Glen Cook - Doomstalker

Below and in front of that mad tree there was one huge dish which faced the heavens above the southern horizon. Sometimes that dish moved the way a head did when the eye was following fast game.

What in the world? Very baffling for a pup from the upper Ponath, who found so much metal put to such inexplicable use criminal at the least. She wondered if Grauel or Barlog knew what was going on here. They had been to the packfast before. Surely they had unraveled some of its mysteries. She would have to become more insistent about being shown where they were recuperating.

Grauel and Barlog were sequestered apparently. She had not seen them since entering the packfast. No one would tell her where they were being treated. When she tried to use her own remarkable senses to locate them, something blocked her.

She did not think she was going to like the packfast Akard.

She knew she did not like the way the fortress's huntresses cringed and cowered around the silth. She knew there would be a confrontation of epic proportion the day the silth demanded that of her.

She went down to where the metal tree was and roamed around. But she could find nothing that explained what she saw. Or what she felt. While she was there she became dizzy and disoriented. It took all her concentration to overcome the giddiness and confusion long enough to find her way to a distance sufficient to reduce both.

Her secret senses seemed all scrambled. What had happened? Had she stumbled into some of the great magic for which the silth were so feared?

I

Marika could not stay away from that strange part of the packfast where her brain and talent scrambled. Three times that day of discovery she returned. Three times she reeled away, the third time so distressed her stomach nearly betrayed her.

There had been a true qualitative difference that last time, the strangeness being more intense.

She leaned against a wall and tried to hold her dinner down, panting, letting the chill north wind suck the sudden fever from her face. Finally, she pulled herself together enough to move on.

She ducked into the first doorway she encountered. The vertigo was less intense inside.

She halted. She heard odd voices ahead. Strange lights flickered around her. Lights without flame or much heat when she passed a finger near them. Quiet lights, constant in their burning, hard to the touch when she did rest a finger upon them. What witchery was this?

She became very nervous. She had been told she could go wherever she wanted and see anything she wanted. Yet the silth must have their ritual places, like the males and huntresses of the packstead, and those certainly would be off limits. Was this such a place? She dreaded the chance she would interrupt the silth at their black rites. They had begun to seem as dark as her packmates had feared.

Curiosity overcame fear. She moved forward a few steps, looked around in awe. The room was like nothing she had ever imagined. Some yards away a female in a blue smock moved among devices whose purposes Marika could not pretend to fathom. Some had windows that flickered with a ghostly gray light. The voices came from them. The female in the blue smock did not respond.

Devils. The windows must open on the underworld, or the afterworld, or ... She fought down the panic, moved forward a few more steps toward the nearest of those ghostly portals.

She frowned, more confused than ever. A voice came through the window, but there was no one on the other side. Instead, she saw squiggles arranged in neat columns, like a page from a book in reversed coloration.

Flicker. The page changed. A new set of squiggles appeared. Some of those altered while she watched. She gasped and stepped closer again, bent till her nose was almost against the window.

The meth finally noticed her presence. "Hello," she said. "You must be the new sister."

Marika wondered if she ought to flee. "I do not know," she replied, throat tight. She was confused about her status. Some of the meth of the packfast did call her sister. But she did not know why. No one had taken time to explain. She did know that the word "sister" did not mean what it might have at home: another pup born of the same dam. None of these meth seemed to be related by blood or pack.

The society was nothing like that of a pack. Hierarchies and relationships were confusing. So far she had figured out for sure only that those who wore black were in charge and everyone else deferred to them in a curious set of rituals which might never make sense.

"What is this place?" Marika asked. "Is it holy? Am I intruding?"

"This is the communications center," the female replied, amused. "It is holy only to those hungry for news from the south." It seemed she had made a great jest. And was sorry to have wasted it on a savage unable to appreciate it. "You are from the stead in the upper Ponath that the nomads destroyed, are you not?"

Marika nodded. That story had gotten around fast once she had told the sentry. Many of the meth who wore colors other than black wanted to know all about the siege of the Degnan packstead. But when Marika told them the story, it made them unhappy. For themselves, not for the meth of the upper Ponath.

"Nomads running together in thousands. Ruled by a wehrlen. Times are strange indeed. What next?"

Marika shrugged. Her imagination was inadequate to encompass how her life could turn worse than it had already.

"Well, you are from the outside, so all this will be new to you. The upper Ponath is as backward a region as can be found on this world, bar the Zhotak, and deliberately so. That is the way the sisterhood and the brethren want it kept. Come. There is nothing here to fear. I will show you. My name is Braydic, by the way. Senior Koenic is my truesister, though blood means nothing here."

"I am Marika." Marika moved to the female's side.

Braydic indicated the nearest gray window. "We call this a vision screen. A number of things can be done with it. At the moment this one is monitoring how much water we have stored behind each of the three dams on the Husgen. That is what you call the west fork of the Hainlin. For us the east fork continues to be the Hainlin and the west fork becomes the Husgen. If you have been up on the ramparts at all, you must have seen the lower dam and its powerhouse."

Marika feared she might have walked into a trap quite unlike the one she had suspected. Meth did not chatter. They became very uncomfortable with those who did. Talkers were suspected of being unbalanced. Generally, they were just lonely.

Braydic poked several black lozenges among the scores ranked before the vision screen. Each lozenge had a white character inscribed upon it. The squiggles left the screen. A picture replaced them. After a moment Marika realized it represented a view up the west fork of the Hainlin, the branch Braydic called the Husgen. It portrayed structures about which Marika had been curious but had felt too foolish to ask.

"This is the powerhouse. This is the dam. The dam spans the river, forming a wall that holds back the water. The water comes down to the powerhouse through huge earthenware pipes, where it turns a wheel." Braydic poked lozenges again. Now the screen portrayed a big wooden wheel turning slowly as water from a pipe poured down upon blades. "The wheel in turn turns a machine which generates the power we use."

Marika was baffled, of course. What power? Did the silth generate the touch artificially?

Braydic recognized her confusion. "Yes. You would not understand, would you?" She stepped to a wall, touched something there. All the lights, except those near the vision screens, went out. Then on again. "I meant the power that works the lights and vision screens and such. I am monitoring the water levels behind the dams because the spring thaw will begin before long. We have to estimate how much to let water levels drop so the three lakes will be able to absorb meltoff without risk of overflow."