by Janet Morris
“Let them say it.” He formed the words slowly, with great effort.
“Sereth, tell him.”
He did not, but slid off the desk, putting his arm around Chayin’s shoulders. They spoke in low tones, and finally both came to stand before Dellin’s chair.
“If you tell us, and cooperate, we will let you live. What has been done can sometimes be undone.” His hands were upon his hips, voice flat, cold. “You have my word. I could use you, in case Celendra has to call you again. We will leave you here when we leave. You will, of course, be bound, but someone will find you eventually. That,” he said, tossing his head, “is the best offer I am willing to make.”
Dellin stared at them a time; then he nodded, wincing at the pain of movement.
“Celendra has asked,” he said slowly, “for certain aid; M’ksakka sends it.” He stopped, fearful. “Two warships, that she may revenge herself upon her father’s murderer.” He coughed. “It is complicated. I could try to stop it.” He slumped in the chair, helpless, waiting.
I wondered if Dellin knew that very man stood before him, and decided he did not. Chayin’s face was emotionless. Upon Sereth I saw another expression, as if he had expected this, and had been upheld.
“When you feel well enough,” the Ebvrasea said, his voice a knife upon silk, “we will see that you have a chance to call them. Think upon what you would say.”
Dellin nodded, and a spasm of coughing wracked him once more. Chayin took the uris pouch from his belt and handed it to me. I recollected, as I unstoppered it and poured a huge amount down Dellin’s throat, how much it had strengthened me in the desert. I contrived to spill some upon my hand as I passed it back. Chayin saw, but only smiled. I licked my fingers, that place between thumb and first, and was myself greatly strengthened.
“Estri!” Chayin’s voice snapped. I jumped to my feet, guilty. “I am hungry. It must be past time for a meal.” Only then did I realize that he could not read the clocks here, all Bipedal Standard. I almost laughed in relief that he would not chastise me.
And we left Dellin there, with Lalen to guard him, and went into the Liaison’s kitchen. There I fed them both by hand, disdaining the menial robot blinking ready in its alcove. The thought came to me that I should have built a fire in the midst of the M’ksakkan marble, if I were truly as Dellin saw me. While I worked scavenging a meal from Dellin’s stores, I set my healing upon my own wound, to test my skill.
When I handed Sereth and Chayin their plates of parr and narne, and served them the excellent kifra Dellin stocked, the scab, dried and white-edged, began to curl up from my skin. I scratched it, for it itched me. The scab came away, revealing new copper skin underneath, hardly darker than elsewhere upon my sun-bronzed arm. I smiled to myself, as I took two of the plates back to Lalen and our captive.
Lalen took his meal from me, surly and taciturn. He set the plate upon the wistwa desk and fell upon the contents with relish.
“I will not feed him. I am no nursemaid,” he said when I set down the second plate and turned to leave. “Nor will I release him to feed himself.”
So I fed him, as best I could. It was not easy for him to eat even the softer foods I had intentionally brought. He did, however, drink the goblet of kifra down to the last drop. Over it his eyes met mine; under those frank straight brows of his they seemed steadied. He sat straighter, his spasms had left him, and the blood upon his face had clotted. Lalen, finished with his plate, watched us, glowering.
“You will live.” I said my first words to him as I rose to leave.
“Do not talk to him,” Lalen snapped.
And I turned and left, silent, lest Lalen take out upon Dellin any temper I aroused in him.
As I reentered the kitchen, muted, angry voices greeted me. Sereth leaned against the steel oven.
“We have no option. We must wait and see what Celendra does. She will keep Dellin informed, you can be sure. I would not move from here until she screams for help. When we hear that Wiraal’s men have arrived; we will leave here, and not sooner.”
“But the M’ksakkans—”
“What can you do? Call a Day-Keeper and tell him that while beating information out of a Liaison you have stumbled upon this unlikely plot? Think, man!”
Chayin paced the floor, stalking he knew not what. He slammed his fist hard into the menial’s blinking panel, killing it. Its machine’s breath poured from it, dark with death, bearing an acrid odor. Chayin stared at it, then turned. He saw me.
