by Ann Maxwell
“Weren’t the other doors?”
“No. The outer one was added in my mother’s time. The next one was a century older. You can tell by the fit,” he added. “Seurs are archaeologists, not extruders.”
“How do the doors lock?”
Daemen opened his hands in a gesture of emptiness. “They just . . . flow together.”
“No seams? No bolts or other obvious mechanisms?”
“Nothing but a space for one of Tric’s crystals. At least, I assume Tric has the key,” he added bitterly. “It was mother’s before they exiled her.”
“I suppose it locks from the other side.”
“Yes.”
She looked at Daemen with something less than affection. At the moment she did not appreciate the quality of his luck. “Is there any other possible way to get to the recycler?”
Daemen’s unhappy expression was all the answer she needed. She turned back toward the doors dividing her from her Bre’n. She glanced at M/dur, not wanting to ask him to risk his life for a quick look down the hall, but knowing he was better equipped than she was for the job.
M/dur cocked his head, pointed to his eyes and then around the curve of the hall. He cocked his head again, obviously asking a question. She made the J/taal gesture of agreement, a quick show of teeth that was both more and less than a smile.
Two clepts stole silently up to the curve, followed by M/dur. The animals vanished, M/dur only a step behind. Rheba felt her muscles tighten as she waited for screams.
Almost immediately, M/dur reappeared. He gestured curtly. Without waiting for M/dere, Rheba ran toward the point where the hall curved away. She dashed around the curve—and nearly slammed into a wall. Where the hall should have been, there was nothing but a seamless Zaarain surface.
She searched frantically for hidden joins, for cracks, any hint that the hall did not terminate right there at her fingertips. She pressed harder, trying to find where hall ended and wall began.
There was nothing but cool extruded surfaces, rippling colors, and silence.
With a sound of frustration and despair, she slammed her fist against the wall. There was no response, no change in the wall’s seamless whole.
Dead end, and nothing in sight to burn.
XXIII
Rheba spun around when she heard Daemen approaching. “I thought you said this was the way to the core,” she snarled. “You led us into a dead end!”
“I told you the door was Zaarain,” he said simply.
“Door?” she said, turning to face the seamless extrusion. “Are you telling me this is a door?”
“Zaarain doors are different.”
Rheba whistled several unpleasant Bre’n phrases. She reached out and ran her fingertips delicately over the door/wall that abruptly terminated the hallway. She sensed vague energies, pale shadows that made Daemen’s thin sunlight seem like a voracious force. Gently, she leaned against the Zaarain door. Her hair lifted with a silky whisper and fanned out, seeking tenuous currents.
She remained motionless for long minutes, learning the exotic patterns that were the hallmark of Zaarain constructs. It was an exercise even more delicate than cheating at Chaos by controlling the Black Whole’s computer. Akhenet lines glowed hotly, beating with the rhythm of her heart. New lines appeared, faint traceries beneath the skin on her shoulders and neck, lines curling up her calves, lines doubling and redoubling until her hands and feet glowed like melted gold.
Finally she sensed hints of direction, of restraints and commands imposed by the placement of molecules within the extrusion. She pursued them with a delicacy that Kirtn would have applauded, but still could not locate any weakness within the door. The lock was the door, and vice versa.
Once she thought she had located a node where currents congregated. Yet when she sought its exact location, it eluded her. Without Kirtn’s presence she did not have the precision she required. Nor could she simply burn a man-sized hole in the door using her stored energy. Zaarain constructs were far too tough for that.
She pursued the nebulous node indirectly, following the energies that fed it back to their source. Raw force exploded along her lines as she brushed a current that came directly from the Zaarain core. Quickly, she withdrew. Her hands smoked slightly, burned by the energy she had inadvertently called.
As she controlled the pain, she caught a shadow of movement within the construct. The motion was close to where she thought she had sensed the lock node.
“Is the key crystal put in about here?” she asked Daemen, pointing to an area at about eye level.
“I remember it as being over my head,” said Daemen doubtfully.
“You were smaller then.”
