Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Likely I could take on any small party of marauders and survive. But in the scale of things, mere looters seemed almost blameless, and fighting them a waste of my abilities. And besides, it would attract attention, and if it attracted attention, it could attract a larger group of people. Even my abilities were no match against a sufficiently large party.

  So instead of going through the paths that led to the palace, I decided to take the route through Simon’s vast, well-manicured lawns.

  The strange thing is that they were still well manicured. If one managed not to smell the fire that had taken half the palace, or to look up at the desolate ruin, one would think, from the lawn alone, that nothing untoward had happened.

  Here, while the seacity burned and people killed each other, or robbed armfuls of whatever they’d coveted, the lawn was soft, cool and deep underfoot, the trees were looming, dark and green and fragrant above, casting deeper shadows where the moonlight filtered through their branches. Here, small things ran scurrying in the undergrowth as I passed.

  As I went around a tree, close to the shadow, my eyes and ears open to any sign that there were humans, hostile or not, nearby, a hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm.

  I had a moment to think it was Martha, but the moment didn’t last because the hand was larger and much stronger, and before I could turn to see who had grabbed me, he—had to be a he—had turned me around so that his arm went around my body, holding me fast, preventing me from moving, and his hand had covered my mouth, preventing any sound.

  There is only one thing you can do in this situation, and I drew my head back, preparing to do it, preparing to hit out with my head at the nose and mouth of my captor. It’s not ideal, mind you. You will feel concussed and a bit dizzy. But a man whose nose you’ve just shoved in with your head will be in no position to take advantage of that. At best, he’ll have had his nose pushed into his brain case and will be dead. At worst, he’ll be bleeding profusely and blinded by pain.

  I’d judged this man to be taller than I. It’s not one of those things you think about, it’s one of those things you feel, from the relative position of his hands and mine. It would need a little jump to hit him in the face, but it could be done. Yes, even with him holding me. After all, I was faster and stronger than even the males of the species.

  Making sure my plans weren’t betrayed, not even by a sudden tenseness of muscles, I slammed my foot down into the ground, to propel me up, and threw my head back at the same time and—

  And hit nothing, overbalancing. My captor had stepped back away from me, and now spun me around, all without letting go of my mouth, and letting go of my arm only as I was starting to fall, then grabbing my other arm, and saying, “Shh.”

  Dazed, I looked up and into the homely countenance of Alexis Brisbois.

  He said again, “Shh.” And then pulled me back with him into the shadow of a tree and put a hand across my middle, keeping me still. He’d let go of my mouth, and I wanted to speak, but before I could even figure out what to say, I heard approaching footsteps, and voices that weren’t trying to be quiet at all.

  The words were in the curious patois of Liberte, and I didn’t understand them immediately, but the conditioning at the back of my mind understood them. They were talking about killing someone or other, in the tone of someone who had played a prank of some sort. There was neither remorse nor fear in the voices that sounded both male and young as they walked past. They looked male and young, too, two of them possibly juveniles, the other three probably early twenties. They also sounded drunk, or perhaps high.

  I let their voices recede away from us, out of hearing distance, then their footsteps. I know I have a more acute sense of hearing than a normal person. I waited till I couldn’t hear them, which meant they couldn’t hear me, and then I said, as low as I could, “What do you mean by this? Why did you grab me?”

  He shook his head. His features remained as hard to read as ever. When he answered it was in the same voice I’d employed. Almost soundless. “Remember the orders I was given. I’m supposed to keep you safe.” He made a face somewhere between disgust and anger. “It’s probably not possible now.”

  I opened my mouth, but he shook his head. “Don’t. Not now. Let me try to get us to a safe place. But first you might want to take off your suit, and hide it.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason I hid mine,” he said. “It’s too good, too expensive, too likely to cause someone to stop us and rob us. You can’t want that, any more than I do. I’ll hide it here, on the grounds. It’s unlikely anyone is going to comb the grounds tree by tree, unless they have reason to think they’ll find the Good Man in one, and they don’t.”

