by Ann Maxwell
“Smells wonderful,” said the cat.
“Reminds me of Meel’s best work,” murmured the man with a voice like water rippling, echoing his hair.
“That would be too much to hope for.”
“Meel is her mother’s cousin,” said the man to Rheba. “She might know what happened to the Liberation clan.”
Rheba sniffed deeply and could not help hoping that food came with the information. Working with the worry stones had drained her energy. Her stomach would not relent until she ate. She wished she had the ability to turn sunlight into food, but that was a trick known only to plants and a few now-dead master fire dancers. And, she suspected, Fssireemes.
She leaned toward the thin man with hair like water—she simply could not think of him as f’lTiri—and whispered, “What does Yhelle use for money?”
“Only clan accountants handle real money,” said f’lTiri, shaking his head to make his hair flow smoothly. His tone told her that people who handled money were a necessary evil, not a topic of polite conversation.
“Then how do you buy food at the cafes?” she persisted.
“You trade illusions.” Then, seeing she did not understand, he added, “You get a meal as good as the illusion you project.”
The explanation explained nothing. She made a frustrated sound and her lines sparked. Hungry dancers were notoriously irritable. Kirtn whistled softly and stroked her arm. After a few moments, her lines glowed harmoniously. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
“But I’m still hungry,” she whistled, evoking a vast rumbling hollowness with a handful of Bre’n notes.
The cat looked over her sleek shoulder, revealing eyes the color of autumn wine, blue on blue with magenta turning at the core. “Your illusion should get you the finest meal in Serriolia.”
“I’m not an illusion,” said Rheba, exasperated again. She threw up her arms. Akhenet lines blazed. “I’m exactly what I appear to be!”
“Sometimes,” said i’sNara with a tiny cat smile, “reality is the best illusion of all.”
The cat leaped up and sat on f’lTiri’s shoulder. Rheba saw that it was not quite a cat. Its paws were small hands and the tips of its fangs winked poisonously. The smile was decidedly cruel.
“We’ll go first,” said f’lTiri. “Don’t speak Universal. Let the snake do your talking.”
Rheba smiled wryly. Yhelle was the only place in the Equality, where a multilingual shape-changing snake would cause no comment.
“Eat whatever is given to you,” he continued. “If you don’t like the flavor, don’t show it. You’ll only be insulting your own illusion.”
They entered the café. Neither Kirtn nor Rheba would have been surprised if the room vanished before their eyes. It did not. It remained just as it was, a construct of moonlight and still waters, redolent of feasts.
Fssa made a startled sound.
“What’s wrong?” whistled Rheba in Bre’n. She had no fear of being overheard in that language. So far as she knew, only five living beings in the Equality understood Bre’n, and the other two were waiting aboard the Devalon.
“I’ve lost them,” whistled Fssa in rising notes of surprise and displeasure.
“Who?”
“The illusionists!”
Rheba blinked. The shiny white cat and the man dressed in chiming silver were still just ahead of her. “F’lTiri?”
He turned so quickly that his hair frothed. “Don’t use my name aloud until we find out what’s going on!”
“Tell him, Fssa,” she muttered in Senyas, not knowing any more of the Yhelle language than the illusionists’ names.
“I can’t see you,” said the snake in soft Yhelle, choosing the idiom of sighted Fourth People over precision. Being a Fssireeme, he never really saw anything at all.
F’lTiri smiled. “Sorry, snake. If we hope to get food or information out of the resident illusionist, we have to put on our best appearance. But we’ll stay as man and cat so you won’t lose us.”
Rheba stared. She had thought the previous illusions were complete, but realized she was wrong. The man and cat were indefinably more real than they had been. The cat’s long white fur stirred with each breath, each vague breeze, each movement of the sinuous neck. The man’s hair rippled to his hips, clung to his muscular body, separated into transparent locks with each turn of his head. His silver clothing links were now bright and now dark, slinking and tinkling with each step.
