“There are even more domes than I remember,” Sanja whispered. “Are you sure the Librarian can find our ship?”
I was never sure exactly how good the Librarian’s audio sensors were, but if he was offended by her question, he refrained from showing it, a courtesy he had rarely extended to me.
“If the Library has been somewhere, he can retrace his tracks,” I said, perhaps with more certainty than I felt. The Librarian had never failed me before, but there was a first time for everything. If we had to return empty-handed, the Nuum’s gratitude at regaining their ship in one piece was unlikely to outweigh their sense of betrayal. For me, at least, this was a one-way trip. If we could not locate The Dark Lady’s hiding place from the air, I would be spending the rest of my life painstakingly searching each pitch-black dome.
We were in among them now, creeping through the air at a height just lower than the tallest of them, hoping to avoid the notice of any night-crawling klurath. Gaz Bronn had assured me that, despite their nighttime raids on the nearby community, his people preferred to move about in the day when they could bask in the sun’s warmth. The chances of our stumbling across a klurath on his evening constitutional were, he promised, microscopic. We took him at his word, and still we crept above the deserted streets, a silent black airborne whale.
Without warning, the ship sank and came about to square with an arched opening in a dome that appeared no different from any other, including the utter lack of light penetrating its interior. We moved forward, darkness swallowing and surrounding us. The anti-gravity engines of our ship were preternaturally smooth, and lacking outside landmarks we had no way to know if we were still moving. I fancied I felt a small bump.
“We’re here,” the Librarian announced with what seemed to me to be more cheer than was warranted.
“I can’t see a thing,” Gaz Bronn announced, leaning toward the forward glass. “You realize,” he continued without turning around, “that if he’s wrong, we could be stuck in here without your ship or being able to find this one again.”
The Librarian raised his eyebrows. “Charles, the next time you need to steal a military vessel in order to reach your own lost ship so that you can rescue your wife from a hidden world full of revenge-driven warriors, would you mind gathering less pessimistic crew? Or if you prefer, I could stay home.” He tilted his head inquiringly. As with the college don on whom he had modeled himself, sometimes the Librarian tended toward the grumpy side of life.
“Enough. The Librarian got us here, just as I promised. We will be on The Dark Lady in a few minutes, and we all have work to do. Librarian, how long until sunrise?”
“Two hours, three minutes.”
I nodded. I had not expected to be able to arrive and leave before dawn. “We can use the daylight hours to familiarize Gaz Bronn with the ship and for you to run whatever diagnostics you need. We also need to make sure the klurath have not come back and helped themselves to anything they wanted. This will be a long voyage and we are going to need all the stores we have.”
We held hands as we followed the Librarian over to The Dark Lady. Fortunately, all of the gravity pallets had been needed to ferry the crew off the ship, and I found one sitting by her side. My final fear had been that a welcome party might have been left should I be foolish to return; the Librarian had set us down as close as he could, and his sensors did not detect any lifeforms, but in this mysterious darkness his sensitivity was greatly curtailed. We encountered no one. In fact, our inventory indicated that the ship had been left completely alone, a development that filled me with relief, as our ability to set down for supplies was going to be, in a word, constrained.
But I was home again, aboard The Dark Lady.
Now, if the Librarian could pilot her as well as he claimed, if we could slip out the way we had come without crossing any klurath patrols, and if we could avoid any passing Nuum vessels who might wonder why the missing Maire Por Foret’s vessel was flying without her…we could try to raise an army from a land where every hand was raised against me.
Sanja was right; my plan was utterly irrational, vulnerable to a thousand failures, and stood a very small chance of success. I would likely die in attempting it and doom my friends as well.
Given what was at stake, I would have tried it a hundred times over.
Chapter 36
Every Hand Raised Against Me
“There it is.”
I pointed forward toward where the rising sun behind us was just beginning to strike sparks from the white sands of the desert. Now that we were far from the normal Nuum travel routes, the Librarian had piled on all sail, as it were, and our destination grew swiftly from a distant bright line to a visible vast wasteland. Such a wasteland, however, was Sanja’s home, and she was eager as a child on Christmas morning to see it again.
“I didn’t think I was coming back,” she said softly. “I didn’t know I even wanted to.”
I left her to her memories and expectations and returned to the pilot house where the Librarian kept his usual vigil, although he could as easily have appeared at any point on the ship, using the comm. system, or not appeared at all, for that matter. His visible presence was irrelevant to his management of The Dark Lady, after all. I knew the real reason, of course: after 600,000 years of operation, the Library is much more than a simple collection of programs, and the Librarian I knew had, although he would rarely admit it, formed an attachment to me in our twenty years of exile. Simply said, he wanted to be part of the action.
“It occurs to me,” I told him now, “that the Zilbiri could have moved in the past few months. How are you going to find them?”
“It may have only now occurred to you, but I have been preparing for that eventuality since we started. Sanja has graciously shared with me the tribe’s usual migration pattern, and I have plotted a projected course originating at the location where you left them. Moreover, since rejoining The Dark Lady, I have re-established a download stream from the datasphere and have been monitoring it for any reference to the Zilbiri. It has provided valuable intelligence.”
