A Prison Unsought (36 page)

Still bent over Ranor, Srivashti looked up. “Call the
medics, fast,” he said to the people standing frozen near the wall console, and
then he met Fierin’s eyes.

A smile of welcome transformed the tension in his face. He
straightened up slowly. “Guard him, will you?” he said to the rest of the
concerned helpers gathered around Ranor, and two or three assents came back.

“Fierin.” Srivashti made her name a
caress as he held out his arm.

She took it, feeling the strength latent there under the
smooth fabric of his tunic.

“There’s nothing to be done for the
man,” Srivashti murmured. “We’re better out of the way.”

She almost said, “Poor Ranor,” except fear kept his name
from her lips. Glad to get away, she matched her steps to Srivashti’s long
strides as somehow the crowd parted to make way for them.

Suddenly she couldn’t bear it anymore; sophistication
deserted her, and she said, “Is Jes free?”

Srivashti’s yellow eyes narrowed briefly, then his
expression brightened to the tender amusement she was used to from him. “I wish
I could tell you that he is, my dear,” he said. “But there appear to be
complications.”

“What complications? He did not
kill our parents, I told you that. He wouldn’t have.”

Srivashti laid his hand over hers, and his fingers
tightened, bringing her words to a halt.

“The Justicials,” he said, “will
require proof. Right now, they maintain that the proof indicates that he did.
I’ve checked, you see, and I’ll continue to move on his behalf. But my very
dear girl—” He smiled down into her eyes. “—shouting it along the corridors
here is not going to make my task the easier.”

She searched his face. So handsome, yet he was impossible to
read. Could he be trusted? Again she saw Ranor fall. She knew she would dream
forever of the pain and pleading in those eyes before death claimed him.

“Very well,” she said,
forcing her lips to smile. “I’ll wait.”

And Ranor’s chip will
wait, as well.

“You, and most of my tutors on
Arthelion, quoted many times from the Polarities of your ancestor,” said
Anaris. “But I never understood exactly how Jaspar Arkad intended them.”

Gelasaar opened his hands. “What do you think?”

“My father thinks the first one is
a prophecy,” Anaris said, snapping the dirazh’u straight. “‘Ruler of all, ruler
of naught, power unlimited, a prison unsought.’ From one to the other: your
rule is shattered, and in a few hours we embark on the last leg of your
journey. Gehenna awaits you.”

The Panarch laughed. “The Polarities were not prophecy, but
your father will understand their true meaning soon enough.”

“I think the Polarities are a
meditation on the limits of power,” Anaris said, winding the dirazh’u into
knots.

“A very un-Dol’jharian concept,”
the Panarch observed.

“Your ancestor grasped an
interstellar imperium and found himself limited by relativity. With the Heart
of Kronos in our hands, those limits no longer apply.”

The Panarch shook his head. “Your father will never
understand, Anaris, but you should know better.”

Anaris said nothing; with a twist the dirazh’u pulled free
of its knots and stretched between his hands, humming with tension.

“The greatest limitation on our
power has always been the human heart in its infinite diversity,” the Panarch
continued. “And against that, no device, no matter what its powers, can give
you any lever.”

Anaris lifted his hand, palm out. “The Urian device that my
father now holds lay within your grasp for seven hundred years, and you denied
it.” He leaned forward. “With that force, all that was yours will be but the
smallest part of my inheritance.”

“I was ever the ruler of naught,”
Gelasaar said quietly. “If your time on Arthelion did not teach you that, your
portion shall be even smaller.”

o0o

Morrighon shivered in the cavernous, drafty interior of
the forward second landing bay, his breath frosting.

Anaris stood easily in
front of him, flanked by his Tarkan honor guard, silhouetted against the view
of space afforded by the wide-open bay door. Beyond, only slightly distorted by
the energies of the lock field, the waspish shape of a destroyer hung unmoving,
so close the blazon on its hull was clear to Morrighon’s eyes: a strange,
round-topped, narrow-brimmed hat impaled on the upright of a cruciform, the
whole enclosed in an inverted star and pentacle.

Samedi. God of the
dead on Lost Earth.
Morrighon wished he hadn’t looked it up. His fundamental
rationalism had been eroded by life among the demon-haunted Dol’jharians; he
didn’t like the omen.