“There is nothing we can do,” he said to Sereth. “Nothing, at all.” His black eyes, far behind the veil, pinned me still, my back pressed against the door. Then he looked away, at his hands in their tight fists. He opened them, spread his long dark fingers. “It is just that I am not one to sit and wait. I will take the watch of him with Lalen.” And he strode to the door, pushing past me as it opened for him.
Sereth rose, too, and came toward me.
“You should eat,” he said, and rather than disobey him, I ate.
“Chayin said,” he remarked as he watched me pick at my food, “that you must have gained great weapons in the helsar. He wonders why you do not share them with us.” His tone was only level. It was his eyes that froze me, a chunk of denter halfway to my mouth. I had sensed Chayin’s testing. I put down the food, pushed my plate away.
“Could you stop me, as Raet once did?” he questioned. “Could you imprison me in my own body?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I could do that.”
Sereth slid down into a chair. He brushed his hand across his eyes.
“What else can you do?” he demanded.
“A great deal, and very little. Do not make me show you. I crave this last normalcy, before all goes once more insane. It is just a little to ask.”
“What do you fear?”
“Once I open to my strengths, what will I be? Whom may I find to talk with, to love? I would not be so different, so alone, as I will surely come to be. Would you still want me, upon my sufferance? Knowing that by whim I could reduce you to component atoms, would you rest easy in my arms? Would any man?” I pushed away and rose, walking to the man’s-height crystal window. Sereth was silent.
“Whatever weapons, the strength is in the wielder. Do you need no practice, no work upon these skills?” he asked at length.
“I save what I have for my moment of need. It could be that I am wrong to do so, but three days’ practice will not even the odds before the millennia Raet has had to hone his skills.”
“Show me something,” Sereth insisted, watching me from the chair. I shrugged, hopeless.
“What if I tell you a thing? Celendra will not call until the evening of Wiraal’s arrival. She is angry. She waits for Dellin to call her and apologize.” I turned to face him.
“Show me something,” he repeated, implacable. I sighed and brushed my hair, now dry, from my eyes.
“Watch, then.” The menial robot was, dead as it was, only a junk heap of useless parts. I pointed to it, then lowered my hand. The metal burst into heatless flame, fierce and bright. It was simply a matter of creating an envelope around that form, an envelope of different natural laws, in which metal and glass and rubber became unstable elements. When there was nothing in the alcove, I raised my hand again and erased the pocket of alternate space I had created. It was neatly done, for a first try. I sensed no leakage. Sereth’s eyes upon me were a stranger’s.
“And what else?”
“Anything. Name it,” I said with a sinking feeling. “You say Celendra will not call. Make her call.” Obedient to him, I closed my eyes to do so. “Wait!” he snapped. “I just wanted to know if you could. Have you done such with me?”
“No,” I whispered, agonized.
“Chayin said he felt you in his mind, that you did things to him he does not fully understand. Is this true?”
I sank to my knees upon the M’ksakkan marble. “Yes.” I barely formed the word, wretched, staring at the veins in the stone.
“Get up! Come here!” I went to him, where he had risen. He stared down at me. “You want normalcy? I will give you some. And we will see if the bonds I have upon you are strong enough. Go and make yourself ready. I will come to you, when I choose.”
I turned, mute, to obey him.
“When I open that door, I would see you kneeling by the couch, suitably adorned.”
I felt the flush upon my skin as the door made way for me.
It was a long time before he came to me. Time enough for my knees to turn numb and cold. Long enough for me to reflect upon what bonds he meant, and to learn that they were strong indeed.
When he did come, he himself tested them upon me.
“Please,” I begged him, my body arched, sweating, under his hand.
“Where are your formidable skills now? What are they?” he demanded sternly.
“Nothing. They are nothing.” He touched me upon the belly, and I moaned and sought him, my lips upon the inside of his thighs. I kissed him, bit gently, pleading, helpless, crell to him and my own body’s needs.
When it pleased him, he took, me, and I wept under his thrust.
