Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (24 page)

Reese paused.

The girl laughed. “Don’t think we haven’t read the competition! They make the Eldritch sound like fragile, forlorn creatures, easily led astray, broken or changed. Not like that at all, are they?”

“No,” Reese admitted.

“But they are as mysterious,” Natalie said. “Imagine it, though. If you live as long as they do, why bother getting to the point of anything?” She wrinkled her nose. “It makes writing the sex scenes hard. That’s why I never write a book about two Eldritch. We’d be dead before the triumphant part with the birth of the heir.”

Reese almost choked. As Shelya patted her back, Reese wiped her watering eyes with the edge of her napkin and said, “You seemed to do well enough with the one I just read.”

“That was a little more of a fantasy than I usually write,” the older woman said agreeably. “And if you keep at it with the fork you’ll shred the meat. We won’t mind if you eat it with your hands.”

So Reese did, and it was messy but also delicious. “Why Eldritch?” she asked over the second bird. “You could have picked any number of other races.”

“Oh, I’ve done others,” Natalie said. “Under a different name, I write rather shocking books about humans falling in love with Ciracaana that involve quite a bit of physics, if not in the way most physicists imagine.”

“You’ve made her blush,” Shelya said. “I can smell it.”

Reese said, “Well, the Ciracaana are nine feet tall and centauroid. If you were human, you’d have the sense to blush about it yourself.”

“No wonder she and the Eldritch don’t get along!” Shelya said with a laugh. “Do you talk this way to him?”

“Maybe,” Reese said. “Sometimes.” She sighed. “Okay, maybe all the time.”

Shelya snickered and cleared away the dishes.

“Why Eldritch, you asked,” Natalie said. “Why not? I’d say. Except that would be an unfair answer. The reason is because my family’s always been interested in them, and it seemed appropriate to uphold the tradition.”

“That seems like a weird thing for a Harat-Shar family to be interested in,” Reese said.

“Not at all!” Natalie said, laughing. “We are the Alliance’s libertines, aren’t we? Pleasure for its own sake. If it feels good, how can it be wrong? And naturally we would gravitate toward our opposites, yes? What could be more diametrically opposed to a Harat-Shar than an Eldritch?”

“Nothing, I guess,” Reese said. “Still, that seems like a good reason to stay away from them. Opposites might attract, but they also cause friction.”

“Perhaps,” Natalie said. “Are you so unlike your Eldritch, then?”

Reese sighed. “He’s not mine. As I keep telling him, or he keeps telling me, or which I can’t remember anymore because he’s so stubborn I can’t tell when he’s disagreeing with me or doing what I want him to do.” She turned her glass in her fingers, leaving greasy prints on it. “I just want him to leave me alone. Things were better without him.”

“Were they?” Natalie asked.

“Yes!” Reese exclaimed. “I feel like he’s always judging me according to some standard I’ll never meet. Like he’s seen everything and I’m nothing special. I hate that he only answers the questions he wants to answer. I hate feeling like he’s part of some world that only barely touches ours. Why does he get to live so much better than we do?” She stopped abruptly, wondering when her voice had risen.

“Didn’t quite realize how much you were holding in, did you,” Natalie observed.

“I guess not,” Reese said, then straightened. “It’s still true, though.”

“Wash your fingers,” Natalie said, nodding to a bowl with a hot towel at Reese’s side. “Then come with me. I have something to show you while Shelya prepares dessert.”

Scraping the grease from her fingers with the pebbly surface of the hot towel left her hands feeling surprisingly clean, almost raw. Reese set it aside and followed Natalie into the lantern-lit warmth of the house, through the shadowed corridor in its center and into an intimately lit room, one almost too small to be called a room... in a groundsider’s house, anyway. There was a single cushioned bench in it facing a dark wooden bureau, and this Natalie opened with a thin brass key she withdrew from her vest. When she opened the bureau’s doors, the pungent smell of paper, ink and paint rushed out, tickling Reese’s nose.

