A scream shattered the calm, then another. People at the edge of the crowd were being dragged off, limp beneath the neuralprobe.
Around Spinel, figures extended, half stood; dark eyes widened, like cows’ eyes. Here and there a dusky shadow popped up and scrambled out to hurry home.
“Uriel!” Desperately Spinel whispered at him, pleading for help, but Uriel was too busy Calling. He had to do something, though, or all that day’s effort would go for nothing. What could Spinel do; what would Lystra have done?
Spinel found himself shaking all over. He knew he was about to get up and do something, and he felt quite out of his head. He rose unsteadily, as if the ground were rolling. “Bring them back!” he called to the wall of guards. “Bring them back, or we’ll never leave, do you hear?”
“Never!” a motley chorus echoed. “Bring them back!”
“And tomorrow,” Spinel added, “we’ll bring the whole town.”
Of course, the town jail could not possibly hold the whole town. Now people settled in more firmly and shouted defiance at their oppressors. The screams stopped; it appeared that only a fraction of the crowd had been hauled away. But the mood was getting uglier, and here and there a knife glinted in the flashlight beams, which was just what Uriel had warned against. How much would the Dolomites stand for? Soldiers now pressed in a ring all around the crowd—practically the whole garrison must be here. One false move, and…
Uriel raised his arm high and beckoned all who could see. “The Patriarch hears us,” Uriel said. “The Patriarch calls on us to sing to Him. We will sing the Anthem of the Nine Legions.”
Spinel gasped; it was a stroke of genius. All the armies of Valedon put together would think twice before disrupting a singing of the Patriarch’s Anthem. Uriel began, Spinel loudly joined in, and the song swelled throughout the crowd. Everyone knew at least the refrain, and most knew the nine legionary verses as well. And Uriel knew countless others, for every known planet and some long dead…
Spinel’s voice faltered at last, exhausted from the day’s campaign. A few stars peeked through the clouds. There was even a hazy sickle of a blue moon. He slumped at his mother’s side. As his eyelids fluttered he imagined that the stars were plantlights above the clickfly webs at a Sharer celebration. Then Lystra flashed into his dream, and he plunged into the ocean after her, pursuing her beating feet even to the deepest realm of nautilus and seaswallower. I’ll chase you to the floor of the world, his mind whispered, but she never looked back.
4
BACK IN IRIDIS, Berenice could hardly wait to see Realgar again. At the door to his Iridian establishment, she was met by three pairs of guards: Iridians in blue with gilt tufts at the shoulder tips; Sards, maroon beneath capes of indigo; and Dolomites in their shapeless gray woolen cloaks. It gave her a start, for Realgar had commanded only Sards before.
A servo reached for her bearskin coat, but she kept it to show Realgar, since he had captured the beast after all. The servo padded ahead of her down the magnificent Sardish carpet, a universe of hunting scenes in russet and gold. At either side of the hall stood beasts he had caught and preserved, from stags and wildcats to the dreaded silver bears.
Realgar had a peculiar sense of honor about the hunt. He would hunt quite alone in the evergreen wilderness, armed only with portable weapons, though a servocopter could have bagged a forest full of fauna in a day. Men, he would say, were ordinary, civilizable creatures to be fought and mastered by the state, but wild things were an impenetrable mystery, only to be faced alone. In a strange way her heart understood this, though she feared for him almost more in the forest than on the battlefield.
And yet his worst tragedy, like her own, had fallen in the safety of his own home with his dearest at his side…Berenice shuddered and pulled at the clawed clasps of her coat. For now, at least, Realgar was posted in civilized Iridis, rather than among Sards whose sophistication overlaid exquisite treachery. In a sense he was a rebel among his own kind, though not as much as she was among hers. Merwen…if only you could understand.
A door slid wide. Cool air brushed her, and blue sky smiled in the open courtyard: a shooting range. Berenice could not see the targets, but Realgar stood in sharp profile, his left hand at the base of the firewhip in preference to his damaged right, the shaft leveled with a blue streak toward a hidden target.