From the rear of the bay Morrighon heard the whir of an arriving
transtube pod. The hatch hissed open, disgorging a squad of Tarkans. They took
up position to either side of the hatch as a group of elderly men and women in
prison garb shuffled out. Morrighon noted a subtle change in the Tarkans, an
increase in wariness and tension, as the last of the Panarchists debarked into
the bay: the slight, upright figure of Gelasaar hai-Arkad demanded and received
respect even in defeat.

Fettered by the heavy gravity, the Panarchists moved with
excruciating care, the scuff of their feet echoing. The Tarkans did not hurry
them.

The Panarchists halted on the other side of the bay from Anaris
and his escort. A flare of light curved up over the hull of the
Samedi,
dimming into the angular form of
a shuttle as it came about to begin its approach to the
Fist of Dol’jhar
.

Subtle movement drew Morrighon’s eye; though the
Panarchists’ countenances were wholly unreadable, some altered their stances. A
kind of drawing in, Morrighon decided, and he resolved to consider this
instinctive motion to act in concert. Their leader, like Anaris, remained
unmoving as he watched the approaching shuttle.

Again the transtube whirred, and Morrighon did not need to
look to know who was arriving this time: the atmosphere of the landing bay
changed, the Tarkans rigid with alert tension as the hatch hissed open.

Eusabian halted
between Anaris and the Panarchists, Barrodagh his ever-present shadow.
Barrodagh’s eyes flickered to one side; following his gaze, Morrighon saw the
cold, faceted glint of an imager complex, recording everything within the bay.

Another propaganda
piece for the hyperwave.
Morrighon knew that Barrodagh had placed imagers in
what he had hoped would be the right positions to draw the maximum attention to
his lord.

Even while he despises
the Panarchists, he is using their predilection for symbol to increase
Eusabian’s power.
Morrighon wondered if he ought to be thinking along the same
lines, then turned his attention to the shuttle, which seemed to hover outside
the bay as the deep hum of a tractor beam resonated through his bones. Then the
craft eased through the lock field, rings of light fleeing outward from its
hull, and settled to the deck with the characteristic spray of coronal
discharge.

After a protracted pause, during which conquered and
conquerors stood together in absolute silence, the ramp of the shuttle swung
jerkily down and clanged onto the deck. A tall, sour-faced man appeared at the
top of the ramp, dressed in a gaudy captain’s uniform, and clutching in bony
hands a small box.

Emmet Fasthand, captain of the
Samedi
, did not inspire confidence by his appearance.
Just as well
, thought Morrighon, that
most of the Tarkan and service personnel accompanying Anaris as he escorted the
Panarch to Gehenna were already hard at work on the Rifter destroyer,
thoroughly inspecting it and installing the data locks and other control
systems that he, Morrighon, had specified.

Fasthand began to descend the ramp, his head jerking one way
then the other then back again as he stared from Eusabian to the Panarch.
Fasthand stumbled on the ramp, flailed helplessly, then went sprawling, barely
managing to convert his fall into a roll. He avoided injury only because he was
caught by an automatic gee field, but he snarled in voiceless rage, no doubt
embarrassed at the misstep in high gee.

The Avatar’s face showed no reaction as he watched the box
in Fasthand’s clutch spring open. Barrodagh’s intake of breath was Morrighon’s
first clue that the small silver sphere that flew out was of any importance.

The sphere fell with
blurring speed to the ramp. Its uncanny motion startled Morrighon: when the
sphere landed, it didn’t bounce; indeed, its impact made no sound. Instead, it
rolled down the ramp and then stopped instantly as soon as it hit the level
deck, less than a meter from where Anaris stood.

The Heart of Kronos!

Barrodagh made a motion toward the sphere but subsided as
Anaris bent down to retrieve it, then paused. His muscles contracted, then he
straightened up, moving the sphere about on his hand. All eyes were drawn to
its weird behavior—as if it were both weightless and massive at the same time.
Morrighon perceived tiny beads of sweat just under Anaris’s hairline.

Due to the sphere’s properties? Morrighon didn’t think so.

