“I don’t know why I haven’t ever asked this before, but... that whole six-person-marriage thing? Do you just all sleep together in one giant bed? Or do you use two-person beds, and play favourites?”
Ayna wasn’t quite sure why she was babbling. But things had been quietly tense for quite a period now, and she needed a release.
“Two-person beds,” Herdis told her absent-mindedly, paying attention to the dig and surrounding area. “And we rotate partners.”
“Right. Why didn’t that occur to me?”
“Because you are a child,” Herdis replied in the exact same tone of voice.
“Maybe.”
She could think of nothing more at the moment, and so just started wandering about. This whole bodyguard thing had been somewhat interesting at first, but day after day of just watching people slowly dig downwards only had so much appeal. And then there was the find of those four bodies.
Ayna looked towards the growth, at the general area where she and Herdis had made the find. Near as she could tell, nothing much had come of it. The bodies had been disposed of, the authorities had been notified, and that was all she really knew about as far as official reactions went.
“Are you aware that you are completely silent even in your sleep?” Herdis asked. “It’s weird.”
“Eh. Normal back home.”
Ayna was going through the motions, but couldn’t inject much actual energy into the show of levity. Maybe it was the workers. There had been a bit of a pall hanging over the group ever since the discovery. Nothing dramatic; just a general subdued atmosphere compared to the majority of that first day. They chatted between themselves but kept it rather low. Enough time had passed for it to wear away at Ayna a bit.
Dulel had declared the day before that this might be the final day of this preliminary dig, and judging by his uncharacteristic excitement the prediction seemed set on becoming true. Ayna hadn’t seen him for a couple of hours, and most of the labourers were now simply milling about in front of the ruins. Steady brush-strokes emanated from down below and Ayna decided to give things a look again. Herdis followed, and Bers was already standing halfway down.
The ever-more delicate digging had uncovered a set of stone steps, cut with rather remarkable skill given the age of this place. Ayna couldn’t be entirely sure, but it even seemed a little bit like the builders had carved patterns into each stone. But then the steps were quite worn.
What it all led down to was some kind of entryway or foyer. Stone pillars on either side held the roof up. The walls on either side were intricately carved and the doorway was rather impressively sized, topped by some kind of centrepiece.
Some of Dulel’s gizmos were busily bobbing up and down, brushing away dirt with exceptionally fine-haired tools, while others made various kinds of recordings. The man himself stood before the doorway, looking absorbed in thought but quite pleased.
“This is... yes... at least...” he muttered.
Ayna took in the symbols on the walls. There was little in the way of recognisable figures, or basic symbols. Whatever meaning this had all held had been particular to the culture that had set this up, and she had nowhere near the education to try to make sense of it all.
“So this was a... temple?” Ayna ventured.
“Temple... school... place of wisdom,” Dulel said, almost as if to himself. “Wisdom was perceived as coming from beyond. So this was a place of power...”
He consulted a handheld screen, showing the scans of the deeper interior, filled with age-old dirt.
“Here they believed they could breach the beyond and learn from it. It is an honour to stand here.”
Alertness was fundamental enough to Ayna’s mind that she noticed a change in the faint sounds of the workers above. Now that she started actively paying attention to it she felt she detected some amount of alarm. She turned at the sound of footsteps coming down, and saw one of the workers.
He said something to Dulel, and the historian’s face promptly focused.
“What?” Herdis asked.
“A man has died,” Dulel said.
# # #
A group of workers was gathered by the edge of the growth. They blocked Ayna’s view, so her first sight of the body was up close. He had been laid out on his back, probably by someone checking for vitals, judging by the torn-open shirt collar.
Death was nothing new to Ayna, but it was the silence that struck her. There were no upset voices, no murmur of conversation. Just solemnity from the human beings, and seemingly from the buzzing little critters of the wild as well.
His name had been Kenn, and Ayna estimated she’d last seen his face three hours ago at the most. Throughout the dig he’d been prone to taking walks off by himself during break time. And now he lay there before her, with the same odd marks of that one body below the cliff.
That strange death had struck again.
It seemed that everyone who meant to come over had already done so, and for a few breaths everyone just looked at one another, the body, and the growth. It wasn’t at its thickest here. A non-Dwyyk could have crept out of it and in again easily enough.
