Chapter Ten
It's eerie to walk through a Dwarven ruin. It's supposed to be empty, deserted, but the lights continue to glow and the pipes continue to steam. It's like the place is waiting for someone to return, as though the Dwarves just stepped out for a moment and haven't been gone for hundreds of years.
-Dwemer Dungeons: What I Know, Kireth Vanos
Arimatha shrank back into the fur's tickle as Admia talked, drawing it close around her bare shoulders. How long since she had felt? A null infinity; the touch was both familiar and raw. Long enough for significant linguistic drift, for she could only vaguely identify a sporadic word from Admia's monologue. Not long enough for her sin to have faded from Falmer eyes. No matter the time; it was irrelevant. Everything was changed, whatever year she had entered. And, fundamentally, nothing was changed. She felt that in her bones.
And yet there was this Falmer, not condemning her, not chasing her out of the hold, but merely talking in that language, unfamiliar save for its layering of overtones. She filtered her voice effortlessly, selecting harmonics so clean and precise the guttural fundamentals melted away almost completely, her vowels mechanical in their exact colouring of her words. There was an entire language of connotation there, hidden in the invisible intervals. A talent honed physically as well as mentally; the nose and nasal cavity had been restructured for better resonance. They had always tried so hard to learn the khoomei, while they still had hope, but Arimatha would not have expected that much dedication. Especially not in one who still had hope enough to talk to someone like her. The harmonic hope of the Dwemer had failed her ancestors, after all.
She studied Admia in the dim light of the standby lamps. Thin, pale skin, burrowed beneath by gnarled blue veins. Wispy white hair. Swollen knuckles, splotched red with interlocked ringworm; bowed limbs and stooped back. Strange, that they should remember and, indeed, advance the vocal harmonics, and yet neglect something so much more basic. She was a textbook specimen of heliodeficiency syndrome. It had happened among them sometimes, too, of course - if some anti-pescetarian child refused to take their sun treatments, sickened by the brightness, or to eat their irradiated pilii. But never so severe.
Arimatha's cheeks had dried, skinned stiff with salt, by the time Admia's musings drifted off into silence. Her breath came evenly, her heartbeat calm. The psychosomatic pressure was eased, for the moment. Time to close the valve; there were other practical considerations requiring attendance. She stood, holding the heavy fur closed around her.
"Back to it," she said in Falmeri - the Falmeri she knew from her assistants of old, of course, not the descendant tongue Admia spoke. "Though what 'it' will be, now... is unknown. I don't think I ever thought quite this far. Too hopeful. But there are the basics to take care of." Food. Clothing. Language. Knowledge. Admia puzzled over her words for a long moment, her face slack and expressionless. Then she replied with a sentence too quick for Arimatha to catch and hopped up onto her nimble tarsi, those clever chitin prosthetics.
"My apologies," said Arimatha. "We need not leave quite yet. I should first see what remains here."
Admia tilted her head, following Arimatha as she stepped past her to adjust a small dial in the wall. The lamps brightened from their turquoise balm, but she left the neons off and only brought the lamps to a third of their strength; Admia's ancestors had not dealt well with bright lights, and judging from the raw ringworm rash around Admia's eyelids, the condition had not changed.
Her workshop awakened in sepia shadows: her desk, scattered with jumbled bins of metal sigil forms and the tattered remains of her parchment design pads, the bed and wardrobe she had brought down when she cloistered herself there for the last years of her former life, the gleaming shelves loaded with bound books. Old-fashioned, but not reactionary; she was just old, and bound books were what she knew. There was none of the Eggheads' inertial ritualism in them - just plain inertia. Before, she had rationalized that they were not entirely impractical - no lexicon or fiche carried its own coterie of pseudoscorpial animunculi, and so could not extend protection to nearby physical sketch media - but, seeing the state of her drawings and threadbare bedspread, it seemed that idea had never been well founded. Even all the defensive microscopic constructs of this many books could not extend much protection from textile and paper pests of other objects over - however long she had been gone.
