But not this time. This time, she needed to sort through much of this alone, for what she’d received and what she’d felt from Paledan were things she was not ready to share.
She sat down, let the quiet seep into her for a few moments. And then she closed her eyes and opened the pathway in her mind, just enough to let the images through in the order they had happened as she had approached the bridge over the Racelock.
There he is.
He walks with certainty, but not pride.
He is even more compelling in person.
The slight silver in his hair adds to the compelling effect.
Despite his wound he is strong, fit, a warrior.
His jaw is strong, his face refined.
His eyes are more vivid than even the picture.
He is . . .
Breathtaking.
She was jolted out of her calm perusal, and her eyes snapped open. She was not certain if she was recalling a thought she had had then, or if it had come just now, watching the images unreel before her mind’s eye. And that had never happened to her before; she had ever been able to separate the two. Her mind seized on that, even as another part of her was aware she was grasping that puzzle to avoid thinking of what it meant either way that she thought this man breathtaking.
She had thought herself far, far removed from such feminine reactions. While it was true she was yet young as Ziemites went, she had long been removed from the ebb and flow of normal life, and of even the potential for such things. And she had always assumed her capacity for such had died with the blast from the coil gun that had wiped Torstan from existence.
The familiar ache, which she considered a lifetime companion, sometimes painful, other times welcomed as a reminder of what she had once had, rose within her. Usually she quashed it; she was the Spirit of the mountain, and lived without. But now she sat in shock as she forced herself to recognize that her reaction to Caze Paledan had been nothing less than purely female.
And that reaction had been before she’d risked that brief touch. Before she’d learned that, beyond his immediate goal of searching the mines for any evidence there was sabotage occurring—hence her urgent warning—and his Coalition concerns, the image of her portrait occupied a large part of his mind.
It was the strangest feeling she had ever experienced. She had never used her gift for her own gain, and yet she felt as if she had this time even if it had been by accident. She had meant to do exactly as she had told Drake, learn what she could that might help the Sentinels. She had hoped she might also learn enough of Paledan to guess why he kept her portrait.
She had never expected it to be so uppermost in his mind that she got in a fierce blast how her image gripped him.
Her certainty of this warred with her belief that officers of the Coalition had no such feelings, were focused only on war and conquering and cruelty.
Her breath caught. The rest of what she had gotten in that blast swept through her, despite the fact that the normal pathway had been shut down. And as important as what she’d found was what she had not.
Cruelty.
She’d been right in her interpretation; there was none of it in this man. Harshness, yes. Toughness, as expected. Even a capability for brutality, but measured, only enough to achieve the required goal.
But no cruelty. He got no pleasure out of such ruthlessness. It was a tool, to be used only when necessary, and ended when the desired objective was reached. This surprised her, for she had thought cruelty present in all Coalition officers. Whether it had been trained into them, or it was that only those with that vicious streak who became officers, she had neither known nor cared; but cruelty was always there and all that mattered.
Both Brander and Drake had sensed from the beginning that there was something different about this man. She had trusted their judgment, but she had never expected such a difference.
With a great effort she steadied herself. This time when she opened the pathway she narrowed it, trying to hold back the fierce flow so that she could make sense of it all. And she forced all about the portrait to one side, for she was in no way ready to deal with that part yet.
There is truly no cruelty in him.
There is anger, coupled with an image of the damaged Coalition bomber.
She smiled at that one, pride in her son and all the Sentinels spiking, but she had to tamp it down and continue.
There is curiosity. As Brander had suggested.
A sardonic sort of humor, another surprise.
Of all people, the ones he would most like to talk to at length were the Raider and . . . a dead woman.
Her breath caught again, and she fought it; she would delve into that later. Right now it was enough to realize that he ranked the Raider above most of the Coalition officers he knew.
Except himself. The confidence is there. But well founded, grown of accomplishment, not ego.
He is . . . not uncertain, but unpracticed in the type of work he must do here. A fighter, not an administrator.
And there was a glimpse of a memory, some shadowy figure in a beribboned Coalition uniform, and of Paledan stating he would take the assignment, but only if allowed to do things his own way.
What kind of man did it take to, in effect, make demands of a superior Coalition officer? What kind of courage, self-assurance, and reputation did it take to win that demand?
With an effort—this was all taking more effort than was usual—she set aside the realization that the demand, to be allowed to do things his own way, could well be the only reason the entire population of Ziem had not been erased already. She was nearing the end of what she had received in that rush, and was into the part of the stream that was more broken into bits and pieces that didn’t necessarily fit together.
Pain. It was constant, yet he suppressed it, allowed himself no quarter.
