All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (25 page)

He’d been harboring designs on
that
?

“Something?”

Cahey, startled back into himself, almost jumped. “I’m not certain,” he said. “I think you know her better than me. We only just met. We’re not friends; she pays me.”

“Pity,” the Technomancer said. “I know she’s not mortal. But there are so many possibilities. Do you think she might be an alf, the last alf?”

She sounded wistful, actually. And she looked it, eyes dreamy and hands relaxed on the control bars of her chair.

“It’s a reasonable theory,” Cathoair said, choosing his words with great care. He could have agreed unequivocally, but somehow the lie troubled him. And he couldn’t very well say,
Oh no, she’s an angel. She’s been hunting her enemy for thousands of years, and it’s just your luck she caught up with him about when he decided you needed killing. Aren’t you fortunate?

There was a pause. They traveled down another beige corridor, the doors swinging open before them without a touch and sealing behind.

That must be Gunther’s doing. In any case, Cathoair had to stride out to keep up with the chair.

The last door opened onto sunlight. Midmorning now, and class must be in session. Cathoair could hear voices through open windows, but the only person in sight was a young woman propped on her elbows in the grass, her hair falling around her book and her bare feet kicked up from the knee so her full skirt puddled over her thighs. She might have been his own age.

His palm pressed his scar. He pulled it away, and stuffed his hand into his pocket again.

The Technomancer seemed oblivious. “It seems like there used to be so much more magic in the world,” she said. And then she shook herself and looked up at him, smiling. “My Selene said you fought the Grey Wolf. And forgive me for saying, but you look like you got the worse end of that fight. How is it you lived?”

Cathoair thought about that very carefully before he answered. Somehow, his memory for things concerning the Wolf—and Muire, for that matter—seemed very crisp. Vivid, as if only they were real and the rest of his life had been a dream.

He remembered hard hands turned generous, and shuddered. “It wasn’t what he wanted,” he said. “He didn’t want to kill me.”

“Or Muire?”

“I don’t know.” That, Cathoair could answer without dissembling. “He vanished. She went after him. I don’t know—”

“She’s very old,” the Technomancer said, and Cahey thought she meant it to be comforting.

“You haven’t met him,” was all he could say.

Her chair moved over the gravel and grass silently, the footprint of its repulsor field pressing the blades flat. When she had moved on, they sprang up again without harm. When they passed the girl on the grass, she hid her face behind her hair, but she seemed more awed than afraid. Nevertheless, Cahey caught himself scratching at his face again.

He couldn’t hide the scar, though, and he didn’t need to be ashamed. Other than his mother, who had been there when it happened, only Astrid and Aethelred had any idea what it meant, and they would never tell.

To cover the gesture, he held the hand out and caught sunshine cupped in the hollow. The Technomancer craned her neck curiously. “This is the sunlight that doesn’t fall where I live.”

“You were born in the Well?”

“We’re not allowed in the Ark.” He shrugged, and turned his hand as if he could let the light spill from its hollow like water. “It’s protected.”

“You’re afraid of the sky, is what it is. I never intended for people to move down there.”

“But you had to know they would. The city is crammed to bursting. And we have nothing. A little extra protection—what if there was radiation, whatever, something the Defile couldn’t handle? So you get all
this
earth overhead and hope.”

She looked at him, cannily, eyelids half lowered. “You’re not stupid,” she said. “What can you learn?”

He shrugged. “I can’t read. What
can
I learn?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. And she seemed to mean it. “That’s my failing. If I were what I should be . . .”

“Ma’am. No one can carry every burden.” He meant it, too. She seemed as if she believed she had failed him personally.

Her mouth worked for long moments before settling on a smile. “We must choose what we weep for, Cathoair?”

“If you like.” But he nodded.

The Technomancer lifted her chin and looked away. “Gunther, fetch Selene please. Or Borje, if she is busy.”

“As you wish, Thjierry.”

