“Never found out?”
“Well, they don’t wear white coats and stonesigns.”
Realgar slammed the desk. “Stone. What about those stonesick natives you were bribing with gemstones?”
“I was just getting to that. Some informants have let us know where the new hideouts are, and I think that—”
A tone sounded from the monitor: an emergency dispatch had just come in from a base in the southwest sector. A squad of divers was digging out a nest of natives hidden beneath the raft’s underside, when a shockwraith approached. They blasted the thing, but its arms wriggled off in all directions and hit several men with acid. One had just died.
The High Protectoral Guard of Valedon had suffered its first casualty on the Ocean Moon.
Realgar called on the Protector. “As you see, my lord,” he told the gray lightshape, “hostilities have escalated. I must have clearance for a full counterattack.”
Talion took his time to respond. “The Envoy wants their science controlled, not destroyed. Even Torr needs their knowledge.”
“Their knowledge could destroy us.”
“Not yet,” Talion reminded him. “Our genetic makeup is foreign to them. It would take them decades to develop a biological threat to us.”
Realgar thought uneasily of the altered breathmicrobe strain, but he was loath to contradict Malachite’s dogma. Besides, breathmicrobes were not actually harmful. “We can always leave one or two rafts intact, to preserve their science. With the rest of them neutralized, the few that remain won’t dare attack us. And if they do, we can isolate the contagion quickly.”
Talion frowned and drummed his fingers on his desk. “Ral, I just can’t understand how those natives manage to cause so much trouble. So many prisoners, for Torr’s sake. Don’t the women think of their families?”
“Sometimes whole families go to prison. I’m telling you my lord, they don’t think like civilized people. They still don’t know what orders are. That’s why we have to crack down.”
Talion sighed. “Ral, the political fallout from this campaign is getting troublesome. I’d hoped at first it would seize the imagination of Valan citizens to strike out and master an untamed planet, and that this goal in common would help dissolve minor squabbles back home. Instead, the scant news that gets past the censors has only disillusioned the public.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint the public.” Realgar kept his voice flat. “Would they prefer a daily body count?”
“Oh, no, of course not. Believe me, I’m with you there.” Talion smiled apologetically. “You know how people are. What they want and what they think they want are not quite the same. They want heroics, like blowing up those shockwraiths—send some more cubes of that, Ral, it helps your image. If you can suggest native scheming behind the monster attacks, so much the better. Did I send you two more divisions just to put women and kids in prison?”
“Insurgents, my lord; they are insurgents, every one of them. The question is simple: Shall we control the natives or not?”
Talion pondered this for a long while. “Those prisoners,” he mused. “They all ‘white out’ in captivity, do they?”
“Not always. Some stay conscious until interrogation. They all have mental deathblocks.”
“Suppose you send me a handful of them, give my Palace staff a crack at them.”
Realgar smiled slightly. “Very well, my lord.” He would send the hardcore agitators whom he had held when the others were returned. The High Protector would see what they were like, all right. “One is the daughter of Protector Merwen herself.”
“A hostage, excellent. Now, to answer your question, Ral: yes, we have to control the natives. Do what it takes to achieve that, whatever it takes—so long as you succeed. Do I make myself clear?”
The message was clear enough. Realgar had better succeed—or else Talion would pick another Commander to pacify the Ocean Moon.
When the thunderclap hit Raia-el, Merwen was astounded: the sky held no clouds, and there was no sign of rain. Again the blast struck, and the raft shuddered at her feet. She lost her footing and covered her ears against the ringing.
Beyond the silkhouse, a column of flames reared and licked at the sky. Somehow the raft was on fire.
Usha and Mirri came running outside. “It’s burning, all over the lifeshaping place! At this rate the whole raft will break up!”
From everywhere, sisters rushed with buckets splashing. Still the flames and smoke churned from the tunnels, some of which collapsed inward. Too dazed to think, Merwen swung buckets back and forth, stumbling as her eyes streamed and blurred from smoke. The confusion was worse than when seaswallowers crested.
