The Rifter's Covenant (67 page)

How nice it will be
to tell Hreem that she’s already here, when he shows up, Tallis thought,
grinning. He would enjoy, very much, seeing Hreem’s face at this news.

Acid washed
through Barrodagh’s cramping guts when he saw the serpentine writhing of the
dirazh’u in Eusbian’s hands. “Why so long a wait between sessions?” the Avatar
asked.

“Lord, Lysanter has
set the schedule for the experiments. He has to reexamine the tempath’s
physical well-being and run noetic scans. If you wish, I shall have him step
this up.”

“Time is growing
short,” Eusabian said. “I will proceed with the transfiguration of the Thousand
Suns.”

Barrodagh heard,
with a sick sense of impending failure, the slight emphasis on the word “will.”
The matter of the tempaths was perilously close to becoming an affair of the
nar-pelkun turish
, the “unsheathed
will,” making delay as dangerous as failure. He bowed and said, “I will inform
Lysanter, Lord.”

The Avatar reversed
the motion of his fingers, and the knots in the dirazh’u smoothed into a
straight line. “Summon the heir to me,” he said.

“Lord, it shall be
done.” Again Barrodagh bowed, though Eusabian had already turned away, a tall,
heavy-shouldered silhouette against the holographic representation of the
fire-lit horizon seen from Jhar D’ocha on Dol’jhar.

As Barrodagh
hurried from Eusabian’s chamber, he started mentally compiling a list of
priorities. He would have to com Morrighon to summon Anaris first thing. Then
to Lysanter, to urge him to hurry his everlasting experiments, but he would
have to be careful, because he knew Lysanter’s plodding pace was meant to
preserve Norio from ending the same way as the preceding tempaths.

If I force him, and
Norio dies, he can blame me, Barrodagh thought. And though Barrodagh could
probably dissolve the threat by the fact that he had another tempath on the
way, he resolved with an inward wince to do everything he could not to have to
use Vi’ya. A Dol’jharian tempath—and one who had lived among the Panarchists,
and so knew their ways? Too dangerous. Too much like Anaris. She and those
terrible little beasts the Eya’a were much better off dead.

So he would
mitigate the warning to Lysanter, and then he would have to prepare Norio for a
stepping up of the experiments. Then, if they were ready, back to Morrighon to
inform the heir—

Inform the heir.
Barrodagh frowned, turning aside to stop at his office. For once the ripe
lip-smacking noise of the door opening scarcely registered. He checked his log
again and turned away, tapping a stylus against his compad.

Why should the heir
insist on being notified of each experiment when he had not observed any of
them? Of late, neither of them had been there, Barrodagh realized, looking back
down at his compad.

Of course it was
very possible that this was just another piece of bureaucratic infighting—to be
expected as the silent struggle for the succession intensified. The heir could
insist on being informed simply because he had a right to, even if he had no
interest in the proceedings.

Unless there was
something he was doing at the same time?

But what?

It made no sense, but
an idea occurred to Barrodagh. The best way to find out would be to simply
arrange for the next experiment to occur right away. At the same time, the heir
would receive his summons. Barrodagh could monitor both events and see if there
was anything to his suspicions—rather than mere coincidence—and no one would be
the wiser.

He tabbed his com.
When Lysanter appeared, looking slightly harassed, Barrodagh said, “According
to your last report, Norio’s physical and noetic scans are back to normal after
the last attempt, correct?”

Lysanter nodded
warily. “Normal considering the stress he is under.”

What do you know of
stress? Barrodagh rubbed his cheek; at least the new drugs he’d stolen from
Norio were working. The numbness was gone, and the stabbing tic far less
frequent.

“The Avatar desires
another attempt to be made immediately. I myself will see that the tempath is
ready.”

Lysanter bit off an
exclamation and nodded curtly.

Barrodagh
terminated the com, then relayed the Avatar’s order to Morrighon, and the
required notification.

Then he left for
Norio’s chamber, smiling with anticipation, while Norio looked down at his
cache in perplexity.

He didn’t remember
leaving the Negus extract out of its place in the row like that, but it was
possible. But his dreams were getting stronger and more repetitive. Had someone
slipped a potentiator into his drugs?

