by Ann Maxwell
Jal looked from the whip to the slave who could ignore pain. With a sound of disgust he jammed the wrangler back into Dapsl’s grasp and cursed the day he had found the incorrigible races of Senyas and Bre’n. “What do you want from me?”
“Rheba.”
“Impossible!”
Kirtn smiled again as he turned around. He had not expected to win her freedom. All he wanted was to get himself and one other person into her cell. Corpses burned quite nicely, as every fire dancer knew.
Jal waited, but the Bre’n only smiled his chilling smile. “If you could see that she was all right, would you perform tonight at the Concatenation?”
Kirtn appeared to consider the proposal, but there was really no need to do so; seeing her was exactly what he wanted. “Take me to her now.”
Jal pressed a stud on the belt that gathered his robe around his hips. He studied the figures in a small crystal window next to the stud. “Hardly more than an hour until you have to go into the tunnel . . .” He glanced up at the predatory golden eyes watching him, then glanced down quickly. “All right. A few minutes.”
“No. As much time as there is before the Act goes onstage.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Every minute there is,” repeated Kirtn, “or there won’t be any Act.”
“You’d kill all of them,” asked Jal, waving a long-nailed hand at the J/taals and clepts, Ilfn and Lheket, “just for a few minutes with your kaza-flatch?”
“Yes.”
Jal’s hand dropped. He looked at Dapsl, who looked away. He looked at i’sNara, all but invisible in the corner. When the Act was not being rehearsed, she appeared as herself; Kirtn would not tolerate the imitation Rheba for one second longer than necessary.
“Could you do both of them?” asked Jal of i’sNara.
She hesitated, then made a small gesture with her left hand, the Yhelle negative. “One or the other with fire, lord. Not both. Perhaps f’lTiri?”
Jal looked thoughtful, then angry. “F’lTiri’s only Ninth Degree. The Act has to look right or the Imperial Loo-chim will have my eggs for breakfast.” He glared at Kirtn again. “All right, furry. But if you don’t perform well tonight, I’ll kill you myself!”
Kirtn laughed. The savage sound brought Ilfn to her feet and made Lheket move blindly toward the comfort of her touch. Her anguished whistle finally stilled Kirtn’s terrible laughter, but even Jal could not bear to meet the Bre’n’s slanting golden eyes. Jal shuddered beneath his silk robe.
“I’ll take you there myself,” he said finally. “I wouldn’t trust a guard with you—or you with it! You’ll walk in front of me with head bowed, like a slave being sent to the dungeon for discipline.”
Kirtn bowed his head, a model of obedience, but the echoes of his feral laughter still vibrated in the air. Jal palmed a small weapon from his belt and followed Kirtn out of the room. The Bre’n saw little of the hallways he walked, for his head was bowed in slave imitation. What he did see was enough. He would be able to lead Rheba out of the dungeon.
The air became perceptibly cooler as they walked down a winding spiral staircase made of stone. The steps were concave in the middle, worn down by the passage of time and slaves. Moisture appeared on the walls, beading up and sliding over the chiseled stone passageway. By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, Kirtn’s fur had roughened, a reflex that trapped an insulating layer of air between tiny hairs and skin.
Even so, he felt the relentless chill of darkness and stone. And if he felt it, how much worse must it be for his unfurred fire dancer? Head bowed, he reviewed the many ways there were to kill a man, and the many refinements of pain possible before death. The Loo lord who had left a fire dancer to die in this hell of icy rock would pray for his own death . . . but it would be long before that prayer was answered.
As though sensing Kirtn’s thoughts, Jal looked up nervously. In the dim light thrown by his belt studs, he could see little but a huge shadow stalking ahead of him, head bowed, to all outward appearances just one more Loo slave. Jal wished that he could believe that appearance. He dropped back farther, his hand tight around the deadly white weapon he had taken from his belt.
Kirtn glanced back casually at the Loo lord, but he was out of reach. The Bre’n had not really expected anything else. Lord Jal was not a careless man.