Kirtn whistled Bre’n praise as intricate as their illusions. Though f’lTiri did not understand the language, the meaning was clear. He smiled fleetingly, revealing the hollow pointed fangs of a blood eater. Rheba shivered and looked away. The vampire races of the Fourth People made her uneasy, despite the fact that they abhorred and avoided the carnivorous or omnivorous races of Fourth People. Vampires simply could not understand how civilized beings could eat carrion.
Rheba followed the lavender-skinned vampire into the café, feeling less hungry than she had a moment ago. Kirtn smiled thinly, as though he knew exactly how she felt. Even Bre’ns were queasy on the subject of blood eaters. Fssa was impervious. He rested his head on top of her ear and whistled beautiful translations of the fragmentary conversations he overheard as Rheba followed man and cat through the crowded cafe.
“—through the veil three days ago and hasn’t been back.”
“Would you go back to that see-through illusionist if—” “—deserve better than cold mush!” “—tempted to try it. Total love. What an illusion! But I hear that no one—” “Marvelous flavor, don’t you think? Yours isn’t? Oh—” “—heard that the Redis have a truly Grand Illusion.” “Who told you?” “Someone who heard it from—” “—garble honk—”
Fssa hissed frustration. Too many conversations were almost as bad as silence for a Fssireeme. His sensors spun and focused, seeking the familiar voices of the illusionists.
Nascent fire smoldered beneath Rheba’s skin, reflexive response to the strangeness around her. If she closed her eyes and just listened to Fssa’s whistle she was all right—until she tripped over an illusion. So she was forced to go open-eyed through as unlikely a concatenation of beings as she had seen in the casinos of Onan and the slave yards of Loo combined.
The crowd thinned around a small, brightly lit area. In the center of the spotlight was a gorgeous butterfly spinning a brilliant green web. As it walked, the butterfly’s feet plucked music out of the green strands. Wings fluttered, scattering fragrance. With a final rill of notes, the insect took flight. As it landed on a nearby table, food appeared.
“How can we compete with that?” muttered Rheba in Senyas.
Kirtn whistled sourly. “We’ll be lucky to get cold mush.” Fssa hissed laughter. “Speak for yourself. I have more shapes than these dilettantes ever dreamed of.”
F’lTiri sauntered into the spotlit area. On his shoulder rode the white cat. In the spotlight she turned the color of honey and melted into his mouth. All that remained were fangs shining. Cat laughter echoed as she reappeared in the center of a nearby diner’s meal, white not honey, fangs intact. With a single fluid leap she regained her perch on f’lTiri’s lavender shoulder.
As though he had noticed nothing, not even the spotlight, f’lTiri combed his water-gleaming hair. Music cascaded out. A chorus of tiny voices came from a shoal of lavender fish swimming the clear currents of his hair. He shook his head. Fish leaped out and flew in purple flurries toward the dark comers of the room. They vanished, leaving behind the smell and feel of raindrops. Kirtn sighed. “At least some of us will eat.”
Yellow light surged through Rheba’s lines. She shook Fssa out of her hair and put him into Kirtn’s hands. “Voices and shapes, snake,” she whistled. “Lots of them.”
As Kirtn stepped into the spotlight, the Fssireeme began to change. One moment he was a simple glistening snake, the next he was a blue-steel spiral shot through with a babble of languages. The spiral became a pink crystal lattice trembling with music, whole worlds
of song. Shapes and colors changed so quickly there was no time to name them. With each shape/color came new songs, new sounds, painful and beautiful, silly and sublime. The shapes came faster and faster until they became a single glistening cataract of change, an eerie cacophony of voices.
Then Fssa settled smugly back into snake form curled in a Bre’n’s strong hands. A voice whispered in Kirtn’s ear. Fssa translated the Yhelle worlds. “First table on your right.”
Rheba watched while Kirtn sat at an empty table next to the man and cat illusion. Food appeared in front of him. Rheba held her breath while he took a bite. Bre’ns had exquisite palates. It would be hard for him to disguise his reaction to bad food.
He chewed with every evidence of pleasure. Breathing a silent prayer, Rheba stepped into the light. Power smoldered in her akhenet lines. Her hair fanned out, catching and holding light until it was every color of fire. She crackled with energy. Tiny tongues of lightning played over her akhenet lines.