He frowned, trying
to think back. One of the side effects of the drugs was that they fuzzed memory
unless he had some other kind of sensory stimulation to augment it.

Opening his
pharmacopoeia, Norio pulled out the porous test plate. His hands shook slightly
as he tapped a few grains of each drug onto the plates and administered the
appropriate reagents. The image that returned most often in his restless nights
was a remembered fragment of an old poem he’d seen animated once: a giant womb
swelling on a beach. The tempath glanced nervously at the gray-painted walls,
thickly studded with stasis clamps. He kept expecting something like that to
erupt into his quarters, so vividly present it felt.

The tests ended
with the viridian-green bloom of the Negus on its plate. Norio relaxed and
began to make up some fresh doses; no one had added poisons. But he wished he
had a quantitative tester. He wondered if he dared ask for one.

He felt as if
someone was always at his shoulder, watching. No one was there. It was this
place
.

Norio licked his
lips. Maybe the latest vid he’d made would help: his Evocation of the menial
they’d punished for spitting on her supervisor’s boots by giving her “to the
Chorei.” Norio trembled, remembering the blood-thick numinous horror that had
poured from the woman’s mind as he conjured her deepest fears out of their
hiding places. She’d died too quickly, fear rupturing her heart; he’d thought
Dol’jharians would be tougher.

The annunciator
chimed, and he moved to the door. To his surprise Barrodagh entered.

Norio waved him
toward a seat. He liked Barrodagh; the man was shorter even than he, and he was
such a mesmerizing bouquet of anxieties and pains and repressed rage. And now
he’d come here, where there was no mind-blur. He must want something very much.

Barrodagh remained
standing. “The Avatar wishes the experiments to be stepped up,” he said. “One
is being arranged now. The new schedule will be given you tomorrow.”

A wave of irritated
pride from Barrodagh washed Norio’s mind as the tempath seated himself in mild
defiance of protocol. If they thought he was one of their menials, he would
have to disabuse them.

“I need a few minutes
to prepare,” he said firmly.

“We don’t have much
time,” Barrodagh retorted. “Lysanter is readying his equipment in the Chamber
of Kronos.”

Norio flushed in
irritation.

Barrodagh’s lips
thinned. “There is another tempath coming. I am hoping that this person will
not be necessary. Your efforts have been promising.”

Norio sat back,
studying Barrodagh’s thin face, his fervid eyes. “Do you have the tempath’s
name?”

“Vi’ya is what she
calls herself.”

Fear-laced
excitement flashed through Norio’s nerves. “Did you capture her from the
Panarchists?”

“No. Apparently she
escaped. And volunteered, as you did. She will be here in less than two days.”

Norio pictured
vividly Hreem’s heady melange of emotions when they had seen the woman last.
She had very nearly killed them—very near. If she’d had more ships and more
firepower, Hreem’s crew would all be dead.

“Dol’jharians live for revenge,”
Hreem had said.

“What will you do
if I can power up the station?” Norio asked.

“We will not need
two tempaths,” Barrodagh replied. “And the Avatar will not permit outsiders to
come to this station and leave alive.”

Excitement pricked
along Norio’s nerves. “If she’s to die anyway . . . .”

Barrodagh smiled
thinly. “You bring the station to full power, and she is yours. You can
experiment with some of our machinery. You might find it interesting.”

Norio shivered.
He’d desired a mindripper from the first time he ever heard of it, and licked
his lips again, thinking of that cold, beautiful face looking down at him from
her superior height. To see her stretched out helpless before him, to have at
his mercy all that Dol’jharian rage, to savor the spikes of agony and release .
. . .

The emotional aura
from another tempath might come very close to killing him, but what an
experience to be savored!

“I shall be ready
in moments,” he said.

“Good,” Barrodagh
replied, and effaced himself.

Norio hurried back
into his inner room, reaching for the drug cache with shaking hands.

In another
corridor, Morrighon leaned against the wall, trying desperately to compose
himself. There was not even room for anger at the way Barrodagh had not
bothered to hide his smirk when he said,
“The heir is summoned to my Lord’s chamber. And you may inform him at the same
time that we are about to commence another experiment.”

