The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  Even less than permitting his crew to take the blame for his action did Cameron want the Kelly put into the position of informer.

  So he forced the words out. “Neyvla-Khan appealed to the Panarch’s mercy. I shot him.”

  “And the record?” Willsones spoke for the first time.

  Cameron tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “I erased that, too.” His voice sounded false to his own ears, but he would go to his death maintaining that.

  Nyberg turned his head aside. Ng pressed her fingertips to her eyes.

  Faseult said, “Captain MacKenzie. There is not a one of us here who condemns you for that. I think many of us would have done the same, had we been in your place.”

  “But not all,” Nyberg said softly. “Not all. There is still the matter of our oaths.”

  Willsones shook her head. “We’ve gone around this all week. Nearly came to blows. But the truth is this: if we wink at this incident, then it sets a precedent. The next one might not be so clear-cut. And you know there’s going to be a next. And another. And another.”

  Captain Ng dropped her hands and said seriously, “You are a superb officer, and I would be honored to have you serving with me. But we cannot let ourselves be motivated by vengeance, justified as it is. Or we may as well contact Eusabian, and ask him to send tutors in the Dol’jharian language.”

  Cameron reached with shaking hand toward his shoulder to pull free his tabs.

  Ng half-rose. “Stop! Captain MacKenzie. We did not begin this meeting by mentioning your superlative handling of the Barcan battle without purpose.”

  Faseult said, “Nor have we forgotten that your Marines were the first volunteers out at the Reef, when I needed them.”

  Nyberg said, “Since you’ve admitted to the truth that we suspected, there needs nothing more to be said. The Panarch is going to be handing out promotions and decorations in a few days, and you are going to be there, because everyone wants to see you honored. But it’s going to be the Nova.”

  The Nova. Ironically, the single decoration made of diamond; the nickname ostensibly belonged to the brilliance of the gem, but everyone knew that a nova flashed, then guttered out. This decoration was only given to someone whose rank would be frozen for life.

  Cameron MacKenzie still had his place in the navy, but whatever happened, he would never move up the ranks.

  He drew in a shuddering breath, feeling as if he was shedding an enormous weight. Eventually it would sink in that he was novaed, but he could still serve. It was fair. It was even merciful.

  Somehow he performed a crisp salute. Somehow he got out of there.

  It was fair, it was merciful, and it was going to hurt for the rest of his life.

  o0o

  Ivard found Tate Kaga busy at a data console set in a large, spherical room.

  The ancient greeted him with genial welcome, then returned to his task. The room was quiet, harmonious to all the senses. Ivard was content to float amidst the drift of small bubbles hanging motionless at random intervals. The polygonal viewscreens scattered about the walls showed a series of desert vistas: barren dunes and twisted rock formations under deep-toned skies and hastening clouds.

  Ivard unfolded his synesthetic sense, and surrendered to pleasure and awe. There truly was no dissonance in this room. Everything fit! He looked down at the old nuller, so shriveled and spare. Tate Kaga was a Prophetae, he knew, but he’d never understood what they did. Brandon had tried to explain it to him, on the Telvarna: “They dive into the collective unconscious, the nous, looking for symbols that people can use to live together.”

  Ivard hadn’t said so, but he figured the nicks just made them up. Now, looking around, he knew that wasn’t true.

  Ivard watched the nuller’s strong, corded hands moving without hesitation over the datapads. The fingers reminded Ivard of a dance, one that had been refined over hundreds of years. From his vantage point he could see the screen. To his surprise, it was meaningless, worse even than the tenno glyphs the Panarch had pulled up out of Telvarna’s fire-control console, where they’d been coded by Markham.

  At the center of the screen was a complex mandala, like a circle of wavy lines with a geometric cross overlaid on it. In the four quadrants thus defined—no. Ivard’s awareness shifted to three dimensions. Along the six axes of the mandala lay ranks of symbols, strange and archaic. Complex patterns rippled through them in rapid evolution; Ivard’s synesthetic sensitivity perceived patterns, but there was no guessing what the symbols meant. Some of them were terribly ugly.

  Ivard looked away. Maybe they were some private language the old nuller had developed. He’d had long enough. What was it like to be hundreds of years old?