Cahey sort of wished there was a sense of presence when Gunther appeared and vanished, but—nothing. He wasn’t used to being surprised; one of his knacks was knowing where people were. Always—in a crowd, in a dark room, around a corner. Gunther made him nervous. Jumpy. More than a little.

“Cathoair.” The Technomancer’s formality of tone commanded his attention. He turned to face her. She continued, “You must be in pain and if I were you, I would want food and sleep and a bath quite badly. One of my moreaux will take you to a room where you may refresh yourself. I will wish to speak with you further.”

He opened his mouth, about to plead his case on behalf of his mother.
She’s dying. She doesn’t have anyone else.
The Technomancer was a kind old woman, and every word she had said to him was the deep-dyed truth as she believed it. She would surely take steps to aid him.

The dying had the gift of ruthlessness. He knew that by hard experience. And there was something in her expression as she looked up at him that stopped his voice completely.

“Thank you,” he said. The last words to part his lips until Selene arrived to lead him away.

S
elene’s palms would not stop itching.

If she had touched some unfamiliar plant, made contact with an unidentified substance, she could have understood it. However, there was nothing. Nothing.

And it was a maddening sort of itch. Not one Selene could shrug off, put out of her mind. This was like the nagging of her sex when her heat had used to come upon her, before she was changed: compelling, compulsive . . .
mandatory
.

But unlike a heat, she did not know what to do about
this
.

She was on her way to the infirmary for a lotion when the summons came. Not much time would have been lost if she continued—it was only a slight detour—but She was accustomed
to a prompt response, and Selene took a great pride in exceeding expectations.

She rubbed her palms against her thighs in a manner that was becoming something of a nervous tic, and gave Gunther an ETA, measured in seconds.

She beat it, too.

When Selene arrived in the Quadrangle, She was still with the nearman, who did not—by Selene’s understanding of human scent and facial cues—seem happy. It must be awkward wearing one’s whole interior life on display, for anyone to read. Something to do with primate hierarchy and band structure, team hunting behavior predicated on being able to see where a comrade was looking and what he was feeling. But that was how the monkeys cooperated, by direction of gaze and expression and verbal signals. Selene guessed it wasn’t really an obvious set of signs unless you had the keys. Even the monkeys seemed to make a lot of mistakes, and one would expect it to be hardwired into them what each set of wrinkles and grimaces conveyed.

She looked up as Selene came within view, but waited until she was quite close before speaking. The nearman—Cathoair—followed her line of sight, and Selene thought his expression brightened. This was not a response she was accustomed to, from humans—trumans, nearmans, halfmans were generally unhappy to notice the arrival of one of Her representatives.

“Selene,” She said, “please take Cathoair to a dormitory, and see that he is fed and made comfortable.”

An easy enough request, and Selene also understood that it was given to her not as something beneath a Black Silk, a punishment for failing to take the Grey Wolf—She did not punish Her servants—but because She thought there might still be
more to learn from Cathoair. And that was a delicate task, unsuited to any but the first rank.

“It will be my pleasure,” Selene said, and gestured for the nearman to follow.

Which he did, without complaining, with only a nod to Her to excuse himself from Her presence. Not that She minded informality; Her power was a fact, no frail construct that must be buttressed with ceremony.

But Selene had gone barely four steps when Her voice arrested her stride. “Selene?”

“Yes?”

“Are you well?”

Selene paused, considering. Considering what in her behavior might have made Her ask, considering the itch in her palms and the frustrations of recent failures. Not her fault, no, and She would never hold Selene accountable. She would say it was Her own responsibility, that She had not prepared Selene adequately, nor created her adequate to the task.

For the first time that she could recall, Selene did not care to hear that reassurance now.

“Fine,” she said, and—nodding her excuses—beckoned the nearman on.

