Shrouded: Heartstone Book One

by Frances Pauli

  “Absolutely nothing.” Haftan snapped. He turned to Syradan and frowned. “Is that the queen’s lute?”

  “The queen asked me to deliver it to Tondil.” Syradan swooped in with his rehearsed response. “He’s coming by to take it for tuning.”

  “Shroud!” Dielel hammered a fist on the table and sent a flat note humming from the lute. “Everything’s gone wrong!”

  “Don’t be dramatic.” Haftan waved off his friend’s distress. “Nothing is wrong.”

  Dielel’s snort drowned in the next knock at the door. Haftan tossed a look at Syradan. Dielel glowered at his own toes. Syradan picked up the lute. This time, he would answer the door.

  “That would be Tondil.” Haftan’s voice had a bite to it.

  “I’ll just give it to him on my way out.” He couldn’t waste his breath soothing either of them. The time had come for action. He’d already sunk to his neck in the business, certainly, but this last act would weigh the heaviest on him. It would be the one that haunted him after he’d gone.

  He reached the door and pulled it wide. Tondil raised his eyebrows but said nothing, only nodded a greeting as Syradan handed him the instrument. He’d asked for it. Syradan reminded himself of that, chanted it with each step as he slid out into the hall. The queen’s lute required tuning, and Tondil couldn’t resist the queen. He fled the scene with his head high and his robes billowing. He’d made the right decision in defying Jarn. The girl had proven quite useful, and she’d be taken care of just as easily. Her arrest would help him a great deal more than her death might have. He smiled at Shayd and Mofitan lurking in the foyer and scuttled past them. Yes, much better this way. Their Vashia was about to commit the crime of the century.

  The transport wobbled as they shot out of the crater. Dolfan steadied the craft, verified that the probes still blinked happily just past the nose and then checked on his passenger. She sat straight and stiff in the chair beside his. Her eyes stretched wide as she watched the Shroud, but her skin hadn’t gone ghost pale this time, her hands sat on the arm rests instead of grasping them in a death grip that the material would never recover from. Good.

  This time, there was no chatter, no constant rattling on of Peryl from the rear—they had no chaperone, and the absence of sound reminded them. The silence screamed between them. It drowned out even the static of the Heart and swept anything he might have said directly out of his mind.

  He struggled against it, counted each mile and calculated how long they had to reach the relay, how long the return trip would take. He weighed that figure against the things that needed said and felt the pressure building. Their only chance, their only time was now.

  “Vashia,” he started abruptly, causing her to jump at the sound of his voice. She didn’t look at him, but one of her arms shot forward toward the view screen.

  “Probe.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Probe!” Her eyes shifted for a second to his, but her hand stabbed ahead.

  Dolfan felt the transport sag before he tore his gaze from her. He guessed he’d find no blinking from the warning devices, but their absence still sent a stab of adrenaline through his body. He flew to action, compensating for the ship’s wobble and preparing to set her down as quickly and gently as possible. They lost the road before touchdown, and the vehicle smacked the surface harder than he’d intended. The undercarriage whined as it tried to spin while embedded in a layer of soil. He killed power and stared at the dust settling over their nose.

  “Damn!” He spun toward Vashia. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, but all her color had gone.

  “It’s just variance, the roads wobble on occasion.”

  She sighed loud enough to reach his ears and nodded, but her eyes remained fixed where the haze of the Shroud drifted beyond the screen. “How long until it wiggles back?”

  “Could be days.” Dolfan didn’t miss the fear in her question, but his mind veered in a different direction. Fate, he suspected, had given him a bit more time. It had also stranded them alone together, a fact that became glaringly evident when she turned those eyes on him.

  “What do we do?”

  “First we retrieve the probes.” He bit back the answers he wanted to give and stuck to practical steps. “Then we make a decision.”

  “What decision is that?”

  “Stay here,” he tried to reassure her, to make it sound casual, but she wasn’t going to like the alternative. “Or make our way to the closest relay. We keep supplies there, and the probes are set to home in on the nearest signal.”