“Whatever else you are,” he said, crouched above me, wiping the sweat from his upper lip, “you are still a woman.” And his hands would not let me rest. I tried to roll away, exhausted. His white teeth were sharp and strong upon my breasts.
“And do you know your bonds now, little crell?” He laughed low.
I knew them. The gift of a night alone was not wasted upon us. Those moments glow in my mind, each rich with the savor that only life-risk can impart. Crell under my master’s hand, I was suddenly wealthy. Opulent is life, in the light of such freedom as comes with submission to a man who will accept no less.
I lay long after he slept, thinking. His arm thrown across my breasts, he dreamed and muttered in his sleep. Sereth and I had pegged an evening of time together in that room I had fitted to my taste so long ago as M’lennin’s couch-mate. How I had hated him. I had also first lain with Dellin here, upon this couch made by Astria’s own master. Celendra, surely, must use this keep. I envisioned her, black and supple, sinuous upon the silken covers that had been fashioned to my order. Then he awoke and chased all thought of her from my mind.
The next morning, Amarsa second third, Dellin sent his message to M’ksakka. Intra-, rather than inter-space, it sped, as the M’ksakkan ships do in the great void. But such can be done only at certain points in the cosmos; the message would rise up and out, lasered, for more than a light-day before it passed, instantaneous, around 160 light-years of space. We would not get an answer before Amarsa second sixth, when Wiraal was due in Astria with his jiasks.
We waited. Chayin, desert stalker, strode the confines of Dellin’s keep. He paced and paced, and drew ever more distant.
Sereth, perhaps from his Slayer’s training, rested content. He waited for Celendra to call, patient, sure. He watched Chayin. They worked their skills together, well-matched, that they might keep their sword arms loose.
Clouds drove the humor from Sereth’s eyes, as the days passed. Often he stretched his lean form upon the floor in the room where Dellin was kept, smoking the Liaison’s donne in a ragony pipe, meditative. He would talk to Dellin without rancor in those times, as if the two were together again in Arlet, as if Dellin were not his prisoner, not beaten near to death, not bound to his chair. From Dellin, Sereth extracted all that he wanted to know, while Chayin paced and snarled.
Lalen came to Sereth once, where he lay there upon the iridescent Thrah pelts, and asked after his blade gruffly, that he might have something to do with his hands. The blond-haired man had honed every edge he owned in turn, until they would each slice a hair from the strand’s weight alone.
Sereth, who never left such things to another, gave up his gear to Lalen.
The hands crawled upon the M’ksakkan clocks. The B.F. date changed sluggishly. Celendra did not call.
Sereth brought Chayin to couch with us, that he might bridge the gap he felt growing between them. At sun’s rising, Amarsa second fifth, I woke to Chayin’s arm upon me.
“Get yourself elsewhere,” he whispered to me. “I would be with him a time alone.”
Sereth’s stiffened form let me know he had heard. Once I had wakened him with a single word, spoken in sleep. I leaned over him, kissing the nape of his neck before I rose. He made no move.
The door closed soundless behind me. I stood alone in a corridor of angry memories. I wandered it for a time, my eyes stinging, my face both dry and tingling from lack of sleep. My feet brought me to the kitchen, and I drank rana until my eyelids would stay open of their own accord. It was second fifth. Today she would call.
I watched the sun’s rape of the night through the window. I sensed the nature of what concerned Chayin. It was a private thing, between them. I did not seek to intrude further.
By mid-meal, Celendra still had not called. I prepared food, brought it to Lalen and Dellin. I brought also servings for Chayin and Sereth. Their denter cooled upon the plates, the blood and fat congealing on the meat. I read the ors, smoked danne, stretched out upon those alien dead beast’s skins.
Khys, I thought as I closed the book, might be better understood in another translation. I sighed and put the Parset volume aside. The test of its augury came fast upon us.
Dellin’s eyes were on me when I looked up. We had not spoken since I had assured him of his life. Perhaps he, as I, felt there was nothing to say. Lalen had eaten, but he had not fed the prisoner.
“Thank you,” said Dellin to me when I brought him the cold food and fed him, bite by bite.
