Spyridon (The Spyridon Trilogy Book 1)

by Lillian James

  As the clang echoed in Mikhél’s head, he met the girl’s stare and realized this must be the guard who’d tried to rape her.

  The boy who’d saved her was now sentenced to death. And it was all a waste, Mikhél knew, because the moment they were gone the guard would try again. This time, with no one to stop him, he would succeed.

  Mikhél’s hand went to his weapon without conscious thought, but before he could find out what he might have done, the guard’s head exploded. Bone, blood, and brain spewed in a graffiti that covered Mikhél. It showered the girl, with the exception of a vertical strip that ran the length of her body where a cell bar had blocked some of the gore.

  Mikhél was covered in it.

  Avron, only a few years older than Mikhél, holstered his weapon as he stepped over the body. “You should not have let him delay,” he told Mikhél. “Endet Lhókesh does not wait for games.”

  He continued down the corridor, Lhókesh following without a glance for his son. Mikhél wiped the blood from his face and hurried after them lest he share the guard’s fate. Once he looked over his shoulder. The girl stared at him, still mired in shock. The left side of her face dripped with gore, but the right side was pale and dry. Surrounded by the purge of the guard’s head, the skin there seemed pristine, the eye pure and beautiful.

  She said nothing else, but Mikhél could still hear her plea.

  The boy was shackled to the wall some distance away. His skin was ebony, his golden eyes bright and glaring. Mikhél wondered if he was the girl’s brother in blood or spirit, though such things no longer mattered. She was about to lose him either way.

  A fire pit was gouged into the wall to their right. The heat it produced thickened the air and deepened the smell. Something was cooking there that made Mikhél want to retch, but he didn’t dare. In the center of the heat, metal glowed red.

  Avron pulled his weapon again, delighted at the prospect of a second kill. He glanced back at Lhókesh for confirmation. When Lhókesh nodded, Avron lifted his weapon to take aim.

  “Wait!”

  Mikhél heard the word come from his mouth, but at first he didn’t believe he’d actually spoken. He could offer nothing to this situation. As Lhókesh’s black, blank eyes turned toward him, he prepared to apologize and hoped he would live to see the surface again.

  But instead he said, “Let me.”

  Avron looked surprised, but Lhókesh showed no reaction. He studied Mikhél and then nodded.

  Mikhél stared at the boy on the wall, his mind racing. He had to do something, and he had to do it now. The boy stared back, a nameless, homeless creature with disgust on his face. And then he spit at Mikhél’s feet.

  With hands that refused to steady, Mikhél used his dagger to draw out the glowing piece of metal he’d seen in the fire pit. It was half of a Nhélanei helmet, huge next to Mikhél’s small body but not as large as the helmets of the Meijhé. It reeked, and he wondered if it had still held flesh when it had been tossed into the fire. The thought made his head go light, and for one horrifying moment he thought he would black out. Then he regained control and walked over to the boy.

  “What do you call yourself?”

  Those golden eyes looked at him with surprise that shifted quickly into defiance, and Mikhél saw they were shades darker than the girl’s. The boy said with a voice hoarse from screaming, “I am Fareg. Why?”

  The question alone—that single “why?”—could have earned him death with any of the guards. No one would have looked twice.

  Mikhél forced strength into his voice, and he wondered if anyone else could tell it was false. “Fareg,” he said. “You will serve the Endet from this moment on. Every action you take will be in service to him. You will recruit others to join you in service. You will, forever forward, bow to the Endet with loyalty only to him.”

  The boy named Fareg spit again, this time on Mikhél’s face. The spittle reminded him of the gore that was already there, and he shuddered. The helmet wobbled on his dagger, nearly too heavy for him to carry.

  He wished, more than anything, that he could drop the helmet and run. But if he did, the boy would die. Lhókesh would go on killing, no one would bring Seirsha home, and the Nhélanei would never be free.

  And besides, Avron was here.

  With the last breath of innocence, Mikhél lifted the helmet that still glowed with the heat of the fire. And then he set it on the boy’s head.