“This folio never leaves this room,” Natalie said, turning from the bureau with a leather folder in her arms. “But you have plenty of time. Enjoy it, and when you’re done set it back and join us for coffee.”

“I couldn’t possibly—it’s so old—”

One of the woman’s brow ridges quirked. “And only young things need to be touched?”

Reese blushed but couldn’t come up with a response before Natalie abandoned her with the folio in her lap.

It was larger than she’d thought—longer than her forearm, but narrow. The leather wasn’t stiff, as she expected, but supple, dyed a dark blue. Hesitant, Reese untied the cords holding it shut and spread it open.

...and gasped at the parchment inside, a painting in vibrant hues, so jewel-rich she had to restrain herself from touching it. The smell of oil rose from the page and with it a sense of age.

It was only barely less staggering than the subject matter: a Harat-Shar jaguar? Leopard? reclining on a day bed beside a young Eldritch woman in sumptuous garb. The Eldritch had a book in hand and appeared to be reading out loud. The Harat-Shar was listening.

They looked so real. And they continued to look real in all the paintings that followed: twenty-two in all, each more unbelievable than the one before. It wasn’t what Reese had expected from a folio of paintings in a Harat-Shar’s bureau—there was nothing salacious about it—but despite the two never touching, never being undressed, never doing anything at all inappropriate, there was an unbearable sense of intimacy in each scene, so pointed Reese touched her cheek and realized it was warm from blushing.

She looked through the whole series of pastoral scenes twice, trying to decide what about it made them so hard to look at, and for the life of her couldn’t decide. And despite her embarrassment, she found her fingers reluctant to tie the folio shut and put it away.

The two women were back in the garden, sipping coffee and nibbling on a white cake thick with a frosting made especially rich by the yellow candlelight. Reese resumed her seat, blinked at the slice handed to her by Shelya, and sipped the coffee, bitter and dark.

“Well?” Natalie asked.

“Who were those two?” Reese asked.

“Sellelvi and Fasianyl,” Natalie said.

“Were they real?” Reese asked.

“Ah!” Natalie said with a laugh. “Does it matter?”

Reese focused on the cake, then looked up at the Harat-Shar. “Of course it matters.”

“Does it make the paintings any less special?”

“No, of course not,” Reese said. “But it could make them more special.”

“Eat the cake,” Shelya whispered. “You look like you could use it.”

Dazed, Reese parted a corner of the cake with her fork and tried it. The frosting was lemon.

“Maybe they were real. Maybe they weren’t. Even if they were real, some secrets aren’t mine to give away,” Natalie said. “That’s the first thing you should have figured out about Eldritch. It’s not just that they keep secrets... it’s that the secrets keep them, fast as prisons.” At Reese’s expression, she grinned and continued, “Those paintings have been in my family for over a hundred years... and whosoever made them didn’t do us the kindness of telling us about their inspiration. She had a fine hand with a brush, and maybe painting them was all she could say. Or maybe it was all she had to say.”

“They’re priceless,” Reese said. “Reproductions of them would make you a rich woman.”

“You saying that as a trader?” Natalie asked. “Or as a woman who wishes she had a copy?”

“A little of both, maybe,” Reese said, realizing the cake was good. She gave it more of her attention, and the more she ate the less vague she felt.

“There’s more than one way to be rich,” Natalie said. “I have no use for more money.”

Reese hesitated over the cake.

“You’re thinking something awkward, I’m sure,” Natalie said. “Say it, say it. We’re not oh-so-polite Eldritch ourselves.”

“It seems wrong to keep something so beautiful hidden, when so many people could see and enjoy it,” Reese said slowly. “Those pieces could hang in a museum.”

“They could,” Natalie agreed. “But not everyone could enjoy them as you have.”

“What makes me so special?” Reese asked.

The old woman grinned. “You have an Eldritch of your own. That makes you special... very special. I hoped that seeing the pictures would keep you from wasting him.”

