by R. M. Meluch
Alihahd didn’t want to talk about it. “I hardly knew the place myself. The whole world is a perpetual Na′id battlefield. I left shortly after I was born.”
When asked where he went after that, he said, “Many places,” and changed the subject.
He was certainly aristocracy. His lofty, occasionally tortured way of speaking wasn’t an affectation. Alihahd fell into it without thinking. There was something so unassuming in his elitism. And he had a voice that made those god-awful speeches of his sound right.
He didn’t possess Harrison White Fox Hall’s cocksureness. Rather, he had the bearing of a man fallen from a great height, a vestige of pride that persisted like an afterimage once the reality was gone. Instinct for command also persisted, like breathing.
Harrison Hall was a lord, but he wasn’t a leader. Men and women did not die for Harrison Hall. He inspired no trust, no desire to march into hell for him or to breathe one’s last gasp at his feet.
Alihahd could command that kind of loyalty if he cared to—and even if he did not. And it seemed he did not want it, not from anyone. He didn’t want the attention. He didn’t want to be followed, watched, or known.
It was obvious he had a past—the kind one does not talk about. But the more secretive he was about it, the more apparent it became that he was not simply hiding from the past. He was running from it.
He stood a paragon, so calm, mature, level, patient, and wise. As with everything that had stood too long, his surface was wearing, so one could glimpse through the cracks and find something else.
He’d developed a series of quirky little mannerisms since his return to the mountain—unobtrusive patterns and rituals that appeared at first glance to be simple habits—a way of ordering objects on his nightstand, of layering his blankets in a certain order and going out of his way to maintain that order. He would clean his teeth with salt twice upon rising, his motions identical both times. He would take twelve steps to cross the bridge, no more, no less, starting always with his right foot. This was more than simply being methodical.
None of it went unnoticed. The weakening of a fleet animal did not escape the watchful eye of the tiger in the brush. Patterns were a snare. The greater the attempts to create order outside, the greater the chaos inside. Something was drastically wrong. Alihahd was trying to lock down the corners of an unpredictable universe that kept curling up at the edges.
But Alihahd wasn’t absolutely patterned. There was a wayward independence and disorder in his time schedule. He had no schedule. None at all. Hall never knew when Alihahd would be anywhere—when he would eat, when he would sleep, when he would rise—none of which activity had anything to do with daylight hours and was never the same twice. The lack of schedule just did not fit the other obsessive patterns, and the waiting tiger was baffled—and wondered if he was being baited.
Hall bided his time.
• • •
The red flags were out. The winds were fast and no one on the mountain ventured beyond the sheltered oasis of Aerie-Haven. No one climbed the peaks, for ele-ala, the wave, would sweep them away. The eagles rode the undulating currents, soaring over the valley without a single wingbeat. A swirled puff of cloud poised over the village, caught in a rotor. The eagles avoided it.
Harrison Hall took refuge in a small cave on the third level of Haven, where he stayed when Serra was bleeding and wanted to be alone.
It was Alihahd’s custom to retreat here at erratic times. Hall never knew when. On occasion, as today, their visits coincided.
Hall had a fire burning brightly in the hearth when Alihahd came in. The cave was a small place, its decoration begun a long time ago and never finished. Crumbling stucco on the unornamented wall came off in dust at a touch. The worn design on the other wall was also faded, painted quatrefoils within squares, carved in relief and intaglio on alternate squares.
Hall was in his shirtsleeves, sitting cross-legged on the bed, tinkering with a gadget retrieved from his ship, Nemo. The mandesairi, the whales, had found wreckage of his broken ship on the ocean floor and had sent pieces back to Hall on the mountain with the eagles.
“Is it a transceiver?” Alihahd said, hopeful.
Hall shook his head and tossed the black box aside. “Just a gadget.” He picked up his pipe and, after a few tries, lit it. He puffed clouds of gray smoke. “I take it there aren’t any in the valley.”
“Transceivers?” Alihahd said. “None that have the range to contact anyone in civilized spaceways—not within this century at any rate.”
