'Do the sums. Your ship's from seven thousand years earlier than my own era. And I've just taken a three-thousand-year catnap.'
'Ah. Perhaps if I'd arrived in time to waken you with a kiss you wouldn't be quite so grumpy. But your point was?'
'We shouldn't be able to understand each other at all. Which makes me wonder if you're lying to me.'
'I see.' For a moment Sora thought she heard him chuckling to himself, almost a catlike purring. 'What I'm wondering is why I need to listen to this stuff and nonsense, given that I'm not the one in current need of rescuing.'
His suit calmed, aggressor markings cooling to neutral blues and yellows. He let his hand drop slowly.
'I'd say,' the familiar said, 'that he has a fairly good point.'
Sora stepped closer. 'I'm a little edgy, that's all. Comes with the territory. '
'You were attacked?'
'Slightly. A swarm took out my swallowship.'
'Bad show,' the man said, nodding. 'Haven't seen swallowships for two and a half kiloyears. Too hard for the halo factories to manufacture, once the Huskers started targeting motherbases. The Cohort regressed again - fell back on fusion pulse drives. Before very long they'll be back to generation starships and chemical rockets.'
'Thanks for all the sympathy.'
'Sorry . . . it wasn't my intention to sound callous. It's simply that I've been travelling. It gives one a certain - how shall I say - loftiness of perspective? Means I've kept more up to date with current affairs than you have. That's how I understand you.' With his free hand he tapped the side of his helmet. 'I've a database of languages running halfway back to the Flourishing.'
'Bully for you. Who are you, by the way?'
'Ah. Of course. Introductions.' He reached out the free hand, this time in something approximating welcome. 'Merlin.'
It was impossible; it cut against all common sense, but she knew who he was.
It was not that they had ever met. But everyone knew of Merlin; there was no word for him other than legend. Seven, or more properly ten thousand years ago, it was Merlin who had stolen something from the Cohort, vanishing into the galaxy on a quest for what could only be described as a weapon too dreadful to use. He had never been seen again - until, apparently, now.
'Thanks for rescuing me,' Sora said, when he had shown her to the bridge of the ship he called
Tyrant
- a spherical chamber outfitted with huge, black control seats, facing a window of flawless metasapphire overlooking cometary ice.
'Don't overdo the gratitude,' the familiar said.
Merlin shrugged. 'You're welcome.'
'And sorry if I acted a little edgy.'
'Forget it. As you say, comes with the territory. Actually, I'm rather glad I found you. You wouldn't believe how scarce human company is these days.'
'Nobody ever said it was a friendly galaxy.'
'Less so now, believe me. Now the Cohort's started losing whole star systems. I've seen world after world shattered by the Huskers; whole strings of orbiting habitats gutted by nuclear fire. The war's in its terminal stages, and the Cohort isn't in anything resembling a winning position.' Merlin leaned closer to her, sudden enthusiasm burning in his eyes. 'But I've found something that can make a difference, Sora. Or at least, I have rather a good idea where one might find it.'
She nodded slowly. 'Let's see. That wouldn't be Merlin's fabulous gun, by any chance?'
'You're still not entirely sure I'm who I say I am, are you?'
'I've one or two nagging doubts.'
'You're right, of course.' He sighed theatrically and gestured around the bridge. In the areas not reserved for control readouts, the walls were adorned with treasure: trinkets, finery and jewels of staggering artistry and beauty, glinting with the hues of the rarest alloys, inset with precious stones, shaped by the finest lapidary skill of a thousand worlds. There were chips of subtly coloured ceramic and tiny white-light holograms of great brilliance. There were daggers and brooches, ornate ceremonial lasers and bracelets, terrible swords and grotesque, carnelian-eyed carnival masques.
'I thought,' Merlin said, 'that this would be enough to convince you.'
He had sloughed the outer layer of his suit, revealing himself to be what she had on some level feared: a handsome, broad-shouldered man who in every way conformed to the legend she had in mind. Merlin dressed luxuriously, encrusted in jewellery that was, nonetheless, at the dour end of the spectrum compared to what was displayed on the walls. His beard was carefully trimmed and his long, auburn hair hung loose, evoking leonine strength. He radiated magnificence.
'Oh, it's pretty impressive,' Sora said. 'Even if a good fraction of it must have been looted. And maybe I am half-convinced. But you have to admit, it's quite a story.'
'Not from my perspective.' He was fiddling with an intricate ring on one forefinger. 'Since I left on my
quest
' - he spoke the word with exquisite distaste - 'I've lived rather less than eleven years of subjective time. I was as horrified as anyone when I found my little hunt had been magnified into something so . . . epic.'
'Bet you were.'
'When I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won within a handful of centuries.' Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. 'But even then,' Merlin continued, 'things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.'
'So you became a mercenary.'
'Freelancer, if you don't mind. Point was, I realised I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.' He smiled. 'You see, even legends are haunted by legends.'
He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin's lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures pre-dating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together - as well as he could - an underlying framework of what might just be fact.
'There'd been another war,' Merlin said. 'Smaller than ours, spread across a much smaller volume of space - but no less brutal for all that.'
'How long ago was this?'
'Forty or forty-five kiloyears - not long after the Waymakers vanished, but about twenty kays before anything we'd recognise as the Cohort.' Merlin's eyes seemed to glaze over; an odd, stentorian tone entered his voice: '"In the long, dark centuries of Mid-Galactic history, when a thousand cultures rose, each imagining themselves immune to time, and whose shadows barely reach us across the millennia--"'
'Yes. Very poetic. What
kind
of war, anyway? Human versus human, or human versus alien, like this one?'