They’d cut his head
off and throw it into space, and feed his body to the Suneater—but only after
protracted agony.

The door to Anaris’s
room slid open. The heir was seated at his computer console, but when he saw
Morrighon, he stood up, brows contracting. “Another one? Already?”

“Yes, but your
father wants you in his chamber. Now.”

Anaris’s eyes
narrowed. Morrighon gritted his teeth, his mind wailing: This means either I
die or we both die.

“Stop that
session,” Anaris said quietly. “At any cost.”

Anaris watched Morrighon’s
face blanch as he bowed and went out.

If he panics, we
are both dead, Anaris thought, and sprang to his safe-cache.

He looked down at
the row of small ampules that Morrighon had brought him the day before. They
had come from the tempath’s store, without Norio knowing; Morrighon had
replaced the drugs with an inert compound that would not register on the
reagent tester he had.

“Negus,” Anaris
murmured, remembering what Morrighon had gleaned from Lysanter. He did not know
what to balance it with, but hallucinations could be controlled. The sudden and
spectacular activation of his TK while he was in Eusabian’s chamber could not.

Hastily he
sprayjected the drug into himself, then he replaced it in its hiding place and
left.

Eusabian was seated
in a deep wing chair sideways before the wall console in his inner chamber.
Anaris approached and bowed wordlessly.

Eusabian motioned
toward the other chair facing him, and picked up his dirazh’u. Anaris studied
the deeply lined face before him. Was he angry? Impatient? No, more like bored.
That could be even more dangerous than anger, which would make him predictable.

“The technicians
have disappointed me,” Eusabian said. “I had expected this station to be at
full power by now.”

Anaris felt obliged
to defend Lysanter, who was extremely cooperative. “If the Panarchists had any
Urian scholars better than Lysanter, they would have been here by now.”

Eusabian’s eyes
narrowed in that expression that was almost humor. “I am aware of that. They
will be here in any case. Barrodagh reported that the newest tempath bought the
coordinates on Rifthaven. It is very possible that one of our more enterprising
allies sold the data, just as we did with the Ares coordinates.”

Images flashed and
danced at the edge of Anaris’s vision. “If the station is powered up first, we
can dispatch Ares with it,” he said.

Eusabian nodded.
“But it can only be one place at a time. This is what I will encompass. After I
have dealt with Ares, you will command the Rifter fleets. Organize them and
impose a semblance of hierarchy and order. I don’t care if you shoot half of them
to do it. Once the Panarchist resistance is finished, we will not need as many
anyway.”

This was the
Eusabian’s first reference to the future. They spoke rarely; Anaris was free to
do what he wanted, and often, as he explored the mysterious passages and
cannulaem or examined the reports of Lysanter’s techs on what little they could
divine of the Suneater’s hidden functions, he wondered what his father was
doing.

He wanted to get
back to Arthelion to play with Gelasaar’s palace, Anaris thought as he belatedly
recognized the two leather wing chairs, and Negus-driven memory of the library
in the Palace Minor almost overwhelmed him with a tide of scent—leather and
glue—and sight—the sunlight through the clerestory panes of ruby glinting from
golden titles of the books—and sound—the quiet, hypnotic rustle of turning
pages.

“Until then, we
have more immediate matters,” Eusabian said. He sat back, his fingers weaving
meditation knots, his gaze steady. “You are aware there is another tempath due
to arrive shortly?”

“Yes,” Anaris responded,
wondering just how much his father knew about this new tempath.

The sardonic quirk
under the Avatar’s eyelids was distinctive. As if reading Anaris’s mind,
Eusabian said, “Occasionally it is illuminating to explore what these Bori see
fit to excise from their reports.”

Eusabian stretched
out one hand and tabbed his console. On the screen Anaris saw a small,
dart-like ship racing scarce meters above a deep green-blue ocean. He
recognized the ship as an old Columbiad, modified with modern weaponry, as it
approached the S’lift—on Arthelion, he realized.

With a breathtaking
maneuver the ship flipped over and began racing straight up the cable without
dropping any speed. It looked to be attached to the cable, so close it was.