The mist both frustrated and fascinated him.
She delved deeper, searching. Found . . .
An ability to separate himself from feelings? No, she sensed something stronger than that. This was no mere walling off. It was a . . . void, where something else should be.
She could not discern what, and so she went on. The bits got smaller, less clear as she reached the end.
An image of a building, tall, towering against a dark sky.
The crossed sabers of Ziem.
Another small jolt to see, although she’d been told he had them on the wall of his office. One of the smaller offices, selected not for import but for its view into the compound. He clearly put duty before prominence.
The stream faded, and then was gone. She opened her eyes. The light from the torches attached to the cave walls danced. Brander had offered to run a power line to her from the main cavern, but aware of how much wiring that would take that could likely be put to other uses more helpful to the rebellion, she had thanked him but declined. She was used to this, and in fact thought it helped her with such processes as this one. If she needed power she would go to it, she’d told him, an option she had not had before his arrival.
She spent much of her time there with the Sentinels anyway. It did her good to see their numbers increase almost daily, all of them ready to fight, or if they could not, to support the fight.
She was, she knew, thinking of such things to give her mind the rest it needed after such intensity. Normally she would take up a piece of handwork, something to be worked on with her fingers, until her mind was clear enough of what she called the debris to function clearly again. It normally only took a few minutes, but she was still feeling the effects of this deluge and did not quite know when it would ease. And until it eased, she did not dare take up what she had shunted aside throughout this torrent of images and impressions.
Until then, she could not deal with the obvious fact that this man, this dangero
us Coalition officer, was more than just idly interested in the portrait that had once graced the wall of the man he considered the fiercest enemy he had yet encountered.
Her portrait.
Chapter 7
THE WOMAN HAD been ill.
It was the only explanation he could think of for the odd sensations he had been having ever since she had bumped into him yesterday.
He had inspected his arm carefully that evening, and there was no mark or any other sign that she had somehow injected him with something. Nor was there any rash or other indication that something had gotten through his skin in some other way. He had, since he had left the Coalition medical unit, learned to monitor his own vital signs, although it had seemed pointless to him; if the shrapnel shifted, his rate of respiration and heartbeat would be pointless, for he would be done. His only hope was that if it happened it would either be his death blow, or that he would have the ability left to get to the capsule of swift, deadly poison he had had secreted in the insignia of his rank.
He sat staring out his window into the mist, which was particularly thick today. So thick that he could not even see the ground outside. Everything slowed down on these days, out of sheer necessity. But he was not thinking about productive time lost at the moment. He was trying to determine just how ill he was. This tightness in his chest was new, as was an echoing tightness in his throat. Yet it was not incapacitating, and seemed to recede if he became occupied with something.
He could have ignored it all, except for one thing. When he had succumbed to the temptation to drag out that bedamned painting once more, at his first look at it he’d been swamped with unaccustomed sensations. As if it somehow had been the trigger for the full unleashing for whatever this was, he’d run cold, then hot, then aching, as if he’d gone through every stage of the Lustranian virus in less than a minute. This was . . . worse than worrisome.
For someone who had taken his strength and power and health for granted for so long, this was indeed worse than worrisome.
Had he somehow incurred an infection after the injury that had waited this long to surface? It seemed unlikely—no, impossible—but it made more sense than that a split second of brushing contact with a Ziemite woman had done this to him.
Now if it had been this woman, he thought with a glance at the portrait, he might understand. He had read, somewhere, that on the conquered worlds that had had artists, those commissioned for a portrait often flattered their subjects, painted them as much more attractive, dynamic, fit, or powerful than they were in fact. Had this artist done so? Would this woman, in real life, have been a faint imitation of this vivid image? Was her hair perhaps not so fiery, her eyes not so vivid, her body not so lithe or female? Was her spirit less than what fairly leapt out from the flat canvas?
Without knowing who the artist was, he could not know if they were the sort to curry favor in that way. And while a part of his mind wanted to believe that no one with that kind of talent would compromise it, the stern, Coalition-trained part of his mind quashed the idea immediately. The part that said artists were of little use when building an empire the size of the Coalition, except for propaganda.
He knew he could likely resolve this question. There were still records, many of which he had studied on his way to this posting. But he had not bothered with images of those already dead, other than one of Torstan Davorin in the moment before his death, captured at the height of his seditious speech through the targeting scope of the coil gun that had killed him. He had studied that for a while, noting the fire in those eyes that even the uncolored image from the scope had shown.
But there were other images, and it was quite possible there would be one of this woman who had been the mate to the fiery orator. Yet he resisted. And he was uncertain as to whether that was because he feared she would not be as beautiful and alive as that portrait . . . or that she would be.