'Does it matter? Whoever the enemy was, they aren't coming back. Whatever was used against them was so deadly, so powerful, so
awesome
that it stopped an entire war!'
'Merlin's gun.'
He nodded, lips tight, looking almost embarrassed. 'As if I had some prior claim on it, or was even in some sense responsible for it!' He looked at Sora very intently, the glittering finery of the ship reflected in the gold of his eyes. 'I haven't seen the gun, or even been near it, and it's only recently that I've had anything like a clear idea of what it might actually be.'
'But you think you know where it is?'
'I think so. It isn't far. And it's in the eye of a storm.'
They lifted from the shard, spending eight days in transit to the closest Way, most of the time in frostwatch. Sora had her own quarters: a spherical-walled suite deep in
Tyrant
's thorax, outfitted in maroon and burgundy. The ship was small, but fascinating to explore - an object lesson in the differences between the Cohort that had manufactured this ship and the one Sora had been raised in. In many respects the ship was more advanced than anything from her own time, especially in the manner of its propulsion, defences and sensors. In other areas the Cohort had gained expertise since Merlin's era. Merlin's proctors were even stupider than those Sora had been looking after when the Husker attack began. There were no familiars in Merlin's time, either, and she saw no reason to educate him about her own neural symbiote.
'Well,' Sora said, when she was alone. 'What can you tell me about the legendary Merlin?'
'Nothing very much at this point.' The familiar had been communicating with the version of itself that had infiltrated
Tyrant
, via Merlin's suit. 'If he's impersonating the historical figure we know as Merlin, he's gone to extraordinary lengths to make the illusion authentic. All the logs confirm that his ship left Cohort-controlled space around ten kiloyears ago, and that he's been travelling ever since.'
'He's back from somewhere. It would help if we knew where.'
'Tricky, given that we have no idea about the deep topology of the Waynet. I can search the starfields for recognisable features, but it'll take a long time, and there'll still be a large element of guesswork.'
'There must be something you can show me.'
'Of course.' The familiar sounded slightly affronted. 'I found images. Some of the formats are obscure, but I think I can make sense of most of them.' And even before Sora had answered, the familiar had warmed a screen in one hemisphere of the suite. Visual records of different solar systems appeared, each entry displayed for a second before being replaced. Each consisted of an orbital map; planets and Waynet nodes were marked relative to each system's sun. The worlds were annotated with enlarged images of each, overlaid with sparse astrophysical and military data, showing the roles - if any - they had played in the war. Merlin had visited other places too. Squid-like protostellar nebulae, stained with green and red and flecked by the light of hot blue stars. Supernova remnants, the viscera of gored stars, a hundred of which had died since the Flourishing, briefly outshining the galaxy.
'What do you think he was looking for?' Sora said. 'These points must have been on the Waynet, but they're a long way from anything we'd call civilisation.'
'I don't know. Souvenir hunting?'
'Are you sure Merlin can't tell you're accessing this information?'
'Absolutely - but why should it bother him unless he's got something to hide?'
'Debatable point.' Sora looked around to the sealed door of her quarters, half-expecting Merlin to enter at any moment. It was absurd, of course - from its present vantage point, the familiar could probably tell precisely where Merlin was in the ship, and give Sora adequate warning. But she still felt uneasy, even as she asked the inevitable question. 'What else?'
'Oh, plenty. Even some visual records of the man himself, caught on the internal cameras.'
'Sorry. A healthy interest in where he's been is one thing, but spying on him is something else.'
'Would it change things if I told you that Merlin hasn't been totally honest with us?'
'You said he hadn't lied.'
'Not about anything significant - which makes this all the odder.' The familiar sounded quietly pleased with itself. 'You're curious now, aren't you?'
Sora sighed. 'You'd better show me.'
Merlin's face appeared on the screen, sobbing. He seemed slightly older to her, although it was difficult to tell, since most of his face was caged behind his hands. She could hardly make out what he was saying, between each sob.
'Thousands of hours of this sort of thing,' the familiar said. 'They started out as serious attempts at keeping a journal, but soon deteriorated into a form of catharsis.'
'I'd say he did well to stay sane at all.'
'More than you realise. We know he's been gone ten thousand years - just as he told us. Well and good. That's objective time. But he also said that only eleven years of shiptime had passed.'
'And that isn't the case?'
'To put a diplomatic gloss on it, I suspect that may be a slight underestimate. By a considerable number of decades. And I don't think he spent much of that time in frostwatch.'
Sora tried to remember what she knew of the methods of longevity available to the Cohort in Merlin's time. 'He looks older in these recordings than he does now - doesn't he?'
The familiar chose not to answer.
When the transit to the Way was almost over, Merlin called her to the bridge.
'We're near the transit node,' he said. 'Take a seat, because the insertion can be a little . . . interesting.'
'Transition to Waynet in three hundred seconds,' said the ship's cloyingly calm voice.
The crescent of the cockpit window showed a starfield transected by a blurred twinkling filament, like a solitary wave crossing a lake at midnight. Sora could see blurred stars through the filament, wide as her outspread hand, widening by the second. A thickening in it, like a bulge along a snake, was the transit node, a point, coincidental with the ecliptic, where passage into the accelerated space-time of the Way was possible. Although the Waynet stream was transparent, there remained a ghostly sense of dizzying motion.