The Kindly Ones

by Melissa Scott

  "Rehur!"

  The younger actor looked around with an effort. Emerant leaned close, fighting to be heard over the noise. "You've got to get word to the Tower for me, tell Maturin what's happened. Will you do that?"

  "Can't one of the others do it?" Rehur asked automatically. He looked over his shoulder for the Halex he had seen before, but the familiar faces had vanished.

  "They've either run, or they're busy with her," Ume-Kai said. He nodded at the medium. "You go to her, too. We'll take your message."

  "Thank you," Emerant said. She dropped awkwardly off the edge of the archway into the pit, and took Ixora gently in her arms. Ixora, still sobbing, let herself be held.

  "Come on," Ume-Kai said grimly. "We've got to find a terminal."

  Chapter 6

  Trey Maturin

  The call came in a little before five hours of the clock-morning, on my private code. The flashing light and the muted whirring of the console alarm woke me at last, but I lay for a moment beneath my blankets wondering stupidly what was happening. Then it registered that a call on that line, at this hour, meant an emergency. I levered myself out of the bed, dragging a blanket with me because I couldn't find my robe, and hit the flashing accept button on the second try. The screen flashed on, and Rehur looked out of it at me.

  "Rehur?" I said, blankly, and groped for a chair. The ghost looked very white and frightened, and I could see the blurred figure of another man standing behind him. "Are you in trouble?"

  Rehur laughed, a little shakily. "No, not me, Trey." He shivered convulsively, the smile vanishing, and the other man put a hand on his shoulder. I wondered a little angrily who he was, and whether Rehur would introduce him.

  "Not me," Rehur said again. "It's Ixora."

  Oh, my God, I thought, and instinctively keyed on the recorder. The Matriarch had sent Ixora into Destiny in the hopes of avoiding a duel. Had the idiot girl managed to fight in spite of that?

  "Fen Erling hunted her out and challenged her," Rehur was saying. "They fought, and he's hurt—and shouldn't you be recording this, or something?"

  His voice trembled on the edge of hysteria. I saw the stranger's hands move gently on Rehur's shoulders, and said, as soothingly as I could manage, "I've already got the tape going, Rehur. Take it slowly, start at the beginning, and tell me what's happened."

  He did his best, but it was still disjointed: Rehur hadn't been in at the challenge, had seen the whole thing more or less by accident, and was still sickened by what he had seen. It seemed to calm him to talk, however, and by dint of careful questioning, I got the full story as he knew it. He was calm enough then that I didn't feel too bad about letting him go; I broke the connection and sat there for a moment, trying to think what I should do next. Herself would have to be informed, of course, but there were a few things I could—should—do first. Ixora had to be taken care of, for one. I called up the Tower's communications net, waking the sleeping duty-operator, and got control of half a dozen outside lines. That was one advantage to the code, I thought, even as I punched in the numbers that might reach Emerant Ansson, the medium the Halex employed for their business in Destiny. My position was unassailable, unquestionable—the code said I had to be obeyed.

  Emerant was not at home, or at the Family townhouse. I hoped this meant she was with Ixora—I had a fairly high opinion of Emerant's common sense—and left messages both places saying she was to find Ixora if she didn't have her, and return to the Tower at once. I called up the Tower operator then, and told her to hold those lines open for me on an emergency basis. Then I braced myself, and punched the codes that would reach the Matriarch.

  The light flashed for what seemed an interminable time, but then at last it steadied, though the screen remained blank. A voice said, "Yes, what is it?"

  It wasn't Herself, of course. I thought I recognized the voice of the Ansson cousin-kinswoman who acted as the Matriarch's secretary, and keyed my own camera just in case she'd set her machine to receive. "Lenor? It's Trey Maturin."

  The sleepy voice sharpened instantly. "Medium? Is there trouble?"

  The last wasn't really a question. Even as she spoke, the picture faded into existence on my screen, showing me a thin-faced woman in her thirties, her long hair, braided for sleep, falling forward across her shoulder. I said, "I'm afraid so, Lenor. You'd better wake Herself—Ixora's fought her duel."

  Lenor's mouth twitched, and the lines at the corners of her tilted eyes tightened momentarily, but she didn't waste time in exclamations. "I'll do that. Would you inform the Heir, and the Branch Holders?"