Unconsciously Berenice clenched her fingers together, responding to the tension focused in his stance. There had been a time, just after her husband left her, when she might have become an officer. It was a good career for a lone noblewoman without hope of a family.
Realgar must have seen her, despite his concentration, for the streak vanished. He tossed his weapon to the servo and came quickly to meet her. “We all missed you,” Realgar said as he embraced her.
Cassiter was watching them gravely. She looked uncannily grown up in her red uniform that was a miniature of her father’s. As soon as Berenice looked at her, the girl’s face lit up and she skipped over to reach her arms up to Berenice’s neck. “Mama Berenice, you’ll be our mama, now, won’t you? Did you bring me my whorlshell?”
“Shora, I forgot.” With everything else on her mind—still, Berenice could have kicked herself for the lapse. “Next time, I promise.”
“Then you’re going away again.” Cassiter looked down and pouted.
Berenice removed the girl’s round cup of a helmet and pressed her hair, the fine straw-colored locks of her lost mother. “Next time, perhaps you’ll come to visit me.”
Berenice glanced at Realgar for his reaction, but he only said, “I hope you plan to stay long enough to leave your coat, at least.”
With a trill of laughter she surrendered her coat at last to the waiting servo, who almost seemed relieved to carry it off.
“A worthy foe that was,” Realgar observed, meaning the bear. “Nearly clawed my eyes out.”
Berenice made a face of mock horror. “Ral, I’d much rather have your eyes than an old bearskin!”
“So you’ve got both. Cassi’s getting to be a good shot, now, aren’t you, girl? Show Mama.” So it was plain “Mama” now. He had always been careful to say “Mama Berenice.”
Cassiter obligingly returned to the range and took her firewhip from the servo. She aimed it seriously, her cheeks and lips as straight as her father’s. Berenice moved behind her just in time to see the target appear on the screen: six black dots in a hexagon standing on end, innocuous enough. But the dots had barely leaped into view before three lines of flame connected them, intersecting precisely in the center. There was not a sound from the weapon, only a whoosh as the flames sprouted into a starsign.
Berenice stared, vaguely uneasy.
“Excellent,” said Realgar. “You’re not superstitious, are you?”
“Of course not. Very good, Cassi.” Jets of carbon dioxide sprayed the flames down.
“Would you like a try at it?” Realgar asked.
“Thanks, but I’m out of practice. Cassi would show me up terribly.”
They retired to the parlor for refreshment, and Elmvar was brought in by the nanny, a servo of broad maternal build wrapped in a cheerfully embroidered peasant skirt. Realgar and Berenice sipped cocktails, while Cassiter and Elmvar plowed through the tea cakes, munching the ones they liked and crumbling those they did not. Realgar said, “I was comforted to observe that Sharer children are little better behaved, despite the abundance of mothers.”
Berenice laughed as delicately as any other cultured Iridian lady. She refrained from pointing out that Realgar in fact ruled his own children as strictly as he chose. He wanted to make her feel needed as a mother, but she felt that far more from the way Cassi hugged her.
“It’s good to see you happy,” Realgar said. “You never seem to laugh, when you’re purple.”
“Do I not?” She would think about that later. “Sharers are full of laughter. How is your new post working out?”
He turned first to the children. “All right, kids, off to be
d.”
“Aw, Papa,” they chorused. They hugged Berenice again before their peasant-skirted nanny bundled them away.
Realgar leaned back and stretched his legs. “You have no idea what it took to get away for a night.” He told her some of his concerns, mostly things Berenice either knew or guessed. The diversity of the High Protectoral Guard was one headache. Talion had decreed the Guard’s cosmopolitan makeup, to enhance the conviction of Valans everywhere that the High Protector and his Guard were in fact theirs. And besides, Berenice thought, Talion little trusted his own ambitious underlings. Realgar would not say as much, although he must have been aware of why he was appointed over several Iridians senior to him.
