David Zindell - War in Heaven

And so he took his shimmering ship down through the sky’s cold ozone into the lower and warmer layers of the atmosphere. It was a perfect, blue inside blue day of sunlight and clarity. Flying was a joy – falling and gliding down through space on wings of diamond towards the Order’s new city, which the Lord Pilot had named, simply, Lightstone. As with Neverness, whom the pilots and other ordermen had abandoned a few years before, this was to be a City of Light – a great, gleaming city upon a hill that would bring the Order’s cold enlightenment to all the peoples of the Vild. Actually, Lightstone was built across three hills on the peninsula of a large island surrounded by ocean. It shimmered in the noonday sun, for all its buildings were wrought of white granite or organic stone. As Danlo fell down to earth, he looked out of the windows of the Snowy Owl and caught the glint of rose and amethyst and a thousand other colours scattered from street to street and hill to hill. Soon his ship swooped down to one of the many runs crossing the city’s light-field. There, a mile from a neighbourhood of little stone cottages, out on a plain covered with flowering bushes and rocks, the Snowy Owl at last came to rest. And for the first time in many days, Danlo felt the long, heavy pull of gravity deep within his bones. It took him little time to gather his things together into the plain wooden chest that he had been given as a novice years ago. He dressed himself in his formal, black pilot’s robe before breaking the seal to the pit of his ship. And then he climbed down to the run’s hard surface. For the first time in more than a year, he stood squinting at the bright light of a real and open sky.

‘Hello, Pilot,’ a voice called out to him. ‘You’ve fallen far and well, haven’t you?’

Danlo stood holding his wooden chest while he turned to look towards the end of the run and the great sweeping buildings beyond. There waited the usual cadre of programmers, tinkers and other professionals who attended the arrival of any lightship. He recognized a red-robed horologe named Ian Hedeon, but it was a pilot who had spoken to him. This was the Sonderval, an impossibly tall man dressed in black silks, as was Danlo. He was as straight and imposing as a yu tree, and as proud – in truth he was prouder of his brilliance than any other man whom Danlo had ever known.

‘Master Pilot,’ Danlo said, ‘it is good to see you again.’

‘You may address me as “Lord Pilot”,’ the Sonderval said, stepping closer. ‘I’ve been elevated since last we met.’

‘Lord … Pilot, then,’ Danlo said. He remembered very well the evening when he and the Sonderval had talked beneath the twilight sky of Farfara some few years ago. It had been a night of the new supernova – the last night before the Second Vild Mission had left the last of the Civilized Worlds for Thiells. ‘Lord Pilot … can you tell me the date?’

‘The date on this planet or on Neverness?’

‘The date on Neverness, if you please.’

The Sonderval looked off at the sky, making a quick calculation. ‘It’s the 65th of midwinter spring.’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said, ‘but what year is it?’

‘The year is 2959,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Almost three thousand years since the founding of the Old Order.’

Danlo closed his eyes for a moment in remembrance. It had been almost five years since he had set out with the Second Vild Mission from Neverness, and he suddenly realized that he must be twenty-seven years old.

‘So long,’ Danlo said. Then he opened his eyes and smiled at the Sonderval. ‘But you look well, sir.’

‘You look well, too,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But there’s something strange about you – you look different, I think. Gentler, almost. Wiser and even wilder, if that can be believed.’

In truth, Danlo wi Soli Ringess was the wildest of men. In the time since Neverness his hair had grown long and free so that it fell almost to his waist. In this thick black hair, shot with a strand of red, he had fastened a white feather that his grandfather had given him years before. Once, as a young man, he had made a blood-offering to the spirits of his dead family, and he had slashed his forehead with a sharp stone. A lightning-bolt scar still marked him to remind others that here was an uncommon man, a fierce man of deep purposes who would listen for his fate calling in the wind or look inside the secret fires of his heart. It was his greatest joy to gaze without fear upon the terrible beauties of the world. His marvellous eyes were like the deepest, bluest cobalt glass, and they held light as a chalice does water. And more, they shone like stars, and it was this mysterious deepening of his gaze that the Sonderval had remarked, the way that light seemed to pour out of him as if fed by some wild and infinite source.

‘You look sadder, too,’ the Sonderval continued. ‘And yet you’ve returned to your Order as a pilot should, having made discoveries.’

‘Yes, truly, I have made … discoveries.’

Danlo looked past the field’s other runs, noisy with the rocket fire of lightships and jammers and other craft. Towards the ocean to the west, the city of Lightstone spread out over its three hills in lovely crystalline buildings, each house or tower giving shelter to human beings who had risked their lives to come to the Vild. Whenever Danlo pondered the fate of his bloody but blessed race, his face fell full of sadness. He always felt the pain of others too easily, just as the men and women whom he met almost always sensed his essential gentleness. Once, when he was only fourteen, he had taken a vow of ahimsa never to kill or harm any animal or man. And yet he was not only kind and compassionate, but strong and fierce as a thallow. With his quick, bold, wild face, he even looked something like that most noble of all creatures. Like the thallows of Icefall – the blue and the silver and the rare white thallows – his long, graceful body fairly rippled with animajii , a wild joy of life. That was his gift (and curse), that like a man holding fire in one hand and black ice in the other, he could always contain the most violent of opposites within himself. Even when he was saddest, he could hear the golden notes of a deeper and more universal song. Once, he had been told that he had been born laughing, and even now, as a man who had witnessed the death of stars and people whom he loved, he liked to laugh whenever he could.

‘ Important discoveries, I think,’ the Sonderval said. ‘You’ve called for the entire College of Lords to convene – no pilot has done that since your father returned from the Solid State Entity.’

‘Yes, I have much to tell of, sir.’

‘Have you succeeded in your quest to speak to the Entity?’

Danlo smiled as he looked up at the Sonderval’s long, stern face. Although Danlo was a tall man, the Sonderval stood more than a foot and a half taller.