“I have a map,” she said, her fingers bringing it up. “Ferrasin’s techs made it for me. But it’s useless, as we can’t get access to the sensors to locate us on it, and the bots remove the location signs as fast as the grays put them up.”
Obviously she didn’t know her way around any better than he did.
Barrodagh felt a snarl twisting his lips, and bit hard into the side of his cheek as he looked away. Almanor closed her compad and dropped it to swing at her belt as they ran to the nearest lift.
Barrodagh struggled against the acidic fury lapping at the back of his throat. It was useless, it only made him feel sick, and he had to regain, and stay in, control. But so much constant irritation—so many small, insignificant things—the doors, the insistent mindless bots, the growing lack of discipline, the general recalcitrance of the palace systems... and the damned dogs. The Avatar took affront at every puddle of urine or dog turd he encountered in his peregrinations about his new demesne, regarding them as a blot on the triumph of his paliach.
Paliach. Then there were the sudden heart-lurches, the sharp pangs of remembered terror that still caused Barrodagh to jerk awake at night, drenched in cold sweat from dreams of Hreem’s gloating face. “One of the Panarch’s sons is here...”
Barrodagh bit his cheek again, hard enough to cause the copper-taste of blood and forced his mind to the moment.
They reached the lift after one false turn. It functioned fine, its cables undisturbed, but as soon as the doors slid open at sublevel one, the sounds of hammering and other machinery reached them. In the pause between one set of machine noises and another, someone cursed heatedly, offering the names of at least three demons. As Barrodagh and Almanor followed the sound of the voices, a voice rose in disgust. “This time they chewed it up and pissed on it.”
The work party of grays paused in their work at the sight of them, then turned to the Tarkan in command. She raised a hand and said, “Senz-lo Barrodagh. It appears the damage is being done by dogs.”
“Dogs,” Barrodagh repeated. “Why would dogs chew the cables?”
“Someone is commanding them,” Almanor said, her voice trembling.
At least she was fighting the same tide of fury. “Kill them,” Barrodagh said. “That order was never rescinded. Kill them on sight.”
The grays exchanged looks as the Tarkan said emotionlessly, “No one reports seeing them.”
“Did you put out more poisoned meat?” Barrodagh asked. “As I recall, we got rid of a number of them when we did that.”
“Twelve,” Almanor reported. “Until they stopped eating the poisoned meat.”
“So you put out a different type of meat, and make sure the poison is odorless and tasteless,” Barrodagh said, scarcely restraining his sarcasm. Why was this so difficult to figure out?
“Do you not think we tried that?” Almanor retorted. “It worked precisely as well as sealing up the bot-hatches the dogs apparently use for access, and destroying the sensors to unblock services, and just about everything else we try in this damned maze...” She stopped, her lips pressed together.
Barrodagh carefully unclenched his teeth until the tightness of his throat relaxed, and his voice could be trusted. On Dol’jhar, Almanor would have been more circumspect. “Then clearly someone is commanding the animals. The order to shoot on sight stands, but institute a thorough sweep for their human commander. Someone has to be directing the sabotage: the location of this latest evidence is not random.” He had no idea where Green Corridor was in relation to where they now stood, but surely at least one of those in front of him did. If the security system can’t be trusted, what is to keep them guarded?
The vivid image of dogs somehow loosing the Panarchist prisoners was real enough to shoot terror through Barrodagh’s nerves. They’d chosen the Green Corridor because of the paucity of bot hatches there, and the primitive nature of the cells, but still...
One of the Panarch’s sons... Once again the memory hit him with the force of a blow.
Dogs, sensors... He turned to the Tarkan in charge. “I want chuqaths in the watch sector surrounding Green Corridor. Let them roam freely.” The Tarkan evidenced surprise with the merest flicker of dark brows, and Barrodagh added, “I know they can’t be trusted. I want that savagery on guard here.” No dog would survive an encounter with a hungry chuqath. “Make certain that the grays and other non-essential staff are told to stay clear of this area.”
“It shall be done,” the Tarkan responded. She motioned to one of the grays, who would have to relay the message using the nearest functional console.