He flexed his arm yet again as he stared at the painting. Realized he could think of nothing beyond it when it was there in front of him, and closed his eyes. Tried to remember more about the woman on the bridge. Tall, the top of her head past his shoulder, even bowed as it had been. Dark hair, long but pulled back; he had seen a strand caught on the edge of the hood of her cloak. She had seemed so frightened, had made that little gasp of sound as she jumped back awkwardly. As if she had truly feared he would strike her down for the insult of bumping into him.
There were, he knew, Coalition officers who would do just that. Some, even, who would have blasted her on the spot for such an offense. And he had been told he was too tolerant, an accusation he usually countered with the true tale of the commander on Carelia who had done just that, and had ended up killing the one local healer who could have saved his life when he’d later been bitten by some venomous local creature.
He’d seen little more of the woman than that, she’d been so shrouded by that long, hooded cloak. Intentionally? Had she wanted to hide, not be recognized? That would imply she was recognizable. To him? That seemed unlikely. More likely she simply wanted to pass unnoticed by the conquerors of her world.
He tapped a finger idly on his desk. It was very different, this dealing first hand with the inhabitants of an addition to the Coalition empire. He had expected it to be so, but he hadn’t expected to be this consumed by it. In fact, he had expected to be bored and eager to be freed of the drudgery rather quickly. And it was true his job was full of that, and yet . . .
He was fascinated.
This obsession would not, he knew, be approved of at High Command. Conquered planets were mere possessions, and their people to be either pressed into service or disposed of, whichever was most appropriate to Coalition goals. Those who were of use were to be treated like children, and even the most useful of them would quickly be put on the elimination list should they cross their masters by trying to think for themselves.
And of course there was nothing in those conquered cultures worth anything to the Coalition—there was no worthy way of life except that of the Coalition—and so individuality must be stamped out.
He’d always known all this, but usually by the time those things began to happen he was long departed, off to another world to lead another conquering force. This was the first time he’d been involved after the fact, and it was proving much more complex than he’d expected.
The problem was not in the task before him, it was in himself. The problem was his own reactions to the task.
And unlike most things in his life, he did not know what to do about that.
IOLANA LOOKED up as Grim came into the cave. He stopped the moment he saw her face.
“My lady? Are you well?”
“I am,” she admitted frankly, “overwhelmed.”
The tall man dropped to a cushion on the floor across from her. He studied her for a moment. “This is a result of your contact with the Coalition commander?”
“Yes.”
She knew she could be completely honest with Grim. He would not chastise her for the risk she had taken, nor question her reasons for doing so. His preference was to always be there as a protector, but he accepted her word as the final decision.
Diverted for a moment, she asked, “Do you not wish for your own life, Grim, now that our lives have changed, and I have people—and family—around me?”
“You are not yet happy, and that was my vow.”
“I am happier,” she corrected, for it was true.
His face expressionless as usual—although that seemed to be slowly changing with the more time they spent among the Sentinels, and especially around her family—he asked formally, “Does my lady wish me to withdraw?”
“Of course not. I only wish that you have something for yourself. You have dedicated too many years to me, my dear friend.”
“I believe that is mine to decide.”
She smiled at him. “I do n
ot merit your devotion, but I cherish it.”
“So I may stay?”
“I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He smiled at that. “Now, will you tell me what you saw in your reading that has you so troubled?”
“It is not what I saw, Grim, but what I did not see. Not what was there, but what was missing.”
“Which was?”
“Not a trace of . . . personal history outside the Coalition. No family, no friends, save an amenable connection with his aide.”
“This is not unusual, for the Coalition demands all loyalty be to them, do they not?”
“Yes, but to have not a single memory? Even of one’s own parents? I don’t believe the Coalition has managed to create humans from nothing yet, although I do not deny they are likely trying.”
“I believe the androids are as close as they have come.”
“Agreed. And those will turn upon them are they not watchful. But that is for another time. What is most . . . disquieting about the man is that lack. I think he is fascinated because he has never known the loving connections of family, or between other people. He understands bonds in an intellectual way, but in his heart? There is nothing of it.”
No concept of love.
Chapter 8
“HOW LONG ARE we going to stand for this?”
Paledan looked up at Governor Sorkost. He’d seen little of him recently, and he suspected it was because the man had been hiding in a shelter beneath the large, luxurious residence he’d taken over upon his arrival here. It had once belonged to the most prosperous planium broker on Ziem, a man among the first to be eliminated after the Coalition had declared the planet conquered.
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