“Keep walking,” said Jal. “Turn right at the next branching of the tunnel, left at the third opening after that, then left at the second arch. She’s in the right-hand cell in the middle of the long hall. Use this for light.”
He tossed a small button toward Kirtn, who caught it reflexively. It gave off little light, but Bre’n eyes did not require brightness to see well. Kirtn whistled, shrill and penetrating, a call that demanded an answer. There was none, though the whistle echoed deafeningly down stone halls and turnings. Fear squeezed his throat, but he whistled again, urgently. All that came back were more echoes . . . and then silence.
He turned and began running down the hall with the sure strides of a predator. The button he had been given glowed just enough to warn of dead ends and passageways. As an energy source for Rheba to draw on, the light would be all but worthless. As he ran he counted doors and arches, turned right and left and raced down a long hall.
It was cold, colder than it had been before he turned at the arch. Icy cold, slick walls of stone gleaming sullenly. He tried to keep down his fear, but like rez it kept uncurling, testing the edges of his control. Piercing Bre’n whistles shattered against stone. No answer came back. He held the button high in his right hand, looking for any break in the wall that could be her cell.
Finally, stone gave way to a cold shine of metal. He lunged at the door. It was locked. With a soundless snarl he attacked the chains holding down the massive sliding bolt. Metal twisted and snapped. The bolt slammed open with a metallic scream. The thick metal door swing inward.
Rheba lay inside, huddled on the cold stone floor. She did not move.
He leaped into the cell, whistling her name repeatedly, getting no answer. Her flesh was clammy, almost as cold as the bitter walls. He buried his hand in her hair, seeking the energy that was a fire dancer’s life. Fssa slipped to the floor and lay without moving.
Rez turned inside the Bre’n, seething seductively, promising incandescent oblivion to his very core. But not yet. Not yet. First he must be very sure she was dead.
He lifted her off the cold floor, held her against his warmth, held her as he had ached to do, woman not child. He poured his energy into her, willing his own heat to warm the chill pathways of her body, forcing out cold as he breathed hot life into her.
Reluctantly, slowly, Rheba’s mind acknowledged the fierce power battering it. Lines of power flickered vaguely, then blazed beneath his demands. Feeling returned to cold flesh. With a scream of agony, she was wrenched out of the blessed numbness that was a near twin to death. A lesser akhenet would have died of the Bre’n power pouring through mind and body, but she had proved her strength when she survived Deva’s end. With a final ragged scream she accepted life again.
Then he held her gently, appalled by the pain he had given to her. He whistled keen regret, apologies as beautiful as the lines burning over her. She shuddered a final time and clung to him, making a song of his name. She kissed him with more than forgiveness, child-woman blazing between his hands.
Behind them the door groaned shut and the massive bolt slammed back into its hole. Laughter bounced off metal and stone—Jal’s laughter. The button in Kirtn’s hand changed, showing a likeness of the Loo lord’s face. Lips moved. Thin sound vibrated in the air around the button.
“That was a very thick chain on the door, furry. You’re even more dangerous than I’d thought. As dangerous as you are valuable. F’lTiri will imitate you well enough for the Act. Imperial lusts will overlook a rough performance, so long as you and the other furry survive to slide on Loo-chim nuga. Enjoy the next few hours with your kaza-flatch, furry. The female polarity won’t let yo
u out of her sight until she’s tired of riding you.”
Kirtn ground the button between heel and stone. Jal’s voice stopped, but the sound of his laughter still seeped through the door. It was absolutely dark until Rheba made a tiny ball of light. As it hovered over his shoulder, Kirtn put his strong hands against the door, testing the hinges, then hammering with all the force of his huge body. Metal groaned but did not give.
A howl of Bre’n fury exploded in the dungeon. He threw himself at the door in an attack as calculated as his howl had been wild. Metal groaned again, but did not shift. If he kept after the door, he might eventually loosen its hinges—but there was not enough time left before the Act.