  Jane woke with a scream on her lips, an echo of the shriek that had lit from the boy in the dream. Her hands shook as Mikhél’s had, and the stench…she could still smell the stench of melting flesh.

  On that thought she leaned over the side of her bed and heaved.

  It seemed to take hours for her racing heart to calm and longer still to clean up the vomit, because every time she looked at it she remembered the dream and wanted to gag again. After she finally managed to clean the floor, she sank against the wall opposite the bed. Kai curled on the floor beside her and slept.

  She sat there for a long time, one hand resting on his warm side, and forced her eyes to stay open despite her fatigue. When he stood and nuzzled her neck, she took it as a sign to begin the day. God knew she couldn’t go back to the night.

  Mikhél lay in bed long after the dream woke him. He felt Seirsha wake, knew when she became sick. He felt her disgust, her horror. Her endless, aching fatigue.

  Neither of them was sleeping well these days. The revival of memories long suppressed was taking its toll, a strain that was complicated by Seirsha’s difficulty controlling the nexus. She was weakest in the prime, when she was fresh from sleep. Or vulnerable from a nightmare.

  She sent him thoughts as she cleaned up her mess and then sat, afraid to sleep. He heard her when she took the cría up to the growth deck to toilet and hunt for breakfast and when she returned the animal to her rooms and hesitated there for a while.

  And he heard her thoughts as she came to his door and requested entry.

  She knew he was there; he could even sense himself through her. He considered ignoring her, but she deserved better than that.

  Instead he sent her a thought: I need to be alone.

  I know why you did it, she sent back immediately. You saved his life.

  Mikhél rubbed a hand over his heart and marveled that he could feel her compassion and understanding so clearly. The warmth of her, the forgiveness she offered, called to him. But he had no right to take it.

  I need to be alone, he repeated. Go away.

  Jane didn’t blink at the blunt command. She could hear his pain. A voice heard through the nexus carried more meaning than a voice spoken. They called it deiamar, a thought-voice not filtered by throat, tongue, or air, so the feeling behind it rang clear. Mikhél’s held all the expression denied by his face, a wealth of communication that only Jane could hear.

  He detested himself for what he’d done. He refused to see the intention behind it and focused only on the horror. She wondered if, had it been her, she’d have responded differently.

  She made her way to the ship’s library and strolled through shelves long ago foraged for materials. Multipronged glass polyhedra winked in sparkling disarray, their contents mysterious. Their coding system eluded her, and she began to think she wouldn’t find what she was looking for here.

  Then the book caught her inner eye.

  A thick block of leather and paper, it rested on a pedestal deep in the heart of the library. The pages were translucent, the printing ancient and faded. Page after page was filled with words she’d never heard followed by a multitude of meanings that were strangely specific and often unrelated. She closed the book to see the title.

  “It’s called the Book of Names,” Eithné said from behind her. Jane cast a smile over her shoulder, and Eithné cocked her head. “You knew I was here.”

  “Of course,” Jane said. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I always wonder if I’ll startle you. I suppose it isn’t possible.”

 
; “No.”

  “No, indeed,” Eithné murmured. “Seirsha means freedom.”

  “I know. Mikhél told me my first night here.”

  “So he did. Do you know the culture of names, Seirsha?” Jane shook her head, and Eithné sighed. “I wonder sometimes what Valaer teaches you.”

  Jane raised a brow at that. The answer, of course, was nothing. Valaer let the language program teach her. Most days he wasn’t even there to get her started. She turned with the thought of making some deflecting joke, but the words died on her lips when she saw the look on Eithné’s face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Eithné shook her head. “It’s a tragedy that you, of all people, should have to learn about our culture in secret. That something as important to us as the Book of Names has become an artifact, abandoned and mostly forgotten because it cannot fuel a warship.”

  She looked as if she wanted to cry. Jane touched her hand, the cool skin like paper under her palm. “Will you tell me about it?”

