The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 16

"Untie me. You need my help with them."

Thumping his chest, he said, "I have killed my share of Khagggun."

She c.o.c.ked her head. "There are three of them. At least. Untie me, Ka.s.stna. I swear I will help you kill them."

His eyes narrowed. "How do I know-?"

"I have not cried out to alert them. I want to kill them as badly as you do."Still, he hesitated. But then, as if they had crested a rise, the Khagggun voices suddenly became clearer. Ka.s.stna crabbed his way over to the kuello-fir and cut the cord. He pulled her into a sitting position, his eyes bored into hers as he slipped the dagger between her wrists and slit her bonds.

"I need a weapon." Marethyn drew on her leggings, lacing up her tunic.

He shook his head. Then they both moved behind a thicket of underbrush beneath the canopy of kuello-fir. An instant later, three Khagggun came into view. They were mud- and blood-spattered. One, a First-Cap tain, was holding the head of a male Resistance fighter. They must have just killed him because blood was still leaking from the stump of the neck.

They were laughing as they headed for the nearby glade. Once there, the First-Captain lofted the head into the rain. It came down on the toe of his boot, and he kicked it to one of the other Khagggun, who caught it on the toe of his boot and lofted it again, this time to the third Khagggun. They played at this grisly game until the head was too battered to kick in a true arc.

"As I told you," one of the Khagggun said, "Kundalan heads are too soft for Pelinq."

"Maybe we should use yours, instead, Third-Major," the First-Captain said, and they all roared with laughter.

The First-Captain crunched the head beneath the sole of his boot. "All right, back to work, you bile-worms. We have had photon telemetry of consistent Resistance activity in this area. That means an encampment. We are going to find said encampment before daybreak, or I will know the reason why."

He led them out of the glade in a westerly direction.

"We have to stop them," Marethyn whispered, "or at least lead them in another direction,"

"As you said, there are three of them. And who knows how many more they are in contact with? We can't risk an engagement for which we are inadequately prepared."

"They will surely find Gerwa's camp."

"All the better for me," Ka.s.stna hissed. "I can return to the tribunal with you and claim this territory as my reward."

"You can't be serious. I have friends there. But even if I didn't, I couldn't allow-"

He shook her until her teeth rattled. "You will do as I say!"

She put her head down. "All right."

s.n.a.t.c.hing the ion cannon out of his hand, she darted through the woods on a parallel course with the Khagggun. Ka.s.stna, cursing under his breath, sprinted after her.

As she ran, Marethyn allowed her artist's eye to merge with the sharpshooter's instincts her grandmother had nurtured in her as she was growing up. The forest became a pattern of dark grey and pale grey, a gridwork through which she glimpsed the Khagggun. A hurried glance ahead revealed a small gap in the natural tree grid coming up. Ignoring Ka.s.stna gaining on her from behind, she drew a bead on the First-Captain. He went in and out of her sight as she pa.s.sed cl.u.s.ters of evergreens. She counted to herself, slowed her pulse, felt her finger curled around the trigger, so that when the gap opened up she was ready.

She squeezed off a shot. There was a brief bolt of lurid green that took the First-Captain off his feet.

He lay in the bed of wet kuello-fir needles, his helmet a blackened, twisted ma.s.s.

By this time, his two pack companions had slewed around in her direction, and were raking the woods with ion fire. Marethyn had not slowed her pace. They were firing behind her. Ka.s.stna leapt and skidded into her, knocking her off her feet.

"You fool," he hissed. "Now they are coming after us."

"Better us than the entire Resistance camp," she said. "Besides, I killed their First-Captain. Without a leader-"

"Look out!" He shoved her down as a pair of ion bolts cracked the trees just over their heads, showering them with sizzling bark and needles.

"Come on," she whispered. "We can't stay here."

Marethyn circled around them, heading northeast because it was away from Gerwa's encampment.

Ka.s.stna looked livid, but he had regained some of his previous composure. He had drawn a new-model ion pistol he had managed to steal from the cache she had brought to Gerwa. He shook it at her silently,and mouthed, I will kill you for this.

Marethyn had no time to think about his latest threat because the terrain had begun to rise more steeply. The rain had not let up. That was a blessing, for it m.u.f.fled what little noise they made in their haste to flee.

"This is useless, you know," Ka.s.stna said. "Now that you have cast the cor among the perwillon, it is only a matter of time before they find us and, if we are lucky, kill us."