  "Of course," I began. There was a noise in the background, and Lenor turned to face the speaker.

  "Yes, ama," she said, and turned back to the screen. "Herself says, Medium, would you also inform the Elders, and ask them all to meet in the Tower conference room by the end of the Eclipse?"

  "As Herself wishes," I said formally, and Lenor broke the connection. I sat staring at the keyboard and the fuzzy screen for a long moment. It wouldn't be easy to arrange for the senior members of the various Branches of the Halex Kinship to reach the Tower by seven standard hours, and some of them would have to attend by vis-link, but at least I could be sure of collecting the Elders—the Matriarch's personal advisors—by then. I reopened my line to the Tower operator and began issuing orders.

  To my surprise, however, only the Holder Yslin Rhawn, caught high in the Prosperities inspecting one of his Branch's mines, had to use the vis-link. The other two Holders, Barthel Ansson and Asbera Ingvarr, were in Destiny already, come to confer about the accident and its implications, and the Elders all lived in or around the Tower. They arrived by ones and by twos, in aircraft or groundcars—only one by the UHST—and were shown instantly to the upper room that the Matriarch had designated as her conference room. Someone, probably the secretary Lenor, had ordered a full meal laid out on the sideboard, but no one seemed to want it.

  The Matriarch sat grim-faced at the head of the long table, the tape of Rehur's story cued up in a reader at her left hand. She had listened to it alone, as soon as I had summoned Elders and Holders, and had not referred to it since. Only the Heir Magan, her son, Rehur's father, had dared to ask to hear it, and she had sworn at him for his presumption.

  Magan refused to be deterred. "Surely we should all hear what's happened before we make any decision," he said. The words faltered into a question under his mother's stony gaze.

  "We will hear that from Ixora," the Matriarch snapped. "Not from the dead."

  There was nothing Magan or anyone else could say to that, though I could see that the others, Elders and Holders alike, wanted more detail than the bald summary I had given them. I stood, sighing, and crossed to the sideboard to draw myself another cup of the vile Oresteian coffee. There was a narrow slit window above the board; I glanced through it as I stirred spices into my drink. The Eclipse was ending, the light flooding back across the courtyard. In an hour or so, the first sliver of Agamemnon would be visible in the lapis sky.

  The window looked out onto the rising ground to the north of the Tower, toward the windmills that drove the Tower generators and, beyond that, toward Destiny. The thin blades were turning slowly in the steady wind, responding to air movements so light as to be almost imperceptible from the ground: there would be no power to spare this calendar-day, I guessed, but enough for common work. Then, in the sky above the left-end mill, I saw a flash of light. It was a small, fast flyer, heading for the makeshift field below the Tower, the only place flat enough to take flyer that wasn't under cultivation in what passed for Orestes' temperate zone. Ixora, I thought, but said nothing until it came close enough for me to read the Halex marking on its tail.

  "Ama," I said, pitching my voice to break the nervous silence. "I believe Ixora is arriving."

  In the next breath, as they broke into nervous, low-voiced speculation, I damned myself for succumbing to the actor's instinct. It might not be Ixora, could even be Yslin Rhawn, if he'd been able to find trans
port fast enough. . . . The Matriarch was watching me, the shadow of a mocking smile on her thin lips. Even deep in her own troubles, she could recognize and appreciate my discomfort.

  But of course it was Ixora, and Emerant Ansson with her, followed by two of Ixora's agemates who'd decided they could brave Herself's anger. One, a dark girl called Dorenn, I remembered from the gang who had managed the hoobeys at the Garnocks; the other I did not know. Rehur was not with them, of course, and, though I had known better than to expect him, I felt a certain disappointment.

  They came through the door in a clump, no one wanting to be first, but then Ixora stepped out from the rest and made a sketchy bow.

  She had been hurt, all right. One bandage was pasted across her face to cover a cut running from the point of her jaw to the tip of her chin; other injuries were implicit in the stiff, painful movements of her upper body. The Matriarch saw that, too, and her voice was a fraction less grim when she spoke.

  "Well, girl, you've made even more trouble for yourself this time."

  Ixora took a deep breath, and winced as that stirred some hidden injury. She said, her words slurred by the topical anesthetic they had used on her face, "I know, ama. But I was challenged."

  That was unanswerable, and after a moment, the Matriarch's eyes slid away toward the tape beside her. "Lenor!"