A sound from Rheba drew him away from his futile attack on the door. She stood with Fssa coiled in her hand, but the coils kept coming apart. She coiled him again. He came undone. Other than a flickering of the small light she had created when Kirtn crushed the button, she did not show her emotions. Patiently, she coiled Fssa into a semblance of life for the third time.
“That won’t help,” said Kirtn, his voice soft
“He’s not dead.” Her voice was brittle, desperately controlled. “He felt almost this cold the first time I touched him in the Fold, when he was so scared.”
The coils loosened and spilled out of her hands like black water. The light guttered, then flared into a single burning point where Fssa’s body hung from her hand. There was no response, though the light she created was hot enough to burn flesh.
Kirtn lifted the snake from her fingers and draped the cold body around his neck. Fssa’s flesh was very dense; he would burn more brightly than even a Bre’n.
“You haven’t much time.” His voice was kind, yet implacable. When she refused to look at him, he turned her face toward his. “Are you ready, fire dancer?”
“For what?”
“For fire.”
“There’s nothing to burn.”
“There’s me.”
Silence, then a hoarse cry of refusal. He waited, but the lines of power on his dancer remained quiescent.
“You have to melt out the hinges, the bolt, or the door itself,” said the Bre’n in Senyas. “The door is nearly as thick through as I am. I think the hinges would be a mistake; you’re more likely to fuse them than unhinge the door. The door may be easier to melt through than stone. That’s your decision, fire dancer. Either way, stone or metal, you’ll need something to burn before you can weave enough energy to melt your way out of here.”
“No.”
“You’ll have to have a base,” continued the Bre’n as though she had never refused, “from which to weave more complex energies. You’ll have to burn me.”
“No!”
“It’s your akhenet duty to survive and bear children.” His voice was still calm, but he was whistling in Bre’n now, and the sounds contained possibilities that made her flesh move and tighten. “Ilfn is pregnant. In time, you will be too. Bre’ns and Senyasi will not be extinct. But first you have to escape, fire dancer, and to escape you have to burn me.”
“Never.” The word was Senyas, unambiguous, containing neither regret nor apology nor defiance, simply refusal, absolute. “I will never kill you.”
“It doesn’t matter, my dancer. I’m dead already.” His whistle was sweet, pure, a knife turning in her. “I was dead the first time I mated with Ilfn.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Rez.”
“But why?”
His only answer was a whistle that slid down all the octaves of regret. For a moment she did not recognize the opening notes of the Bre’n death song. When she did, she could not control the tears that fell over the golden lines on her face. She wanted desperately to contradict him, to tell him he must be wrong, that he could not go into rez, turning on himself, his mind literally consuming his body cell by cell to feed Bre’n rage. She wanted to argue and scream and plead, but was afraid that any one of those actions might simply precipitate the very rez she so desperately wanted to avoid. She needed time to think, time to plan, time to outwit rez.
'What do you want me to do?” she asked in a trembling voice, using Senyas, for her inner refusal would have shown in Bre’n.
It was all Kirtn could do not to gather her in his arms and hold her for the last time in his life. Yet if he did, neither of them would have the strength to do what they must. “After you escape from here, hide in the tunnel until just before the Act goes on stage. Then, take over the Act. One of the illusionists can imitate me. If they refuse, kill them and use just my outline. Let M/dere handle the fighting. She’ll get you and the other akhenets to the ship. Take the slaves who can keep up with you, but don’t wait for anyone.”
She said nothing, not trusting her voice. The only other time she had seen Kirtn so violently controlled was when she told him that Deva would die before first moonrise.
“I’ll give you my energy.” he said, speaking Senyas because neither one of them could bear the poetry of Bre’n. “Use it to create fire to melt rock or metal. When I’ve given you all my energy, use my body as you did the J/taal bodies back in the Fold. Only this time, take the energy that is released, compress it, and let it explode inside stone or metal. The shock waves will destroy solids and generate more heat. At that point, you’ll be able to burn your way out of this cell.” His voice was so reasonable that she could almost believe he was talking about a length of wood rather than his own flesh. She began to refuse, but was stopped by the shadow of rez at the center of his yellow eyes. Time. She needed more time.
