The Novels of the Jaran

by Kate Elliott

  “I hope you do not believe that I did not know of this dead one’s offering to you? I am not so blind as that, Lady Terese. But only my weapon is programmed to kill one of my species.”

  While he was talking, she slid her thumb over the hilt: light streaked out. Nothing happened but for a brief echo glittering off the screen.

  “You see, Lady Terese, that I have always told you the truth.” He blinked, his inner eyelids flicking down and up. The pistol lowered slightly, like a reprieve. “Violence is such an inelegant transaction. Perhaps we could bribe you.” Was it her imagination or had his voice taken on a coaxing tone? “Leave this palace, Lady Terese. Forget what you have seen. Forget this journey. And we will take Bakhtiian off planet with us. We will give him the treatments that will make him live one hundred of your years, and you can have him.” He lowered the pistol even further, gaze hard on her as if he was trying to measure some attribute in her character. “Does that tempt you?”

  Tempt her? To have Ilya for a hundred years. To show him the stars.

  The stars, where the jaran, a name that could—that would—resonate across a continent, meant nothing. Lord, it would kill him.

  The pistol rested at Ishii’s side, but his finger still touched the firing lever.

  “I fear, Cha Ishii, that you will make me laugh. Of course, he might make a sensation for a time, which would be diverting enough, I suppose, but when it wore off, I would have to dispose of him. That would be tiresome.” She took a step toward him and casually rested her hand on her saber. His hand did not move. “But I think you will find that there are other commodities that might persuade me.”

  “Other commodities?” A flash of many lights on his face as the screen changed, then a sick, brilliant white. “I do regret this hasty, slovenly solution, Lady Terese, for you would do so very well at court. But I am not a fool. The sister of a mushai, a traitor, cannot be bribed.” He raised the pistol to point straight at her heart. “Please remove your belt and the weapons.”

  Her hands shook. She slipped the tongue of her belt free of the buckle and took another step toward him. The harsh light had drained all color from his face. He looked as if his skin were painted on. “The duke knows I am on this planet. I left him a message. A letter.” Her voice broke. It was her last play. “You will be ruined.”

  “Unfortunately, the message to your brother was destroyed. The duke never received any letter from you. I must assume that he believes you still on Earth. There is no reason to trace you here.” His finger—

  She lashed out with her hand, the instantaneous reaction of cold fear. The buckle of the belt smashed into his hand. He cried out. The shot seared into a bulk of metal, a high, harmless crack. She whipped the belt back. The hard metal caught his fingers. His knife fell to the floor. Tess kicked it away. It skittered across the smooth surface and slid under Garii’s slumped body.

  The impetus of her kick brought her forward, and she plunged into Cha Ishii. Without even thinking, she knifed him in the abdomen. He screamed and fell.

  Caught in his falling, she lost her balance and came down with her knees in his stomach. He made a sound, a cry. She scrambled forward, pulling out the knife, tripping on the belt, stumbling, getting up. Then she was in the passage, slipping on the smooth floor, hitting her knee hard as she went down, catching herself one-handed, pushing up. She got her balance and drew her saber, holding the belt in her other hand. Glanced back. Ishii was gasping as he struggled to get up. She ran.

  Her hand, thrust in front of her, came up against sheer wall. It fell away. She tumbled out into the empty, white room. As the door slid back into place behind her, she stuck the knife into the crack. The door shut with a sharp grinding noise, not quite closed. She shoved at it. It did not move.

  “Jammed. Please, God, jammed.” She ran to the other door, paused there, trying to stop breathing so loudly. A tear snaked down her cheek to dissolve, warm and salty, on her lips. The door was shut. She gave it a gentle push, and it slid open a handbreadth. She saw nothing, heard no sound at all from the chamber beyond. She slipped into the room with her saber preceding her. The two megaliths framed the doorway like sentinels at a tomb. A scraping noise sounded behind her. She ran.

