The snout-smile stretched. “Of course, Lady Amber. That is why I am here.” And the Bythian hand, gray overswirled with plum tattoos, reached down for her.
Hussiah watched from the mouth of the earthen cave as the hatchling purred in its sleep. He rubbed a weary hand over his second eyelids. He did not pretend to understand these beings, not at all, but in this one he’d finally found the tool he needed.
The off-worlders would be here, encouraging the hopes of those who wished for the Third Age, until driven off. To the east, Omnipotence Suh-he-lan had brought in the Thraks. Hussiah quivered as he thought of the hard-shelled beings. Unlike Suh-he-lan, he could look into their souls where he saw Bythians were no more than meat for the table platters. No. He would not deal with the Thraks. But neither would he deal with these others, these ho-mans. The God of All called. Much better for his fellows to be clasped to the breast of the God than to break themselves upon the stones of their world any longer.
Hussiah desired the peace of the God of All. He desired it for all of his fellows. He was tired of shedding another life, dividing his soul with it until he died/reborn. The world was old. As hard as they had tried to conserve it, the water was sparse. Mistakes from their past haunted them still. Toxic wastelands were still unreclaimed. No. It was better to go into peace than to try to carry on.
But the fellow known as Jack worried him. Yes.
The prophecy of the Third Age was written in that being’s eyes. Hussiah had recognized it immediately, for was he not the greatest of all Bythian seers? He had himself written the prophecy of the Ages in a fever dream sent by the God of All.
Now he was going to defeat it. He was tired.
The hatchling stirred on the cave floor as though the frenzy of his thoughts touched hers. Hussiah stilled his breath and meditated until she quieted. In the morning, he would begin working with her.
When he was done, she would kill Jack Storm—this time successfully.
Chapter Twenty Six
It was almost the oldest political trick in the world, waving the bloody shirt. But it caught the attention of everyone in the shadowed, beery smelling pothole of a bar called the Forked Tongue.
At his back, a warm hand folded over his and a voice suggested, “Why don’t you put that up, fella, and come have a drink?”
Jack twisted, used leverage, and the suggester was on the floor under the ball of his foot. Jack twisted the wrist in his hand a shade more, and the man went very gray and silent. Beads of sweat popped out on his upper lip.
“What was this?” Jack asked.
“I—I’m the one who sent you that. Don’t damage the hand, fella. I need it for piloting.”
Jack let the man get up. The pilot eyed him and rubbed his scarred chin reflectively.
“I meant to get your interest,” he said.
“You’ve got it.”
“All right then. Come to the corner with me and talk.” The pilot called out, louder, “Wally—two beers!”
The bar went back to its din of noise.
Jack noticed that his newfound drinking companion walked with a profound limp.
“I’m Ted,” the pilot said. He captured a second chair to put his leg up on.
“And you know my name. What have you to do with the Eastside merchant?”
“Him? I fly for him sometimes. We have a lot in common—we both want to save our skins when the snakes decide to kill each other off.” Ted’s voice dropped a little as the bartender came over and dropped off the chilled bottles. Dribbles of ice and sweat ran down their sides. Ted and the bartender looked expectantly at Jack.
Jack forked over a couple of silver pieces. The bartender smiled widely before pocketing one of them, pushing the other over in front of Ted with a finger accented by a split fingernail. He left the two of them alone.
Jack still had the blood-etched rag. He laid it down on the table. “Do you know where this came from?”
“A hellcat of a girl. She’s alive, but the news doesn’t get much better than that.”
Jack opened a beer and tipped it up, savoring the drink down a raw throat. The pilot watched him warily before doing the same.
Jack took the rag back up and tucked it inside his uniform jacket. “How much do you want for the rest of the news?”
Ted smiled and leaned back in his chair. His jumpsuit was a nondescript gray, patched and repatched, and his dark chestnut hair was poorly cut and going thin. He’d seen much better times. “No, fella. It’s not that easy. This is not an ‘I give and you give’ session.”
