Gillian Anderson - The Sound of Seas

Mikel was silent for a moment. “If you could call being buried by icy snow disbursing.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Skett said. “Most will get away. They are very, very hardy. They will dig down and hibernate. It is remarkable though, isn’t it? The fact that the slightest variation in the acoustic modulation being employed here can impact a life-form at the end of the earth. It’s a shame Arni didn’t know that, eh?”

“We’ve all had a very steep learning curve,” Mikel replied. “All right, Skett, it’s cold where I am. What am I doing here?”

“You’re going down into the pit.”

There was a brief silence. “With a broken wrist?”

“I didn’t say you were going to climb,” Skett said. “Good God, I’m not a lunatic. The Tacoma must have a winch and you can rig a sling. In any case, you are going into the pit.”

“And once I’m there?” Mikel asked.

“You will send me video of whatever is there as you see it.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Mikel said.

“Oh?”

“That one’s not me being obstinate, Skett. I could barely get a signal the last time I was there. I’ll record images and send them later.”

Skett considered that. “As insurance for you, no doubt?”

“That too,” Mikel said. “If anything happens to me, to any of us, you get nothing.”

“That’s not true, you know,” Skett said. “All it means is that I’ll have to send someone else, and that will mean a delay. And Flora will be dead: I will kill her and burn her with my various rodents and pigeons. Anyway,” Skett went on, “I don’t think you’ll be uncooperative.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I am,” Skett said. “You can stonewall and posture all you want, Dr. Jasso, but you want to probe the knowledge of that civilization. Why else would you be in the South Pole? Why did you risk death?”

Skett had a point. Mikel did not answer.

“To do all that before you freeze, you will need my help,” Skett went on.

“Skett, you do understand what you’re playing with?”

Skett snickered. “Do you understand who you’re talking to? Dr. Jasso, I’ve spent decades studying this subject… waiting for global warming to catch up to my needs, to show me what hacked satellites and outpost communications could not, to reveal Galderkhaan. I have waited patiently for this moment. I need eyes on— now , if you please.”

There was another short silence on Mikel’s end. Skett’s careful eyes slid toward Flora. He was accustomed to watching everything from the shadows: studying the reactions of people on the street to the dead animals he collected for the city, watching how other animals responded to death, even watching how people responded to their own death, like Yokane and the others he had been forced to murder for his people. He knew fear and defeat, compliance and docility, when he saw it. All those qualities were present in Flora Davies. It hadn’t been necessary to restrain her: as long as he controlled the acoustic monitor, he controlled the two tiles and their fearful power—even the near-dormant artifact in the freezer. Flora knew what his colleague Eilifir Benediktsson and the team in Connecticut knew. They had all seen what those unbridled forces did to poor, fumbling Arni Haugan in this very room… and to Caitlin O’Hara in the park. The reason she hadn’t perished was not known to Skett. That too was something he needed to uncover.

All in its time , he told himself.

Flora knew all of that too. She sat quite still-not because she feared for her life, but because she did not want to distract Skett needlessly. Not with the forces at his fingertips. And as heartless as it was, she too was curious. Adrienne was already in the thrall of the stone in the laboratory; Flora had noticed her fingertips stiffen when Skett boosted the power slightly. They were relaxed now. She suspected that Adrienne was the target of the experiment on this end. She had no idea what he was expecting on the other end.

“How is it going out there, Dr. Jasso?” Skett demanded.

“The truck is getting into position.”

Skett glanced at his watch. “You have another minute. One. That’s how long it should take.”

Mikel went silent and Skett saw Flora glaring at him.

“Oh, poor Flora, sidelined and denied her place in the modern Galderkhaani pantheon.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was learn, to work with the tiles. You want to control them.”

“Like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other,” Skett said.

“It’s your mind-set that is objectionable,” she said. “All these years, these centuries of exploration and struggle, and this is how it finishes. With a prize in the hands of some Technologist.”

“Not ‘some,’” Skett said. “‘The.’ He is the senior surviving Technologist. His name is Antoa.”

“And what are you?” Flora asked. “A hireling.”

“You cannot humiliate me, if that is your intent,” Skett said.

She snickered. “You still have blood on the side of your hand… like a butcher.”

“It’s honorable blood, blood spit from the mouth of Yokane, the blood of a Priest,” he said.

“Lunatic hatreds,” she sneered.

“Which you have helped to perpetuate.”

“Not true!” she said. “I rejected the overtures of Priests, of those like Yokane. I knew they existed but I refused to communicate with them. I only served one cause: knowledge.”

“But you took their funding,” Skett said. “You had to know.”

“I didn’t know and I would have stopped, at once, had anyone interfered,” Flora said. “Whatever was arranged was set up long before my grandparents were born. And never did I kill, or advocate killing.” She raised a chin toward the tile. “Mikel was very careful about obtaining that. Stealth and thievery, not murder.”

“What about Arni? What about two decades ago, Dr. Meyers, who was killed in Hong Kong trying to buy an artifact from the Triad.”

“Unfortunate,” she admitted. “We all know this is dangerous work. I’m not naïve, Skett. We’ve robbed museums, private collections. People have gone to prison.”

“Not you, though. You are careful and pragmatic, and I salute that. But you also have no right to judge me.” Skett squatted to face her, held the side of his bloody hand to her cheek. “In the old days, I’m told, before ‘civilization’ came to Galderkhaan, human blood was a means of communication, of writing, of art.”

“Of sacrifice.”

“That too,” he admitted. “There was barbarism. The adolescence of an ancient people.”

“Galderkhaan banished it,” Flora said.

“Did they?” Skett said. “Even after violence was outlawed, bloodletting continued under the aegis of the Priests. Blood caused words to grow, quite literally.”

“That’s not been proven.”

“We have writings that verify it,” he said. “They describe how the mosses and molds that sprouted from paintings executed in blood gave rise to the accents, the hand movements, of the Galderkhaani. The ancients believed that the Candescents were speaking to them… through blood.”

“Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs,” she said.

“Questioned, yes. Disproved? Never quite that. Mosses grew differently, more eloquently, on certain stones. These stones. The ones that vibrated. If they were not special, why would we all have sought them these many centuries?”

“Not because we believed that a god was trying to talk to us through fungus sprouting naturally from biological material,” Flora said. “We were looking for deeper secrets that were locked in the stones, in matter that we believe dates to the dawn of the universe.”