Korval's Game

by Sharon Lee

“But Ren Zel is not of Clan Korval,” he finished, knowing the necessities as well as she. “Gordy of course is of Korval, and also possesses all of nineteen Standard years. Too young by a year or so to stand command of a starship orbiting a world enduring post-war conditions.”

  “True,” she said, her voice soft across the distance that separated them. “And you cannot leave Miri and Val Con while they are so ill.”

  “Miri is out of the ’doc,” he said, suddenly recalling that he had not told her that. “Weak as a kitten, of course. Val Con . . .” His throat closed and he shook his head, as if she could see him.

  “The techs still believe he’ll be . . . impaired?”

  “Impaired.” He grinned without humor. “Yes, they do believe that, and quite ill-natured I find them for it, if you will have the truth.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she said gently. “I—when he is out of the ’doc and an evaluation is made, perhaps—”

  Shockingly, the portacomm on his belt buzzed. Shan jumped, swore, and thumbed the receive.

  “One moment, Priscilla—yos’Galan,” he snapped into the portable.

  “Shan—Lord yos’Galan—it is Alys Tiazan. I am in the recovery room with Miri my cousin and two of the Clutch who are her brothers.”

  Yes, of course, Shan thought. The situation had only lacked eight foot turtles.

  “How delightful for us, to be sure. I shall be down directly to make—”

  “Their Wisdoms,” Alys interrupted, with a refreshing lack of deference for his station; “Their Wisdoms say that the songs of the machines are harming my cousin, your sister. They say that the autodoc may be preventing Val—preventing Lord yos’Phelium—from healing completely. The med tech is—” she paused, apparently decided that he could judge the med tech’s state of mind for himself, and finished in a rush. “Cousin Miri says to get you down here.” The last four words were in Terran, pronounced in tones so authentically Miri-like that Shan grinned, even as his heart trembled.

  “One moment,” he said to Alys, flicking the ‘mute’ toggle. He glanced at the desk unit. “Priscilla?”

  Her answer came slowly. “It is possible,” she said, “that the rhythm of the machinery is interfering with total healing. It has been known to happen. Rarely.” She was silent, then burst out. “Who knows what may harm them? They are linked, heart and mind, by that—edifice!—no more simple humans than—than the Clutch are. No,” she corrected herself, more calmly. “More human than the Clutch are. And the Clutch may see truly—for their own kind.”

  “Then it appears my task has been laid out for me,” Shan said and flicked the portable on.

  “Please allow my sister to know that I am on my way to her side,” he told Alys Tiazan. “Ask her, as she loves me, to stay her hand from the med tech until I arrive.”

  There was a small snort, as if Alys had half-strangled a laugh, then a demure, “I will so inform my cousin, sir.” The line cleared.

  “Priscilla, my love . . .”

  “Until soon, Shan.”

  “Until soon. May your Goddess send it very soon.”

  He thought he heard a soft sigh before the connection light went out. Sighing himself, he stood, and left the room at brisk walk.

  A short time later, he turned smartly into the hallway containing Miri’s room, and nodded to the guard on duty.

  “I am summoned.”

  The merc shook his head as he turned to put his hand against the plate. “They call this rest? She might as well hire a band and call it a party.”

  The door slid open and the guard waved an impatient hand. Shan strolled across the threshold and—paused.

  Immediately before him, two very tall, green persons wearing a truly impressive quantity of tilework across their shoulders and down their backs, confronted an average-sized Liaden woman—which is to say, her nose was not quite level with the equator of the shorter tile-bearing person. That the woman was in high temper was obvious even without the abrasion of her passion against his Healer sense. The Turtles—were invisible to his Healer sight, in contrast to the rather irrefutable physical evidence. Shan glanced aside, locating Alys Tiazan, strategically placed between the med tech and the bed in which Miri wilted against an oppression of pillows, long red hair snarled across one shoulder, eyes closed in a face as white as salt.

  Ignoring the med tech’s anger, Shan focused on Miri, catching the shine of mayhem along her pattern, and a fear bordering on terror.

  “Cousin Miri,” Alys said. “Lord yos’Galan is here.”

