by Ann Maxwell
F’lTiri bowed to Senyas pragmatism. “Given those conditions, follow me.” Then, softly, “Thank you.”
The veil was a vague thickness across the street. Rheba stared over i’sNara’s shoulders while the illusionists projected their destination on the veil.
Faces. A whirlpool of faces spinning around a brilliant center. Crystals shattering light into illusion. Whirlpool spinning around, sucking faces down and down, pulling at them relentlessly, spinning them until there was no direction but center where crystals waited with perfect illusions . . .
The veil shook. Destinations raced by too fast to see or choose. The illusionists hung on to each other and their goal. The veil bucked like a fish on a hook, but destinations slowed until a single view held.
Kirtn did not need i’sNara’s signal to know it was time to cross. He spread his arms and swept everyone through, afraid that the least hesitation would separate them. They arrived in a breathless scramble, but together.
“Is the force field always that stubborn?” asked Kirtn as he set Rheba down and held her until her dizziness passed.
“No,” panted f’lTiri, breathless from his struggle with the veil. “It keeps wanting to take us to the Redis clan house.”
Kirtn looked around grimly. “Did we come to the right place?”
“Yes. Clan Yaocoon.”
Rheba wondered how they could be so sure. The street they were on was just as hot and improbably populated as the last one. The illusions seemed to run to plant life here . . . eight-legged vines and ambulatory melons. She sighed and closed her eyes. At least the itch had abated.
When she opened her eyes a moment later she was a ripe tomato swinging from a virile vine. Fssa was a thick green worm. A moment’s frantic groping assured her that Kirtn was the vine. The vine chuckled and wrapped around her, lifting her off her feet.
“You like this,” she said accusingly.
The vine tightened in agreement.
“Where are your ticklish ears?” she muttered, patting the area where his head should be. She found his ears beneath dark vine leaves. He relented and put her down, but kept a tendril curled around her wrist.
The illusionists were just ahead, appearing as exotic leafy plants, fragrant to the point of perfume. “Our scent won’t change,” said i’sNara. “Will you be able to recognize it?”
“Yes.” Kirtn’s voice was confident. A major portion of a Bre’n’s fine palate was in the olfactory discrimination.
“Good. We’ll try not to change too often, but we’re going to go on random memory, keeping only the scent. It’s a way of resting,” explained f’lTiri. “Controlling the veil was hard work.”
“Won’t projecting our disguises tire you out?” asked Rheba.
“Hardly. Eyes only, no other senses involved. Elementary. Besides, Ara’s house isn’t far from the veil.”
The two plants moved down the street. Their gait was erratic and their shadows tended to show legs instead of stems. The illusionists were too tired to worry about anything more complex than first appearances.
The house they stopped in front of looked like a jungle tree. F’lTiri edged forward, spoke to an orchid, and waited. After what seemed a long time the greenery shifted and revealed a cucumber lounging beneath a canopy of cool leaves.
“Ara?” said f’lTiri curtly.
The cucumber blurred and reformed. It was rotten now, oozing pestilence. “She’s gone.”
“Where.”
The cucumber puddled and stank. “The only wall in Yaocoon, and the only gate.”
The leaves bent down and mopped up cucumber residue. The tree closed on itself. F’lTiri did not talk until they were well away from the unfriendly house.
“What happened?” asked Kirtn.
“Ara doesn’t live there anymore.”
Kirtn’s whistle was shrill enough to make nearby flowers shrivel. “I don’t think that cucumber was glad to see you in any shape or form.”
“No, but he would have been glad to see Ara rot. He was afraid.”
“Why? Did he recognize you?”
“I doubt it. Ara must be involved in the rebellion.” F’lTiri spoke in Universal, as though he feared eavesdroppers.
“Where do we go now?” asked Rheba.
“To the wall.”
Rheba rubbed her eyes but could not reach the itch that was tormenting her again. The feeling of being followed, of being exhorted to do something in an unknown, unheard language was like a pressure squeezing her eyes. She turned around, knowing she would see nothing but unable to stop herself.