Anaris bowed to his
father, dropped the sphere into his hand, then retreated to his former place.
His eyes were somber, and wary, forcing Morrighon to remember the eve of his
rise to the heirship, when Morrighon caught Anaris performing psi experiments.
The Dol’jharians were ruthless in trying to expunge any traces of the talents
of the Chorei from their offspring; though Anaris was now the only heir,
Morrighon knew that Eusabian would have no hesitation in having Anaris executed
if he knew about those talents emerging in his only living son.

There must be some
kind of psi resonance in the Heart of Kronos,
Morrighon thought. The Avatar
hefted the sphere, wholly absorbed in its strange motion. Barrodagh watched in
fascination, his gaze flickering to the luckless Rifter captain, who rose
painfully to his feet. Morrighon let out a breath of relief a trickle at a
time; he was glad they would not be anywhere near that damned sphere until it
had been taken to the Suneater and put to whatever task awaited it.

The Rifter limped the rest of the way down the ramp, rubbing
his shoulder as Barrodagh met him and spoke in an urgent undertone.

With one backward glance eloquent of fear and mistrust,
Fasthand retreated back up the ramp again.

Ignoring them both,
Eusabian kept testing the odd qualities of the sphere.

The Panarch is already dead in the Avatar’s mind,
Morrighon thought. A lesser man might gloat, but Eusabian had lost interest in
the Panarch as soon as his enemy proved too weak to stand against him. Now he
was just a means to end a ritual whose final piece had at last reached his
hands.

As if in confirmation Barrodagh motioned for the Tarkan
guards to herd the Panarchists up the ramp behind the Rifter.

Anaris’s reaction could not have been noted. Morrighon
breathed easier as he observed the Panarch, who looked up at last, but not at
Eusabian; to all appearances each man was unaware of the other. Gelasaar’s
reflective gaze rested on Eusabian’s son, then he mounted the ramp and
disappeared within the shuttle.

The huge bay was filled only with Dol’jharians and those who
served them.

Eusabian turned his attention from the Heart of Kronos to
his heir. “Anaris achreash’Eusabian, of the lineage of Dol,” he said, his voice
resonant in the chilly bay, “complete my paliach, and return to my right hand.”

Anaris bowed deeply. “As my father commands, so it is done.”
He wheeled about and strode up the ramp. Morrighon hurried after, feeling
Barrodagh’s gaze bore into his back.

The shuttle lifted off the deck and eased through the lock
field in a spray of coruscating light, dwindling rapidly toward the Rifter
destroyer. Then the screen blanked.

As Admiral Nyberg turned away from the display, Commander
Anton Faseult observed the admiral’s tense expression with a visceral pang.

“Do we have enough information to
set a deadline?” Nyberg asked.

Vice-admiral Damana Willsones, head of Ares Communications, inclined
her head. “The cryptography section has completely deciphered the message
headers on the Dol’jharian hyperwave transmissions. With your permission?”

Nyberg flipped his hand toward the console, a gesture of
informality he used only with those he’d worked with for decades—and trusted.

Willsones got up with the care of the aged person under too
much stress, and walked to the console. The subdued lighting of the admiral’s
office evoked subtle highlights from her white hair as she tapped it into life.

A draft on Faseult’s neck drew his attention to the tianqi
in the Downsider Summer’s End mode: cool, almost wintry, carrying a faint trace
of burning leaves. It was the customary setting for the three of them, but
there was now a fourth person in the room.

“Our information put the
Samedi
here, at the Rouge Sud edge of
the Phoenix Sud octant.” Willsones worked at the console. In response to her
input, lines of light speared across the display. “Gehenna, of course, is here,
high in Phoenix Sud toward the Rift, and the
Fist of Dol’jhar
was coming from Arthelion.”

She paused and turned to Captain Ng. “Your strategy is
working perfectly, Captain. Ship movements in response to our feints indicated
that the Suneater must be somewhere in the Rift off Phoenix Sud, and the ship
locations revealed by this transmission confirm that.”

Captain Ng brought her chin down in a nod; if she had any
idea how rare it was for Nyberg to include a ship captain in one of these
planning sessions, her reply gave no hint of it. “But that still leaves us with
upwards of several million cubic light-years to search.”