Vwaa! Vwaa!
Though I suspected I knew the answer, I hurried forward and asked, “What is it? What’s happened?”
“They lost power in the west wing. Cameras are down.”
I loved Valka in that moment.
“Another outage?” Then, “Wait, the west wing? That’s where the others—” I broke off, eyes snapping to where Uvanari hung on its cross. Whether it was listening or not was hard to say, for its head sagged again, breathing now more ragged.
The inquisitor scowled—was that accusation in her black eyes?—and swept toward the door, which hissed open on its hydraulics. “Come, Marlowe.” I didn’t move, glanced back over my shoulder at Uvanari. “Come on. You’re needed. The other Cielcin—”
“Let me stay.”
“No.”
“Let me talk to it.” I glanced at the cathars. “Alone.”
“They’re attacking each other. You are coming with me, now.”
I ground my teeth as loudly as I knew how and jabbed one finger at the floor beneath me. “The last time you left me alone with this one, I made more progress than you did in two weeks of cutting and burning. Give me five minutes. Ten.” The alarms still blatted their screeching cry, lights red and white spiraling on the metal walls and ceiling. As an afterthought, I added, “Just until you’ve secured the others.”
Vwaa! Vwaa!
The woman might have been a century responding. She was not the sort of person used to the pressures of time; she was used to being in utter control, to being in command of every line and detail of a situation, to power. The chaos was chafing at her, breaking whatever discipline she had. Fear was a poison, was poisoning her. I bit my cheek to stifle the crooked Marlowe smile that threatened to steal over my face and steal my plan from me. The word that left her was all air, flat of sound and shapeless as the Cielcin yes.
She pointed. “Rhom, stay with him. You, with me.” She departed in a whirl of black robes and a hissing of door hydraulics, taking the other cathar and all my hopes with her.
The cathars. I had forgotten about the thrice-damned cathars. They never spoke, and so they had slipped beneath the level of my notice entirely. Stupid, stupid thing to do. Cathar Rhom stood in the corner, not speaking. I dared not argue. When this was over, when I had done as I had promised myself I would do, there would be blame enough directed at me without the cathar’s testimony that I had demanded he be sent away. Yet with him present, I was done for.
I moved close to Uvanari, hoping my whisper would carry under the vwaa-vwaa of the alarms. “Eka yitaya,” I apologized, hand clenched around my sheathed dagger. “I cannot do as you asked.”
The xenobite’s face lifted, and even clamped to the torture rig it looked down on me, glassy teeth the color of human blood in the red light of the alarms. Though it was hard to say for certain, I thought the black eyes tracked over the figure of the cathar in his corner. Its eyes shifted to the ceiling, to the pulsing of the alarm lights high on the metal walls. “You did this?”
Hoping that whoever came after me would miss the subtlety of the gesture, I bared my teeth. I wanted to tell the creature what was coming—needed, in fact, to step back—but I also had my part to play, Eudoran melodrama or no. I asked, “You have met humans before, then?”
Uvanari made that awful keening whistle that passed among its kind for laughter, though the sound was smaller than I had ever heard it before. It thrust out its chin, one of those gestures we coincidentally shared with its kind, and said, “You are asking the questions now?”
“Please?” I looked nervously over my shoulder at the cathar. He was still there, unmoved, a terrible specter of failure, all too visible. I took a step back.
The Cielcin blew air past its nose-slits. “Yes.”
“Saem ne?” I asked. Where? It didn’t answer but retreated into sullenness and the certain knowledge that its torments were not over. This was only a moment of calm, or would have been were it not for the sirens.
And then it was.
The sirens died, all lights snuffed out but for the still-glowing service lights on the cathars’ surgical cart, tiny indicators like stars that cast almost no radiance in that dark place. The power was gone. The cameras. Everything. But for the cathar, we would have been alone long enough for me to fulfill the Cielcin’s wish and my unvoiced promise to deliver it from this place.
Something thudded to the floor in front of me, heavy and hard as bone.
