Kryn shivers, and the blue-clad guard involuntarily steps forward out of the corner, then back into the columns.
Always the guards, Martin reflects, always the trappings of power.
His eyes flicker over the communit bracelet that links her into the Regency data system, the blue leather overtunic that costs more than his total tuition, the sunpearls on her ring fingers.
He clears his throat.
“It’s not that simple, Kryn.” Not simple at all. He cannot register for further grad study, not with the Query stamped against his name.
No reason is given, and the junior registrar with whom he’d managed to get a face-to-face appointment had not known anything … nothing except a few vague thought fragments unvoiced to Martin.
… has to be dangerous … deadly … not even Darin will meet him … why me?… Darin’s ex-Marine … afraid of a student … why me?
“The real reason?” Martin had pressed.
“Imperial Security, Citizen Martel. That is all the University is told.” Her smooth dark brow and open thoughts had revealed nothing else, even when he had probed deeply. And no one wanted to talk to him.
That had been it. Someone, somehow, had fed the results of the damned paracomm tests to Imperial Security, and he was out of grad school and on his way to the mines or the Marines … the only employment open to someone who was Queried.
“Why not?” snaps Kryn, her cold words bringing him back from his thoughts into the chill of the Commannex courtyard.
“Because I can’t get a job, any job, on Karnak. With no credits, I can’t free-lance. If I could, no one could hire my services. So it’s either off Karnak, or the Marines and off Karnak shortly. That’s the choice.”
“There has to be another one.” Her voice is matter-of-fact. So are her feelings, Martin can tell, and she is as calm as her mother, the Iron Duchess, in telling a subject he is mistaken. Kryn will be Duchess, or more, Martin knows.
“If you could be so kind, Lady Kryn Kirsten, as to suggest another alternative for your obedient subject, Martin Martel, I would be most deeply obliged. Particularly since my student status will be terminated rather shortly.”
“How soon?”
“Tomorrow … today … perhaps three days. The term is over, and the minimum guarantees of the Regency toward a Free Scholar have been met.”
He looks down at the flat white of the marble pavement, then lifts his eyes to watch the dust devil in the far corner scatter a small heap of cone needles.
The sunlight floods abruptly into the courtyard.
“The climatizers succeed again,” the ex-Scholar remarks, “bringing light into darkness, except for a few of us.”
“Martin!”
He realizes that she wants to stamp her foot but refrains because the action would be unladylike.
He chuckles, and the low sound eddies through the columns. The guard in the shadows, now that there are shadows with the full winter sunlight beaming down, edges forward.
“What will you do?” Her question comes almost as a dismissal, an acceptance.
“I don’t look forward to spending five years in the ore mines … and I don’t have the heroic build of the successful Imperial Marine. So I’m somewhat limited.”
“You aren’t answering the question.”
“I know. You don’t want to hear the answer.”
“You could leave the Empire…”
“I could. If I had the creds for passage. But no one can hire me to pay my way, except an outsider, and outsiders aren’t allowed to downport here. And I don’t have passage to the orbitport.”
“I could help.”
“I’ve already made arrangements.”
“You didn’t!”
“The Brotherhood is looking for comm specialists, so…”
“But”—her voice sharpens—“that’s treason.”
“Not unless the Regent changes the law.”
He ought to. Brotherhood is nothing but trouble.
“Perhaps he will,” Martin supplies the follow-on to her thought. “But they do pay, and will clear me from Imperial space, if necessary.”
“Why?”
“Because, Lady Kryn Kirsten,” Martin answers the question she meant, “I came off the dole, and I will not spend five years at slave labor in the hope that a black mark will be lifted from my name.”
“May be Da—, the Duke, I mean, could take care of that.”
Martin refrains from trying to read her thoughts.
“I doubt that even the Duke could remove the Prince Regent’s Query. And why would he? For a penniless scholar who’s attracted to the very daughter he’s planning to marry into the Royal Family?”
“Martin Martel! That’s totally uncalled for.” How did he know? Never said … paracomm?
“Realistic,” he says in a clipped tone, trying to allay her suspicions. “Duke of Kirsten holds the most powerful House on Karnak next to the Regent. What else?”
So obvious, so obvious even to poor sweet Martin.
He cannot keep the wince from his face.
“Martin … what, how do you know?” He reads thoughts, I know he does. How long? What does he really know?
“Nothing that the gossip tabs haven’t already spread. Nothing every student in the Commannex hasn’t speculated.”
Sweat, dampness, runs down Martin’s back, with the perception that the guard is drawing his stunner, edging the setting beyond the stun range toward lethal.
Martin concentrates on the energy flows in the stunner, puzzling how to divert them, to distract Kryn from her iron-cold purpose, to just leave without raising any more fear and suspicion.
Aware of his sleeve wiping perspiration off his forehead, strange itself in the courtyard chill, he stammers.
“Nothing … nothing more to be said, Lady Kryn, time to depart … fulfill my contract to the Brotherhood … and then if you hear of a newsie named Martel on a far planet … think about corel.”
