• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Akanah shook her head in earnest disagreement. “You, who’re immune to your own tricks—who are you to judge the harm done? You do this in secret, to lead a suggestible mind, or compel an opposed one. Do you think that those you’ve coerced see the morality of it the same as you do? Besides,” she sniffed, “it’s inefficient.”

“What?”

“Inefficient,” she repeated. “It requires your constant attention and involvement.”

“If you know an alternative, I’m your eager student.”

“What about the way you concealed your hermitage?”

Luke frowned. “That’s different. I created it from elemental substances to have that quality—to blend in with the coastline as though it were part of it.”

“It was a powerful bit of work,” she said. “When I saw it, I knew you had the gift of the Fallanassi. But you didn’t go far enough and apply the principle to its ultimate conclusion.”

“Which is—”

“To make it not merely resemble its surroundings, but merge with them,” Akanah said. Closing her eyes, she drew a deep breath. She let the breath out slowly as she lowered her chin to her chest—and then she was not there.

“I’ll be a—” Luke reached for her where she had been standing, but his hand grabbed only air. “Cute trick,” he said, taking a step toward the refresher, away from the forward deck. “Handy for breaking into libraries, escaping arranged marriages—where are you?”

“Here,” she said from behind him. He turned to find her silting sideways in the right-hand seat, wearing a small proud smile. “Did I touch your mind?”

“No,” he admitted. “Not that I could notice.”

Akanah nodded. “A long time ago, one of the Circle discovered that when she achieved a particularly profound Meditation of Immersion, she would disappear from the view of others. Much later, we learned how to take an object in with us and leave it there.”

“Where do you go when you disappear?”

“Where do you go when you dream? It’s impossible to say. What does an answer from that context mean in this one?”

“Well—is it difficult?”

She shrugged. “Once mastered, it’s no more difficult or mysterious than concealing a cup of water by pouring it in the sea.” Then she smiled. “But achieving mastery is much like trying to remove that cup of water afterward.”

“And you’ve merged this ship?”

“Yes. Some time ago, while I was in meditation.”

“Will the engines still work?”

“Did the floors of your hermitage hold you, and the roof keep out the rain?”

Luke wrinkled up his face. “So we’re completely undetectable now?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing is absolute. But we’re safe from eyes, and from the machines that are like eyes. Take us directly to J’t’p’tan, Luke—as quickly as you can. Trust me in this, at least. I’ve depended on this art for my survival, virtually from the time I was taken from Ialtra. I promise you that we won’t be discovered—not by the beings in that starship.”

The stone ruins of the temple of J’t’p’tan sprawled over more than two thousand hectares. Even scorched and smashed, what remained made the extent of the builders’ ambition clear. The ruins filled the floor of a pocket valley with an intricate pattern and climbed the inner walls of the enclosing hills.

But it was also clear long before Mud Sloth landed in the middle of an open diamond that the ambitions of the H’kig had collided with the ambitions of the Yevetha, and the latter had triumphed.

Long walls of finely chiseled cutstone had been toppled and shattered. The slope of the hills had been undercut in several places, collapsing parts of the great structure onto itself. The quarries were half filled with water, the quarry sledges burned to charcoal, the quarry road blasted out of existence. And nowhere was there a hint of life.

Luke climbed down from the skiff slowly, wordlessly. The destruction assaulted his senses—there was a sick smell on the slight breeze, and before he had gone a dozen meters from the ship his eyes began to pick out the blackened lumps of corpses among the scattered stones.

“It’s like Ialtra all over again, only worse,” he whispered to himself. Then he turned back toward the skiff, looking