Snare

by Katharine Kerr

  ‘Of course. For five weeks, isn’t it?’

  Duhmars merely nodded.

  ‘Soutan’s found himself a patron, hasn’t he?’ Loy felt her voice hovering on the edge of screaming. ‘The goddamned Burgunee zhundars have been bought off.’

  ‘Loy?’ Zhoc leaned forward and used Tekspeak. ‘Please be calm and humour the useless little man. When he’s gone, we’ll talk further.’

  Duhmars was glaring at them both; he doubtless could guess that he was being discussed. Loy nodded the master’s way, then turned back to the commiz.

  ‘I do not know,’ Duhmars said, ‘if bribery is involved or not. I can understand your frustration, Mada Millou, but those are serious charges. If you want to bring them formally –’

  ‘No. You know as well as I do that I don’t have one damned shred of evidence.’

  Zhoc made a clucking noise and shook his head in a vigorous no, trying to shut her up, she assumed. Duhmars hesitated, then shrugged.

  ‘I’ll insist that it gets on the first day’s agenda. Please, Mada Millou? Be reasonable?’

  My only child was raped and brutalized, Loy thought, and you’re telling me to be reasonable. Aloud, she said, ‘I know you’re doing all you can.’

  ‘Let me assure you of that. I’m taking a personal interest in this case. We’ve already got all the evidence in order for the trial, just for one thing. Don’t you worry. We’ll get a conviction.’

  If it ever comes to trial, Loy thought. If that rotten little dungworm hasn’t disappeared by the time Burgunee Council meets. Zhoc escorted Duhmars out, then closed the door with a snap.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in Tekspeak. ‘I never dreamt this would happen, or I wouldn’t have raised your hopes.’

  ‘Thank you, but in my better moments I know that. I wonder who Yarl’s found to protect him?’

  ‘Dookis Marya.’ Zhoc sat down, letting his body sag into the leather as if he were exhausted. ‘That damned rich little swine! I’ve already alerted the Master of Burgunee. He agrees that the situation’s serious, but –’

  ‘But Marya’s very powerful.’

  Zhoc pursed his lips in a sour smile. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘It turns out that this Kazrak khan, Jezro, is part of Marya’s establishment now. Her secretary or something. Somehow she knew that Yarl and his friends were on their way and sent letters to the commiz ordering him to leave Yarl strictly alone.’

  ‘Merde!’ Loy saw him wince. ‘Sorry. It’s just like Marya somehow, collecting herself an exotic Kazraki secretary and a crazy loremaster.’

  ‘The same way she collected a title?’

  ‘Come now! She paid Burgunee Council a nice fair price for that title.’

  Zhoc scowled at the joke. ‘She’s her father’s daughter, all right. God, I hate them both!’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Well, look at what they did! Hoarding the technology they found, dribbling it onto the market at high prices, not even letting us inspect the site!’ Zhoc took a long breath and calmed himself. ‘Anyway, Master Pool will see what he can do if Yarl tries to bolt back to Kazrajistan. Once he leaves Burgunee, he’s fair game.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose. I could go north –’

  ‘It’s too risky. Yarl would love to see you dead.’

  ‘The feeling’s mutual, and I’m smarter than he is.’

  ‘So? He’s got Kazraki soldiers with him. No, Loy, you can’t go hunting Yarl. It’s too dangerous, and I forbid it. As the master of your guild, not just as a friend. No. You may not.’

  Loy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Arguing with Zhoc once he’d invoked his position in the guild would only waste her time. ‘Very well,’ she said instead. ‘But you’ll keep me informed?’

  ‘Of course! And don’t you worry. We’ll get this slimy little criminal yet.’

  In a grim mood Loy left the guildhall and started across the square. Students were trotting from one set of offices to another, or standing around talking about their grades. They were young, laughing, full of hope and plans – she envied them as much as Zhoc envied the Tribes. I was like that once, she thought. Once.

  Outside the sheltered square a wind had come up, easing the heat. As she walked along Loy heard music, drifting from the town centre, the sound of brass trumpets and drums. Laughing and calling out, a gaggle of students rushed past her, their robes flapping behind them.

