her instruments 03 - laisrathera (22 page)

Surela wasn’t done. “I regret putting us in this situation.”

“Do you really?”

“As much as I regret admitting it to a human.”

That… she laughed. She didn’t expect to. “Yes. I bet you do.”

“Do you know… what they plan…?”

“For us?” Reese shrugged. “Your guess is better than mine; you were the one out there most recently.”

“So they have not come for you.”

“No.” Reese thought of Baniel’s words and shivered. “No, I think they’re going to keep me here until all this is resolved, either way.”

Surela glanced at her sharply. “You know something…?”

Reese said, “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Being cellmates with you doesn’t make you my ally, Eldritch.” At Surela’s flinch, she said, “Doesn’t feel any better from the other end, does it.”

“I….”

When the other woman trailed off, Reese said, “But we can agree to try to fight our way out if they open the door again, can’t we?”

Shoulders tightening, Surela said, “Yes.”

“Good. That’s one thing, then. But I’ll make this clear now: when Liolesa gets back and beheads you, or whatever barbaric thing you people do here to execute criminals, I’m going to be in the front row. For what you did to Hirianthial, and to her, and most of all this world.”

“What do you care what happens to this world?” Surela muttered.

“If you think I want to see anyone given over to slavers….” Reese shook her head. “Maybe you can afford to live in your little bubble where terrible things happen to other people and that’s not your business. The rest of us don’t work that way. We’re a
community
. We protect one another from people who prey on us. We’ve got one another’s backs. Because anything else leaves us all easy pickings for pirates and murderers and criminals.”

“So you do this out of selfishness,” Surela said.

“We do it because we’ve seen what’s left of the people taken by slavers,” Reese replied, voice hard. “And we wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And that includes terminally stupid, stuck up bigots like you and all your people, and by that I mean
your
people, Surela. Because people like Liolesa and Araelis aren’t stupid enough to think the slavers are going to come for only their enemies. They’ve spent their lives defending you along with all the more worthy and grateful people, because they knew that they couldn’t keep half the world safe. It’s everyone or no one.”

“It was never my plan to involve aliens,” Surela whispered.

“Except as tools to your own end,” Reese said. “Even now, you’re trying to talk yourself into believing in a universe where you had some noble reason for what you did. Just admit it, Surela. You were selfish and willfully ignorant, and you brought the doom the Eldritch have been trying to hold off for centuries before you were even born right on their heads. You invited it in the bleeding door! And here you are in a cell for it. Did you really expect any differently?” Reese hugged herself against the cold and rubbed her running nose against her shoulder.

“All I wanted for us,” Surela said, voice trembling, “was for us to be left alone.”

“And I’m sure you expected to be, because you are born to wealth and privilege and it never occurred to you that being left alone is something only the powerful can have, because it takes power to defend yourself against all the people who want a piece of you, no matter how trivial that piece. The rest of us know that freedom has to be paid for in fresh blood, eternally, over and over.” Her anger ran out, left her feeling hollow and tired. “I just wish you’d known that before you started all this… but I guess everyone has to learn that the hard way.”

Surela said nothing for so long Reese assumed their conversation was over. She was glad; her sides ached as if she’d run a race, and she felt heartsore, and she missed her crew terribly. Allacazam would have been a great comfort right about now. Hirianthial, she was sorry to admit, even more so.

But Surela did speak. “Tongue like a whip.”

“You’d better hope that’s the sharpest thing you get hit with. I wouldn’t get your hopes up though.” Reese thought of Hirianthial. “I’ve seen what pirates like to do with Eldritch.”

Surela shuddered. “I know,” she whispered. At Reese’s sharp glance, the woman finished, “I saw what they did to my liege-woman.”

There seemed no good answer to that, so Reese said nothing.

CHAPTER 14

On the way to the armory, Hirianthial fell back to pace the Faulfenzair navigator. Her aura had a texture, like smoke against the fingers, warm and pricked through with unexpected embers. He would have thought such an impression would distress, but he found it strangely appropriate to her.

“The God’s Gift,” he murmured to her as they followed Soly down another of the enormous vessel’s many corridors.

