by Sarah Zettel
“You have our thanks, Heart.” Jay let the curtain fall back into place and waited until he heard the Teacher’s footsteps fade down the hall.
“We’ve got to see them armed,” he said to Cor’s back. “Silver’s losing support, even though she’s winning. We’re losing support because we’re not stronger than the myths. The Vitae are going to show up soon. If we don’t have this place locked down before then, then all our time and effort, it’s for nothing and the Vitae will let these…people loose on the Human Family.”
“The Vitae might just kill them,” said Cor without turning around. “They don’t think much of genetic engineering on humans.”
No, thought Jay. I don’t think they’d kill this crowd. But he said nothing. Cor was trying to convince herself they were doing the best thing possible, and he needed to let her succeed.
“All right.” Cor faced him and folded her arms as if she were trying to keep out a chill. “Tomorrow we can go back to the shelter. Find out what luck Lu’s had with the Notouch. If there hasn’t been anything, then I’ll back you on the call for arms. I mean, there’s not that many power-gifted and it’s becoming very obvious that without Stone in the Wall and her family, no one knows what the story is with the arias.”
“Thank you,” said Jay seriously.
Cor gave him a watery smile. “Keep well ’til then, Jay.”
“Keep well.”
She left and Jay sagged onto the bed. There’s a chance we can still take this place. A good chance. He stared out toward the window and fingered his torque. If we can just get moving. The torque beeped. Jay’s heart leapt to his throat. The torque beeped again, and again, and once more for good measure.
Blood and bones. Jay pulled the translator disk out of his ear. It can’t be time already!
With his free hand, he undid the catch on his torque. The signal said this transmission couldn’t be handled with the usual setup. It would be coming from too far away, at too high a frequency. He slid the disk into a barely visible socket on the torque’s side and waited.
“Jahidh, this is Kelat. The First Company has landed in the Home Ground and I am with them. You have about two hundred hours left before Second Company comes down to reclaim the populated regions. What is the state of your operations?”
Jay stared incredulously at the torque. “Kelat, I don’t know,” he said. What do you think I’m doing? he added silently. Running a lab experiment? Controlling a team of Beholden? “The Unifier cause is a mess, I’ve managed that much, but I’m also standing in the middle of it. We may have finally found another artifact like Stone in the Wall, but I won’t know for sure until I’ve heard from Lu.”
“Contact me directly when you have more news.” The torque fell silent.
Jay refastened the torque around his neck. Their conversations had to be brief, he knew that. Lu might not be the most conscientious systems handler alive, but he had designed some highly efficient watch programs to make up for it. But somehow, knowing Kelat was within reach made his isolation that much sharper.
We weren’t meant to work alone, he sighed. Father was right about that much.
Jay lifted the lid on the chest beside the bed with one hand and loosened the belt on his overtunic with the other. He peeled off the stiff cloth and pitched it onto the chair for the Bonded to pick up for washing. He unstrapped the gun belt next. His gun was the only one the Unifier committee had voted to allow onto the planet. It was a barbaric projectile weapon. It made too much noise and too much blood, but it was impressive. It was for an emergency, if they needed to scare these people who could kill with a touch.
Jay remembered the first project he’d ever worked on as an apprentice engineer. The Vitae had been contracted to create a security network for Eispecough, one of the countries of an embattled world called Toth. Basq, proud of Jay’s engineering aptitudes, or maybe just seeking the extra status that would come from proving his son was brilliant, had gotten him assigned to the job of designing the module links. He’d worked hard, almost fanatically, and watched the network grow. He remembered his pride, both of place and accomplishment.
Then, there’d been an election in Eispecough and a new government moved in. They canceled the contract and told the Vitae to leave. The Vitae did leave, because that was their way. Work for hire only and when told to go, take the severance payment and go. Jay had kept a surreptitious eye on his work, just to see how it held up. He’d even done a little remote repair work on the code. Basq had known about it and kept it quiet. Contractor Kelat had found out, however, and had Jay removed from Basq’s custody, citing that Basq, by over-permissiveness, had allowed his child to become a danger to Vitae public dealings.