Far down the street, a grove of trees marched silently toward them.
“Kirtn!”
The Bre’n spun, hearing the warning in her voice. He felt her wrist burn with sudden power beneath his hand. “I see them,” he said. “Illusion?”
“I wish. Fssa?”
Concave sensors whirled. Energy pulsed soundlessly, returned. “Men.”
“Certain?”
The snake’s head became a frilled cone, then a spiral, then a sunburst. “Men,” he said again, in unambiguous Senyas.
Rheba and Kirtn hurried until they were right behind the illusionists. “We’re being followed.”
The plants did not seem to change, but Rheba clearly heard f’lTiri’s gasp.
“They’re all alike!” His tone made it clear that sameness was more astonishing than any possible manifestation of the illusionist’s art. Then, “They might not be after us.”
Fssa made a flatulent sound. Fourth People’s capacity for wishful thinking was ridiculous when it was not dangerous.
“How far is the wall?” said Kirtn, lengthening his stride.
“How fast can you run?” retorted the Yhelle.
Exotic plants, vine, and tomato with green worm clinging sprinted down the street.
As she ran, Rheba wove sunlight into fire until she was incandescent. Kirtn’s hand on her wrist soothed and steadied her, letting her take in more and more energy, giving her a depth and fineness of control that was impossible without him. Each member of an akhenet pair could stand alone, but together they were much more than two.
Fssa became eyes in the back of her head. His sensors focused on the not-trees. “Confusion,” he whistled. “They’re bending around like grass in a wind. They’re arguing whether to grab you here or wait for—here they come!”
The illusionists turned right, leaped an invisible barrier, and scrambled up a hill. Kirtn and Rheba duplicated the motions exactly, even when there seemed to be no reason for twisting, turning or leaping.
The trees followed.
“They’re getting closer,” said Fssa calmly.
“Are they carrying weapons?” panted Rheba.
“Clubs, mostly. A few metal fists.”
“Lightguns?” she asked hopefully. She had discovered on Onan that she could take the output of a lightgun and reflect it back on its user. Learning that particular trick had burned and nearly blinded her, but it had wiped out the Equality Rangers who were pursuing them.
“No lightguns.”
They ducked beneath a bridge, waded through a real stream and clawed their way up the opposite bank? Along the top of the bank ran a high steel wall. The illusionists sprinted parallel to the wall, trailing their fingers along it. Suddenly they stopped.
“Here!” called i’sNara, beating her palms in a staccato rhythm against the wall. F’lTiri joined her, leaves blurring into hands as he pounded on steel.
Kirtn and Rheba pressed their backs to the wall and turned to face their pursuers. Trees blurred and became men scrambling under the bridge and across the stream.
The pursuers were indeed all alike, even when they appeared as men. Gray clothes, gray gloves, gray clubs. Only their eyes were alive, pale as crystals in gaunt skulls. They came up the slope in a silent, ragged line. As one they began to close in on the four people trapped against the high wall.
The illusionists beat on the steel dividing them from safety. They had man
aged to find “the only wall in Yaocoon.”
But where was the gate?
IX
Rheba sent an exploratory current of energy through the metal wall. Akhenet lines glowed as she followed the energy’s path. She sensed no circuits, no blank areas, nothing to indicate that the wall concealed or was powered by outside energy. There was a seamless sameness throughout its depth. No hint of a break, a gate. She would have to search more deeply, and much more deftly.
The illusionists beat their fists on the wall and called to their Yaocoon cousins.
“Mentor.”
The word formed as much in Rheba’s mind as on her lips. Kirtn stepped behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. His long thumbs rested lightly just behind her ears. In that position he not only could help her balance the energies she used, he could also send her into unconsciousness if she called more than they could control. He had been forced to that extreme only a few times, when she was very young.
