“Then why is he here!” Gervis howled.
Good. His reaction would hide her lie, one powerful emotion swamping another. She’d relayed what the stranger wanted Gervis to think, but Corah had seen the cracks in it as well. Had the others? If they felt the untruth in her answer, neither of them dared to reveal it.
“He said he came to murder Dolfan, that he was caught and then tossed to the slavers.” Gervis glared at the viewing glass as if he could force the man who couldn’t even see him to tell the truth with only a strong glance. “He said he escaped from prison on their home world. Does it check out? Or is he lying?”
The final occupant of the room spoke up. Gervis’s assistant Rerl hadn’t the psychic ability of a flea, but he was an ace with computers and other tech that Gervis didn’t easily share information about. He kept Rerl close at all times and the man had a firm enough position to interrupt without fear. “There was a corequake reported on Shroud during the time frame he gave us. And a prison breach. The Shrouded king has posted a request for the capture and return of three fugitives.”
“And what reward has the Shrouded king offered for anyone who sees to do his dirty work for him?” Gervis asked.
“None is mentioned.”
“Of course not. Corah?”
“Yes? What shall I ask?” She looked him in the eye, held her thoughts under a sharp thumb, and smiled for her boss. “What do you want to know?”
Gervis Dern’s eyes squinted into slits when he tried to shield himself. He shouldn’t have bothered. Corah saw his plan forming, a dark seed wrapped in intrigue and weighed from all directions against Gervis’s goals. How could he use this man? That was his real question. What could Gervis Dern do with a lookalike to the planetary governor’s mate? He could use him. She read it, and she understood now exactly why this particular slave had been singled out, why he waited on a chair in an empty room, enduring what was supposed to be torture. She understood it better than Gervis did, and she saw her chance in that understanding too, an angle she might play after all.
She hid that quickly, waited for a probe from Mawl or Santel, for any sign they’d caught her deceit and meant to turn her out, to trade her life for an ounce of favor from their master. Nothing. No fingers in her mind, no invasion. She breathed and focused on her hearing, on the next words from Gervis Dern. She felt him huddled around his idea, happy with it, but nervous too. When the question came, Corah was ready for it.
“Can I trust him?”
She needed time. If the man really was here for a murder, she needed to make sure it happened in the way that would serve her purpose too. If he was here for anything else, then she’d need time to sway him, to get him on the right side, or else to get rid of him before Gervis could make him his. For now, she needed him alive but not in Gervis Dern’s pocket.
“Corah! Can I trust the man or not?”
“Not.” She watched Gervis, felt his impatience flutter dangerously close to disappointment, to a final decision to kill the man and be done with the whole thing. Not yet, Gervis. Not until I’ve had a chance to use him too. “You can’t trust him yet, Gervis.”
“Ahh.” He smiled, a wormy twist of lips that made his face into a parody of itself. “Dear Corah. Of course. I’m too eager, too careless. Good. Yes. Not yet, but…eventually?”
“It is possible.”
“I knew it.” Gervis clapped his hands together and turned the wiggling smile on the viewing wall. The prisoner shifted on his perch, turned his head in a swivel that brought the eagle to mind again. “Not yet, of course.”
The lilac man found her, somehow, though no vision could pierce the one-way wall. His eyes found Corah just the same. They pegged her down, accused her and named her all at once. Betrayer. She heard his thoughts in her own head, through shields that no one else had ever breached. Heart.
She heard it in the blood pounding against her temples. Heart. Heart.
Chapter Five
Mofitan hated waiting. Even when he played a game to pass the time, he craved action over idleness. Dern’s torture chair was too small for his ass, the guards had stopped flinching when he lunged at them, and the questioning had ceased too long ago for him to have passed whatever test they had him taking.
Every few breaths, the psychic fingers would rifle through his shield, and when that happened, Mofitan gave them what Shayd had suggested. He threw his anger at them, over and over, until he felt a lightness growing in its place. Shroud. If he cured the ills of his past, he’d have nothing to shield with. If Gervis Dern meant to torture him, it wouldn’t do at all to turn the episode into therapy.