I stumbled back, one hand still on my knife. Something moved ahead of me, blacker than the darkness. The reality clicked into place a couple of moments later.
The clamps.
The electromagnetic clamps.
By the Earth, the cathars had removed the analog straps to keep them from catching fire during the Cielcin’s lead torture and had not restored them, leaving Uvanari free when Valka cut the power. I expected it to lie in a puddle at the base of the cross, to hold itself, to cry. It’s what I would have done, what any human would have done having suffered what Uvanari had suffered.
The Cielcin was not human.
It stood, snarling through the slits in its flat face.
Brother Rhom realized this all far too late. With a speed I could not have imagined, the Cielcin barreled past me, ruined hands outstretched, pale gray in the dimness. A hollow crack filled the cell, rebounding in the quiet: Rhom’s head smashed against the wall. Uvanari groaned, its flayed and bandaged arm thrown across the cathar’s throat, the other hand closed over the human’s too-small head. I should have stopped it, should have stabbed it in the back. It would have been perfect, would have been justified. I see that now. I did not then. I stood frozen, transfixed, jaw slack as Uvanari twisted the cathar’s neck, displacing the blindfold. Briefly I saw the cathar’s eyes—white and pure, without iris or pupil, glowing in the black—before the Cielcin sank what pointed teeth remained to it into the meat of the cathar’s throat. Those eyes went out like sparks, and Uvanari tore.
The darkness spared me the color of the blood. Only the shape of it, dim as thunder, impressed itself upon my petrified mind. Uvanari hunched over Rhom’s new-made corpse, and I swear it drank of his blood. After a moment, still shocked, I drew my knife. The Cielcin hear more sharply than we. How this is possible when their ears are but sunken holes, as lizards’ are, I cannot say. The quiet rasp of ceramic on leather seized the Pale captain’s attention, and it turned. Red blood coated the creature’s face, dribbled down its chin and fell upon its pointed chest. “You mean to do it, then?” Its bluish tongue, black in the darkness, snaked down, visible by its glistening. It tasted the air.
“That’s what you wanted. Why I’m here.” I hoisted the main gauche. Its dull white blade shone blue-gray in the gloom, almost the color of the Maeskolos’s highmatter sword. Fervently I wished it were that weapon I held and not this piece of common zircon.
The Cielcin stood, obscene, Satanic in its nakedness. I heard its nostrils flare. “Yes. I’m not sure how you did it. But here we are.”
“Ndaktu!” I said, keeping up my guard. “You said it was my fault. You wanted me here!” I knew I was trying to reason with Death, that one never reasoned with Death. I had worked so hard—so hard—to achieve this moment, to undo what I had done, to spare a creature its obvious suffering.
“And if you die here,” Uvanari said simply, “who will question my people? They need you to speak with them!”
“They’ll find another translator!” The desperation cracked its way into my voice. “Your people are dead without me.”
“They’re dead anyway,” Uvanari returned, “but I will not see them suffer.”
It lunged again, gait jagged and uneven, thrown off by pain and by so long on the cross. I threw myself sideways, getting the cross rig between myself and the Cielcin, forcing it to slow. Even on a good day, one-to-one, armed as I was and unarmored, the xenobite would have shred
ded me. It was larger, taller, had the better reach, had claws and horns and fangs all sharp enough to kill, had muscle reinforced by alien praxis to resist the degradations of space. Against that, how could I hope to stand with only my grubby knife? Uvanari slashed at me with its left hand—the one that still had four claws—and I raised my knife so that the forearm cut itself on the edge of my blade even as I looped sideways, ducking one arm of the cross to keep it between myself and my attacker.
“I mean it!” I said through gritted teeth. “I want to save them! To speak—” I seized the arm of the cross and torqued it upward, using it to strike the creature in the face before dancing back. “I want to contact your aeta. Everything I said was true.”
“Paiweyu.” I don’t care.
Gilliam. I clearly remember thinking this. I saw the crook-backed intus clear as day, facing me across that cell. It’s Gilliam again. My stupidity, my arrogance had pushed me forward into a place and time I did not wish to be in and robbed me of any freedom to choose. I was now a victim, not of fate but of a kind of logical proof.
