What the Rift Showed Them

He had told himself to check the room, and when he woke he did.

The panel on the south-east wall comes first in the notes, the way an unfinished task does. He doesn't say what it did, and nothing in the records suggests anyone found out. After the panel comes the armoury, and he was more thorough about that. No traps. Four batteries, still holding a charge. Suits of armour, all of them broken: a D-suit, estex suits, and a ysoki refractor suit that would need retailoring before anyone else could wear it. Jump jets, which he marked for Bren. A security key for some computer system, its door unnamed. A pair of injection gloves. Two vials of weaponised insanity mist.

He doesn't comment on the mist. Under it is a note about something that would spoil a person's aim for a short while. I think it belongs to the mist, but the page doesn't say so.

At the computer wall lay a dead reptile. Taeon identified it as a violisk, a magical beast about seven feet long and heavy, two hundred pounds or near it. Then he did what the order trains us to do with any dead animal and read the body for the life around it. Violisks, he noted, are more likely found in pairs or in family groups than alone. This one had slashing wounds and blast wounds. Its eye sockets were empty. It had died within the last few days.

Where one lies dead, do not count one.
Count the ones who walked beside it, and are not here.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Absence

He doesn't write down who killed it, or who took the eyes, or where the rest of its family had gone. He wrote down that there would have been a family. That is the observation I keep coming back to.

---

The records skip ahead here, and I can't fill the gap. They don't say how the party left the facility or how long it took. When the notes pick up again, the party is listening to Chiskisk.

Before the briefing there is a sketch of a ship, labelled a Deaths-head necro-glider: a long bone hull of ribs and spines, two skull-like prows, a burning core showing through the open chest. It carries a crew of one and is quick for its size. He doesn't say whose it was, or whether the party ever saw one up close. He set it down the way you would draw a predator's track before you knew what made it.

Chiskisk's part is in fragments. Dr Solstarni would not be able to help. The Stellar Degenerator was named, and next to it the Corpse Fleet. There was a name connected with the city of Orphys on Eox, which he wrote down as he heard it. I can't make it into anything, and I won't pretend to. There was a district, Splice. Eox, he was told, would be uncomfortable, but civil. One line he underlined in spirit, if not in ink: Must keep the weapon out of their hands. And one more, about a profile: Hugh had been deputized.

That is the whole of it. A ship, a weapon, a city of the dead, and a duty. They set out.

---

The first two days of the voyage were uneventful, and he says so in one line. There is a note that the pilot of the ship was in the airlock, without a word on why.

On the third day, at sixteen hundred, with Bren and Grek nearby, something opened ahead of them and to the left. He describes it carefully: rift-like, a purple shimmer with lightning running through it and black at its centre, twice as wide as the ship. Someone knew of something similar, long unseen, associated with Apostae and with the drow. Then it washed over them.

The Fragments tell this part, and they tell it better than I could.

And on the third day the dark opened beside the ship, and it was wider than the ship.
And it passed over them, and each felt it as lightning in the blood, and the light went out of their eyes.
And each one in the dark was shown a thing.
And to the one called Hugh the dark was heavy, and held him still, and meant him no harm,
and he knew that many strange things had happened, and could not say which.
And to Grek the dark showed his own making running down: the gears slipping, the age coming on,
and a street at night, and rain, and a window of screens, and a mirror, and in it a man.
And to Kopalo the dark showed Apostae, and he did not know why.
And it gave him a grief for the whole of the galaxy, and for every life lost in it, and the grief was his own.
And he reached back for what came before, and found nothing behind the prison on Castrovel.
And a boy of the lashunta smiled at him there, and for a moment it was enough.
And Kopalo sat as he had been taught, and was calm, and a gate of metal closed somewhere in the dark.
And then there was nothing at all.

— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told

The records support every line of this, and that is rare enough that I want to say so. The Fragments add the ceremony and nothing else. The line about the prison is his own. He wrote that he could not remember anything before it, and he wrote that the feeling was personal. I won't make more of it than that, and the Fragments don't either, which I think is to their credit. The boy he doesn't name. I have never found out who he was.

---

Grek woke first, about five hours later. He was in a small cell with Taeon, and Bren was not there.

The room beyond the bars was lit by six braziers, all burning. Three chests stood in the middle of the floor and two more to the north. Grek's cell was not locked. Whoever had put them there had not been careful, or had not needed to be. Their gear was in reach. Grek took his own and Taeon's, and they armed themselves.

Hugh found his own gear too, then went through the chests and came up with a buzzblade dueling sword, a chain sword worth nine and a half thousand credits. The notes give it an exclamation mark. It is the only one on the page.

One chest held a liquid, thick enough to call goo. A baton went into it and stuck there. Someone used a psychokinetic hand on it, and the notes record the result as a high-five. I take that as a small joke made in a strange room, and I am glad they made it.

That is where the records stop: a cell that wasn't locked, a room of fire and chests, a sword, a stuck baton, and one of them missing.

He was calm when the dark took him. The records don't say whether he was calm when he woke and counted three of them where there should have been four. I would like to think so. I know only that among the first things he wrote down after waking was that Bren wasn't there.