“I think we are... done,” Dulel said.
The ride back to town was quiet, marked by nervous tension in the group. It was funny how mystery put more fear in people than a plain and obvious disaster.
Two ships coming in for a landing on the strip was the only real distraction from Ayna’s thoughts, and that only lasted until they were out of sight. She was quite glad when the vehicle came to a stop.
For a moment it occurred to her how she would normally handle stepping off. Knowing herself, it would probably be with a jump, followed by raised arms and a dramatic whoop of a job completed. But her mood was darker than usual. And a show of levity for the sake of being consistent would not have gone over well with the labourers.
Bers said a few words of farewell with the men he’d chatted with during this period, and Ayna and Herdis did their best to do likewise.
“Well... that is... that is that,” Dulel said awkwardly. “I would dearly have liked for it to not have been marked like this, but there is nothing I can do about that. The past is as the past is.”
He shuffled about in place.
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“Do you have what you need to go back successful?” Herdis asked.
“I do, yes. Enough to get my marks and kick off a proper dig. I do...”
The man looked around, but they were fairly alone.
“I do still have quite a bit of university money left over. I think maybe I’ll look into leaving some of it for that man’s family. I can file it under ‘unexpected expenses’.”
“Will you get away with that?” Ayna asked.
“It is code for luxury dining or exotic prostitutes more often than you might think,” the man stated simply. “Among my colleagues.”
“So is that yes or no?”
“Yes.”
Dulel cleared his throat.
“But I’ll start with paying you as promised. Just let me get to the bank before it closes.”
Ayna wandered off, not thinking about anything in particular, just letting her inner self swirl about on its own. She moved slowly, staying in the general area of the hotel, so she was a bit surprised at first to see a small group of the workers still nearby. But a second glance showed that Saketa had apparently held them up, and was talking to them.
Ayna couldn’t hear the subject from where she was, nor could she see a ready way to get close enough without being obvious about it. So she simply turned left down a side street and kept on ambling until her comm chimed.
“We have the money,” Herdis told her. “And me and Bers wanted to splurge a little on dinner. Do you want to join us?”
She did, now that she thought about it, and shortly after Ayna was biting down on some kind of sea creature lathered in plant matter. Her taste buds went through a bit of an adjustment period before simply falling in love. The dish was the most expensive one in the hotel’s restaurant, and it was a delight to find that it was worth it.
Herdis ate with the expression of an explorer, seemingly applying the entirety of her faculties to feeling out this new treat. Bers wasn’t quite as focused, but as a skilled cook himself it was no surprise that he would treat eating with more care than he did most other things.
Once they were mostly finished, the woman cleared her throat and looked at the two of them.
“Now that that is all over with I don’t feel much like just staring at a wall until the Addax comes back,” she said. “We don’t know exactly when that’ll be, so we can’t really wander far, but I would like to get to know this planet a little bit better, now that I’m not busy.”
Ayna nodded.
“I wanted to spend tomorrow going about town, checking the markets, the entertainment... things like that,” Herdis went on. “Now... I have looked into things, and there is no real commercial air travel here. But we can get a cheap boat to take us to the nearest city. It will be a bit of a trip, but the overland route is much longer. I was thinking of using the day after tomorrow for that one, if possible. What do you say?”
“Sounds... sounds good,” Ayna said. Her mind hadn’t really been on exploration lately, but suggestions had a way of jogging the mind.
“Do whatever,” Bers said to them, looking a bit distracted. “I... I stay here.”
“Here in town?” Herdis asked.
“Yes.”
“Alright. Ayna?”
“Sure,” Ayna replied. “I’m up for a trip, if possible.”
“And you’re both up for going about town tomorrow?”
Ayna and Bers both nodded.
“Good.”
They played a few games of cards, until it felt appropriate to go their separate ways. Ayna retreated to her hotel room, locked the door and lay down on the bed with her clothes still on. She took the glasses off her head and dropped them on the nightstand and simply stared up at the ceiling for a little bit.
It could be maybe seven to ten days before Gaylen, Jaquan and Kiris returned. So at least a week of this planet and its mysteries. Though this was hardly a metropolis there were surely enough distractions to last her that long. So why were these strange murders sticking in her mind like this? She had no actual reason to get anywhere near the wild growth again.
