The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  She closed her eyes and felt them as the base of a triangle with her at the point. Then the others joined, a triangle mirroring hers, so that she and Ivard faced one another, the Kelly a line at Ivard’s back. It was not a stable image, but it was the best they could contrive.

  Then she let the communion deepen into synesthetic perception and lowered her fingertips gingerly onto the Heart. Instantly the sense of the station as a whole enwrapped them. Startled, they pulled back, confining their perception to the Chamber of Kronos, then slowly, slowly reaching out again. Vi’ya fought dizziness. How strange to see things from all sides at once!

  Back in the Rifters’ chamber on the other side of the Suneater, Ivard sagged back against Vi’ya’s bed, and Jaim took the compad.

  Warning flowed from the Kelly, difficult to understand, but Ivard comprehended enough to wave his hands wildly.

  The others braced themselves as he settled himself into his rapport posture, closed his eyes, and let his spirit bathe in the soft, blue-tasting fire of the Kelly.

  Standing at the Heart of Kronos, Vi’ya sensed Ivard swiftly sorting out the manifold emotions of those within the chamber, setting them aside to free their perception. And so with those outside as their ambit widened. The emotional noise faded.

  Far, far away, slow power boomed in breathing tides of nascent awareness, reminding her momentarily of the deep tones of the organ in New Glastonbury. Oddly, enfolded in the Unity, the memory was not painful. Instead, she felt the deep joy that had touched Ivard there, a flicker of resonance from the Kelly.

  Ivard’s synesthesia slowly brought the image down to more familiar human terms. He perceived the six other members of the Unity around him as if floating in a pool of warm liquid: blue radiance of the Kelly, blinding white from the Eya’a, cool steady green from Vi’ya. Waves rocked the fluid, stirred by the malevolent presence that haunted his dreams.

  Another light glimmered into being a short distance away.

  The malevolence settled around it, and began to squeeze in an effort to devour it. Ivard cried out in pain. It felt like someone had plunged a knife into his solar plexus. Knowledge erupted from the Kelly, and Ivard felt Vi’ya’s startled recognition: a pulse of light, resonant with the chill control of Dol’jhar, like an echo of the Avatar close by. But more complex: Anaris. Not Norio, but Anaris!

  Vi’ya began to reach toward that light, an instinctive movement, to balance Ivard, then controlled the impulse a heartbeat before the malevolence closed around him in a shroud of darkness. Jagged pain jolted through the Unity. She tried to pull away, but it was like trying to wrench away from a demanding memory, a part of oneself. The malevolence encompassed Anaris and the light faded even more, pulsing in protest against the surrounding darkness, evoking savage bursts of agony in the Unity.

  Then blue pinwheels of alien emotion erupted from the Kelly, flowing through Ivard to detonate in her mind. Vi’ya and the Eya’a joined them, and the Unity enfolded them all. After an instant of confusion, a welter of color and form, their focus narrowed. On the horizon, farther away than was possible on a planet, something like heat lightning flickered; the light would have been searing if directly visible.

  The Unity threw itself against the demonic knot of hunger with the reflexive ferocity of self-defense, trying to reach its newest member. But the hellish entity had totally encapsulated the last member of the Unity, and their anger found no purchase. Vi’ya felt her awareness fade as the Unity expended its last strength against their opponent.

  o0o

  As soon as the portal squonched shut behind Morrighon and Vi’ya, Anaris dived for the chest with Norio’s drugs in it.

  He sprayjected himself with the first dose. There wouldn’t be time for the second. But he didn’t want to be unconscious, anyway. If whatever it was attacked, he would meet it open-eyed.

  His console then began blinking with a relay from Morrighon: the record of the karra ceremony. He watched it, chilled by the echo of his near ingestion during Vi’ya’s second probe of the station. He eyed the floor. Could it reach through?

  Anaris moved to the center of the room and stood warily, his peshakh gripped in one hand. The Dol’jharian in him hated the fear that prickled his skin, the Panarchist acknowledged it as an appropriate emotion. His physical senses sharpened to hyper-awareness of his surroundings.