She spared a quick glance at the advancing men. They had slowed, sure of their prey. Or perhaps it was simply that they had never seen an apparition as arresting as a dancer fully charged, burning through her illusion from within.
“Snake,” she murmured, “some sounds to go with fire.”
Fssa burned beneath his green illusion until he became an eye-hurting incandescence that was a Fssireeme at near-normal body temperature. At normal, he was a mirror of punishing brightness, a perfect reflector, but he had been that way only a few times in his memory. Fourth People planets were much colder than the huge planet/proto-star that was home to Fssireemes.
His body shifted, expanding into baffles and chambers, membranes to create sound and bellows to give voice. A high, terrible keening issued from him.
The sound was a knife in her ears. She felt Kirtn’s hands tighten on her shoulders and knew it was worse for him. Then Fssa projected his voice over the men and she understood that sound could be a weapon. Men went to their knees with their hands pressed to their ears, mouths open in a protest that could not be heard over the sound tormenting them.
Yet still they advanced, knee-walking, faces contorted.
Deft Bre’n fingers closed over Rheba’s ears, shutting out much of the sound. The pain was vicious for Kirtn, but Bre’ns were bred to withstand much worse before blacking out. If it were not so, young dancers would have no one capable of teaching them how to control the energies they could not help attracting.
Rheba set her teeth and concentrated on her own kind of weapon. She took more energy from the sunlight, braided it until it was hot enough to burn and sent it hissing across the lush grass separating them from the attackers. Flames leaped upward, bright and graceful, dancing hotly.
The attackers thought it was an illusion. The first man to stumble into the flames threw himself backward, scrambling and clawing at his clothes. Others hesitated but could not believe that they were not seeing an illusion. By twos and threes they struggled toward the twisting flames, only to be driven back by a heat they had to believe in.
Deliberately she wove more energy into fire, thickening the barrier that held the men at bay. There was little natural fuel to help her maintain it. The grass quickly burned to dirt. She could set fire to that if she had to. She could burn the whole area down to bedrock and beyond. It would be easier simply to burn the men, but in Deva’s final, searing revolution she had seen too many die by fire. Her nightmares were full of them.
She turned toward the wall. Kirtn moved with her smoothly, knowing what she needed as soon as she did. She spread her hands and pressed them against the steel wall. The energy she sent into the metal was neither mild nor testing. She poured out power until currents raced through the wall’s length, bending as the wall bent until wall and energy met on the far side.
There was a gate. It fitted so smoothly into the wall that it had not interrupted the flow of her first questing energy. She probed again, balanced by her Bre’n’s enormous strength. Discontinuities much smaller than the interface between gate and wall became as plain to her as the sun at noon. She could sense minute changes in the alloy, stresses of weather and time, tiny crustal shifts that created greater tension in one wall section. There were weaknesses she could exploit if she had to.
But first there was the gate, the built-in weakness in every wall. The illusionists had located it correctly. It was beneath their flailing hands. And it was locked.
A bump in the energy outlining the other side of the wall told her what kind of lock she had to deal with. A slidebolt. Primitive and effective. She would have preferred a sophisticated energy lock. As it was, she would have to burn through the bolt without heating the wall-gate interface so much that the metal expanded, jamming irretrievably. Burning through to the bolt would require coherent light exquisitely focused.
And time. She hoped she had enough of that. The men?
The question was not so much words in her mind as an image of trees surging toward them, trees haunted by danger and held back by flames that thinned precariously.
Kirtn’s answer was precise: Dance.
The command/invitation/exhortation went through her like a shockwave. Her hands were consumed by akhenet lines. Intricate swirls of gold ran up her arms, thinning into feathery curls across her shoulders. She was hot now, in full dance; only her Bre’n or a Fssireeme could touch her and not be burned. If she got much hotter she would risk burning herself and her Bre’n. If she got hotter than that she might kill them both. Dancers, like Bre’ns, could be dangerous to be around. There was no danger at the moment, though. She was dancing well within the abilities of herself and her Bre’n.
