The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  “Fierin. Will you permit me to disturb you for a moment?”

  She smiled up at Srivashti as she gestured a welcome.

  His strange light eyes searched her face. Interrogation, she thought, though there was nothing but affection in the husky, low voice as he said, “Intriguing scents you evoke from the tianqi. What are they?”

  “I’m pretending I’m on a planet,” she said. “Since I wanted to get details right, I used memories of my home on Torigan.”

  He moved with leisurely grace to sit beside her. His hand rose, the palm cupping her cheek, warm and protective. “Memory. Will you honor me with a similar exercise?”

  “Gladly,” she said, obediently still. He did not like it when one moved away from his touch, even a casual touch.

  His thumb stroked down to her chin, then to her neck, moving in light circles. “The courier that brought you back to me,” he said. “There was a laergist on board. Remember him?”

  Here it is. Fierin had been dreading this moment—and so had thought out every possible question, and her response.

  She let her authentic dismay at the arrival of that moment contract her brows, knowing that Srivashti would misread it. “How could I forget Ranor? He was so polite, everyone liked him—and to be assassinated just as he left the ship! How could someone like that have an enemy?” She sighed as the massaging thumb moved down to her collarbones.

  Testing her pulse.

  She looked up into Srivashti’s wide gaze, and made no attempt to hide her worry. Not that she could. “Did they ever find out why?”

  “Did who ever find out why?”

  Fierin gestured vaguely. “Nyberg. Faseult.”

  “The investigation is still going on,” he murmured. “In aid of their efforts I am conducting my own parallel investigation. Why anyone should assault a laergist is indeed a puzzle, one that might take up some of the time that lies so heavily on our hands while we wait for the return of the Aerenarch.”

  Fierin exerted control over every muscle and nerve in her body, forcing herself to relax into the pleasurable distraction of the Archon’s thumb moving so lightly, but consistently, from nerve nexus to nerve nexus.

  “Cast your mind back, if you will, my dear. Did you observe him often? Speak to him, perhaps?”

  “He was there at meals—of course. At first he never spoke at all. I noted him, but he stood apart from everyone, looking at the viewscreens.” She made a gesture. “Skip-mode for the screens was cycling through an Arthelion sequence. Shipboard gossip said that he had lost his mate there.”

  “What else did shipboard gossip say about him?”

  Fierin counted three breaths as she considered the question, three levels: what she should say, what Srivashti was seeking, and what she could do to further relax as he now used all his fingers, moving ever lower, persistent, raising distracting sensations. She sighed. “Not much. At least, that I remember. He was on the periphery of interest, you might say.” She opened her eyes and looked up at Srivashti. “I did have an encounter with him once.”

  Was that the faintest hesitation in his touch?

  “And?”

  “It was that horrid man Gabunder. Persisted in trying to kiss me, sometimes even grabbing me. Kept threatening suicide if I wouldn’t go with him.” She gestured distaste. “It was the laergist who found us—I’d gone down early for a meal—and intervened. Afterward I thanked him, and he said it was his training, and that was that. Subsequently I ate in my cabin to avoid Gabunder, and saw neither of them.”

  “So he never came to your cabin?”

  Impossible to prevent a sudden quickening of her heart, and she knew the questing fingers had noted it. “Once.”

  “Ah.”

  “He was very drunk—”

  “The laergist, Fierin. He is the subject of our discourse, is he not?”

  “Oh. Yes.” She sighed again. “It’s hard to think when you give me that shakrian. At least, I find it hard not to think of something very different from that poor laergist and that loathsome drunk.”

  He smiled, and after one last caress lifted his hands. “And so?”

  “No.” Now she could hide the racing of her heart in a slow, deliberate stretch. She leaned out so that the water could pound on her hands, then she looked back at Srivashti. “I don’t think Ranor had any interest in one such as myself, with a tainted name. His social focus at meals was on those with precedence—the Aegios Hamamura and Emma vlith-KilDophnik.” She named two people of some social rank who had disappeared mysteriously soon after the laergist died.

