Page 59
She shuddered.
It was all feasible, and looking at it from her present day perspective? All predictable.
She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.
It was indeed predictable. She was no genius, just an ordinary, well-educated woman who could think clearly. She refused to believe that people with those characteristics hadn’t existed back then. Of course they did.
They must have known what would happen. They could easily have anticipated the pitfalls, the problems, and the really terrible results of what they were doing.
The horrid conclusion confronted Maelin.
At some point, accident had become intention. Things didn’t merely go wrong. Someone who played “Crowns and Tides”, someone who loved strategies, subtleties, unexpected moves—and winning—that someone had carefully orchestrated the development of the Rhovan. Strange war machines that had wrought havoc on the battlefield and nearly ended Caelemar itself.
She took a deep breath, and made some notes.
A picture was growing from these jottings. A city that had unknowingly created an underground world. An effort to amend that creation resulted in an underground hierarchy that served violent interests.
And those interests must have created the worst killing machine ever known.
She’d take these facts to Cyrus, she knew. All of them would help in the treatise they were building, but whether they’d help or not in their search for answers to their current problem?
She had no damned idea.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cyrus was still turning over the information he’d learned in his mind as he walked through his house to what he liked to call his thinking room.
Others would have said his ‘study’, but to him it was a place to sit, stick his feet up on a very nice red leather hassock, and just think. Which he did quite a lot, as demonstrated by the heel marks his boots had left over the years.
The name Hallion had clearly disappeared from his reference materials. He didn’t need to consider that a question, since Mae had discovered a descendant in one of her uncle’s books—one that didn’t automatically update itself.
That fact puzzled him, and he took a few moments to consider the implications.
Someone—or several someones—wanted the later Hallion name removed from history. But they were happy to leave the original references that pertained to the construction of Caelemar itself. That was indeed a magnificent achievement and something to be honoured.
As to the Rhovan wars...the information was brutal, blunt, and not terribly specific.
A race of strange, apparently mechanically enhanced creatures, with human-like attributes, had attempted to take over not only Gloamtide, but Caelemar itself.
Fortunately, attacking Caelemar had been problematic for them.
Alerted by the Gloamtide battles, the Caelemar army had put regiments of guards around the access points, shut down many of them, and managed to contain the Rhovan to the lower levels, where they had systematically trapped and, according to the official histories, destroyed them.
But even so, the cost had been brutally high, and the effects had lingered for generations.
His contemplations were interrupted by a tingle on his wrist, and he raised it to see his whisperseal glowing. He touched it.
“Cyrus, it’s Mae,” came the soft voice. “I have found things.”
“I’m here. My town house. Come. I have found things too.”
A brief flash of green signified assent and receipt, and then she was gone.
He had to wonder what she’d found that necessitated such a brief contact, but at this point he was starting to think that not very much would surprise him.
One of his concerns was that the current source of Rhovan interest might be her Uncle. He was, as far as Cyrus knew, a brilliant if intensely private man. He had access to a very tidy fortune, more than enough to hire the right people to do the wrong things, and probably a greater familiarity with the Rhovan story because of his age. He would have known some of the survivors’ children, or perhaps their grandchildren. He had no idea how old Phineas Theryn was, but he made a note to find out. So yes, he was on Cyrus’s list of suspects. Was it a coincidence that the first victim had been discovered during the Theryn ball?
No way to tell at the moment, but it was a worry.
