These included a pair of wonderfully odd chairs, the sort that looked hazardous to one’s health, yet were seductively difficult to leave once you took the chance. Rael hesitated but followed my lead, her look of surprised appreciation making me laugh. She peered over at me. “You seem remarkably cheerful for someone receiving the news I brought,” she commented dryly.
I shrugged. “When you are at the bottom of things, Sister-mine, any improvement is appreciated.” Her eyes glistened as I sketched the gesture of beholdenness and kinship in the air between us. “I’m simply grateful,” I continued with the truth. “I’ve been warned about Ica. And you are here.”
Rael’s face, transparent as always, showed her puzzlement. “Yes. And I’d like to know exactly how I came to be here.” She paused and licked her lips. “Not to mention some explanation of what I experienced in the M’hir.”
I understood. She’d seen the M’hir life-forms, but I knew she had no context to recognize what she’d seen. To her, they were oddities of the M’hir pathways and what really mattered was the Drapsk machinery. Rather than share the formless apprehension I felt, courtesy of the Drapsk, I pointed a toe at the ball on my carpet and replied: “I’m afraid there’ll be a delay. Your answers are in that brain, not mine. Suffice it for now that I don’t dare use the M’hir—and not just because of the Council’s Watchers.”
She winced and shook her head. “The Watchers. Let’s hope the power of your friend’s device clouded the trace we left, or they’ll know you’re here, if not why.” Then, more anxiously, “You don’t suppose the Watchers will react to the Drapsk—”
“Copelup hasn’t been concerned about the Watchers,” I said, more to reassure Rael than because I was convinced myself. “He said they monitor a different part or frequency. Something like that.”
“They think the M’hir has parts?” My sister was startled into a chuckle. “What odd little beings.”
“You can’t begin to imagine,” I agreed wholeheartedly. “We’d better hope he’s right—what the Watchers know, the Council knows. And you said Ica has a source on the Council?”
Rael gestured an apology. It was becoming habitual. “I never intended to plot against you, heart-kin.”
“And you didn’t, not really,” I assured her, the feel of her memories in mine more than proof. “To be honest, you were only doing what I should have done myself. It was time for me to come back. I had no right to choose exile, to take my happiness and leave the needs of the Clan behind me.”
“They betrayed you—” Rael sounded mystified. “Tried to use you, even kill you.”
I glanced at the Drapsk, now reluctantly installing the replacement door panel they’d taken from some other cabin presumably with the Scats’ permission. The fewer doors the better, as far as they were concerned. Anything that divided the Drapsk from one another diminished the whole. “I have learned to look beyond that,” was all I said, adding briskly: “Now, as far as Ica is concerned . . .”
We talked for an hour or more, sometimes by voice, as often our thoughts and feelings mingling underneath. Rael accepted there were things I chose to keep hidden—I had been this way before I had the secrets of others to protect, I remembered; I’d never been comfortable revealing my inner self completely to others, no matter how trusted, until I’d granted Morgan that right.
A right and a peril, I thought, when we paused a moment in respect for the loss of Larimar’s Chosen in the M’hir. Those Joined shared every risk, whether they shared belief in it or not.
“I don’t like it,” Rael said when we were done exploring plans and actions, all avenues seeming to lead to one possibility. “It’s risky.”
“Do you think there’s anything we can do, including hiding, without risk?” I countered, not particularly pleased with our results either. But there wasn’t time to debate or second-guess ourselves.
“So you agree,” I went on briskly. “We won’t wait to find out if the Watchers are aware of what I’ve done—we’ll grab their attention and turn it toward Ica’s group and the Human telepaths. The Watchers will sound the alarm to Council, keeping them both busy while we search Ret 7 for what was stolen from me.” And Morgan, I said to myself, my priority if not Rael’s.
“Pella—” Rael closed her lips over the name, but her concern lapped against my thoughts.
I didn’t share Rael’s sense of responsibility for our younger sister, having lately grown less patient with fools of any kind. “From what you’ve told me, Pella hasn’t done anything yet but linger in Ica’s orbit. If they scan her, that’s all they’ll find. Maybe she’ll learn something from it, but I doubt it.”