  Eithné drew in a deep breath and then nodded. “For the Nhélanei, names hold special significance. It is a great honor to give someone a name, and so the namer chooses very carefully. There is the family name, which for most families was begun thousands of years ago. The family name is passed down through the mother and usually tells something of the family. Your family name is Braillen. It means hardworking. It also means royal.”

  “What does Dhújar mean?”

  “The exception to the rule,” Eithné said ruefully. “Dhújar means young.”

  Jane smiled. “Young at heart.”

  Eithné laughed, and some of the sadness left her eyes. “Our given names come from our families. Usually the mother provides the name by which the child is called.”

  “My mother named me Seirsha,” Jane said.

  “And it was your father who gave you the name Enan. Have you looked it up?”

  “No.” Her hands trembled as she turned the delicate pages, and she almost passed the name. When she found it, her eyes smarted. “It means loved.”

  It made her think of Mikhél and, of course, Aida and Lhókesh. Mikhél had only a family name and a given name. She understood Aida well enough now to know that the given name had come from her.

  “Mikhél’s father didn’t give him a name,” she said.

  “No. He wouldn’t have.”

  “Because he didn’t want him?”

  Jane thought of the dream. What had she seen when Lhókesh had looked at Mikhél? She’d expected hatred, maybe anger, but his visage had been too flat for that.

  Apathy? Was such a thing possible?

  Eithné sighed and called up a chair. “There’s much you don’t know about where you come from, and there isn’t enough time to teach you everything that matters about our world. It occurs to me now that you know even less about the Meijhé.”

  She was right, of course. That was why Jane had come to the library in the first place. She was beginning to suspect she’d never be able to help Mikhél face his past if she couldn’t help him understand his origins.

  “What do I need to know?”

  “Physically the Meijhé are more similar to us than any other thinking species we’ve encountered, except, perhaps, for the human. But in every way that matters, they are completely different. It is because they have no emotional experience.”

  “They don’t feel anything?”

  “They feel physical things. Pain, pleasure, hunger, cold. But there’s no emotional component to those experiences like there would be for us.”

  “That’s why Mikhél hides his emotions,” Jane realized. “He doesn’t want Lhókesh to know he has any.”

  She thought of his face, so hard and impassive, a converse to the maelstrom she now knew he held within.

  “I would imagine so,” Eithné said. “If Lhókesh knew what Mikhél has the capacity to feel, he would know how little of the Meijhé is in him. The Meijhé don’t even feel the most basic evolutionary emotions. There’s no sense of possession among them. No sense of ownership or pride. No desire for anything. It makes for an ordered, rule-abiding society. And, in some ways, a very disturbed one.”

  “How?”

  Eithné frowned. “Seirsha, I’ve spent the last two decades trying to make sense of the Meijhé, and I still don’t entirely understand them. The best I can tell you is that about one-third of the population breaks, psychologically speaking. It’s as if intelligence requires emotion. When emotion isn’t possible, the psyche seeks a substitute. The Meijhé who become sick…they do unspeakable things. Torture, rape, dismemberment, murder. It’s believed they hurt in an attempt to feel. When that’s unsuccessful, they escalate.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Jane said, almost to herself. “Mikhél dreams about it.”

  “I imagine he would. He’s had a firsthand view of it his entire life. Before La’Fek was formed, the Meijhé executed those who became sick. There were no exceptions. But when the Meijhé joined the connected worlds, such practice was deemed immoral. La’Fek demanded treatment for the ill. The Meijhé refused at first and then eventually agreed. The treatment facility they set up housed maybe a tenth of the affected people.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  “Exiled. It’s known throughout the connected worlds, but La’Fek turns a blind eye. Gryphon,” she explained bitterly, “holds a wealth of resources. And the Meijhé, being without conscience, boast a brutally effective army and an arsenal that makes worlds tremble.”

  “Is that why all this?” Jane waved her hand in the air, as if the empty library signified the siege on Spyridon. “The ones who were exiled came to us to feel something?”

