Chapter 265: Looking down on Earthlings

Chapter 265: Chapter 265: Looking down on Earthlings

The light took him gently, and set him down on soft ground.

That was the first thing Rowan noticed: the ground. It was soft. His boots sank half an inch into dark, rich loam, and the smell that rolled up from it was thick and sweet and deeply alive, the smell of wet clay and old roots and a thousand seasons of leaf-fall. He stood motionless for a heartbeat with his eyes closed and his palm resting against the hoe’s haft, and he felt it.

Good soil, he thought. Better than good.

Then he opened his eyes.

They had arrived on a hillside.

It was a long, gentle slope of tall, silver-green grass, rolling away to a wide basin below, and above it, a sky the pale, hazy gold of late afternoon. A river threaded through the valley floor, bright as hammered tin. Beyond it, the land rose in a ring of jagged, snow-capped peaks, and between the peaks and the river lay a patchwork of forest, plain, marsh, and stone, laid out like a map for a child to read. The air was cool and thin. Somewhere high above, a hawk screamed.

It was beautiful. It was also, Rowan realized slowly, enormous.

"The arena," said a quiet voice at his shoulder.

Clara Winterbourne had appeared beside him, pale, wide-eyed, clutching her paper in both fists. Behind her, in a loose, shifting cluster, the rest of the first transport was materializing in soft bursts of blue light. Forty figures, perhaps, in the gray Confederation coats, blinking and stumbling and turning in slow circles. Voss had arrived on his knees, one broad hand clutching the grass. The Baltic brothers stood back to back, stone-still, with their eyes wide. Katya stood very straight, with her arms wrapped tight around herself and her lips moving soundlessly.

And at the top of the hill, at the very crest, a pillar of pale silver light rose out of the earth, humming softly.

The Beacon.

It was a crystal the size of a man, slender and tall, floating a handbreadth above a plinth of white stone. It glowed with a steady, living light, and where the light fell on the grass, the blades bent toward it as though in prayer. Rowan stared at it for a long moment.

Earth 1078, it seemed to say, in a voice not quite sound. Alive.

"Positions," he said, very quietly. "Voss. Brothers. Form on the Beacon. Everyone else, behind them. The second transport will arrive in thirty seconds, and the rest after that." He drew a breath. "Nobody moves until we know what’s out there."

They obeyed.

Above them, in a place that was not a place, the Administrators were watching.

It was a vast, silent void, black as the space between stars, and it hung above the arena like a roof above a stage. There was no floor. There were no walls. There were only twelve tall, high-backed chairs arranged in a wide, curving arc, each carved from a different material, each occupied by a different figure.

They were the Tower Administrators. One for each world in the pod, and a handful of others, silent observers from the Guild’s upper ranks. In front of them, spread across the void like a great, shimmering window, lay the arena, seen from above, in perfect, glittering detail.

Five beacons burned across it, five points of light in five colors. Each one marked a world’s territory, and five delegations were arriving, in soft, rippling pulses, at the foot of each.

The Administrator of Earth sat at the end of the arc.

It had not moved in a long time. Its ink-black silhouette lay motionless against the high-backed chair of void, with its two faint, pale pinpricks of eyes fixed on a single hillside, a long way down. It watched a man in a straw hat kneel in the grass and press one gloved hand against the soil.

It said nothing.

To its left, a tall, regal figure in robes of undying white glanced down at the arena and let out a faint, dry sound, somewhere between a cough and a laugh.

"That," said the Administrator of the Old Throne, in a voice like a polished blade, "is Earth?"

"It would appear so," said the Administrator of the Crystal Court. His body was a column of living glass, and the words rang from it in a thin, bright chime. "Level two. The lowest rank in the Cycle."

"I had not believed it."

"Nor had I. And yet, there they are."

All along the arc, heads turned. Pale, shifting eyes fixed on the faint blue figures stumbling out of the light at the foot of Earth’s Beacon. A murmur of low, amused voices rippled through the void, like wind through reeds.

"They are children," said the Administrator of TRAPPIST-1e, a vast, rippling shape of dark water with eyes like pearls. "The oldest of them scarcely a quarter-century."

"The Level cap, surely. Fifty at most."

"I count a forty, at the front. And a thirty-eight. And a... what is that? A twenty-six?"

"It is a rabble."

"It is an embarrassment."

A soft, cold laugh ran around the arc.

Below, the second transport arrived.

Twenty more of the hundred descended in a burst of silver mist, and then the third, and then the fourth, the squad leaders arriving last, Seraphina with her notebook and her cloud of cool water, Caelen with his cloak whipping, Barney and Mirei side by side. The last of the blue light faded from the hillside. For the first time, all one hundred of Earth’s representatives stood on the same ground.

And in the sky above the basin, an enormous, glimmering board unfolded.