  It took me a moment, but I obeyed. There didn’t seem to be anything to gain in defying him. I doubted that he wanted to get me out of my broomer suit and steal it, or something of the sort. For one, it wouldn’t fit him. For another I had a feeling I was in the presence of one of the most honorable men I’d ever met. I felt a reliance, a trust in him that didn’t make any sense. Perhaps, I told myself, it was only that I trusted him because Simon trusted him. Simon didn’t strike me as an idiot. And neither was I to come to rely on this man so much in such a short acquaintance.

  So I removed my suit and gave it to him. He disappeared with it, around the tree, and I followed. He skirted close to a clump of tall, overgrown bushes, and then near another tree. Between tree and bush, into a dark area, he thrust the suit. Then he turned, and nodded, seeming not at all surprised to see me so near.

  He extended his hand to me. “We shall be a happy couple, again,” he said.

  “A happy couple in this?” I asked.

  “What, you think there aren’t any?” he asked. “People might be scared and shaken, worried for their possessions, and unsure of what the future will bring, but I warrant you that they’ll also be excited and interested, and, not least of all, grateful that their normal work and duties have been interrupted, and happy that they can take the time off to be together.”

  It was probably true, but it didn’t make it any more pleasant.

  It was a strange situation. I didn’t know Alexis or trust him. But I knew one thing for certain, he was supposed to protect me. What part of that also meant that he was supposed to keep me from doing anything I might want to do, I didn’t know. I was very much afraid that he thought the two were sides of the same coin. And I couldn’t allow that. You see, I intended to rescue Simon.

  Yes, it would be dangerous, and it was unlikely, and no one would hold it against me if I had refused to do it.

  But he had given me shelter and he’d accepted me with no condition and no demur. It was not honorable nor decent for me to abandon him to his fate. And while I might not have been brought up to love or friendship, I had been brought up to honor and duty.

  I put my hand forward, and let Alexis Brisbois grasp it. His hand was cold and calloused. He held me close, all the way back from the lawn to a path. We walked down it, meeting groups of people who didn’t give us more than a passing glance. So far at least, the disguise they’d given me was working.

  What Mad Universe

  “How did you recognize me?” I asked.

  There had probably been very little thought involved in his dragging me back to the same hotel room we’d first rented. The strange thing is that Alexis still had the codes for it. “Rented it for a week,” he explained. “I always do. It’s a habit that’s seen me through more than once.” I didn’t want to think of his past of conspiracy nor what it might mean now. Nor what he was playing at now.

  I sat on the plastic-looking bedspread and looked at him. I felt suddenly very tired, and it occurred to me that other than the catnap I’d caught while Royce Allard changed my appearance, I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. But the tiredness went beyond physical. After all we’d done, after all I’d tried, we were back where we’d been when the ball had been interrupted and the palace attacked.

  I realized I’d said
something like that, when Alexis shook his head. “Not…exactly,” he said. “Oh, sure, we’re back here physically, but we do know more. We know that the Good Man is prisoner, we know who is in charge of this. We know—”

  “We do?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, at least,” he said. “That’s what I was doing in Olympus, while you were—What were you doing, precisely?”

  There was a tone of amusement in his voice, as though I’d done something funny. It made me grit my teeth. “I was making preparations to rescue Simon. What else would I be doing?”

  The amusement changed to something sharper edged as he said, “Perhaps being sensible. Who gave you the idea that you could do this? On your own? And…Who helped you change your appearance?”

  “How did you recognize me?” I asked, heating to my theme. “Who told you where I was? Did you follow me? How did you ambush me?” And that last was more material than I could tell him, since I could hear much better than normal humans. But I hadn’t heard him.