“Thank Sereth, that you live to eat,” I said icily. I heard the manacles upon his wrists clink.
“Estri, please.”
“I do not want to hear it,” I said, thrusting a large enough bite in his mouth to silence him. The door slid aside. Lalen rose.
Sereth wore the Shaper’s cloak upon his-shoulders. He had not done so upon the way here, but wound it around under his leathers. He avoided my eyes. Whatever had passed between him and Chayin, he was not at ease with it.
Chayin walked to the desk, where their food lay, and touched the coldness with his finger. He also had taken time to battle-dress. He even wore his high boots.
“Doubtless, you can do better than this, Estri,” he said to me, giving the slab of meat a desultory prod. Chayin was greatly eased. He even smiled.
So I took the meal I had made them and threw it away, and made another. I served them, with exaggerated crellishness, where they sat talking together, near to Dellin. They took no notice.
When they had finished, Sereth went to the master board. He had just activated the visual display when the call code sounded. He slapped the board quiescent and dived out of range as Chayin jerked Dellin’s chair before the desk. Kneeling beneath the desktop, out of sight, Sereth drew his blade with one hand, and reached up to activate the receiver with the other. Chayin stood upon my left, Lalen upon my right, though I had not seen him cross the room.
“How are you feeling?” purred Celendra’s voice, The light her image threw flickered across Dellin’s half-healed face.
“Better,” he managed.
“You look terrible,” she said sharply.
“I passed out in the hall. I will be fine,” His eyes watched a face we could not see. I saw him shiver. Beneath the desktop, Sereth’s blade rested naked between Dellin’s bound legs. “What do you want?”
“Just to see if you were ill. I see you are ill. Have you any word?”
“No, croaked Dellin.”
“What?”
“No word from them. But do not worry.”
“That is easy for you to say,” Celendra snorted. “You see no more than your hand before your face. I want you to call me, tomorrow mid-meal. I have great unrest. Perhaps by then you will be well enough to leave your couch.” And she broke the connection without even a tasa.
Dellin slumped in his bonds, white-faced.
/> “So”—Sereth laughed—“Celendra called him upon your schedule, Estri. To see how he was feeling.” And his laughter infected Lalan and Chayin. I found myself smiling. The jiasks would get there tomorrow, and we would be informed by Celendra of her exact reaction. We did not even have to wait for her to call us. She had ordered Dellin to call her! Chayin hugged me against him. For a moment I was eye-to-eye with the uritheria on his bicep. It leered at me. Then he let me go.
Sereth went and again set up visual screening, that we might see any approaching us. The day was exhausted before he turned away from it.
“Let us take a walk,” he said stretching. “I am stiff from sitting.” He led me unresisting back down the hall of marble, into the corridor of star steel, down the steps into the outer court. The extravagance of Astrian dusk turned him as copper as I. I sniffed the air, sweet and clean after the keep’s alien odors. It caressed the skin, told stories of the life it carried. I breathed summer sarla and name bloom, and the pungent ripeness of, this fertile land whispered all around. As I watched, the constellations made their stately entrance into the newborn night. Yellow criers took song, while swamp kephers kept the time and a hundred species, waiting, hummed and buzzed and whistled.
Sereth’s hand was cool and reassuring on my waist. My father’s cloak rustled upon his shoulders. Through Mlennin’s fastidious gardens we circuited. The second time around the outer court, he pushed me gently to the grass within a circular harinder brake. We lay there long, looking at the stars.
And that was where Lalen, breathing heavily, found us.
“Dellin speaks again with the woman. Chayin sent me for you.” He said this last to empty air; Sereth was gone, running. Lalen reached down and lifted me like a small child and half-dragged me beside him. He was, I reminded myself as I struggled to pace him and retain my arm, responsible for me.
“Let me go!” I demanded as I stumbled while he impelled me up the steps. “I warned you.” I sighed, and caused his grip to drop from my arm. I walked up the stairs, and he made way for me. I smiled to myself as he fell in beside me. His consternation was evident. He did not ask, and I did not enlighten him.