains, who told wild tales and traded occasional jewels and rolls of majat-silk.

Tallen had met with them, these sullen, furtive men, suspicious of any ship that called; and there was warning here, for there were no few ships resting derelict in Istran fields.

Sixty years the contact had lapsed: collapse, chaos, war…worlds breaking from the Alliance in panic, warships forcing them in again, all for the scarcity of certain goods and the widespread rumours of majat breakout.

It was told in Tallen’s family that men and majat had coexisted here, had walked together in city streets, had co-operated one with the other.

It was told somewhere in Alliance files that this was so.

He heard the sound nearer now, and walked warily, stopped at last as a glittering creature rose out of the rocks and brush.

A trembling came on him, a loss of will. Natural,he thought, recalling the tales his grandfather had told, who claimed to have stood close to them. Humans react to them out of deep instinct. One has to overcome that.

They see differently:that too, from old Tallen, and from reports deep in the archives. He spread his hands wide from his sides, making clear to it that he had no weapons.

It came closer. He shut his eyes, for he quite lost big courage to look at it near at hand. He heard its loud breathing, felt the bristly touch of its forelimbs. A shadow fell on his closed eyes; something touched his mouth—he shuddered convulsively at that, and the touch and the shadow drew back.

“Stranger,” it said, a harmony of sounds that joined into a word.

“Friend,” he said, and opened his eyes.

It was still near, the moiré eyes shifted through the spectrum at each minute turn of the head. “Beta human?” it asked him.

ii

A stirring ran through the hive. Raen lifted her head, read it in the voices, the shift of bodies, needing no vision in the dark.

Stranger-human,the message came to her, and that pricked at curiosity, for betas would never come this far: they did their grain-trading far out on the riverside, where they brought their sick, such as majat could heal.

And the azi had gone long ago.

She missed them sorely. The hives did, likewise, mourning them in Drone-songs.

Merry had gone, neither first nor last, a sudden seizure of the heart. And she had wept for that, though Merry would hardly have understood it. l am azi,he had said once, refusing to be otherwise. I would not want to outlive my time.And so, one by one, the others had chosen.

It was strange, now, that a beta would have ventured into majat land, under the great Hill.

“Jim,” she said.

“I hear.” He found her hand, needing sight no more than she, as he was in other ways skilled with her skills.

Of all of them, Jim remained, a costly gift of Worker lives, and of his own will, more than Merry had had, who had wanted things his own way, in old patterns, in terms he understood.

For a long time she had cared for nothing beyond that, to know that there was one human to share the dark with her.

Now Warrior came, immortal as she, as he, in one of its many persons. “Outsider,” it said, troubled, perhaps, in the perception of changes. “Unit called Tallen.”

iii

Tallen blinked in the twilight, watching them come…two, woman and man, robed in gauzy majat-silk. They wore it as if it were nothing, priceless though it was, as if their own will were cloak enough.

They stopped near to him, and Tallen shivered in their regard, that strange coolness and lack of fear. There was a mark on the man, beneath the eye and on the shoulder: azi. The old Tallen had reported such, but not such as he, whose gaze he could not bear. The mark on the woman was of jewels; of her kind too there were remembrances.

“Ab Tallen,” she said, strangely accented, “would be an old, old man.”

“Dead,” Tallen answered. “I’m his grandson. Your people remember him?”

Her eyes flickered, seemed possessive of secrets. She held out her right hand and he took it; hesitating at the strange warmth of the jewels that covered it.

“Raen Meth-maren,” she said. “Yes, there’s memory of him. Kind memory.”

“Your name is hers, that he mentioned.”

She smiled faintly, and questions of kinship went uninvited. She nodded to the man beside her. “Jim,” she said, and that was all.

Tallen took the other offered hand, regarded them both anxiously, for majat hovered about, escort, guards, soldiery—there was no knowing what.

“You delayed longer than you should,” she said.

“We had our years of trouble. I’m afraid there may have been landings here of a sort we’d not have allowed. Our apologies, for such intrusions.”

She shrugged. “Most have learned, have they not?”

That was truth, and chilling in her ma

“Now,” she said, “we’re pleased to answer you. Is it trade you want?”

He nodded, all his careful speeches destroyed, forgotten in that direct stare.

“I’m Meth-maren. Hive friend. Intermediary. I can arrange what you want.” She looked about her, and at him. “I speak and translate.”

“We need lab-goods, more than the jewels the farmers have been trading.”

“Then give us computers. You’ll get your lab products.”

“And some sort of licensing for regular trade.”

She nodded toward the plains, the beta-holds. “There are those who will deal with you as we arrange.”

“There’s no station any longer. It’s gone.”

“Crashed. We saw it, Jim and I. It fell into the sea, a long time ago. But stations can be rebuilt.”

“Come aboard my ship,” he invited her. “We’ll talk specifics.”

She shook her head, smiled faintly. “No, ser. Take your ship from the vicinity of the hive tonight, within the hour. Go to riverside. I’ll find you there with no trouble. But don’t linger near the hive.”

And she walked away, leaving him standing. The majat remained, and the man, who looked at him with remotely curious eyes and then walked away.