She stared at the wall with eyes veined with gold. She saw not steel but energy, pattern on pattern, currents swirling, dark line of interface, a bolt swelling out on the other side of the wall. Hot gold fingertips traced the line, seeing with a sight more penetrating than standard vision or touch.
Light gathered at her fingertip, startlingly green light that narrowed into a beam almost invisibly fine. The beam slid along the interface, warming it dangerously. Almost imperceptibly the interface shrank. She sensed the beam searing into the bolt, heating a thin slice of it. Before light could burn more than a tiny hole, wall and gate expanded very slightly, closing the interface.
Instantly she stopped, feeling the flash of her frustration echoed by Kirtn. To cut through the bolt and free the gate she must use more heat. Yet more heat would jam the gate against the wall before the bolt was cut apart.
Brackets.
The thought was hers, Senyas precision, picture of the brackets that inevitably must support the bolt mechanism.
She concentrated on the bolt-shape, sensing its location on either side of the cooling interface. Two brackets at least. No, four. Two on the gate and two on the wall. Strong, but thinner than the bolt—and far enough away from the interface to burn through without expanding wall and gate into an immovable mass. She hoped.
Light formed again at her fingertip, light more blue than green. It was wider than the previous beam yet still so narrow as to be more sensed than seen. The beam leaped out, bringing first red, then orange and finally white incandescence to the blank steel face of the wall. A tiny hole bored inward, a hole no wider than three hairs laid side by side.
By slow increments her fingertip moved, drawing coherent light through steel. The bottom of one bracket developed a molten line. The light moved on. Steel quickly cooled, but could not draw together again; some of its substance had been volatilized by dancer light.
One bracket was cut in two. The next bracket was closer to the interface. She had to burn less hotly. It was slow work, almost as delicate as burning through the interface had been.
Behind her, men were stirring. The Fssireeme’s cry never stopped, but the men either were deafened now or too desperate to give in to pain. Fssa could step up the power of the cry, but he could not protect his friends from the result. He could only delay, not defeat, the attackers.
Clumps of d
irt and rocks rained against her. Kirtn’s body shielded Rheba from the worst of it. Even so, there was a moment of distraction, light flaring too hot, too hard, before she was in control again. A piece of the second bracket fell away. As though at a distance she heard i’sNara scream warnings, f’lTiri or an illusion roaring by, confusing the attackers.
The third bracket also was close to the interface, attached to wall rather than gate. Part of her, the part that was Senyas rather than dancer, knew that the illusionists were being overwhelmed by a ragged surge of men. Control shifted wholly to her, smoothly yet quickly. Their outnumbered friends needed Kirtn more than she did. They needed her, too. Three people, even when one was a Bre’n, were no match for what was coming up the slope.
Rheba felt impatience seething deep inside her, a reckless urge to vaporize everything within her reach, most particularly the stubborn gate.
Suddenly the gate swung inward, opened by someone on the other side. It was so unexpected that Rheba nearly burned the Yaocoon clansmen on the other side. She stumbled through the opening, yanked out of her dance by surprise. She spun around inside the gate, still afire, and saw her Bre’n meet the first attackers. She heard their startled cries as he scooped up three men at once and flung them back on the gray uniforms charging up the slope.
I’sNara and f’lTiri rushed by Rheba, routed by a Bre’n snarl when they would have stayed to help him. Kirtn knew what his dancer would do when she saw him in danger. He wanted the illusionists out of the way of what was coming.
Rheba lifted her hands. Fire swept out from her, fire that was renewed as fast as it was spent, fire drawn from inexhaustible sunlight and condensed into flames. Her hair was all akhenet now, searing corona, sucking every available unit of energy into her.
Kirtn jumped for the gate in the instant before the firestorm broke. Fire sleeted harmlessly over his head, scorching the attackers but not killing them. There was no need to kill now. He was safe. Then she saw blood swelling over his fur and wished she had killed.