Steal Across the Sky (6 page)

Surprise was a time-honored kulith attack. “Ostiu Cam, a moment ago you reached into your tunic before and after drinking your wine. Why?”

She looked startled. This one could hide nothing. She was not a goddess, nor an emissary, nor a soldier, nor a scholar. All those were devious.

She said, after a long hesitation, “I have weapons.”

“Of course. You touched your knife. Why?”

“Not a knife.” And then, in steady decision, “Spears slide off me, fire can’t burn me. The soldiers told you that, right? I am protected by . . . by invisible armor. Touch me. Go ahead—touch me.”

She held out her hand and Aveo slid a bony finger along the back of it. Slickness like the finest metal, but also a very faint tingling. He lifted her hand and studied his finger against it in the fading light. A small gap between their two skins. He touched her lips, too dazed for propriety: the same slickness and tingling. Aveo fought for calm.

“I see. You . . . dismantled the invisible armor to drink. Nothing can get through this armor. But when a hard thing is struck very hard, as you were by spears, it staggers and falls. You did not.”

“No.”

“The armor roots you somehow to the ground. And the fire? Smoke cannot get through, either? How do you receive air for breath?”

But he had asked too much. He felt her withdraw from him, protecting the rest of her secrets, perhaps regretting that she had said so much. Aveo chose another kulith strategy: the presentation of vulnerability to lure an opponent closer. “Ostiu Cam, your presence is puzzling to us all. We have never seen anything like your egg, or you. The king himself, Uldunu Four, sent me here to see you and tell him what you are. I have said to Cul Escio that you are Pulari, not only for my own sake but because that is something he can understand. I cannot understand what you are or what I must do without your help. I will do whatever you say. Do you understand me?”

She smiled radiantly and Aveo saw that she believed every word. Her
dark eyes sparkled, her well-fed body leaned toward him. An innocent, such as Aveo had not seen in a very long time, not in what the world had become. Innocent, and a little stupid.

She said, “I come from much farther away than Pular, Aveo. From a place you have never heard of, where we have things you haven’t yet invented, like the invisible armor. I’m here as an observer only, to see everything I can and then tell my own people about it. That’s all. We’re curious, like scholars are curious. I know you can understand that.”

It was impossible not to believe her. And yet—was she so stupid that she didn’t know how she sounded?
Here to see everything and then tell my people about it . . . like scholars
. But invading armies, too, needed to know as much as possible about their potential conquests, and they sent spies to discover this. An army of soldiers who could not be speared or burned or knocked over . . . Uldunu Four’s reign would fall. But how much else with it?

Aveo could be the means for all his people to be slaughtered.

She might be an innocent, but who might be using her without her knowledge?

His head swam. Just as she said, “It’s so dark,” a slave entered the tent and lit the lamps. In their glow the slave, a naked girl barely budded, looked terrified. She knelt, trembling, before Aveo and crossed her arms across her thin chest.
“Rem
, the
cul
sent me . . . to wait on you and the goddess. . . . The
cul
will sleep . . . I don’t know where, not here, he . . .” Terror brought her near tears.

Aveo said in his own language, “Make two beds on either side of the tent, and bring food from the cook tent.”

“Yes. . . .” She was gone, skittering through the tent flap so quickly she barely moved it, although even so Aveo saw the guards that Escio had set outside.

Her fear had, perversely, emboldened Aveo. He said, “
Ostiu
, you must continue to pretend to be Pulari. A trader from Pular, I think, here to offer commerce in invisible armor. That way you will not seem so threatening.”

“Good idea. If I’m going to sell armor to your king, he’ll want to see me, right?”

“Yes.” With Aveo as translator, and thank his own forethought that
she must have a translator. He could not imagine what her unbridled tongue could say to the king.

“That girl—she’s a slave?”

“Yes.”

“Where I come from, there isn’t any slavery anymore. It’s wrong.”

Stupefied, Aveo stared at her—at the clear dark eyes, the invincible body—and decided he would not ask who, without slaves, did the menial labor in her country. There were more subtle ways to learn her. And learn her he must, because if there was truly a nation of Cams somewhere on the other side of the world, then changes were coming such as Aveo had never dreamed. Nor anyone else.

