Alector's Choice (26 page)

A good two glasses
before dawn on Sexdi morning, Dainyl walked across the courtyard from the
temporary quarters that had become less and less transient, and more and more
cramped. The night before, he’d been up late writing the report on the
court-martial, included in the weekly dispatch to the marshal that Quelyt would
be taking back to Elcien in a glass. Ahead of Dainyl, beside one of the
squares, waited Falyna and her pteridon.

The colonel adjusted
the shimmersilk flying jacket and heavy gloves. While they weren’t necessary in
the light east wind blowing across the compound, they would be in the chill
heights above and around the MurianMountains.

Falyna inclined her
head to the colonel. “Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning,
Falyna. You ready to fly me up there?”

“Yes, sir.” The
Myrmidon ranker paused, then added, “If you’ll pardon my asking, Colonel, and I
wouldn’t ask anyone, but you were a flier for a long time—”

“You’d like to know
why I keep asking you to fly me out to where that ancient tunnel is? There’s
something that keeps coming back there. Sooner or later,” Dainyl shrugged, “I
hope that I’ll be there when it is. I want to get there earlier today. We’ve
been too late before. I can’t help but think it has something to do with this
so-called rebellion.”

Falyna frowned, then
nodded. “Those locals fired at us from right below there.”

“It doesn’t seem like
coincidence.”

“No, sir. You want me
to set down and wait?”

“No. You could set
down somewhere else, but not close. Give me a glass alone.”

“We can do that.”

Falyna felt that her
colonel was wasting time, and perhaps Dainyl was, but he’d talked and
questioned lander after lander over the weeks, read reports, and followed what
the Cadmians were doing—and he knew very little beyond what he’d discovered in
the first week.

He nodded to Falyna.
“Let’s go.”

In moments, Dainyl
was in the rear saddle and harness, and the pteridon sprang skyward, wings
propelling it seaward into the wind. Once they were well clear of trees and
buildings, Falyna eased the pteridon into a climbing turn toward the northwest
over an ocean that was a dark, dark green, with scattered whitecaps. Then they
were back over land, climbing above the casaran nut plantations to the north of
the compound, headed for the MurianMountains. The skies were clear, and
promised to remain so.

Dainyl could not
sense either the soarer or her creatures, but she visited the tunnel every
second or third day early in the morning. He hoped that he had guessed
correctly. His eyes moved to his left, down at the road to the guano mine, then
to the mine itself.

Mines—the iron and
coal mines in Iron Stem, the guano mine in Dramur—all were having troubles.
Iron Stem was close to the towering Aerial Plateau, and the guano mine was in
the lower reaches of the MurianMountains. Was that because the ancients were
involved, and because they preferred heights? Or just coincidence?

He could sense the
greater use of Talent by the pteridon | as it climbed until it was above the
peak that held the tun-[ nel, then began to make an approach into the light
wind.

As soon as the
pteridon touched down and half folded its wings, Dainyl unfastened the harness
and slipped out of the saddle. “A glass from now!”

“Yes, sir.” The
ranker nodded.

Dainyl hurried back
to the western edge of the bluff or ledge to get clear of the pteridon’s wings.
There he turned eastward and watched the wide-winged pteridon launch itself,
then glide away, dropping lower as it left the higher peaks behind.

After a moment,
Dainyl entered the ancient tunnel, lowering his head.

As so many times
before, the only tracks on the fine sand were those of his own boots. There
were no scratch tracks of birds, no swirled displacement created by snakes, or
even fine lines drawn by insects—just the heavy indentations of an alector’s
boots.

From the outer
metallic archway of the tunnel, he studied the mirror on the floor, a mirror
that still puzzled him. Again, he probed it with his Talent. For the slightest
of instants, the golden green that surrounded it seemed to stretch endlessly…
somewhere.

A flash of golden
green light flared before him, and the soarer hovered above the floor mirror.
Dainyl’s hand went to the grip of the light-cutter in his belt.

Do not touch that if
you wish to live.

Faced with that cold
green authority, Dainyl decided against trying to use the sidearm.

You have sought us.
Why?

“Because the indigens
seem to worship this place—or you—and because they attacked me. Because miners
are disappearing. I thought there might be a link.”

You have raised your
steers upon our world. Should those among us not also feed?

Feed? What did that
have to do with a revolt? Feed? Who was feeding on what?