She had an accent… a lovely one, breathy and musical, somehow evocative of her aura. “Your ability, yes? A gift from the God. I assume you have your own name for Him.”

“Does your god give gifts, then?”

“Of course,” Lune said, unruffled. “To defend ourselves when we were new, Faulza granted us the mindfire.” She held out her hand and the air rippled around it, waves of heat visible to both his natural sight and his finer senses where it lit her aura with licking flames.

Startled, he said, “Is that as hot as it looks?”

“It will burn flesh, but not metal.”

“Not your flesh.”

“It would be a curse and not a gift if so.” Lune glanced at him as they jogged. “You have some confusion?”

“We do not call my abilities a gift from any god, where I’m from,” Hirianthial said.

She flicked her ears. “If not from the God, from where does such a gift arise?”

A good question. “I suspect,” he said slowly, “we believe it arises from ourselves.”

Lune huffed, a sound that dimmed her smoke-drawn aura. “Forgive me. That sounds delusional. Hubris… that is the right word. Yes? To believe all good things come from oneself?”

“Some would say this gift is no good thing,” Hirianthial replied. “At best, neutral.”

The Faulfenzair glanced at him. “This seems unbelievable to me. Also, asking for sorrow. Why invite sorrow? Life is long enough to contain enough without asking for more. You should know, yes? You are a little longer lived than us.”

“A little?”

“Soly—how long do I live, in your years?”

“Eight hundred, I think? Seven?” Soly paused, consulted her map. “This way, we’re almost there.”

“Seven hundred years!” Hirianthial said, stunned.

“Not so alone in the universe after all, eh?” Sascha said from behind him.

Shaking himself, Hirianthial hurried after the others.

The battlecruiser’s armory was not as large as Hirianthial had expected; apparently the vessel did not have a single centralized facility, but scattered them throughout. There was light armor here, little more than a padded tunic, and of heavy armor nothing; but there were weapons, and even the swords. He accepted one and a tunic; the rest of the party armed themselves, and they found the nearest Pad station.

“You’re going to walk over this into Engineering,” Soly was saying. “Give us ten minutes to secure the bridge, then move out. Do what you can. Report at intervals. And try not to leave too much evidence.”

Narain snorted. “I’ve been through the training, arii.”

“You have, but the rest of them haven’t.” She smiled and swiped his shoulder, which he ducked. “Take care of them, Spotty.”

“And try not to tickle too many groins with your tail,” Tomas added. “I’d hate to see you lose it.”

“Awww, and all this time I thought you found my tail-tickling annoying….”

“I do, but it doesn’t change that they’re my tail-tickles to be annoyed by. I’m not letting any pirates steal my prerogatives.”

Narain grinned. “Good luck.”

“See you on the other side of it all,” Soly said, and led the rest of the team out.

“And now we wait?” Sascha guessed.

“Ten minutes,” Narain agreed. He considered Sascha. “Long enough for a little fun to get us through the next few hours of blood and gore?”

Sascha pursed his lips. “Someone might walk in on us.”

“That’s what your Phoenix’s claws are for….”

Sascha started laughing. “I like you. You should meet my sister.”

“She pretty?”

“Just like me, but a girl.”

“Promising!”

Hirianthial leaned against the wall, arms folded, and listened to the banter, the way it smoothed out the auras of both Harat-Shar, bled the tension out. Bryer was unflappable, as always, crouched alongside the Pad and staring at the door from the side of his head. It left him alone, to his thoughts of an alien race that treated its ability to burn others as a gift from a God who wanted them to have some defense. Against what, he wondered? He had not asked. Creatures, like the monsters that had beleaguered the Eldritch settlers? Each other? Aliens? Did the target matter?

What he’d said to Lune had been only truth: no matter what gods the Eldritch purported to worship, they began with themselves. All good things rose from within, like the engineering that had set them apart from humanity on the voyage out from Terra. All evil, also. Hirianthial considered his fingertips, imagining flame licking them. At his shoulder, Urise seemed to wait, an ineffable presence. A man who believed; no question there, not with the ocean of the priest’s experiences filling him. What would it be like to believe oneself the recipient of a divine gift? Did that lead one, inevitability, to pride and cruelty? Or to a responsibility to use the gift with respect, because it had been bestowed with love?