At last the wormrunners managed to get a hose hooked up to the tail of a starworm, and that began to make a dent in the flames. As flames receded, the charred sunken surface of the raft looked even more horrible than the fire itself. Black smoke still twisted up and stretched out to the horizon, curdling the sky. A few helicopters kept circling with their maddening drone, surveying their deathwork.
Afterward, Usha picked through the charred raftwood, trying to figure what had been lost. “The supplies: the stocks of every strain of medicine plant, every enzyme secretor, thousands of different ones. I’ll have to start over from scratch, from the raftwood genes.”
“No, Usha.” Merwen held Usha’s arm and squeezed hard. “The other rafts will help us. We’ll soon be set up again.” But even as she spoke, her eyes scanned the horizon. There were black clouds rising above other rafts.
The lifeshaping places of Per-elion were all in ruins, a disaster that no one could have imagined. And the return of seaswallowers, though late this season, could only be days away.
“Do you know, Usha,” she mused as she watched the horizon, “I could almost regret the day I brought Spinel home with us.”
“Spinel? Merwen, you don’t mean that. You still miss him.”
Merwen half smiled. “Yes. But for his sake, I bless the day that he left.”
12
FOR WEEKS NOW, Spinel had been getting by in Iridis, holding forth as a Spirit Caller amid the crowds on Center Way. He took up with another old Caller, Elaterite of Karias, who rented him half an attic room and bequeathed to him a cowled robe with deep pockets to collect change. Beyond rent and food, Spinel saved every bit he could toward a ferryship ticket for the Ocean Moon.
The coins mounted slowly, and he skimped on food. His breathmicrobes receded until only a tinge of lavender remained in his palms.
Still, business was pretty good, compared to Chrysoport. City folk expected the same thing villagers did, only they talked faster, let him say less, and paid more. City gossip was a bit more lurid—the daily murders, refugee riots, and new trouble brewing out in Azurport—but he soon got used to it. Then came the chilling news that the High Protector declared war on Shora.
Everyone else was thrilled to hear that Valedon would conquer another planet in a crusade for the Patriarch. Half the Spirit Callers on Center Way ran off to enlist.
Spinel was bewildered. “You can’t fight a war up there,” he told old El. “There’s nothing but women and kids.”
“What do you know about it?” said El. “The Commander says they’re nothing but terrorists up there, concocting secret weapons.”
Spinel combed the gutter for a discarded newscube and showed it to El. At a touch, the face of the High Protector filled the cube, going on about the Purple Menace. Next came the Commander, General Realgar resplendent in stones and medallions. The general reported native “assaults” on Valan bases, even at Headquarters. Casualties were light, but many native prisoners had been taken, and “the situation was in hand.”
A familiar face filled the cube. Spinel gasped. “It’s Merwen!” There were soldiers in the background, and the general spoke with Merwen in an oddly stilted way.
“Greetings, Protector. You must accept the authority of Valedon.”
Her lips moved woodenly. “I respect your authori
ty.”
Then there were clips of the ocean, of helicopters buffeted by storms and boats entwined by giant octopods. Yet all the while the one face burned in Spinel’s mind. “Shora. Oh, Shora,” he whispered.
El said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It was Merwen, I told you about her. Did you see the look she gave him?”
“She wished him to hell, I’m sure.”
“Not exactly. More like saying, Mister, you’re driving yourself to hell.” At least Merwen was still there, alive, despite the ill-defined “assaults” and the general driving himself to hell. Was Lystra all right, too? More than anything, Spinel wished he had never left, though he dreaded to think what it must be like up there, ten times worse than with the Dolomites in Chrysoport. He had not yet saved half the fare for the ferryship.
As the next weeks passed, Palace reports were scanty, with little conventional combat, but a lot of shockwraiths blown up, and invidious plagues that beset the troops. There were other rumors, though, spread by men and women home on leave. They said there was no war at all, just a lot of makework and phony patrols and maintaining the bases on a treacherous sea.
“I told you it was crazy,” Spinel told El over a cabbage-soup supper in their attic room. “Why’d the High Protector send an army in the first place?”
