Zeroth Law, page 7
She scrambled back up, finally pulling back on her tunic, but she was alone now. The battlefield was quiet.
Blood, death. Shouting.
The memories weren’t quiet. They couldn’t be. They would remain - the pain would remain. But so too would these gifts, and they held her hand as she learned the ways of war. She saw her dead family and neighbours watching her from the crooks of the trees, but the light of her gifts was slowly peeling away those shadows. Perhaps that was the greatest of the gods’ gifts to her - not just the strength to kill, but the strength to kill despite knowing what it meant to be killed.
Isavel did not like that thought.
Chapter 5
Ada watched Tanos gaze upon the ruins with all the wisdom of a peasant. Reverence textured his features as they clambered down the gully, but there was a tinge of curiosity there, too. The younger ones weren’t always as stuck in their ways; perhaps he might yet learn something.
It jutted out of the bottom of the hill: a dark-grey metal frame around a smooth, white metal door. The frame seemed to extend into the hill itself, as though the ruin were mostly underground. She didn’t see anything she might suspect of having killed the previous coders, nor any clear evidence of past attempts to gain entry. There was, however, a huge testament to superstition surrounding the ruin.
Somebody had laid down a ring of large stones around the clearing in front of the door, at least a dozen meters across. They were spattered with something dark - blood? How had they gotten the stains to stick around after rain? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Within the ring of stones the ground was surprisingly flat and open, populated only by short weeds and bushes.
“We call it the Cave of Light.”
Ada tried hard to reign in any hint of condescension. “Why would you call it that?”
“Parts of it light up when people try to get in.”
Admittedly, that wasn’t surprising, if the thing was covered in code. She had expected something more ridiculously mythological. “What happens if we do this?”
She fumbled with the gun a bit, searching for the trigger. Was she holding it right? Ah, yes. She aimed at the door and fired off a shot.
“Stop!”
Tanos tackled her to the ground just as the projectile impacted on the door. She didn’t see exactly what happened, but a lance of hot white energy sailed over her head through the space where she had been standing, striking a tree behind her. The tree cracked and sprayed splinters that, as though for extra flair, all caught fire.
Ada blinked for a moment. Wait, Tanos was still lying on top of her. Shouting.
“You idiot, I told you that people get killed trying to break into there! I told you the door shoots back! How stupid are -”
It was true, he had mentioned that. She had forgotten, and for a moment she did feel a pang of stupidity. But she was still several steps ahead of everyone else here, she reminded herself, so she brushed off that sense of failure, and Tanos with it. “It’s research, you moron. I need to know how it behaves. Get off me. ”
He scrambled and hid behind a tree trunk. “Hide! It’s going to shoot!”
She looked back at the door, considered how it had reacted. A brief flash of understanding and satisfaction made her smile. “What? No it won’t.”
“How can you -”
She stood up, weapon in hand, and walked towards the door, waving.
“Hey! Hey, door! Shoot me!”
Nothing happened.
“Are you insane?” Tanos cowered behind the stone wards.
She smiled. “Yes!”
At least that’s what the Institute had called her, again and again. Insane, heretical, foolish, undisciplined… Perhaps it was all true, but in this moment, smiling and waving at a deadly door, she didn’t particularly care.
“Get back here!”
“No. You get out here and stop grovelling. It’s actually simple - it won’t hurt us at all. Hell, those burning wood chips are more dangerous; at least step away from those.”
He glanced back at the sizeable chunk blasted out of the fir’s trunk, which was apparently enough to nudge him closer to her instead. “What makes you so sure?”
“It’s just a defense mechanism.” She grabbed his arm and traced shapes in the air; a little education was in order. “It shot back, once, in the exact direction an attack came from. It’s reactive, see? It’s not going to shoot if we don’t shoot first.”
“But if it knows where you were, how do you know it won’t keep shooting?”
“ It doesn’t know anything - that’s - that’s not how code works.” She shook her head; even she, with her Institute education, didn’t quite have the vocabulary for this. Frustrating, but she’d have to let the explanation pass unsaid. “Come on, let’s just take a closer look.”
As she approached the ring of bloodied stones, she paused, nudging one of the rocks with her foot. It felt pretty loose. She kicked it out of the way, breaking the circle. It was all just ignorance; there was no point in letting it stand.
“Those wards are -”
“A call to fear. They don’t tell anybody anything useful - for that, we need to experiment. Watch me.”
He looked wary, and she wondered if he might turn back. He’d better not. That would be… well, frustrating. She wasn’t afraid, so why should he be? People had to learn, one way or another. Humans could do so much better than cleaving to habit and superstition. If he wanted to do his dead family justice, he needed to overcome his superstitions. It was a good cause; she was happy to help. She knew from experience how satisfying it could be to help someone learn.
She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, yanking him closer to her.
Wait a minute, no, this was too close. Wrong person. Ada shook her head, trying to cast off the unwanted memories that kept peeking at her from the dark corners of her mind. Those days were over. She backed off a step, and tried glaring at Tanos instead.