  The woman in the bed opened fierce gray eyes and gave him a ragged grin.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I had to shave.”

  The grin widened, briefly, then one hand wavered more or less horizontal, index finger almost pointing at the taller of the two green persons.

  “Edger,” she said, hoarsely. The finger moved perhaps the width of a thought. “Sheather.” Her hand fell back to the coverlet. “This is Val Con’s brother, Shan yos’Galan. He’s a Healer. Tell him what you told me.”

  “What they told you,” the med tech snapped in a mode perilously close to superior to inferior, “is arrant nonsense! The machines are needful! Your heartbeat must be monitored! Your air must be filtered! Your blood pressure and body temperature must be monitored! Shut down the machines and risk doing yourself needless, preventable harm, Lady. To even think of removing your lifemate, damaged as he is, from the catastrophe unit . . .”

  “Quiet.”

  One word, quavering on the broken edge of a whisper—terrifying from a woman who could make herself heard amidst the pandemonium of a battlefield.

  “ . . . is to kill him outright!” the med tech continued unabated. “These—persons!—are not of Erob’s house medical staff! They—”

  “Silence!” Shan snarled, in all the force of Command. The tech’s anger flared and he countered it, barely heeding what he did; merely casting out a glamour of cooling, like a handful of snowflakes. The med tech fell silent, passion melting, bowed and went over to sit in a chair.

  “Very good.” He transferred his attention to the turtles, who were yet standing patiently, watching him out of yellow cat eyes.

  “Shan yos’Galan,” the turtle on the right—Edger, Shan remembered—boomed in what was recognizably the Liaden High Tongue, though exactly which mode was a bit difficult to determine at this volume. “It is a joy to speak with the brother of my brother.”

  “It is an honor to meet one of whom one’s kin has spoken, often and with affection,” he responded in the ritual stiffness of the High Tongue, in the mode of meeting the kin of kin.

  “Allow me, also,” said the turtle named Sheather, in Terran, “to express my joy at making your acquaintance, Shan yos’Galan.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you, as well,” Shan replied in the same tongue. He glanced over to the bed, saw Miri rigid against her pillows; once again caught the edge of her fear against his Healer sense.

  “Please forgive me if I force the topic too quickly,” he said to the turtles, in blessedly quick, modeless Terran, “but I cannot help but see my sister’s distress. The med tech seems to believe that you would have her—and my brother as well—separated from the healing units.”

  “These devices are all in discord!” cried the turtle named Sheather. “They interfere with the truesong of my sister’s self. We hear that our brother is more grievously damaged still. I fear—in my heart, I fear—that the machine which imprisons him, helpless and unable to communicate his own needs, may also slay him.”

  Shan frowned. “And yet our sister has come successfully out of a similar machine, healed of her injuries and only needing to regain her strength. Many—” What had Val Con said the Clutch called the family of humankind—aha! “Many of the Clans of Men do exactly that, every Standard Year. It is how we heal ourselves of physical wounds.”

  “Yet, as my younger brother will have it, we hear discord emanate from yon devices and know too well the damage that
may be done. Our sister is surrounded by those things which leach her strength, and make her path to full vibrancy into a perilous journey, uncertain of a happy outcome.” Edger blinked his eyes solemnly. “Our sister tells us that you are one who may see into the fabric of others, and who may reweave somewhat that which has become unwoven.”

  “I am a Healer,” Shan said slowly. “But I have no skill in mending physical hurts—only common first aid, which this med tech will trump, without a single machine to aid her.”

  “It is your skill in seeing that we would harness, for the lives of our sister and our brother,” said Sheather. “We have already observed the skill with which you silenced the medical technician and soothed her anger before she became a danger to herself.”

  He had what? Shan looked over to the med tech, sitting peacefully in her chair. Carefully, he extended his regard and brushed her pattern, encountering an overlay of cool patience, beneath which the rest of the woman’s . . . essence . . . appeared to slumber.

  Oh, gods, he thought in consternation. Shan, you idiot, what have you done?

  “I will have to confess,” he said, looking up into Sheather’s enormous eyes, “that I am not entirely certain that . . . whatever . . . I’ve done to this person has been in her . . . best care.”

