The Thrones of Kronos (41 page)

She shook her head. So Ivard was right. It was watching
them. She had never perceived it but from within this chamber—no doubt another
warning of the Unity’s incompletion. “Do you?”

“No. Though I suspect it is not a normal part of the
station.”

The simple honesty of his statement, and the emotions
accompanying it, were like the waft of a tianqi set to Downsider Spring. Moved
by a sense of gratitude, Vi’ya added, “That it certainly is not,” and left him
standing, excited puzzlement coloring his mind, as she ascended toward the
Heart of Kronos.

Exultation filled her, quickly moderated by the Kelly, as
the Unity fell into place around her more surely than ever before. There was
little of the sensory distortion of the first two attempts, although the
sensation of wading through water remained.

The silver spheroid bulged from the forward edge of the
curved curb-like excrescence that had suggested the low back of a chair. If it
grew any more, she would have to stand in front of it with her back to the well
in order to reach the Heart. The Eya’a stood behind her, a step out of physical
reach. She could hear their quick breathing.

She closed her eyes and felt them as the base of a triangle
with her at the point. Then the others joined, a triangle mirroring hers, so
that she and Ivard faced one another, the Kelly a line at Ivard’s back. It was
not a stable image, but it was the best they could contrive.

Then she let the communion deepen into synesthetic
perception and lowered her fingertips gingerly onto the Heart. Instantly the
sense of the station as a whole enwrapped them. Startled, they pulled back,
confining their perception to the Chamber of Kronos, then slowly, slowly
reaching out again. Vi’ya fought dizziness. How strange to see things from all
sides at once!

Back in the Rifters’ chamber on the other side of the
Suneater, Ivard sagged back against Vi’ya’s bed, and Jaim took the compad.

Warning flowed from the Kelly, difficult to understand, but
Ivard comprehended enough to wave his hands wildly.

The others braced themselves as he settled himself into his
rapport posture, closed his eyes, and let his spirit bathe in the soft,
blue-tasting fire of the Kelly.

Standing at the Heart of Kronos, Vi’ya sensed Ivard swiftly
sorting out the manifold emotions of those within the chamber, setting them
aside to free their perception. And so with those outside as their ambit
widened. The emotional noise faded.

Far, far away, slow power boomed in breathing tides of
nascent awareness, reminding her momentarily of the deep tones of the organ in
New Glastonbury. Oddly, enfolded in the Unity, the memory was not painful. Instead,
she felt the deep joy that had touched Ivard there, a flicker of resonance from
the Kelly.

Ivard’s synesthesia slowly brought the image down to more
familiar human terms. He perceived the six other members of the Unity around
him as if floating in a pool of warm liquid: blue radiance of the Kelly,
blinding white from the Eya’a, cool steady green from Vi’ya. Waves rocked the
fluid, stirred by the malevolent presence that haunted his dreams.

Another light glimmered into being a short distance away.

The malevolence settled around it, and began to squeeze in
an effort to devour it. Ivard cried out in pain. It felt like someone had
plunged a knife into his solar plexus. Knowledge erupted from the Kelly, and
Ivard felt Vi’ya’s startled recognition: a pulse of light, resonant with the
chill control of Dol’jhar, like an echo of the Avatar close by. But more
complex: Anaris.
Not Norio, but Anaris!

Vi’ya began to reach toward that light, an instinctive movement,
to balance Ivard, then controlled the impulse a heartbeat before the
malevolence closed around him in a shroud of darkness. Jagged pain jolted
through the Unity. She tried to pull away, but it was like trying to wrench
away from a demanding memory, a part of oneself. The malevolence encompassed
Anaris and the light faded even more, pulsing in protest against the
surrounding darkness, evoking savage bursts of agony in the Unity.

Then blue pinwheels of alien emotion erupted from the Kelly,
flowing through Ivard to detonate in her mind. Vi’ya and the Eya’a joined them,
and the Unity enfolded them all. After an instant of confusion, a welter of
color and form, their focus narrowed. On the horizon, farther away than was
possible on a planet, something like heat lightning flickered; the light would
have been searing if directly visible.