“Come on. If you want to finish what your parents started and clear their name, you’ll need to trust me on this.”
He hesitated for a moment before reluctantly letting her pull him over the blood-stained ring of warnings. “Just don’t get me killed.”
“I don’t like people dying. Don’t worry.”
As she neared the door, she kept an eye out for signs of active code along the surface. She had acted too quickly earlier, it was true, and she wasn’t eager to be shot in the face at point-blank range.
The door was twice the height of a person and about twice again as wide. It was not entirely featureless; there were markings of some kind along the middle , but Ada knew they were not code. Ancient etchings like these were fairly common, and considered meaningless. Perhaps they were decorations. She swept her hand across the door, code shimmering in its wake.
At first, most of the code seemed almost equally meaningless. She meandered across the door, looking for something more interesting - and then she found it, something expectedly unexpected. There was a seam in the code, an empty space that no connections seemed to cross.
“What are you doing?”
Tanos was staring at her, and Ada realized that he was not going to have much to do while she worked. He wasn’t a coder, after all. “I’m trying to figure out how this will work. This, er, might actually take a while.”
“So I didn’t need to stand next to the death-door?”
“The door won’t kill you! Not if you don’t hurt its feelings. Just - I don’t know - find something to eat.”
“You’d better open that thing.” He grumbled as he sat down on the ground, pulling out a piece of jerky and chewing.
Seriously? He was just going to watch her? Ada hated people watching her work. It made her blood boil. She threw up her arms. “I thought finding food would occupy you! Stop watching me work!”
“Well, what else do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know - scout the area.”
“For what?”
“Turn around, then!”
“Why?”
She groaned, grinding her teeth. “Fine, whatever. Just be quiet . ”
She did her best. Though his presence in the corner of her eye and the back of her mind made it difficult to focus, she was nonetheless able to follow the code as it wove across the metal. There were symbols and linkages she didn’t recognize or fully understand, but the clean and even shape of the seam in the code was giving her some ideas.
It was in trying to decipher this kind of code that the coders of the Institute were bound to fail. She had run afoul of their baffling unwillingness to look at large pieces of code as intelligible combinations of smaller symbols. They looked at large artifacts - indeed, such as the doors of the Institute itself - and considered them to be covered in a single, absurdly complex sigil, incomprehensible and unlearnable except through rote memorization. Though they could copy and reapply the symbol, sometimes with reference material, it was just arcana to them.
This door was a good example. Someone from the Institute would have taken one look at the code and despaired. Her heresy, though, was that she saw the code as something else. The elders had thrown around terms like small-mindedness and the much-hated reductionism , but the closer she looked, the more these symbols always collapsed into infinitely complex assemblies and relationships of a limited number of simple, individual, often familiar parts.
Ada soon found that the door’s code did seem to cross the seam in one spot - only to disappear into another one of those mysterious stops, like the one on the gun. Another such stop was right next to it, though, and she followed that logic as it snaked across the bottom of the frame, up the right side and into the edge of a large, strange sigil that encompassed a completely empty hexagonal space.
She frowned. Hadn’t she seen that symbol before? It seemed familiar, somehow, but she couldn’t place it. She looked over to Tanos, mostly because staring at a problem without being able to figure it out was a little intimidating. She could do this, but she needed time to digest the code’s structure.
Tanos was staring at her - or her pants? - but glanced up after a moment when he realized she was looking. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a symbol in the code, looks like an empty slot. I don’t know what to do with it.”
Where had she seen it before? Tanos broke her concentration with a snicker. “Have you tried sticking something in it?”
She smirked. “Thanks for your input, Tanos, but I don’t think -”
She paused. All the code was fading now that she had stopped touching the wall, except that empty hexagon. It was meant to be used, somehow.
“Hm.”
Ada reached out to the empty sigil to trace the simplest symbol she could think of - a sigil that did nothing more than glow faintly, and did nothing at all if left alone. The code here had other plans, though; the space inside the hexagon glowed brighter the moment her finger touched the empty space. I t pulsed red for a few moments and fell still again. Ada watched, but nothing else happened after that, and red was a fairly clear signal that she had done something wrong.
Still, her mind raced. “Yes!”
“Did you figure it out? Did I help?”
“No. Yes. Sort of. I still don’t know what it wants from me, though.”
“Should I try more innuendo?”
“No! Shut up. I need quiet to think.” She kept talking. “Maybe it’s expecting some kind of code from me? It reacted fast, but maybe if I can figure out what it wants from me, I can open it. Maybe it reads my mind.”
“So it could basically be anything.”
“Right!” She paused. “Well, no. I mean, it would have to be something relevant. Like a command to open, or a command to lower the door, or a prayer to some ancient door god. I don’t know.”
“Is there an open sign?”
“No! That’s not how code works. Things don’t just magically happen when you write code.”