  The station twitched as the lights dimmed in familiar prolepsis. A pucker began forming in the wall. It was round, as in the karra ceremony, not elliptical as in the vid of his deadly experience during Vi’ya’s second probe. It is coming for me.

  He hefted the peshakh, sneering at the futility of the gesture—but did not return it to its sheath until, abruptly, he felt very light. Anaris grabbed the edge of the console and held on as his feet lifted off the floor, leaving him extended out from the console like a flag in a high, steady wind.

  Looking along his body, he saw the pucker begin to open in a ghastly smile. He caught a glimpse of eyes and talons within. Anger flooded him with adrenaline.

  For a heartbeat he was back in the vision that had taken him in the landing bay, the day Vi’ya first arrived on the Suneater. He saw Math, Lictor of the Chorei. Heard his voice: Though we go together to rejoin Totality, we will give our gift to the future. And should the gift be accepted, then in the end we all shall triumph . . .

  A shock like the one he’d experienced in the Telvarna jolted through him, and suddenly, dizzyingly, the force suspending him in midair blossomed within him.

  “Esrackh atta-mi!” he shouted in triumph. “It is mine!”

  And dropped lightly to his feet. Seizing the edges of the fistula with his mind, he commanded it to close, exulting in the pure exertion of his Chorei strength. The orifice slammed shut. The room bucked violently. The lights had failed, save the emergency glow near the door. In the gloom the console flickered behind him as the stasis clamps fought the motion.

  Hands erupted from the floor around the edges of the dyplast sheet and the covering carpets that insulated him from the floor and jerked at it savagely, knocking Anaris to his knees and ripping loose the console cabling. The flicker ceased, and the ceiling began to bow downward. The hands jerked harder. He sprawled full length and began to slide toward the edge. There was nothing to grab hold of.

  o0o

  Skittering without direction over the frictionless surface, the Unity could find no power to oppose the destruction of its final member. Then a burst of searing anger erupted from the eighth light and it abruptly snapped into alignment with them—

  And the world took form.

  A squelching sound accompanied a pucker as new comprehension resonated through Anaris from somewhere he couldn’t trace. Where was the light, the lights, color coming from? But his enemy was not of the Suneater, and his Chorei nature seized the Urian material in its intangible embrace under this new guidance, the source of his help clear.

  For the briefest moment the shaking stopped, and without hesitation, Anaris sprang up and threw himself into the wall opposite the pucker

  The eight were no longer a lopsided polyhedron floating directionlessly across a dimensionless pool, but a stable formation, three-two-three, balanced on a knife-lean canoe moving rapidly along a rushing stream.

  o0o

  In the Rifters’ chamber, Jaim looked down at Ivard, disliking the way he had curled up. He looked almost as if he’d been stabbed, with both hands clutching crab-like in the middle of his chest.

  Lokri ripped the pillow off his own bed and moved to wedge it under Ivard’s shoulder, then he froze as the station trembled. The room vibrated like a bubble in air currents, subsonic noises pulsing through bones and skull.

  At first it was merely to be endured, as had been the first attempts. Ivard cried out in pain. Lokri gripped his shoulders, helpless to do aught else. For a long moment, nothing further happened save the trembling of the station.

  Jaim’s nerves fired, signaling alarm. Nerves, then muscles, readying for battle or retreat, and
then his mind registered a shape forming in the back wall of the chamber.

  He was not the only one to feel it. The others faced that wall, Marim scrambling over the beds to sit between Montrose and Sedry, and Lokri set his hands under Ivard’s armpits and pulled him bonelessly back into the safety of his grip. Ivard heeding his protective grip no more than he noticed the undulating of the room.

  The deep groaning noise was overlaid by a hiss, faint at first, then increasing rapidly. A pucker formed in the wall.

  A crack made them all jump as the pucker split open and a body shot through, landing on the floor next to Ivard.

  “Vi’ya?” Lokri croaked as they stared at the long, black-clad form.

  But the clothing was wrong, the hair short, the proportions masculine—

  As suddenly as it had begun, the motions of the station subsided, save only for a flutter in the ceiling, and the back wall slowly re-forming like melting wax.