  He shrugged. “It’s stupid and suicidal,” he told me. “For you to think you can rescue the Good Man on your own or, in fact, at all. You will go back to Olympus. I will escort you off the seacity and some distance on the way. And then you’ll promise me that you’ll go back. That you’ll not try to return here. That you’ll leave me to rescue the Good Man, a job for which I’m far better equipped than you are. That you’ll stay in Olympus until I bring him back safe and sound, or until we both die.”

  For all I was sure—almost sure at least—that he didn’t belong to the same class as Keeva and Simon, he spoke with the sort of easy authority that assumes it will be obeyed. It was much like being a toddler and being told that I was going to be a good girl, and what being a good girl entailed. It never occurred to any of the adults that a three-year-old would not merely disobey, but say no and mean it, and set another course of action. I wondered if that was where my relationship with my foster parents had gone wrong; if that was why I’d never truly been their daughter, even if they’d had the raising of me since birth.

  And now I was all set to do it again. I looked up into the dogged, homely face, and into the dark brown, confident eyes, and I said, “No.”

  It took him a moment to absorb it, as though I were speaking some long-forgotten language. “No?”

  “No. I will not go back to Olympus. I will not promise not to return. There is nothing I can do or get in Olympus that will help Simon. There is nothing I can say that will persuade them to risk whatever balance they think they’ve achieved to come to our rescue. And I will not go back. No one wants me there. No one wants me here, either,” I added, with scrupulous honesty. “But if I am here, at least I can perhaps do something to help Simon. I owe him that much.”

  “I promised him I’d keep you safe. You owe him to let me keep you safe.”

  I shrugged. “That was when the palace was attacked. He told you to keep me safe and get me out of there, both of which you’ve done, thank you. Now your duty is done. You kept me as safe as I could be kept. Now is the time for you to go and do whatever it is you’re meant to do—look after yourself or your family, or whatever. That thing you said that most people were doing: enjoying a holiday. Your job is done. Go.”

  He looked as though he’d very much like to murder me. He said something under his breath. It was probably “merde.” For reasons that could make no sense to anyone, and least of all to me, his expression cheered me immensely. Perhaps it was that you don’t get that mad at people you don’t care for.

  Then he sighed, and he said, in a voice of deep and heartfelt loathing, “I do not know why the Bon Dieu thought it necessary to create females, unless it is to drive men to despair. Of all the nonsensical, stupid creatures—”

  He stopped sharply because I asked him a question. He frowned. “What that has to do with anything, I don’t know. Or what business it is of yours. But no, Madame. Or at least not that I ever felt any attraction to the male of the species. Which doesn’t stop me wondering why the species must be saddled with women.”

  I glared back at him. “You’re not saddled with me,” I said. “You’re not obligated to stay with me. I will be fine on my own. I have been fine since I was three and able to look after myself, and if you think Earth is any stranger than the world I grew up in, then you—”

  “I don’t want to discuss it,” he said. “I can’t convince you to leave, and you can’t convince me to leave you. I suggest we call a truce and go to sleep.”

  I glared at him. “We’re supposed to be rescuing Simon.”

  “You’ve been awake how long?” he said. “You’re supposed to sleep. I don’t care how tough or how capable you were designed to be, you’re not made of dimatough. You’re still made of human flesh, and you should go to sleep.”

  We’d reached the point in the procedures when I’d have argued if he’d told me I was supposed to breathe oxygen. And there was really no good reason for it. Well, there wasn’t any reason for it, good or not. It was just that I didn’t like this man, I didn’t like that he’d constituted himself in authority over me, and I hated that he was trying to keep me safe in a way that denied me both thought and autonomy, and everything an adult is supposed to have.

  All my life I’d been told I was more capable than normal human beings, and now I was being treated as though I weren’t capable of anything at all. And by a man who was a servant, a menial—

  At this point in my thought, I stopped because I gurgled with laughter. You see, in its own way, the world I was brought up in was as egalitarian as the Sans Culottes. It’s a different type of equality, though. Instead of a majority enforcing that everyone should be equal, it is assumed that the individual has the right to tell the majority to take a flying leap. And also the right to ignore any authority, duly constituted or not, who tries to tell him otherwise. Which meant that every citizen of Eden was equal to every other citizen in the ability to be free and take the consequences.