  ‘Loremaster Millou!’ a girl called out. ‘It’s the Recallers. They’re in town!’

  Loy hesitated. She could go home and brood, or she could let herself be distracted. After a brief fight, sanity won.

  ‘Wait for me!’ she called back. ‘I’ll join you.’

  The Recallers had set up their wooden stage in their usual spot, the riverbank park across from the white dome of the synagogue. The stage rested on two open wagons with locked wheels, while one of their covered wagons stood nearby to function as a dressing room. A wooden frame rose half-way across the stage area, and upon it a pair of Recallers were hanging curtains. Around the stage a big crowd had already grabbed the best seats on the grass, while behind the lucky ones, on a slight slope up, a fair collection of people were standing, craning their necks to see. Since Loy stood just five feet two inches high, she gave up on actually seeing the performance. One of her students, however, ran off to the row of nearby shops and came back with a wooden crate.

  ‘Thank you,’ Loy said. ‘Remind me next semester to give you an A.’

  The girl laughed, then trotted off to join a gaggle of her friends. By standing on the crate, Loy could just see the stage, still empty of performers and props both. She turned, idly looking over the crowd. Since she’d lived in Sarla all her life, she knew most of them – students, faculty, the grocer, the wood merchant, a couple of young men who’d joined the zhundars straight out of college. Two strangers, however, stood towards the back of the crowd: a Kazrak and a tall woman, her blonde hair severely braided. Loy could just make out what seemed to be a long feather hanging from her single earring and a pair of grassar-skin saddlebags over her shoulder. A spirit rider, Loy thought. An honest-to-god spirit rider, here in Sarla! And could that be our third Kazrak with her? Loy would have jumped off her perch and gone straight over, but the performance was starting.

  Dressed all in black, a stout man walked through the curtains. When the crowd clapped, he smiled, bowed, then raised the mask he was carrying and held it up in front of him. A caricature of a human face, it concealed a small megaphone in its mouth.

  ‘In the heart of the past the secrets shine, a galaxy of buried stars,’ he began. ‘Where is the ship to sail between the stars of the soul? It lies in our hearts, for the past has birthed us, and we are the past and present alike. When we came to the far country, we wept. By the waters of the Rift we sat down and wept, because we remembered the stars of home.

  ‘Eight hundred years ago it was, and the land here stretched wild. Not a house, not a ship, nothing but the saurs among the water reeds and the Chiri Michi in the hills. How could we have signed their bargain? We asked it a thousand times, but we knew that without Landfall we faced death. In the vast void twixt here and home, no stars shone to power our travelling.

  ‘Were it not for our children we might have risked death, but they, too young to choose, deserved what life this world could give them. The wild red valley would be our home, the wild brown swamps ours, too, to do with them what we could. Yet even still, some doubted. After Admiral Raynar sealed the bargain with his death, a good many cursed him for what he’d done.’

  A tattoo of drums rang out from behind the curtain. The Chief Voice stepped to one side, and the players appeared, wearing the sleek blue costumes that traditionally represented the uniforms of the interstellar fleet. What the officers from the Settlers’ starships had actually worn, no one remembered, but the one-piece outfits with their multiple belts certainly looked archaic enough. Loy had heard this particular play, Diamond Words, so often that she knew large parts of it by heart. I
t wove a story around the founding of Nannes and in the process described the actual Recallers, the specially bred H’mai whose name the travelling players had taken for their guild.

  Since the piece held no surprises for her, Loy spent a large part of the performance watching the Kazrak and the spirit rider. The Kazrak she could only describe as entranced. He stood with his hands shoved into the pockets of his filthy grey trousers and his head tipped a little back to keep his gaze firmly on the stage. The spirit rider would watch for a while, then turn and look over the crowd, her face utterly expressionless. At times she rocked on her feet as if tired, bored, or both. Eventually, towards the end of the first act, she leaned close to whisper something to the Kazrak, then left him and began making her way through the crowd.

  Loy jumped down and followed her. With her long legs the spirit rider walked fast, but fortunately she went only as far as the grassy bank of the river, where she sat down and hauled her saddlebags into her lap. Loy hurried up to her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Loy said in Tekspeak. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that you’re from the Tribes.’

