The Rifter's Covenant (23 page)

“What is it with
the Douloi?” he blurt out. “Ami liked me enough—but she just shut me out. Oh,
she’s friendly enough, but she’s no longer interested in me. I can smell the
difference.”

“She has found a
new bolster for her bed, eh?”

“Some ensign off
that ship, the
Astraea
. Looks like a
stiffrump to me, but she got herself sewn to him while we were on the
Telvarna
.”

“Astraea,” the
nuller said in his rusty old voice. “Skipped in bearing its wounds like a
badge. Some find this aura of heroic action attractive.”

Ivard opened his
mouth to deny how much action anybody serving on one of those big
battlecruisers could really have seen—then he remembered the
Grozniy
at Gehenna and the
Korion
. Hot blood suffused his cheeks
when he also recalled Ami had first expressed interest in him, after the Eya’a
and the Kelly had singled him out at that party.
And it was Tate Kaga’s party, so he must have seen her choose me.

Which meant he knew
as well as Ivard did that Ami had been drawn to him for exactly the same
reason.

“Blunge,” he
muttered.

Tate Kaga laughed,
but somehow the sound was not at all offensive. “Remember something about the
Douloi, Little Egg,” Tate Kaga said. “Most are just so—they change partners
with exactly the same care that they change clothes.”

“My sister told me
before she died that there is no such thing as love. She was talking about
Rifters, but I guess she meant Douloi, because I’ve seen love in Rifters.” He
couldn’t bring himself to mention his violent feelings for his first lover,
Marim, before he found out she’d seduced him for his part of the Arthelion
treasure. And he didn’t feel it right to mention Vi’ya and Markham, or Jaim and
Reth Silverknife.

“Some Douloi do not
know such an emotion. They marry for political and economic expedience, and
they bunny indiscriminately—and even some of those partners are chosen for
social or political reasons.”

Despite the rain,
Ivard thought he caught a whiff of sharp scent—something different than the
autumnal spices the nuller liked in his air.
He’s warning me. Now that it’s too late.

“Come, Little Egg!
You have more tale ahead than you do behind.”

“Meaning I’m
young,” Ivard panted in a disgusted voice, but then he looked down,
comprehending there was a second meaning to Tate Kaga’s words, and he
snickered.

“Ho!” The nuller
sounded pleased. “Come visit me.” His bubble spun away rapidly.

Peering through the
gray sheets of rain, Ivard discovered that he’d reached the next station. Gray
and Trev came alert, then ran off. Ivard did not try to stop them as he slowed
his pace, walking the last hundred meters to join the crowd already waiting
inside.

Automatically he
sniffed, sorting the myriad scents of the people around him. They were all
tired, and some gave off the faint, sharp odor of anger as they eyed the people
around them and shifted their stances—they did not like standing in a crowd.
Ivard adjusted his own stance, keeping a distance from them.

The tube was nearly
full when it arrived, but he did find a seat, and sank back with a sigh,
feeling grateful to Vi’ya for pointing out that if he worked at night, there
was less bombardment of psychic static from the people around them.

Since he couldn’t
have mental privacy, he didn’t mind sharing with Vi’ya. Nothing shocked or
disgusted her, she answered his questions—and she treated him as an adult.

He enjoyed the
swooping sense of acceleration as the transtube climbed toward the spin axis
and the entrance to the Cap. Sometimes he saw Vi’ya’s dreams, but rarely. She’d
learned to block her thoughts, though he could feel the effort it took. And he
didn’t like her dreams. It was his reactions to them that always woke her and
ended them abruptly.

That part of their
connection they had not discussed.

Warned by an
upsurge in the blue fire that flickered vigilantly at the edge of his
consciousness, he looked up. He had reached his destination. “Leaving,” he
called out, and the people around him obligingly made space.

Since their return
from the Suneater mission, Vi’ya had been exploring the databanks they now had
access to, and had produced some records on their erstwhile home, knowing how
interested Ivard was in Panarchic history. He was delighted to find out that
the Detention block hadn’t just housed naval scapegraces and bureaucratic petty
criminals; there had been some shady rulers in the past who had kept
high-powered private enemies there—including, once, a Krysarchei who had been
planning a spectacular revolt against her father.