“Oh.” He squinted, measuring the place where her hand was against his childhood memories. “Yes . . . I think so.”
“Stand back. It’s going to get hot around here.”
Daemen backed up hastily.
Rheba’s eyes slowly changed from cinnamon to gold as she gathered the energy within herself. Her hair crackled wildly before she controlled it. Her akhenet lines blazed with life. For a long moment she held herself on the brink of her dance, shaping energies into coherence. For a terrible instant she missed Kirtn with an intensity that nearly shattered her dance.
Then she lifted her burned hand and let energy leap.
A line of brilliant blue-white light flashed from her fingertip to the Zaarain construct. Colors surged dizzily over its surface. The only constant was the coherent light called by a fire dancer, light that slowly ate into a door millions of years old.
Smoke curled up from the colors, an eerie smoke that smelled of shaval and time. It flowed seductively around her, sweet as Bre’n breath, warm as Kirtn’s body against hers. She cried out and her hand shook, energy scattering uselessly.
The pain of her teeth cutting through her lip dispersed the smoke’s enchantment. Her hand steadied. Energy condensed into an implacable beam of light.
The door sighed and dissolved back into the building so quickly that a Seur on the other side was pierced by the deadly energy flowing from Rheba. Surprise was more effective than any attack could have been. Seurs ran away, retreating down the hall, unable to face the alien who burned more brightly than their sun.
Rheba’s dance collapsed as exhaustion sent her staggering. She fell over the corpse of the Seur she had killed. With a muffled cry she rolled aside and braced herself on her hands and knees, too tired to stand up. Her hair hung limply around her breasts and her akhenet lines were no more than faint shadows beneath her skin. Burning through the Zaarain lock had cost every bit of energy she had stored, and more.
It was much harder to dance alone.
M/dur leaped across her and ran down the hall, followed by clepts.
“Rheba?” The Luck’s voice was tentative, awed. “I heard the stories about how the Loo-chim died, but I didn’t really believe . . .” He held his hand out to help her up, then snatched back his fingers, afraid to touch.
M/dere brushed The Luck aside. Her small, hard hands pulled Rheba upright. Eyes the color of aged copper checked the J/taaleri for wounds. Then she cocked her head, asking Rheba a silent question.
In answer, Rheba pushed away and began walking after M/dur, using the wall as support for the first few steps. By the time M/dur and the clepts returned, Rheba was walking faster but she still occasionally needed the wall’s support.
The J/taals exchanged a long silence. Not for the first time, Rheba cursed Fssa’s absence. The snake would have told her what the J/taals had found.
“It’s probably the second Zaarain door,” said Daemen quietly.
She slumped against the wall and hoped he was wrong. She did not have the strength to battle another Zaarain construct alone.
M/dere touched Rheba’s shoulder in a silent bid for attention. Rheba looked up and thought she saw compassion in the J/taal’s green eyes.
M/dur stood on tiptoe and stretched his arms as high as they would go. Then he sketche
d the outline of a man, a big man. When he was finished, he touched M/dere’s fur and pointed to the imaginary outline again.
“Kirtn?” Rheba straightened and felt fear like cold water in her veins. “You saw Kirtn?”
M/dur grimaced in agreement.
Rheba pushed past the J/taals and ran down the hall. If M/dur had seen Kirtn, f’lTiri was either hurt or too tired to cover the Bre’n with an illusion. Either way, Kirtn was in trouble.
The hall curved gracefully, left and right and then left again, each change of direction marked by subtle gradations in the colors that rippled over the walls and floor. The hall curved right again. And ended.
Rheba was too tired to stop herself. She ran into the Zaarain door with a force that made her see double. She leaned against the door, shaking her head, trying to see just one of everything again.
Then she realized she was seeing the room beyond, seeing it as Kirtn saw it, a swirl of enemies circling around and beyond them the pale gleam of the recycler fluid.
She screamed Kirtn’s name but he could not hear her through the door, unless he was seeing as she saw, not double but one of each, his view and hers.
