“You have much to answer for,” Ampris said, growling in her throat.
A knock came on the door. Backing her ears, she glared at Quiesl as he came inside.
He saw the crystal in her hand, saw her flattened ears, and sighed. “You are finished, then.”
“Yes.”
“It is very late. Time for you to sleep.”
She snarled. “No, Quiesl, it is time for me to think.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No, now.”
He took the crystal from her hand and put the viewer aside. “Bish left this sealed for you. He believed you would return to learn more.”
“And now I know the truth,” she said bleakly. “It is worse than I imagined.”
“It happened long, long ago,” he replied. “Such a great wrong cannot be righted immediately. There is time enough—”
“No,” she said sharply, striking the blanket with her fist. “For every whip laid across an abiru back, there is not enough time. For every ration of food withheld from a starving cub, there is not enough time. For every Viis injustice—”
“Perhaps I should be recording this speech as the first new message of the revived Freedom Network,” Quiesl broke in gently.
Despite her outrage, she gave him a reluctant smile and sank back against her pillows. “Perhaps,” she agreed. “You said you had them recorded. Can you persuade someone at the station to broadcast them?”
“Yes.”
Ampris blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to answer so readily.
“Do I have your permission?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes, of course. The Viis have no legal right to keep us enslaved, Quiesl.”
“No, Ampris,” he agreed. “No legal right at all. The Myals, however, sold themselves into bondage in their greed for knowledge. We have been better treated than your people, but we were fools just the same.”
“They can’t hold us if we resist,” Ampris said. “We are stronger. There are more of us. Do you realize how foolish and lazy the Viis are? They can’t fix anything, and yet I have seen manuals and technical diagrams here that would solve so many problems. Why do they—”
“Later,” he said, smiling at her while his tail rose behind his head and waved gently back and forth. “You’ve had enough excitement. Time to sleep.”
She lay down and let him change her medication patches. He turned off the lamp and went out, closing the door. But Ampris did not sleep. Her mind kept turning busily.
The Aaroun homeworld had been destroyed, but according to the account she’d read the treaty’s wording had been vague and open. It didn’t actually mention Sargas III by name. That meant the Aarouns could substitute another planet for their homeworld, and “return” to that planet, without violating the terms of the treaty.
But even as the thought crossed her mind, she was laughing grimly at herself. Oh, yes, honesty must be a genetic trait of the Aaroun blood, she thought. For centuries the Viis had oppressed and enslaved them, for centuries the terms of the Osoa Treaty had been broken, yet here she lay, trying to think of a way to meet its terms.
Snorting, she turned her thoughts instead to Ruu-113, a fabled planet that upon its discovery had been hailed as a promised land for the Viis. Ruu-113 was to said to be almost identical to what Viisymel itself once was, before its inhabitants exploited and ruined it. But Ruu-113 could not save the Viis from their poisoned, dying homeworld, for it was unreachable except through a failed jump gate. How ironic that the Viis had first poisoned the Aaroun homeworld. and had now poisoned their own.
Ampris felt no sympathy for the Viis plight. She remembered that the Zrheli engineers on the space station Shrazhak Ohr were rumored to have sabotaged the jump gate to Ruu-113. They guarded that secret still, and the Viis could not repair the damage themselves.
Drawing her blanket up over her shoulders, Ampris smiled grimly to herself and felt a renewed sense of purpose. For too long she had let the cause of freedom slide, believing it to be hopeless.
Now she was ashamed of herself. The Aarouns had legality on their side. Freeing them from slavery was no longer about simple rebellion. It was about seeing justice done It was time to get to work doing just that.
The imperial lodge in the Kreige mal-Hahfra Mountains was old and quaint and boring. Israi had loved it as a chune, but as an adult she saw its flaws and structural problems. The place was showing its age rather badly, more so with each successive year. It needed repair, and one wing was no longer usable. There was no money in the treasury to repair it, even if Israi had been interested in doing so. She knew from watching her father’s efforts that restoration meant pouring vast amounts of money into a bottomless hole. Since she’d first come to rule a bankrupt empire and found even her personal fortune to be less than half of what she’d expected, she had refused to spend a ducat on fixing any building.
As a vacation, especially when she’d been looking forward to the very decadent delights of Mynchepop, her sojourn here in the old-fashioned lodge was less than satisfying. There was nothing to do. The season was wrong for hunting, and although the mountains were cooler than Vir, they were not cool enough. The courtiers were also bored and bickered among themselves in numerous petty feuds. She wished she’d banished each of them to their country estates.
The new sri-Kaa did not travel well. He cried almost incessantly and would not eat. Israi could not bear to have the hatchling near her.
Bad news from the war filtered in constantly with the arrival of every dispatch.
Israi was reclining on a low, gilded couch, her musicians plinking out a doleful tune, when the heralds stirred and the door was opened for the latest messenger from Vir.
He came striding in, a tall handsome male with a magnificent green rill and clear yellow eyes. The dispatch box, sealed behind a force shield, floated beside him on the security tether attached to his wrist.