  The call took me by surprise—I had expected her to demand an explanation, at least—but the secretary had clearly been waiting for it.

  "Ama?"

  "Do your job. Get Yslin Rhawn," Herself said, and turned her attention back to Ixora. "Then we'll hear what this one has to say for herself."

  "Yes, ama."

  The secretary rolled a small console away from the wall, touching keys as she did so. A holophone rose from its top, and an image blossomed above it: Yslin Rhawn, short and squat for an Oresteian, scowled at us all.

  "About—" His static-distorted voice broke off as he saw Ixora, and the Matriarch said, "Then we're all here."

  "No fault of mine I wasn't there sooner," Yslin protested, and I saw Lenor flush.

  "It was at my order you weren't called before," Herself said impatiently. "No need to trouble you until the evidence was here to be heard."

  And, I thought, no need to bring a troublemaker into the council until the last minute. At least she had silenced Yslin. His console was placed so that he could observe all of us, and I hastily smoothed my expression, willing myself to be as unobtrusive as possible. Among the Halex, only the Rhawn Holder had opposed my hiring—from sheer obstinacy, it seemed, rather than any reasoned disapproval, but I didn't want to make things any more difficult for the Matriarch.

  Herself shifted in her chair until she faced Ixora again, and folded her gnarled hands in front of her. Someone—Lenor again?—had brought her a cup of coffee, but it sat untouched beside her right hand. Magan leaned forward as though he would say something, but his mother lifted one finger, and he steeled back in his place.

  "Now, Ixora," Herself said. "Tell us what happened, from the beginning."

  Ixora took another deep breath, and winced again. There seemed to be bruised ribs under her borrowed tunic, but her voice was steady enough, blurred only by the anesthetic on her face. "Ama, as you ordered, I went from the Tower to the Family's house in Destiny. I stayed there, and did not go out, or tell anyone I was there. But someone must've told—" She broke off, tardily afraid of making another rash accusation, and continued, "Somehow Fen found out I was there, and insisted on seeing me. He told Arnvid he lied when he said I wasn't there, and Arnvid had to let him in after that."

  She stopped, gathering strength. I bit back an exclamation of disgust. Arnvid Rhawn was the caretaker of the townhouse, ten years older than I was, and with the full dignity of his years to back him he should've been able to keep Fen out. But honor forbade lying, and to be caught in a direct lie was at least horribly shaming, if not mortal; I could understand how Arnvid had been bluffed into capitulating. That did raise the question Ixora had been afraid to ask: how did Fen Erling know she was there, and know it certainly enough to risk accusing a man older and higher in the social hierarchy than himself? Someone must've talked. . . . But that was a matter I could go into later.

  "Fen said I had called him a murderer and a liar in front of witnesses," Ixora said, "which I had done, and that he was owed satisfaction." She pushed back her hair with one hand and fixed a sudenly defiant stare on the Matriarch.

  "He said that if I didn't fight him, he would take that as admission of guilt, and that the code would back him. I didn't see anything else I could do, so I agreed to meet him. Because I had choice of weapons, I picked whips, so I couldn't kill him by accident. I hurt him badly, though."

  She was silent for a long moment, thinking about what she'd done, then shook herself and continued. The rest of her story was nothing more than what Rehur had told me already, and I closed my mind to it, trying to think what this would mean. Fen wasn't dead, so the matter of Ixora's accusation still had to be decided—or did it? Would this be like the very ancient days on Earth, when losing a duel meant that you were also assumed to be guilty of whatever crime had provoked the fight? Probably not: dueling wasn't part of the original code, was really only a sort of fashion among the younger bloods. Still, the whole incident, accusation and blinding, would only add to the already deep bitterness between Halex and Brandr. I couldn't see any way of stopping the old feud from being declared again. Glancing around the table, I saw the same knowledge in half a dozen other faces.

  When Ixora had finished, there was a long silence, broken at last by a faint creaking as the Matriarch shifted to face the Elder who sat at her left hand. "Well, Tirey? What do you make of it?"

  The man she had addressed, Tirey Ingvarr, shook his head slowly. He was a quiet, nondescript man in his late forties, and an expert on all the nuances of the code. "This creates a number of further difficulties," he said, and couldn't stop himself from a bitter glance toward Ixora. "I cannot see that this has settled anything between Halex and Brandr, and it may well cause problems between Halex and Fyfe."