No … no! Treason? Corel. Romance and flowers to the last. But a Duchess is as a Duchess does.
Her hands touch the stud on her wide belt, the stud that screams “emergency” to the guard. The tight-faced man in blue aims the stunner.
Zinnnng! The strum of the weapon fills the courtyard.
“I wish you hadn’t, Kryn. Wish you hadn’t,” mumbles Martin, knowing that he has bent the focus of the beam around him, knowing that such is impossible.
The guard knows it also, looks stupidly down at the stunner, then raises it again, only to find that the blackclad student has disappeared, and that tears stream down the cheeks of the Lady Kryn Kirsten.
Along the courtyard wall, behind the black marble bench, lit by the slanting ray of the afternoon sun, the dust devil restacks the pile of cone needles.
iv
AURORE
No shadows has the noon; no darkness has the night,
And no man wears a shade in that eternal light.
The night has not a star; the sky has not a sun,
Nor is there dusk nor dawn to which a man can run.
No breakers crash at night, nor fall on sand unlit.
No lightning flares the dark where coming years might fit.
No dawn will break like thunder; no eve will crash like surf.
No shadows seep from tombs to mark its golden turf.
And if that’s so, then why does darkness stalk the sky,
And only one god cast a shade to those who die,
And only one god cast a shade for those who die?
v
The overhead is pale yellow. The color is the first thing he notices. That, and that he is on his back, stretched out on a railed bed of some sort.
The second observation is that he wears a loose yellow robe, nothing more, that is hitched up close to his knees.
There is no pillow, no sheeting, just a yielding surface on which he lies. He lifts his head, which aches with the pain he associates with stunners. Kryn’s guard had missed, but not Boreas.
“You’d think you’d learn, Martin,” he mutters.
You’d think you’d learn, Martel.
He scans the room. No one else is present. The portal is shut. A single red light on the panel next to the portal is lit. The unlit light, he presumes, is green.
The railing lowers with the touch of a lever, and Martin swings his legs over the edge and eases himself into a sitting position. Rubbing his forehead with his left hand, he continues the survey of his quarters.
“Wonder if I’m being monitored.”
Wonder if I’m being monitored.
Besides the bed, there are two chairs, a low table rising out of the flooring between them, a higher bedside table, an opaqued window screen, and a closet. The sliding doors of the wardrobe/closet are half open, and Martin can see that his few belongings have been laid out on the shelves or hung up. The travelbag is folded flat on the top shelf.
He shakes his head, winces at the additional pain the movement generates, and studies the room silently.
No speakers, no inconsistencies in the walls that could conceal something.
As he lowers himself to the floor the room wavers in front of his eyes.
“Not again!” He recalls the paratest that led to his confinement, that test which seems so distant, even though just days past.
Not again! The echo pounds into his skull.
Slow step by slow step, he covers the meter or so from his bed to the wardrobe, putting each foot down carefully, unsure of his perceptions and his footing. By the time he puts out a hand to lean on the wall edge of the wardrobe, he is dripping sweat.
He shivers.
The robe, which had felt almost silky when he awoke, grits against his skin like sandpaper. Martin fingers the cuff, but the material still feels smooth to his fingertips.
He shivers again, but ignores the chill to concentrate on the personal belongings laid out on the chest-level recessed wardrobe shelf.
Two items leap to his eye. The first is the solidio cube of Kryn, which glows with a new inner light.
The second is the Regent’s Scholar belt clasp. Before, it had been a dull maroon. Now it glowers at him with a crimson malevolence.
One hand against the wall, still propping himself up, the former scholar and present fugitive/prisoner checks the garments. The robes provided by the Brotherhood have all been replaced with simple pale yellow tunics and trousers, three sets, and two new pairs of soft brown formboots lie on the floor.
After wiping his forehead with the back of his cuff, still looking silky and feeling gritty, he checks through the underclothes and folded personal items.
Most are missing … anything that might have linked him to the Brotherhood or to his time as a Regent’s Scholar.
“But why leave the clasp?”
But why leave the clasp?
… leave the clasp …
… leave the clasp …
The room twists upside down, then right-side up, then upside down.
Martin closes his eyes. The brochure he’d been studying before Boreas had stunned him had mentioned disorientation. But this wasn’t disorientation. It verges on torture.
He opens his right eye. The room is right-side up. He opens his left eye, and the room jumps to the left and stays in the same place, all at once, so that Martin sees doubled images.
He concentrates on fixing the images into one, just that, keeping his visions of things firmly in place. The images merge.
The sweat streams from his forehead again.
Suddenly the floor looms in front of his face, and pain like fire screams from his nose. And darkness …
The overhead is still pale yellow, and his head still aches. So do his nose and a spot on his forearm.
Again he is flat on his back on that same pallet, in the same hospital, if that is what it is.
“Flame!” he mutters without moving his head.
Flame!
He closes his eyes and tries to think.
He must be on Aurore. So why is it so painful? Aurore is a vacation spot, a wonderful place to visit, where sensuality has its special delights and where some people gain extra powers. So why is one Martin Martel having such difficulty?