“Majesty—”
Israi could stand no more of it. She stood up and gestured for silence. The murmuring of her courtiers stopped, and the musicians ceased to play. The messenger halted in his tracks, the dispatch box floating beside him.
“No,” Israi said firmly. “No more.”
Without another word, she turned and left the room, hearing the rising babble of consternation in her wake and taking no heed of it.
She strode through the corridors without benefit of her heralds or her guards. Startled servants sprang to open doors for her. Someone called out a question, but Israi did not pause.
Heedless of her afternoon gown of sky-blue silk embroidered with threads of real gold, she went outside and hurried around to the stables. There, she gestured impatiently and stamped her foot until startled servants shook themselves free of their lazy siestas or dice games and hurried to warm up the engines of a skimmer.
Across the courtyard, her guards were scurrying to her, their green cloaks billowing out behind them. “Majesty, wait!” one called.
Israi fumed. “Hurry,” she snapped at a servant, who finished tinkering with the skimmer controls. He stepped out of her way and she jumped aboard the little craft, feeling it bob and adjust to her weight.
Before the guards could reach her, Israi gunned the skimmer across the courtyard and out through the open gates. While she was glancing behind her to see if they were going to bother coming in pursuit, she nearly hit a tree.
The automatic warning systems on the skimmer blared, and she wrenched the controls over, scraping the trunk so closely that her heart pounded in exhilaration. For the first time all day, she smiled. Then she extended her rill and laughed, loud and long, letting the wind whistle around her.
She had been cooped up too long. She would go out of her mind if she had to lounge around one more hour in that dreary lodge. What she wanted was to wait until late at night when the capital city of Mynchepop was alive and thrumming with energy, then dress herself incognito and go dancing in the zavda clubs, feel the savage beat of the drums fill her blood with recklessn
ess. She wanted to drink and gamble and laugh, forgetting for a time that she was Kaa, held a prisoner by her own power, little more than a glorified clerk endlessly attending to the stupid details of the empire.
But there were no dancing clubs or gambling halls here in the mountains—only rocks and sky and soaring narpines. She rocketed as high as a treetop, then plunged toward the ground with such speed a crash would have killed her instantly. At the last moment, she lifted the controls, forcing up the shuddering nose of the small skimmer.
She made the engines cry in protest, and the frame shake, and still it was not enough to settle her.
Not knowing where else to go, she headed off toward her waterfall, a place where she had gone often as a chune to escape her lessons or Lady Lenith.
So far, her guards were not in sight. Laughing and pleased that they had not yet found her—although they had only to set a scanner on her craft to locate it—Israi gunned the skimmer even faster, darting in and out recklessly through the trees with such speed and abandon the slightest mistake would have crashed her to pulp.
She did not care. She was alive, and this at least was fun.
Several minutes later, she reached the clearing where as a chune she’d watched the waterfall go thundering down the mountain in a great cascade of water, throwing up rainbows of mist above a deep pool basined in natural stone. It was a magnificent place. Always it had had the power to awe her and make her appreciate the beauty of nature. She had not come here in several years now, feeling that the special places of chunenhal should be left alone. But today she wanted to feel young again. She needed renewal, desperately.
The clearing was still here; she had not forgotten the way to it. Sunlight slanted down through the trees, casting the place in a golden haze. But the waterfall did not seem as noisy as in years past.
Slowing the skimmer, Israi flew into the clearing slowly, wanting to feel that uplift in her soul at the beauty before her.
Instead, she found the waterfall diminished to a trickle, less than two-thirds its normal size. The lush plant life that had always grown on the rocky cliff beneath the fall, sending out long streamers of magenta blooms in summer, now lay dead and yellow. The vines dangled lifelessly, leafless and ugly. Below, the pool looked dark and stagnant. Large blooms of algae floated on its surface.
Appalled, Israi let her hand slip from the controls. The skimmer automatically went on hover and parked itself, humming there while she stared, aghast, at the place she had loved so much.
It seemed to be a symbol of her entire adult life. Every year, things grew worse and uglier. She remembered her chunenhal as a golden time, when courtiers laughed and gossiped, resplendent with jewels and showing not a care in the world. There had been food aplenty. The slaves were quiet and obedient. The palace seemed happy, full of life and music.
Was it her? Had she poisoned the land and ruined the aristocrats? Was her entire reign to be doomed by problems and trouble?
Israi stared at the dying waterfall and knew she could no longer deny what she saw daily on the vidcasts. The whole planet was in peril. The drought was strangling the life from everyone. Even the protected imperial lands were not exempt from the climate problems. She stared around her. The narpines, so tall and straight, looked yellow, with drooping needles and many dead branches. She knew the yellow was a sign of combined pollution and drought damage.
But how had it reached this far? How had it come here, to her own property? Why had her servants not stopped it somehow?
She had wanted only a few moments of peace and beauty. She had wanted to come here and find a haven, unchanged from what she had always known.
Instead . . .
Israi flicked out her tongue and buried her face in her hands.
The sound of stealthy rustling from nearby startled her. She looked up and saw a strange figure crouching near a cluster of wilted faizein lilies on the opposite side of the pool.