Hissing like a nest of snakes, Uvanari boiled at me from under the arm of the cross, flayed and bandaged arm tucked against its chest, the other reaching out to seize me. I slashed at it, but the creature drew its arm back, and my knife whistled through air. It clanged against the metal backside of the cross, ringing up my arm. The xenobite stumped past me, fingers clattering across the top of the instrument cart. It came away with the mace, the lead sprinkler, still vaguely orange from its cooling tray. Swearing, I ducked a savage blow, unwilling to risk a parry.
The wild sweep cleared a space between us for a moment, and we stood an arm’s length apart, my knife raised in a low guard while the creature fiddled with the mace, shifting its grip. “You need to stop this. The power!” I lunged, but Uvanari swatted my arm aside with its own longer one. “It won’t stay out for long. They’ll come back!” My opponent slammed its mace downward, nearly taking me in the side of the head. It smashed into one of the cross’s arms, bending the metal rig backward with a crunch. It didn’t answer me; at last it had unraveled the mystery of the little bronze ring on the handle of the torture device that activated the heating element in the head of the weapon.
An orange glow like the death of a fire blossomed in the dark, carving red highlights into the naked inhuman’s twisted face. Only the eyes were dark, pits so deep they reached up through the floors of the bastille and the air to channel the fathomless night of space. It smiled, crystal teeth glinting like obsidian in the hell-light from the torture mace. It jerked its arm back, brought the weapon down.
In sword fighting, one parries the blade, fighting sword-to-sword as often as not. The knife fighter attacks the arm. I advanced inside the blow, snagging the Cielcin’s wrist with my open hand, torqueing down even as I stroked my knife along the inside of the creature’s arm, shaving it as a carpenter does hardwood. By rights, blood ought to have streaked blackly from the wound. It only dripped.
But Uvanari cursed all the same, withdrawing back toward the corner and the cart with the surgical implements. I pressed my advantage but hesitated a moment on the verge of another lunge. The Cielcin swung the mace again, and my hesitation saved my life. The lead fell like burning rain against my shoulder and my left side, where I’d thrown my arm up just in time to catch and stop the blow. Heat blossomed on my side and back, pain sprouting like the new grass from my flesh. I heard myself scream, somehow remote, as if the sound were echoing up a deep well. Something hit me in the back, but the pain of it shrank beneath the fire. I felt myself hurled into the corner, crashing into the cart. The surgical instruments and torture devices tumbled off, clattering to the floor as I tried to rise. The air stank of smoke and burning meat, and I fancied the fabric of my shirt still smoldered. Brother Rhom’s torn corpse lay not far off, the meaty gash torn from his neck sickly wet and all too visible. His killer stood naked over me, its shadow flickering on the steel walls from the light of the glowing mace. I laughed, shaking my head as I scrabbled around on hands and knees, free hand searching in the dark for something, anything that could protect me.
“Dein?” Uvanari paused, prone to the same error of curiosity that was my great sin. “What are you doing?” It had never heard a human being laugh before and did not know what to make of the sound. Nor did I. I thought I was sobbing.
I made no sudden moves but said, “I saw one of your kind executed once. I just realized this is the same.” My voice broke, torn by the heat still ebbing into my flesh, the lead cooling, hardening against my skin like wax. The Gibson part of my mind whispered, tried to tell me that fear was a poison again and again, but I didn’t need it. The fear was gone, burned away. My back and side ached, throbbing where the molten metal ran and cooled on my flesh. The pain had taken it all away, left me clear and unable to think of anything else. I risked a glance back over my shoulder and saw the Cielcin raise his weapon, ruined forefinger hooked through the loop that opened the slotted head to the lead filings bubbling inside. My hand seized at last on something heavy, and I felt my knuckles creak.