He focused on the heartstone. His emotional wounds around the Shrouded mating rituals still burned closer to the surface. They were fresh enough not to pale under the constant examination. He’d wanted it, perhaps, more than he’d believed, wanted to find the one soul in the universe that would match his own.
Mofitan gripped the chair arms with fingers that still felt the weight of his ring, the heat of just one small chip from the Shrouded Heart vein. His thoughts fluttered around it, his heart raced, and a new touch settled in his mind. This one came in like a cat, low and quiet. It circled him and, he knew before it pounced, also saw right through him. He was sunk. Gervis Dern would know his counterfeit. The other psychics had only worn him down for the real assault and now…
His heart swelled and leapt for his throat. The place where his ring would rest fired and warmed him. Before he could stop it, his body reacted to the new mind, reaching, doing its best to welcome the intruder. Wrong. He’d lose everything if he let that free. Besides, he wasn’t nearly ready to forgive the stone, to risk again, to believe in anything.
He shoved the hurt of every Heart ceremony, every failed attempt to find his match, straight into the invader’s path. Betrayed by his own blood. Lied to by the Shrouded crystal. All that he’d felt while watching Haftan and Vashia, Dolfan and Vashia, and even Shayd and Rowri, the letdown, the futility, the years of being chosen second, or last. Mofitan summoned it now and made a barricade to block the pathways that even under his pain still sang, Heart, Heart.
Lies. He knew what a talented psychic could do: plant all sorts of illusions, read a subject and play their weaknesses against them. He wouldn’t fall for the Heart’s song again in this lifetime. He refused to allow himself.
Eventually, when his body trembled and the pain of his wounds finally registered, that skilled mental probe lifted, too. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he held and followed the song in his blood, the echo of Heart, Heart up and outward. Behind the wall. They’d be standing there, wouldn’t they? It was logic and nothing more that led him to turn his attention in that direction.
If his skin prickled when he tried to stare through the viewing screen, Mofitan guessed he’d only managed to psych himself into a heightened state of awareness. Nothing important waited there. He could blame it on his own thoughts, on the beatings he’d endured and the successive probings.
Whatever gripped him only held for a second. Then the invisible fingers released and Mofitan sagged forward, allowed himself to relax long enough to catch his breath. He ignored the soft chuckling from the guards and let the pulse in his temples chant to him. Endure, deflect, keep your head. Finally even the guards’ humor grew weary and the room fell silent.
His breath still echoed. The physical exertion was starting to show, even if he had the mental fatigue somewhat under control. He’d put his focus there and now his body stung and pinched and reminded him he’d also taken one hell of a physical beating. His lungs worked the stale air in and out, and Mofitan heard the ragged edge to his breath bouncing to the far side of the cell and back.
Footsteps rang an answer to that sound, a chill and even match to his erratic rhythm. They grew into a beating drum, and suddenly the stairs beyond the bars were no longer empty. Mofitan identified this one without doubt in an instant. Gervis Dern had come in person. The lesser governor peered through the glow of electric m
etal, tilted his head to one side and then the other, and smiled with shadows tugging at his mouth, as if someone unseen actually made the gesture and Dern only modeled it.
“Well, hello.” Dern’s hands fluttered, moved from his mouth to his sides and then together. They never stopped fidgeting. His eyes flashed like black gems.
“Gervis Dern.” Mofitan showed his teeth, remembered he meant to woo the man, and shifted the grimace into a smile. “Finally.”
“They tell me you are called Mofitan.” Dern waved for the nearest guard, but the man hesitated.
“They tell me you are in charge.”
Dern laughed, but it was a short burst that shook his narrow frame like a seizure. He flicked his fingers at the guard again and ordered, “Open the door.”
Instead of obeying, the uniformed men favored Mofitan with a round of nervous looks. Their leader suggested caution. “I’m not certain that’s advisable, sir.”
“Then it’s a good thing you are not my adviser, Captain Curel,” Dern snapped at the man while his hands flapped to his chin and down again, signaling nerves he didn’t mean to reveal. “Open up. I’m quite confident that our guest has no intentions of harming me.”