“You can’t trust the Council.”
I smiled, completely without humor. “Rael, my dear sister, I trust nothing but their predictability. I know exactly what the Council intends for me. I have no intention of helping them succeed.”
This was a point on which we didn’t agree. “I can’t believe the Council is behind what happened on Pocular—it makes no sense for them to act against you. At least, not so openly.” This last with a reluctant conviction. Rael had lost a number of her illusions.
“How much proof will it take, Rael?” I countered. “I told you what the Scats said about the Retians’ experiments. And Huido discovered a Retian named Baltir was involved in the attack on me. Baltir, Sister. The toad brought to the Council by Faitlen di Parth, in order to supply technology to use my mindless body to produce more ‘Siras’ if I failed to be willing or able to do so. The evidence,” I rested a hand on my violated abdomen, “proves they didn’t forget that plan.”
“After you left, Sira,” she argued, “the Council claimed it had no prior knowledge—”
“With shields wide open, no doubt?” I waved a hand, softening my tone. Rael wasn’t the enemy, not anymore. “It doesn’t affect our plan. We both know how the Council views rebellion. They react to it almost as violently as they do to the idea of Humans in the M’hir. They won’t be impressed by Ica’s venture into the forbidden.” I made two fists and brought them together gently. “We tie both groups up in accusation and counter-accusation until I have Morgan safe.” A new thought came to me, and I considered it before musing aloud: “We could add Bowman and her Enforcers to the mix.”
“You wouldn’t!” Rael said, aghast. “Bad enough they are already sniffing around you and your Morgan.”
“It was,” I responded mildly, “just a thought.” But not a bad one, I added to myself, quite willing to use whatever leverage I had against my enemies.
Rael regarded me suspiciously.
I smiled.
INTERLUDE
For all Barac knew, his body was still in the cell, probably crawling with hungry fungi dissolving their way through a feast of clothing, flesh, and bone. The thought was a distant horror, almost forgotten in the surging joy.
She was near.
He was desire.
Nothing else existed but the desperate need for completion, to reach the Chooser, to offer himself for her Testing. Barac flung himself forward, not knowing if he flew within the M’hir or ran across a midnight field. His destination was that light, that radiance.
He gasped, reeling as the Chooser sensed his approach and drove at him with her power. This was her place. He was the intruder. His was a contamination to be pushed aside.
Instinctively, desperately, Barac resisted, knowing this was the Test, the measure of his worthiness to Join her absolute perfection.
He resisted, but knew at once he would fail, that he wasn’t worthy of such overwhelming power. Just when he felt himself about to dissolve, crying out his disappointment and feeling her triumph, there was distraction.
Another!
A candidate was never offered to two Choosers at once. Barac experienced the why of it as he hung like a piece of metal suspended in the overlapping attraction of two powerful magnets, unable of himself to move toward one or the other.
Powerful magnets who became aware of each other, their
thoughts filling with jealous fury. Mine the Choice, they screamed as one.
Barac felt his sanity returning as the attraction of the Choosers transformed into their battle with one another. He fought to free himself from their grip, but was stuck fast.
Helpless, he felt them tear at each other, pulling free pulses of power to bleed into the darkness. Invisible tears cascaded down his cheeks as their beauty weakened, their power faded. They were killing each other, as caught in passion as he had been.
Help me, he screamed without sound, trying to recapture their attention, to pull them from their fatal conflict.
It became more and more difficult to keep his thoughts straight, to understand what was happening. The moment came when Barac imagined the fungi from his cell had entered the M’hir with him, that clumps of it surrounded the doomed Choosers, climbing over their brightness, consuming it in some obscene feasting.
He struggled to reach them, then stopped. Somehow he knew it was too late for the Choosers. It was too late for him as well. Barac felt himself become less and less, spreading so thin he hardly knew where he began or ended.
Then, from the nothing, an outpouring of raw energy, strange yet oddly familiar, encircling what he’d become, collecting and compressing until Barac writhed with the pain of living again. There was a pull that threatened to rip his mind apart . . .