Uvanari grunted, smashing the mace downward, slots open to pour forth their horrors. I twisted, taking up what I had grabbed. Twisting, I slammed the heavy tray the tools had rested on into the descending mace, batting it aside. Specks of lead hissed against the steel floor like fallen suns. The tray rang bell-like in my hand, and time stretched as I cast it down, rising to my feet and stepping inside the Cielcin’s reach. I closed my left hand over its right wrist and brought my knife’s point up into its abdomen, striking once, twice, three times. Uvanari barely made a sound each time, each more gasp than word. With the third stab I twisted the knife. The Cielcin swore, dropped the heated mace with a clang. It bumped against my leg. I stepped forward, the knife still in Uvanari’s gut, and slammed the Cielcin into the wall. The air went out of the xenobite, and it slid down the wall, lubricated by the black slickness of its own blood.
“Stay down,” I hissed through clenched teeth, through pain. I had said much the same to Crispin once, long ago. “Stay down, or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what?” I could feel Uvanari’s breath on my face, and only the steady twisting of the knife kept it from lashing out with those horrid fangs. “You’ll kill me?”
I barked, “No! I’ll let you live. It won’t be long before the power’s back on—before they’re back in here—and then what do you think they’ll do with you after what you did to Brother Rhom here, eh?”
“You wouldn’t!” Uvanari’s round eyes went wider, still naught but shining pits in its skull of a face. “You wouldn’t!”
“I would!” I nearly shouted the words. “I’ll ensure you live. I swear by Earth!” Now I wonder if that last bit meant anything in the xenobite’s tongue. Eyudo Se ti-Vattaya gin: I swear by Earth. I wonder if it had some comparable significance to the old captain as it does to us humans. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you alive, Ichakta. But give me something . . .” The word hung between us, ripe with implication. I felt the lines of my face harden into stone, heard my voice go cold until it was Lord Alistair speaking and not Hadrian at all. “Where did you meet humans? Where have you met humans before? Tell me that!” I reversed my grip on the knife, held it firm against the creature’s ribs. “Marerra ti-koarin!”
“Fusumnu!” Uvanari said between quickening breaths. A world? No. World was fusu’un. I felt my brow furrow.
“A dark world?” I asked, pressing the knife a shade deeper.
The xenobite grunted, air rushing out in juddering steps. “Y-yes! Between!” The word vohosum, between, literally meant between the stars. I drew back a fraction, grip slackening as understanding filled me.
In Galstani I said, “The Extrasolarians.” Barely human shapes twitched in my mind like spiders, men who had given themselves wholly to daimon machines. My grip tightened again, and I used the knife to slam Uvanari against the wall again. “Where?�
� When it didn’t answer, I said, “Tell me, or I’ll have them start on Tanaran!” I didn’t mean it, couldn’t mean it, and I was ashamed, glad the creature could make little sense of my facial expressions. Uvanari didn’t answer but tried to free itself, clawing at my eyes. I torqued the knife up, angling the blade deep within its body, grinding it along the curve of a rib. Its grip slackened from the pain, talons scraping my face. I slammed its right hand down against the floor, felt bones snap. The Cielcin screamed, and I screamed back at it, “Where?” I slammed the wall beside its head with my open hand. “Coordinates, damn you!”
“I don’t know! I was not ichakta then! I was a child!” Someone was pounding on the door, words muffled and strange. How long had they been there? What did they want?
“A name, then! What was the planet called?” The Cielcin shook its head, shaking it in the counterclockwise negative that had become so familiar to me. “What was it called? Uvanari?”
Perhaps it was the sound of its name that shook the answer free. Something in the creature broke, pulled the wind out of it, and shrank it until it was a husk that sprawled beneath me. It rolled its head again spasmodically. I could not say if it was a yes or a no or the inchoate gesture of a dying thing. The pounding on the door intensified, the press of the immediate future and necessity against the interminable now. “Tell the others my wound took me,” Uvanari said. “Tell them anything, but do not tell them it was like this.” I could hear the defeat in its tone, the surrender. I nearly choked on it, having already betrayed the truth to Tanaran and the others. I offered a stiff nod, a gesture wholly meaningless to the creature. At last it spoke again. “The world? Vorgossos.”
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