The Kiva of Tishtan

            Tall Man entered Towatki early in the morning, as the sun was just beginning to come over the horizon in the east. The city was its usual self, the sprawling downtown area just beginning to buzz with activity.

            Towatki was not a huge city, but it was old enough and large enough to have actual history. There was a rocky hill that rose up in the south, and it was upon this hill that the Temple of Tishtan stood. Tishtan was a bit of a favored deity in these parts, but as was the Arizradna way, there was less worship and more a kind of reverence, not too different from the way that historical figures were looked upon with respect. Tishtan himself only appeared on occasion. The Meteor God would attend the opening for the annual Space Festival, but in recent times, it seemed that he had taken a page out of Kerahn’s book over in Narcia, and was making himself more and more scarce. Still, unlike Kerahn, Tishtan had not completely withdrawn from the people, though he always insisted that the term “god” was not really applicable to him, or anyone, for that matter.

            Tishtan had actually been a founder of the Temple of the Machine. When the Temple was founded, its tenets essentially boiled down to a notion that the universe could be explained in its entirety in rational terms, and that the gods themselves were not fundamentally different from mortals. Over the centuries the growing mysticism and the outbreak of violence on the part of the Machinists had forced him to distance himself from what had become one of the most aggressive and zealous religions in the world. Still his convictions stayed mostly the same, which made the entire presence of a Temple dedicated to him somewhat ironic.

            Still, the Temple had existed long before Tishtan had co-authored “The Great Machine,” and even if it was not precisely a place of worship, it held great cultural importance.

            Tall Man walked past the attendant priest, who bowed to him as he entered the temple, which was carved into the stone of the hill. The actual entrance of the temple was smaller than one might expect, though the carvings in the rock were ornate. The door led to a small cave-like space. Here, there was a ladder leading down through a hole (though a few centuries back someone had been thoughtful enough to install an elevator for the elderly or the handicapped.)

            At the bottom of this ladder, one found oneself in an enormous kiva, with a circular wall and a dome ceiling. There was no need for electrical lighting here, because hanging in the air were thousands of balls of what appeared to be frozen starlight, and nestled together on the ground were little thickets of those odd, naturally occurring lamplights that grew in the desert.

            Thus, inside, there was a beautiful quality to the light, like a cloudless night in out in the Sarona, with the Path of Aeoes and all the stars providing plenty of illumination.

            Likewise, the air was very cool, and still. The stone walls were dark, representing the blackness of space, and there was a calm, mineral scent in the air that came up from the fine white sand on the floor.

            Tall Man wished that he could pause to appreciate it all. He had grown up in Telavi, a much younger city, far too modern to have these sorts of wonders. But Tall Man was here for the House, and there would not be time.

            The chain was breaking down significantly. Tall Man had been out of contact with the agent two links up from him for months now. His own superior, an old crone who lived in a little mud-brick house overlooking the ocean and went by The Other Witch (presumably there was some other agent who was called “The Witch”) had disappeared, her house ransacked.

            Tall Man was what he understood to be a “gatherer.” Officially, there was no ranking in the House – every member was an Agent. Yet some people specialized, and Tall Man, who joined the House when he was only a small child, had made it clear to his recruiters that he abhorred violence. A lesser organization might attempt to mold a young boy into a more dangerous person, but the House only recruited those they felt could serve as agents in their own right. Tall Man had never before felt in any danger in his work. For years all it had meant was reading newspapers. Later, when he was given subordinates, he was allowed to do some cursory analysis of their reports, and occasionally he would travel to a town to just “take the temperature”, talking to the locals.

            Professionally, he worked as a photographer, often providing pictures for the very newspapers he was to read. Cameras had been his passion since he was young, and the profession was ideal to give him an excuse to look into the important stories around the country in greater detail.

            Tall Man snapped a few photos in the kiva. Despite how it looked with adjusted eyes, it was dim, and even with his steady hands he expected the pictures to turn out blurry with such a long exposure, but professional clumsiness aside, the pictures were just for show until the two Narcian tourists were ready to leave.

            He had met Mr. Flow only once before, when the middle-aged djinni had announced that they were doing some restructuring in the face of the current crisis. The problem, as Mr. Flow explained it, was that while the chain system worked perfectly in an ideal situation – the information feeding directly upward and the instructions flowing directly down – in this state, the gaps left by dead or missing agents were wreaking havoc, and the House was just barely struggling to keep hold of southern Arizradna, let alone succeeding in any operations.

            Tall Man could smell the strange “cigarettes” Mr. Flow smoked even across the kiva from him. They smelled sharp and overbearing, even though Mr. Flow was not currently enjoying one.

            Finally, the Narcians climbed up the ladder and left. Tall Man walked forward.

            “Hey, Joseph,” said Mr. Flow. That wasn’t Tall Man’s name.