“It’s a curious mix,” Realgar said. “Dolomite troops are the sturdiest in a crunch but fiercely proud, tending to fly off the handle at a fancied insult. Also, they’re put off by modern equipment and female commanding officers.” Iridian and Sardish troops contained about a third women. “Your Iridians, now, are precisely trained, beautiful for drills and parade exercises. But get them on a battlefield—” Realgar shook his head. “A corps of servos. My apologies,” he added politely, “but it’s no wonder you get provincials to fight your real battles.”
Berenice raised her glass. “And which troops are the best, all round?”
“Well.” He looked up and past her. “Sards have special skills, of course. Especially in intelligence.” Berenice watched his face turn blank. He almost never displayed his thoughts directly, but often he showed a blankness that might tell as well. Sards were masters at information extraction, the twisting and probing of minds, a guild so covert that even its stonesign was unknown to the uninitiated. Patriarchal law held that the mind was inviolate, but no state could function without some flexibility.
“Berenice, before it slips my mind, we’re to dine with your parents tomorrow night.” At her frown he added, “You did promise.”
“I’m to see Talion that day. I have to make sure that—”
Realgar took her hands and murmured, “You hold too much on your shoulders. Leave Shora to the Patriarch. Surely you must trust His wisdom.”
She let herself melt in his arms, but the sense of unease would not subside.
The next day, Lady Berenice walked the skystreet of Center Way toward Palace Iridium, ignoring solicitous hangcars as usual. Without newscubes to tell her, she might not have known that Iridis swarmed with Pyrrholite refugees this winter and that food riots overran the older sections. The bazaars far below were full, as always, and from this height who could tell how many of the crowd were foreign, or how ragged were their clothes, or how sunken their eyes.
Palace Iridium rose ahead, its monumental facade crowned by the image of Malachite. Within the palace, Berenice had to wait ten minutes outside the office of the High Protector.
Talion himself looked startlingly solid after Berenice’s sessions with his light-image, as if someone had just filled in a mold of his form with clay. He clasped his fingers upon his desk. “Lady Berenice. What have you to report?”
“Little, in fact. Sharers are content with the current situation. I have certain questions—”
“You intend to interview myself?” Talion’s voice deepened with irony, “Our side is content, as well.” His words were rapid, even brusk. “In fact, you may consider this an exit interview. From now on, we can manage without your services, which you so graciously provided for—was it six years?”
Berenice was surprised and irritated. “I still serve Shora. I must know what Malachite intends for that world.” She had to find out how far Merwen’s fears had been justified.
“Oh, not to worry. It turns out that the native life science is less developed than we had feared.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Envoy found that their ‘lifeshaping’ would require a generation at least to create any threat to us.”
“Well, I told you they were no threat.” Although not for that reason.
“Exactly,” said Talion. “You are prescient, as always. Now events can take their normal course.” A melodic tone of dismissal sounded. “If you will excuse me, my lady, I run a tight schedule.”
Automatically she rose and turned toward the door. Then she stopped and turned back. “What normal course?”
“The present course. My lady, I have a meeting now.”
Berenice stepped to his desk and leaned across it. “Will things go back to what they were?”
“Of course not.” Talion stood behind the desk; two servos moved discreetly from opposite sides of the room. “A new era begins in our—”
“New how, Talion?”
The mask of his face slipped askew. The High Protector was shaken by such astounding breach of protocol. “If you really care so much for your native friends, why didn’t you get them to take an Envoy?”
“But that takes time, to adjust.”
“Malachite had six months. That had to suffice. It will be nine years before he returns, don’t you see? He can’t sit and wait for little men to make up their minds.” Talion pulled back, regretting his outburst. “I warned you not to meddle in affairs of state. Leave, before you leave me no choice.”
The servos were closing in.
“Nine years or ninety, you will answer to the Patriarch!” Berenice fled the office, the halls, and the intricate maze of gem-studded corridors. Shaking uncontrollably, she found herself outdoors, leaning against the face of Palace Iridium, her body framed by a single marble tessera of the epic mosaic. Across the courtyard stood the skystreet, from which viewpoint these tesserae spread as small and numberless as grains of sand.