Three local months later, there was a civil war in Eispecough and the network was destroyed. The Vitae did nothing. Their work wasn’t theirs. Their vision wasn’t theirs. They’d abandon it all to chaos, because they would not take responsibility for their vision.
The Imperialists wanted to change that. They saw the change that was happening in the Quarter Galaxy. The Vitae in their fearful isolation had made no friends, established no colonies, and claimed no servants. They survived because many civilizations in the Quarter Galaxy considered them useful, and so they were used. But that could change as colonies and stations grew ripe with their own histories and technologies. There might just come a day when the Vitae went from being respected experts to being beggars, unless they established real power. Unless they began issuing contracts instead of just obeying them.
That, no matter what his father said, was the real work.
Jay weighed the weapon in his hand for a long moment before he laid it carefully in the chest. He couldn’t see the angle on any of the shadows from here, but he had the distinct feeling tomorrow was still a long, long way off.
Cor left Jay’s room without looking back. Her thoughts crowded around her like a cloud of biting flies and she was so busy trying to shoo them away so she could find some kind of understanding, that she lost track of where she was going. She looked up, blinking at the shadows and squinting at the stonework. The relief carving of the three Crooker trees told her she was almost to the dining hall. Her stomach rumbled. Food would help clear her head and warm her cold hands.
The hall itself was a broad, solid, graceless chamber. The space between the tables and benches was taken up either by stone pillars or by coal fires carefully banked in their own ashes. When she’d first gotten here, Cor had found the acrid heat suffocating. Now she breathed it into her lungs as a source of comfort and reassurance. This far into the house it was never warm. The day’s heat was not strong enough to penetrate the stone, but the night’s cold never seemed to have that problem.
And it’ll do nothing but get worse, she thought. The Dark Seasons are coming.
Averand, her homeworld, could zip around its sun forty times in the time it took the Realm to skulk once around the Eyes of the Servant. She remembered when she first saw the simulation of the Realm’s orbit. It circled the binary warily, swinging in almost too close, then backing off almost too far, always riding the bare edge of tolerance as it made its long, slow way around its stars. It was on its way out to the far, cold edge now.
Ceramic pots stood in the ashes at the edge of the fires. Cor snagged a red clay bowl off a table she passed and dipped it into the nearest jar to shovel out a helping of porridge, mushrooms, and overcooked chicken meat. She glanced over the jar, looking hopefully for a flat dish of baking bread, but didn’t see any. She sighed at the porridge. It’d keep her from starving, but not do much more than that. Even the Nobility kept barely at a subsistence level in the time when there was more day than night.
She thought about Raking Coals, who brought his sledge in every tenth day and kept asking her what price she set her own hands at with a broad wink and a happy leer. And the Oilbrake sisters, who carried fifty-pound sacks of grain on their backs when their pair of oxen went lame and still whistled at the stable boys who crossed the courtyards. A
nd the Notouch daughters who scrambled this way and that in the courtyard, grabbing up the feathers that came down like snow when the house’s Bonded sat on the roof and plucked chickens.
It was a filthy, hard, stupid life, and if the Vitae got hold of them, it would vanish.
And if the Family gets hold of them? Cor dropped onto the bench and stuck her fingers into her bowl, shoving the food into her mouth before it went cold.
She’d been sent down with the team when the Unifiers still thought these people were Family. She’d hunkered down and learned the language and the customs and made friends as fast as she could. She learned to tell jokes and to laugh at them. She learned to pitch in with the work of the Bondless and to defer to the Teachers and the Nobility. She could recite the Words of the Nameless in the Temple on the tenth day and navigate using nothing but the walls around her. She’d deliberately set out to find anything and everything she could admire and respect about the culture. It was her job. She’d trained for it specially for years.
