In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  “Do you . . . feel something?” Jeremy asked quietly.

  Her ears twitched. “Yes. But nothing definite. Frustration! I have a mechanism of matchless power, and I cannot use it effectively for want of sufficient information. I am like—metaphorical mode—some nomad confronted with a dart rifle for the first time, and reduced to using it as a club.”

  They stood together near the prow of the landship. Baked reddish desolation lay all around them. The Traveler crested over the height of a slight rise and down into a depression. Widely scattered over it were little cones of dirt with holes in the center. A thin stalk with an eye on the top protruded from each; as the landship passed they whipped out of sight into the darkness, rising slowly and cautiously back out as they passed.

  “Why are we heading east?” he said after a moment. “I haven’t been . . . focusing. But surely we could return to Zar-tu-Kan now?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “It is essential that we push east. Dvor Il-Adazar is in that direction.”

  He blinked. “Uh . . . you’re going to claim the Ruby Throne?” he said, almost squeaked, in fact.

  “The Succession, at least: The piece must reach the end of the board to be doubled. Now that my identity is known, the alternative is running until I am caught, and then dying. There are more Coercives on the Real World available for my Lineage’s enemies to hire than there are places for me to conceal myself as a fugitive without resources. Also, I now wear the Invisible Crown. In Dvor Il-Adazar that is a potentially decisive advantage; and the information on its proper use is there. Elsewhere, it will merely astonish the individual who at last succeeds in decapitating me.”

  “Aren’t your—our—enemies also there in Dvor Il-Adazar?”

  “I concede the point. But bear in mind that there I will know where they are.”

  “Urrrkkk!” Jeremy said.

  Mother of God, I’m in the middle of a faction fight for the Imperial throne!

  And Martians played politics for keeps; he’d had a sample of that already. But Teyud was right—this was the sort of game where you could survive only by winning it all. And their fates were linked; he couldn’t run away even if he wanted to . . . which, he found, he didn’t.

  And if she wins, there’s the archives of the Mountain, and all those early sites . . . God, you could spend a working lifetime there . . .

  “What are our chances?” he said, surprising himself with his calm.

  “Impossible to quantify,” Teyud replied, putting one foot up on the railing. “Information is insufficient. But I do think that more searchers are abroad looking for me than those we dealt with. Zartu-Kan is a major hub; I remained there too long . . . no, just long enough.”

  She smiled at him when she said that, and they touched hands.

  Then her head came up. “Something approaches.”

  Something turned out to be several dozen giant birds, eight feet at the shoulder, with long legs, thick necks, and viciously curved hawklike beaks. The crystal lances of their riders sparkled unmercifully in the bright sunlight of noon, visible for miles in the clear thin air, and the jewels on saddles and reins and the complicated-looking arrangement of bars and levers that did duty for the bits their mouths weren’t shaped to take. They paced along with a quick, elastic stride, as fast as the Traveler or a little better.

  “Nomads,” Teyud said. Then she applied her binoculars. “Annoyance! Severe annoyance! Not all of them are nomads!”

  She willed focus; the instrument responded with a speed and clarity it had never shown before. Most of the riders were in the dull maroon robes of the tribes of the Deep Beyond, equipped with sword, lance, and bow, their faces flat and noseless behind the cover of their headdresses, their feet in splayed moccasins. Many carried tufts of hair or strings of finger-bones slung from their lances; one had a skull on the pommel of his saddle, the polished bone set with turquoise and silver.

  Ostentatious and primitive, she thought. But the others . . .

  Five wore robes of civilized weave and had dart rifles slung over their backs; one looked as if he had torso armor under the fabric. They lacked the fantastic mantis elongation of the Deep Beyond dwellers, and she could see where the cloth covering their faces tented out over normal aquiline noses.

  Jeremy looked at them through his own inanimate viewfinders. “That’s significant, that they aren’t all nomads?”

  “The Deep Beyond dwellers are generally hostile to other breeds, but can be hired or bribed into temporary cooperation. I speculate that these are the survivors of the landships we wrecked, and that they have promised extravagant rewards to secure the assistance we see. The nomads are all warriors—no vehicles or children, only a few pack-birds and remounts. It is configured as a raiding party, able to travel quickly and far.”