  The woman smiled at her. ‘Since you’re not blind,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose you could help it. You must be a sorcerer, if you know the spirit language.’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s certainly what your people would call me. My name is Loy Millou, and I was –’

  ‘Loy Millou? Old Onree from Nannes mentioned you to me.’

  ‘He did?’ Loy sat down, facing her in the grass. ‘Is that Zayn Hassan with you?’

  ‘It is, yes. My name is Ammadin, I ride with Apanador’s comnee, not that you’ll know who he is. Zayn and I were going to look for you after the performance.’

  ‘And I’ve been hoping to find Hassan. Onree told us about him in his report, but not about you. That’s like him, though. He forgets things.’

  ‘For a man his age, he’s still pretty sharp, I’d say.’

  ‘Yes. We should all be in such good shape at ninety, huh?’ Loy smiled at her. ‘I need to thank him. I’m so glad we’ve found each other.’

  ‘So am I. We have a lot to talk about.’

  After Ammadin left, Zayn turned around once to make sure he knew where she was going; then the performance took him over again. Since he knew so little about the history of the Cantons, the plot proved difficult to follow, but he could pick that over at his leisure, he figured. He was memorizing every word of the performance, stowing away not merely the words but images of the actors and their costumes to replay later in his mind. One thread of the play took all of his conscious attention: the Recaller herself, a woman who memorized and sorted information in exactly the same way he did.

  The actress playing this Lieutenant Diamante seemed to have no real understanding of how such a mind worked. She was continually laying her hands on her forehead and rolling her eyes to indicate that she was in the process of memorizing something. That Zayn could ignore, however, in return for the sheer flood of information. The other characters took her mind for granted; they asked her questions, showed her things that she should be remembering, referred to her special training and spoke of her inborn talent.

  Inborn. He had learned the word earlier, but in the players’ mouths it took on a vast new significance. At first he couldn’t quite understand why the characters shuddered or made some other gesture of fear when they spoke it, but a long speech from the young officer who loved Diamante finally answered his question. Her mind was no lucky accident. Somehow or other, the Settlers had managed to give children certain skills or characteristics by breeding, the same way that a gardener would produce pink roses from red and white. After those traits appeared, then the Recaller traits bred true, provided, of course, that both parents were Recallers. In the play, the young officer would never be allowed to marry the woman he loved simply because he was an ordinary human being.

  Now and again the Narrator in Black, or so Zayn was thinking of the man with the mask, would appear at the side of the action and give a speech, generally concerning some obscure point of history that the rest of the audience seemed to understand. Once, however, he spoke a couple of lines that made Zayn’s blood run cold.

  ‘Did we not hate and fear the Inborn, they who knew so much more than we would ever learn? Did we not fear and hate the Inborn with other gifts, those whose minds fed upon numbers, those whose minds melded with their ships? Did we not hate and fear those as well who had created them in their mothers’ wombs? Sorcery, some called it, and the work of devils, though we knew it was but knowledge applied by ruthless men.’

  Some called it – Agvar and his followers. Ruthless men? The Ancestors, Zayn supposed. What had driven the Ancestors to create the Recallers and those number feeders, whatever that meant? As the play continued, it referred to other classes of H’mai who had been altered the same way, created or engineered as the play put it, but it never gave them convenient names. The complicated plot threads began to twine together, shoving raw information aside.

  All at once Zayn realized that he was beginning to feel nauseated, as badly as if he’d stuffed himself with rich food. He also realized that he now knew why, if the play was to be trusted. Recallers felt information in their bodies just as normal H’mai felt emotions. For a moment he nearly did vomit, but he caught control of himself and began to work his way out of the crowd. He could guess that he looked ill by the hurried way the audience parted to let him through.

  Down by the river the air smelled clean and cool. Zayn stood for a moment, breathing deeply, letting his mind settle and his stomach with it. Overload – Diamante had called the nausea overload. Too much data too soon. Zayn filed the word away and remembered lying in Ammadin’s tent, reading the Vransic dictionary, an extravagant pleasure, almost sexual, a gift from the talents – this curse of talents that had been laid upon him hundreds of years before he was born.