  Ivard dove up to the long wide platform overhead. He pulled himself onto the prickly carpet of living moss spangled with small yellow flowers, inhaling deeply of the fresh scent as he thought about Tate Kaga’s immense age—and what it meant.

  In his own way, he was more than human. Perhaps that explained how his home, alone of the humans’, was the way it was.

  “Ho, Little Egg!” said the nuller. “The Douloi are used to seeing me overhead, but in the Fourth World I’m underfoot.” He cackled. “Seen from beneath, the Douloi have no clothes on.” With one strike the console went dark. “Not the best of views.”

  Then, slapping one of the little spheres, Tate Kaga propelled himself up to the platform and pulled himself down against the moss facing Ivard, his legs folded under him. “You are looking at my workroom for the first time again?”

  “You can see!” Ivard exclaimed.

  The nuller blinked at him. “Eyes I have, but that’s not what you mean.” He sniffed delicately. “You have been with the Kelly.”

  The words tumbled out of Ivard as he tried to explain what had happened to him. When he ran down, Tate Kaga spoke slowly.

  “You have gone far beyond me.” He waved one stick-thin arm around at their surroundings. “This is nearly seven hundred years of life and dreaming. What I receive in the Dreamtime, you walk with in daylight.” A wide grin lightened the nuller’s face; his eyes gleamed amidst a mass of wrinkles. “So then!” he exclaimed. “Tell me, what is the third meaning of my name, Little Egg, whom the Kelly are hatching into something unexpected?”

  Ivard gaped at him. He could do something better that Tate Kaga had spent over six centuries practicing? The thought made him dizzy. “Makes the Wind,” he said automatically. He’d guessed one of the meanings at their first meeting, in the garden of the Kelly enclave. “Your gee-bubble makes wind, and you like beans.”

  “And?”

  He opened himself fully to sensation. Present perception of Tate Kaga and the room as a synesthetic whole, and memories of past conversations, participated and overheard, coalesced into a complex unity, and from it emerged something he’d heard the High Phanist say, as she attended his sickbed on the long journey from Desrien to Ares on the Grozniy: “The wind blows where it will, but no one hearing it knows whence it comes or goes.”

  He repeated the thought.

  “Washte! Not the words of the Shanungpa, but it is good!” the nuller said, turning a slow somersault and remaining upside down from Ivard. “You are ready to begin seeking your own name.”

  Ivard basked in his approval for a brief time, but then the memory of Tau Srivashti and his bodyguard intruded. A terrifying frown creased the old man’s face as Ivard reported his experience.

  “Pah!” he spat. “He sought to tangle you in his web. The yellow-eyed one thinks to be a spider, but Ynktomeh knows him not.” Then he laughed, a merry, rusty sound. “Oh, to be a fly above that web, to see his face when you broke free!”

  Ivard sensed a deep detestation in Tate Kaga, much stronger than at the Ascha Gardens, where he had first seen Srivashti and the nuller together.

  “Enough of prabhu Srivashti,” he said. “The winds will scour his works away and him with them. You came here seeking something else?”

  “I’ve been dream
ing. I can’t stop. I’m scared.” He related the dreams.

  “Ho! If you stand against the wind, the dust it bears will polish your bones in time. Don’t fight the Dreamtime, Little Egg.” Tate Kaga pushed himself off the platform and slapped his way out of the room via the little spheres, beckoning the youth to follow. “Come, we’ll sweat it out. You need a good cleansing.”

  Some time later Ivard left, flushed and invigorated physically by the Ynipi ceremony, his mind and spirit moving along calmer paths. He yawned. He wasn’t looking forward to dreaming again, exactly, but he didn’t fear sleep so much now.

  o0o

  Jaim adjusted his stance minutely, no more than a slight shift in weight to ease tired muscles. It was nearly four in the morning. The dancers had been at it since eleven, when the supper ended. Jaim saw his own exhaustion reflected in the wooden faces of the other support personnel in the room, bodyguards and servants alike; they had to be counting the moments until the watch change, at which time they would unobtrusively exchange places with their replacements, unnoticed by the Douloi guests who danced, talked, flirted, drank, and wandered about the long chamber that the Litsu-Frazhien family had turned into a ballroom by having two walls removed in their domicile, decorated by borrowed banners and tapestries.