  “So he never talked to you? Offered you anything?”

  Fierin straightened her back and neck, her attitude the haughty rejection of intimacy offered by inferiors. “I never invited privy attentions of any of them,” she said.

  A hint of impatience at her misunderstanding of his wording contracted his brows, but he said nothing. Instead he rose to his feet. “Thank you, my dear. I will leave you to your imaginary garden.”

  “Will you tell me what you discover?” She still smiled, leaning closer to the fall. Cool water drummed her skin, wiping it clean of the sensory memory of those demanding fingers.

  He bowed compliance, but his gaze had gone distracted, and she saw no threat in his pose. When he had gone, she turned her own face up to the water, still hiding her reaction in case she was watched. She did not touch the seam under her arm where a chip rested, snug against her skin, as she exulted: He believed me.

  o0o

  “Fierin knows nothing,” Tau Srivashti said a short time later, as he tossed a chip onto the low, black table before him. The motion drew the gaze of the other two Douloi present: Hesthar al-Gessinav and Stulafi Y’Talob, Archon of Torigan. “We have been through every other person on that courier, which forces me to conclude what had seemed impossible: that a laergist could indeed be a political naif and that there was only this single chip.”

  “Ruined by the chatzing neurojac,” Torigan grumbled. “Why didn’t you have your assassin use a knife?”

  Hesthar permitted herself a deep, pleasurable breath of triumph, the first since she heard that the laergist who had been at the Ivory Hall bombing was on his way to Ares.

  Srivashti lifted a shoulder. “I told him it had to be quiet. A knife seemed the obvious choice to me.”

  Because his own bondsman used knives and poison, Hesthar thought, looking across the room at Felton, the silent, lank-haired servant who was seldom very far from Srivashti these tense days. If Felton had been ordered to assassinate the laergist Ranor, there would have been no mistake. Except Srivashti had not wanted to risk having Felton seen.

  “It is entirely possible,” she said, “to be socially adept yet politically naive. We have among us a living example.”

  Torigan shifted his massive body and squinted up at Hesthar, then grunted. “Vannis Scefi-Cartano,” he said. “Correct. Probably better trained in the social nuance then any laergist, but politically . . .”

  Hesthar detested people who stated the obvious. Too often it was, if not a sign of stupidity, certainly one of condescension. But Torigan was useful, and had been for years. At his pause she said, “We must remember that Ranor was assigned to the Petition of Governance from Ansonia, a planet of no importance whatever.”

  “So someone else in the government thought he was naïve.” Torigan gave a crack of smug laughter, fists on his knees.

  “The main thing,” Srivashti said, pulling everyone’s focus back with one of his slow gestures, “is that there no longer appears to be any evidence of what happened on Arthelion.” He ended on a note of inquiry as Torigan gestured his wish to interpolate.

  With smiling grace Srivashti deferred, and Torigan said, “What about the old nuller?”

  Hesthar once again suppressed her impatience. “There is more than one nuller in Service.” She took great pleasure in stating the obvious, hoping Torigan felt her condescension.

  Srivashti added, “I believe if the Prophetae had any i
nformation to offer he would have come forth by now, would he not? Certainly he might have communicated with me, as we are distantly connected.”

  Ah, Hesthar thought, that added dimension. Why had her very dear friend Tau not mentioned this before?

  As Torigan muttered something about nullers, a part of Hesthar’s mind was busy modeling a line of descent into Tau Srivashti’s history.

  Then Srivashti continued, “Given the lack of new information, I believe we must now endeavor to forget a lamentable decision and turn our minds to other matters. Our colleagues await us in the next room. As you might have surmised from the abruptness of my invitation, I have just today discovered that the mission to rescue the Panarch has failed.”

  Hesthar suppressed a fierce pang of joy. Gelasaar Arkad dead! She had hoped half her life to see this day.

  “It might spare us,” Srivashti went on, “a certain amount of wearying effort if we three are in agreement.”