That gave Barrodagh an idea. “Order a cart to meet us,” he told the Tarkan. “And make certain Ferrasin awaits our arrival.”
The gray hurried away, her gait an almost bounding run in the lower gravity of Arthelion.
Barrodagh and Almanor watched the grays remove the junction box. Its case had been quite deliberately torn apart—the teeth marks were evident if one examined closely. The stench of urine was strong as he bent. Not satisfied with shredding the internal circuitry, the dogs had urinated on the remains as well. No dog would do that on its own. There had to be someone, or someones, lurking in these very sublevels.
Well, the Tarkans would find them. In the meantime, he’d have to reassign some of the cims to make metal junction boxes, and cable cladding, until the techs could re-route the cables along the ceilings. Danathar could see to that.
The cart arrived. Barrodagh noted the grays watching as he and Almanor were driven away. There was less of the healthy fear in their expressions that had been the norm on Dol’jhar, he thought. Another sign of the ongoing erosion in discipline.
As the cart hummed through halls and corridors that all looked the same, Barrodagh smelled dog urine now and again; some sections were totally dark, and the driver sped through them.
The computer offices were deep under the Palace Major. Barrodagh walked into a chillingly cold room filled with blank-faced compute arrays, cables snaking everywhere and consoles on every surface. As Barrodagh and Almanor stepped over the cables, all the consoles blinked once, twice.
“No! No!” howled Ferrasin, a huge, sloppy man, both hands clutching unkempt sandy hair. “NonononoNO!”
The consoles all went dark. Several techs dived at the keypads. Someone somewhere must have achieved something, for the displays reappeared, the images bouncing in unison, then showing... the blue and gold phoenix medallion of the Panarchy.
“Ch-ch-chatzing...” the man uttered a strangled curse, spun around, then spotted Barrodagh. His face was red and sweaty, his expression almost demented. He blinked rapidly, then said, “At least wuh-wuh, we’ve b-bounced. Back.” He slowed, fists clenched as he struggled to enunciate past his stutter. “To the t-top. Top. Chthon.”
“Does that mean you can speed up progress in getting our compads functional beyond line of sight? And the Tarkan and conscript comms? Without the damned relays?” The need to wire independent access points had left security stretched perilously thin.
“It’s t-taken us tuh, time to fuh, fuh, fuh...”
“Firewall,” someone murmured softly from behind. Barrodagh could not see whom.
Rather than being irritated, Ferrasin seemed relieved, and waved a tech forward, a Bori who didn’t look any older than fifteen. He exchanged looks with Ferrasin, then said, “There are actually two problems here. We’re trying to extend our control of the upper chthons of the computer system so we can use the existing network for secure communications, rather than laying our own cable. “
The boy’s knobby hands swooped on the word ‘upper’ signaling symbolic rather than physical space. “While he’s trying to probe the deeper chthons, which is where things like the security phages and sensors are.”
“Can you find out who is commanding these dogs? They must be using their own communication system,” Barrodagh said.
“Dogs are deep chthon, too...” began the boy.
“No one,” Ferrasin interrupte
d. “N-no one is using the palace comms. I wuh, wish someone would. So we c-c-c-could puh, puh, piggyback. On their traffic. The d-dogs?” He swallowed, shut his eyes, and made an enormous effort that Barrodagh could almost feel in his facial muscles. His head began to pang.
“The p-palace system is almost a thousand years old. And enormously c-complicated. Dogs are p-part of it. The bots... w-we’re seeing em-muh-merrrr—”
“Emergent properties,” said the Bori tech. “We don’t think anybody programmed some of what we’re seeing.”
Barrodagh waved a hand, cutting off Ferrasin’s painful attempt to continue. “Just treat security of the prisoners as secondary only to matters pertaining to the Avatar. And report any progress to my office.”
“We’ve got some progress already,” a woman called from farther back in the room. She poked her head over a console, tired black eyes blinking. “The neuraimai are settling down! I think we’ve finally got them an upper-chthon space of their own that the system can’t get at.”