  “Some days I think so. Other days I think Lhókesh came looking for Lan’Gemhína, and hurting us was an unexpected benefit. But most days I think there are reasons at work here that are so far beyond my comprehension, I can never hope to understand them. I can only hope to survive them.”

  Jane looked at the Book of Names. The pages were thin, the leather tended lovingly until the library was abandoned. She wondered if it transcended what was happening to them now. If this war, so huge and consuming to her, was really a blip in the history of Spyridon. An event that would end someday, while this book and the culture it represented would persist long after she was gone.

  Or was this war the end of that culture? Was the Book of Names a symbol of the steadfastness of Spyridon or a relic of a place that was already dead?

  Shaken by the feeling that this might be her last chance to see them, she looked up Mikhél’s names. Niyhól meant loyal. Jane pursed her lips. She knew enough of Mikhél’s experience to understand that most Nhélanei believed the opposite of the Niyhól family. An unfair but understandable need to place blame had settled it solidly on the shoulders of Aida and Mikhél—and, indirectly, Betha.

  Mikhél meant strong and true of heart.

  “Why didn’t Lhókesh give him a name?”

  “They don’t name anyone. Or anything, for that matter. There’s not a single person or place on their world that receives a given name. Gryphon, the name of their world, means place of rock. It was given to them by the Nhélanei when we first made contact. Meijhé too. It means unsolved, and it remains fitting to this day. Lhókesh means broken shadows. To the Meijhé they are just words, unnecessary and easily ignored.”

  Jane couldn’t wrap her mind around it. The technicalities alone were mystifying. “How does it work? The language, communication of any sort. How do you do that without names?”

  “Their language is largely indecipherable to the rest of the connected worlds. I think Valaer understands some of it. I’m certain Mikhél does. In fact he might be dreaming in their language. It’s possible your link has helped you understand it without your knowledge.”

  Jane struggled to pull the language of her dreams into conscious memory. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can tell.”

  “Well, it’s not important at the moment anyway.” Eithné glanced at her
link. “Your training will begin shortly. We should take different routes once we leave the library.”

  Jane gave the book one last glance and ran her fingers over Mikhél’s name. As they walked out, she asked, “What does Dhóchas mean?”

  Eithné’s expression grew wistful, but her lips curved.

  “It means hope.”

  As Jane drifted off to sleep, she thought of the boy from Mikhél’s dream. His name had been Fareg. She wondered what it meant, what his parents had hoped for him upon his birth. Certainly not the fate that had befallen him.

  And that, of course, made her think about the boy in the street.

  As the image flashed into her head of his sweet smile, she opened her eyes. He could haunt her only if she let him. She stared at the ceiling and willed her mind to settle on some other memory. But as thought slipped into dream, the grip of her will slackened. The boy returned, standing on the sidewalk near her old apartment. The street sounds filled her mind, and she moaned in her sleep. When he turned to her and smiled, she jerked herself awake.

  Sitting in her bed, gasping in air with lungs that felt too tight, she stared out at the stars and wondered how long she could keep such a horrible secret.

  CHAPTER 30

  Thirty days till arrival

  The growth deck pulsed with the primal thrill and flow of life, and with inevitable and sometimes violent death. Plants rustled as they stretched up toward the jumplight. Rodents scampered along the grass, providing fertilizer and preventing overgrowth. Insects burrowed in the dirt or flitted from branch to branch on wings translucently delicate. Automated machines swished and clicked as they harvested crops for the crew’s consumption. Even the floor hummed where gently lit planks of glass crossed the vegetation in an array of walkways and private alcoves. A Nhélanei past the age of the jagat should have heard a symphony here.

  Valaer heard only the pounding of his own heart.

  He was getting close. His entire being throbbed with the need to act, and he could see his last moves coming into play. And oh, what a difference it made to have a purpose again. The bleak and bitter rage that had driven his every move was finally in his control. It fueled him now, a destructive force driving him ever onward toward a destructive end.