Her collar lay on the desk beside her pen; a thick memnonium chain, inlaid with tiny, dormant weaver constructs. A few last scraps of silk crumbled away from the metal as she picked it up. She had been sitting right there, when she left.
She pulled the culture vial from the centerpiece link, analyzing the color of the fluid inside by the light of the lamp at her shoulder. Milky sludge; it had died long ago, without its daily diet of oil stains and mending silk. She buckled the warm metal around her neck anyway, beneath the fur. There were plenty of starter cultures to be had, if that part of the hold was still intact.
The pen, too, was long dead, gone dry even in the steamed air. She moistened the nib on her tongue just enough to restore the ink left there, then scribbled a quick sigil on her palm. Water pooled in her hand until the ink ran, and she unscrewed the end of the pen to fill the reservoir with water, shaking it to hydrate the ink inside. Then she capped it, and folded it in her wet hand. She could draw quickly, if she needed to.
Those two items were all she really needed from the room, for the moment, so she hoisted the heavy fur back onto her shoulders and knocked on the memnonium doors to tell Admia she was ready.
They left, walking side by side through the dim halls. Admia's head swiveled this way and that, bobbing in and out to catch the sound of Arimatha's footfalls and guess her intent; Arimatha kept a sidelong vigil on Admia as she scuttled along on her chitin legs, but the Falmer clearly needed none of her help thus far. Neither was really sure who was in the lead, but when they came to the fork that led either to silent Vogram, the cistern of her hopes, or back toward the rest of the hold, Admia took a decisive turn toward the silence.
"Not that way," Arimatha called, catching her elbow lightly. "There is only the cistern, there." And she was not quite ready to make that visit.
Admia mumbled something melodically puzzled, her wasted face still blank, but turned to walk with Arimatha. Bare feet warm on stones heated by rushing steam, Arimatha led her to the exit of her cloister, closed as she had left it, the door seamlessly concealed in blank wall. Admia must have come down in a different way - strange. She trilled the lock quickly and stepped out into Rkund proper.
First the switch room: hemmed in on all sides by cords and conduits and piping in all diameters until the door was barely accessible. Admia waited outside, listening alertly, as Arimatha stepped inside the cramped room. A flickering neon tube spat lumens across the patched console and the array of levers, dials, switches, barometers, keys, voicepipes, and widgets. She sank into the familiar old chair briefly, leaning in to check the hold's homeostasis in the dim light. Aquifer pressure was high; to be expected when the only water consumption had been from autonomous systems since she left. The turbines were producing at half-capacity as she had set them, but one of the boilers had failed and been replaced by a backup. Other than that, everything seemed still in good order - the seismic damage to the upper hold notwithstanding, but that had been old long before she left. The last petroleum pocket her family had tapped was gone empty, but the jelly fields seemed to have more than made up the difference with their profane hydrocarbons.
No doubt the animunculi field would need recalibration, if she had been gone long enough for that depletion. Indeed, its recognition was definitely off-kilter, for none of the automata they had passed in the halls had shown any response to Admia's presence. She probably would not see it done, though; just as well to leave it alone, unless serious problems arose.
She did not lift the hold from its general standby, but manually adjusted the gas lighting up a third notch, leaving the neons extinguished. Then she flipped the remote switch for the cryogenic vault; might as well start the partial defrost cycle while they walked.
Admia said something in the cant of curiousity as they headed off into the slightly brighter halls, her wispy head bobbing and weaving.
"Is it too bright?" Arimatha asked. "I can decrease the flow rate, if you require a more dim environment." A pause, and then the Falmer said, clearly, "No,"and something else Arimatha could not understand. She did not respond, and after a moment Admia repeated herself.
"I do not understand," she replied, touching Admia's elbow gently to direct her along their route's turns. Admia struggled for a moment, then repeated herself with a slightly different phrasing, and this time Arimatha could make out what she thought meant 'how.'
