The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  The Bori laced his fingers together. “The Panarchists have curtailed our time, Riolo. Given as long as he needed, Lysanter would have mapped out your Ogres and found anything untoward. But we do not have that time. You will remain here until we have secured our goals. Until then you have certain choices. You can gamble on our ignorance—which will not last long—and the mindripper will be your fate if we discover those traps I alluded to before. I need not assure you that the pesz mas’hadni is also skilled in prolonging one’s life. If the Avatar wills it, his enemies can lie there for months as the physicians experiment on them. You can gamble on that, or you can choose to serve us, in which case the rewards are commensurate with service. We have the power, Riolo. Either way. Choose now.”

  Riolo thought swiftly. He owed Hreem nothing. On the other hand, there was no reason for the Dol’jharians to spare him once his usefulness to them was finished. In the end, his only loyalty was to himself, and to the Matria who had sent him. Remembering the crudity of the precautions on his console, he decided on a gamble that was really his only choice in this twisted simulacrum of the Under. He would show them how to remove the most obvious traps, but with code that would help him install other, more subtle ones.

  So he projected a sickening mélange of relief and horror. “Hreem?” His voice croaked, not altogether voluntarily.

  Barrodagh looked pleased. “He will never know. My promise.”

  Riolo expelled his breath. “I will show you the traps he commanded and how to disable them. But I will need a compad, and links to a number of arrays . . .”

  o0o

  Anaris dropped the last of Norio Danali’s drugs into the disposer and watched them vanish with a whoosh. The temptation to hold on to them in case they might be needed was outweighed by the risk of Barrodagh getting his goons into Anaris’s chamber long enough to do a thorough search. Though he could not know why Anaris would keep drugs, the less Barrodagh knew, the better.

  Especially now.

  Anaris turned away and gazed into his chamber. If he ignored the dimensions, it was almost possible to believe he was not standing in the depths of the Suneater, but high in his ancestors’ stone tower at Hroth D’ocha. How many hours had they spent together among these furnishings, Jerrode and Barrodagh? Had the Bori secretary ever been invited to sit?

  Probably not. And now Jerrode Eusabian had nearly attained the goal of every Dol’jharian lord: total independence. He’d come aboard the station as dependent as the lowest work slub upon Lysanter and Barrodagh and their faceless, nameless commensals, but through the brilliance of a Rifter noderunner and the calculated gift of a pair of Ogres by another Rifter, the Avatar of Dol was very nearly as independently powerful as the ancient family ritual and mythology painted him.

  And that knowledge makes him ever more dangerous. Anaris remembered Gelasaar discoursing on the illusion of autonomy—“an illusion Dol’jharian lords indulge in to a degree often indistinguishable from insanity.” He had dismissed the Panarch’s comment, but present events brought it back to mind with renewed force. Was his father’s sanity eroding as he came closer to total power?

  For Eusabian needed only one more thing to make him the most powerful man in all of human history, and that he would have soon, perhaps within twenty-four hours—the powering up of the Suneater. Then he wouldn’t need Barrodagh anymore, or the army of spying, mutilated Bori underlings.

  And he would find it very easy to control a troublesome heir.

  Which meant that Anaris had to accelerate his own plans. First order was to get off the station as soon as possible. Anaris was gambling on the fact that his father would take some time to glory in his new toy, the most powerful ever known to humankind, and would straightaway move to dispatch Ares and Rifthaven. But even if fully mobile, the station could not be in two places at once, and if Anaris was fast, he could be well out of reach before his father remembered to deal with him.

  A troublesome heir, he reflected with acid humor as he tabbed his console to reflect the view on space, with equal freedom of movement. And a fighting chance.

  First, to confirm his ascendancy over the Tarkans.

  Next, to secure the Rifter who had upset all their calculations: Vi’ya.

  He sat back, the ancient chair creaking in protest of this unaccustomed treatment, and propped one boot on his desk while he contemplated this latest unexpected twist in a life of unexpected twists. His last sustained relationship had been with the beautiful Lelanor, a young, sensitive, and delicate highborn Douloi woman who had had the mortally bad luck to be traveling somewhere the same time some Rifter jackers had made a raid.