I blinked. “The Nuum are talking about the Zilbiri?”
“Not so much now,” he admitted, “but they were discussing them in some detail after we left. I’m afraid the incident with the two officers who came to take you into custody, and the stolen vehicle, caused some comment. There was talk of reprisals.”
This sent a chill down my spine. I had seen the Nuum idea of reprisals. “And?”
“Again, it was only talk. Apparently Jazil was quite persuasive in blaming you, and in explaining how the tribe had saved you in the desert. Jazil believes you to be Nuum, after all. And the officers were reluctant to admit they had been subdued so easily. According to the records, a substantial fine was levied, but nothing further.”
I was grateful all over again that I had not taken Jazil into my confidence over my origins.
“How soon do you think we will find them?”
The Librarian shrugged. “I have increased our altitude in order to expand our search area. If Sanja’s projections are accurate, we should locate her tribe within a few hours.”
I nodded, hoping that Sanja’s projections were sufficiently vague that I would have enough time to figure out, once we found Jazil and the Zilbiri, what I was going to say to them.
True to his nature, the Librarian was far better at executing search grids than I had hoped him to be, and it seemed a matter of minutes before he announced that the Zilbiri were not far off and getting closer. For me the time had sped by like a man awaiting his execution, while simultaneously it felt as though I had formed and discarded a thousand plans.
Sanja put her hand on my shoulder. “Be direct. The desert doesn’t give you time to tell long stories.”
Simple as it was, her advice gave me strength. All my life I have bulled my way through trouble with a rashness that more than one friend has predicted would get me killed. Even in the War, I had mostly lead my men just by pretending I
knew what I was doing and trusting they would follow. Why should I abandon that approach now?
Calling Gaz Bronn into the pilot’s house, I outlined for them all my next step, a process which consisted solely of letting my mouth run on with minimal interference from my brain. When no one offered any better solution to our problem, I decided there must be some sense to it—unless my crew was as mad as I was, although in this case, that would probably prove a benefit.
At least I had no trouble gathering the tribe to talk to me—a Nuum airbarge floating above their heads proved an irresistible attraction even to these pragmatic warriors. On the other hand, they were certain to be heavily armed one and all; not a consideration as long as I floated a hundred feet above their heads, but it might present a serious obstacle when I stepped into their midst—and this was not a speech I could give from on high, not if I wanted to succeed.
Which is not to say that I was going to walk right up to them and trust in their good manners, either.
Making sure the force shields had been deactivated, I leaned over the railing. “Ahoy Zilbiri!”
There were a few moments of excited buzzing from the crowd. It was unusual enough for Nuum to be visiting them, and typically bad news. But to be addressed by name…that could not be good. We had come about so that the rising sun was behind us, leaving me in shadow.
“I want to speak to Jazil!” This produced the desired effect—as in any stratified society, a chance to pass the buck up to someone higher was an irresistible opportunity. The buzzing grew in volume, then died to a murmur as one man raised his arm. To give them credit, the other Zilbiri did not move away from him—much.
“I’m Jazil! Who are—how can I serve you?” The words came out of his mouth like gravel, and probably tasted the same.
“Hello, Jazil,” I said in a more reasonable voice. “It is Keryl Clee. I have returned to settle my scores with the Zilbiri.”
The murmuring stopped. Down below, Jazil’s lips moved without sound, as if he was trying to formulate a response. He had driven me out of his tribe, turned me over to those he thought were my enemies, and now I was back in a Nuum airship. As far as he knew, there were enough guns pointed at him right then to decimate the entire tribe. Or was I only after him, intent on visiting on him the overlords’ justice? Jazil was a gamesman, but he had no idea the rules of the game he was being forced to play.
As I expected, he reverted to what he knew best: bullying.
“We’re the ones who have the score to settle, with you! You killed the Wind and the Sand! You kidnapped Sanja Drusine and sold her into slavery! Come down here and we’ll see who settles what!”
“Oh, I intend to,” I said. “After I have your promise of safe passage.”
It took a moment for this to sink in and then he laughed. The tribesmen followed his lead. I waited for them to finish.
“You’ll be safe all right!” he shouted at me. “None of my men will harm a hair on your head! Now the sandclaws, they might have different ideas!” This met with the hilarity I would have predicted, but it soon died in the face of their circumstances. Threatening a man on a ship full of guns floating out of range of your own weapons pales rather quickly.
Truthfully, even had The Dark Lady been fully manned, her armament was limited. On the other hand, she was fully capable of wiping out the Zilbiri for the simple reason that she could spend all day raining fire on them while they could never touch her. And even were she to meet some mishap, a Thoran taking up arms against a Nuum would mean the aggressor’s complete destruction. That fact alone virtually guaranteed that I would have been safe even had I walked up to Jazil right then. But virtual safety was not absolute safety, and I could take no chances. Jazil’s personal promise of safe passage was my greatest security.