  “I’m not more than human,” I told the very puzzled Brisbois, as he shook his head at me. “I never thought of myself that way, and certainly not in the Earth sense, and damn it, I don’t need bodyguards or servants. What I’m proposing, Monsieur Brisbois, is that you let me leave and go about what I think I must do. And then you can do what you please.”

  He shook his head, in mute, stubborn refusal. “No. I was told to protect you and I will protect you.”

  “What are you?” I asked, and for the second time in a very short time made an exception to my rule against rudeness. “Simon’s dog or his slave?”

  His mouth contorted in a sneer. If his smile made him look younger and much more pleasant, this expression made him look older and as though he’d rather kill me than look at me. “What I am, Madame, is a disciplined fighting man. Disciplined fighting men take orders and obey their superior officers. Which St. Cyr is. If I stop obeying him, then I’m nothing but a hoodlum, a…a violent criminal. Which I was once, I grant you, but which I do not wish to be ever again.”

  “Well, I am not a disciplined fighting man!”

  This brought the sneer into a guffaw. “Well, no. Madame Sienna, please, stop being foolish. We’re both very tired, and nothing can be gained by us screaming at one another. You take the bed. I shall lie down on the floor and sleep. And when we wake we shall revisit this topic. I don’t think anything productive can be said or done by two people as tired and frustrated as we are now.”

  I glared at him, searching for an answer, when it hit me that if I stayed awake even a few more minutes I was likely to fall on my face with tiredness. Then it occurred to me that I should offer to sleep on the floor instead, but a look at the stained carpet convinced me this was a very bad idea. So I glared at him some more and said, “Fine.”

  In my mind, I was sure that while I needed sleep, I would recover faster than he did. I thought this as I lay down lengthwise on the bed and closed my eyes. I would sleep a couple of hours, then get up, step over the sleeping Brisbois
and go off into the city to find out how to rescue Simon.

  I woke up an indefinable time later, in utter darkness. For a moment I was puzzled as to what had woken me. Then I realized it had been the opening of the door.

  I leapt off the bed, half expecting to trip on Brisbois. But he was not on the floor, where he’d laid down. And when I rushed to the door and opened it, I saw him some distance away walking down the street.

  Clash by Night

  I proved I was faster than most people—if not smarter—in the next few seconds, as I checked my weapons, closed the door behind me and ran after Brisbois as fast as I could.

  As I got close to him, I slowed down, favoring silence over speed and knitting myself with the shadows, so as not to attract his attention.

  Following him, I walked down the street and into what looked like a walled open-air market. The streets were more deserted than they’d been, possibly because a nighttime of burning things and looting had taken its toll. There were people asleep in the open air market, legs protruding from beneath stalls, or cloak-wrapped bodies huddled in corners. I guess looting and burning really took it out of you.

  Towards the back of the market was a gate that I surmised led to loading docks. It was closed and held so by a mechanism that involved a code pad. Brisbois typed a code into the pad, and as the gate opened, stepped through. I lagged behind, trying to give him a head start, so I could step through unnoticed. As the gate started closing again, I squeezed in.

  The other side was darker than the market, so dark, in fact, that I couldn’t see more than a palm in front of my face. I stopped, afraid to give myself away, and heard Brisbois’s voice coming from my left, “Here.”

  It sounded like a response to someone, and I dropped back into the shadows and looked around to find him a hundred steps away from me, no more than a glimmer of clothing and movement in the gloom. There was a suggestion of someone he was speaking to, but the someone was even more distant and lost in the gloom, visible only when he moved and only by the movement. Strangely, I was sure it was a man. I could not hear him, though. He must be using a whisper so low it was close to subvocalization. But it was clear that Brisbois was answering someone, as he said, “No, she’s asleep. Yes, I’m sure.”