“Angry?”
He was staring out through the bars, but even in profile she could see his face change. Harden. The red of his eyes seemed less like wine and more like blood, like the color Reese saw on the inside of her eyelids when she wanted to explode. The doctor, the alien, the inconvenient object of an unwanted mission, those faces became masks, and something darker looked out. “I found a man whose tastes were repellant, even for a slaver.”
For some reason Reese didn’t want to ask what those tastes were. She didn’t even want to ask, “What did you do to him?” but by the time she realized that she didn’t want to hear the answer the question had already escaped her.
“I set his house on fire. With him in it.” He didn’t look at her, but even in profile his lack of expression terrified her.
“REESE!”
Irine’s wail dragged her attention away, and she crawled to the Harat-Shar. The tigraine had Sascha’s head cradled in her arms and she was rocking, her ears flat and eyes wide. “Reese, what’s wrong with him? Why won’t he wake up?”
“He’s not ready to wake,” said a steady voice behind Reese’s shoulder.
Reese jumped. “Stop doing that!”
“Doing what?” the Eldritch asked absently as he slid past her to Sascha’s other side, running a hand above the tigraine’s face.
“Sneaking up on me,” Reese said. “At least have the grace to make a little more noise.”
“Grace and noise aren’t usually associated with one another,” Hirianthial murmured.
“What’s wrong with him?” Irine asked the Eldritch. Reese could hear none of her typical skepticism in her quivering voice and she wondered at this instant trust. Was he influencing her mind?
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Hirianthial said, his voice gentle. “He isn’t ready to wake, that’s all.”
“But this burn—”
“Just a palmer, alet. He took no greater harm from it. He’ll wake soon.”
Only then did Irine look at Reese, still holding onto her brother’s body. “Captain?”
“He’s a doctor,” Reese said. “He’d know better than me.”
“What about Bryer?” Irine asked after a moment. “Is he okay?”
“Everyone’s okay,” Reese said. “We’re just in a bit of a fix.”
Irine’s gold eyes flicked to the walls of the cell. “Yeah, I see that.” She looked back at the Eldritch. “This is him, isn’t it? Our spy?”
“At your service,” Hirianthial said.
“I guess you already have been,” Irine said, stroking Sascha’s mane.
Reese sighed and turned back to the bars. She prodded the back of her molars with her tongue, searching in vain for any minuscule deposit of chalk that might have stubbornly clung to her gums. Her stomach was going to kill her. “So how many people are guarding us?”
“I’ve counted six,” Hirianthial said. “Two personal guards and four up the corridor.”
“Six,” Reese repeated, musing.
“There are five of us,” Irine said from behind them.
Reese said, “They have palmers. And the keys.”
Irine shrugged and didn’t reply.
“The ship’s coming tomorrow to pick them up,” Hirianthial said after a moment. “Presumably we’ll be going with them.”
“So we have...what, twenty-four hours to break out of here, overwhelm six people, get to the Earthrise and flee far enough to lose a slaver-ship?”
“Twenty-two,” Hirianthial said. “Days here are shorter than Alliance mean.”
“Wonderful,” Reese muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose.
Hirianthial’s voice sounded quietly behind her. “You need only secure your escape from this cell, lady. You were captured and put here only to inconvenience me. If you disappear, they will not bother to track you. It’s me they want.”
“I can’t leave you behind,” Reese said, irritated. “You’re the debt I have to pay. If you rot here, I’ll have to do something else and I bet it won’t be any easier.”
“The Queen isn’t expecting you to save me if the odds are overwhelming,” Hirianthial said.
“Well, six guards isn’t overwhelming,” Reese said, then stopped. “Did you say...the Queen?”
His voice was quizzical. “Of course. I thought from our talk that you’d concluded she was your mysterious benefactor.”
Reese turned, setting her back against the bars. The Eldritch’s face remained composed, but somehow she could still sense his confusion. A polite confusion. She couldn’t quite mesh this courteous facade with the darkness revealed by the memory of the slaver. “Are you trying to tell me that the Queen of the Eldritch saved me from bankruptcy?”