Too aware! The idea flashes into his thoughts. For whatever reason, his body is more sensitive to the environment.
Eyes still closed, he begins to let his thoughts, his perceptions, check out his body, starting with his toes, trying somehow to dampen the ultrasensitivity, to dull that edge, to convince himself that such perceptions should be voluntary, not involuntary.
He can feel the sweat again pour down his forehead, scented with fear, fear that he will not be able to regain control of his own body.
Others do it, he thinks, suppressing the urge to talk aloud.
The headache and the soreness in his nose and neck retreat. Martin opens his eyes. The room is a shade darker now, and yet the light levels from the walls have not changed, he realizes.
He lifts his head slowly, turns on his side, and fingers the rail release. After a time, he again sits up, legs dangling over the edge of the bed, heels touching the cold metal of the lowered rail.
He wills his vision to lighten the room. Nothing happens.
He relaxes the iron control on his perceptions.
The room wavers; his back itches; the soreness across the bridge of his nose throbs; the light intensifies.
Martin clamps down on his control.
Not a matter of will, but of control. Of perception.
He experiments, trying to isolate one sense after another, until the room begins to waver. He lies down, lets himself drift into a sweating sleep.
He dreams. Knows he dreams.
He is on a narrow path, except there are no edges, no walls, and the path arcs through golden skies. In front of him is Kryn. Her golden eyes are cold, and her mouth is tight-lipped.
Martin does not care, and yet he does. He takes a step toward Kryn, and another one. With each step he takes, she is farther away, though she has not moved.
Soon he is running toward her, and she dwindles into the distance.…
He sleeps and, presently, dreams. Again.
Martin watches a mountain spire, covered with ice, which thrusts up from a floor of fleece-white clouds. A part of his mind insists that he watches a meteorological impossibility, but he watches.
In the thin air above the peak, from nowhere appears a black cloud, modeled after the Minotaur. Across from the bull-cloud stands a god, male, heroic, clad in sandals and a short tunic. His crown is made of sunbeams, and it hurts Martin’s eyes to look at his perfect face.
Between the two arrives another, a full-bearded barbarian who carries a gray stone hammer, red-haired, bulky, fur cape flowing back over his shoulders. He sports leg greaves and a breastplate, both of bronze.
Above the peak hovers another figure, which is present, but not. Martin strains to see, and after a time penetrates the ghostly details. She is slender, golden-haired, golden-eyed, and glitters. Beyond these details he cannot see, and his attention is distracted by the appearance of another god, also ghostly.
Where the goddess is golden, the latecomer is black-shadowed.
Unwanted, as well, because the three older golds strike. The barbarian throws his hammer; the sun-god Apollo casts a light spear; and the bull-god sends forth a black mist of menace.
Precog? questions someone, somewhere.
Perhaps.
Martin loses his dream, drops into darkness …
… and wakes screaming!
The scream dies as he moves his head, discovers he is on his side, holding the railing of the bed. Discovers his fingers are sore. He releases his grasp, and knows he should be surprised. He is not.
The metal is crushed, with eight finger impressions and two thumb holes clearly visible.
Martin scrambles to his knees, ignoring the wavering effect, to study his handiwork. He grabs the railing in a new place, farther toward the foot of the bed, squeezes with all th
e force he can muster.
His palms and fingers protest, but the metal does not yield. He lets go. Tears well up, sorrow and frustration.
“Mad, I’m mad. Crazier than Faroh.”
Mad, I’m mad, mad, mad. Crazier, crazier, than, than, Faroh, Faroh.
He closes his eyes, presses balled fists against them to shut out the double echo, and the incredible flare of light that accompanies it.
“You’ll get used to it,” a calm voice comments.
Martin hops around on his knees, feels awkward, embarrassed, and almost pitches over the side of the bed as the nausea strikes him in the pit of his stomach.
The glare dies with the closing of the portal.
The speaker looks like the sun-god of his dreams, with short and curly blond hair, even features, cleft chin, piercing green eyes, heroic body structure, wide shoulders and narrow waist, under a gold tunic and trousers.
Martin nods for the man to continue.
“You’re going to have more trouble than the others. There are two reasons for that. The first is that you’re an untrained, full-range esper, and fully masked. The second is that you have, shall we say, a certain potential.”
The golden man clears his throat, and even that sounds oddly musical, matching the light baritone of his clear voice.
“During the times ahead, for a while you’ll know you’re going mad, Martel. At times you will be. You have a great deal to learn. A great deal.”
The speech bothers Martin, but he cannot pin down why.
“Who are you?”
Who are you?
Martin winces.
“You can either sync your thoughts to your speech or put a damper on them to eliminate the echo. The resonance makes any long conversations impossible, not to mention the headaches, until you get your thoughts under control. That’s a function of the field. It tends to amplify stray thoughts and reflect them. Really only a nuisance, but without controls you could upset the norms and the tourists pretty strongly.”
Norms? Dampers? Field? And what about the glare from outside?
Haze and the Hammer of Darkness Page 31