Then the word came down. These weren’t Family. These people were artificially created. Nothing like this had ever been found before. New policy would have to be formulated as soon as the extent of the engineering could be understood.
Policy? She scowled at her bowl and her porridge-spattered fingers. Jay’s voice had been flat and unquestioning when he delivered the message. As if there could be any policy for this world except getting them some decent food and a way to keep warm and dry through a twenty-year winter. These people who worked and starved and slaved and still sang and loved and told really, really obscene jokes.
Behold the noble savage, she thought grimly. Cor, Cor, Cor. They’re dirty and ignorant and so enslaved to their superstition that they don’t even know what they’re standing on top of. Come out of it, woman. It’s a raw deal, of course, but the worst the Family does’ll be better than the best the Vitae’ll do.
Cor scooped up another mouthful of porridge.
Of course it will.
A sharp ringing in her ear made her jerk and Cor nearly sent her bowl crashing to the floor. After a moment she realized it was her translation disk. She balanced her bowl in her dirty hand and tapped the disk twice.
“Cor, Jay,” said Lu’s voice. “Get yourself back here and move it like you mean it.”
Cor shot up straight and shoved the heel of her hand against the torque. “What is it?” she demanded, forgetting to whisper like they usually did over the e-comm links.
“We hit diamond. I think. I…look, just get back here.”
“On our way,” came Jay’s voice.
Cor sucked the last of the porridge off her fingers and deposited her bowl on the table for the Bonded to find later. She hurried through the halls and across the walks of the High House, shouldering past anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, barely pausing to raise her hands to them. Something could have happened down in the smooth shadowy tunnels under the shelter. Maybe something finally switched on or came alive. Something real and comprehensible. That idea shone like a freshly lit lantern.
“Jay.” Cor slapped his threshold and pulled the door-curtain back at the same time. He was sitting on his bed, shoving his right foot into his boot.
“Where’s your gear?” he demanded. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving. We’ve only got a couple of hours until nightfall.”
“Have you got us leave from the King?”
A spasm of distaste crossed Jay’s features. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it. You get the sledge ready. We need to move it!”
“All right, all right. I’ll bring everything round to the main courtyard.” She let the curtain drop. She was halfway down the corridor before she was able to put a name to the strained, stark expression on Jay’s face. He was scared. No, he wasn’t just scared, he was so panicked that he didn’t care what she saw.
What in any hell could panic a Vitae? Even an ex-Vitae?
Her throat tightened but she didn’t let it slow her down. Jay needed to get back to the shelter. They needed to find out what was going on and get that information back home. That was her other job. She was to learn everything, immerse herself in everything, and at the very end, it was her absolute responsibility to get out with what she knew.
In the back of her mind a voice said Jay was not going to make that easy. She gave a mental shrug to silence it and concentrated on not skidding on the slick flagstones of the open walkway that led to the stables.
“Skater! Sight!” She shouted the stable keepers’ names imperiously and added a loud whistle. The pair of squat, Bonded men scrambled into view from between the oxen’s fat bodies. “I need the sledge. Let’s get it done.”
They passed their hands briefly in front of their eyes and sprang into action. With whistles and wordless shouts, they bullied a quartet of oxen into place and started strapping them to the yokes while Cor knotted and buckled the leather reins into place. She tried not to think about how the oxen’s eyes looked so much like Skater’s, or how once upon a time she never would have ordered another person around like that.
I am not here to judge. I’m here to learn and get the news out so they can all join the Family.
Except they’re not going to get to.
It’s still got to be better than this. She caught up the driving stick and slapped the rump of the left, rear ox.
“Move, you lumps!” she hollered. The sledge scraped forward over straw and mud out onto rutted dirt and rock.
Jay jogged up to the sledge and swung himself clumsily up next to the driver’s stand before she could call the team to a halt.
“Keep going,” he said, clambering back to sit on the crates.