Of course, his people had already descended to pride and cruelty, bigotry and xenophobia, entirely without the excuse of belief in a god. Their whole religion was a sham, a way to swaddle the killing of the talented in the raiment of legitimacy. The way, no doubt, Surela was attempting to swaddle her own reign. What was it about his people that they were prone so to this error?

“We lost him,” Narain said.

“It happens.” Sascha bent down until he could look up into Hirianthial’s lowered face. “Hey, arii? Still with us?”

“I am, yes. Is it time?”

“It is.”

“Let us go, then.”

“Right. And remember… as much as possible, let us do the work, Lord Hirianthial. If we need you, we want you to be topped up.”

“Understood.”

It took exactly five hours for Malia to get worried enough to beep her. Irine touched the telegem at her ear and tapped back a ‘fine’ response and immediately started looking for cover. She was hugging the palace’s basement beneath the balcony that led to the lake; there were sunken windows along its edge that suggested a way in, if she could find one that hadn’t been shut tightly enough. Guessing that Malia was going to want words with her, though, she found the deepest corner and cuddled up into it, puffing out white breath. While she’d been sneaking back she’d hardly been aware of the cold; now that she wasn’t moving, it felt a lot more acute.

Hopefully the conversation wouldn’t take long and she could move on. She hugged her knees and bent her head into them, scanning the lake’s edge. There were scrapes in the snow where the bodies Hirianthial had left had been pulled away—into a pile, in fact. Why hadn’t their graves been dug yet? Maybe the ground was too cold to get a shovel through?

The telegem hissed to life in her ear. “Irine! Where in Iley’s name are you?”

“Under the ballroom balcony.”

“What!”

“I’ll be fine,” Irine said. “We need to get off this channel before someone hears us.”

“Irine, you’ve got to get back here!”

“And I will. When I’m done here—”

“Irine! If they take you and someone reads your mind to find out where everyone’s gone….”

That she hadn’t thought of, and it put her fur on end. She clenched her teeth against their sudden need to chatter. “I guess I shouldn’t get caught then.”

“Come back. Right now. Before you blow operational security to the moon and back.”

“I can’t.”

“Irine, they killed everyone at Jisiensire! They’re not going to bat a lash adding you to that count!”

Her heart lurched. “Everyone?” Irine asked, fingers tightening on her shins. “All Hirianthial’s kin?”

“Everyone. We just heard. And that army’s coming back this way. We’re going to get word to the rest of the allies. Tell them to start heading north….”

“Sounds like you’ve got work to do,” Irine said. “I do too.” In the distance, the pile of bodies seemed to waver. Was it snowing? She blinked to try clearing her eyes. “Angels with you, Malia.”

“Wait, Irine--!”

She shut the telegem off manually and tucked it in her pocket. She couldn’t afford to let Malia dissuade her. Her vow had been to Reese, not to the Tams, and not to the Swords. And Reese needed her. She crept out of her hiding hole and skirted the edge of the palace, grateful for the lack of technology that had deprived the building of the sort of external lighting that might have exposed her. All she had to worry about was the moon and starlight, which, granted, was reflecting off the thin snow… but then, she was used to that. The sand near her house was nearly white too, and on a moonlit night it could be blinding.

She checked the next window, found it solid and sneaked to the next. On her way, she glanced toward the bodies.

One of them was moving.

Irine froze. For a moment, she thought about zombies and the uneasy dead and her adrenaline spiked… and then, through the uncertain light, she saw someone lift his head, short hair swinging around shoulders streaked dark in the chiaroscuro of the evening.

“Val?” she hissed, shocked. Checking the windows for lights and finding none, she darted across the distance as light-footed as she could run, her tail low to scuff the marks behind her. As she approached, the smell became more obvious… not as ripe as she’d expected, but still unmistakably blood and gore. And there, on top of the pile, was Val, struggling weakly against the bodies on top of him. “Angels on the battlefield! Val!” She lunged for him and dragged him out of the pile, falling backwards with the Eldritch in her arms. He didn’t move… just dropped his head on her chest and breathed, hard.