“You will give me your guarantee for two reasons,” I told him. “The first you know. My crew will be watching everything that happens.” My “crew” was exactly one girl and one klurath, neither of whom could reliably work the deck guns, and one Librarian-turned-pilot. But I saw no sense in letting Jazil know that.
“What’s the second reason?” Jazil shouted.
“When you need to know that, you will,” I promised. “Do I have your promise?”
He hesitated and pretended to weigh his options, as I knew he would, but in the end he agreed, as I knew he would. I stepped onto an anti-gravity loading sled and floated to the ground in no great haste, landing almost on his feet, forcing him to step back. It was probably unnecessary to embarrass him, but then, it was what a Nuum would do.
Jazil and I stood face-to-face, his warriors crowding in on all sides. I could feel their anger and their hatred, reined in only by respect to their chief. I had re-armed myself from the ship’s stores, but it was only for show. A word from Jazil and I would be dead before I could draw my gun, no matter what the consequences from above. But Sanja had assured me that the Sand’s word was law, as binding on him as on any man.
“What do you want?” The earlier deference was gone. There were no charades here, no pretense of subservience.
“I need help.”
Jazil actually blinked. “You—?” His hand shot to the hilt of his blade, but he caught himself before he drew. The tribe surged forward and stopped as one. Every man had reached for his sword. “My help? After what you did, you want my help? Are you insane?”
“I don’t want your help, Jazil.” I looked past him, and ran my glance over the assembled tribesmen. “I want your help! All of you. I need fifty men.”
That they found funny. While Jazil stared at me in utter astonishment, the Zilbiri broke down and roared with laughter so hard that they had to release their weapons and hold each other for support. It took most of a minute for them to control themselves enough to hear me speak.
“I have been told the Zilbiri are the best warriors in the world! I need fifty to help me rescue a woman being held captive in a city full of lizard-men!” Curiosity sobered them up, as the idea of lizard-men building a city was alien to Thorans and Nuum alike. Well, I thought, if that gets their attention, they are going love this part. “I need you to help me because the Nuum are afraid!”
“The Nuum are afraid?” a man asked. “Of what? What are they afraid of?”
“Who cares?” interrupted the man next to him. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Are you saying I am?” the first shot back, and he shoved his fellow hard.
“Stop!” Jazil ordered, thrusting a hand between them. “No one is fighting until I say—” he turned to me—”and no one is fighting for you. Let the Nuum fight their own battles. When the day comes for us, we will be ready.”
“I can pay,” I said simply.
“What do you mean, you can pay? Why should that make any difference?”
“Because for a short time I was one of you,” I answered loud enough for all to hear. “I took my share of the sandclaw bounty, just like all of you. And I will pay any man who comes with me out of that bounty.”
In all honesty, I doubted the source of my funds was in any way relevant, but the chance to remind them what I had done for the tribe could not be missed. I never expected Jazil’s sword to leap out of its scabbard and hover at my throat.
“You stole that bounty! You took all of the sandclaw venom, just like you stole Sanja, all for yourself!”
There was a madness that glowed in his eyes that was not to be stayed by any law.
Chapter 37
Out of Danger into Peril
“Jazil!” A Zilbiri stepped up and laid the edge of his sword lightly against his chieftain’s arm. “He has your promise. Your promise is our promise.”
Jazil’s eyes dimmed and he shuddered, but he lowered his sword. “My apologies,” he said, but to his men, not to me. To me he said, “Get out of here. We’re done.”
“I did not steal the sandclaw bounty. It is in your bank account in Mindal.”
The first man who had spoken to me thrust his face into mine. “You should
leave. Even a grant of safe passage has its limits. What you did, you did then. But if you lie about it now, right here…”
“I can prove your bounty was left to the benefit of the tribe. I took my share and Sanja hers, and the rest we left.”
Jazil’s breathing began to quicken in anger, but I hardly needed that to know what he was feeling. His emotions were overruling his head. I could not say why, but it was the opportunity I had been looking for. In the hands of the FBI’s best interrogator, he was putty. I brushed back my hair, an unconscious gesture that Jazil ignored.
“Did you take the bounty, Jazil? Is that why you almost killed me?”
“That’s enough,” he whispered. “In one minute I will revoke your safe passage. I will not stand here and be slandered by the likes of you.” His fists were clenched white.
“What did I do, Jazil? Or was it what you did? Why did you take the money, Jazil? Was it because Sanja ran away? Did you think taking the bounty would make up for losing her? Did you think it would make up for the fact that she ran away rather than marry you?”
This time I was ready and I blocked his clumsy swing. I stared straight into his eyes and he knew that I had figured him out. I watched as he slowly regained his control, and waited for him to damn himself out of his own mouth.
“You come here and force me to give you safe passage, then you insult us all with your Nuum superiority, and then you insult me with your lies. You’re a Nuum—if what you said were true, why would you even care?”
“Care? You can betray your tribe every day, Jazil, and it makes no difference to me. But it does make a difference to some people.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Sanja walked up to the circle past the stunned Zilbiri as if they were ghosts. She held a piece of paper in one hand, turned and raised it so that all could see.
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