  The man on the floor stirred, then with an effort sat up. Jaim gazed in blank-minded astonishment at the unfamiliar black eyes and strong-boned face. A hand much bigger than his own lifted slowly to rake blue-black hair from a high forehead. The man gazed around at them, and they stared back.

  Then Ivard moaned, and opened his eyes, and gasped. The man, who still sat on the floor, looked down into Ivard’s face.

  “Anaris?” Ivard said weakly.

  “Sanctus Hicura.” Marim slid her hands over her eyes. “We’re in for it now—it’s the royal blunge-sniffer himself.”

  Anaris ignored Marim and got to his feet.

  Ivard looked up at the big Dol’jharian, who dwarfed everyone else in the room. “You—have TK. Norio didn’t get you.”

  “Norio?” Anaris repeated. “Is that the negative entity?”

  Ivard nodded, his eyes squinted in diminishing pain.

  “There are also Kelly,” Anaris said. “A Kelly trinity was part of this. Where are they?” He spoke the Uni of Arthelion, which jarred Jaim until he remembered that the heir had spent years as a hostage in the Mandala.

  Ivard’s chin lifted. “You’ll have to ask Vi’ya,” he said. “Lysanter will let her come back pretty soon.”

  “I will ask her,” said Anaris. “But not here.”

  He faced the back wall and lifted his right hand. For a moment he stood thus, fingers outspread, his powerful back in the ripped white silk shirt turned to the room. Then he laid his hand gently against the wall, and the quantum-plast rippled like water. Again that hole opened, swiftly and with a hissing noise rather than the wrenching squelch that the normal doors made.

  The floor lifted gently and carried him through, and the door hissed shut behind him, the pucker swiftly fading from sight, leaving the wall blank and smooth again.

  “Ohhhhh, no,” Marim moaned. “What was all that?”

  Ivard looked up at her. “He’s got TK. He can make the station move him around.”

  “I mean that about Norio. I thought he was dead!”

  “He is,” Ivard said. “But some part of him somehow got into the station. I don’t know how. He’s the source of my nightmares.”

  The others looked sickened, and Lokri shook his head. “Chatz! I think I’d rather have Eusabian haunting the station than Norio Danali.”

  Montrose nodded. “There’s that. And there’s the added threat of Anaris with TK. I don’t like any of this.”

  Sedry said, “If Anaris has what the Dol’jharians call a gift of the Chorei, Eusabian cannot possibly know about it. He would have had Anaris killed years ago.”

  They all looked at one another, then Marim whistled. “Can we use that biznai about Anaris?”

  Lokri had laced his fingers together, dropping his head so no one could see his face. At Marim’s question he looked up, his mouth twisted. “You want to be the one to tell Eusabian?”

  Marim shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to tell him anything. But maybe Lar . . . Morrighon, even . . .”

  “Let’s wait for Vi’ya,” Jaim said.

  “My thinking as well,” Montrose said, his voice a low rumble.

  Marim grimaced. “You know she’ll just say to sit on it.”

  “If it keeps us from being put in their mindripper for a month or two of torture, I have no problem with sitting on it,” Montrose retorted. “Better to do nothing than to give the wrong data to the wrong person.”

  “The station is almost entirely populated with wrong persons,” Sedry said as Marim sighed.

  Presently the door sloonched open, and Vi’ya and the Eya’a entered, Vi’ya with her hair hanging loose, her clothing torn in places, and bruising smudging her dark skin. She glanced toward the console.

  Sedry said, “’S off.”

  “A hole opened up in that wall,” Lokri said quickly. “Anaris popped through. After it was over, he got up, said he’d talk to you later—’not here’ was what he said—and he put his hand on the wall, like this, and it opened, and he left.”

  Vi’ya glanced up at the wall, then turned to watch the Eya’a move into their chamber. “So telekinesis is his Chorei gift,” she said.

  “Can we use it?” Marim asked.

  Vi’ya gave her head a negative twist. “Eusabian knows.”

  Marim made a noise of disgust and flung herself onto her bed, her back toward them.