Hall waved some of the smoke away. “They really don’t seem to give a damn about the Outside.”
Now and then the Itiri sent scouts abroad to pick up pieces of someone else’s technology, a ship, a weapon, and maybe rescue an alien in peril along the way, then return home, recluse again.
“I do see the purpose in hiding their existence from the Na′id,” Alihahd said. “The notorious warrior-priests of Iry are sadly unprepared to fight a modern war. Yet they continue to stagnate. There is no effort to build for themselves. They aren’t ignorant, exactly, but there is a decided lack of ambition and want of foresight here. Their folly if they think they can hide forever.”
Hall was chuckling, gently, mockingly, fondly, his laughter indulgent as at a clever child. “What?” Alihahd said.
“The way you talk.”
“So glad I keep you entertained.”
“You know, of course, you’re wrong.”
“I know this?”
“The Itiri could hide forever,” Hall said.
Alihahd had to nod. They were truly lost out here. Na′id ships never came this way, never would. Unless something were to draw them.
Hall set aside his pipe, the fire of which had gone out, and he picked up the piece of equipment from his ship again. “Have you noticed they count in hex?” he said.
“Hexadecimal?”
Hall pulled out a lens from the black box. “Yes.”
Alihahd paused in thought. “I suppose I had noticed something odd.” He’d never heard an Itiri count past nine in Universal.
“Vaslav figured it out,” Hall said. He pulled out another lens.
“What kind of people use hex?” Alihahd said.
“People with sixteen fingers.”
The Itiri had ten fingers. Logically they should have developed a base-ten number system.
“Computers,” Hall continued his list of answers. “People who use binary.”
“Which is to say high tech,” Alihahd said. “Which the Itiri are not. They are an odd people.” He stopped talking. He’d caught himself, not for the first time, calling the Itiri people. He brooded in silence for a long time while Hall repositioned his lenses. Alihahd looked over his shoulder. “Is that anything that will help us escape from this planet?” Alihahd asked without much hope.
Hall looked at Alihahd. He’d already told him it was not a transceiver. “No.” Hall looked into Alihahd’s eyes, lifted his hand, and touched Alihahd’s cheek with a hot, dry touch. “What an incredible color for eyes.”
Blue eyes dropped away from Hall’s gaze. Alihahd couldn’t meet his gaze anymore. He left the cave with the restlessness of a caged beast.
Hall balanced his projector on his knee and slouched back against the wall, thoughtful. He hitched his thumbs in the pockets of his gold-weave vest. Hall wanted to leave Iry, too. He had a battle to fight. And if his need was not as desperate, at least his motive was clear, which was more than he could say for Alihahd.
There was no good reason why Alihahd should be anxious to leave Iry and rejoin the crusade against the Na′id Empire. His heart was obviously not in it. He seemed weary of the whole thing. Yet he was obsessed with return.
Hall’s reason was simple: vengeance. But what made Alihahd go? It wasn’t revenge. Alihahd espoused no specific ideology. He had no real cause, except
perhaps freedom of choice. But what did that mean to him? He had nothing personal against the Na′id. He did not hate them. He opposed them but not for himself. Or maybe his selflessness was very much for himself.
Hall sat up straight. He saw it in a flash. There was only one real motive for martyrdom, and it was not devotion.
It was atonement.
You’re doing penance.
For what? What had Alihahd done?
• • •
Evening passed into early night, the seventh of the Serpent. It was unnaturally mild on the mountain, becoming actually warmer after sundown. There was little movement in the air but for a gentle breeze, soft and moisture-laden.
On the horizon could be seen a black mass blotting out the stars. Then distant lightning lit up the outline of a monstrous thunderhead, its top sheared off by a jet wind way up high. The bolts themselves couldn’t be seen—only the flashes of cold light from behind the massif and the muffled report of far-off thunder.
The Itiri were taking off their sword belts and their metal jewelry.
Alihahd climbed to a ledge where two warrior-priests kept vigil. The towering thundercloud menaced in a slow advance from the far side of the valley, its flat top miles above the mountains. The Itiri marked the ominous shape of the thing and muttered.