  At four, most support staff would change over, but Jaim would remain on duty.

  A light, musical riff of laughter brought Jaim’s attention to the center of the room, where Brandon was involved with a dozen others in learning the galliard. The frequent missteps inspired good-natured amusement from the Douloi watchers.

  “So clever of Caroly to have dug that up,” the elderly, well-preserved Archonei Rachid murmured to her companion, the extravagantly gowned Archonei Todghift, both seated a few meters from Jaim.

  “She says it was all the rage four hundred years ago, when everything had to be archaic.” Todghift set down her crystal glass with a precise ting and added, “You should see the collection of dusty handwritten books we inherited from that fad.”

  Jaim noted the politely raised brows and fixed smile in the elegant Rachid, which indicated a score. Doubtless her family was not that old.

  “Four tapestries we have from that time, depicting people in outlandish clothing, with Old Earth script bannered across the lower edges,” a languid young man put in, lounging nearby.

  “Why aren’t you dancing, Philan?”

  The young man, a Chival from Karelais, shrugged one shoulder. “Too tiresome, trying to remember all the steps. If Vannis doesn’t change the fashion by next week, then I suppose I’ll have to learn.” He bowed, low and elegant. “Just watching them is fatiguing. I believe I will seek some refreshment. Do either of you ladies require anything?”

  The two women thanked him and he strolled away. Todghift said to Rachid, “A wager? Next party he’ll show up an expert at the galliard, and probably the minuet as well.”

  Rachid laughed softly. “I already warned my daughter to clear her schedule for morning minuet parties . . .”

  That was the third time Jaim had heard Vannis mentioned. Jaim transferred his gaze once more to the dancers. Controlled and graceful, Brandon and Vannis led the row, executing the primly flirtatious steps with occasional falters and laughs. At a short distance Tau Srivashti sat, surrounded by sycophants, watching.

  The poles of power had shifted twice during the long evening. Both times Brandon had obliquely facilitated the drifting of attention away from himself, while Vannis had smilingly bound the disparate knots into a whole by suggesting something new. Listen, Brandon had said to Jaim earlier. They talk more freely when they aren’t competing for my attention. Jaim wondered if he had asked Vannis to help him in his deflection, or if this effortless-seeming, unspoken partnership of theirs was leftover habit from their Mandala days.

  Fighting a sudden yawn, Jaim activated the mastoid sound enhancers that Artorus Vahn had given him, and he focused on the little conversational knots, sorting for anything he ought to hear.

  “. . . managed to get four client families in, though I don’t know where he expects to house them . . .”

  “. . . won’t let his heir anywhere near the spin axis, but I let both my children go. They know how to keep their distance from the more raffish Polloi . . .”

  “. . . things will be hideously different, I fear. Simply horrendous . . .”

  .. and the Rigali family as well. Everything lost. Everything. I don’t blame Trellora for committing suicide . . .”

  “. . . likes his toys young and inexperienced. Oh, speaking of toys, you know of course that his ward, the Kendrian girl, has vanished?”

  Jaim did not alter his stance overtly, but he focused in on the speakers: four young people, two men, two women. By now he knew all of the significant Douloi orbiting the Arkad sun.

  Yudri nyr-Chezare-Masaud said, waving her fan, “From what I’ve heard about his bedroom habits, who can blame her?”

  “No finesse,” tall, blue-eyed Julienne ban-Athios said, sniffing delicately. “That’s not the way things are done. She’ll do her family untold harm with such sopvid behavior.”

  “But if the reasons were political?” Vidal vlith-Estrasi murmured, leaning over the back of her chair.

  All four glanced quickly Tau Srivashti’s way, then back again. If the Archon noticed, he gave no sign.

  In a lower voice, Vidal went on: “You’ve all heard the novosti going on about the Douloi Rifter.” He drawled the oxymoron with distaste. “Her brother. Who was one of the Rifters with the Panarch.”

  “Srivashti’s putting it about that some Polloi kidnapped her for ransom,” said Julienne.