You see, but you do
not see. Go out and look at the world below.

“Why?”

So that you may see.
So that you will be warned.

Warned? Dainyl didn’t
like those words at all. Still, he moved back from the soarer, one step
backward after another, never taking his eyes off her. His Talent revealed
nothing about her except the golden green nimbus of Talent-energy surrounding
her. The soarer followed him, keeping the same separation.

Once outside the
tunnel and the outer unnatural cave, Dainyl stepped sideways. The soarer glided
past him, a miniature and perfectly formed winged woman perhaps half his size.

“Now what?” he asked,
his eyes and Talent scanning her and the area around them. There was no sense
or sign of the violet-red stonelike creatures… but there hadn’t been any sign
of the soarer until the moment she had appeared.

Behold the world.
Look out across the lands.

Warily, Dainyl
shifted his glance to the southeast, back toward Dramuria.

Abruptly, he was
surrounded by a greenish light or mist. He blinked, forcing himself not to draw
the light-cutter. Through the green he still saw the lands below, stretching
toward the distant ocean, but in addition to what he had always seen, a weave
of color assaulted him, lines and webs of brown, and black, and amber—thin
lines, thicker lines, all intertwined. His second sense was that he saw a
subtle weave that filled the entire silver-green skies, the warp and weft of
lifewebs that seemed to intertwine, and yet never touch.

Under the sensory
assault, he took a single stumbling step sideways before catching himself. What
was he seeing? Was she trying to control him, use her Talent to destroy him? Or
worse, enslave him?

We do kill, but only
as we must. We do not bind. That weakens the lifewebs more than death. You see
the webs of life, all life.

She might have been
lying. Dainyl doubted that he could tell if she were, not with the power she
projected, but he did not think so. Somehow, he did not doubt that the ancients
could see the ties that bound the lifemass of Acorus. Why couldn’t Talented
alectors? Why hadn’t he?

Look at yourself,
alector. Look at yourself.

Almost unwillingly,
he looked down at himself. Purplish pink threads sprang from him, merging into
an ugly purple thread that arched away from him toward the northeast. Compared
to the soft and warm colors of the web stretching out below the peak, the
purplish pink that surrounded him was wrong, not subtly wrong, but oppressively
so, a color and shade that did not belong on Acorus, that conflicted and fought
with the tapestry formed by the softer lifewebs.

Yet he was an
alector, and that purplish pink was him. Could he do anything about that
purpleness? Should he? Why him? If he had seen the web and the clash of
life-forces, surely, others had also perceived it. He couldn’t have been the
first one, the first alector to sense that. Or could he?

You see? You are not
of the world.

He repressed a
shiver.

You must become one
with the world—-and of the world— or you will perish.

“That sounds like a
threat.”

As suddenly as it had
come, the greenish mist had vanished—and so had the soarer. Dainyl stood alone
outside the cave, looking down on the land. The warp and weft of the lifewebs
had also vanished. Once more, he blinked. Had it all been illusion? He shook
his head No, the soarer had been real, and so had what she had shown him.

He tried to call up
what he had seen, but the only aspect he could sense was the purpled skein that
was his own lifethread. He had always been able to sense a slight purplish aura
around other alectors, and the faint silver-black-green around the few landers
who had Talent, but he’d never seen himself that way.

What had he seen? Had
it really been a web that linked all the lifeforces of Acorus? Or that of the
higher life-forms? He knew that he had seen those interweaving and converging
threads, yet he could not call up what he had seen, not by himself, anyway.
That he could sense his own aura, and that it was similar to those of other
alectors, was enough itself to suggest that what she had shown him was real,
but why couldn’t he sense beyond himself? Was his Talent that weak, compared to
that of the soarer?

He took a long and
slow deep breath, then turned and walked back to the amber-green-gold archway
that framed the tunnel. His eyes lighted on the mirrorlike device in the floor
of the tunnel. It had to be a transport device, something like a Table.

Slowly, he walked
into the tunnel, his head low, until he stood on the mirror. He’d never used a
Table, but according to Lystrana, the key was to visualize where you wanted to
go. He concentrated, thinking of the one Table he had seen, in the Hall of
Justice in Elcien.

Nothing happened.

He tried reaching out
with his Talent, into the depths that had to be within or behind the mirror,
but he could find nothing there.