            “Adewale,” responded Tall Man, using the first djinn-sounding name he could think of.

            “How was your trip? Not too much traffic, I hope?”
            “No, it was pretty smooth.” Tall Man had not encountered any trouble on the road.

            “How’s your mother?” asked the djinni.

            Tall Man took a deep breath. “She’s out of the hospital,” meaning that his superior was missing, presumed dead.

            “And your grandpa?”

            “On vacation.” Likewise, he had not been in contact with the Other Witch’s superior, a stern Retron man called High Hill.

            Mr. Flow nodded grimly. Things were really falling apart. “Did our girl get her package all right?”

            “Yes, she sends her regards.” The Prisoner was still up at the DFO with Dust. Tall Man had no idea why there had been such a fuss made over the man. Normally, an agent was given permission to recruit their own subordinates, but in this case, this “Jack Milton” was chosen by someone far higher up, and then given to Dust, who was a lovely person, but, like Tall Man, was a gatherer, and thus probably not prepared for any seriously dangerous situations, for safe keeping. In recent weeks, Tall Man had kept Dust out of the loop. It had been Mr. Flow’s orders, but Tall Man concurred. The Prisoner was clearly a high priority, and keeping him insulated from the current shitstorm seemed wise.

            Mr. Flow walked over to the elevator and pulled a key from his pocket. He turned the key and a red light appeared on the control panel saying “Out of Service.” The only remaining entrance to the kiva was the hole in the ceiling. The djinni spoke now very quietly.

            “Ok, here’s the deal,” he said. “There’s at least one of them in town. They’re sniffing around.”

            Tall Man kept an eye on the hole for the ladder.

            “Someone has been asking about the DFO,” said Mr. Flow.

            “Do you think they…?”

            “It’s one of two things.”

            “One of two? What’s the other one?” Tall Man imagined The Prisoner was a high priority, and that’s why he had been hidden all the way out here, but such a plan would seem to break down if the DFO actually had anything of import.

            “Sinret,” said Mr. Flow, and gave Tall Man a meaningful look.

            “Sinret?” The enemy was interested in an astronomy project? “What do they care about…”

            “Sinret was always their project. We just didn’t know until recently.”

            “What do they want from it?”

            “We don’t know.”

            An old priest watched as the tall man with the camera made his way out of the temple. The priest was small of frame and the deep red of his skin had faded in his old age. The light was beginning to beat down harder now. Soon he would retreat into the kiva, where it remained pleasantly cool all day.

            He would have to wait for the djinni to leave though. They could not suspect that they had been watched. The priest had not heard what they were saying – the djinni had cleverly picked just the right part of the room to be acoustically obstructive, and the priest’s surveillance equipment could not be installed in such a magically radiant location.

            Still, straining his large, sensitive ears, the priest could hear the mention of the Sinret Project, which meant that they knew, or at least they were beginning to suspect.

            Three nights. The information that had come down to them said that within three nights, the telescope would be pointed in the right direction, and they would have the information they needed.

            In the café that sat two blocks from the hill, the Diplomat sipped at the sweet, nearly-frozen tea they served and took a bite of the complementary bread, which itself was oddly sweet, with a hint of cinnamon.

            The priest was just a brown pillar up on the hill when viewed from that distance, but his presence confirmed that things had gone according to plan, or rather, things were going according to the new plan. The DFO situation was a crisis, to be certain, but the Diplomat remained skeptical that the enemy would find the information quite as useful as they expected.

            Really, though, this was phase two of what he considered “The Prisoner Project.” Phase One had worked out in the end, though the Diplomat worried that he had been too anxious and jumped the gun in giving Milton the coffee.  Perhaps, Milton would have been better off if he had had a chance to prove himself capable of standing on his own, as it were. The Diplomat had been an agent for a very long time, though, and this sort of second-guessing was far from unusual.

            The Diplomat created plans within plans, and accounted for many possibilities, always being careful to lay the track for contingencies should they arise. Sometimes, the older tracks had to be abandoned, but he had cultivated an instinct, during his tenure, to know when to keep the ideas and resources he had collected and use them for other purposes. Thus, second-guessing was not the weakness that some others might believe it to be. The Prisoner had been given a crutch in Phase One, but now the Diplomat had seen what he might do with such an advantage. The madness to which he left his torturers had been edifying, both in regards to the nature of the faceless men and to the character of Jack Milton.

            The theory went that if Milton had already “awakened,” he should have seen the faceless man the moment he woke up in his cell. Perhaps events might have played out entirely differently. Yet, there were still some doubts that Milton would ever truly do so, that perhaps the analysis had given a false positive.

            What the Diplomat had was the hearsay of hearsay, but if it proved to be true, Milton could just be the key to the survival of the House.

            Phase One had ended, and the groundwork was now laid. In three days, Phase Two would begin.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)