  Edger turned his massive head and—sang, one high, whispery note that was gone before Shan could quite—

  “She takes no harm. She reposes in calmness and heals herself of her distress. It is well done,” Edger stated.

  “They said,” Miri rasped from the bed, “that they could do a demo, like, and let you decide if what they thought was best would kill us or not.”

  He looked at her. “I’m to decide? How delightful for me! Val Con did mention to you that I’m his heir, didn’t he? This is the perfect opportunity for me to murder you both and grasp Korval for myself.”

  “Sure it is,” Miri said, agreeably. “Look, whyn’t you turn off the monitors for a couple minutes while the tech’s having her nap, and let Edger sing you a couple bars, OK?”

  “My sister’s plan has merit,” Sheather said.

  Miri turned her head on the pillow and addressed Alys, her voice almost steady in the mode between kin. “Cousin, you are wanted elsewhere. What we undertake now is Korval’s affair, and nothing that should trouble the sleep of one who belongs to Erob.”

  For a moment it seemed that Alys would protest, then she bowed, as kin, to the woman in the bed—“Cousin Miri”—and as housechild to the turtles and Shan alike—“Wisdoms. Lord yos’Galan.”—before walking away, with chilly dignity, and letting herself out into the hall.

  Shan met Miri’s eyes down the room. “You’re certain you want to try this?”

  She gave him a lopsided grin. “Hate to break it to you, but I’ve breathed unfiltered air before and didn’t take no lasting harm.”

  He sighed. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.” He moved over to the wall and threw the first switch, then the other five in quick succession. Across the room, the med tech sat, dream-eyed, in her chair.

  The last unnatural hum faded from the air and the room filled up with quiet. Sheather filled his lungs, tasting the various scents on the confined air, soothed by the absence of discord. His work at the wall of instruments completed, Shan yos’Galan returned to them, his hair pale as the light of the homeworld’s lesser moon; his eyes the color of the substance Men named silver.

  “Very well,” he said, his voice pleasing in its conservation of power. “I have a subject for a test, if you are willing, sirs.”

  One’s brother blinked down at the man, tasting, Sheather was certain, of his power and his courage. “Say on, Shan yos’Galan.”

  The white-haired man bent and touched his right knee lightly. “I very foolishly wrenched my knee—it’s too trivial a thing for the ’doc, but I will confess that it does irritate one.” He straightened and looked from one to the other of them with his sightful silver eyes. “Is this the sort of thing one of you might put right, while I watch?”

  One’s elder brother signed that he would undertake this minor bit of healing. Thus released, Sheather moved away down the room, to stand by the bedside of his sister, Miri Robertson.

  “Understand, this will be a very small thing, in comparison to what we propose on behalf of our brother and sister,” Edger said.

  “I understand perfectly, sir. What we wish to prove here is the concept. If my leg shatters under your care, it is an inconvenience, quickly put right by some time in the ’doc, and we have our answer without risk to either our brother or our sister, both of whom are as precious to me as I know they are to you.” He paused and tipped his head. “I hope you won’t be offended by my screams, if it should happen to occur that my leg does shatter.”

  “I believe you will not find it necessary to scream, Shan yos’Galan,” Edger said solemnly. “I ask you now to open your eyes and hold yourself to silence.”

  Shan yos’Galan straightened and closed his outer eyes. Sheather heard the song of his power intensify even as Edger opened his mouth and sang the two notes required.

  ***

  SHAN COMPOSED himself and dropped his inner shields, watching with Healer’s eyes.

  At this exposure, the turtles stood revealed as systems of all but intolerable complexity, informed by a method entirely outside of his understanding, stretching far beyond his ability to read, yet tantalizingly familiar, as if . . .

  All at once he had it: Himself, just home from Healer Hall and quite vain of his new-trained powers, striding up to Korval’s Tree, the redoubtable Jelaza Kazone, and flinging his shields down like a dare.

  Immediately, he had been swept into a long, slow, greenness that spiraled on—forever, or so it seemed to his shortsighted eyes. Every turn of the spiral was unique, rich with nuance and surprise. Ensorcelled, Shan hung, and watched, and was delighted—until Val Con knocked him into the sodden grass, and lay across his chest, shouting in his ear that it was “ . . . raining, and our mother has been looking for you everywhere!”