Patterns of intricate fire burned over her body while she searched the air for emanations from a local power source. As she had hoped, the café’s lights were real, drawn from Serriolia’s power grid. She tapped into the lights, taking visible streams of power from them until she was a focus of fire in a room suddenly dark.
She pirouetted. Flames streamed out, separated, became single tongues in the center of each darkened table. In all the languages of the Equality, the flames sweetly inquired if the food was equal to a decent illusion. The impertinent voices were Fssa’s, but the whiplash of impatience beneath the words was pure hungry dancer.
She burned in the center of the stage and waited for her answer.
A voice whispered meaningless Yhelle words in her ear. Fssa realized the difficulty just in time. He whistled a fast translation. Still burning fitfully, she walked toward Kirtn’s table. There were several empty chairs. She pulled one over to him and sat.
The food was exquisite, but before she finished it, the chair developed aggressively familiar hands.
Rheba leaped to her feet and set fire to the sniggering chair. It exploded into a fat, outraged Yhelle male beating his palms against his burning clothes. A burst of laughter from the diners told him he was naked of illusion. Instantly he took on the aspect of a bush and rustled through the crowd toward the exit.
Realizing what had happened, Kirtn started after the lewd bush. It took a gout of dancer fire to keep the Bre’n from stripping the crude illusion twig from branch.
The white cat smiled and called sweetly, “If you’re going to seat a class twelve illusion, you’d better be a class twelve.”
Fssa whistled a translation, complete down to the malicious pleasure in the cat’s husky voice.
Rheba waited until Kirtn sat down again. She ignored his clinical—and rather shocking—Senyas description of the fat illusionist. She looked skeptically at the remaining empty chairs. She gave the nearest one a sizzling bolt of fire. Kirtn would not let her sit down until he smelled wood burning. Only then was he satisfied that a chair rather than a lecher waited for his dancer.
As Rheba sat gingerly, the cat leaped to the center of the table and began cleaning its hands with a pale-blue tongue. “Meel will be here soon,” she purred almost too low for Rheba to catch. “Eat fast.” She flexed her poisonous nails and leaped back to the other table.
“I wonder if those claws are as lethal as they look,” muttered Rheba.
“Bet on it,” said Kirtn. Then, in a metallic voice, “I trust you burned more than that cherfs clothes.”
Rheba’s lips twitched. “Yes.”
He took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Good.”
There was a predatory satisfaction in his voice that made her look closely at her mentor. His slanted eyes were hard and yellow, the eyes of an angry Bre’n, but that was not what made heat sweep through her. Her wrist burned where his mouth touched her, burned with a fire that would have scorched any Fourth Person but a Bre’n or Senyas. He drank her heat like a Fssireeme, leaving her dizzy, her lines blazing with a restless incandescence that wanted to consume . . . something.
She had felt like this before, when they had “shared enzymes” in a lover’s kiss. They had fooled the Loo-chim into believing that Bre’n and Senyas had a complex symbiosis based on such sharing, and would die if separated. The kiss had shocked her, for she had never thought of her Bre’n mentor as a man. Since then the thought had occurred with uncomfortable regularity. She knew that Bre’n sensuality was the core of many Senyas legends, but she did not know if akhenet pairs were also supposed to be lovers.
She had been too young to ask or even speculate on such a question when she was on Deva. Now there was no one to ask but Kirtn . . . and she could not find the words. It was not just fear of being rejected by him if the answer was no. In a way less intimate and more complex than enzymes, they needed each other to survive. She could not jeopardize their lives by ignorantly probing areas of akhenet life that might be taboo.
Nor could she pretend that Kirtn was not a man. His simplest touch excited her more than the hours she had spent with boyish Senyasi lovers. It was not a comforting realization. If she allowed herself to think about the sensual possibilities latent in her and her Bre’n, she would be tempted to pursue them in defiance of any taboos that might exist. She must think of him only as her Bre’n, her mentor, her partner, never her lover. And yet . . .
Fssa’s low whistle startled her. She realized that she had begun to build a cage of fire around herself and her Bre’n. She had done that once before and not understood why. Now she was afraid she did understand.
Kirtn was watching her with eyes that burned.