She walked past him and ran her hands over the door, releasing distinct currents of energy. Her akhenet training let her read the currents as they moved through the metal. The bolt on the far side was thicker than her own body. The hinges were equally massive. It might be easier to use heat to crack the cold rocks than to melt through the door—yet the thought of sending molten rivulets down the high-density alloy made her lines blaze hotly with pleasure.
She turned back to him, holding knowledge and argument inside her, pretending to agree. There was a way, a small fire dancer trick that she had used against childhood playmates. She would take what he gave her, draining off his power until he lacked the energy to flash into deadly rez. Then they would talk rationally about ways and means of escaping from the dungeon.
“Ready,” she said.
She backed away from the door until she came up against the cell wall. She stepped forward just enough to allow him to stand behind her. When he touched her, energy raced through her body, setting akhenet lines to pulsing with the joined beat of two hearts.
A thin stream of barely visible energy stitched around the door like a questing fingertip. She controlled it precisely, using the minimum amount of her own and his energy. That was nothing new, certainly not dangerous to either of them, merely an akhenet pair at work.
Kirtn felt his energy flowing into her and wished for many nameless things in the time before he died. But he was akhenet, disciplined. The energy pouring into her did not waver with his unvoiced regrets. He sensed heat building in the door. His golden eyes reflected the uncanny gleam of Senyas fire. He poured more energy into his fire dancer, wanting to feel the searing core of her power while he still could.
She refused. Her lines surged, channeling his power back to him in a reflex that was born of her refusal to let him die. He realized that he was not as spent as he should have been by this time. She had been taking his energy—and then returning some of it to him so subtly that he had not sensed the exchange. At this rate he would be drained gradually, unconscious before he found the death that he must have to set her free. And then he realized that was exactly what she had planned.
With a terrible cry, he flashed into rez.
XXIV
The first instants of rez were deceptively safe, like the rumble of an earthquake presaging the violence to come. Images shattered in her mind, images of herself as seen through Kirtn’s eyes.
She was a toddler, ab
sently striking fire from straw. She was seven, lighting candles with her fingertips in her first dancer ritual. She was seventeen, awash with triple moonlight, laughing with a boy lover in Deva’s scented autumn.
She was a searing core of radiance taking the Devalon and flinging it into space instants before the sun licked out, devouring Deva in pure light. She was a woman dressed in lightning, calling down fire on a gambling hell. She was a dancer wearing only her lines of power, mouth soft and bittersweet as she gave him a woman’s kiss in a Loo room where enslaved stones wept.
She was lying on an icy stone floor. A dead Fssireeme slid out of her cold hair.
And then rez raged through her with the force of an exploding star. She was being torn apart by the life force pouring into her like a cataract of molten glass.
Screaming, writhing, she deflected rez as she had been trained to deflect other destructive energies. But she was only one, and young. He was Bre’n, and in rez.
Burn me! Burn me to ash and gone!
Energy shaped itself into wild lightnings, visible and invisible, impossible colored shadows smoking over stone walls. She gave back to him what she could, a feedback loop that quivered and shook with violence barely channeled. There was a stink of scorched stone, but not flesh burning, not yet, she would not.
I won’t!
She screamed again and again, her hair a corona of wildfire, driven to her knees by the force of Bre’n demand. The cell shrank smaller and smaller, too hot, far too small to hold the clash of lightnings. There was no air. Stone turned soft beneath her hands. Rivulets of orange and gold and white ran down the walls.
She could not breathe.
Burn me!
Never!
Her shriek was lost in the sound of rez doubled and redoubled by stone that smoked and spat ghostly flames. The energy she deflected came back to her from all sides, reflected by walls. Her skin split and blazed, forming new lines of power each instant as she tried to cope with impossible energies, tried not to breathe, tried not to die, tried not to—