Barrodagh contained his impatience at the jargon. After some initial disasters that had furnished subjects for Evodh but no advances in understanding of the Palace compute arrays, he had learned to insulate Panarchist technical staff from the realities of Dol’jharian discipline—it just terrified them into stupidity. Unfortunately, that also tended to compromise the attitudes of the Bori technical staff he’d brought from Dol’jhar, but as with so much else on Arthelion, he had little choice.
“Translate,” he said to Ferrasin, who blinked, his face relaxing slightly.
“That’s m-major progress, senz-lo Barrodagh. Now we have a chance at penetrating the lower chthons of the s-system and undoing the security blocks. Once that’s d-done, we’ll be a lot closer to the access you want.”
Barrodagh nodded and walked out—followed by Almanor. So her purpose was not just a status report from Ferrasin, but something private. He wasn’t going to hear it in front of the gray driving the cart.
As they passed a lift, Barrodagh halted the driver with a word, and climbed off the cart. Sure enough, Almanor hopped down as well, showing the ten years of difference in their ages with her agility. The lift took them back to ground level, opening onto a corridor supported by fluted columns of rose marble. He knew where he was: his offices were in the building across this garden, which held pools of fish gathered from numerous worlds.
The enormous glass door slid open, and they walked into the garden. Both their compads chirped at the same time; they were now in range of the external Dol’jharian system.
Barrodagh glanced at his and suppressed a groan at the length of his message queue—what good was Danathar, anyway? But that could wait. More important was whatever Almanor was working herself up to.
He scrutinized the complication of vines and flowering shrubs surrounding the tiered pools, then said, “I imagine your com queue is nearly as long as mine.”
Almanor looked around very deliberately, as though Barrodagh hadn’t scanned. He suppressed his irritation. He had never liked her, but he would not deny her thoroughness, which was as scrupulous as his own. And he was as sure as was possible among the Catennach that she was no threat to him.
She said, “There’s something going on with Vox.”
Vox Populi. On Dol’jhar, nobody ever talked outside Catennach quarters about the game that was so very much more than a game. Here, in the complexity of the Palace, there was less reason to fear the lords’ attention, but the reticence remained. This must be serious. Barrodagh stopped, facing her. “What?”
Almanor’s thin lips pressed into a pale line. Then she said, “It’s...” She glanced skyward, as if the data was written there. “Vox is changing. I still don’t think it was a good idea to run it on the Palace arrays, although I realize we had little choice if we were to run it at all. But the longer it runs, the more compute space it consumes, the odder it gets.”
When Barrodagh began to speak, she brought up a hand. “I realize we don’t have time or wherewithal to deal with it now. But I thought you’d better know.”
On Dol’jhar, Barrodagh had been only an observer of the game, and occasional participant in the hidden conversations about Bori life it made possible. On Arthelion he didn’t even have time for that.
“What do you mean, odder?”
She shook her head. “I can’t really define how, except to say that players whom no one took seriously on Dol’jhar seem to be unusually lucky. Like Danathar. And Nyzherian. Especially him. He’s gaining gravitas with every round.”
“Nyzherian has too much free time,” Barrodagh said. “I shall amend that.”
Her lips curled upward at the corners, then she turned away, and walked rapidly in the direction of her own offices.
Vox Populi! There would be some changes in Catennach playtime, starting today. For a few steps Barrodagh took pleasure in working out the wording of the memo. But he must not let himself be distracted with the easy problems. As he turned up one of the slate pathways, careful to avoid stepping on the fragile-looking grasses, and swatting at things that buzzed near his face, he forced himself back to one of the deeper problems, one he yearned to delve into when he regained computer control.
Deeper problems were those with roots back on Dol’jhar, when his control had seemed secure: how could he possibly have missed the connection between Anaris and the slave Lelanor? More importantly, how could he have missed that Lelanor had been taken aboard the Fist of Dol’jhar? It could only be Evodh behind it, and his motivation to strike at Barrodagh’s careful attempts to build trust with the conditional heir.
