The Long Hunt by Debra Doyle

Author:Debra Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

XI. SAPNE; KHESAT

THE FOREST of derelict ships extended for several miles beyond the point where Faral and the others had begun walking. They were lucky, Faral supposed, that Amaro had set the Dusty down close to the edge of the old landing area, and not near its center. The maps in the shipboard data files had shown an extensive port complex at Sapne Market, with a landing field bigger than some small towns.

Now, if he’d been right in his guess about the building most likely to house a black-market passport-and-visa operation …

Sometime about noon they left the forest behind them. The terrain changed from woods to open ground overgrown with stands of tall grass. Here and there a trail appeared among the waving, head-high stems.

“Do we need to be following one of those?” Miza asked.

“Depends,” said Faral. “Do we want to be ambushed?”

They continued in a straight line, guiding on the sun. At last a building appeared, looming tall and wide above the grasses, with blank walls that gave back the light in a fierce dazzle. They’d built well on Old Sapne, before the Biochem Plagues—neither time nor vandalism had made any change to the building’s armor-glass sheath. Many paths converged in the open ground before it, and the grass there was trodden short.

Jens shifted the weight of the portable generator on his shoulders and squinted up at the building. “If this isn’t the place where we get our passports validated, it certainly ought to be.”

“Somebody uses it for something, at any rate,” Faral said. “All those trails leading up to it—those are footpaths, not animal tracks.”

Cautiously, they approached the building. Its main doors stood open, the dilation membrane that had once covered them jammed apart at the three-quarter point. Beyond, lit by high skylights, lay the entrance foyer. Once it might have been a grand atrium in the prewar style. Now it was dim, and decorated … oddly.

Carved images of human forms, larger than life, stood at intervals along the atrium walls. At first glance they seemed to have been crudely hacked out of tree trunks, then planed to smoothness. A closer look revealed that the distortions and the twisted, half-melted postures were deliberate, the results of careful hand-carving and polishing. Where light from above struck the images, their surfaces gleamed with oil.

In between the wooden statues, huge plates of hammered metal hung in pairs and threes from the interior balconies surrounding the atrium. The ropes that suspended them were wrist-thick cables of twisted wire. The panels hung closely enough together that the vibration of footsteps on the atrium floor caused them to shiver and strike against one another with a sound like flat, atonal bells.

The floor itself had once been a solid sheet of pure unmarked—and unmarkable—crystal, whose deep black luster would have given back reflections like an unmoving tarn. Now it was covered with spiraling, labyrinthine pathways drawn out in lines of pollen, petals, and colored stones.

“It’s … different,” Jens said, after contemplating it for a few moments.

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