  “New area of the station opened,” Vi’ya said. “Eusabian wants the experiments stepped up.”

  “Can you do it?” Lokri asked.

  Vi’ya glanced at the back wall, then at Marim’s curly head. “It is not a matter of whether,” she said, “but how. And when. The station is waking on its own, which constrains us in time.”

  Alarm flared through Jaim at all this news, and he saw the same reaction in the widening of Lokri’s eyes. In spite of Barrodagh’s promises, they suspected that Eusabian would dispense with them if the station energized on its own. Then there was the different threat in the fact that Norio Danali was not the missing member of the Unity. He never had been. Anaris was the eighth—which explained, in part, the terrible nightmares Ivard had had on Ares.

  And didn’t he say once that Vi’ya had also dreamed of Anaris? Though she has never said so.

  More questions roiled through Jaim’s mind.

  Vi’ya’s black gaze was like a blow. She trod through the door to the Eya’a chamber.

  Montrose and Sedry had fallen into low-voiced converse. Lokri went to get Ivard some water.

  Jaim rose and followed Vi’ya into the bare, chilly little room where the Eya’a were housed. Already they had curled into balls, their breathing slowing, frigid air from the hissing vents ruffling their white fur. The door sucked shut behind them.

  “Anaris is the last member of the Unity,” he said.

  She gave a short laugh and watched her breath cloud and dissipate. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Jaim considered that and said, “Will you tell him about the Unity?”

  “No. If he thinks it happened by accident, he will be intrigued—and possibly more cooperative in exploring the possibilities.”

  Jaim nodded slowly. “Whereas foreknowledge indicates a conspiracy. But what about the Kelly?”

  “The weak point,” she said. “It all depends on how well he got to know any Kelly while he was living on Arthelion. I will tell him that our trinity is part of my crew and is hiding on board the Telvarna lest Eusabian discover them and treat them as he did their Archon. If he does not know any Kelly, possibly he can be led to infer that they are silly, shy, weak creatures who also happen to have a telepathic gift. If he thinks that my telepathic gift is enhanced solely through the Eya’a, perhaps he will lose interest in the Kelly and leave them unmolested on the ship.”

  Jaim nodded, drew in a deep breath. “What happened?” he asked. “In Anaris’s room. With you.”

  “Nothing. And nothing will, unless I choose.”

  Once more he sensed her putting up a wall between them. Because they were alone, and she was tired, he did not stop. “Why sh
ould there be a choice at all?”

  “To hide our conspiracy. To test the limits of his alliance—and his enmity.”

  He crossed his arms, letting her feel the depths of his skepticism.

  Her lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “To pass the time.”

  Jaim remembered the Karusch-na Rahali, and how Vi’ya would be bombarded constantly with the overriding emotions of lust, greed, anger, and under it all, fear. It must be, he reflected, like trying to live one’s life in the midst of a shouting mob.

  But he knew she was capable of forcing it all from her consciousness—as she had on Ares. But would she?

  “Why should you pass the time with an enemy?” he asked.

  “Not out of friendship,” she said. “Or shared interest or experience. Not out of affection or kindness.” Her tone warned him that this was as much of the subject as she wished to discuss.

  “Why?”

  She looked up at him, and her eyes narrowed.

  He stood his ground, glaring back. To try to forget Brandon? To revert to her origins as an exorcism of inconvenient emotions? A symbolic snap of the fingers in Eusabian’s face? Any reason he could offer would only be a part of the truth, and thus none of it. But his instincts warned him that she was on the cusp of a lifetime of trouble if she pursued this path.

  “An excess,” she said finally, “of energy.”

  Jaim stepped further into the freezing room and laughed. He was no longer cold; danger, and more complex emotions that had nothing to do with danger, sent hot blood coursing through his body.

  “You’re a fool,” he said deliberately, and slapped her across the face.

  NINE

  ARES

  Though the Hand of Telos had pointed Eloatri onto a new path, old habits stayed with her. Finishing her meditations, she drew three cleansing breaths and rose to her feet. One hand reached absently for her begging bowl, and as awareness conquered habit, she touched the Digrammaton hanging round her neck.