Minister Capstone did not look well. The grey shawl she had donned in place of her robes of office clung to boney shoulders, the bulging joints of swollen elbows, wrists and knuckles peeping from beneath the fringed hem. Her hands trembled around her tea cup, and she lay more than sat in her chair, cradled by the cushioning. She’d caught a respiratory infection, each breath wheezing through her nostrils. Despite her illness, her spirits appeared bright. A wistful smile played about her chapped lips, and crows feet crinkled around the filmy wells of her eyes.
Sister Young unfolded her desk on a low table between them in the Ministers suite.
“It is the tenants of your order to record all you see and hear, is it not?” asked Capstone.
“It is,” Young scraped the edge of her graphite against the sharpener.
The Minister chuckled, “what a difficult and challenging mission this assignment must be for you, then.”
“How so?” Sister Young asked, putting her graphite to the page and catching in brief shorthand the minister’s preamble.
“You cannot see or hear what the wyrms communicate. Beyond that, you do not understand when she does speak.”
“By communication, to what are you referring?”
Capstone’s brows drew together in a shadow of a frown. “There are no words for it, for it is not of words.”
“This presents a challenge for me, you understand.”
“Oh, indeed.”
“Will you cooperate with my mission?”
“As much as I am able to, certainly.”
“Thank you,” Sister Young paused to drink from her own tea cup. Ship grown, brewed by her own hand, it was pleasant and refreshing. An errant question passed through her mind, it was not pertinent but she asked it anyway. “Does the emissary prepare the tea she serves correctly?”
“Pardon?”
“The tea the emissary had brought with her, Theatian Jasmine, is her preparation of it correct?”
“Yes,” said Capstone, a faint knowing in her watery eyes. “The buds only open under high heat, releasing their pigment and flavour. The jasmine is mildly toxic raw, deadly if treated to under cooking.”
“It is poisonous?”
“Only when mishandled. Theta Mars is only dangerous if one assumes one knows it, not if one has learned it.”
Sister Young wrote in silence a moment.
“What is your relation to the emissary?”
“I gave birth to her.”
“Did you know the emissary would be your child before she boarded Divine Messenger?”
“No, I did not.”
“How did you come to learn of her provenance?”
“I was informed by my fellow ministers that successful espionage had been run aboard this ship. It was not a private meeting, and much ado was made. I’m sure if she was any of the other children, it would have been their parents they brought along.”
“Why did parliament desire to bring the emissary’s parents?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“To try to coerce her to join their cause I’m sure. The offer of asylum was genuine.”
“What motive is there for this action?”
“Proof that Haddock has harmed or mistreated his hostages. I'm sure you understand how that would look. It would make a compelling suit of grievances for the colony to bandy about, were it true.”
“You assert that it is not? That the upbringing of your child and the other hostages was just?”
“I do.”
“By what word have you been informed of this?”
“By no word, Sister, but I believe and trust my daughter’s assurances.”
Sister Young caught no sign of doubt or untruthfulness on the minister’s face or in her tone.
“What was the… ritual… that passed between the emissary and yourself?”
“The giving of a drop of blood.”
“Is the blood of significance?”
“Oh, very.”
Sister Young closed her eyes and blinked for a long moment. “Are you deliberately obfuscating the record, Minister Capstone?”
“No, Sister,” the woman sighed, a faint sadness to her tone. “This is where the waters become muddy. Have you spoken with Abalone? She would be better able than I to explain it to you, or perhaps the Scholar, have you read his thesis? I’m sorry, Sister. I am only an old woman who has spent her flexible years learning economics. My expertise is far from this arena.”
Sister Young sat alone in her rooms, staring at the sprawling mess of inconclusive detritus she had collected. Transcripts and statements where topics were talked around and not named. Double speak and lies. Political unrest was not a stranger to her, schemes, pogroms and obfuscation were the basis of the founding of her order. Precise, complete records created honest, accurate worlds and colonies. Debates, arguments and even wars she could analyse, understand, decode. But from Theta Mars there was so much noise from the colonists. It was as if they were dogs in a pit, tearing into each other after learning they could not climb the walls.
They shouted out against an aggressor that said nothing.
Sister Young shuffled through her papers and found the copied document she sought.
On the _ of _, colonial year _, five wyrms had landed outside parliament in the colonial capital of Theta Mars. A man had been with them. He had delivered an address, and left a copy of a decree. The Expulsion order.
Then there was nothing.
The man who was with them was identified as James Haddock, who had died in a fire at a Capstone research facility several years ago. His body was never recovered.
Everything that followed conformed to the letter of the decree. Capstone’s planetary enterprise was destroyed, Capstone himself vanished, but no other individuals were harmed. One hundred infants were abducted over a series of months.
On the date specified by the decree, a burning was begun on the edge of colony territory, moving inwards. The human occupation of Theta Mars ended.
The ministers Sister Young listened too, themselves all appointed to the positions they held long after the Expulsion, spoke as if an attack had been launched against them unprovoked and without warning.
Through unrecorded means, the Expulsion decree had been widely disseminated, most Theta Martian adults had read it.
They told her, repeatedly and with dogged animation, that James Haddock was insane and held a personal vendetta against his employer, Joseph Capstone. He had managed to tame a wyrm, and was using the animal as a weapon of terror.
The madman hypothesis relied upon unsubstantiated claims. First, the individual claiming the name the Teeth of the Lion was Jame Haddock. Second, the actions undertaken by the wyrms were orchestrated by him. Third, that the goal of the Expulsion had been to instill terror and end human lives.
The entire thing hinged on the notion that this was a conflict between men. The trouble then was the wyrm.
It loomed behind the emissary, lurked on Theta Mars. It did not speak, it did not accuse and it did not bargain. This was not new.
When the settler ships landed, it was there. A smouldering observer. A non communicative animal.
Sister Young recalled what Felsdam had told her. His insinuations of corruption stemming from the very dawn of the colony.
The wyrm was identified, almost upon discovery, as a potential danger. Those that studied it were often seen as courting doom. Journeymen died in the field, or were mauled and maimed. James Haddock was one such Journeyman. He survived a solo expedition, and returned with a bite wound that had encompassed most of his left shoulder. It was this scar that led to the identification of him as the Teeth of the Lion, as that man bore a matching wound. Chemical burns were also present in the injury site, indicative of wyrm ichor. This was where the theory of poisoning took root. The same root hypothesis backed Felsdam’s writings, Ichor Theory.
Sister Young did not have patience to sift crackpot science for truth, she did not have time to listen to the whining of industrymen either. She needed to know the rest of the account, she needed the silent watcher to speak.
She stood. She would collect the Scholar and the Journeywoman, and ask them to act as translators. She would beg, if she had to, but she would hear the wyrm speak. She would know the other side of the truth.