“It’s the Purple Menace, haven’t you heard?” El’s voice lowered sepulchrally. “A creeping doom will come upon us all.”
“Purple nothing. You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”
“Of course not. I suppose Talion just wants to keep his troops occupied so the generals don’t plot to oust him, the way his own father came to power. That was the year my grandfather lost all his sheep in a snowstorm, and my father came to Iridis to work in a trainsweeper repair shop…”
One day Spinel heard that native prisoners were on display before the Palace. It might be just a rumor, but Spinel ran down the blocks to the end of Center Way to see for himself.
Beyond the courtyard rose as always the majestic face of Palace Iridium, where Malachite and the Legions stood embalmed in mosaic tiles. At the top was the symbol of the Patriarch, whom Spirit Callers were supposed to harken. Spinel himself knew better now, though the “Spirit” he actually called remained elusive as ever.
There was no parade in the courtyard, but the crowd was almost as dense as on the day the Torran Envoy was honored. By now, Spinel was expert at handling city crowds, and he soon wormed his way through.
There was a cage with bars, as if for lions, with a couple of burly guards to keep the crowd at a distance. Inside the cage were six Sharers, dusty and covered in loose prison gowns. Their wrists and ankles were manacled. They sat and stared, lifelessly, unseeing.
Then everything receded except one, shoulders still straight and tall, grimy and sullen and achingly beautiful. “Lystra! Lystra, say something, share a word with me!” The Sharer words rang strangely, here, after so many months.
The guard, a thick troll of a woman, waved a neuralprobe at him. “What are you jabbering, almsman? Catfish can’t talk. You that desperate for a client?”
Onlookers laughed and hooted and sketched starsigns, followed by obscene gestures. But Spinel ran past the guard and clung to the bars of the cage. “Lystra! Lystra, speak to me, or I’ll go Unspoken.”
Lystra’s eyes did not turn, but her lips moved. “Stonetrader. Go join the death-hasteners with Kyril.”
She had shared speech with him at last, after all. A rush of joy overwhelmed him.
Another Sharer was scandalized. “Quiet, Intemperate One. They’re Unspoken, all of them.”
“It’s Merwen’s Valan pet,” Lystra snapped. “He was one of us.”
“Indeed.” The Sharer looked out at him with interest. “Have you a selfname, sister?”
The guard caught him by the hair and spun him around. “A miracle,” she mused. “A Spirit Caller brought speech to the deaf and dumb.”
Spinel winced as his hair tore at the roots, but he dared not risk the neuralprobe. “They’re my sisters,” he tried to explain.
The guard snorted. “If they’re your sisters, I’m the Patriarch.” Her huge jaw lifted. “Chains,” she called.
Manacles clamped on his arms and legs.
Spinel found his voice. “Hey! Hey, wait a minute—”
“Stop jabbering. You’ll tell your tale to the High Protector,” the guard flung back at him.
The office of the High Protector of Valedon was the finest room Spinel had seen since the passenger lounge of the Cristobel, on his way home with Lady Berenice. But whereas the lounge had been full of cushions and servo arms, this place was sharp and functional. Flat oblong panels pulsed with light behind the massive desk, where sat the Protector himself, a granite-faced man who seemed almost a part of his desk. Spinel’s seat was a polished black curve that had risen cleverly from the floor.
The Sharers, still manacled, sat on the floor in a semicircle. Between them and the door, the guards stood stolidly at attention.
The Protector spoke. “So you lived six months among the natives.” He paused as if about to pronounce judgment. “A pity we haven’t met before.”
“Yes, my lord,” Spinel replied politely.
“Now. I understand you communicate extraordinarily well with these…women.”
“Well, I—I hope so, my lord.”
The Protector said flatly, “Ask them why they cause my troops so much trouble.”
Spinel blinked and swallowed. He glanced warily at Lystra. “Um…the ‘Protector’ wants to know,” he said in Sharer, “why you share trouble with death-hasteners.”