I
t was an effort, but Cathoair remained silent as Selene led him down graveled paths and through acres of gardens, things he had never seen—flowers that seemed to exist for the sake of being flowers only, and trees that gave shade and scent and clean oxygen but served no other evident purpose. Everything was sunlit here, and the air was clean, cleaner than anything
he’d ever smelled, so he could pick out what must be the distinct aromas of different flowers. A truman with a push-mower cut the grass; the sunwarmed scent was dizzying. They came to the river and crossed it on an arched stone bridge, and when he stared down into the water, he half expected to see fish.

It was as if he had somehow been transported back in time, to another world. And through it all, Selene walked a few steps diagonally ahead of him, tail flicking lightly against her calves, as if this were perfectly ordinary, perfectly everyday.

To his own surprise, Cathoair grew angry. “By what right?” he asked, only half aware he spoke aloud. And then Selene glanced over her shoulder at him, incurious eyes in her broad feline face, and he stammered his embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“What is your question?” Her ears flicked forward. She hadn’t a mane, precisely, not like a lion’s. But her face was surrounded by a thick ruff of variegated pewters, smokes, silvers, and pearls, and his fingers ached to touch it.

Oh, what the Hel
. “By what right do you have all this,” he asked, “when we have . . . darkness? By what right does your world cast mine in shadow? What gives you the right to plenty?”

She stopped short and turned to him, and he tensed himself for a blow that never fell. A low rumble vibrated the air between them, and he thought at first it was a growl, but just as he was about to step back, he realized that it was a different sound entirely.

Her eyes were squeezed in what must have been her smile, and the sound she made was
purring
. It sounded nothing at all like the simulations of cats he had seen and heard on vii.

“If you think this is plenty,” she said, “you should see how they live in Ark.”

Cathoair found himself staring at her, flabbergasted. By the way Selene shook her head, though, he could sense her frustration. “This is a trust,” she continued. Her hand swept out. “Someone has to keep it. So when the world has had time to heal, there will be something to repopulate it.”

“Us.
You?
”

“Moreaux are sterile.” She said it defensively. If she were human, he would have guessed the lifted chin was defiance, but he was musing too much about unman body language already, and he knew it could play him spectacularly wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said, hoping she would understand what was he felt the need to apologize for. Not her sterility, exactly, or his own ignorance, but—

“It is nothing. We do not die. And I had kittens in the before—”

She shrugged. If she meant, as he thought she meant, that they had been born when she was just an animal, before the Technomancer uplifted her, then those kittens were long dust, and any potential descendents with them. Nothing survived outside the walls of Eiledon, now that its lone sister-survivor had fallen. The outside world was a poisoned ruin, and those who went there to salvage—which was what Cathoair’s father had done—went into danger.

She still stared at him, and he wished he could read her face. “Me too,” he blurted, because the weight of her regard was such that he had to say something, and that was the only thing he could think to say that wasn’t insensitive or condescending.

She stared harder, tail lashing. “Do not mock me.”

“No—” He held up a hand. “Me, too. I’m sterile, too. I’m nearman because of an engineered flu. Supersoldier bug.”

“And it rendered you infertile. Of course. They loved that trick in the old days; render the troops barren, and maybe if you fought hard for them,
they
would give back your future children after the war.”

“And now
they
are gone. And here we are.” Cathoair started walking forward again, in the direction Selene had been leading him, because it was easier than looking at her face. “It’s not so bad. My partner doesn’t want babies, and she’s not the only one who likes not having to worry.”

Selene caught up effortlessly. “Come on,” she said, and if she changed the subject out of pity for his babbling, he wasn’t offended. “I’ll show you the rose garden.”

S
elene had not expected to like the nearman. She didn’t like humans as a rule; they were too self-conscious, too enmeshed in their ego-reinforcement games. And Cathoair had that. It wasn’t that he was unlike other humans, because he was—egocentric, confused, scrabbling.

But he was also something else. He watched her with awareness. He did not mock her service, even by implication, even when he did not condone the means by which she served. And so she found herself picturing him as a peer, a companion. His polished skin and bound-back hair made her think of a stallion, nervy and long-necked and proud, and Selene wished for a bitter moment that he could have been one of Hers.