Despite the assurance, his hands moved again, picked at his jacket front and then brushed something from the shoulder. Mofitan sat back in the tiny chair and did his best to look non-threatening while the leader of Dern’s guards opened the door despite knowing exactly the opposite.
“My dear Corah assures me that I have nothing to fear. Isn’t that right?”
From behind Dern, a small voice answered, low and even, with nothing in the tone aside from the words. “Yes, sir.”
Mofitan sat straighter. He leaned toward the door like a lodestone and behind him his right hand clutched at the fingers of his left, squeezed the place where his ring wasn’t.
“You see, Captain,” Dern crowed, but it came out with all the force of a wheeze. Was the man’s health an issue? His body looked frail as glass. Perhaps Vashia could simply wait out this last thorn in Eclipsis’s side. “Approval from the deepest source.”
“Yes, sir.” The captain stepped aside, made way for Dern to enter, and stood at still attention. Despite the formal stance, the agreeable words, Mofitan had been insubordinate enough to know the captain didn’t approve of Dern’s decision nor, possibly, of the woman who followed the man into the cell.
Heart.
Mofitan’s knuckles cracked. The chair groaned under his weight. The woman behind Gervis Dern stared over the devil’s shoulder at him while a whisper of invasion brushed against his mind. It asked a question he didn’t want to hear. She asked it. That touch could come from no other source. His blood reacted to it, but in his mind, Mofitan built an iron box. He forged a vault of will and rage and into it he stuffed his reaction to her. He forced it down, sealed it, and welded the thoughts away with a fierce shake of his head.
“Mr. Mofitan,” Dern said. “May I introduce my first assistant, most trusted aide, and primary psychic, Corah da Nurah. You may consider her my right arm.”
“And what may I consider you?” He didn’t have to fake the growl, didn’t need to put on a skeptical face. This woman served the enemy. His right arm, Dern said. Mofitan didn’t need to consider her, no matter what his blood said. The Heart had screwed him over yet again.
“Only time will tell.” Gervis Dern made his answer a question. “Before we worry about that, it’s been suggested, Mr. Mofitan, that we get to know one another a little better.”
“Great. Tell them to put away their weapons and we can all have a drink.”
Dern’s hands danced. His lips twisted and a ghostly laugh slipped around the room, a phantom of humor, unsure if there were real merriment present. The woman moved like Dern’s shadow, stood at his shoulder, and, when he fluttered, tugged at her clothing. Poised, that one was, possibly more dangerous than her fidgety master. Her hair knotted into a roll at the back of her long neck, and though she was slender as a sapling, her body had more shape to it, more structure and strength than Dern’s did. Or he only imagined as much.
Mofitan sniffed and offered Dern the friendliest toothy smile he could muster. Maybe she was the master, and Dern just her puppet show. He’d make a good dummy leader, with all his nerves and wiggling. Maybe this Corah pulled the lesser governor’s strings. Her eyes were sharp and fixed, where Dern’s darted like fish in a stream. She held her head straight and high, whereas Gervis Dern’s bobbled and dipped forward from his shoulders like a toy.
Maybe. Heart. Maybe he could get through to her.
The touch at his mind came again, but Mofitan flinched from it. He clamped down on that hope, stuffed it into the box with the rest of his ridiculous notions.
“Perhaps, eventually, we might do just that,” Dern said. “But I’m not in the habit of inviting ex-con slaves into my home. You’ll understand, Mr. Mofitan, if I insist on something else initially.”
“And what something else would that be?”
“I have a job that should keep you busy for now.”
“I don’t do windows.”
And he had a job already. He reminded himself of that fact and avoided making eye contact with the woman behind Gervis Dern. He needed to get close to the man, needed to uncover what sway the lesser governor held over the region, what his plans were, and who among the other regional leaders might side with Spectre. Once he’d gathered that intel, he needed away from here as fast as possible.