Another one of those miniscule shrugs. “It seems that way.”
“Damn,” Irine said in wonder.
“That makes no sense!” Reese exclaimed. “What would a queen want with me? How did she even find me? Why would she bother?”
“Why did she bother with me?” the Eldritch said. “But she chose you and she cares what becomes of me and here we are. Why question it, lady?”
“I’m not your—”
“—lady, so you say,” Hirianthial said. “But you are an instrument of a queen, so what shall I call you instead?”
“My name is Theresa Eddings,” Reese said. “I am the captain of the TMS Earthrise. And you will call me ‘Reese’ because that’s what people call me. Not ‘lady’ and not ‘madam’ and not ‘princess’ or whatever else you can come up with. Just “Reese.” Or ‘captain’ if you insist.”
“As you say,” he said.
Such polite words, such courtesy, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was going to call her whatever he wanted, and damned what she thought of it. Reese pursed her lips and eyed him skeptically, but his expression never changed. With a sigh, she steadied herself against the bars and rubbed her temple. “These guards. Do they ever check on us?”
“They check about every hour. They don’t always come within eyeshot, but I can sense them.”
She glanced at him, then back at her crew. Irine had curled up around Sascha, her striped tail wrapped around his so tightly she could barely tell which inserted into which spine. Bryer remained unconscious. This was what she had to work with. Reese sighed and looked back at the Eldritch. “Can you set the guard on fire when he comes? Then we can grab for the field key and make a run for it.”
The Eldritch stared at her, white brows lifting. “Lady—Captain—do I look like a magician to you?” he asked.
“You did say you set someone’s house on fire. How much harder is a person’s clothes? If you were sent for your special talents....”
He laughed then, a breathy, quiet thing. Reese had never seen someone laugh without relaxing; it seemed unnatural. Did all Eldritch have this extreme control over their bodies?
“Good God! I can’t break the laws of physics at a whim, I’m sorry to say. The Queen sent me because I’m one of the few non-touch telepaths, not because I can set things on fire by staring at them, or teleport or anything equally preposterous.”
The hairs on the nape of Reese’s neck bristled beneath the tangle of her beaded braids. “How was I supposed to know? Your world is so cloistered it makes a monastery look positively cosmopolitan! I didn’t even know it was your Queen who sent me to rescue you... how do you expect anyone to know anything about you under circumstances like those?”
His cheeks colored a faint blue-tinged peach. “Your point is taken, lady. Pardon me.”
Reese snorted and looked away, clenching her hands on the bars. No knives, no data tablets, no pyrokinetic Eldritch, no peppermint chalk, and a hold full of rotting rooderberries. She stared at her dirty, broken fingernails. By the time she found another port she’d have to do some fast talking to get someone to buy the things—
Reese’s chin jerked up. She smiled, feral, and turned to face Hirianthial again. “But what if they thought you could set them on fire?”
“I mean, why don’t we set things up so that it looks like you’re doing some sort of magic with our help, and use that to scare the guard into letting us go?”
“Do you truly believe we can talk our way out of this cell?”
Oh, he sounded so certain. Reese folded her arms over her chest. “I’ve talked my way out of worse situations.”
His face remained maddeningly smooth. She wanted him to sneer or roll his eyes or something. “Have you?”
“Look, Hirianthial,” she said, “I’m sure I can do this. I know my people can. It’s you I’m not sure of. Can you act? Because if you can’t pull this one off, then it won’t matter that I can do it and the twins and Bryer can do it.”
“What exactly would you have me pretend?”
Was it her or was he actually uncomfortable with the idea of lying? Trust her to find the one Eldritch in all the worlds who actually believed in personal honor. In the books she’d read they’d never had a problem abandoning their beliefs to serve the story. “You’d have to pretend to be what everyone believes Eldritch to be. And don’t tell me you don’t know what that is. If you’re out here playing spy, mingling with pirates and slavers, you know very well what Eldritch are supposed to be like.”