. . . until he spun away into a darkness unlike any he had known before.
Chapter 45
OUR plan, like several others I’d made recently, ran headlong into the Drapsk. The Makii, it seemed, had somehow adapted Copelup’s M’hir-blocking device to encompass the Nokraud. While it probably protected Rael and me from detection by others of the Clan, it also prevented us from using the M’hir to contact the Watchers—or any other Clan for that matter. And there was the parallel and not unrelated business of the locked ship ports. It all began to seem very familiar to me.
Captain Makairi had rushed over from the Makmora the moment I’d started seriously shouting. Now, we stood face to front on the bridge of the Nokraud, and I felt no closer to a solution than I’d been on Drapskii itself.
“There are other ways to send a message, Mystic One,” the Captain was insisting.
“Watchers don’t have addresses and comlinks,” Rael said impatiently. Not having my previous experience, she was finding it very difficult to accept that the small polite beings were literally holding us prisoner for our own good.
She had a point. There were two kinds of Watchers: those who guarded the unborn and those who guarded the M’hir. The first were posts of honor within a House: Clan assigned to act if a Joining were severed during pregnancy, to attempt to save the mind of the infant despite the loss of the mother’s into the M’hir.
The second, those we and other Clan rightly feared, did not know themselves. In some individuals, a portion of the mind lingered within the M’hir waking or sleeping, a portion that formed a complex awareness completely separate from the individual’s consciousness, possessing the knowledge of that individual but none of the personality. Some believed the Watchers were the next step in our evolution, beings closer to a true, continuous existence in that other space. Regardless, all Watchers shared a grim protectiveness about the M’hir, a territorial instinct which the Clan Council found very useful indeed. The Watchers never acted on their own, but were lightning-quick to sound the alarm to Council if Clan or alien transgressed borders or behaviors they themselves established. Their thoughts felt strange, almost hollow; their communication left a spectral echo in one’s mind, unforgettable and unnerving. I, for one, didn’t trust them.
I wondered, mind flitting off on a tangent again, if any Watchers had encountered the M’hir life, and if so, had they reported it?
Rael and the Drapsk were arguing; I put up my hand to stop it, not bothering to follow the details. “Captain Makairi, when will Copelup—reemerge?”
He sucked a tentacle pensively. “Who’s to say, Mystic One? Eopari can be a very personal matter. If Copelup is in deep mediation, it could be days as his mind explores connections and meanings, moving into a higher plane of reason. If he is sulking, we could wake him right now with a good kick in the—You get my meaning?”
I smiled. “I most certainly do, Captain.”
It had been, as Makairi hinted, a case of sulking. Copelup unrolled himself immediately, giving a shout of outrage that was the loudest sound I’d heard a Drapsk produce. I kept my feet carefully together, not wanting to provide him with any clues as to the culprit. “Welcome back, Skeptic,” I said warmly. Rael, watching from the safety of her chair, put her hand over her mouth. She never was good at keeping a straight face under any circumstances. “I have a challenge for you.”
Maka hurried to the now-speechless Skeptic with a container of some drink—a peace offering Copelup accepted at once and clamped to his face. “One is always dehydrated after eopari,” Maka explained to me, sotto voce.
“We are,” I said politely but firmly, “running out of time.” Copelup’s antennae twitched. They were still partially coiled around one another, I supposed in the Drapsk-equivalent of a humanoid struggling to wake up from a too-sound sleep. “My sister and I thank you for your assistance, my dear Skeptic. Now we need you again.” The antennae unwound with an alacrity suggesting alarm. I knew how to change that. “You see, Copelup, we’d like you to run some tests on Rael—find out more about how the Clan operates in the M’hir.”
His yellow plumes, so striking among the purple-pink Makii, shot upward in absolute delight.
I hadn’t been completely truthful with Rael, telling her only that I wanted to learn if Copelup’s devices really did hide us from the Watchers. In that, we were not successful. The devices at close range gave the M’hir an odd, not unpleasant, metallic feel, hardly detectable unless one was aware to look for it; certainly nothing that appeared to disguise any other sensations. This was Rael’s description, shared with me mind-to-mind.