He was right. The Khagggun were using the echo-guidance system hardwired into their helmets to track the two fugitives.

"Then we will just have to kill them first," she said, scrambling up a rise.

"And how do you propose to do that? We cannot take them by surprise the way you did the First-Captain."

"No." She stopped so abruptly he ran right into her. "But just possibly there is another way to surprise them."

Minnum was elbows deep in the rich claylike gums into which the roots of Za Hara-at had been sunk when he felt the telltale tingling at the base of his neck.

"Someone this way Thripps." He ceased his digging and wiped his hands and forearms on the leather ap.r.o.n he had fas.h.i.+oned for himself. He had been at his work all day and saw little of value to show for it, save a headache behind his eyes and some not very expert surveillance on the part of a couple of presumably bored Khagggun. He wished Sornnn was still there. After years as curator of the Museum of False Memory, living the solitary life, he was astonished at how much he missed Sornnn SaTrryn. This was just one measure of how much his life had changed since the Dar Sala-at first poked her half-drowned head above the rim of his cistern that dank and rain-filled afternoon. He had never before had any experience with friends.h.i.+p and responsibility.

Sapphire evening spread its wings over the great steppe. The air vibrated with the Mokakaddir, the ecstatic prayer cycle of the Ghor. Ever since the Dar Sala-at had made herself known to this religious sect, a group of them had made camp outside Im-Thera, there to observe the ongoing project of restoring Za Hara-at to its former glory and to pray for the Dar Sala-at's swift return. Sornnn had gone to speak with them daily, returning with dire snippets of news concerning the imminent war among the Five Tribes.

A small whirlwind of red dust gathered itself before him, then released. Within its widening gyre, Giyan appeared. Her face was pale and drawn. Minnum took one look at her and knew he would not like the contents of the basalt mortar she held in the crook of one arm.

"Good fortune to you, Lady Giyan," he said. "What news from the Abbey of Floating White?"

"All evil," Giyan said as she put down the mortar on the remains of a stone plinth. The city of the dead rose all around them in dizzying swaths of temples, plazas, and boulevards, all meticulously marked with mysterious runes meant to invoke at a whispered breath the vast engine of the power bourns that crisscrossed beneath the foundations. "Perrn-odt is dead, murdered, unless I miss my guess, by sauromicians." She was looking at him when she said this and saw him wince.

Minnum set about brewing gowit tea. The pungent cinnamon aroma soon suffused the air about them.

While the tea was steeping, Giyan said nothing, but sat brooding with her arms crossed over her knees.

Minnum poured the deep rose-colored tea into tiny handleless cups.

"To the end of evil days." They clinked their cups together.

He shook his s.h.a.ggy head ruefully. "Ever since the Dar Sala-at and I encountered the sauromician archon Talaasa here in Za Hara-at, I was afraid of this. When we killed him to stop him from gaining possession of the Veil of a Thousand Tears, we began a war the sauromicians have for some time been longing to wage. Believe me when I tell you, Lady Giyan, that Perrnodt's death is but the opening salvo in their retaliation."

"I had hoped I was wrong, but..." Giyan nodded. "What we need to discover is the source of theirnewfound power," she said. "Perrnodt said something about the Others. Does that word mean anything to you?"

He shook his head.

Giyan put aside her tumbler and took up the basalt mortar to show him its contents. "I found this grit stuck between her eyelids."

Minnum looked at the crystals as if Giyan had produced a deadly adder. From his knapsack he produced what looked like a thin concave implement, but of what material it might be made was unclear.

Taking a sample of the grit onto it, he eyed it speculatively. Rubbing thumb and forefinger together, he produced a greenish yellow flame that gave off no heat. This flame he introduced to the crust of crystals.

There was a brief flare, along with a bitter odor that stuck in the back of Giyan's throat. All at once, her eyeb.a.l.l.s began to ache, and she was sick to her stomach. She felt a quick plunge, as if she was falling off a cliff. For a split instant, she was a.s.sailed by an army of coruscating colors. Then everything snapped back to normal.

"As I suspected," Minnum was saying. "This is the crystal residue of Madila."

"I have never heard of it."

"Unsurprising. Madila is not in any Ramahan plant lexicon. It is an indole distillation."

"An hallucinogen! So that is what I felt just now!"