  “Except the relay isn’t broadcasting.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “So.” Her fingers drummed against the armrests, but didn’t bite again. “If that were the best option, how do we find it?”

  “By memory.” He watched her laugh, enjoyed it for a moment until she realized he wasn’t joking. Then the sound stopped, and her eyes widened again. This time she was scared. He rushed in before the fear could magnify. “I know the lanes by heart. All of the Shrouded do. The positioning of the relays is set. It’s just the roads that vary, and we’ll have the probe to assist with a general trajectory.”

  “You favor that idea.” She looked forward again, watched a curl of dust passing. “There’s a reason, I assume.”

  “The ship is not stocked with much—maybe two day’s worth of water, a ration packet that could sustain us longer than that, but the scrubbers will fill with dust eventually, and we’ll have a finite amount of good, filtered air.”

  “But if the road will come back, then we could wait a bit?”

  “A bit, yes.” He let her digest it, and then flicked on the emergency beacon. Someone would have to stumble upon them to pick it up without the relay’s help. There’d be a bike there, better filters and a way home even if they couldn’t repair whatever damages the storm had done to the communications. As he figured it, the relay was the only option, but he didn’t care to force it on her. Not after her accident. “I’m going to suit up and fetch the probes before we lose them,” he said. “You’ll need to fit a full mask while the door’s open.”

  “No.” She put a hand on his arm. It felt like a lead weight. Her words came in a rush, and he felt how much each one cost her. Her voice wavered, but there was strength behind it too. “No. Let’s just grab them on the way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  VASHIA BRUSHED the dust away from her mask and ground her teeth together. She pressed her hand over the tether attached to her waist and stumbled after the man secured to the other end of it. The face filter kept her breathing freely, but her terror drove her dangerously close to hyperventilation—something that could prove disastrous to a limited air supply.

  The Shroud pattered against her clothes and skin. It washed the figure in front of her in light and shadow, making him shift from high detail to silhouette and back again. Dolfan. He’d been willing to let her decide, had taken her fear into account, when remaining at the transport would have been a mistake. Even she could see that.

  So she’d sucked back the urge to cry, donned the protective gear, and shouldered a pack she was sure held half of what he carried. They recovered only one of the craft’s probes. Dolfan plucked it from the thick dust that caked the surface of the core. He pressed a lever and extended the handle that allowed the device to become a hand-held tracker for the nearest relay. Little good that would do, considering its damaged status. Still, he waved it to either side, adjusted some esoteric setting and then nodded to her. The liar.

  She smiled, even through her panic, and marched after him. The second probe failed to appear. They didn’t waste much time searching for it. Instead they walked through the haze, pretending it wasn’t poisonous enough to kill them in minutes, pretending that they knew where they were going and tied together by a short measure of woven silk.

  She couldn’t have been happier.

  Even scared out of her mind Vashia would have been content to keep walking, so long as
they continued away from the Palace. She would have followed Dolfan into the Shroud without hesitation if it meant never returning, never producing the royal offspring or sitting like a dutiful queen beside Haftan’s throne. She imagined, just for a second, that he’d meant for this to happen all along.

  He’d been shocked when Peryl joined them and hadn’t hid it well at all. He’d planned for them to have the trip alone, and she suspected Syradan had assisted him in arranging it. Maybe he had a ship waiting. Maybe they could leave the planet, contract be damned, and make a run for it. No one on Shroud would follow to fetch her back. That much, she would have bet on.

  She’d seen his expression at Tarren’s. She’d seen how concerned he was. She knew his loyalty belonged to his people. Unlike her, Dolfan wouldn’t run away. It sent a shiver of guilt through her, cast a shameful shadow on her Eclipsan past. She’d never ask him to leave Shroud, because she already knew his answer.