The Unity threw itself against the demonic knot of hunger
with the reflexive ferocity of self-defense, trying to reach its newest member.
But the hellish entity had totally encapsulated the last member of the Unity,
and their anger found no purchase. Vi’ya felt her awareness fade as the Unity
expended its last strength against their opponent.

o0o

As soon as the portal squonched shut behind Morrighon and
Vi’ya, Anaris dived for the chest with Norio’s drugs in it.

He sprayjected himself with the first dose. There wouldn’t
be time for the second. But he didn’t want to be unconscious, anyway. If
whatever it was attacked, he would meet it open-eyed.

His console then began blinking with a relay from Morrighon:
the record of the karra ceremony. He watched it, chilled by the echo of his near
ingestion during Vi’ya’s second probe of the station. He eyed the floor. Could
it reach through?

Anaris moved to the center of the room and stood warily, his
peshakh gripped in one hand. The Dol’jharian in him hated the fear that
prickled his skin, the Panarchist acknowledged it as an appropriate emotion. His
physical senses sharpened to hyper-awareness of his surroundings.

The station twitched as the lights dimmed in familiar
prolepsis. A pucker began forming in the wall. It was round, as in the karra ceremony,
not elliptical as in the vid of his deadly experience during Vi’ya’s second
probe.
It is coming for me.

He hefted the peshakh, sneering at the futility of the
gesture—but did not return it to its sheath until, abruptly, he felt very
light. Anaris grabbed the edge of the console and held on as his feet lifted
off the floor, leaving him extended out from the console like a flag in a high,
steady wind.

Looking along his body, he saw the pucker begin to open in a
ghastly smile. He caught a glimpse of eyes and talons within. Anger flooded him
with adrenaline.

For a heartbeat he was back in the vision that had taken him
in the landing bay, the day Vi’ya first arrived on the Suneater. He saw Math,
Lictor of the Chorei. Heard his voice:
Though
we go together to rejoin Totality, we will give our gift to the future. And
should the gift be accepted, then in the end we all shall triumph . . .

A shock like the one he’d experienced in the
Telvarna
jolted through him, and
suddenly, dizzyingly, the force suspending him in midair blossomed within him.

“
Esrackh atta-mi!
”
he shouted in triumph. “It is mine!”

And dropped lightly to his feet. Seizing the edges of the
fistula with his mind, he commanded it to close, exulting in the pure exertion
of his Chorei strength. The orifice slammed shut. The room bucked violently.
The lights had failed, save the emergency glow near the door. In the gloom the
console flickered behind him as the stasis clamps fought the motion.

Hands erupted from the floor around the edges of the dyplast
sheet and the covering carpets that insulated him from the floor and jerked at
it savagely, knocking Anaris to his knees and ripping loose the console
cabling. The flicker ceased, and the ceiling began to bow downward. The hands
jerked harder. He sprawled full length and began to slide toward the edge.
There was nothing to grab hold of.

o0o

Skittering without direction over the frictionless
surface, the Unity could find no power to oppose the destruction of its final member.
Then a burst of searing anger erupted from the eighth light and it abruptly
snapped into alignment with them—

And the world took form.

A squelching sound accompanied a pucker as new comprehension
resonated through Anaris from somewhere he couldn’t trace. Where was the light,
the lights, color coming from? But his enemy was not of the Suneater, and his
Chorei nature seized the Urian material in its intangible embrace under this
new guidance, the source of his help clear.

For the briefest moment the shaking stopped, and without
hesitation, Anaris sprang up and threw himself into the wall opposite the
pucker

The eight were no longer a lopsided polyhedron floating
directionlessly across a dimensionless pool, but a stable formation,
three-two-three, balanced on a knife-lean canoe moving rapidly along a rushing
stream.

o0o

In the Rifters’ chamber, Jaim looked down at Ivard,
disliking the way he had curled up. He looked almost as if he’d been stabbed,
with both hands clutching crab-like in the middle of his chest.

Lokri ripped the pillow off his own bed and moved to wedge
it under Ivard’s shoulder, then he froze as the station trembled. The room
vibrated like a bubble in air currents, subsonic noises pulsing through bones
and skull.

At first it was merely to be endured, as had been the first
attempts. Ivard cried out in pain. Lokri gripped his shoulders, helpless to do
aught else. For a long moment, nothing further happened save the trembling of
the station.