Copelup’s other test, the one we kept from Rael, confirmed what I’d both hoped and feared: that my sister’s presence in the M’hir drew no unwanted attention from the M’hir life-forms. If it was my unbalanced power that attracted them, and worse, if my Power-of-Choice was rebuilding itself around me, I didn’t want her to know. Not yet. Morgan came first.
Once we were certain of the results, I broached the subject to the Drapsk. “Captain Makairi,” I began, keeping my voice calm and patient—no amount of belligerence or begging would sway a determined Drapsk, “the Skeptic feels Rael’s presence in the M’hir will not endanger either of us. I ask your permission to have her attempt to contact the Watchers.”
“You would not be at risk, Mystic One?” The Drapsk predictably focused on the member of his Tribe over a virtual outsider. “You would promise not to enter the Scented Way again yourself in this dangerous place?”
I thought of what waited for me there—waited with appetite—and had no problem saying with the utmost sincerity: “I promise. As I am of the Makii,” I added on impulse, feeling this should carry some weight with him. Rael was glancing back and forth between the Drapsk and I. I shook my head slightly when it was my turn again, hoping she’d appreciate that the Drapsk would detect any nonverbal communication and rightly mistrust my promise if it occurred.
The Captain inhaled all his tentacles—the new ones had grown to match the others, I was relieved to notice, giving me one less item to try to explain to Rael. Two tentacles popped back out with the words: “We will remove the field, Mystic One. The Makii are relieved you are being sensible.”
“Ah, about that,” I said, drawing a deep breath. This was the trickier part and I wasn’t prepared to take “no” for an answer. “Once Rael has sent her message, she can be traced here. We’d like to leave immediately and go into Jershi, to find Baltir.”
“Leave the ship!” I could tell Rael was amazed by the unison with which the Drapsk could inhale tentacles and rock in place.
Before I could start arguing,
a deep voice rumbled from the far corner of the bridge: “I will be with her.” Huido, presently acting as a couch for three Drapsk crew, walked toward me, shaking off his passengers who bounced up from the floor and trotted away without complaint. “We must resume the search for my brother. This Baltir of the toads is the best lead we’ve had.”
The Drapsk weren’t pleased; the continuing sound of subdued tentacle sucking filled the bridge. I saw Rael preparing to add her comment and quelled her with a look. “Captain, we have come here with a purpose. You must accept that I know what I’m doing,” hopefully, I added to myself. “Holding us on this ship can protect us today. What about the future? We have a chance to confuse my enemies, to recover the—” I searched my knowledge of them for an equivalent to describe my attachment to Morgan, settling for: “To recover the missing member of my own Tribe.”
Tentacles popped out, forming the flowerlike ring that I thought signified if not agreement, then sudden comprehension.
I just hoped they were comprehending what I intended.
INTERLUDE
With a frustrated growl, Morgan threw aside his bag of equipment, trading it for a bit of extra mobility and a second free hand. He’d chased the Clansman into the next room, only to find it was the antechamber to another, much larger space. A nightmare.
A nightmare built from a maze of tubes, most wider around than his arms could span, writhing upward to a ceiling lofted through at least two more floors, like some bizarre forest canopy of medical gadgets and industrial pipes. Any open space was filled with tables and counters, most of these connected by thick cabling that made it impossible to find clear footing for more than a couple of steps at a time. The Retian alarm system was fully active—silent, but with orange-red strobe lights careening from every corner, bewildering the eye.
Faitlen either knew his way through the place blindfolded, or had an inner guide. He had almost immediately disappeared from sight, running frantically not as though he feared Morgan, but as though he had to prevent something from happening at any cost. What? Intuitively, Morgan stopped and closed his eyes. He ignored the pounding of his heart, the sound of his own breathing. He shut out any concern about the Retians on their way down or how he was going to escape the Baltir. He became still, only then opening his thoughts to the M’hir.
Ties of Power (Trade Pact Universe) Page 36