  She got no farther than six steps. A figure emerged from a megalith. Like the strike of a snake, a hand gripped her right wrist, twisting it so her saber fell, a brilliant clatter on the floor, and pulled her in. An arm closed around her back. Her hands were trapped, one in back, one in front of her, her legs constrained by space. Her hair rested against a head. Head. Neck. Throat. She ducked her head, got it under the chin, and pushed up; lunged with her teeth for the throat.

  It happened so fast that she only knew that both her arms were jerked painfully up behind her back. A hand locked on her chin, holding her head bowed back, fingers pressed tight on her jaw. His face held a breath away from hers.

  “Try that again,” he said, his eyes two points of blackness, “and I’ll have to—” Abruptly, he jerked her chin to one side, as if he could not stand to look at her. His beard tickled her cheek.

  “Oh, God,” said Tess. She would have fallen if he had not been holding her.

  “By the gods.” Bakhtiian looked past her to her saber, a gleam on the ebony floor. “I think it is time for you to tell me the truth.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “To protect it within your silent bosom.”

  —EMPEDOCLES OF AGRAGAS

  HE DID NOT LET go of her until they were inside the room that the priests had given him to sleep in. She was panting, dizzy from the pace he had set, the sudden halts, the fear of every blind corner. Her wrist ached where he held her. When he released her, she staggered backward. The bed frame caught her knees and she half-fell to the hard mattress. All of her breath sighed out of her. She sank back against the wall and rested her face in her open hands. Light flickered. She lifted her head. He set a candle on the little table midway along the wall.

  His stare was so hard that she looked down. “What, did he try to kill you?” he said finally, as if he had thought of doing it once or twice. “If you will be caught spying, then you must expect to suffer the consequences.”

  She stared stupidly at him. Half a meter to the right and the shot would have burned through her.

  “I could not sleep,” said Ilya at last. “I saw you meet the pilgrim called Garii and go with him. He took you into the white room, but when I looked inside, you had vanished. Then Ishii came and went inside, yet the room remained empty—to my sight, at least. And you came out, running as if demons were after you. There is blood on your hand, by the way. Where did you go?”

  There was blood on her hand. She wiped her face frantically but only the barest smear came off. There was not much, after all: a pale stripe across her knuckles and a few drops darkening her sleeve.

  “You have done violence in the shrine,” he said.

  Her head snapped up. “No! He tried to kill me. It was self-defense, damn you. I didn’t kill him. God, he killed Garii. He would have killed me!”

  “Where did all this take place?”

  “There’s a secret room, a secret door. Don’t you have anything I can clean this off with? It stings.”

  He took a step toward her. She jerked up, but he was only turning to open the door. He went out. She was suddenly seized by a paralyzing terror: what if he had gone to find Ishii? Or Mother Avdotya? A hand rattled at the door—but it was Ilya. He tossed her a damp cloth and resumed his stance against the door, regarding her with his unrelenting gaze. She scrubbed at her hand and her cheek and then sat, staring at the rag until finally she dropped it on the floor next to his bed.

  “You have no farther to retreat,” said Bakhtiian, “and I want an explanation.” The candlelight threw his shadow high up on the wall, arching over onto the ceiling, so that it seemed to lower down on her like the approach of a storm. “You had better be honest with me, because I am—completely—out of patience with you.”

  “I
can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t tell me! The penalty for violence—”

  “You aren’t listening to me!” She pushed up to her feet. “He tried to—” Inside her shirt, the cylinder slipped down. She grabbed at her side.

  “Tess!” he cried, starting forward. “He hurt you—”

  “No.” She stepped back, half up onto the bed.

  Ilya stopped short. “Let me see.”

  “No.”

  He walked forward. She backed up along the bed, standing on the mattress, until he had cornered her.

  His shadow seemed to take up an entire wall. Under her hand, through her shirt, the cylinder felt hard and cold. He looked at her hand, cupped at her waist. Slowly he placed one foot up on the bed and, with a slight grimace, pushed up with the other, so that he, too, was standing on the bed. He placed a hand on either side of her, trapping her.