At first Israi thought he was one of her guards, but almost immediately she realized she was mistaken. She sat in her skimmer, too startled to move, and wondered why her guards had failed to catch up with her. Instantly fear stabbed through her heart. She’d been the target of an assassination attempt before, when she was a vi-adult. She’d never forgotten that terrifying experience. Now she was alone and unprotected.
When she remained motionless, the stranger slowly rose erect from his crouch. He was skinny and dressed in rags. Although he had the build of a Viis, he was not. His head was deformed, rounded on top and flat of face. His dark eyes held a piercing intelligence and expression remarkable even at a distance. Israi stared back, and for a moment the shape and color of his dark eyes tugged at her memory, as though to remind her of someone she had once known.
But she would have remembered meeting any creature as deformed and hideous as this. He was a monster, somehow neither Viis nor abiru nor beast, but some terrible combination of all three, far worse than any Reject.
Israi drew in a sharp breath. Her servants should have been here to shield her imperial eyes from such ugliness. Her guards should have been here to protect her. Her lands should have been free from such a trespasser.
Anger filled Israi. She might be alone, but she was far from vulnerable.
The creature was still staring at her with its mouth open, as though enraptured. “You are beautiful,” he said in a clear, youthful voice. He spoke flawless Viis, with the inflections and accent of the aristocracy.
Israi grabbed the side-arm from its clip beneath the controls of the skimmer and accelerated her little craft across the pool, heading straight for the creature.
He stood there, frozen and stupid, as she came zooming right at him, but when she aimed the side-arm at him he shouted something she did not understand and broke into a run. By then Israi was right on top of him. She leaned out of the skimmer and fired, but the craft veered under her shifting weight, and she missed.
Smoke curled up from a blasted bush. The creature screamed again, and dodged away from her, diving headlong into a thicket that her skimmer could not penetrate.
She flew around it, firing again and again into the thicket until the charge on her weapon registered empty.
Exasperated, Israi tossed the useless side-arm away and circled the thicket once more. Nothing emerged from it. Nothing moved. Perhaps she had killed him. She did not think so.
Wheeling her skimmer about, she flew straight up to the level of the tall treetops, then hovered there, watching the thicket with narrowed, intent eyes. The skimmer’s hand-link was flashing an urgent red.
Israi took it from its clip and switched it on. “Where are you?” she demanded in a whisper. “We are in need of you immediately.”
“Majesty!” the static-filled voice responded, sounding both relieved and alarmed. “Our scanner shows shots have been fired.”
“Of course shots have been fired. We are hunting,” she said in exasperation. “Better game than the hunt-master has shown us thus far.”
“Hunting, majesty?” the guard asked in puzzlement. “But without the huntmaster or weapons?”
“We need our long-range equipment,” she said in hushed excitement. “Scopes and sniffers . . . everything. Bring this to us at once and summon the huntmaster.”
“Perhaps the Imperial Mother should return to the lodge and allow us to outfit her properly,” the guard suggested.
Her tongue flicked out, and she nearly threw the hand-link from the skimmer. “Fool!” she said louder than she meant to. “How can we keep this creature pinned if we fly away from it?”
“Majesty, you must wait for us to arrive,” the guard said in alarm.
“We have waited too long already,” she said impatiently. Below her, a bush in the thicket trembled ever so slightly. Israi drew in her breath with a hiss. So the monster was not dead. Her instincts were right.
“Please, majesty. Give us your location—”
“Have you no scanner?” she said furiously. “If you know we have been shoot
ing, then you should be able to find us.”
“Majesty, it’s malfunctioning,” the guard said, sounding acutely embarrassed. “If you will keep the channel open on the hand-link we can follow the signal.”
Fuming, she tossed the hand-link to the floor and put both hands on the controls of her skimmer. Her heart quickened in anticipation. Now she waited, feeling her anticipation grow as the bush trembled again. She glimpsed coarse-woven cloth, a gleam of sunlight on pale skin.
Israi flicked out her tongue and tensed.
The moment the creature emerged from the thicket, Israi sent her skimmer plummeting straight at him.
The skimmer made next to no noise, but he heard it just the same and turned around in time to gasp and duck. Pulling up on the controls so that the skimmer’s small engines whined in protest, Israi wheeled it around to block her quarry from darting back into the thicket.
He ran into the forest, slim and awkward, yet swifter than she’d have thought. Israi laughed and pursued him. She could have outdistanced him easily, but she kept behind him, dogging back and forth each time he looked over his shoulder at her. She wanted to play with him now, to exhaust him. He could not run forever.
Already his mouth was open, and he was breathing hard. His dark eyes widened as he glanced back again, and he veered toward the boundary line.
As though she cared where property lines lay. Israi flew past him and wheeled around to block his path.
The creature panted and stumbled, turning back. Israi passed him again, and once more blocked his path.
He twisted around and darted for a narrow gully strewn with rocks that cut into the hillside. Any normal individual would have broken his ankle immediately, but the creature scrambled over the rocks like a mud spider, crouching low and using all four limbs.
Looking ahead of him, Israi could see where the gully deepened gradually into a ravine choked with vines and undergrowth. Once he got inside that thicket there would be no flushing him out.
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