  “On what?” Torigan scowled. “The young Arkad is not going to have any of us on his Privy Council—not after we just tried to take the chatzing government from him.”

  Hesthar pressed her lips together. She would not be the one to remind them that she had been missing from that confrontation.

  She said, “He is a realist, I believe. Except at the end, when Harkatsus lost control, the only words spoken favored unity. We represent important interests. I do not think he is foolish enough to harbor resentment.”

  “If you will permit me to amend your very admirable assessment?” Srivashti said smoothly.

  Hesthar inclined her head, gesturing in a deferential mode. Of all the conspirators, only Srivashti was to be feared; it was debatable whether he was as smart as she was, but he was adept in getting what he wanted. He had only one weakness.

  Her gesture briefly exposed the edge of the Mark on her arm; no one must see it for what it was, and yet she exulted in the risk. Of course no one ever saw it fully, and those very few who had the wit to notice always assumed it was simply body art blurred by age. Proof, she thought with satisfaction, that she was surrounded by stupidity.

  Inadvertently she glanced at Felton, who gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Not yet. She was impatient for the Ritual of Opening, but she must wait.

  Unaware of this covert byplay, Srivashti went on talking. “You are, I trust, correct in general, but in particular I do not think Brandon will have any of us for his Privy Council. Any of those of us who confronted him. You, Hesthar—” Srivashti bowed. “—were prevented by . . . circumstance . . . from being with us. It is possible that Brandon could be led to believe that you suffered a change of heart. This, plus your position as heir to your cousin’s holdings in Infonetics, might place you in the best light. It needs only one of us to be on his Council . . . who will then benefit from all of our experience.”

  And that was a warning. Hesthar bowed back. Now was not the time to discuss her manipulations of the outside data that reached the novosti on Ares. Sufficient that her ochlologists and semioticians were laying the foundations for a reversal crowd that would engulf the entire station and pull the new Panarch down in ruin if he proved resistant to her influence. Whether she included Srivashti in her personal plans remained to be seen.

  “Shall we join our colleagues?” Srivashti suggested.

  Hesthar raised a hand, knowing that it behooved her to tie the three of them together again. “First I suggest we vow, here and now, to leave Ranor and the Enkainion in memory, never again to be spoken of.”

  Srivashti bowed his agreement. “Little profit in further discussion, and great danger. I concur. Stulafi?”

  The Archon of Torigan swiveled around to grin up at Hesthar, challenge obvious in his heavy face. “I never look back at mistakes,” he said.

  You fool, Hesthar thought, meeting Felton’s gaze over Torigan’s head.

  o0o

  Fierin vlith-Kendrian decided it was time, a full hour after Srivashti had departed.

  She had planned for this moment with infinite care, mapping out in her imagination every move, every step.

  Anyone spying on her—she had to assume at least one pair of eyes watching at any time—would merely see her going to her daily volunteer work.

  She bathed and dressed with care, making certain of the datachip that she had worn against her skin all these weeks, and in her hair when he required her to strip. She knew she never would have been able to hide it if he hadn’t a weakness for style even during his chastisements: when he was in that mood, he required her to present herself to his chamber dressed in nothing but diamonds.

  When he’d first taken her aboard his yacht as a grieving teen, he had promised that obedience would earn partisanship, and for the longest time it had seemed that he kept his word.

  But she had learned to be afraid when her will diverged from his. She had hoped she could find a way to break with Tau Srivashti, but she had learned that no one ever broke with him. When he tired of his young lovers, he married them off to advantage.

  And so it had come as no surprise since her arrival at Ares that her belongings had been searched down to the smallest seam. She also must assume that she was spied on by either human or mechanical means on Srivashti’s yacht, alone or in company: he not only knew exactly when she left and arrived, but what she said, even in the privacy of her room. So she had taken care never to touch the chip unless she was in absolute darkness.

  Dressed at last, she called for a shuttle. Felton usually attended Srivashti when he left the ship, but she must nonetheless assume that he would shadow her when she departed from the yacht.