  I frowned, not understanding yet, and Herself said, "Explain."

  "Fen Erling is hurt—blinded, probably," Tirey said. "But he owed the Fyfe something for causing the accident and killing Tasma Fyfe—especially since she's an Heir's-daughter, even if she isn't Demi-heir. How will he pay it now, and will it be worth anything? The Fyfe quarrel had precedence, and Ixora usurped it."

  "Fen Erling challenged me," Ixora protested, and the Matriarch silenced her with a look.

  "That's true, though," Magan said. "She couldn't refuse." He stared at Tirey as though daring the other man to defy him.

  Tirey sighed, and I saw on his face a sudden, intense exhaustion. "But she could," he said. "She could. A matter of precedence—settle her quarrel after Fen fulfilled his own obligations."

  "That claim's been disallowed more than once before," another of the Elders—a youngish woman called Jannah—said sharply.

  "But it would've let us avoid a quarrel with the Fyfe," Tirey said patiently. He looked around the room, and let his gaze settle on Herself. "And we can't afford extra enemies right now. Ama, I see no way to avoid feud with the Brandr. Unless, of course, they choose to put a lenient interpretation on events."

  His tone betrayed how likely he thought that to be. And he was probably right, too, I thought, and shivered a little. It is a Mediator's responsibility to do everything possible to avoid open conifict. I wasn't at all sure what could be done, except to urge that this go before the Ship's Council rather than be settled in blood. I opened my mouth to say just that, but at that moment there was a sharp knocking at the door, and it opened without waiting for the Matriarch's command.

  "I beg pardon, ama," said the girl who stood there, "but there's an urgent message from the operator. The Fyfe and the Branch Kinships wish a formal meeting with you—with the Kinship—before the clock-day's over."

  Whispered exclamations rustled around
the table, and all heads turned toward the Matriarch. She glared at the runner in the doorway, visibly biting back her first comment. "Did they give a reason for this extraordinary summons?" she said at last.

  "They said, ama, that they wanted to see if they could come to some settlement," the runner answered. There was an edge to her tone, as though she didn't believe her own words, and Herself snorted in agreement. It hardly seemed likely, I thought. More probably, this was the obligatory meeting before the Brandr declared feud —but if that were the case, why were the Fyfe included?

  The Matriarch glanced toward Tirey, who shook his head worriedly. "Ama, I don't know what's in their minds."

  "What do you recommend?" Magan asked softly.

  Tirey sighed again. "That we be ready to answer any accusations. That's all I can say."

  Herself turned back to the runner, still waiting patiently in the doorway. "You may tell the Brandr and the Fyfe that the Halex will meet with them this clock-evening."

  She glanced quickly at Magan, who said, "The nineteenth hour? Can we be ready by then?"

  It was Lenor who answered, standing forgotten in a corner. "I can have it arranged, yes."

  Herself nodded. "At the nineteenth hour, tell them, girl. And there's no need to be too polite about it."

  I winced at that, but the hard line of the Matriarch's mouth warned me against making any protest. The runner nodded again, repeating the message to herself, and slipped out of the conference room. The Matriarch swept the rest of us with an imperious stare. "Well, about it," she said at last, and pulled herself awkwardly to her feet. "There's no time to waste if we're to come out of this with the advantage."

  The rest of the day was divided between helping Lenor and the Tower communications staff set up the holo-link with the two other Towers—as an off-worlder, I was presumed to know about computers and communications links, but in actuality, my role was reduced to typing commands into the test console, freeing the others for more important jobs—and acting as a sort of moderator in the discussions that followed Herself's decision to accept the meeting that evening. There was a lot to be done—everything had to be phrased with the utmost care in order to avoid admitting Ixora and the Halex had been in the wrong—and it was well into the afternoon before we had finished. Herself dismissed us to a hasty dinner, but despite the fact I hadn't eaten more than a sandwich snatched near clock-noon, I found it impossible to stomach the heavy food. It was my job as Mediator to prevent this kind of trouble, to keep the Halex out of feud if I could, but I could see no alternative that the Matriarch—or her counterpart of Brandr—would accept. In the end, it was a relief when a runner finally appeared to tell us that it was time for the meeting.