“How long?” Alihahd asked.
“By morning,” they said.
As they spoke, there was a change in the air. Cold, with a downdraft.
Alihahd was aware of another menace, in counterpoint to the storm, on either side of the great rift between the mountains. On the dawn ridge he could see Ben-Tairre backed by the turbulent sky. Always a striking figure, Ben had assumed a dynamic stance, a conscious or unconscious display of power and dominance. His clothing, loosely fit, still showed the play of muscles in his thighs, his heavy shoulders, his hard abdomen. He carried an obsidian blade.
On the eagle ridge opposite—black, hard and sharp as if fashioned of obsidian herself—crouched Roniva. Her long thin limbs, tight-corded and agile, were folded beneath her, catlike, her body hard as stone, fluid as water.
Over them the sky was about to break. The air was electric, charged with premonition so strong even Alihahd felt it—a storm that had been building long before he’d ever seen the Aerie.
Alihahd spoke to the warrior-priests on the ledge with him. “What happened here? What is between Roniva and Ben?”
Emerald eyes exchanged hesitant glances as if the warriors were actually afraid.
And they told him there would be a death tonight.
11. Thunderhead
A STRANGE SOUND ROSE over the Aerie, beginning softly, steadily gaining in strength. It was not a rain sound, but an odd rhythmic swelling of voices in an ever building chant, over and over.
Kaza, kaza, kaza.
Serra came out of her cave. She stepped to the rail of the arcade and looked out.
The sky was dark, starless. A few fluttering torches lit the paths of Havenside. The chant carried eerily from Aerieside, from within the Chamber of the Golden Dome.
Kaza, kaza, kaza.
Serra called in to the others. “Something’s happening.”
Alihahd joined her at the balustrade. An electric hiss of lightning tracked through the clouds. Then the whole sky lit up brighter than daylight. In the brief weird illumination, the landscape was surreal, blue-white, with jagged edges and black, black shadows.
Alihahd saw Arilla dash along the Ledge Path toward the Chamber of the Golden Dome. She appeared as an impala-bodied white streak. A lightning flash caught her expression, froze it. Fear. An odd thing to see on a warrior-priest.
Harrison Hall spoke from behind Alihahd. “She’s Ben-Tairre’s fire sister. This is it.”
• • •
Arilla flew into the Chamber of the Golden Dome and broke through the ring of warriors, but at the inner edge she was caught in the arms of an Elder who lifted her off her feet and stopped her flight. There could be no physical intervention here. Her fire brother was alone in this.
In the center of the ring Jinin-Ben-Tairre and Roniva circled the floor, the surrounding crowd calling on them to break setkaza now, finish it.
It was said that he who made the first move lost. Neither would strike first. But the ring of warriors was intent on breaking one of them. They could not leave this chamber until one was dead.
Kaza, kaza, kaza.
Alihahd came to the jeweled arch. He shifted to see between the heads of the crowd of warrior-priests. Their chant surged like the incessant pounding of a heartbeat.
Kaza, kaza.
Suddenly Roniva’s sword was out. She moved to the center of the chamber and stabbed the point of her sword into the floor.
The chant stopped. The ring widened as everyone moved back to the farthest boundaries of the chamber, onto the benches and the stone sills of the tall lancet windows.
Ben and Roniva circled the sword three times.
Someone gave Ben his sword. Roniva pulled hers from the floor, and the final battle began.
Blades flashed. The two swept across the inlaid floor like sidewinding serpents. Spectators fled from their approach. The players owned the space, pausing for no one. No one had the right to be in the way of the fatal dance, which Roniva, having begun it, was fated to lose.
Roniva swung at Ben. With a ringing clash, Ben batted the flat of her sword away from him with his false hand. The awkward thing became for him an extra weapon, and he lunged into Roniva with his sword.
The trick should have caught her, would have, but Roniva was quick and wise to Ben’s way of turning his weaknesses. She parried, jumped away, and countered.
A wet sheen glowed on Ben’s skin in the unheated chamber. The Itiri would see Ben in a shroud of heat. Exotic eyes that always looked angry narrowed in ferocity. Small, broad feet wrapped in strips of red rags were a burned reminder that Ben did not know how to lose.