5
THE WINDOW OF the Hyalite reception hall bulged out over the city. Light points spread and crowded below like a frozen sea of waterfire. Other objects were motile; they swam and pulsed through the city’s angular veins. Berenice leaned into the window as if she could seep through its restraint and plunge into the ocean of night. A dark place to hide, to plan her next move…She had not felt such apprehension since the day she had hidden in the shockwraith’s lair.
Malachite could not deliberately have left Shora to the wolves. Yet it was equally unthinkable for Talion to disregard the Envoy’s wishes so confidently, the moment his back was turned.
Behind her a dress train swished. “Berenice,” called Cristobel, her tones low yet rising fashionably at the last syllable.
Berenice half turned her head, her eyes cast down. The evening dress she wore was an unaccustomed nuisance. Its long embroidered train anchored her, made her a fixture jutting from the floor, dependent upon the tortoise-shaped trainsweepers that scurried about to keep the trains untangled and unstepped on.
“Berenice,” said her mother again. “Have you made the acquaintance of our dear unfortunate guests from Pyrrhopolis?” Cristobel’s hand drooped in invitation. Her arched nails matched the cream of the stonesign at her neck. Her figure mirrored that of her daughter, but her face was all ovals, from the dome of her forehead to her rounded chin. To achieve a serious air she shrewdly kept her hair natural. Whatever gray hairs appeared, Berenice thought vengefully, she knew who had put them there.
Without a word, Berenice clasped the offered arm. She had to be civil and calm, at least on the outside. Cristobel leaned to her ear and whispered, “Come now, dear, Talion won’t hold that spat against you.” She paused, then added, “Our guests, you know, arrived in such unfortunate haste.”
The Pyrrholite couple showed little sign of haste. They wore their provincial style, multiple layers of seasilk, fur trim, beaded embroidery on puffed sleeves, their robes cut short, mid-calf. That was just as well, since a room full of trains could confuse the trainsweepers and short their circuits.
“We still can’t find a place,” explained the Pyrrholite woman. “Why it was that everyone had to rush to Iridis, with all those lovely coastal spots around, I have no idea. For months we’ve looked, and the only establishment remotely suitable doesn’t even have a skin-texturing ro
om.”
“Your parents took us in,” the husband told Berenice. “How fortunate that one so generous runs the refugee program.”
Cristobel in fact ran most of city politics, her fingers reaching every street level and district. Her lashes lowered. “One must set an example. All Iridians will do their part.”
“Oh, they have, surely,” said the woman. “Of everyone I know, not one has not been taken in somewhere.”
“Oh,” said Berenice, “then are food riots at an end?”
The Pyrrholites blinked at each other.
Cristobel squeezed her daughter’s arm. “Of course the common lot have a difficult time. We process hundreds daily. But what of the thousands who failed to escape?”
“Three days the Envoy left us.” The voice of the Pyrrholite man was low, intense. “Those who got out afterward might have wished they had not. They were little more than ghosts, their skin peeling from the bone, their bodies rotted away…” He caught himself and offered a charming smile.
“You’ll pull through,” Cristobel told the Pyrrholites. “You know, you could regenerate your capital by investing in our lunar development plan…”
Berenice caught sight of Realgar and her father walking toward her, absorbed in conversation. Realgar’s head inclined toward the shorter man, whose indigo talar and train contrasted with his own brilliant dress uniform. Hyalite’s features were as precise as his daughter’s, though more intricate, with many crisscrossing lines.
Realgar slid his arm behind her, but she kept her expression cold. He knew what Talion was up to—and he had not told her.
Hyalite winked and raised his glass. “When will you two tie the knot at last? You know, my dear, all of us adventurers do settle down, sooner or later.”
“Yes. How’s the moon trade?” Too abrupt; she had to keep her voice casual.
Hyalite nodded, drumming his fingers on his empty glass. “Winding up smoothly.” From above drooped a servo arm to replace the glass with a full one.
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