Tanos seemed rather cautious. “Well, it is magic, isn’t it? Like any gift.”
She turned to face him. “No! That’s the point! It’s not mysterious or impenetrable. It makes perfect sense.”
“So why can’t you figure it out?”
“Because I don’t know everything there is to know. Just because I don’t know everything doesn’t mean it’s unknowable. Now give me a minute to figure this out.”
She considered the door again as Tanos chewed on his jerky. There was very little room; it would have to be a simple sigil. Or… what if she had to touch a specific part of that empty hexagon? Something only those allowed to enter would have been told.
She touched her finger against another corner of the sigil, but it flared red again. Well, at least she was interacting with the object as the ancients that built it had intended, to the point where it would react. She tried another corner - red light again. “Damn it!”
“Other coders have tried before.” Tanos sounded like he was consoling her, which was only more infuriating. She grimaced at the idea of her peers fumbling around this same ruin.
“I doubt they even got this far. They don’t understand this kind of thing. I mean, I don’t understand this kind of thing either, but at least I know that there’s something there that could potentially be understood. They don’t even know what they don’t know.”
She hefted the gun, took a few steps away from the door, and sat down. It wasn’t just a mystery - it was a puzzle, a deliberately designed obstacle hiding something valuable within. The hexagonal symbol was clearly waiting for some kind of input, but she couldn’t tell how it knew what to expect, or why it reacted so damned fast when she touched it.
Could it be some kind of sibling sigil system, where this sigil worked in combination with another somewhere else, to open the door? Maybe, but it could also be that there she needed some specific ancient relic to interact with it. Where there other options? Was it perhaps more complex than a binary system? Maybe could she make the door do more than just open and close if she knew the right sigils.
Ancient coders were sophisticated, and they had created complex tapestries of code that their descendants apparently could not hope to fathom. Perhaps there was no real chance of her opening this.
That thought incensed Ada, though. She the heretic, expelled from the Institute essentially for the crime of being better than them - well, she was better than them. Better than the coders who had tried and failed here in the past, better than those who taught and learned in their distant enclosure in the valley.
And yet she still didn’t have the heritage, the education, the knowledge the ancients did. So how was she supposed to deal with this?
“It’s okay if you don’t know how to get in.” Tanos bit right into those fears. “I mean, it would be nice, but there’s no use in us sitting out here forever. We can go back to the village, and I’ll grab you a drink. Nobody else has figured it out, either.”
She looked over at him. He appeared to be egging her on; his tone suggested a challenge, rather than a dispassionate conclusion.
“Are you trying to goad me into figuring out a solution?” She blinked. “I’m genuinely not sure. I can shoot the door again, if you want.”
“What? No! Don’t do that.”
“So you want me to shoot the door.”
“No, damn it I just said no!”
She stood up and grinned. “I’m hearing you say you want me to shoot the door.”
He looked horrified, which made this all the more amusing. Ada hefted the gun, burst into a jog still grinning, and aimed at the door. She fired off a shot and stopped a few steps later.
She saw something quite interesting as the door absorbed the hard light blast and fired back. She barely registered the blast whizzing a meter or so from her shoulder; instead, she saw the code light up - not in relation to how close it was to the blast, but in relation to something else. She realized the impact was causing power to surge through the code, lighting up the parts of it more closely connected to the impact zone.
“Huh.”
Tanos uncovered his hears. “What - did I help?”
“You think I needed to doubt myself to figure this out? Trust me, I would have shot it eventually out of frustration, so don’t flatter yourself. Besides, this isn’t an answer, it’s just more information. Let’s see how useful it can be.”
She took aim and shot at that receptive symbol she couldn’t figure out. Walking as she did, she avoided the retaliatory shot that came back when she missed the first time and hit the door. A second blast did land on the frame, though, and the frame didn’t shoot back at all. Instead, the projectile exploded into flames, as she would have expected it to.
“Huh.”
She held the gun carefully and fired another blast at the frame, and the same thing happened. Tanos had already rushed away from her and the door, his fears probably somewhat well-founded, but Ada wasn’t afraid. She approached and, not moving this time, fired another shot.
As the flames faded, she saw the long sliver of code that she believed controlled the door pulse brighter. She looked more closely at the gun; was there a way to boost its power? A moment’s cursory inspection didn’t help, though, so she raised the weapon again and fired as fast as she could on the doorframe.
The increase was noticeable. The line connecting the receptive symbol with what she suspected to be the door’s controller pulsed a little brighter with each successive shot, though it quickly faded into invisibility when she stopped firing.
“Bombs don’t work!” Tanos yelled from behind a ridge. “I doubt a gun will open it.”
She sighed. “It won’t, you’re right. But failure is useful too, if you can learn from it. And I think I’ve just learned something about the code.”
She thought back to the incident in Tanos’ village, where she had almost inadvertently set the inn on fire. She remembered the specific mistake in her code, too, and that gave her an idea.