  The crowd began streaming past; the show had ended. Loy looked over Ammadin’s shoulder and saw the Kazrak striding towards them. He was a good-looking man, Loy thought, with his dark skin and curly hair, but there was something brutal about him as well. She couldn’t quite place it – a hard look about the eyes, an animal wariness in the way he moved. Ammadin, who had never turned around to look, suddenly smiled.

  ‘Here’s Zayn now,’ Ammadin said.

  ‘How –’

  ‘His scent,’ Ammadin said. ‘Everyone smells different, you know.’

  Ammadin got up and grabbed her saddlebags just as Hassan joined them. Loy stood, too, and brushed flecks of purple grass off her leggings with the side of her hand. Ammadin and Hassan spoke in Hirl-Onglay, but Loy could follow it well enough, since Ammadin was only making a simple introduction.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mada Millou,’ Hassan said in perfect Vranz. ‘I’m glad we found each other so easily. Did Ammadin tell you about old Onree’s recommendation?’

  ‘Yes, she did. What did you think of the Recallers?’

  Hassan blinked several times, then looked her over with a dark stare that verged on the frightening. ‘Very interesting,’ he said at last. ‘I enjoyed it.’

  The silence hung between them like a threat. Ammadin turned to Loy and spoke in her heavily accented Vranz. ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet, where we can talk. What about our hohte?’

  ‘If you don’t mind, yes,’ Loy said, ‘that will be fine.’

  They were staying in a hohte near the city gate, not a splendid place, but clean and fancy enough, Loy supposed, for people who were used to sleeping on the ground. The pale yellow room held a bed, two chairs, a table; on the back wall a window gave them a view of purple grass and a scarlet lace-leaf tree. They’d piled their saddles and other gear in one corner on the faded green rug. The room stank of horses, from the saddle blankets, Loy assumed. Ammadin laid her saddlebags on the table, then sat next to them in one of the chairs and gestured at Loy to take the other.

  Hassan hovered by the door. ‘Would you like some wine? I can get some from the maiderdee.’

 
‘Yes, thank you,’ Loy said. ‘White for me, please.’

  He nodded and left, hesitated just outside, glanced around as if for enemies, then shut the door behind him.

  ‘Zayn can be frightening,’ Ammadin remarked in Tekspeak. ‘I hope he’s not troubling you.’

  ‘Oh no, no.’

  ‘Really?’ Ammadin raised one eyebrow. ‘You smell terrified.’

  Loy gawked.

  ‘Don’t you have the spirit powers?’ Ammadin said.

  ‘I’d forgotten about that,’ Loy said. ‘No, not all of them. You spirit riders are the only sorcerers who do have them all, actually. But I’ll stop trying to be polite. Your man scares me half to death. I don’t even know why.’

  ‘You’re more sensitive than you think, is why. Zayn can be kind of dangerous.’

  ‘Kind of.’

  Ammadin laughed. ‘We’re just passing through Dordan,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to cause trouble or have trouble caused for me. If no one bothers Zayn, he won’t bother them, but I do have to warn you, he’s very good at violence. Most comnee men are. All right?’

  ‘All right. Believe me, trouble is the last thing any of us want.’

  ‘Good. But about the spirit powers? I may have them, but I’ve come to realize that you sorcerers know a great deal more about the crystals than we do.’

  ‘Um, yes.’ A hell of a lot more, Loy thought, but I don’t dare tell you. ‘From what I’ve heard I’d say that’s true.’

  ‘The reason I’m asking is Zayn has to go off on his own, where I can’t follow, if he’s going to complete his quest. That means I won’t be able to hide him from Yarl’s scanning. Yarl must know that Zayn’s going to kill him when he finds him. By the way, will you mind?’

  ‘Only because I won’t be there to watch.’

  Ammadin’s smile became a good bit warmer. Loy began to feel as if she were chatting with a longtooth saur.

  ‘But what I was wondering,’ Ammadin went on, ‘is whether there’s some sort of crystal that Zayn could carry, something that would keep working the Hide Me command even though I wasn’t there.’