"How did I adjust the lamps?" she said. "The room we were just at contains monitors and basic controls for many of Rkund's systems. Lighting is one of those." She doubted that the Falmer had understood, or even that she had answered the correct question, but she had not ignored her and that ought to be good enough for the moment.
Centurions bowed them through the double doors to the Condensation Cloister. Adsorption towers and coiled condensers lined the walls of the long hall, and thick sheaths of white frost encrusted the outputs to the storage vats of chilled and distilled air fractions at the far end; their insulation needed repair. The largest vat was ringed with stairs and a metal catwalk, three times her height. They climbed around to the top, Admia leaving her crutches at the bottom in favor of the rail, and Arimatha threw the lever to unseal the vat's cover. It opened with a pop and swung upward, revealing a field of frothing azotic air which immediately began boiling over the edge in a wave of bright white fog. There was no sound from the vacuum pumps, so the void of the submerged casket should have flooded with liquid azote. Another switch, and the center of the vat fountained silver spray as the top of the cylindrical vault contained within rose to the surface, and then opened in twelve sections, like sepals folding back beneath the bud. From this rose the Vault to the level of the catwalk, a thick memnonium cylinder covered in cabinets, shrouded in azotic fog as the refrigeration fluid boiled off the exterior.
Arimatha circled around, leaning in to the chill fog to read the designations engraved on each door. This vault contained inoculum for all the biological implements she might need - seeds, spores, cultural stocks, embryonic cell lines. They would be kept cold while she looked by the reservoir of azote in the center. When she had located the yeast cultures, she padded her hands against the bitter metal with the fur draped around her and released both clasps on the cabinet, then pulled the drawer of vials out on its extensible tracks over the catwalk; a healthy splash of azote came too, but most bounced down into the vat, and what did not was insufficient to affect her. That drawer was filled with tiny glass vials, each labeled briefly in spiky shorthand. After rubbing frost off the caps of a few to read, she quickly found what she wanted: the silk strain. There were at least two columns of identical starter vials, so she removed just two and then quickly shoved the drawer back into the vault. She marked each of these with a complex little sigil; they needed to warm from cryogen slowly, and she had forgotten to bring ice from the cold room alcoves off the hall.
That done, she resealed the cabinet she had opened and sent the vault descending back into its icy bath, closed the external cylinder, and lowered the whole back to the center of the enormous vat. Finally she switched on the pumps, to evacuate the space between the two cylinders (in case of failure in the azotic distillation systems, the vacuum barrier would insulate the vault for a number of years).
Admia's head jerked up as the pump's gulping gasps guttered on. She said something, and this time Arimatha hardly needed to know the words to understand the inquiry.
"Only a pump, Admia. I have retrieved a microbiological culture that can produce silk and create clothes. Once we retrieve another collar, you can have your own set of weaver constructs, if you like." Talking such detail was a fruitless endeavor, most likely, but given the situation it was likely that Admia understood her much better than she understood Admia, so perhaps not completely pointless. She inserted one of the vials into the central link of her own collar. Once it warmed up, the yeast would begin producing silk, to be spun out into clothing by the twelve weaver animunculi set into the rest of the links. More convenient than the fur, if not warmer.
Admia asked something to the effect of, "Are you ended?" Arimatha smiled.
"No. This facility has clearly been without supervised maintenance since I left. It will require repairs, and no doubt more than I already anticipate. For now, yes, it would be better to wait before seeing to anything else. But, beyond the moment... how could you and I, here, be anything but a beginning?"