As Ivard walked
down the last corridor before Detention Five, he wished he had one of those
timeskips people were always inventing in the adventure chips. He’d love to see
that Krysarchei—who hadn’t been much older than he was—pacing restlessly back
and forth in her diamonds and brocades, plotting how to launch a fleet of ships
against Lao Tse. Would she be interesting to talk to?

The Marine guards
at the front saluted him, one with a welcoming smile, and Ivard grinned and
lifted his hand in return. No one in the future will ever know I was here,
he thought
—
but that didn’t matter so much anymore
.
One thing he’d learned the last few months while orbiting with
famous people: fame wasn’t worth the cost.

As the door to the
suite he shared with Vi’ya, Marim, and the Eya’a slid open he was taken by a
sudden, enormous yawn. Then a myriad of fast impressions flooded nose, ears,
and mind, stopping him dead. Jaim was not there, nor Marim—but sitting across
from Vi’ya at the game console was Brandon hai-Arkad, now Panarch of the
Thousand Suns. They were deep in a game of Phalanx L-3.

Two brief glances
impacted him, one the bright blue of a planet’s summer sky, the other black as
space.

“Hey, Firehead,”
Brandon said, his smile exactly the same one he’d given Ivard months ago, when,
blushing and feeling stupid, Ivard had directed him in restocking the supplies
aboard the
Telvarna
.

Vi’ya said,
“Manderian was here after you left. He will return again, at which time he
wants to work with the trinity and the Eya’a on the semaphores again.”

“Oh.” Ivard knew at
a visceral level that Vi’ya was tired; then, with another swoop of his innards,
he noted the rumpled clothing on both. Brandon had been there all night. Not
sleeping, either.

“Jaim didn’t come?”
He hoped his voice was as casual as he tried to make it sound.

“Vahn’s got him
running scan against the circus next week,” Brandon said.

“Circus?” Ivard
said blankly. “Oh! You mean the big party thing.”

“Parties,” Brandon
said with grim humor. He did not pause in his keying or take his eyes from the
screen. “From breakfast until breakfast for three days I’ll be pegged out and
paraded, like an insect under glass.”

“It is in lieu of
the Mandalic ritual,” Vi’ya said, not looking up from the game. Ivard sensed
that they were in the final actions—and neither intended to lose.

“No throne, no
ring,” Brandon agreed equably. His voice changed slightly as he added, “No
government, either.”

Ivard’s innards swooped
again; he thought, they’ve been talking about that
.
Though he wasn’t sure how he knew. Weird. Here he’s got a quarter
million people to talk to, some of them owning whole planets, and he’s here in
Detention with Vi’ya
.

Memory: Markham’s
homely face and one-sided grin as he said not long after Vi’ya joined the crew,
“She remembers everything she’s heard even
once, and she’s more honest than a mirror. It’s a lethal combination.”

Within a year after
that they were mates.

Mates . . .
He looked at the two heads bent over the consoles, and Tate Kaga’s words came
back to him: “They change partners with exactly the same care that they change
clothes.”

“Ha.” Brandon sat
back and cleared the screen with a careless swipe of his hand. Vi’ya smiled,
her face flushed, and her black eyes crescents of mirth.

Ivard couldn’t tell
which of them had won.

Ares flared and
evaporated in the fierce rush of energy from the black hole newly created by
the Suneater hovering nearby. The ships thickly clustered around it detonated
silently in tiny puffs of flame . . .

Eusabian opened his
eyes and sat up, leaving the directed dream behind as he stood and began the
meditative exercises of the
orr nar-hach pelkun
turish
—the Hour of the Unsheathing of the Will—building on the energy
unleashed by the
som-turi
vision of
the final completion of his paliach. A minor irritation persisted: to know the
location of his enemy’s base and yet be unable to reach it.

Yet.

He dismissed the
thought.

The room was
silent, cool. A solitary light hovered above him, dimly illuminating the walls
and ceiling of overlapping tapestries and holographs surrounding him in rich
imagery as unacknowledged as the air that sustained him or the soft rugs
underfoot. He did not have to see the alien material of this chamber in the
Suneater. Everything in his sight conformed to his will.