It hung in the air like a banner, miles across, clear as glass. Five columns of pale light ran down its face. At the top of each, a world’s name and sigil burned in white. Beneath them, five lines of numbers blazed:

[ STRENGTH REGISTRY: POD 4 ]

HD 40307 G (OLD THRONE) — Aggregate Combat Rating: 9,412

GLIESE 667 CC (CRYSTAL COURT) — Aggregate Combat Rating: 6,788

TRAPPIST-1E (DEEPWATCH) — Aggregate Combat Rating: 5,203

PROXIMA CENTAURI B (LAST HOMESTEAD) — Aggregate Combat Rating: 3,127

EARTH 1078 — Aggregate Combat Rating: 1,946

The numbers stood in the sky for everyone to see.

On the hillside, a thin, strangled sound rose from the earth wing. Someone had looked up. Someone else had read the board. A murmur of dismay rolled through the hundred, low and fast.

"Nineteen hundred," breathed Andreas Keller, white to the lips. "We have nineteen hundred. They have nine thousand."

"It is only a number," said Seraphina, sharply.

"A number five times ours."

"It is a number the Tower invented," said Seraphina. "It does not measure a field."

But her voice was tight.

In the arc of the Administrators, the laughter had grown.

"Nineteen hundred," drawled the Old Throne, in a voice of cool pleasure. "They would not last a minute against a single squad of ours."

"Not a minute," agreed the Crystal Court. "I would not trouble to send more than three."

"They will be ignored, of course." The Administrator of Proxima Centauri B, a small, quiet, weathered figure in patched gray, spoke for the first time. His voice was low, and a little bitter. "As will mine. We are the cellar of the Cycle. The great worlds will look to one another. They will not waste effort on the lowest."

"You, at least, have a Level three," said the Deepwatch, with a rippling snort. "Earth is a two."

"A two," said the Old Throne, with a soft, cruel laugh. "Truly, I wonder that the Guild did not simply strike their name from the list."

"They would have, if the Registry permitted it."

"Perhaps it was a mercy."

"Perhaps it was an oversight."

They laughed again, and the sound rolled around the void like the clink of glasses.

The Administrator of Earth did not move.

"I should like to propose," said the Crystal Court, leaning forward, with the delicate, brilliant ring of a struck bell, "a wager. Among ourselves. That the Earthlings will be eliminated before the third day."

"Third?" said the Deepwatch. "Generous. I say the second."

"The first," said the Old Throne. "If any of the others trouble to look their way."

"They won’t."

"They will not. That is the beauty of it. No one will bother. Each of us will focus on the worlds that matter: ourselves, and one another. Earth will be left for last. We may sweep them up at our leisure, in the final hour, like crumbs from a table."

"They pose no threat."

"None whatever."

Nobody laughed that time. It was merely a statement of fact, delivered in tones of mild, contemptuous boredom, and the void settled back into a languid, satisfied quiet.

At the end of the arc, in the last high-backed chair, a faint, ink-black silhouette tilted its head.

"You are quiet, Administrator of Earth," said the Old Throne, with a silken turn of the head. "Have you nothing to say in defense of your delegation?"

For a long moment, the shadow did not answer.

Then it spoke, in a low, calm, rustling voice, like autumn leaves over frozen ground.

"I would suggest," it said, "that you keep watching."

A pause.

"It will make the next seven days more interesting."

On the hillside, Rowan was kneeling in the dirt.

He had not looked at the board again. He had read it once, with a single, cool glance, the way he read the weather before a storm, and then he had turned back to the earth. His palm lay flat against the dark loam, his eyes were closed, and the Law of Earth hummed in his chest in perfect, steady rhythm.

Foundation, he thought. Burden. Cycle. Stillness.

Beside him, a small, trembling voice said, "Rowan? Are you... are you looking at the numbers?"

"No."

"They’re awful."

"They are."

"Doesn’t it..." Clara swallowed. "Doesn’t it frighten you?"

He opened his eyes. He looked at her for a moment, at her pale, round, frightened face and the crumpled pages clutched against her chest. And he smiled, a small, calm, crooked smile, the first genuine one he had worn all day.

"Not as much as it should," he admitted. "Which probably means I’m in trouble."

She let out a startled laugh, wet and breathless.

He rose, brushed the dirt from his knees, and looked out across the valley. The hills rolled away, gold and silver in the evening light. The river glittered. In the far distance, small and faint at the foot of the eastern peaks, a pillar of white fire burned against the sky, the Old Throne’s Beacon, and beyond it, to the south and west, three more, each a different color.

Four worlds, he thought. And all of them looking at us as if we were already dead.

Good.

He turned to the hundred, gathered in a tight, uncertain ring around the Beacon, and the expression on his face changed.

"Listen to me," he said.

The murmur died.

"They’ve told us what they think. In the sky, in numbers, for everyone to see." He glanced up at the board, where the pale figure 1,946 burned alone at the bottom of the column. "They think we’re nothing. They think they can leave us for last."

He lifted the hoe from his shoulder and planted its blade in the soil.

"Let them."

A stir ran through the ranks. Barney grinned. Mirei’s hand tightened on her bow. Caelen’s eyes, steady and bright, rose to meet his.

"We are not going to be the strongest," said Rowan. "We’re going to be the best-prepared. We have seven days. We have good ground. And we have each other." His voice was soft, and perfectly clear. "Roots first."

He turned to Voss and the Baltic brothers.

"Walls," he said. "Starting now."