  She’d been brought to Dol’jhar as a slave, and the Avatar’s householder had bought her as a kitchen slub. Barrodagh had put her in Anaris’s way for what seemed at that time incalculable reasons. Hindsight made those clear: to gain Anaris’s trust and at the same time to have something to use against Anaris if occasion warranted—both of which had come to pass exactly as Barrodagh had planned.

  Closing his eyes, Anaris reviewed the year he’d had with Lelanor. Prompted by what he knew now was a taste for Gelasaar’s polite, civilized Arthelion, he was immediately attracted to her. It had taken time for him to gain her trust, which had been speeded when Anaris arranged for her transfer from kitchen drudgery to the textile staff, whose job it was to repair the ancient tapestries and rugs and upholstery throughout the fortress. She’d liked this work, and for a time he had patiently listened to her marvel over the fact that there was nothing—ever—new in such a household, whereas at home they had changed their furnishings twice yearly. He had even helped her speculate how many years it would take before the threads in a tapestried chair-back would be completely replaced, though retaining precisely the same design.

  It had not taken long to win her trust and then her love. He had visited her again and again, employing the sensual arts he had learned in the bedrooms of the mannered Douloi. Even the need to leash his vastly superior strength had served for a time as enticement, and adding its own dazzlement was the knowledge of his deliberate flouting of custom. The real enchantment had not been in Lelanor herself, which Anaris had not understood until he was forced to kill her, but in the very fact of the relationship, conducted as it was deep in his father’s house in direct contravention of custom.

  So Barrodagh had finally miscalculated. In betraying me to my father, Barrodagh had set me emotionally free.

  He slid his peshakh from his sleeve and toyed absently with it, reflecting how Vi’ya had closed her hand around it and launched herself straight at his throat.

  The custom-ordained struggle with other Dol’jharians had come to be merely boring. The servants and soldiers were dull; those with intelligence, and the rank to develop it, tended to be obsessed with political gain. To speak of anything else was weakness, and their humor in comparison to his years of diamond-bright wit on Arthelion was either nonexistent or predictable. Lelanor at least had been intelligent and had known how to laugh, and she had been willing to learn, within the limitations of her frail strength, what Anaris had taught her.

  Beloved. He’d used the word because she did, because Douloi liked tenderness in language as well as in bed, but it had not meant anything real to him. Did it now?

  He’d had only three brief conversations with Vi’ya, and one fight. Grinning as he looked around his room, he recalled that spectacular battle. Between the two of them they had nearly trashed this collection of antiques, and it had taken an army of two dozen workers to restore the chamber to a semblance of normalcy. And all for exactly nothing.

  I give myself when I choose, was all she had said—in the language of their ancestors. Then she’d done her damnedest to bury his own knife in his neck.

  It had taken all his strength to keep her from killing him—all his strength and all his concentration. Though he was the stronger, it was not by any vast margin, and she had superior skill in the art of contact-fighting.

  It had been a princely bat
tle, all right, and Morrighon had walked in right in the middle of it.

  Anaris laughed when he remembered the shock on the secretary’s face. He had never seen Morrighon so totally nonplussed. At first he himself had not known how to react; the ready Dol’jharian anger had not had time to manifest itself when Vi’ya had reacted first. Not with the anger of their progenitors, or with the embarrassment or pique of Douloi whose privacy had been breached, but with unsuppressed gusts of hilarity. Unafraid, unpredictable: complex, elusive mind.

  Vithya. Vi’ya

  Anaris had scorned, in private, the Dol’jharian enslavement to the meaningless lunar myths, but at the same time he was too much a product of his forefathers not to feel the lure—and he was too honest to deny it.

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. Was she, too, aware of the symbolic tidal pull from the light-years-distant moons?

  Of course there was no response, for he was no telepath, and he knew she wasn’t, either, unless the brain-burners were linked up with her and Ivard.