Seurs swirled in a flurry of whips and knives. Kirtn reached for Fssa, heavy around his neck. With a powerful throw, he sent the Fssireeme and his cargo of zoolipt toward the recycler. The snake landed in the midst of Seurs, scattering them. But instead of moving toward the recycler, Fssa turned back toward the Bre’n, screaming about enemies sneaking up behind Kirtn’s back.
Pain exploded in Rheba’s back, hammering her to her knees, taking from her even the ability to scream. But not Fssa. He disgorged the zoolipt with a shriek of Fssireeme loss that made even the Zaarain walls quiver.
Vision canted, slipped, and the floor came up to meet Kirtn, swallowing him in a darkness that had no end.
Rheba clawed herself back to her feet, seeing only the Zaarain door in front of her, feeling only the slashing pain that had hurled Kirtn headlong into unconsciousness. In one terrible instant she felt everything, saw everything, knew everything burned in patterns of energy across her mind. Seurs screaming hatred, a knife ripping through Bre’n muscle to the organs beneath, Fssireeme anguish, and Zaarain construct humming around everything with eerie immortality.
Kirtn was dying.
She could not light the darkness condensing inexorably around him, could not even touch him. She reached for him, reached for anything that she could hold, because he was slipping through her grasp like twilight.
And she touched the Zaarain core.
Lines of power exploded across her body, fed by the same energy that sent ships out to the stars. She writhed like a worm in a skillet as alien patterns scorched her brain. But she felt the pain only at a distance, for there was no greater agony than her Bre’n dying beyond the reach of her light. She gathered the core around her like a terrible cloak and reached for Kirtn once again.
The door vaporized in a cloud of shaval smoke, leaving her horribly burned wherever she was not protected by akhenet lines. The pain was so great it simply did not register. She was beyond its reach, beyond everything but the need to be with her Bre’n.
Through the smoke’s scented pall she saw Seurs backed against the most distant walls, Seurs fleeing, Seurs fallen and glistening beneath an icy covering. It was the signature of a Fssireeme, a predator who sucked up even the energy that made electrons dance, leaving his victims so cold that moisture in the air condensed around them, becoming a shroud of ice.
Kirtn lay on his side amid the glistening corpses, a Fssireeme keening against his copper fur. In his hand was the bloody knife he had wrenched out of his back as he fell.
She knelt beside him, ablaze with akhenet lines. Her fingers probed gently, seeking any pulse of life. She found a sense of distant pain, distant emotion, life sliding away beneath her raw fingertips, blood running down her burned body, blurring the gold of akhenet lines.
She found no pulse, though the slow welling of his blood onto the floor argued that he was still alive. She let energy flow into him.
There was no response.
She increased the flow of energy into him but it was like trying to power a spaceship with a candle. It was then that she tapped the Zaarain core, risking death almost casually, accepting the searing agony that came.
But the core was not enough, for even the Zaarains had not discovered how to transform dying into living.
Numbly, she let go of the core. She stroked Kirtn’s face with hands that shook, hands as gold as his eyes staring sightlessly beyond her. She closed her eyes and felt coldness slide up her fingertips like another color of night, heard Fssa’s keening coming from the end of time.
The cold feeling moved, flowing over her with a gentle sucking sound. She opened her eyes and saw the turquoise sheen of a zoolipt covering her hands and Kirtn’s face. She was too numb to do more than watch dully, her skin cringing from the zoolipt’s cool touch.
The zoolipt quivered, tasting the burned flesh beneath her akhenet lines. A queer tingling rose in her, starting from her fingertips and spreading through her body with each beat of her heart.
The zoolipt thinned even more, covering her burned body until it looked as though she wore a turquoise veil. The tingling spread throughout her body, a feeling of energy spreading, an energy that was both subtle and immense. She tried to move but could not, held in the zoolipt’s blue-green embrace. It permeated her body cell by cell, multiplying and tasting her with a thoroughness that left her shaken.
Then, with a sound like a long sigh, the turquoise veil peeled away and dropped onto Kirtn. She stared, certain the zoolipt was darker now, more dense, with more shades of blue turning beneath its odd surface.