  She ran her fingers along the tether and watched his back fade in and out. They hardly needed the line. She could have found him by the static, but she imagined if one of them fell, the tug on the rope would trigger a quicker response. She imagined the safety measures were beaten into every Shrouded child in the same way the memory of the magnetic patterns were, the same way the absolute trust in their crystal Heart was. But if one could fail so fully, why couldn’t the other?

  He slowed enough for her to catch up. When they stood shoulder to shoulder he pointed to a dark spot in the distance. It looked like a shadow, just another shift in the Shroud’s movement, but if she squinted at it, the shape definitely turned dome-like. Dolfan altered his direction and took off at a slower pace, a pace the kept her at his side where the static hummed the loudest. He kept his face forward, but his eyes drifted toward her more than once. Vashia walked beside him, worked her legs and made certain she was there, looking back, each time he checked on her.

  By the time the bunker truly looked like a bunker and the dome could no longer be mistaken for a shadow, her legs burned. Her steps wobbled to one side and then the other at the whim of the winds as she lagged a half step behind Dolfan, even though he’d slowed twice to accommodate her.

  He led her to the base of the relay. It possessed a smaller hover pad than the one in the Palace complex, the little buildings behind it were dwarfs of their royal twin, and the bike parked in the clamps under their overhang might as well have been a chariot. They climbed a service ladder to pad level and crossed the platform with a thicker Shroud pushing against their steps.

  Vashia clung to a strip of railing while Dolfan opened the doors. When he waved her in, she had to use the rope and pull each step along it. He caught her half way and steered her inside. The doors slid shut at a touch and cut off the constant whisper of the Shroud. The sudden quiet pulled on her as much as her fatigue and she slumped against the airlock wall while Dolfan flushed the area.

  When the chime indicated a proper level of safety, he triggered the inner door and they entered the relay’s main room. A wide console dominated the center. It smoked and threw sparks in intermittent showers to the metal flooring. The roof was intact, as far as she could see the damage all centered on the computer systems. The storm damn sure hadn’t done that.

  “Who?” she moved to the nearest couch and dropped her outer wraps, shaking off a layer of dust along with them.

  “Someone with no good intentions.” He dropped his own wrap in a pile at his feet and paced from one end of the bank to the other assessing the damage. “Someone with a weapon and no good intentions.”

  A bad combination. Who would intentionally take out the Shrouded relays? Dolfan had proven the signals were little more than a backup system to the mental map embedded in the mind of every member of his race. Destroying this one had slowed down the cargo moving in and out of the crater, however. Losing the network could affect trade lanes and delivery times. It could shut down commerce, slow travel. Travel.

  “Do you think someone’s trying to stop the coronation?”

  “Maybe. Has Haftan mentioned anyone that might be unhappy with him?”

  She snorted, and realized how it sounded only when he turned a raised brow in her direction. “No. No, he—” She stumbled under the weight of his expression. “He doesn’t really speak to me.” How desperate did that sound? She tried to cover it. “I think you would know better than me. I mean. The Council—”

  “The Council would never cross Haftan even if they disagreed with him.” He blinked and flushed red.

  Vashia noticed his chagrin and relaxed. Apparently the Council wasn’t pleased with her husband either. Fine. At least they’d both screwed up. She tugged at the sleeve of her gown and shrugged. The wrappings had come loose during their trek, and one end fluttered free. “I suppose we’re both equally clueless, then.”

  “I suppose.” He narrowed his eyes. “If we can restore the core memory, there might be a clue in there as to what happened.”

  He turned back to the console. Mechanics had never been a strong area of study for Vashia, though she recognized a few of the tools in the box he fetched from a wall mount. His expertise quickly outpaced her, and she turned her attention back to her sleeves, both of which now sprung their bonds flapping in random puffs.

  She fought them back under control, managed to get one arm tucked loosely into its binding and then turned her attentions to the other. The console beeped behind her, and she heard Dolfan cussing. A rain of sparks danced in the corner of her eye and then the sound shifted to a low hum.