  Opening his eyes, he let the chair fall forward with a crash. Time to find out.

  o0o

  “Is the pain bad?”

  Montrose’s rumbling voice broke into Sedry’s thoughts. She blinked hot, dry eyes and looked up. Her neck ached, and for a moment she didn’t recognize the silhouettes across the room. Her eyes insisted on trying to resolve them into data glyphs.

  But then she saw Montrose, big and burly and grizzled, bending over Jaim, who lay flat and still on his bed. Jaim never complained, but sometimes his breathing changed; Sedry had begun to notice it only after Montrose had reacted several times, dispensing tiny dosages from the small hoard of elixirs that Barrodagh had permitted him to bring from the Telvarna.

  Sedry sighed, realizing it was the station equivalent of the middle of the night, and she had been working far longer than she had intended. Better stop before tiredness makes me stumble. She began to close down her work, careful to eradicate any traces. Grateful as she was for the dataspace Tat had managed to win for her, it was not nearly enough, and she’d been forced to compact too many functions into compressed holding matrices, keeping track of their various functions only with her mind.

  The stress had taken its toll. When she stood up, darkness dopplered across her vision, and she began to fall.

  Montrose crossed the chamber in two swift strides.

  Within another minute he had Sedry in the bain and began stripping off her clothing. She mumbled a protest, then the smells of stale sweat and caf rose, and she closed her eyes and submitted gladly, passive as a small child.

  Gently, impersonally, the hands washed her clean, then toweled her skin dry. Montrose wrapped her in another towel and led her back into the room. Modesty made her steps lag, then gave way before the greater needs of plain human exhaustion and reeling emotions.

  As she passed Jaim, she met his eyes and read only concern there and patience. And nearby, Vi’ya sat, awake, her face blank, her attitude impossible to interpret. Sedry had tried hard to understand what could have prompted Jaim to bait Vi’ya as he had. And how could she have beaten him so savagely—and afterward . . .

  She winced away from the thought. Stranger still was the fact that it was Vi’ya who had tended Jaim the longest, and he had permitted it. Mostly in silence, but sometimes the two had conversed in the soft tones of intimates, as if this violence had never occurred between them.

  “Stretch out,” Montrose said, and Sedry glanced down, saw her bed—recently neatened—and lay obediently on her stomach.

  Montrose began to knead, working the stress from muscles and fascia. The little stabs and zaps of pain diminished, like ice shards melting and draining away. She was now wide awake, though still unable to move.

  So she turned her head and gazed with open eyes into the room, and gradually she became aware of a change. Nothing specific could be pointed at to explain it, but the air was different: she felt it across her sensitive flesh. The others were now all awake. Marim, laughing softly, leaned over to poke at Lokri, who slapped lightly at her hand. They fell across his bed in a playful wrestling match, and for once, Sedry had no wish to look away.

  She had been celibate for over thirty years, for it was not in her nature to enter intimacy with someone she did not love. Not until recently, when she had thought her life was beginning its wane, had she found the companion she had never thought to have, and old desires had rekindled, only to be denied. They were all imprisoned in this room together, without privacy, and though Sedry did not fault the younger ones for giving into natural physical urges, it was nothing she could bring herself to do before their smooth youthful bodies and critical eyes. She considered it a gift to aesthetic harmony to keep herself covered up and her increasing desire for Montrose controlled.

  He had said nothing, nor did he now. He continued his work, impersonal and efficient, though the flush through her skin made her wish for the even kneadings to alter to urgency.

  In the room, Ivard, clad only in trousers, sat with his knees up and his arms clasped tightly round them. His green gaze expressed a complexity of emotions Sedry could only guess at. Lucifur lifted his great, spatulate head from Ivard’s pillow and purred, eyes half-closed.

  Vi’ya did not move from where she sat on the edge of her bed, hands on her knees; nor did Jaim, who lay flat, face watchful. From behind the closed door the Eya’a lifted their high voices in ululating song, and Luce growled, his fur ruffling round his head.

  Then both Ivard and Vi’ya lifted their heads, and the back wall opened with a quiet hiss.