After a good half
glass of trying everything he could think of, Dainyl finally walked out of the
tunnel to wait for Falyna to return. The mirror was a transport device, but how
it worked… he couldn’t determine, and he doubted that either he—or any
alector—would ever understand or be able to use it.

The other phrase that
the soarer had used… that those among them…fed. That suggested strongly that the
other creatures, the ugly ones, had fed on the missing miners. Dainyl had no
proof, but it all fit. It would explain why some of the miners vanished—and why
the miners would do anything to escape.

Dainyl walked to the
eastern end of the blufflike ledge, thinking. That might explain the
disappearances—and the reason why those miners who had escaped were trying to
create a revolt, but they were merely a handful. The soarer’s revelations might
explain the missing miners, but they didn’t make anything any clearer as far as
the Highest and the marshal were concerned.

What had become all
too clear was that far more was happening than any of those involved knew or
understood. Yet, if he reported what he had seen, he would reveal his own
Talent and possibly threaten the marshal and the Highest—and, considering the
fate of Submarshal Tyanylt, risk his own destruction. If he did not report on
the ancient soarer, he might well betray his duty as a Myrmidon.

As the white sun rose
out of the dark green ocean to the east, he stood and waited for Falyna to
return.

On Septi, Mykel was
back patrolling the mining road with fifth squad. The morning sweep had gone
without incident, and the local Cadmians had escorted the prisoners to the mine
and taken up their guard positions in the towers and along the perimeter. Mykel
and fifth squad had continued to patrol the access road, but had seen nothing.
The cool winds around and below the mountains felt refreshing after the days
spent in the Cadmian compound in Dramuria. There, Mykel had felt as though the
walls were closing in around him. He’d never experienced that feeling of
constriction in any other Cadmian compound. It had to be the situation facing
him, where he. could see no way out, no matter how hard he tried to avoid the
traps set for him by Majer Vaclyn. Mykel knew all too well that people, even
senior officers, often disliked others for no good reason, but much as he told
himself that, he still kept trying to puzzle out why the majer had suddenly
targeted him.

Now, in the late
afternoon, he and fifth squad rode back to the mine, sweeping the road once
more before the local Cadmians escorted the prisoners back to their camp. As
the chestnut carried Mykel toward the mine, less than half a vingt away, the
captain surveyed the road to the north. In the late afternoon the slope was
shadowed, making hiding easier. While he could not see anyone, he had a feeling
that somewhere in the rocky slopes to the west of the road were more of the
escaped miners, waiting to take more shots at them. His lips curled. Based on
what he had experienced so far, he would have been a naive optimist to feel
otherwise.

“Eyes sharp, now!”
Mykel rode another hundred yards or so, more and more on edge, but still not
seeing or sensing any figures in the shadows above the road.

Crack! Crack!

The sounds of the
shots were so faint that, for a moment, Mykel did not recognize them, thinking
that he was hearing a hammer on stone or some other mining operation. He
straightened in the saddle. “Rifles ready!”

“Fifth squad! Rifles
ready!”

Continuing to ride,
he eased his mount to the left, alongside the stone wall. From there he studied
the rocky slope, but he saw no one and had no sense that they were being fired
upon.

Another report echoed
from the north. Was it from the mine itself? Were the prisoners trying to
escape?

“Fifth squad, loose
formation, quick trot! Forward!”

As they neared the
mine, Mykel could hear more shots, definitely coming from the rocky slope above
the mine to the north.

As he watched, one of
the Cadmians in the guard tower staggered, then dropped his rifle and collapsed
over the wooden railing. Mykel still couldn’t see who was shooting, and exactly
from where, but there were at least several snipers. When fifth squad reached
the heavy wooden gates to the mine area, as suddenly as the shots had begun,
they ended. Mykel had not seen a single rifleman, but at least one Cadmian
guard was dead.

The gates creaked
open.

Captain Benjyr was
mounted on a roan, just inside. He looked at Mykel. ‘Too bad you didn’t get
here earlier.“

“Did you send anyone
up the slopes?”

“To get picked off?
No.”

Mykel turned in the
saddle. “Vhanyr, I need your two best shots to cover me. I’m going up after the
snipers. Put them in the north tower.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Going to be a hero?”
murmured Benjyr.