  She chuckled and snagged the silk tail. Usually, she pinned the stupid thing against the bedpost and kept it tight. Now she put her leg up on the couch and tried to use her knee for leverage. Her free fingers stuffed the fabric into a wad, but when she tried to pin them in place and reach the binding, the whole mess went slack again. “Damn it.”

  Vashia took a slow breath and started again, tuck, fold, pin. The whole sleeve burst free and sent a rush of chilly air up her arm. She stamped her foot and growled, considered just letting the damn thing hang loose. Dolfan’s voice at her shoulder killed the thought. She hadn’t heard him cross the room.

  “Here,” He said softly, snagging the silk tail midflutter. “With your permission?”

  Vashia nodded. She didn’t trust her voice just then. His other hand took hold of her forearm, and the static between them flared into a crackle. His fingers slid up the silk, folded and tucked, and she felt the burn of tears against her lids. No one aside from Murrel and Lucha had ever helped her do this. She closed her eyes. She was supposed to be queen, but she was also the most pathetic bride on Shroud.

  She clenched against emotions that made no sense. She’d never wanted it, had she? Not like Murrel had, but maybe more than Tarren. Dolfan pulled the silk bindings tight with each pass. He tucked and folded and wove the sleeves snug against her arms, and her skin burned beneath the fabric.

  “Haftan should have wrapped these tighter,” he whispered. Vashia heard the same pressure in his voice that pushed at her eyes. He had to know, didn’t he, that Haftan wouldn’t touch her, would never touch her if she could help it?

  She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it quickly. If she had words, they would be the wrong ones. She shook her head, just slightly, just enough to shake off the lump in her throat, but the motion released the first tear instead and it fell on the silk, leaving a single round stain.

  “Vashia.” His finger brushed her chin and lifted her face enough that she needed to look at him. His eyes shimmered.

  “Haftan hates me.” Her voice sounded tremulous and weak even to her own ears. “He—I—”

  They stared for a brief second before he pulled her in. Dolfan’s arms wrapped her torso in a vice-grip, but his lips only grazed hers. The shockwave might have shaken the dome overhead. Vashia wound one hand into the fabric of his shirt and let the other snake up to his neck. He whispered into her hair. “The Heart was wrong.”

  “Yes.” Yes, damn it! He had known it, to
o! Her chest seized and the sobs broke loose, even when his lips returned. This time he pressed the kiss. This time, she sank into him and freed the tension, the sobs, and the passion.

  His arms lifted her into the air as she clung to him. The roar of whatever bound them together drowned out the thoughts of politics and repercussions. His tongue danced across her lips and erased everything but him. “Vashia,” he hissed. His fingers wound through her hair and her head tilted to reach him better, to fit closer together.

  Dolfan.

  The console clanged from across the room. A series of beeps serenaded them, and he pulled back just enough to listen. His arms still pressed her close. Her blood still flamed in her veins, but the fury of the mechanical sounds couldn’t be ignored.

  “What is it?” She spoke in gasps, out of breath and weak from both her tears and the sudden rush.

  “It’s found something.”

  He pulled her with him to the machine, one arm glued at her waist where—as far as she was concerned—it belonged. They leaned over the display together as the broken comm churned out the last remnants of its memory banks.

  “There’s a message in here.” Dolfan’s free hand adjusted the signal strength. The machine beeped another sequence, and words began to scroll across the narrow screen.

  “It’s from Madame Nerala.” Vashia read along with him. The words settled over them, effectively blotting out her first tremble of happiness in years. A face filled her memory, sneering and smug and completely out of context. Jarn walking down the corridor at Base 14. Jarn in a place he had no business being.

  “Gods help us,” Dolfan whispered. “Someone’s taken the moon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE ELEVATOR CAR poured mercenaries out onto the platform. Jarn stepped from his transport and scowled at the scene. His bodyguard kept a step to his left, watching the merc troops gather into formation days before they should even have been on the surface. Once they’d formed an aisle, Kovath strode from the car. His shoulders pressed back so far his chest bulged through his uniform, and his thick brows lowered in a single, slanted line over his eyes. The bastard had trumped Jarn again.