Cor managed to keep the reflexive jerk in her arms from tightening the reins. The oxen plodded forward toward the main gate.
“What’s with you, Jay?” She tried to catch sight of him out of the corner of her eye, and still keep her other eye on the approaching gate.
“I think I know where that missing hundred went.” He was looking past her shoulder, toward the heights. His face was still strained as he scanned the tops of the roofs and the distant walls.
“Are you going to tell me, or are you seeing scars on my hands?” The saying popped out before she could stop it. Her knuckles tightened on the reins and she had to just nod at the guards at the gates. Only one of them looked up. The other five had their eyes fixed on the commander coming down from the staircase alongside the wall.
The sledge jostled through the gate and Cor had to keep her eyes on the ruts in the half-dry road as well as the walls of the houses that defined the narrow streets. She pulled on the reins and whistled to the oxen to steer the sledge in something approaching the right direction.
“They’re here,” said Jay.
“What!” Cor glanced wildly from the street, to Jay and back again. She meant to tell him he had lost his mind, but her surroundings were beginning to penetrate through acclimatized eyes and her brain was starting to realize something was wrong.
Narroways was a noisy place, and this afternoon was no exception. There was noise and plenty of it. Shouting and hollering bounced off the close-packed buildings and cut through the steamy wind. Every blacksmith in the city seemed to be at his forge, hammering away. But there weren’t any children on the stairways, just the tops of beads and glimpses of faces bobbing to and fro on the roofs. No pedestrians crowded the streets. No soldiers on their oxen jostled them aside. There was just the shouting and the clattering and…
“Skyman!” shouted a voice.
A stone whizzed past and Cor ducked. The oxen halted in confusion. Jay hauled open the sledge’s canvas cover. The missing people spilled into the street like a flood down a canyon, driven by soldiers in the First City uniform. The noise hadn’t been blacksmiths, but swords. People ran into the houses, trying to get out of the way of the fray, but some were making a stand, with whatever they had at hand. Bodies draped in ponchos so she couldn’t tell if they were men or women surged around the
soldier’s oxen waving sticks and hatchets. The soldiers flailed with swords and clubs. Stones from slings shot through the air indiscriminately.
The lead oxen bellowed and reared, giving Cor something she could concentrate on. She hauled hard on the reins and whacked their broad backs with her stick, poking and shouting, reminding the stupid beasts that they were more afraid of her than of anything in front of them. The sledge lurched forward.
But there’s a truce! her mind cried.
First City is a bunch of sticklers for…
First City is losing. Badly. But they knew Narroways couldn’t afford to prolong the war. They were ready to risk two minor members of their Noble house in a gambit to knock what was left of Silver’s support out from under her.
And they wouldn’t feel it was much of a risk if they knew that Heart of the Seablade was a Heretic.
Cor shouted at the oxen and smacked at them with the reins. The big, stupid beasts bellowed and stamped forward. Hands grabbed her arm and for a split second she saw an angry round face and felt herself dragged off-balance. Jay almost fell forward and smashed a heavy fist across the stranger’s mouth. The hands fell away and Cor regained her footing.
The oxen were panicking now, all of them fighting through the surging, clamoring mob to try to find enough room to run. Cor gave them all the rein she could. Animal instinct and a ton of mindless fear might just clear the way for them. Another pair of hands snatched at her. She smacked flesh with her driving stick and heard a voice howl. More hands. She struck out again. More screams, more white eyes, more confused colors on earth brown skin. She lashed out again and again, the noise of battle fading fast behind a ringing in her ears and a sick swirling in her head.
Jay loosened his jerkin and pulled out the gun.
He hunched beside Cor, drew a bead on the thickest ranks of the First City soldiers, and squeezed the trigger.
The soldiers of both sides exploded. Blood and flesh sprayed everywhere with the sound of the shots echoing between the houses. The fray turned into a stampede as they screamed and fled. Cor urged the oxen forward and they tried hard to break into a run to get away from the noise and the blood.