“He’s not mine to waste!” Reese exclaimed.

“Of course he is. Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

“Figured what out?” Reese asked, gripping her fork harder.

Natalie only shook her head. “Read more carefully, girl. And finish your coffee there, before it gets cold.”

Try as she could, Reese got no more information out of the writer than that, and though she ate more cake than she intended in her pursuit, Natalie cheerfully offered no more insight. Standing outside the Harat-Shariin’s house and staring at the stars, Reese reflected that while dinner had been pleasant, she’d gotten even less information out of Natalie than she’d ever gotten out of Hirianthial....

Except for the paintings. The beautiful paintings.

With a shiver, Reese headed back to her hammock.

After the child survived, Jarysh showed active reluctance whenever Hirianthial left to discharge his duties to Irine and Sascha’s mother. Had he not already promised those hours, he would have gladly given them to the hospital. Where once thirty doctors worked, including five surgeons, now only ten reported... and of those ten, only Hirianthial and Jarysh had residential contracts. The hospital was a permanent home for forty children with diseases crippling and chronic enough to require full-time care, and the ward offered beds to those who needed only occasional check-ups. Two doctors alone weren’t sufficient to the task. Without enough full-time employees to keep track of the residents, Hirianthial often found them trailing him through the halls when he did his rounds on the transients or draping across nearby furniture while he attempted to repair the single Medimage platform the hospital owned.

He was no mechanic but the set-up had come with a basic repair manual; it had contained a long block of explanation on how the Pad technology had made the Medimage platforms possible and then a smaller set of pages instructing Pad technicians on the differences and similarities between the two. He’d glanced through them, picking up several bits of trivia about lights and quantum tunnel disruption before flipping to the troubleshooting sections. Lying flat on his back beneath the raised floor of the operating room he could just see the solidigraphic diagrams projected by the manual; if necessary, he could turn the projector with a foot to examine it from a different angle and continue work.

When the children used his midriff as a pillow he didn’t complain. Their thoughts were so thin and tired they barely sank past his shields. More than the discomfort of stiff muscles or the ache that drove him to bed, those tiny flickers of thought made him feel his age.

“We really shouldn’t let them do this,” Jarysh said from the door one day, voice thick with too little sleep. “If they separate they might have a seizure in some corner and we’d never know it.”

“I can feel them,” Hirianthial said shortly, squinting into a mass of conflicting circuitry and wondering which relay needed replacement. He felt along their seams.

“Feel them... even without touching?” Jarysh asked.

“I wouldn’t mention it otherwise,” Hirianthial said.

“And you know where they are? And how to get to them?”

“Yes,” Hirianthial said.

“Even when you’re sleeping? Would it wake you up?”

Beneath the platform, Hirianthial paused to consider. “I don’t know.”

“Because... well, maybe we both could sleep more if that was the case.” The Harat-Shar rubbed his forehead. “They climb over the bed rails and go wandering sometimes. Gives me nightmares.”

Hirianthial had shared them, but didn’t say so. The place felt abandoned and desperate and listless, a disorienting combination that left him feeling anchorless in a deep melancholy. He wasn’t sure if his daily excursions out of the hospital exacerbated the problem or blunted its edge, but he kept the feelings tightly reined. Espers were rare among the Pelted outside of the Glaseahn race, but some individuals still developed the talent and children were especially sensitive to emotional pollution.

“I think we need to replace this card,” Hirianthial said. “That might be all we have to do to have the platform work again.”

“Sounds worth a try,” Jarysh said. After a moment, he said, “Can you get up? There’s a girl on your stomach.”

“I’m not sure,” Hirianthial said. “She’s asleep.” When one of Jarysh’s footsteps sounded close, the Eldritch said, “No... let her be. She was very tired and if you try to move her she might wake.”

“I can’t just leave you on the floor,” Jarysh said, exasperated.

Remembering the insistent throb of pain that had sent the girl on her wanders, Hirianthial said, “I’ll get up later, after she rises.”