  “What do you have?”

  The implacability of his voice terrified her. “I can’t show you.”

  “You will.”

  Finally, she lowered her head in acquiescence. He stepped down. Too quickly, this time; he winced and with a marked limp moved back to the middle of the room.

  “Oh, God,” she said under her breath. This was it. All her efforts for nothing: now he would know, and she could not begin to imagine what the knowledge would do to him.

  She turned into the corner and retrieved the cylinder. With it in her hand, she stepped down from the bed and handed it to him.

  He took it to the candle. “I see no writing. Is this some holy relic?”

  She felt impelled to smile, thinking of what Ishii had said about archaeology. “Yes, the relic of a prince who is long since dead.”

  He turned it in the light as if its black sheen fascinated him. “Whom ought this to belong to?”

  “That depends on which one of us you talk to. Myself or Ishii.”

  “Why do you want it?”

  “My brother wants it. It represents—I can’t explain in a few words. Power and knowledge.”

  “Why should your brother have it? It is the pilgrims, after all, who have come on this journey for holy purposes.”

  “For their purposes.”

  “Which are?”

  “Bad ones.”

  “While your brother’s are good? That is very easy, my wife, but rarely true.” She winced at his cutting tone. “Well?”

  “How long do you want the explanation to be?” She rubbed at her eyes with her palms, then lowered them, taking in resolve with a deep breath. “Ilya. The khepellis will use that relic to enslave my people. Already they control most of the trade that enriches Jeds. And many other cities. But if my brother gets that relic, then he can work to free all those the khepelli have subjugated. Not just for his own sake. You have to believe me. He isn’t—his work is for other people not for himself.”

  Her gaze on him worked like a fire. He took a step toward her, away from the table. Framed by light and shadow, he seemed to Tess a man in some half-remembered legend, a force in and of himself, caught between the new world and the old. “How could you read the inscription on the arch?”

  “I have learned—” She broke off.

  “You have learned the tongue the khepelli speak. You said it was their writing. Last night, after—” He jerked his gaze away from her suddenly, staring down at the lines of wax that laced a tangled pattern around the base of the candle.

  “Last night,” he began again, “I went to the sacred fountain to—to reflect. But two of the pilgrims were in the room. They did not see me, but I saw them drink from the basin. Deeply. It did not harm them, Tess. They aren’t like us. I have always known that—only a blind man would not see it—but this…The water did not poison them. They aren’t—” He hesitated, as if once said, the words would alter his world forever.

  Which they would. She could not look at him, stared instead at the candle burning down. Soon its flame would fail, having consumed everything that it could feed on. They aren’t from this planet.

  “They aren’t human,” he said. “There are old stories about the ancient ones who lived here long ago, who were driven away by war or drought or sickness, or by us—those who are women and men, jaran and khaja both—never to be seen again. I think those stories are true. I think they fled away across the seas and founded a kingdom in lands far from here. And now they’ve come back to find what they left behind. Am I right? Did their ancestors build this place?”

  In the silence she heard the clack of twigs as the wind stirred in the garden outside. “Yes.”

  “And as they traded and grew strong, your brother must have sent you to watch them.”

  “Not precisely, but…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

  “And you followed them here, to discover—you didn’t know either, did you? That they had once lived and ruled here.”

  “No,” she said, a hoarse whisper. “No. We did not know.”

  “They believe they have some right to this land?”

  “I don’t know.” But the opening leapt full into her mind. “But if my brother gets this relic, then he will ensure that they never exploit these lands. Jaran lands. They will be forced into treaties. They will trade, or at least their trade will be circumscribed, that is—”

  “You are either lying to me,” he said, “or else you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. What will your brother do with this relic? How can his having it help him in his good purposes?”