Jaim’s nerves fired, signaling alarm. Nerves, then muscles,
readying for battle or retreat, and then his mind registered a shape forming in
the back wall of the chamber.

He was not the only one to feel it. The others faced that
wall, Marim scrambling over the beds to sit between Montrose and Sedry, and
Lokri set his hands under Ivard’s armpits and pulled him bonelessly back into
the safety of his grip. Ivard heeding his protective grip no more than he
noticed the undulating of the room.

The deep groaning noise was overlaid by a hiss, faint at
first, then increasing rapidly. A pucker formed in the wall.

A crack made them all jump as the pucker split open and a
body shot through, landing on the floor next to Ivard.

“Vi’ya?” Lokri croaked as they stared at the long,
black-clad form.

But the clothing was wrong, the hair short, the proportions
masculine—

As suddenly as it had begun, the motions of the station
subsided, save only for a flutter in the ceiling, and the back wall slowly
re-forming like melting wax.

The man on the floor stirred, then with an effort sat up.
Jaim gazed in blank-minded astonishment at the unfamiliar black eyes and
strong-boned face. A hand much bigger than his own lifted slowly to rake
blue-black hair from a high forehead. The man gazed around at them, and they
stared back.

Then Ivard moaned, and opened his eyes, and gasped. The man,
who still sat on the floor, looked down into Ivard’s face.

“Anaris?” Ivard said weakly.

“Sanctus Hicura.” Marim slid her hands over her eyes. “We’re
in for it now—it’s the royal blunge-sniffer himself.”

Anaris ignored Marim and got to his feet.

Ivard looked up at the big Dol’jharian, who dwarfed everyone
else in the room. “You—have TK. Norio didn’t get you.”

“Norio?” Anaris repeated. “Is that the negative entity?”

Ivard nodded, his eyes squinted in diminishing pain.

“There are also Kelly,” Anaris said. “A Kelly trinity was
part of this. Where are they?” He spoke the Uni of Arthelion, which jarred Jaim
until he remembered that the heir had spent years as a hostage in the Mandala.

Ivard’s chin lifted. “You’ll have to ask Vi’ya,” he said.
“Lysanter will let her come back pretty soon.”

“I will ask her,” said Anaris. “But not here.”

He faced the back wall and lifted his right hand. For a
moment he stood thus, fingers outspread, his powerful back in the ripped white silk
shirt turned to the room. Then he laid his hand gently against the wall, and
the quantum-plast rippled like water. Again that hole opened, swiftly and with
a hissing noise rather than the wrenching squelch that the normal doors made.

The floor lifted gently and carried him through, and the
door hissed shut behind him, the pucker swiftly fading from sight, leaving the
wall blank and smooth again.

“Ohhhhh, no,” Marim moaned. “What was all that?”

Ivard looked up at her. “He’s got TK. He can make the
station move him around.”

“I mean that about Norio. I thought he was dead!”

“He is,” Ivard said. “But some part of him somehow got into
the station. I don’t know how. He’s the source of my nightmares.”

The others looked sickened, and Lokri shook his head.
“Chatz! I think I’d rather have Eusabian haunting the station than Norio
Danali.”

Montrose nodded. “There’s that. And there’s the added threat
of Anaris with TK. I don’t like any of this.”

Sedry said, “If Anaris has what the Dol’jharians call a gift
of the Chorei, Eusabian cannot possibly know about it. He would have had Anaris
killed years ago.”

They all looked at one another, then Marim whistled. “Can we
use that biznai about Anaris?”

Lokri had laced his fingers together, dropping his head so
no one could see his face. At Marim’s question he looked up, his mouth twisted.
“You want to be the one to tell Eusabian?”

Marim shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to tell him
anything. But maybe Lar . . . Morrighon, even . . .”

“Let’s wait for Vi’ya,” Jaim said.

“My thinking as well,” Montrose said, his voice a low rumble.

Marim grimaced. “You know she’ll just say to sit on it.”

“If it keeps us from being put in their mindripper for a
month or two of torture, I have no problem with sitting on it,” Montrose retorted.
“Better to do nothing than to give the wrong data to the wrong person.”

“The station is almost entirely populated with wrong
persons,” Sedry said as Marim sighed.