Mykel looked back at
the other captain. “No. I’m going because I’m the best shot and the least
likely to get hit—and because you don’t keep asking your men to take shots
without taking them yourself.” He eased his mount over toward Vhanyr. “I’ll
have to climb from this side. I’d be a plucked fowl if I went over the stockade
on the north side.”

After reining up back
outside the gates, Mykel handed the chestnut’s reins to Lasent, an older
ranker.

“Take care, sir.”

“Thank you. I’ll
try.”

Rifle in hand, Mykel
moved upslope steadily, using the shadows and the rocks for cover, keeping low.
Riding boots were not made for climbing, and he slipped several times on the
sloping sandy spaces between boulders.

A quarter glass
passed before he was above the top of the mineworks and could begin to move
northward. He felt—but didn’t know—that there were rebels somewhere farther .
north.

Crack!

Mykel dropped behind
an irregular chunk of old black lava. That single shot had been too close, but
it also gave him an idea where the shooter hid, only slightly higher than he
was. Mykel resumed his climb, more deliberately, and jnore directly uphill,
rather than slanting to the north.

He had only climbed
another ten yards or so when another shot ricocheted off the lava to his left.
Flattening himself against the slope, beside an outcropping, he considered.
He’d been right. There were at least two shooters, and one was to his left and
one to his right. He decided to go after the one to the left first. If he went
after the one to the right, the one to the left would be free to rake the mine
road.

He peered around the
sandstone, then crawled to the next outcropping… and the next.

After another thirty
yards, he felt he was closer, much closer.

He heard a slipping,
scraping sound, feet sliding on sandy soil. Turning slightly, he fired, hardly
aiming at the patch of gray that looked different, but willing the bullet to
strike.

“Oooh!”

The clatter of a
dropped weapon followed the exclamation.

Mykel moved quickly, but
not carelessly, keeping low and threading his way uphill and through the lava
and sandstone. Before that long he was looking down at a man in gray, bearded
and dying, sprawled and wedged amid the black lava.

“Who sent you after
us?” Mykel demanded.

“. •. couldn’t say
no…” The rebel half coughed, and his face contorted in agony. “… cold here… so…
cold…”

He was dead.

Mykel noted the
location and began to move northward through the rocks and infrequent scrub
bushes. He thought he was higher than the other shooter, but the man easily
could have moved to another position.

Crack! Crack! Both
shots were high and wide of Mykel and suggested that the rebel had moved
farther north but no higher on the slope.

Mykel peered from the
side of another lava boulder, one smoother than most, looking northward. He had
a good idea where the rebel was, but the man was keeping his head down as well.
The captain darted to another boulder, then another, dropping down just before
another pair of shots passed overhead.

Despite the cool air
and the chill breeze, Mykel was swearing heavily. He definitely wasn’t used to
scrambling around on mountainsides. He took several long and deep breaths
before resuming his crawling-and-crouching progress across the slope.

He traveled another
hundred yards when he heard the clatter of rocks. He glanced around a taller
irregular rock in time to see a patch dark gray against the darker lava
downhill.

Mykel snapped off two
shots, and the off-color gray vanished.

He keep moving,
carefully and cautiously, toward where he thought the rebel had been. There
were no more shots.

After another twenty
yards, he paused. There was heavy breathing, and a low groan, not too far
ahead. Could it be a ruse?

Anything was
possible. He looked around, and finally found a fist-sized chunk of rock, then
lofted it over the sandstone outcropping behind which he crouched.

The breathing
subsided, then continued.

Mykel held his rifle
ready, easing around the top of the sandstone ledge.

He needn’t have
bothered.

Below him, in a depression,
lay a rebel. The man’s rifle was less than a yard from Mykel, twice that from
the wounded sniper, who looked blankly at the captain.

A golden green
radiance washed over Mykel. He whirled.

In midair hung a
winged woman, certainly no more than two-thirds his own height. A gauzy
iridescence cloaked her figure, leaving only her head, shoulders, lower arms,
and legs open to view.

For a moment, Mykel
just gaped, holding his rifle.

Had the soaring
woman—certainly an ancient, if the old tales were correct—anything to do with
the rebels?

“What do you want?
Are you with the rebels?”

They serve a purpose.

The wounded rebel
looked up at the soarer, and whimpered… whimpered. “No… no!”

A blocky
figure—smaller than Mykel, but larger than the soarer—seemed to ooze upward out
of the rocks beside the gray-clad man. Mykel turned the rifle on the creature.