  “Ah, that would explain why he’s been trying to get himself placed on the Committee for Public Safety,” Yudri said, tapping Vidal’s muscular arm with her fan. “I heard that from Mishi.”

  “Did you hear about the old Polloi found poisoned?”

  “Who? What?”

  “It seems the Kendrian girl worked at some crèche. Someone questioned everyone who was there—and one of them had disappeared. Corpse found in an out-of-the-way transtube nexus.” He leaned back, smoothing his long blond hair with a careless gesture.

  “Srivashti wouldn’t do that,” Julienne scoffed. “Why risk his position? All speculation, and—you’ll honor me with your forgiveness—tedious at this late hour.”

  The violins flourished the last notes of the minuet, amid laughter and polite applause. The dancers separated. Brandon moved to where he’d left his drink, and the Douloi around him adjusted enough to permit Jaim to take up his stance behind him, through no one acknowledged him with so much as a glance.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Vannis did not find it necessary to drink wine in the Panarch’s proximity, but included the dancers in a gesture, and led them to the larger group of watchers on the far side of the room, the complicated braids of her burnished brown hair firelined with ruddy highlights amid the yellows, blacks, blues, and rainbow displays of the others. From his position behind Brandon’s chair Jaim contemplated her perfect profile as she smiled, straight-backed and clear-eyed, at something someone else said.

  “That was delightful,” a poison-faced woman drawled at Brandon’s right.

  Jaim recognized NorSothu nyr-Kaddes, a social vampire.

  NorSothu waited for the murmurs of agreement from her small circle of sycophants, then sighed mendaciously. “Vannis has always been the most skillful dancer among us, don’t you agree?”

  “What a question,” Alian Hristo said. The tall red-haired Aiglar leaned against nyr-Kaddes’s chair and gently fanned her face. “How can one answer with any grace?”

  A ripple of laughter greeted this, and the heir to the Io family put in, his handsome face slightly bored, “Merely adding the rider ‘saving present company’ you are free to agree.”

  Hristo’s eyes narrowed, and though he did not move, Jaim was aware of well-defined muscles under the green velvet sleeves, and a powerful chest that did not hint of sloth. “I beg forgivene
ss for my stupidity, Pereil, but am I to understand that you do not agree?”

  Pereil vlith-Io kissed his fingertips in Vannis’s direction. “On the contrary,” he said. “She is all perfection. She even had the good taste to turn me down.”

  The laughter swept away the hint of threat, and Jaim noted several listeners sit back with a faint air of regret.

  NorSothu said, “It is a positive shame that she is unlikely to host any parties, given how well she leads us all.”

  “What, is she announcing a new fashion, withdrawal to a hermitage?” Pereil mimed surprise.

  Once again the ripple of laughter, and NorSothu shrugged her thin shoulders. “It may come to that.” And with a slack-lidded glance in Brandon’s direction, she leaned forward in a confiding manner, and managed, in spite of lowering her voice in a pretense of intimacy, to be perfectly heard: “I happen to know that she is quite without resources: there isn’t one of us she hasn’t borrowed from. Though she hides it with a commendable air.”

  Polite expressions of regret met this news, whispered by properly somber mouths below eyes that betrayed, at this late hour, disinterest, pity, and in the redheaded Hristo, disdain. Brandon said nothing.

  “The Cartanos have their own retreat, no doubt more comfortable than this,” Pereil said, his tone ambiguous. “Surely they will make good her debts.”

  They signed or spoke polite agreement.

  Still Brandon said nothing, merely sipping at his wine.

  NorSothu turned to her hostess, her thin lips crimped in a polite smile, but the upper lip betrayed complacency. “Is there to be more dancing, my dear?”

  Rista Litsu-Frazhien clasped her hands together, and Jaim felt her effort to force her chagrin to sound merely casual. “Alas, I contracted these musicians only until three, and even bribery won’t keep them here any longer now.” She sighed, her pained smile reflecting her awareness of the faint signs—slightly lifted shoulders, a languidly dismissive finger, and exchanged smiles—that her guests had decided she could not, after all, manage a really memorable event. The perfect host controlled everything, with no visible effort, until the last guest left—even if it were days after the original invitation merely for a dinner.