Jack started to stand. “Don’t waste my time.”
Ted held out his hand. “It’s no waste. Ever heard of the Green Shirts?”
Jack sat back down.
The pilot gave a lopsided grin. “I thought that might get your attention. This is complicated, but I represent a group of concerned businessmen who want to be able to get the hell out off this planet.”
“Now?”
“No, but soon. And I can tell you that I mean very soon.”
Jack etched his initials in the frosting bottle. He took another drink, but a more cautious swig. He didn’t want to expose his throat to the other man. “Surely such… businessmen… could catch the ear of the ambassador.”
Ted let out a roar of laughter. He did not subside until his flushed face had returned to a normal color. He sniffed. “Maybe,” he said, and wiped at a tear in the corner of one eye. “But the new ambassador is too holy to consider such things.”
Colin. Of course. But what had this to do with Amber? “Why should I help you?”
“Because I know about the girl. And… because I knew about Claron.”
Jack felt his jaw tighten, and a muscle twitch. The pilot saw it too, because he gave another gratified grin.
“I’m a bush skimmer, see. I did close terrain mapping for the mining companies. I did some recon photos of some very interestin’ phenomena there. That’s why I got busted up and ended up here. I wasn’t supposed to live, y’see, fella. But I did. So I have certain connections and one of them got ahold of me about a month ago and told me you were en route. That if I would be willin’ to testify to certain happenings on Claron, you might be able to get me out alive’t‘do it.”
“You saw sand crèches on Claron.”
He nodded. “Absolutely. Of course, there weren’t no reason to firestorm it, but just in case anybody asked later, I suppose it was better than nothin’.”
“Not much,” Jack muttered. “What’s your price for Amber?”
“Oh, that’s part of the package. I can tell you now where she is—it won’t do you any good.”
Jack smiled thinly, and Ted suddenly looked nervous. “It might,” he said slowly, “do you some good.”
“The girl’s been picked up by the High Priest Hussiah. He goes into th’ hills all the time. He’s some kind of prophet or something. Anyway, he won’t be giving her up until he’s ready, but in the meantime, it’s my guess she’ll be okay.”
“How do you know this?”
“My skimmer got caught in a dust squall not far from here. Just picked me up and set me down. I saw her and him go off. Came back to town and found out they thought she was dead, just bits and pieces, so to speak.” Ted gave a tentative smile. “I thought one o’ the pieces might catch your attention.”
“Bush skim much around here?”
“Some.” His eyes narrowed and he took on a canny look. “I won’t be telling you anymore until I’m bunked in th’ company of Dominion Knights and got my ticket home in my hand.”
Jack finished his beer and stood up. “How will I reach you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be watchin’ you.” Ted saluted him with a fresh bottle of beer. “Here’s to th’ Dominion!”
“Right.” Jack watched him empty the bottle in two gulps. Here’s to the Dominion which firestorms colonized planets without a thought to twenty thousand inhabitants just to immolate one Knight and one sand crèche. He left the Forked Tongue feeling
sick to his stomach.
***
“Let me sleep.”
“No,” said Hussiah. He pushed at the hatchling. He caught the fuzzed edge of her thoughts. She was susceptible now. Wearied but not too exhausted. He handed her the clay cup into which he had carefully sprinkled his drugs and stirred them into water. “Drink this.”
Outside the mouth of the cave, another dust squall whirled past. The cave filled suddenly with grit and twigs. Hussiah merely brought down his second eyelids, but she blinded herself. He took her hand and forced the drinking jar into it. Too many fingers, that hand. Clumsy. “Drink.”
She gulped it suddenly.
Hussiah smiled. It was the one thing he’d ever learned from off-worlders. The muscular grimace was an outward manifestation of satisfaction and pleasure. He enjoyed doing it as much as feeling it.