  “I don’t know how he will use it, not to tell you details. Except that it will help him disrupt their trade. Help him keep them from ever claiming these lands, if that is their intent. Because it is proof entire that they did indeed once reside here.”

  He lifted the cylinder, extending his arm so that the black shape marked the distance between them. As it did. How could she not have seen it before? He was bound by his world, bound still to Newton’s universe, which, like the idea of the Chapalii being not human, was wildly revolutionary to him. Farther than that—farther than that did not even exist for him. To him, Rhui was the universe.

  “If I agree to help you,” he said, “what guarantee do you offer me that your actions, and mine in aiding you, will not harm my people? Will not prevent them from fulfilling their destiny?”

  She crossed to him, halting a bare arm’s length away from him. He was not so much taller than she as she had at times thought. “Ilya,” she began, and she faltered. Meeting his gaze, she knew without a doubt that if she kissed him now, used passion, used her love for him as her guarantee, he would help her. But it would be no better than a weapon used to get what she wanted. As he had used her ignorance to make her his wife.

  “Ilya. We have clasped friends, and I have given my honor into your hands. That is my guarantee. And by the honor you gave into mine, my right to ask your aid and protection.”

  The room was still, like the hush before dawn, only two motionless figures in the fading glow of the candle.

  “Damn you.” He jerked his gaze away from her, staring into the shadowed corner. “By my honor,” he murmured, as if to the gods themselves. As if he wished with all his heart that she had used any other argument but that.

  She simply breathed, watching him, and the wind sighed and called outside. She could not read the expression on his face.

  “Then you will help me?” she asked at last in a low voice.

  He met her gaze. “I will not let them kill you,” he said with such simplicity that she knew that it was true. “I will get you to the coast and safe on a ship for Jeds. Will you let me keep this until then?” He turned the cylinder so that it winked in the candlelight. “Only to keep it safe. By your honor and mine.”

  “Yes. By that guarantee, I trust you.”

  “By my honor,” he said, so quietly that she scarcely heard it, “but not as my wife.” The he shook his head, as if he had not meant to say it, or her to hear it. “You look exhausted. I think it would be best if you didn’t go back to your r
oom tonight.” He hesitated, then gestured to his bed. “No one will remark on your sleeping in the same room as your husband.”

  She flushed, and her gaze strayed to the bed. She saw how neatly he had folded his blankets at the foot, how carefully he had hung his saddlebags over the endpost. Only a scrap of material sticking out from the opening suggested untidiness: a shirtsleeve, with a needle pierced through it, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of embroidery.

  She simply nodded, afraid to venture words.

  He picked up the candle. Darkness moved around him as he carried it to the door.

  “But you must sleep—” she protested, seeing that he meant to leave.

  “Someone must guard you.”

  “Ilya…” She was not sure what she wanted to say to him. She was not sure what she wanted at all, except that, right now, she wanted him.

  He blew out the candle abruptly, flooding her in darkness. The door opened and closed, and then the snick of the latch sounded as it fell into place outside.

  She lay down on the bed and pulled the blankets up over her. The cloth felt coarse against her skin, scented of grass and the summer earth. He had lain under these blankets. She wrapped a corner of one under her, so that her cheek lay against it, and with that comfort, she slept.

  Storm clouds raced in over the mud flats of Odys Massif. Charles Soerensen stood in the wind and the hard slap of rain, out on his balcony. Beyond, at the far towers of Odys Port, a ship had landed. Suzanne was on that ship, back from Paladia Major without Tess, without any indication that Tess had been on the Oshaki after it had left the Delta Pavonis system.

  But Suzanne had not come back alone.

  Charles turned and walked back inside. Jamsetji sat at Charles’s desk, manipulating graphs in the air above the flat screen. On the flat surface, the net burrowers dredged deep into the datanet, seeking any scrap of information on Chapalii protocol in the matter of transfers of fealty. Almost every tunnel led back, like a blind maze, to the hand of the Yaochalii, the emperor. By the emperor’s hand, thus will it be granted.