Seeklight

Daenek drew back from the balcony before he could be spotted by them. Standing in the corridor he became aware of a faint electronic whine coming from somewhere very close. The seeklight, he thought suddenly. He reached into his pocket and brought it out. The smooth metal was sticky with drying blood.

The little faceted light was blazing, and the shrill note became louder as he pointed the device towards the unexplored end of the corridor. The only direction I’ve got left, he thought. I might as well follow it.

Tracing whatever path kept the tiny light brightest, Daenek moved through the old palace. Corridors without light and cramped with musty air, high-ceil-inged rooms that filled with the echoes of his steps as he crossed them. In one, he saw the sun set through a stained-glass window as he passed.

The seeklight’s whine seemed to become as loud as the bad priests’ cries had been when Daenek stood at last before a pair of metal-studded doors. The last stairway he had followed had descended deep into the bowels of the palace, into this silent chamber lit only by the last flickering radiance of a near-dead fluorescent panel in the ceiling. Daenek set his palm against the edge of one of the doors and pushed it open.

Inside, it was like the nest of some large, burrowing animal. A heap of matted cloth and straw lay in one corner, a few yards from the glowing embers of a small fire. Small bones and vegetable rinds littered the floor.

Daenek picked up a half-burnt stick from the fire and blew on it’s end, re-igniting it into flame. Something rustled in the mound in the corner as he approached it, holding the flame overhead to see.

An old man’s face, wizened and with a beard that was matted with dirt and grease, looked up at him. His body was curled up like a child’s on the rags where he had been sleeping. As Daenek bent down, the old man’s eyes widened, his ancient face becoming suffused with an expression of wonder and delight. In a scratchy falsetto, he spoke. “You’ve come back,” he said.

“You’ve come back.”

The old man lapsed into a clouded senility from time to time, and Daenek, nearly an hour later, was still not sure whether the old man understood that he was not the old thane, his father.

Daenek gathered from the old man’s rambling that he had been some type of official or courtier for the old thane. “I crept back here,” mumbled the old man. “Oh—a long time ago. There was nowhere else to go. It was all over. But you’re here now.” He broke into a racking spasm of coughing that brought flecks of blood to his cracked lips.

“Take it easy,” said Daenek, holding the old man’s shoulder steady against the mound of rags and straw. He’s not going to last long, he thought.

“The—the bad priests never bother me.” The old man’s yellowed eyes rolled from side to side. “I think that I’m a pet to them. They bring me some food now and then, little things that they catch—they’re very fast—and water. But they never bother me.”

“That’s good. Don’t get excited.” I don’t have much time, thought Daenek listening to the old man’s ragged breathing. Not if I’m to learn anything from him.

Almost desperately, he pulled the little square of white metal by its chain from beneath his shirt, stiff with dried blood. “Do you know what this is?” he said, holding it out.

Something behind the old man’s eyes seemed to grow clearer as he looked from the metal to Daenek’s face. “That’s right,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t know, would you? You were only a baby.”

Before Daenek could stop him, the old man had risen from the mound and started tottering across the room. “This way,” he piped, waving his gnarled hand.

Daenek picked up another stick from the fire he had re-kindled, then followed the old man. He found him in front of another pair of doors. They were featureless, with no visible way of opening them.

“Here,” the old man said excitedly, pointing a wavering finger at a small slot in the surface of one of the doors.

Leaning forward, Daenek studied the tiny opening. Without thinking, his hand found the square of white metal and pressed it into the slot.

A groan of long unused machinery, and the two doors began to pull apart from each other. Daenek stepped back and the metal fell out of the slot and against his chest. Fluorescent panels flickered, then blazed on inside the chamber revealed when the doors were open all the way. The light gleamed from the gold-plated surfaces of machinery within, ornate in its complexity.

“It still functions,” said the old man with a note of pride in his voice. “The priests, the original ones who came on the seedship, built it well.”

“What is it?” said Daenek. The reflected glow dazzled him.