He watched her. He had some fear that the drugs might not work on the hatchling as they worked on his own people. Some fear, but not enough to keep from using them.
She blinked and swayed, then retreated into an open-eyed, catatonic state.
“You will listen to me and you will learn,” the High Priest said. “I will teach you of the harshness of life, and the reward of death. I will teach you to be unafraid of death, and then you will no longer fear killing.”
“When you no longer fear killing, the shell of your mind will be open to me. I will teach you to embrace the killing with scah, that is, honor and reverence, and you will be free.”
“Free,” Amber whispered.
“Yes, hatchling. First I will purge you. Like the sun that burns our eyes if we stare at it too long, life burns into our souls. You must forget everything.”
“Forget,” she said quietly.
Then he did to her what she had once feared he could do. He reached in and ripped her soul free of her flesh.
Hussiah smiled even more widely.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Two weeks stuck in Jack’s mouth like a bad taste. He sat in staging, eyes narrowed to focus on the grainy projection in front of him.
“Look at this tape. It’s Black Piss River all over again. For every stick out there, there’s an army, and every one of those tin soldiers is standing in line to take a shot at us.” Kavin perched on the corner of a conference table. The slide holo was projected up against the flattest wall they could find in the villa, but there was still a distortion at one corner from a column.
“That’s three engagements in fourteen days. They’re taking massive casualties. We’ve pulled Denaro’s bunch out of trouble once—” Jack frowned at that. The militant Walker had stepped in as soon as Colin became ambassador, evidently feeling that his talents were needed to spur the religious investigations onward. For his fervor, he’d earned a week’s stay in the local infirmary. Jack waved a bypass on the stim-stick Lassaday passed around, but he took in a lungful of blue-gray smoke drifting on the air anyway. It burned the back of his throat and left him with an edgy feeling. The sun was barely up, tingeing the indigo sky. “We’ve even covered the Thraks once. One day we’re the good guys, the next, the enemy.”
Lassaday said, “And where are the hissers coming from? Or is everyone in the southern hemisphere a part-time soldier?”
“And why? With this many armies in the field, why can’t we find a decent commander? It’s suicide,” said Kavin.
Rawlins spoke up. “It’s like they’re not coordinated.”
“This is a civil war. One army isn’t going to coordinate with another, looey.” Lassaday snickered. “Besides, we’re just here to protect his reverence’s ass from getting shot off.”
The cadet flushed to the roots of his towhead. “That’s not what I meant. I meant each army operates as though each soldier in it is independent.” He stood up and the holo covered him for a moment looking eerily like a Bythian skin tattoo. “See this placement. I took it out—” The cadet ignored the jeers and catcalls from the back of the room as though he’d been bragging unnecessarily. “I mean, sir, that I shouldn’t have been able to. See this wing here. When the battery command here went down, they should have gone in to cover it—but they didn’t. I walked in and took it out because there was no one in the way.”
“Cowards.” Travellini held the stim-stick, took a deep inhale, then released it. He smiled, a movement of thin lips that almost did not exist.
Jack stared at the screen. “No,” he countered. “I think Rawlins is right. I’ve never seen one Bythian move to cover or help another.”
“Every snake for himself?”
“Maybe.”
Kavin dangled one of his long legs over the side of the table. “That could explain a lot. They cooperate, to a point.”
“Maybe it’s a religious taboo,” Lassaday said.
“Possibly. We should get Quaddah in here to look at these films.”
The room grew quiet. Not a Knight in that room was unaware of what a civilian might think of the slaughter depicted. But it could not be helped. Kavin reached around and snapped the projector off. “We have other concerns that need to be looked into, as well. I’ve got two men not responding in Quadrant 42 and I don’t like having missing men.”
“I’ll go,” Jack said.
The two eyed each other. “You’ve already been out there once.”
“And I didn’t find anything, but at least I can get out there and back.”
Kavin smiled faintly. “There could be trouble.”
“I’m going.”
“I’ll go, too, sir,” Rawlins said.