The slave returned with two plates of food. Hastily the girl made up two beds. Cam reached inside her tunic and kept one hand there as she reached for the plate Aveo had already picked up. Gently she took it from his hand and began, one-handed, to eat.

So three more things learned: She was not completely trusting after all. She could be poisoned. She didn’t have the sense to cloak her suspicion in deception.

They ate in silence, and afterward Cam removed her hand from her tunic. The slave had once more fled. Aveo guessed that Escio used her at night; he had the fastidious look of a man who traveled with his own bedslave rather than the much-soiled camp prostitutes. The lamps glowed softly on the walls of the
cul
’s tent.

“I want to be taken to the king tomorrow,” Cam said, “but first I have more questions. That is, if you don’t mind.”

“In time,” Aveo said, and she frowned. But he was firm. Rising from the stool, he pulled between them the tent’s one low table, with its beautiful inlaid box, and opened the box. “First, Ostiu Cam, there is something you must do. If you are to be someone who has lived with the Pulari, and if you are to see the king, you must be able to present yourself properly. This is completely essential. You must—”

“What are you doing, Aveo? What are all those little bits of wood and stone?”

“Game pieces. I am going to teach you to play kulith.”

(page 1 of 16)

Summary

Analysis program #1. Identified Patterns: NONE

Analysis program #2. Identified Patterns: NONE

Analysis program #3. Identified Patterns: NONE

Analysis program #4. Identified Patterns: NONE

HE DREAMED, YET AGAIN, OF GIANNA
. She walked across the Kularian steppe, walked right through one of the complicated and multi-rooted trees, and came to him, naked. Her smooth flesh gleamed insubstantially, but her eyes were her own, alive and sparkling, as she said, “I’m still with you, Lucca, even if I am dead. I—”

“Lucca! Lucca!”

He woke to Chewithoztarel crouching over his pile of blankets. Only by her voice was he sure it was her; the tiny hut was so dark that he couldn’t see even the outline of her small form. Hytrowembireliaz snored loudly, in counterpoint to his wife’s softer wheezing. Somewhere in the close, smelly dark, the other two girls also slept.

“You screamed,” Chewithoztarel said, from somewhere between fear and concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Lucca said. It came out as a gasp. “Go back to sleep.”

“People don’t scream when nothing’s wrong,” the child said logically. She didn’t move. Lucca had wished for curiosity among the Kularians, for a deeper connection to them, and now here it was and all he wanted was for her to go away.
Gianna, walking toward him
. . .

Chewithoztarel said, “Are you sick?”

“No.” . . .
naked and insubstantial, walking through trees and
. . .

“Are you going to start out on the second road?”

“No! Go to bed!” . . .
naked and she said, “I’m still with you, Lucca, even if I am dead”
. . . lies. All lies, delusions to comfort the desperate and the gullible. She wasn’t with him, would never be with him again, and he hated the dreams that offered lies instead of truth. There was no comfort in lies, and it was cruelty for his mind to cloak the lies in Gianna’s vanished love.

Chewithoztarel crept away. He heard her settle back into her own pile of rugs, and he smelled the fresh reek in the air as the blankets were disturbed. He would have liked to go outside, but that would surely wake everyone, and it was bitter cold out, and if the sky was overcast he wouldn’t be able to see anything in the vast, unlit dark. So he stared sightlessly at the ceiling and tried to hang on until morning.

“I DON’T KNOW
if I can stand the whole winter here,” he said to Soledad on the commlink. It was the first time Lucca had made this admission to her, and maybe to himself. He hated saying it.

“If you’re absolutely strained to the limit, I’ll come get you,” Soledad said. “But I think you can make it to the end.”

“What end?” Lucca retorted. He and Cam were supposed to stay on their respective planets until they had “witnessed something that needs witnessing,” probably the vaguest instructions in all human history. On Kular A there was nothing to witness, nothing to report except endless fishing and hunting and dancing and winter sleeping so prolonged it was nearly hibernation. With his leg healing but not yet whole, sleeping was the only one of these activities that Lucca could take part in. But sleep brought the cruel, lying delusion that Gianna lived.

“Whatever end arrives,” Soledad said. “Are you sure you can talk this often? Where are you?”