Over the next weeks, then months, the lonely pair settled into an unstructured companionship. Admia would often accompany Arimatha on her errands around the hold - though the animunculi had kept the hold relatively well, there were still jobs they had not recognized or could not do; shifted stone to shore, leaks to patch, machinery to repair - but Arimatha quickly learned that there was just as much work awaiting the Falmer. The chaurus hatched within days, and she learned by demonstration how to rear, tend, and train the immature insects. She helped Admia prepare clever traps throughout the ruins of the upper hold, though she knew not what enemy they warded against. Sometimes they ate together and sometimes they did not, just as sometimes they found themselves working alone in the humming hold. The Falmer was taciturn and gregarious by turns, babbling merrily when the mood was on her, a rushing monologue that overwhelmed Arimatha's ability to work out the gist of her dialect. And when the mood was not, she remained monosyllabic at best, nonresponsive at her most inaccessible. Once or twice she had even outright run from Arimatha, vanished with preternatural evasion. Arimatha let her be.
When she was speaking, she continually drilled Arimatha on her language, at first pointing out objects as they worked and teaching her their words until she had a limited basic vocabulary, and later correcting her grammar incessantly and rattling through some set of memorized exemplary sentences; they quickly engrained themselves upon Arimatha as well.
Consequently, it was several months - one might say only several months - before they had their first real conversation.
"Where are your kin?"
"I do not know how to tell you. They are in Summersgap, and in the other gaps, but how your folk called these places I do not know."
They were in Arimatha's room - not her workshop, but her older room, in her family's apartments where she had grown up. The remnants of their meal stood cooled on the small stone table. Both Arimatha and her bed were clad in fresh silk spun from the memnonium collar at her throat; the weavers danced across her chest even still, reconfiguring the geometric embroidery of her robes in response to her activities. Admia, however, had refused to wear the collar Arimatha had commissioned from the animonculory for her, though she found it fascinating; she sat with her tarsi unbound from her legs, across from Arimatha."
"And where are your kin, mm?"
"They are nowhere."
"Mm. Is that where you were?"
"It is not a place. It is nothing - in fact there is no 'it' at all. Only absence."
"But you are present, and they are - not."
Arimatha nodded, then hummed an affirmative when she remembered that a nod meant nothing. After a moment, she spoke again.
"If you do not know our names for your homes, could we simply travel to them and meet your kin together?"
Admia cocked her head. "Why?"
"Because I - knew your ancestors," Arimatha answered. "Quite well. I would like to know what became of their children." Her children. Or so she had thought of them, before the rebellion - no, the revolution.
The Falmer sang a little ditty of disappointment, her hands clenched on her knees. "I hear you, I hear you. I would like to help with that, mm, but unfortunately it is not possible. I am dead, after all."
"Dead?"
"To them. That is why I am here in this abandoned gap. They put me to sleep, laid me to my rest, never permitted to return. That is how they do, with those who have sinned too greatly for forgiveness."
"And what was your sin?"
Admia bared her sharp teeth, one of the first emotional displays Arimatha had seen from her.
"Bad policy. Mm. You know - as a leader, make a few bad decisions, well, it doesn't take much for your people to turn on you. I only tried to give them what they deserved, though. To return them to the Endless Gap where we belong. It's time - or, well, I thought it was. Mm. Apparently I chose a bad moment. The Loud Mouth - have you heard her? She's yelling even now - is just too much for us. Or so they think. And it is true that she breaks our ears with even her whispers..."
"So the Atmorani are still abound," mused Arimatha.
"Mm, yes. No one ever did manage to return them. And you, mm, I'm afraid, would be slain as soon as heard. So no. Unless I brought with me some way to truly beat them back, with my history, there's no chance we could go to the other gaps. Sorry."
Arimatha hummed again, staring off into the turquoise lamp flame. A twinge in her abdomen; a slight cramp. It would be time for that again, soon. It seemed she really had returned in full.
"However," Admia went on, "I am quite interested in your experience with my ancestors. I'm sure what I can tell you of my kin is no comparison to actually meeting them, for you, but it is better than nothing, mm? Perhaps we could trade our tales."
Arimatha shifted her gaze to Admia; the wispy white hair, the wasted skin, the red sin of the Dwemer beneath her eyelids. The would-be spark of another revolution - of course she would want to know about what her kin had been, before.
She sighed. "There is no need to bargain, Admia," she said. "I will tell you everything."