In the end, what to do about Dern or this Corah woman would be in Vashia’s hands. In Dolfan’s hands. Yet another woman he’d have to hand over to his father’s favorite.
“They mine gems on Shroud, don’t they?”
Mofitan nodded, though he couldn’t be certain Dern’s question had even been aimed at him. The woman answered, softly and like an echo of her master. “Their primary export.”
“Excellent.” Dern’s head bobbed. “We have mines as well, Mr. Mofitan. Not quite so glamorous as you’re accustomed to, I assume, but I’m certain you’ll find a way to make yourself useful there.”
“Mining?” Mofitan snorted and shifted his weight enough to creak the chair, to induce a new round of cringing from the guards. Dern didn’t cringe or flinch. His psychic leaned forward, peered over Gervis Dern’s shoulder exactly the way a puppeteer might.
“You would rather continue your journey on the slaver’s ship perhaps?” Dern’s mouth moved. Did the woman form the words for him?
“No. Mining I can do easy enough.”
“Good.” The bobbing slowed. “Captain Curel?”
“Sir!” The man Mofitan had judged to be in charge of the guards slithered to attention. Sloppy, not precise enough to be military, and with a sideways eye fixed on the chair in the room’s middle.
“Get this man a uniform and clean him up.”
“Sir?”
“You have something to say about this?”
“I don’t believe his story for a second, sir.”
“Well, we’ve already established that you are not acting as my adviser, Captain. Clean him up. It’s not like we’re bringing him home for dinner.” Dern laughed, a crackling sound that the rest of the guards were happy enough to drown in their own chuckles. “Deep mining on Eclipsis isn’t exactly dainty work, Mr. Mofitan. You may well wish you’d taken the slaver’s option.”
Mofitan snapped as straight as the chair would allow. “Yes, sir!”
Gervis Dern bobbed his head, parted worm-like lips and smiled. “Now then, Captain. You see? This one learns fast.”
The lesser governor and his shadow woman slipped out of the cell, leaving Mofitan to face the irritation of the guard captain. Curel; he remembered and logged the man’s name away for later. He’d probably do well to make friends there, but in the light of Dern’s correction, figured it was the time to tread lightly now. The time to work hard and do his best to carve out a channel he could slip through had come.
Mofitan pondered his future while the
guards worked up enough courage to slide forward and remove his cuffs. He needed to be close to Dern, and the mines didn’t exactly sound like a step in that direction. Not that he couldn’t handle a little labor. But if the governor meant to forget him in the depths of Eclipsis, Mofitan would have to find some way, any way, to make the most of that. He’d find a way to stand out, to catch the man’s notice…again.
Same as always. One step up and three steps back.
“You coming or not?” Curel stood beside the door but hadn’t looked once in his direction. Mofitan’s wrists had been freed, and Captain Curel did his best to remain confident. He showed more bravado than his fellows, and Mofitan resisted the urge to lunge at him, to test his true mettle.
“Sure. Sure. How bad can it be, right?” Mofitan stood and watched the others flinching. Did they cringe from him this time, or something worse? How bad could the mines here be?
“I guess you’ll find out.” Curel didn’t flinch. His voice was flat, unmoved by the remark, but the rest of them laughed, and in that chorus, Mofitan heard his answer.
Chapter Six
“You’re sending him below the surface?” Corah traced Gervis’s steps and focused on surfing his mind.
“Oh, I think the mines will suit him, Corah. All that bulk has to be good for something.” Gervis’s thoughts wove around his plans, one layered over the other until she couldn’t track them fully, not without stopping and making a too obvious effort. One thing came through clearly, though—his interest in the Shrouded prisoner. All his scheming at the moment centered around the lilac man. “He looks just like him, don’t you think? Except for the hair of course. Easy enough to fix.”
It didn’t take a psychic to know where that thought was headed.
“You mean to use him as a double? To replace the planetary governor’s mate?”
“Yes.”
Corah caught the flash of murder in that syllable. Gervis would kill the girl, her real mate, and even the decoy when he’d lost his usefulness. “I see.”
Eclipsed (Heartstone Book 3) Page 4