  Alarm, and something that was not alarm, zinged through Sedry when she saw the tall masculine silhouette in the opening.

  It was Anaris, the heir. He stood a single pace inside the room. Lifting his right hand in a gesture that was an ambiguous blend of command and appeal, he faced Vi’ya.

  Also without speaking, Vi’ya got slowly to her feet. Anaris stepped back, and Vi’ya walked through the wall-door. It closed abruptly; Sedry saw Jaim’s long hands grip, white-knuckled, at the sides of his bed.

  Ivard shook his head, almost a shudder, and reached to stroke Luce’s fur. The big cliff-cat slowly stretched out on the bed again, head on paws, slanted eyes watchful. Lokri and Marim, who had paused in their games when the wall opened, sat up, clothes rumpled and hair messy. Marim chuckled, a sound like bubbles in a running stream.

  The patient hands stroked lower down Sedry’s spine.

  No one had spoken, yet the atmosphere had intensified, the air charged with expectation.

  Again Ivard shivered, and rubbed his hands over his face. Then he winced, as if from a blow, and laughed, his eyes wide open and gleaming. He stretched, his head dropping back; his whole body appeared to glow with inner heat. Inner fire.

  Like muted thunder, Sedry’s pulse drummed in her ears. She sat up, no longer aware of her own nakedness. She could not look away from Ivard, who straightened up slowly, the embodiment of grace, and youth, and promise—as beautiful as a young god.

  They all faced him, hearts beating in synchrony, flesh warmed with the flame of Ivard’s desire. The kneading hands on Sedry’s body had altered their touch, sending runnels of star-fire through all her nerves, and yet she fought the urgency of flesh yearning for flesh; anticipation, so very long denied, was delicious.

  Marim’s laughter was exultant, and with a gesture she ripped free of her clothing and stood before Ivard, smooth and round and lovely. Ivard traced a finger along the contour of her face, and down her throat to her collarbone in a gesture that was at once tender and a farewell. His hand lifted.

  She reached, but his head had turned, and he did not see. Beyond Marim stood Lokri, whose extended hand was met, slowly, by Ivard’s. The fingers entwined and Ivard moved around Lokri and Lokri around Ivard, circle and circle, sustained as a dance.

  Then with a twist of surrender their bodies impacted, a tangle of strong limbs and smooth muscle; Sedry saw in Marim’s face the anguish of denial, and ne
arby another kind of anguish in Jaim, and then she could no longer see anything but Montrose’s laughing eyes, and his smiling mouth, as his insistent hands could no longer be denied.

  ELEVEN

  ARES

  Margot Ng raised her goblet and looked around the cavernous hall with its banners and holographic mementos of past military triumphs and tragedies.

  Light shone on the crystal gripped in hands young and old, female and male.

  Each person in the room save one captained a ship about to depart for the Suneater. For once they mixed freely: captains of destroyers with lieutenants who commanded cutters; battle-worn vessels and armed but decorative civilian yachts; Panarchist and Rifter.

  She saw in the bright eyes and brittle movements, the sudden laughter and moments of unconscious abstraction, that they were all equally aware that some would not return.

  In eight hours, she would emerge from her quarters, dressed in her formal whites with the sunbursts of the high admiral on her high collar, sit down on a bridge silent except for the subliminal whisper of data consoles, with her alpha crew who had steadfastly denied promotion in order to remain with her. And despite the tianqi, programmed to exude calming ions, every person there—present and within range of communication—would be poised, heartbeats accelerated, waiting for her to speak the command that would send them to battle.

  She closed her eyes, her fingers tightening on her goblet. This was the moment supposedly every commander lived for. Whatever happened, her name would be inscribed in the logs of history from now until this civilization had turned to dust.

  Should there be pleasure? There is none. Anticipation, yes, tempered with the dread of imminent loss. Even stronger, the determination to win. This time Dol’jhar will find no mercy.

  “Confusion to the enemy!” Brandon Arkad drank off his champagne, then cocked back his arm and smashed his goblet against the back of the vast stone fireplace.