"Then you can imagine." Minnum nodded. "It is used by sauromicians for a number of purposes including, I am very much afraid, obtaining information from those otherwise unwilling to divulge it." He dropped the crystals back into the mortar. "However, in this concentrated form, Madila becomes a most powerful and toxic compound." His eyes looked bleak. "My Lady, our friend Perrnodt was subjected to a particularly horrible death. The compound quite literally drove her mad before it paralyzed her autonomic nervous system."

Rocking, rocking. Eleana held Riane in her arms. And all the while she eyed the beast, the Hagoshrin, whatever it was. Had there ever been such a malevolent creature? Her head ached, but not as much as her heart. Riane's breathing was quick and shallow. Her shoulder was angry-looking, her swollen, pale face a sure sign of how much blood she had lost. The violent s.h.i.+vering was what terrified Eleana most.

Riane was cold as ice. Eleana wrapped her as fully as she could in the Veil, spreading it out, hoping that it could heal her.

Eleana closed her eyes for a moment, recalling how Riane had saved her from drowning when they had escaped from the Khagggun pack and the Tzelos in Axis Tyr. How she had wrapped her and healed her with her Osoru spells. How she wished she could do the same now. Instead, she held her tightly, rocking her a little, and tried to transmit her own warmth through the Veil to her lost love.

She bent over, her hair a bower, drawing them closer. All the loss she had suffered, and now this. A family of two brothers and a sister, mother, father, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, who else spinning away from her memory, gone now, all of them ground to pulp under b.l.o.o.d.y Khagggun heels.

And then to fall in love with a V'ornn! Irony sharp enough to carve you, make you weep. But what could you say? A heart will flow where it will, it cannot do otherwise. But how strange life is! Stranger than dreams, more surprising, even, than imagination. The biggest mystery was how a heart so full of hatred and revenge could love at all. And yet the stone had cracked, broken open, revealing inside an organ hot and wet and still beating. Ready.

"O, love, I know who you really are. I thought I had lost you forever. How you came to be inside this body I cannot imagine. I only know that by some blessed miracle you are not dead. You have come back to me. I see how you glance at me, and I know that look. It melted me the first time you looked at me with your V'ornn eyes. I did not care that you were the enemy. I listened to the language of my heart.

I knew that I loved you, that I would love you for all time. That I would a.s.sault the very gates of N'Luuura if that is where I would find you."

She held Riane more tightly, as if with her own strength she could stop the other's violent shaking."Annon, Annon, Annon! I never thought I would ever again utter your name without the chill of death running through me. But now you are here inside this body. I feel you. I know you are there. Don't you dare leave me now!"

In her mind's clear eye, Eleana saw her father, hands in soil dark and damp, dirt streaks painting his face, never so happy as when he was teaching her to plant medicinal herbs. He tilled small plots of soil, reclaimed from bedrock and tenacious scrub, for the high hills of the Djenn Marre were generally inhospitable to farming. That hards.h.i.+p did not stop him. When a patch withered and died he pulled out the dry roots and replanted. Celebrated what grew, nurtured what grew poorly.

He did not know how to give up. That was her father.

In these memories, in a kaleidoscope of others, her father lived again. But Annon, in the body of an alien, what memories did he have? Overhearing a low conversation with Giyan, she had learned that Riane had no memories, had lost them in a fall. No mother, no father. Brothers, sisters could be alive or dead. A blank slate, or almost so. A life without memories. She could not conceive of such a sad thing.

Rocking Riane. Rocking her and loving her.

Riane, wrapped in the Veil, in Eleana's arms, shook and s.h.i.+vered like a boat tossed on high seas. A storm of gale-force magnitude blowing through her, rattling her insides, trying to shake her apart.

Eleana's father shaking, his eyes red and rheumy, whittled into premature old age by the deaths of his beloveds. Holding Eleana's little hand at graveside, shaking like a leaf all the same, knees turned to jelly, his healing knowledge washed away on a tide of grief. He took up arms the next morning early, before Eleana had awakened, so as not to say good-bye. Not knowing how, or not wanting to, she guessed he was dead by nightfall, fallen hard, died happy, having taken his revenge, slitting the throats of two Khagggun while they slept, dreaming of blood and victory.

Eleana was left alone to train, to learn how to survive, how to kill. Which was, more or less, how Annon Ashera had found her. He turned all her preconceptions about V'ornn on their head. Lost love Annon, returned to her. Rocking her, rocking. She made up her mind. She would not let Riane die.