  “Can they catch us?”

  “If we were able to proceed at full speed, there would be a high probability of our escape; even if not much faster, the ship will not tire as the rakza do. Limited as we are, yes, they will overtake us before their mounts are exhausted.”

  She looked over at Baid tu-Or. “If they catch us, the consequences will be negative.”

  “Painfully and with decisive fatality,” the engineer said with a sigh and nodded. “We must risk damage to the bearings, and see how randomness dictates our roll of the dice.”

  “Make all sail!” Teyud called.

  The sail slatted up to expose its full surface as the crew spun the cranks on the deck winches. The Traveler heeled, and began to accelerate again, and the blunt wedge of riders fell farther behind. She cocked an ear toward the outriggers; Teyud did so too, but she could detect no change in the hum of the bearing-races. Of course, they would only begin to whine sharply just before they failed.

  Something itched at the back of Teyud’s mind, like a scab or the way your gums felt when a new tooth was coming in to replace one knocked out. Instead of commanding the binoculars back into their container, she turned her gaze skyward, careful to avoid the sun. After a long moment she sighed in vexation.

  “It is fortunate that I have not played the Game of Life for large stakes of late,” she said.

  “Why?” Jeremy said.

  “I would undoubtedly have lost heavily,” she said, and pointed upward.

  “Uh-oh!”

  A flier was hanging in the sun at high altitude to stay invisible from the ground, and could be glimpsed only from the corner of the eye, but it was unmistakable. She looked at her lover; he was feeling fear, she could sense, but controlling it tightly—and without the resigned fatalism she felt from the rest of the crew, who had mostly decided that they were effectively dead. They were muted colors, but the strength of will blazed from Jeremy. She warmed her self at it for a moment.

  “What else could go wrong?” he said, with a wry smile.

  The bearings began to whine.

  I had to ask, Jeremy thought, a half-hour later. I really had to ask, didn’t I? Oh, hell, at least being threatened with death’s got me out of my funk.

  He glanced sideways at Teyud, who was supervising the crew as they put up spiked mesh antiboarding panels all along the bulwarks. The smell of frying lubrication was still strong, although there weren’t any more flames, just a trickle of acrid smoke from the joints where the wheels joined the axles. The Thoughtful Grace checked the fastenings, nodded in satisfaction, and spoke:

  “We have a superior position and better weapons. The nomads will not press an attack in the face of heavy losses. Resist strongly and fight for your lives; much depends on the combat rolls for each move.”

  To Jeremy’s surprise, the Martians gave a brief cheer—not something he’d heard very often on this planet. Baid tu-Or went down on one knee, placing the palm of one hand on the deck and bending her head. The others followed suit.

  “Guide us according to Sh’u Maz, Supremacy!” they chorused, and then rose and waited.

  The nomads and their employers were at their ease a thousand yards or so away from t
he stranded landship. Teyud looked at them, frowned, and went to the dart caster on the quarterdeck.

  “Give them two rounds,” she said. “Miss, but not by an excessive amount.”

  The crewman nodded and inserted a magazine into the lips of the feed tray; it sucked the ammunition in with a wet, smacking sound. The long barrel swung around and he squeezed the handles to ignite the methane in the combustion chamber.

  Ptank!

  One of the nomads’ rakza screeched like a calliope and danced backward as the metallic crystal slug slammed into the sand between its clawed feet and raised a head-high plume of red dust.

  Ptank!

  Another nomad pitched out of the saddle with a screech as the lance shattered in her hand, scattering jagged fragments for yards around; another of the Deep Beyond dwellers ran screaming with a six-inch splinter pinning his robe to his meager buttocks. The rest of them retired; many seemed to be laughing.

  “That was an excellent shot,” Teyud said.

  The gunner shrugged, with a slight smile. “Random,” he said.

  “Aiming to miss?” Jeremy said softly.

  Mind you, I’m glad, he thought. If there’s one thing about Teyud I’m not in love with, it’s that she’s sorta-kinda casual about killing people.