“Not necessary. The skimmer won’t hold but one armored man. All right, captain, you take it out. Let me know what you find.”
Jack nodded. He and Kavin both knew he would scour the area that might have been covered by Amber as well. There had been no further word of her… it was as though the earth had opened up and swallowed her whole. It was no longer enough to know the High Priest had taken her in. He wanted her returned.
“And Jack—”
He paused at the barracks’ doorway.
“Quaddah has sent word that the armies might be mustering whatever attacks they can because the dust storm season is closing in. We might be on the edge of it, so take care.”
Jack saluted and left.
A skimmer was not Jack’s search vehicle of choice—a hoverscout had more range and could carry him through bad weather, but a skimmer was better than nothing. He stood in the building converted to a garage and checked out the battered piece of equipment which looked as if it had been on Bythia since first contact.
A Thrakian sand crèche. The real thing, or manufactured by someone in case it became necessary to firestorm Bythia as well?
And if it was the real thing, Jack could not suffer it to continue, because it would become the germ, the seeding for the sands to come later if the Dominion left and the Thraks remained. Nor did he want Amber left in the wilderness anywhere near Thraks and their sand.
He shouldered the garage door and pushed the skimmer outside. Its engine coughed over on the second kickstart and Jack mounted it. As it rose into the air, he pushed back the landing wheels with the heel of his boots and revved it into cruise. He soared over the city wall. Beneath him, dark shadows to race the shadow of the skimmer. He looked down and saw the genetic horrors known as surfas keeping pace.
They fell back eventually, their black oily tongues panting out of crimson, gaping jaws. Their eyes glittered as though knowing he’d be back.
On the roads below him, the Bythians piloted their high-sided windsails down rutted roads used for centuries, wheels sunk into grooves as permanent as rails. Even the high sides were not always enough protection, so they ran their vehicles in caravans. The sail of each vehicle was dyed to match the tattoo skin patterns of its holder, and Jack could always spot a road by the ribbon of prismatic colors billowing upon it. He made a low circle about Sassinal and its regions, then headed toward Quadrant 42.
***
Amber bowed low, touching her forehead
to the ground. She drew her eyelids down and kept them down, knowing she ought to still be able to see through them, but she could not because she was different from her elder. Still, she obeyed.
“I will strike,” Hussiah warned her. “Feel it.”
She did. His body scent curled up inside her nostrils, carrying his aura and his intentions with it. Now, cool and meditative. Now, heating with the first tension of muscles. Now, the pungent scent of tingling nerves. And now—!
She dodged to her right, eyelids flung open, her hand curved into a rigid claw, and, pinned under it, lay Hussiah. Painstakingly, he turned his face to her and smiled.
“Now,” he said. “You have become a warrior. Your mind is clear. You never need kill anything but that which you wish.”
Amber returned the smile. She released her elder.
He held up a strangely tooled jacket and pressed it into her hands as she relaxed and coiled back. “This is your enemy now,” he said. He took her hand and stroked it down the fabric. It was redolent with the memory of scent. “Know him. Remember him.”
Jack programmed the skimmer. He paused for a moment. The Thrakian sand crèche that Colin’s aerial surveys had unveiled was not all that much farther north than the Black Piss River. The scar on his right hand itched a little and he scratched the absence of a little finger and thought to himself that the itch was merely psychological. All the same, he’d like to be able to scratch that mental itch, too. Would he find sand or not, or just a patch of desert, maybe a dried out riverbed, in the green belt?
He’d hung Bogie up behind the pilot’s seat. The Flexalinks shone in the bright morning sun. The armor danced with a life of its own and Jack swore the gauntlets brushed his shoulder at least once, just to touch him.
*I remember sand,* the armor thought, without letting Jack hear him.
Jack reached out to tap the keyboard and slow the skimmer down. The skimmer nosed into a spiral search pattern, cameras examining terrain and panning it before him.
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