As he dressed, each
garment donned invested him with another aspect of his indwelling power,
interwoven as they were from threads teased from the robes of his ancestors.

When the Hour had
passed, he summoned Barrodagh.

Anaris also awoke
at the same hour, but he had not been practicing the art of the
som-turi
. His Panarchist tutors had
given him far older techniques.

None of them were
helping.

The room was cool,
the featureless dyplast ceiling diffusing the glow of the solitary light he
activated onto the rich hangings on the walls. Thick gray paint showed on the
floor at the edges of the rigid dyplast sheet that, scattered with rugs, hid
most of it. Air whispered; he sensed a slight fluctuation in temperature, the
hint of an odor. He heard the console click as the tianqi compensated for the
change; a flicker of status lights indicated an adjustment of the stasis clamps
that held the mutations of the Urian station in check.

Anaris began his
Ulanshu exercises, combining them with the disciplines of the Hour, drawing
strength from both, and grim humor from the fact that in the timeless
environment of the Suneater, the Hour was but a matter of the watch he had
chosen for his sleep periods. He doubted his father had ever entertained that
thought.

He was stiff from
the residue of his dream: this one, in familiar and inexorable progression,
more intense than that of the night before. He moved more strongly, shaking off
the sense of paralysis, of muteness. The heat of his blood finally dissipated
the dream-sensation of insects crawling on him.

As yet, he could
remember no images from the dreams. Wryly he considered whether gratitude might
be the proper response to that.

The oddness of the
concept jolted him. Gratitude to whom? What could be lurking in these visions,
that he would waken feeling exhausted, yet not remember anything? He felt
unbalanced, as though the careful synthesis of Dol’jharian and Panarchist
thought he’d achieved was threatening to unravel.

Anaris remembered
Gelasaar’s face and the Panarch’s final words to him.

“I regret only one thing—that this last
lesson will make it less likely that you will ever underestimate us again.”

“No, Gelasaar. Never again.”

Their discussion on
the ship carrying his father’s enemy into exile had opened up new avenues of
thought for Anaris, illuminating byways laid down by the tutors of his foster
home on Arthelion that were now bringing to light both weaknesses and
strengths.

But Anaris also
remembered the queasy feel of the Heart of Kronos, the shock of psychic energy
that had lanced through him when he picked it up in the landing bay of the Fist
of Dol’jhar. Now it lay in what appeared to be its proper place, at the center
of the station in a chamber as awesome in its alien way as the Throne Room on
Arthelion. He had been there only once. He would not willingly go there again.

The memory
sharpened: the sense of pressure, as though the air were congealing around him;
the sudden, almost peristaltic ejection of a gray-clad guard from a suddenly
animated side tunnel, provoked by the involuntary release of Anaris’s Chorei
talent for psychokinesis; the blinding headache that followed. His head panged
again, a final trace from the night’s dream.

One of his
teachers, the strange woman who had finally unleashed the gift of the Chorei in
him, had told him of the ancient legend of Morpheus, the god of sleep. “He was
believed to send dreams through one of two gates, Ivory and Horn, false and
true.”

But here, for him,
it seemed, the poles of sleep were the Suneater and the Mandala.

When the Hour had
passed, he reached for his compad to summon Morrighon, who lay in slumber.

. . . Larghior and Demeragh
fell asleep with their limbs twined around him, while Tat stroked his feet . . .

Morrighon opened
his eyes, and the image fled, but not the sensation: the wall pulsed
rhythmically, warm against his feet. A hoarse scream propelled him out of bed.

He slapped at the
console. The lights blinked frantically as the node monitoring this section of
the personnel quarters fought the station’s adaptation with surges of
paralyzing energy through the stasis clamps Lysanter had invented.

Finally the alien
substance of the wall, disguised with a thick coat of gray like every surface
in the room, lapsed into quiescence. But Morrighon didn’t trust it—his chamber
seemed to tremble on the edge of movement.

The blinking light
on his console—Anaris’s summons—came as a relief.