  “Nomads can be deterred by casualties,” she said quietly. “Alternatively, they can be enraged by the loss of lineage members, and moved to irrational frenzies as they attempt revenge. It is—what did you say the English expression was for difficult-to-calculate aspects of randomness?”

  “A toss-up?” he said. Then in English: “The way our luck breaks.”

  There wasn’t really any word in Demotic that exactly corresponded to “luck,” whether good or bad; Martians didn’t anthropomorphize impersonal forces at all, not even as a metaphor. That made a surprising amount of difference, when you started thinking in this language; and if your native tongue was from Earth, it made for an occasional mental stutter, like stubbing your toe.

  “A useful idiom. Now let us attempt to communicate.”

  One of the hands ran a flag up the mast—a rectangle colored like a candy-cane in red, white, and purple. Unlike Earth, they didn’t use the same visual signal for “I surrender” and “let’s talk,” which also said something about Martians.

  That started an argument over in the enemy camp, nomads against employers. At last the standard-form Martians adopted the spread-armed pose with head turned away that meant “reluctant acquiescence.” One of the nomads put an equivalent pennant on his lance, and he and a standard-form rode forward, the quick pacing step of their rakza covering the ground faster than a horse could move on Earth.

  Teyud vaulted over the rail of the Traveler, and Jeremy followed, after a sip at his canteen to wet a mouth that felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. Half the crewfolk covered them with dart rifles, and the three who manned the heavy darter did the same from behind their weapon’s shield; the other six kept a careful lookout all around, with Baid tu-Or watching both.

  Checking for nomads crawling up with knives between their teeth, Jeremy thought. Mother of God, this is far too much like those damned movies about the so-called archaeologist.

  Sally had said that, too. And look what happened to her, he thought grimly. We didn’t have the scriptwriter on our side.

  “Won’t these guys respect a flag of truce?” he said to Teyud.

  “They will, unless they see a substantial advantage in doing otherwise. They are not noted for taking the long view of such matters. And they are known for their whimsical sense of humor.”

  “Christ, that’s reassuring,” Jeremy muttered in English.

  The two rakza riders drew up; as they approached you could see how the long levers at either side of the bird’s head pressed at the base of its mouth when the reins were pulled. The birds shook their heads and made low fluting sounds of resentment when their masters reined them in. The nomad’s mount cocked its head at Jeremy and looked at him speculatively, rather in the way a robin did at a nice juicy worm; since its eye level was eight feet in the air, he didn’t find that reassuring.

  “Eeeeat?” it said, in a voice like a giant parrot crossed with an operatic soprano. “Feeeed?”

  “Shut up!” the nomad said in his guttural dialect, and bashed it over the head with the flexible tapering steel rod that was his equivalent of a riding crop.

  “Owww! Good bird, good bird! Owww! Foooood, master,” it replied. “Hungry, master.”

  The nomad struck it again, and it hunched its head down and fell silent, giving an impression that it was sulking as it rocked slightly from foot to foot making an oww-oww-oww sound. The same beady eye stayed trained on Jeremy; he found its stare distracting, given its announced intentions. So were the great hooked beaks only a few yards away, and the six-inch claws on the yellow-scaled feet that flexed as the birds thoughtfully clutched at the soil.

  The nomad chief reversed his lance and ceremoniously stabbed the blade into the bare desert dirt, a sign of peaceful intentions. Jeremy thought the effect was spoiled by the jewel-decorated skull on the high pommel of his saddle. Then he unbuttoned the face cover of his headdress and let it fall to one side. That was alarming in itself; the creature had reddish brown skin like cured leather, and no nose—simply two slits that showed a feathery white lining when they flared and snorted out twin jets of dust. His eyes were huge and pink, without any white, and two small tusks showed over his upper lip.

  The type was adapted to the Deep Beyond. And one of the Traveler’s crew had been a hybrid between this and the standard Martian variety; it made you wonder about somebody’s tastes, or exactly how that had happened . . . which was an image he really didn’t want in his head, come to think of it.