Do not use the
weapon. He will die soon anyway.

“Who?”

The injured one.

Mykel’s eyes darted
from the rock-creature to the winged woman, then back to the rough-skinned
creature that bent over the dying man. The creature barely touched the rebel,
and the man shuddered. He was dead.

“How did you know?”
demanded Mykel.

Fading lifeforce is
obvious. Fading or not, it should not be wasted.

Not wasted? The
creature had fed somehow on the dying man. Mykel repressed a shudder. “What do
you want with me? Are you Death?”

Mykel received a
wordless impression of mirth.

No more so than you
are.

“What do you want
with me?”

Nothing… now. You
must find your talent to see the world beyond your eyes. You must understand
what you feel… or you will perish. With those words, the green radiance
vanished, and so did the soarer, leaving Mykel alone with a dead rebel and
another stolen Cadmian rifle.

Mykel had no doubts
there were no more rebels. Still, he was careful as he dragged the second rebel
and carried the two rifles—both with numbers—downhill, his thoughts on what he
had seen. The soarer had to have been an ancient, beautiful, but with a
deadliness that made the Myrmidon colonel look clumsy and brutish. He had no
idea what the other sand-skinned creature had been, save that it had somehow
fed on the lifeforce of the dying rebel.

But how could he tell
anyone what he had seen?

He also had no idea
what the soarer had meant by finding his talent to see beyond his eyes. He
doubted that he had any particular talent, except for shooting well enough to
kill people. Or was that how he could shoot so well?

Abruptly, he realized
that the soarer had not spoken to him, that her words had been in his mind. At
the time, it had seemed normal, and unremarkable. Why had he felt that way?
Could all the ancients do that? The miniature dagger set in the slots in his
belt seemed to pulse green. He knew it hadn’t. Daggers, even daggers of the
ancients, didn’t pulse. He had to have been imagining that. But why had he felt
that way?

He pushed aside the
questions until he had the rime to think about them later.

Once he was within
hailing distance of the gates, he called down. “I took out both of them.
Vhanyr! Escort the prisoners back. Leave Lasent and Doytal to help me.”

“You sure, sir?”

“I’m sure.”

By the time Lasent,
Doytal, and Mykel had finished recovering the other body, the road back down to
the mine compound was empty, and the sun had set. As Mykel had expected, both
dead men had tattoos on their ankles.

Mykel heaved himself
into the saddle, then reloaded his rifle, glancing up as Captain Benjyr reined
up beside him.

“You a mountain
type?” asked Benjyr.

“I’ve learned.” Mykel
felt that admitting he was a city boy would only make things worse.

“They say you’ve
killed nearly a score of rebels like that.”

“Not that many,”
Mykel protested. “I would have liked to have gotten these two earlier, but you
can’t see them until they start shooting.”

Benjyr nodded.

Mykel realized that
the other captain was offering a silent apology, and that made him uneasy.
“You’ve never had the men to go after them.”

“We never had any
real problems until a year ago. Then it just got worse and worse.”

“There can’t be too
many left. I mean, escaped miners with rifles,” added Mykel quickly. He had no
idea where he’d gotten that idea, but he felt he was right about that. There
could be hundreds of rebels in the lowlands, people forced off their lands, and
unhappy growers, but they couldn’t be all that many rebel miners left.

“You think the
shootings will slow down?” Benjyr’s tone was skeptical.

“Up along the mine
road, but not elsewhere.”

“I’m afraid you’re
right. Good evening, Captain.” With a faint smile, Benjyr nodded and urged his
mount down the road.

Before starting back
down the graystone road himself, Mykel took a last look over his shoulder at
the mineworks. He felt sorry for the local Cadmian ranker killed by the rebels,
but he also felt sorry for the dead rebels—and for the families of all three
men.

He also worried about
what Majer Vaclyn would say the following afternoon about Fifteenth Company’s
failure to protect the guards at the mine. It didn’t matter that such
protection wasn’t the company’s primary task, or that there was no way to keep
an entire mountain clear with less than a hundred men. The majer would still
blame him for all the problems.

Not for the first
time, Mykel had to wonder exactly what he and his company had gotten into. They
were dealing with alectors and ancients, escaped prisoners seemingly bent on
revenge, and rebellious seltyrs, and no one seemed to know why.