Remembering, then, something long forgotten, the song her father would sing to her, half under his breath as together they turned over soil, planted the mugwort deep, pruned the low branches off sweet clemett.

A little nonsense rhyme with a melody so simple and lovely it brought tears to her eyes. Remembering him fiercely. Loving him all over again. Flooding her mind with light and life . . .

Hours later, Riane started, bringing Eleana back to consciousness. The Hagoshrin had made so little progress in its attempts to get to them, it had apparently retreated, for there was no sound of it, and its distinctive scent had faded. Riane opened her mouth and sighed. That was all she did, sigh. Twitched a little. Gave one last s.h.i.+ver and was done with it.

Because Eleana had dreamed of her father and mother alive amid a herd of cthauros, because she had awakened with a heaviness in her heart, she leaned down, and whispered, "Listen to me, Annon. I lied to you when we first met. I told you my parents raised cthauros because we needed them to ride and I knew you would not trust me if I told you the truth, told you I was stealing them. Who would trust a thief? I wish my parents raised cthauros. I wish they were alive." The truth had used up all the energy she had woken with. She lapsed into a state of semiconsciousness, alternately drowsing, starting awake with a fresh jolt of anxiety.

Not long after, however, Riane's breathing slowed and deepened as she sank into the sleep of the exhausted warrior.

Iin Mennus stood in the semidarkness of the interrogation cell and picked up a wicked-looking implement from a narrow shelf. In its place, he set up a small crystal recorder and activated it. Then he prodded Fleet-Admiral Hiche as he if were an underdone side of cor meat. Hiche moaned. So. Not dead, Mennus thought. Not yet.

Stretched out on the stone bench where for centuries Ramahan priests and priestesses had gone to cleanse themselves spiritually by fasting and praying to Miina, Fleet-Admiral Hiche lay, defeated. He wastall and broad-shouldered and handsome. In short, he was everything Mennus was not. Or, at least, he had been. Twenty hours under the merciless ministrations of Hannn Mennus had tenderized his flesh. His face looked like a pulped orangesweet.

"Little Admiral, can you hear me?"

The lump of flesh lying on the bloodstained bench stirred.

"Look at you, Little Admiral. So diminished." He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"Such an ign.o.ble end for you. For us, to die is nothing, am I right? But to die in disgrace, a conspirator, a traitor, well, that is everything."

Fleet-Admiral Hiche uttered a curse, which turned into a moan as Mennus twisted the implement.

"There is a way, though. A way out for you. If you are smart enough to take it."

Hiche muttered something through cracked lips.

"Eh?" Mennus leaned on the implement as he corkscrewed it into the rotting flesh. "Speak up."

"Wh-what..."

"What," Mennus repeated. "Yes, precisely. What can you do to save yourself from a dishonorable death?" He bent closer, trying to ignore the stench that wafted up from the Fleet-Admiral. In a conversational tone, he said, "Well, you can clear up something for me. You see, another of the Little Admirals, Lupaas, is dead. With his dying breath he implicated you. Yes, you, Hiche. He told me that you were the instigator of the recent a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on the regent."

"Fleet-Admiral Lokck Werrrent. . ."

"Yes, we all thought it began and ended with Werrrent and the former Star-Admiral." Mennus barked a laugh. "But of course you know this. Better than I do, I warrant." Mennus' face closed down, and now it was truly ugly. "There was a conspiracy. That is what the Little Admiral Lupaas told me just before his spirit departed for N'Luuura. He named you, Hiche. No surprise there, since you were a great admirer of the former Star-Admiral. So. Who else was involved? If you tell me, I will absolve you. I will grant you an honorable death. You will be at peace, and your family will not be stripped of their rights and your coins."

Eyes muddy with pain stared up at him. "I ... I was not involved," Hiche rasped. "I know of no con . .

. conspiracy."

"In other words Lupaas was lying. Is this what you wish me to believe?"

There was fear in Hiche's eyes, as well as pain. "Not lying," he gasped out. "Possibly mis . . .

mistaken."

"About you or about the conspiracy against the regent?"

"Me ... I. ..." Fleet-Admiral Hiche spent a few moments gasping. The gases he thus expelled were noxious in the extreme. "I ... had heard of unrest... in certain quarters . . . but there is always-"

Mennus twisted the implement buried in the Fleet-Admiral's flesh. "Have you knowledge of a conspiracy, Little Admiral, yes or no?"