But just how had those people died, the ones with the strange wounds? How had this death been so close to her and Ayna had picked nothing up? What was Saketa’s part in all of this?
And how by the deep spirits had the woman gotten behind her like that on Uktena Station? No matter how many times Ayna replayed that scene in her head she couldn’t understand it. And not knowing what blind spot her stealth and awareness had was very unnerving.
After a little while she gave up, sighed, and sat up. She walked over to the window and opened the woven shutter. Darkness had fallen, bringing relative silence to the town and a blessed relief from glaring light.
Why not? she asked herself, before swinging herself out the window. Finding purchase was easy enough on the stone wall, and she climbed down two storeys before leaping onto a neighbouring rooftop. Then she started a silent jog above unsuspecting streets. She had come to know the route, and so made good time to the poorer part of the town; the one with the really cramped streets, offensive smells and grim and desperate people... and virtually identical housing, making for easy traversal.
There was a bit of a naughty thrill in all of this; scuttling about above the heads of people whom culture and biology had left so blind and oblivious. But the unfortunate reality was that she had a goal.
It was a little-known fact of Dwyyk biology that they needed fewer hours of sleep than most of humanity’s branches. And so she’d made a nightly habit of poking about... and three times she’d spotted Saketa lurking about the poor district.
There was a moderate amount of traffic down in those narrow canyons that served as streets; those who did have jobs around here mostly had to work late into the evening, and the unemployed seemed to amble about at any hour. And then there were the gangs, watching out for intrusions into their little slice of this paradise, and the twitchy, angry, directionless youngsters. Twice Ayna had seen them get up to some petty act of vandalism, and had seen plenty of evidence of more.
Saketa was looking for something, and clearly the woman believed she could find it here. She’d had the demeanour of a hunter on those three occasions, and Ayna had seen her forcefully confront people four times. The most dramatic case had been when she’d clearly been demanding something from a four-man group of teenage punks, who responded with belligerence.
When one tried to move from belligerence to physical force, Saketa had beaten them all down in a rather frightening display. And then continued with the demands.
There was something different this time around, when Ayna eventually spotted that very distinctive crimson head. The woman wasn’t hunting. Now she was striding, heading to a specific destination with quick, purposeful strides.
It was enough to make Ayna rather nervous. She’d asked herself repeatedly if she and Herdis had made the right call by keeping quiet about the woman’s poking about near the four bodies. That moment in Uktena’s dark underbelly came to the forefront of Ayna’s mind, and she wondered if this time the woman would indeed kill someone.
She followed. Saketa moved a bit faster than Ayna, but not to the degree that keeping track of her was an issue. Her feet landed gently on rooftop after rooftop, until Ayna started to suspect their destination. Up ahead was a large tavern; one of the largest buildings in this part of town and one of few with a bit of space around it.
Ayna stopped on the second building over and crouched low. She could glimpse the main entrance from where she was, and Saketa did indeed make her way directly to it and barge in. The din of conversation and carousing muted over the following seconds, but wasn’t immediately replaced by sounds of combat.
Curiosity got the better of Ayna, continuing its winning streak, and she let herself hang off the roof’s edge before dropping. Her joints handed the landing easily and silently, and she moved over to the tavern. She had her hood up, and in the gloom the locals wouldn’t notice her chalky skin from a reasonable distance.
She went around the front and found a window. The woven covering had been lifted a bit to let out heat and smells, and Ayna peeked in.
Saketa was dragging a table to the centre of the main floor with one hand and holding her sheathed sword in the other. She got up on the makeshift platform and turned in a slow circle, apparently making sure that she was the centre of attention. Her audience was highly varied in age, but all looked hard-bitten and poor. Ayna could tell the woman wasn’t a welcome guest, but it seemed that no one dared tell her.
Saketa spoke in a stern tone, pointing in a particular direction. There was a sense of challenge in her voice, which became all the more clearer when she switched languages to Larin.
“I am done searching,” the woman said in her hard, trilling accent. “Tomorrow night I will go to the old ruins. The ones you have all seen in the distance. I will stay at that old sacred place, fouling it with my presence. Until someone dares remove me.”
She tapped her scabbard on the table.
“Spread the word.”
She hopped down and strode back out the door.