  Val Con.

  Shan took another breath, deliberately imposing calm, sternly refusing the impulse to enclose himself in puny protections. This was for Val Con’s life; he dared not make an error—of any kind. His knee ached, a little; Healer eyes saw the irritation as an angry red glow. He allowed the minor pain to remain within his consciousness.

  Faintly, a note sounded. He heard it as the warm wash of rain against his naked skin; saw it as a bell tone, attenuating . . . The first note was joined, complimented, enlarged, by a second, inspiring the gentle shower to rain in earnest as the tone coalesced into a ball that grew dense, denser, dense to the point of implosion . . .

  The music was ended. His knee was pain-free. A quick scan showed an entire absence of the angry glow of injury that had surrounded it.

  Shan opened his eyes.

  “Well?” Miri rasped.

  He turned to look at her.

  “Perfectly well,” he said, and took a harder breath, deliberately strengthening his hold on the physical world. Slowly, he brought his protections up; and found himself saddened to lose sight of the turtles’ vast incomprehensiveness.

  If they can heal Val Con of the effects of the poison. If he can walk. If he can fly . . . he thought exuberantly; and then, more soberly. If it fails, we may lose both.

  He stepped to the bed and bent down to take Miri’s thin, cold hand between two of his.

  “I give you the judgment of your thodelm, Korval,” he said, in the mode used when addressing one’s delm.

  She blinked. “I ain’t Korval.”

  “The Code teaches us that lifemates are one melant’i in two bodies. Val Con is nadelm—Korval-in-future. You are true lifemates, bound by the soul. My own father died of his lifemate’s death-wound. You speak for both of your lives in this—and for Korval entire.”

  She paused, her eyes losing a little focus, as if she consulted her memory of the Code, which was ridicul—

  Her gaze
sharpened. “It is,” she said, her voice pure and firm in the High Tongue, “as you have said. I decide as Korval in this, for the good of Korval. Let Thodelm yos’Galan render his judgment.”

  “I believe it to be—the best gamble for the clan, to allow these your brothers to attempt their peculiar form of healing. I say gamble. I have heard the judgment of the medical technicians; in best case, my brother will emerge from the ’doc able to care for himself, to speak, to reason, and to walk, for some limited distances. Your brothers offer a potential for a greater win—and a greater loss.

  “I may not convey what I have seen, just now. However, as a Healer, I approve both the method and the results.” He paused, then added in Terran.

  “It could work.”

  She was utterly still for a moment, limp and white-faced against the pillows, then nodded.

  “That’s a go, then,” she said in Terran.

  Shan released her hand and straightened. “As Korval wishes.”

  “It is therefore decided,” Edger proclaimed, and fixed Sheather in his eye. “This my brother will remain and sing our sister into harmony. Shan yos’Galan and I will make haste to the side of our brother and discover us the song we must craft for his whole good health.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Miri said, and gave Shan another of her ragged, heart-stopping grins. “Take the med tech with you, and drop her someplace to sleep it off, OK? I don’t want her waking up halfway through the proceedings and getting her nose outta joint all over again.”

  DAY 50

  Standard Year 1393

  Liad Department of Interior

  Command Headquarters

  COMMANDER OF AGENTS closed the file and leaned back in his chair.

  He was not one to indulge optimism out of season; however, he allowed the plans lain for Clan Korval’s confoundment to be . . . adequate.

  Of necessity, the plans of action were several, for Korval presented several fronts to the offense.

  There was, first, the on-going effort to recover Val Con yos’Phelium, rogue agent and Korval’s delm-to-be. A breakthrough had been made on this front, in the form of a gene-match program run against the supposed “Terran mercenary,” Miri Robertson. The odds that yos’Phelium was on Lytaxin, sheltering with Korval’s oldest ally, Clan Erob, now approached certainty. Recent reports of Yxtrang activity near or on the planet, followed by a rumor of hurried retreat, and other rumors of a strangely behaving vessel seemingly carved from rock—these reports only added weight to the prediction of the odds.