Interlude
It was the dead of night when Topaz and Mica came through their own gate. They wore local clothing, and carried arms considered appropriate to their sexes. Additionally, they carried between them a considerable quantity of trelve and forjin to ease their journey. Possibly most importantly, they’d all been immersed in what was believed to be the latest version of writing, here and now, something called “Sacred Writing.”
The pair plus the AI, who had been given the name Mary, the better to blend in, came out not far from where the Q’riln had, by a spot that had once hosted a forest of stakes and abused corpses. The stakes and the bird-eaten bodies were long gone, now, centuries gone; only the faint traces of their psychic agony remained.
“It would have grown fairly powerful here,” Topaz said. She was, as a female, considerably more attuned to such things than her mate, Mica. “So many sentient beings, so much agony, so long to finally find surcease. And . . . even little ones, who had no idea what they’d done to deserve a horrible death and who hardly knew what death was until it came for them.”
She shuddered from the sheer horror. Her people just didn’t do that kind of thing. They never had.
“It may be worth remembering,” said Mica, “that the Q’riln didn’t do any of that; at worst it fed upon it.”
“Yes,” Topaz agreed, “yes, I know. But, if we don’t take it, then it will cause things like this. Or, as the chief said, ‘worse.’”
“I’m aware,” Mica said. He wrapped a comforting arm around his mate, just as he would have if they’d still been in their natural, somewhat similar, forms. “Remember, though, our job is not to take it, but to kill it.”
“I know,” said the female, with a deep sigh.
Mary, their mobile artificial intelligence, encased in and controlling a largely brainless, cloned body, turned in one direction, head and eyes concentrating like a pointer’s, and one arm raised somewhat like one, too. She said, in a voice that still sounded metallic and artificial, “The Q’riln had gone that way but is no longer there, of course. Now she is. . . . computing. . . . sensing. . . . recalling. . . . right now she is in . . . a place called . . . ‘Germany.’ I have this language but you will have to learn it. Shall we advance?”
“Yes, Mary,” Mica said. “Lead on. Teach us this language as you do.”
Language had been the first shock. While Mary, the AI, insisted that the writing they were seeing was mostly founded in the “Sacred Writing” they’d had implanted in them, they just couldn’t see the connection. Now they’d have to learn an entirely new writing system but without the advantages of deep immersion their agency could provide.
“No way,” insisted Mica. “There is no way that their vowel, ‘A,’ comes from a hieroglyph for a beast called an “Ox.”
“Yes, there is,” Mary insisted. “Here, look.” With that she began to trace out what she thought was the evolution of the letter on a spot of bare earth.
“Madness,” Mica said, “sheer madness.”
“The Q’riln was here,” Mary said, as they stood on a hill looking at the ruins of the sacked and burnt town. “Here she feasted on the death agonies of twenty thousand sentient beings.”
“Why did this happen?” Topaz asked. “Do these people do this for fun?”
“Not fun,” Mary replied. “They have different interpretations of their writing about and proper approach to the Universal Creator. It made them hate each other enough for massacre.”
“Did the Q’riln cause all this death?” Mica asked.
“No,” said Mary, “they came up with this conflict entirely on their own. And it was more than death. There was forced, unlubricated reproductive behavior, pain infliction for amusement, robbery, and arson. A LOT of arson.”
“How many people did you say died here?” asked Topaz.
“On the order of twenty thousand. And not so much died as were murdered.”
“Creator!”
“Oddly enough,” said Mary, “many of the dead called upon the Creator, too; their echoes are still vibrating in the scorched stones of the town. He did not, apparently, listen to them.”
Mica asked, “Where has the Q’riln gone now, Mary?”
“She has crossed the sea to that place they call ‘England,’ here and now. We must go west and cross an area called ‘France.’ Yes, it means another language for France, and yet another for England.”
“Is there another way to go?”
“By sea, all the way, but I do not recommend it. I do recommend buying some of those quadrupedal riding animals.”
“I don’t know how to ride one,” Topaz said, doubtfully.
“They seem to me,” said Mica, “to be a lot like chisnar at home. Sure, four fewer legs and less fur, but the principles seem the same.”
“Could we instead get a cart?” Topaz pleaded.
“I’ll find out at the next town.”