Fssa whistled again. She sucked energy back into her lines, but that was not what the snake was concerned about. She looked toward the illusionists’ table. There were two cats where formerly there had been just one, yet f’lTiri still appeared to be a tall blood eater. Suddenly the white cat’s lips drew back in a snarl. The other cat, darker and much less defined, vanished. From the table where it had been rose visible tendrils of odor. The stink made Rheba gag.
“Out!” shrilled Fssa urgently. “Get out!”
VII
Before Rheba could stand up, Kirtn had grabbed her and was racing through the crowd with a fine disregard for patrons illusory and real. She helped by scattering minor lightning. Within seconds, they had a clear path to the door.
“The illusionists?” asked Rheba, squirming in Kirtn’s grasp until she could see over his shoulder.
“Invisible,” whistled Fssa. “They’ll probably beat us to the door.”
“What happened?” snapped Kirtn.
Fssa’s sensors wheeled through metallic colors and finally settled on incandescent green. He scanned the crowds behind them as he answered. “Meel came. The cat illusion is a recognition signal for Tllellas, and i’sNara was Tllella before she joined illusions with f’lTiri. When Meel found out who the white cat was— Hit that blue lizard with some lightning!” Fire poured past the snake’s head. He hissed satisfaction. “She won’t be hungry for a week.”
Serriolia’s hot, moist air wrapped around them as they gained the sidewalk in a long leap. Fssa’s sensors changed again, more blue than green. “Yellow flower,” he snapped in Senyas.
Hot fire rained on a flower growing out of the street. The flower squawked, shivered, and vanished.
“Any more?” asked Rheba, wondering if the puddle ahead was truly the product of Yhelle’s daily rains.
“Not that I can scan. I’sNara is that tree growing behind the house illusion. Oh, you can’t see through that one, can you? But I can’t find F’lTiri.”
“Here,” murmured the air next to Kirtn’s right ear. “No,” urgently, “keep walking. I can only hold invisibility over us for a few more seconds. Once we’re around that house illusion—”
With the “house” between them and the cafe, f’lTiri let go of invisibility. In the instant before he formed a new illusion, they saw his
real face, pale and sweating. Invisibility was the most exhausting illusion of all.
“What happened?” asked Kirtn. “Fssa said the dark cat was Meel.”
A nearby tree shivered and split. Half of it became i’sNara. A different i’sNara, though. Short and thick, skin as black as the expression on her face. “Meel is afraid of her own illusions,” she spat.
F’lTiri’s outline blurred and reformed as that of a bird. The bird flapped to i’sNara’s shoulder and closed its eyes. She stroked feathers as she explained. “When I told Meel who I was she nearly lost her illusion. At first she was happy. Then she was afraid. When I asked about my children, she said to go to k’Masei. When I asked again—” I’sNara made a cutting gesture. “You smelled her answer.”
“Who is k’Masei?” asked Kirtn.
“A Liberation clan traitor.”
The bird nuzzled i’sNara’s ear. She sighed. “I know, but it makes me sick even to hear his name.” Her lips twisted as though she were eating something as bad as the smell in the café. “K’Masei was the Liberation clan’s master snatcher. He said he was going to use our few good Ecstasy Stones to help him snatch the Redis’ Stones. So he went into the Redis clan hall with all our Stones. He never came back. He gave our Ecstasy Stones to the Redis!”
“Maybe he was caught,” suggested Rheba.
The illusionist laughed bitterly. “He was the one who sold us into slavery. He’s the head of the Redis clan—a position he bought with Lib clan Stones.”
Rheba sighed. “Then I suppose that’s what Meel meant. K’Masei will know where your children are.”
“You don’t understand,” said i’sNara, her voice strained. “Saying to Libs ‘Go to k’Masei’ is wishing death or slavery on them. You saw our clan hall. What chance do you think we’d have with k’Masei?”
Kirtn’s whistle sliced through mere words. “Then who do we ask?” he demanded.
“Meel isn’t the only Tllella I know.”
I’sNara strode confidently down the street with the blue bird perched on her shoulder. Kirtn watched her for a moment, then shrugged and started after her.