“Supposed to be like,” Hirianthial repeated, and for the first time she heard what she was expecting. Bitterness, maybe. Fatigue. Except he wasn’t looking at her, but at something on the inside of his own eyes. “As if we are expected to fill some void in the universe.”
In the face of uncertainty, Reese did as she always did. “Look, are you up for this or not? Because unless you have some better idea how to get us out of this hole in the ground, we’re going with my plan.”
“Had I had a better plan, we would not have met,” the Eldritch said at last.
“Then let’s get Sascha up. This is how it’s going to go.”
Hirianthial rested his hands on his knees, feeling the guards mill against the edges of his awareness. He could just—just—pick them out past the flares of the people sitting in a semi-circle around him. Where Reese had obtained her ideas about ritual magic he had no clue, but try as he might he couldn’t complain that they lacked dramatics. There was no real magic outside of wild stories of ancient Eldritch mind-mages, of course, and his mental talents couldn’t be intensified by any outside aid, but the concept sounded good and he supposed that was all that counted.
He’d been many things on Liolesa’s little mission. He’d played instruments he barely remembered learning at a tutor’s side for dinner. He’d washed dishes, scrubbed decks, even bandaged a wound or two. He had not yet played the charlatan. All of it galled. That he’d taken on this role to free himself made it only a hint less bitter. Always, his people wanted something of him he wasn’t made to give; his attempts to fulfill those expectations usually ended in failure. While he wasn’t expecting this to be any different, he hoped for the sake of the aliens grouped around him that it would be.
The guard pierced his circle of awareness, heading for their cell. “He’s on his way.”
“All right, people, look calm,” Reese said.
Irine giggled. “This is too silly.”
“It’ll work,” Reese said. “Just remember your lines.”
The Harat-Shar giggled again. Hirianthial opened his eyes and found them all in position facing him. Reese and the two Harat-Shar had copied his stance, palms up on their knees with eyes closed. Bryer, who couldn’t sit cross-legged, kneeled with his hands pressed together at his breast, the feathers splayed from his arms in a decorative fan. One could argue they had the hard part: to remain composed and to seem as if they were concentrating when they knew the farce they were engaged in. Still, Hirianthial hated lying. Obfuscation he could do. Lying wounded him.
The heavy thump of boots on stone pulled him out of his reverie. Hirianthial set his face. As he’d hoped, Blond stood in front of their cage, staring at their group and playing with the key ring. Spikes of sweaty uncertainty jumped around his aura. He cleared his throat of thick phlegm and said, “What are you people doing?”
“What does it look like?” Hirianthial asked with just a hint of contempt.
The guard’s aura flared red. “Don’t you mess with me, pastehead. You’ll be dancing a different set when they put you in real chains.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’ll be doing that. Not with my new... friends... to help me.”
The guard’s left boot creaked, then the right. Nervousness gave his colors a green sheen. “Ummm ... look, I don’t know what they’re doing, but they should stop it.” He stared at Reese and the others. “What are they doing?”
Now for the lies. The premise had sounded so ridiculous Hirianthial couldn’t imagine anyone believing it, but Reese had convinced him. He thought of the last time he’d been angry from pit to fingers and summoned up that voice, the deep soft one with the hard edges, the one that made a lie out of his cultured accent. “Channeling power to me... so I can set this building on fire. Or didn’t you hear about the last time?”
On cue, Sascha began to hum.
“What the—”
“The power is flowing to me. I might spare you afterwards. Unlock the door.”
“I don’t, I...”
Irine added her mezzosoprano to her brother’s tenor. They started out in harmony and then Sascha dropped his voice until they were only an octave and a quarter tone off. Hirianthial wondered if they realized what they were doing or if they were just tone-deaf. He focused on the man. “Unlock the door. If you do, I’ll give you time to run before I start.”
Reese added her contralto, filling part of the lower register.
Blond shifted from foot to foot, books creaking. His fingers played almost spasmodically with the keys. Hirianthial stared him in the eye, willing him to do it.
“Unlock the door.”