The zoolipt shivered, lifting a part of itself into the air like a clept questing for a scent. Before she could move, the zoolipt surged over Kirtn’s back and poured itself into the Bre’n’s deep, ragged wound. She made a futile gesture, trying to keep the zoolipt away from Kirtn’s helpless body. But the zoolipt simply flowed between her smooth fingers.
Her fingers.
She stared at her hands, not believing what she saw. There was no blood oozing, no raw flesh burned to the bone beneath akhenet lines. Her hands were as smooth and perfect as a baby’s. She looked from her hands to the rest of her body, remembering the instant the Zaarain door had vaporized, burning her so completely that her mind had simply refused to acknowledge the messages of pain.
But there was no pain now, nothing except an odd tingling euphoria in every cell of her body. Every healed cell. She was as whole as she had been when she had crawled out of Square One’s living pool.
This time it was different, though. This time the zoolipt had not been satisfied with merely tasting her. It had become a part of her.
She stared in horrified fascination at the zoolipt pseudopod that had remained outside of Kirtn’s body. The zoolipt was definitely smaller now, but still dense, still with tones of blue turning beneath its surface. More blues than it had had a moment ago, and more greens. Currents were visible, shivers of deeper blue-green, vivid glints of turquoise like laughter moving across its face.
Sighing, sucking softly, the zoolipt slid off Kirtn onto the bloody floor. With amoebic patience the zoolipt advanced on a Seur’s frigid corpse, leaving a clean floor behind. The zoolipt paused at the icy barrier, then seemed to flow through it.
Slowly, the ice became shades of blue, reflecting the zoolipt beneath. When the zoolipt withdrew, the ice collapsed with tiny musical sounds. The corpse was gone. The zoolipt was bigger.
And Kirtn’s heart was beating beneath her hands.
XXIV
Kirtn shuddered and was on his feet in an instant, pulling Rheba with him, a Seur’s knife still held in his hand. He remembered only that he had been under attack. A swift glance told him that the battle was over. Dead Seurs lay scattered around him. Living Seurs had retreated to the side of the huge recycler room, held at bay by J/taals, clepts, and an exhausted but ot
herwise unharmed illusionist.
Rheba’s joy coursed through Kirtn like a shockwave, uniting him with her in brief mind dance. For a moment he lived what she had seen and felt from the instant of double vision on the far side of a Zaarain door. He buried his face in her hair, holding her close, trying to comfort her and convince himself that he was not dead.
“How do you feel?” she asked, tilting her head back and staring hungrily at his eyes, alive again.
“I—” He hesitated, then said with surprise in his voice, “I’ve never felt better.” Turquoise flashed at the corner of his vision, startling him. “What’s that?”
Rheba followed the direction of his glance. She could not help shuddering as the zoolipt condensed around yet another Seur corpse. “That is the zoolipt.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, eyeing the zoolipt and remembering the amount that Fssa had swallowed. “Isn’t it bigger than it was?”
“Yes,” she said succinctly, “it is.”
Another shroud collapsed with a musical tinkle. The zoolipt shook off random pieces of ice and flowed over to the nearest dead Seur.
“Fssa?” whispered the Bre’n, suddenly realizing just how the Seurs had died. “Did Fssa do that?”
The answer was a Bre’n whistle that vibrated with shame. The Fssireeme slithered toward Kirtn. Dark lines ran over the snake’s incandescent body. The lines showed his shame at reverting to his ugly predatory heritage; the incandescence showed that he was replete with energy taken from Seurs.
Kirtn, knowing how Fssa felt, whistled extravagant praise of Fssa’s beauty, followed by thanks for saving his life.
“I’m not beautiful,” mourned Fssa, “I’m a parasite, and the zoolipt saved your life.”
Rheba counted the bodies of Kirtn’s attackers. “If it weren’t for you, snake,” she said crisply, “there wouldn’t have been anything left for the zoolipt to save.”
She knelt and scooped up the Fssireeme. He was so hot she burned her hands, making Fssa all the more ashamed of his nature.