He expected an explosion. Instead, Lystra calmly asked, “Are you a selfnamer yet?”
Spinel recalled what Merwen had said of Uriel. “I’m a ‘Spirit Caller.’ That’s getting close, Merwen says.”
“Then see that your children remove these chains.”
Embarrassed, Spinel looked to the Protector and wondered how much he understood.
“Unchain them,” the Protector ordered. The guards did so. The Sharers promptly slipped off their prison gowns. Nevertheless, the Protector waved away the guards. “Spinel, why do they remove their clothes?”
“Well, I’m not sure.” Spinel felt like a hinged door, pulled in both directions at once. “Lystra, why don’t you keep your plumage on? It’s just polite, on Valedon.”
“Because it’s filthy and shameful. You share the shame yourself, hiding in a blanket on a day so warm. Your sweat smells stale.”
Spinel looked at the Protector again and wondered how he would react if Spinel actually followed Lystra’s example and slipped out of his robe. He felt a hysterical impulse to laugh; if only Ahn and Melas could see him now, before the High Protector of Valedon, they would faint away of amazement.
Then he looked more closely at Lystra. Dark welts crossed her arms and breasts, and her legs were torn and scabbed. A chill seized him until his teeth shook. There was nothing to laugh at, here.
“Spinel. Spinel?” The Protector had been calling him. Spinel forced his gaze back. “Spinel, ask her why Sharers do not obey my troops.”
He was beginning to understand, now. He could guess where Lystra’s welts had come from. His throat thickened until he could barely swallow. “Lystra,” he said hoarsely, “why is it that Sharers do not do things that soldiers ask?”
“Soldiers order,” the Protector corrected in Valan.
“I don’t know the Sharer words for ‘order’ or ‘obey.’”
The Protector said nothing. Apparently he did not know the words either.
Lystra said, “We used to do everything the Valans asked, out of pity for their sickness. Then the death-hasteners sickened worse and shared unspeakable acts. So we Unspoke them.”
“What acts?”
“Silence,” the Protector ordered. “What I must know is—”
“They took our sisters and put coldstone things around their heads, from which alien thought came an
d burst the door of self until—”
“Silence.” The word cracked like a whip.
One of the guards extended a neuralprobe. Spinel could not tell what the guard did with it, but then Lystra’s breath hissed and her muscles pulled into hard knobs. “Until-they-died.” Lystra’s voice squeezed out as if pressed between rollers. “Then-sisters-came-from-all-over-and-witnessed—”
“Stop it.” Spinel lunged toward her. Pain streaked through him, pulling every tendon from the bone. He skidded and fell; the cool floor hit his elbows. The pain dizzied him, and red blotches winked before his eyes.
When his head cleared, the guard was saying, “All it took was a touch on him. What’s wrong with them?”
The other guard still had her neuralprobe set at Lystra’s neck. Lystra went on with her monologue, though her hands were losing color, and Spinel thought, She’ll go white any minute and maybe never speak again, but he was too weak to say another word.
“Enough,” said the Protector. “I got one talking, at least. So much for Sardish mindbending. Ship the lot back, with the almsman.”
So for the third time Spinel crossed the sky between worlds—this time, in the prison hold of an Iridian warship.
13
ONCE CLICKFLIES WERE hopelessly entrenched again, Realgar changed his strategy. Jade’s staff, with the help of a few “stonesick” informants, deciphered the insect communication code. Unspoken or not, Sharers would keep no more secrets from him.
It came as something of an anticlimax to hear, after all, that Talion had gotten the natives to talk.
Jade was outraged. “Trollbones for that. His staff’s no better than mine.”
“A Spirit Caller did it,” said the general. “Got them talking in no time, even the Protector’s daughter.”
“A Spirit Caller! But that’s ludicrous!”
“Yes.” His lip curled slightly. “Talion even sent this Spirit Caller back to us, to help us out.”
Color rose in her cheeks. “So Talion thinks he got an almsman to do what all my staff couldn’t. The nerve of those catfish. That Protector’s daughter—”
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