Barrodagh stumbled over some loose rocks on the path, and paused to kick them back into place, with a swift and wary look to make certain the Avatar was not roaming about as he’d begun doing so uncharacteristically. The intermittency of their comms made it difficult to keep track of him, which was another... oh, it was far too dangerous, and unsettling, to think of as an irritation.
He never would have known about the incident with Lelanor if Morrighon had not reported it. He did not have enough resources, that was the fundamental problem. Without resources, how could he establish the control he needed? His cheek ached, and that brought back Hreem’s face. One of the Panarch’s sons...
That vid replaced his surroundings: Brandon nyr-Arkad exiting a flyer, and behind him, Barrodagh’s agent, the cashiered marine guard Deralze. What really happened that day at the Ivory Hall? Barrodagh was beginning to suspect that this question was the impulse behind the nightmares, not merely the shock of discovering that Brandon nyr-Arkad was still alive, and free, when he had expected to hear from Rifthaven that Deralze had delivered the nyr-Arkad’s head and had then been killed. At least he’s dead now. They both are.
Fortunately, Brandon nyr-Arkad’s death had followed close enough on the news that he was alive that Barrodagh had been able to balance the failure of the Enkainion plot with the Krysarch’s death in his report, thus preserving the Avatar’s paliach, if not his paliachee. Even so, Barrodagh had been astonished at how easily Eusabian took the news.
He rocked back on his heels when once again he almost ran into a door—another heavy glass one. After a moment it slid open. He entered the cooler hallway beyond, blinking to adjust to the shadowy lighting. His compad chirped again as it lost access.
A short time later he entered his office antechamber. Danathar was present at his desk, Barrodagh noticed with sour approval.
“There are several requests for real-time coms for you, senz-lo Barrodagh,” Danathar said obsequiously. “Beginning with Kyvernat Juvaszt.”
Barrodagh nodded curtly as he continued through to his private office, showing no sign of his satisfaction. Juvaszt, with his familial connection to the Eusabians, had been one of the most dangerous Dol’jharian nobles with whom Barrodagh had to deal in the run-up to the attack, and had always communicated through subordinates. But no longer; not since the near disasters at Narbon and Lao-Tse.
He brought up his queue and to
uched Juvaszt’s name. In less time than Barrodagh had expected, the kyvernat’s dark, scarred face windowed up.
“Kyvernat,” Barrodagh said.
Juvaszt did not speak for a moment. Barrodagh watched his jaw muscles bunch before the Kyvernat finally said, “I am concerned about the Avatar’s security. The Panarchists will eventually rally, and I need more ships for the defense of Arthelion.”
Juvaszt calling the Rifters ‘ships’ was an acknowledgement that Barrodagh had never thought to hear. Before he’d referred to the Rifter allies by pejoratives. The only ‘allies’ in his view were the Dol’jharians dispatched to Narbon and Lao Tse.
That was another deep-reaching problem that Barrodagh had managed not to think about: just how close they had come to losing the battles that had erupted after the assassination of Semion and the capture of the Panarch.
It had been relatively easy to play on the kyvernat’s belief in the superiority of the Pure Blood—an assumption shared by Eusabian—to limit Dol’jhar’s nascent fleet to the Fist of Dol’jhar and three destroyers. Procuring more, Barrodagh had felt, would have risked alerting the Panarchists.
Not procuring more had very nearly lost them Narbon and Lao Tse. The assassination of Semion had not, as expected, disrupted the Naval response, and Dol’jhar had lost two destroyers at Narbon, manned with Dol’jhar’s best, with a third battered almost into scrap. Not to mention the loss of some of the best-drilled forces among the Rifters. Though the losses the Navy had taken were tremendous, they had come very close to winning: only the fact that Barrodagh had assigned an overwhelming force had turned the tide, no matter how much the Pure Blood despised the Rifters and Panarchists.
It had been very little better at Lao Tse. The battlecruiser that had brought the Panarch and the Privy Council to the planet had badly mauled the Dol’jharian destroyer leading the Rifter contingent before being destroyed. The only functional capital ship actually crewed by Dol’jharians was again, as had been the case in the long years since Acheront, the Fist of Dol’jhar.
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