Roniva advanced on him, her sword a whistling blur before her, and she pursued him to the wall, where watchers divided and dove to either side. Her strike sheared the curtain from the window and shattered the mirrored jamb with a spray of glass. Ben spun off to the side. He seized the offensive, beat Roniva into a retreat, and backed her to the hearth.
Her sash ignited at the fire’s edge. She sprang backward over the pit, arched like a cat, cut her sash from her waist, and wielded it as a flaming bola. It swished in a circle, searing the air, and she let it fly.
Ben leaned far to the side. Before the bola was even on the floor, he was on immediate counter-offensive, swinging his sword at Roniva in a mighty arc.
Roniva’s sword was down, Ben’s blade driving at her head. In a swift deliberate move, as fast as a sword’s sweep but with an eerie sense of slow motion, as if time itself were commanded to wait, Roniva raised her left hand in a gesture of halt and caught Ben’s blade on her bare palm.
An edge that could sever tempered steel, the tungsten-plastic should have gone through with no more resistance than slicing air. The blade stopped dead still.
The look in Roniva’s eyes reflected a power, a force to stop a starship, a faith to move mountains. It was a borrowed power of the universe. The myths of magic that surrounded the Itiri like rubbish were all there, focused in the palm of Roniva’s hand.
Ben took a step back in shock, looked at his blade for blood that was not on it. In that moment he lost the battle.
It was quickly done after that. Ben’s feet were swept from under him by a long, lashing kick. Roniva stepped on his sword hand and put her sword point to his jugular. All motion came to a stop.
Arilla turned away and hid her face against the chest of the Elder, Eren-Ben.
Jinin-Ben-Tairre didn’t breathe. He waited for Roniva to finish him.
Roniva spoke to him directly. He was next to dead and counted as no one now. �
�He who breaks a setkaza first loses. Except that not for nothing was I made Fendi of this Aerie. I can break traditional bonds also. Thou wert someone before thou wert Itiri, Jinin-Ben-Tairre. That someone may live, if the Itiri agrees to die and never be seen on this Aerie again.” Dark eyes met dark eyes and she asked, “Art thou dead, Jinin-Ben-Tairre?”
Any Itiri would rather actual death to ritual death. But survival instinct would not leave him. “I am.”
“Let all be gone,” Roniva commanded. “Tell everyone that Jinin-Ben-Tairre has died.”
As the warrior-priests filed solemnly out, Eren-Ben knelt by the dead warrior, took his sword and placed it in a wooden chest. He took the dead man’s eternity flower from his belt and his signet ring of the carnelian serpent from his finger. The flower and the ring he gave to grieving Arilla.
Jinin-Ben-Tairre spoke softly from the floor at Roniva’s feet, for only her to hear: “The corpse requests to be buried with his book.”
Roniva’s visage was severe and scowling. She did not look down, but hissed through her teeth, “Ben, shut up.”
Outside, the sky had split open and rain poured down in torrents. Lightning flashed and roared. The smell of ozone scorched the air.
Jinin-Ben-Tairre stayed sprawled on the floor where he’d died, until only he, Roniva, and the hanina Eren-Ben were left in the chamber.
And Alihahd. He hadn’t gone out with the others and didn’t intend to go unless he was told. He stayed in the background in the nine-sided chamber, behind the lattice barrier that stood in front of the dais. No one paid him any attention, though he sensed they were aware of his presence.
Roniva lifted her sword away from Ben’s throat, and she melted from her regal pose. She seemed to sway for a moment, and she leaned against the Elder, Eren-Ben, who was quietly there where she needed him, the only other living warrior to bear the name Ben. Eren-Ben was shorter than the other aghara, wider across the shoulders. His pacific eyes were a striking blue-green, wide and fathomless. His ageless face was mild, sad, serene. His hair, a flowing mane as long as Roniva’s, was a silvery ashen blond different from the normal Itiri gold. He wore his eternity flower behind one ear, as Roniva did.