“I—”
“Unlock the door.”
“It’s not—”
“Unlock the door.”
Bryer broke in with a shrill ululation that skidded up the scale of comfortable human hearing. Blond’s fear shot his aura with actinic sparkles, and the man lunged forward, keying first the field and then the door. The latter beeped its processing tone. A few seconds later, the door opened. Blond stood paralyzed before it, as if unable to believe his actions.
Gently, Hirianthial said, “Run. Now.”
Blond stared wildly at him; his eyes flicked to Bryer’s feathers. Then he turned tail and fled.
“All right!” Reese said, jumping to her feet. “Quick, before it’s too late!”
The two Harat-Shar dashed out first, striped tails swaying. Bryer loped after. Reese pointed. “Out. I’ll be behind you.”
Hirianthial rose, and she darted around him, closing the door behind him.
“Which way!” Sascha yelled back.
“Left!” Hirianthial called.
The two tigraines vanished around the corner, and then Irine yowled. He could just see two more people in front of them. “Guards,” he warned.
“I think they already found them,” Reese said dryly, running up the hall. They turned into the corridor to find Bryer leaping on one of the guards, his bronze claws muted by the red flash of blood. Disoriented, Hirianthial turned toward the smell—blood required two kinds of attention—but a hand grabbed the back of his tunic and yanked. He felt concern and pain and fear and adrenaline like a punch to the spine.
“This way!” Reese said, pulling him past the two Pelted and the Phoenix, who were doing more than distracting the guards.
“They’ll die,” Hirianthial said, transfixed by the deflation of the auras under Sascha and Bryer. Old instincts warred with new oaths.
“Have your crisis of conscience later!” Reese said. “Or have you forgotten what these people have done? Do you want to live your life in chains?”
He still couldn’t force himself forward. It had been so long since he’d seen blood spilled i
n violence. It woke demons.
“Blood on the dust, Hirianthial, MOVE!”
He moved. He couldn’t not move beneath the force of that command. He couldn’t decide if they were wounded or enemies and in the face of that ambivalence he could turn his back on them and leave them to die. Even if he’d wanted to turn back, Reese was at his heels, riding him, herding him. He didn’t want to have to push past her and her cut-glass aura.
Sascha pushed past him, blood streaking his fur. “Are there more?”
“Two more ahead,” Hirianthial said. “They know we’re coming.”
“Stop!” Reese said. “They’re going to have weapons—”
“Yeah well, now so do we,” Irine said, holding up three palmers.
Reese crowed. “Excellent, fuzzy! Just be—”
Sascha and Bryer had already taken one of the palmers and run ahead.
“—careful,” Reese finished to the sound of palmer fire. She winced.
Irine shrugged, then ambled up the corridor. “It’s clear, boss.”
And just like that, they’d taken care of everyone in the prison that had held him for so long. Dazed, Hirianthial followed Reese up the corridor, paused to stare at the bodies. These two, at least, weren’t dead. Memories tangled with reality in his eyes, blurring the edges of the room.
“Come on,” Reese said. “No time to sight-see. The moment someone wakes up and realizes we’re gone our lives are worthless. Or at least, to us. I love my old crate, but she’s not going to outrun a pirate.”
“The tumbleweeds await!” Sascha said, pushing open the door. He threw a telegem to Reese. “Might as well use this. They’re going to find out about us anyway.”
Reese tossed it aside. “I don’t want to alert them any sooner. Let’s just run and hope Kis’eh’t can get the Earthrise ready fast enough without warning. You. Prince Charming. You go in the middle where we can—”
“—guard me?” Hirianthial asked, a brief sense of amusement blowing away the numbness.
“Just go.”
He went. Bryer ran alongside, wings and tail a flutter of bronze and muted crimson. Sascha took lead, with Irine at the side. Reese ran behind. They sprinted out into a purple twilight and onto the empty streets, avoiding the street lamps. There were no lights puddled in the windows, but the breeze that sloughed through his hair—Hirianthial had felt nothing finer.
Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) Page 4