  The Martian beside him swung up the visor of his helmet. That was a shock as well, because of how closely he resembled Teyud, down to the yellow eyes and hair the color of raw bronze. His face showed a great scabbed-over graze on one side, too, and slightly puffed lips. The sort of injuries you’d get if you survived the crash of a landship at speed.

  She looked at him sharply, then unfastened and shook back the sleeves of her robe, holding up her arms so that the long swirling red-and-black patterns that ran from the inner side of her wrists to the elbow joints were visible. The man did the same, and the marks were identical—even a little more vivid.

  “Faran sa-Yaji, Independent Contractor of Coercive Violence in Wai-Zang-Ekk,” the man said. “I require your life in fulfillment of my contractual obligations, and for reasons of personal satisfaction.”

  Teyud looked at him with one thin brow arched. “For money, Faran sa-Yaji? The Thoughtful Grace do not sell themselves for a bowl of to’a. Sh’u Maz forbids.”

  The man smiled slowly; when he spoke his Demotic had the same crisp, staccato accent as hers.

  “Sh’u Maz has become no more than a metaphor, while a bowl of to’a is life to hungry offspring. And you are more than even the whole pot. Also, my pair-bonded partner and four of my immediate Lineage were killed when your technically brilliant counterstroke destroyed our landships.”

  “We were bred as the sword of the Tollamune emperors. I unite their Lineage with that of the Thoughtful Grace.”

  “It is debatable how much my immediate Lineage owes the Kings Beneath the Mountain—they who dismissed my ancestors for lack of resources to feed them. In any case you are the product of genomic theft, rather than a purebred or authorized cross, as has become commonly known recently. You would be flattered at the resources on offer for your person—or, alternatively, simply for your head, Deyak sa-Vowin.”

  That’s right, Teyud’s an assumed name, he thought; it was oddly disconcerting. I’ll keep thinking of her as Teyud. That’s the person I got to know.

  “Ah. Alternative open contracts, then?”

  “Several, from several parties. The offer for your living presence or your ova is the larger, but I foresee unpredictable complications even if you were safely
delivered captive.”

  “You flatter me once more,” Teyud replied.

  Jeremy pushed aside bafflement. Someone wants her alive to use as a figurehead. And this jerk is saying he doesn’t think that would work.

  The mercenary shrugged. “Even a puppet Tollamune would have influence . . . and might someday cease to become a puppet. I had some acquaintance with your mother, and if you resemble her in character as you do in form, you will pursue the perception of injuries with malignantly unreasonable persistence. You see the implications from my perspective.”

  “Logical,” Teyud conceded. “But your analysis neglects an important input, Faran sa-Yaji.”

  He assumed the position of polite-interrogative, leaning forward slightly with both hands turned upward and fingers crooked; his ears signaled ironic doubt. Teyud went on calmly:

  “I am also Deyak sa-Sajir-dassa-Tomond, and I am the closest in genetic consanguinity to the Ruby Throne. Hence, if you were to assist me . . .”

  “But you are not acknowledged with a Vermillion Rescript, swaying the Real World. Preventing this is the primary motivation for those whose contractor I am.”

  Teyud’s tone was ironic. “Yet there is acknowledgment, and acknowledgment. There is acknowledgment by a sheet of writing material, and there is—”

  She put her hands to the sides of her head. Her eyes closed; her features didn’t grimace, but they went wooden as the strain showed, and after thirty seconds there were even a few beads of sweat on her forehead.

  Suddenly cold white light flashed, but he could tell that it was somehow inside his head, as if ice water had been injected into the fibers of his nervous system, an echo of that moment of shuddering blankness when Teyud had first put on the Invisible Crown. For the briefest instant it wasn’t invisible, and then it was again and that glimpse of silvery mesh and bloodred jewel was fading, like the memory of a dream on waking.

  The nomad chief yelled in fear and flung a gloved hand up before his eyes; both rakza screeched like an predatory orchestra’s woodwinds, showing thick purple tongues vibrating within their beaks, and reared back with their crests flaring in a threat display. From behind his back the crew of the Traveler raised a brief harsh shout: