Horizon Storms

Mere days after his ascension, Mage-Imperator Jora’h watches the handlers prepare his father’s body. Through the thism, the telepathic web that binds every Ildiran to its ruler, he now knows everything Cyroc’h knew, and the knowledge sits on him like a stone. He has himself carried in the chrysalis chair to the highest transparent level of the Prism Palace and summons the Designates, his father’s sons and his own. In the private ossuarium beneath the palace he faces Cyroc’h’s skull, glowing pearly white among the skulls of the rulers before him.

He sees to the succession. His eldest noble-born son, Thor’h, is already Prime Designate; Pery’h is to be the next Designate of Hyrillka, and Daro’h of Dobro. His oldest daughter, Yazra’h, comes without being called, and he gives her a role in home defence. Then a medical kithman bursts in:

“Liege, it is the Hyrillka Designate!”

Rusa’h, Jora’h’s brother, has lain in a sub-thism coma since hydrogue warglobes smashed his citadel palace. Now he is awake, and he grips Jora’h’s hand with a strange, almost defiant strength, and Jora’h has to tell him that Thor’h is Prime Designate now.

Thor’h is no comfort either. He is hooked on shiing, the drug of Hyrillka that dulls an Ildiran’s link to the thism, and he shows up in his father’s awareness as a dark spot; rebuked, he says it helps him focus. Uneasy, Jora’h sends the convalescent Rusa’h home with Thor’h and Pery’h to rebuild Hyrillka, and Rusa’h’s face shows no warmth or welcome. On that pleasure world, under dim orange sunlight, the long rows of nialia vines flutter with newly hatched plantmoths, the source of shiing. Rusa’h walks among them as if in a trance, eats a plantmoth and licks his fingers. Thor’h is overjoyed.

Far away, on the resort world Maratha, where a day and a night each last half a year, the human scholar Anton Colicos and his friend Vao’sh, a rememberer whose face lobes flush with colour as he feels, stay on with a skeleton crew into the long dark, together with Designate Avi’h, Jora’h’s youngest brother. Anton wants to see the geysers called the Cannons of Darkness.

Deep inside a gas giant, in a hydrogue citysphere of faceted globes, the little compy DD, a prisoner of the Klikiss robots, asks their leader Sirix to let him see the human captives. He meets Robb Brindle, the EDF officer who went down into Osquivel’s clouds to parley in Book II and was given up for dead, and the people held with him, sharp-tongued Anjea Telton among them. DD has already learned that the robots are allying with the hydrogues.

Robb’s lover Tasia Tamblyn, a Roamer serving in the EDF, has no idea he is alive. Her cruiser arrives at Ptoro, a chilly, obscure gas giant, carrying a new Klikiss Torch, the alien device whose first test started this war, and a green priest relays the orders. Robb is a prisoner inside. As the Torch is readied DD speaks with him; the hydrogues evacuate the planet and the robots flee with DD. Robb stays a captive, and to Tasia he stays dead.

At Qronha 3, where Adar Kori’nh’s suicide charge broke the hydrogues, the Hansa rushes a new cloud harvester into place. Its manager, Sullivan Gold, a family man, has taken the job no sane person wants, with the green priest Kolker as his link home, and soon he is launching full loads of ekti.

And early on, a dead man takes stock:

“Everybody probably thinks I’m dead.”

Jess Tamblyn found the wentals, the living water that fought the hydrogues in an ancient war, and when the hydrogues caught him spreading them the wentals infused his body to keep him alive. On the empty ocean world where he set them free, he watches huge shapes like sea serpents move beneath the currents. He is no longer entirely human. His thread runs through the whole book. He rejoins the Roamers, explains the wentals and recruits volunteer water bearers, the young scout Nikko Chan Tylar among them, to carry wental water to other ocean worlds. With the wentals’ help he builds an exotic ship that answers his thoughts and gestures, and rides it down into a gas giant through silver lightning. When he meets Cesca Peroni, the Roamers’ Speaker, the woman he has loved for years and who is free again now that Reynald is dead, he cannot safely touch her: his body can barely contain the water in its cells. He warns the Roamers who want to drink it themselves.

On Theroc the burn is everywhere. When the green priest Yarrod leaves the EDF and comes home, the forest is worse than he imagined, the charred trunks standing like a wooden Stonehenge, and Father Idriss, ruling again with Mother Alexa, gives him the count:

“The hydrogues killed both Reynald and Beneto.”

Celli, the youngest of the family, rides behind the green priest Solimar on a gliderbike with condorfly wings to survey the damage; the scar runs as far as the gliderbike can take them, and on one flight the engine sputters and a wing freezes. Roamer engineers under the brilliant, eccentric Kotto Okiah come to rebuild the half-destroyed fungus-reef city, and Cesca invites Idriss and Alexa back into their rebuilt home.

Jora’h has told Udru’h, the closest of his brothers, to give up Dobro as soon as possible and train Daro’h as its next Designate. On Dobro, Udru’h uses the chaos to spirit Nira Khali out of the breeding camp, flying her far to the south, into an entirely different climate zone, and leaving her isolated on a small but lush island in the middle of a vast lake. Sick of so many secrets, the Mage-Imperator presses his brother to talk, and insists that his orders be obeyed. He goes to Dobro himself, to a great stir, meets his daughter Osira’h in the Designate’s residence for the first time, and is shown Nira’s grave on a hillside among singed, scrubby trees. He believes it. The reader knows better.

Osira’h is slipping out of Udru’h’s grip. Since her mother reached her at the end of Book II she has carried Nira’s true memories, and her thoughts are turning against Udru’h and his schemes. She and Rod’h, the strongest of Nira’s children, exercise their minds under a thin, pale lens kithman; when Osira’h tries to pry into Udru’h’s thoughts she finds them tied in deliberate knots. A Klikiss robot visits Dobro, and Udru’h and Daro’h talk about the heart of their plan.

Book II’s great discovery was the transportals, the Klikiss gateways: stone walls framed with coordinate tiles that open onto other dead Klikiss worlds. At the Rheindic Co gate the spy Davlin Lotze finds the coordinate tile for Corribus, and the technicians applaud as he steps through to the cliff city where Margaret and Louis Colicos deciphered the Torch. After more risky explorations he turns up in secret in Basil’s rooms with demands, and the Chairman meets them; Rlinda Kett flies him to Crenna, the sleepy colony where he means to settle down. He studies the evacuated Ildiran settlement there, and then notices that the sunlight is weakening.

The Hansa, meanwhile, launches a transportal colonization initiative to put settlers on the empty Klikiss worlds. On grey, cloudy Dremen, farm girl Orli Covitz and her father Jan, a dreamer of unflagging optimism, face another failed harvest; they are among the first to go, under a special exemption. Rlinda, who changed into a flowing bright purple outfit to visit her favourite ex-husband, the AWOL pilot Branson “BeBob” Roberts, soon has both their ships shuttling colonists to the gates. On Rheindic Co the Covitzes befriend Hud Steinman, an old transportal explorer, who decides to settle on Corribus too.

Then Crenna’s sun begins to fail. Hydrogues and faeros are fighting inside it, and between them they put it out. The colony freezes. Davlin’s ship limps into the nearby Relleker system with almost nothing left in its stardrive, and the governor, Jane Pekar, tells him Relleker has nothing to spare. It falls to Rlinda and BeBob, arriving on a scheduled supply run, to cram the colonists aboard their ships, the Blind Faith dangerously overloaded, and carry them off a frozen world.

The Hansa’s war with its Roamers begins with a secret. Scouting the route of Raven Kamarov’s overdue ekti hauler, young Nikko Chan Tylar finds the ship gutted, emptied of its cargo and then blasted. Cesca shows what is left of it to the clan leaders, and the blast patterns read like a smoking gun. She broadcasts an accusation of EDF piracy and declares an embargo: no more ekti for the Hansa. Tasia, still in EDF grey, hears the rumours; her Listener compy EA, sent on a secret errand to warn the Roamers, has come back with her memory wiped, and the memories Tasia uploads into her come back as lifeless statements of fact. In the Osquivel shipyards, where Del Kellum’s clan holds the EDF survivors of Book II’s battle, Patrick Fitzpatrick III keeps silent. On General Lanyan’s orders, he destroyed Kamarov’s ship himself.

The prisoners there, Fitzpatrick with the weapons specialist Shelia Andez, the cybernetics expert Kiro Yamane and burly Bill Stanna, refuse to work for their captors, and Andez accuses Kellum of wanting them all dead. Kellum’s daughter Zhett, who pulled Fitzpatrick out of a drifting lifetube, unsettles him by flirting. And Kellum has a prize: a small hydrogue derelict, completely intact, found in the rings, its diamond hull now under study by Kotto and his compies KR and GU. Before the book is out the prisoners plot an escape with reprogrammed Soldier compies, and Bill Stanna dies cycling through an airlock in a badly planned break.

On Earth, King Peter, married now to Estarra of Theroc and openly at odds with Basil, still performs: he addresses great crowds from the Whisper Palace balcony in fine form while Basil watches through hidden cameras. Basil has spent a year grooming his pale, hairless deputy Eldred Cain as heir apparent. With Cain and Sarein, Theroc’s ambassador and his lover, he studies warglobe wreckage brought from Theroc, and he has Sarein, as the official ambassador, go home to Theroc, a trip she dreads. The Soldier compies, built from programming taken out of a dissected Klikiss robot, roll off the production lines under the tall, blond engineering specialist Lars Rurik Swendsen; studying them, Peter’s Teacher compy OX finds troubling details, and Peter’s suspicions grow.

Late in the book Sarein reaches Theroc. She cannot find her old quarters in the rebuilt fungus reef, and her parents leave her feeling like a little girl. Basil has sent her to claim Theroc’s leadership. She finds the Roamer Speaker already there, and Cesca angrily accuses Sarein and the Hansa of trying to start a war.

On Hyrillka, Rusa’h stages a startling imitation of the Mage-Imperator’s ascension, sitting in an imitation chrysalis chair, and turns to his nephew:

“It is magnificent. Thor’h, you are truly my Prime Designate.”

He claims visions from his coma: the Lightsource, the realm of light that Ildirans believe in, has shunned Jora’h. He uses shiing to cut his followers loose from Jora’h’s thism and bind them into a web of his own, publicly accuses Jora’h of poisoning their father, and takes on all the trappings of a Mage-Imperator. Thor’h throws in his lot with him: “I am linked closer to Imperator Rusa’h than I ever was to our misguided father.” Only Pery’h stays loyal. He forbids it, and the workers at the plantmoth vines obey Rusa’h instead; Thor’h tells him he does not even belong there, and uncle and nephew imprison him under guards with crystal-tipped spears.

Then Rusa’h strikes at Ildira. He sends assassins to the Prism Palace and executes Pery’h to distract his brother. An assassin’s two knives cut the Mage-Imperator’s robe and slice Yazra’h’s arm as she urges her father into shelter, and her quick action saves his life. Jora’h answers: “I also rescind Thor’h’s appointment as Prime Designate.” Even Yazra’h is startled. He names Adar Zan’nh, his firstborn son, whose mother was a soldier-kith officer, provisional Prime Designate and sends him with warliners to restore order on Hyrillka. Later, with a new spate of hydrogue attacks, Qronha 3 now worked by human and Ildiran harvesters and the knowledge that the Klikiss robots have betrayed the Ildirans, he sends to Udru’h for the child Dobro was built to produce: “Instruct him to send Osira’h to me. She must be ready.”

On Maratha the long night stops being a holiday. The generators of the domed city, Maratha Prime, fail in a sudden, suffocating blackness: sabotage. Alone in the dark, Anton watches a hulking black Klikiss robot stalk away; the robots have been building a sister city on the far side of the planet. More sabotage wrecks two of the three shuttles, and Anton, Vao’sh, Avi’h and a few survivors set out through the darkness for the robots’ city, Anton suspicious all the way.

The robots stop hiding. They have woken programming buried in the Soldier compies, and EDF warships crewed by those compies are now theirs. As a test, they take a stolen Juggernaut and five Mantas to Corribus and order a total bombardment of the new colony. DD pleads with them and fights back; a Soldier compy lifts him overhead and he is overpowered. Orli, exploring the cliffside caves, watches the colony destroyed; Book IV calls her the only survivor of the massacre.

The Hansa’s war reaches the Roamers’ heart. General Lanyan’s ships surround Hurricane Depot, capture everyone there and destroy the station; from the navigation module of a captured ship the EDF finds Rendezvous, the hidden asteroid capital of the clans. Admiral Lev Stromo, mocked as Stay-at-home Stromo, issues an ultimatum to all Roamer personnel there. The EDF encircles the cluster, alarms sound, and old Jhy Okiah, hoarse, tells Cesca to get out. Stromo’s orders are clear: once nothing of value is left, the Mantas open fire in a dazzling display, and the Roamer capital is destroyed. Cesca and the survivors scatter. At Osquivel, when Kellum brings the news, Shelia Andez says the Roamers had it coming.

On Theroc, a wooden figure opens its eyes. The worldforest has grown a golem in the shape of Beneto, the green priest who died with his grove on Corvus Landing, and it speaks:

“We felt every single death”

And on Dobro, isolated on her island in the vast lake, Nira secretly builds a raft and escapes, drifting for days across the open water. The book leaves her lost, but alive and free of Udru’h at last. Her grave on the hillside is empty, and the man who loves her still believes it.