  Memory chilled her, but she fought the impulse to rub her arms. She had only tried once to visit Jesimar in detention. Srivashti had smilingly warned her against it when she first arrived, but he had also promised to use his influence to get Jes freed.

  She’d waited for him to keep his word until the day after the Grozniy had departed on its mission to rescue the Panarch at Gehenna. Vannis Scefi-Cartano had stepped to her side as they walked along the lakeside to a picnic. “Torigan is having your brother tried for murder,” Vannis had whispered, her voice low and eyes otherwhere. “With Srivashti’s concurrence.”

  Vannis, it was rumored, had once been one of Srivashti’s lovers. Her care not to be overheard intensified Fierin’s anxiety as much as the news of Tau’s betrayal.

  She had used the first opportunity to slip away to visit Jes, but just before she reached Detention One, Felton had appeared from somewhere, bowed, and unsmilingly held out his arm to escort her back.

  Being mute, he could not speak. Afterward Srivashti did not refer to the incident, but he’d summoned her to his inner chamber for one of his reminders of who had her best interests at heart. It had lasted a very long time.

  Fear made Fierin’s heart bang painfully as the shuttle arrived. She tabbed her boswell, and making certain she had her breathing under control, she spoke a loving message for Srivashti. Everything must be just as usual, with no variation. She then sent orders concerning the repair of a gown she wished to wear to a social event that evening.

  On the short ride from the yacht to the oneill she composed herself for the imagers, gazing outward. She gained no pleasure from the spectacular sight of the immense cylinder glinting in the roseate light of the nearby red giant, and the cloud of ships surrounding it. Behind the mask of her dreamy pose she reviewed again her plans.

  The shuttle nestled up against the lock, and when the hiss of air subsided and the light turned green, she slipped inside. Beyond the lock a transtube waited, held by the priority on Srivashti’s shuttle, despite the fact she’d docked at a Polloi lock. It was already crammed with people, many frowning at her. There was nowhere to sit, but she did not want to wait for the next, which might be just as crowded.

  In an effort to distract herself, she listened to the voices around her. What she heard was little comfort: short rations, crowded dorms, and the steady increase in brawling and petty crime.<
br />
  The crèche burgeoned with noise and rambunctious children, but Fierin was used to it. She liked the noise of happy children. She nodded to the Navy officer at the front desk who logged her in, then she made her way through the wide, well-lit central area.

  The crèche was laid out in a circle, with living areas built around the circumference. Work and play spaces lay within the circle. Fierin headed for the older children’s work space. In the center of the circle rose a complicated edifice reminiscent of the Ascha Gardens, although its gravitational conformation was far simpler. Children climbed, crawled, swung, and bounced through it, appearing and disappearing, only their voices a constant, sounding like gulls over a beach.

  Fierin stepped down into the work area. Efficient dampers high overhead reduced the noise to a soft, distant murmur. Hidden tianqi encouraged alertness with Downsider Summer’s End, a comfortingly familiar scent to Downsider and Highdweller alike.

  Young teens sat absorbed in the row of consoles and simbooths. Fierin’s supervisor, Chlarmon, an older woman dressed in mourning white, finished her circuit of the consoles and headed Fierin’s way, her face relieved.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said softly. “We have to move again. I’ve got to go supervise.”

  “Move?” Fierin repeated, chill spreading through her as she jolted back into her own problem. Where could she herself move to be safe from Srivashti?

  “. . . and those two cruisers came in with even more civs,” Chlarmon was saying. “We’ve been reassigned to the new domiciles over by the citrus groves.” She sighed, hands on her hips. “We adopted two children out yesterday—but took in twenty-four more. All orphans for all practical purposes, until we’re fully linked back into the DataNet again.”

  She chattered on while Fierin murmured appropriate words. These poor children would wait a long time for that. The effort of gathering intelligence from the DataNet, and communicating with the burgeoning resistance movements throughout the Thousand Suns, would hold top priority until the war was over. Reuniting families was going to have to wait.