her instruments 03 - laisrathera (31 page)

“No?”

“I’m here to figure out why you’re the one stalling. Did your fickle alien throw off your yoke? Or did you kill him before you could suck all the power out of him?”

Hirianthial extended a feather-soft hand toward his cousin, felt her stir.
/Araelis,/
he whispered.
/Can you run?/

No words in her bleary response, but she was rousing.

“Ah, ah,” Baniel said. “No, I think not, my brother.” Araelis vanished from his awareness as if cut away. “Very well, if you wish. Let us begin this, and have it done.”

Hirianthial gathered himself and launched the attack, met unexpected resistance. Tested that resistance, found it strong and smooth to the touch. He explored it and then exhaled, emptying himself. Let his brother hold fast against the divine silence. No mortal shield could deflect the power that lived in the dark spaces between stars, and in their molten hearts.

Val’s shout ripped across the hall. “NO!”

He opened his eyes, saw the knife in Baniel’s hand darting toward Araelis, slowing as Val exerted himself on it.

No one expects a knife,
the whispers in his head suggested, and he woke his sword and ran the length of the ballroom, to end the struggle, to commit to the execution too many years in the arrest. He reached the dais, swung, and missed when Baniel leaped inside the range, close enough to almost smash into him, the knife reversed. The forearm Hirianthial used to deflect the attack took a long slice—and from his own dagger, the missing Jisiensire knife, to boot—but missed, and none of it made sense of the leaping triumph that blazed from his brother’s mind.

“Oh yes,” Baniel hissed. “Give it to me, brother!”

His life? Baniel’s?

Fingers skidded, slick, over the cut in his arm.

…and reached into him, forcing a bond and swallowing the power that was pouring into him from the welling calm, the Divine, the energy that had no ending, swallowing and swallowing until appalled, Hirianthial cut it off, choking his brother’s grip and by then it was much, much too late.

This he learned when Baniel threw him halfway across the room with his mind alone.

“You too, pathetic thing.” Val froze in place and Baniel grinned. “Stalling, was I.”

A furtive test demonstrated that he could move, so Hirianthial cautiously tucked his feet beneath himself and watched his brother. The aura around him was so dense it crimped the air around him—he had no doubt even the mindblind could see it now.

“Tempting to take the rest,” Baniel said. “But this is more than enough. Now truly we finish this.”

He could almost feel the wave poised to crash over him when a warm wash of energy flowed through him. Startled, he looked toward Val, who met his eyes.

/Take it, or we’re both for toast./

As Hirianthial drew it in, Val added,
/And don’t open that first channel again or he’ll take it all./

Was that true, he wondered? Could all he have learned about no longer relying on his own poor energy have come so quickly to naught? Could divine power be stolen?

Anything can be stolen
, was the soft answer.
And anything abused. The gift is made unconditionally. Otherwise, how would They know Their own?

Hirianthial made a shield out of Val’s offering and met the crashing wave, and the battle was well and truly joined.

The halls were
gory
. She hadn’t even known that was possible, but Reese was appalled at what the battle had done to them. The pirates had palmers, which tended to cauterize the wounds they made when set high enough to kill… but where they missed, they’d dug divots out of the wall and sent shards of stone flying like shrapnel. And the places where people had been reduced to fighting with swords or knives… the rich carpets had been ruined with blood and fouler things, and the walls were smeared with it. When she had to step over a shattered statue, something in her broke. She reached for someone’s hand, anyone’s, and got Irine’s. One squeeze steadied her and she dropped the tigraine’s fingers to resume being strong and lady-of-her-own-castle-ish. “There don’t seem to be many people left.”

“The fighting’s probably closer to where the pirates were staying,” Sascha said.

“Up the stairs, then.”

They took the nearest stairwell and then they could hear it: the yelling and squeak of palmers and the harder, wetter sounds of bodies falling.

“Shoot first, ask questions later?” Reese guessed.

“Kind of hard to bring back reinforcements if we do that,” Sascha said, peering down the hall. “Come on.”

Olthemiel had solved their problem by having his men tie the remains of the ropes that had bound them to their arms like sashes. They met up near a different stairwell, beside a window.

“Asaniefa’s guard have taken on the pirates,” he said in response to Reese’s question. “And mostly killed them, or been slain. There are some few left, from what I’ve seen. And yes, we can go to the Lord’s aid, and will do so directly. Only—”

“Only?” Reese asked, not liking the hesitation.

“We have not seen the shapechanger.”

“You might not,” Sascha said. “He might be masquerading as one of you.”

Reese thought of Surela and shook her chin once to rid herself of unwanted imaginings. “Where’s Baniel been staying? Have you been able to find out?”

“Up the stairs again. He has liked an aerie, that one, on the top floor overlooking the lake.”

“Right. Go bail out Hirianthial, please.”

“At your command, Lady.”

“And that leaves us to do what?” Sascha asked.

“We’re going to rescue Liolesa’s enemy.”

“Really?” Irine said, making a face.

“…and kill the Chatcaavan.”

“Okay, that I can get behind,” Irine said. “Lead the way.”

There was no question in Surela’s mind that she was dying. She was no apothecary to understand how, but the creature had bled her too many times, and she’d grown weak with it, so light-headed she sometimes thought she imagined her durance at his hands. But always, the alien reminded her.

He liked defiance. She’d had that from him through his skin the first few times he’d attacked her: how he’d relished her loathing and the revulsion she’d felt at his touch. How her indignation that an alien would dare use her in such a fashion excited his lust. And she’d managed to sustain those reactions for a while, letting her anger and incredulity carry her past the screaming despair that would otherwise prey on her… the despair she’d briefly let the human woman see in the cell.

But he had worn down her resistance, replaced her defiance with a dull exhaustion, and she could sense the arc of their interactions as he saw them playing: now that he had ruined her, he would kill her. As she’d lost more of her will, he’d become more violent, until she knew she could not have attacked him and won even with the alien’s borrowed tool.

…but then he’d had Araelis brought in, and his mind had clouded with plans, not of rapine, but of torture and infanticide.

Surela had ceased to care about the distinctions between Eldritch Houses. The politics that had once dominated her life had fallen away in significance beside the far greater menace that she had invited into their world in all her hubris. The only thing that mattered, seeing Araelis’s bloodless lips and wide eyes, was that the Chatcaavan intended to inflict himself on another Eldritch woman, and the only thing stopping him was the completion of his entertainment with her.

So she fought him. With nails on his borrowed Eldritch skin, with her teeth, with flailing limbs. She pushed past her lassitude and dizziness and forced him to re-evaluate just how far gone into meek death she was. And as she guessed, it enflamed him.

There would come a time, she prayed, that he was so certain that all she had to use against him were those nails and teeth… and then she’d have the opportunity to wield the needle. She could feel it against her back where he’d rolled her onto the dress he’d finally shredded to expose her.

“Second wind, eh?” the alien hissed into her ear. “I had no idea you would be such a fighter, false Queen.” He stroked her flank with fingers that felt too sharp, and when she looked down she saw talons, not fingers. Would he shift on her, then? she thought, terrified. In her? She tried desperately to push him off, only to see him toss his head and begin to pant. His talons became fingers again. For an instant, this puzzled him, but his emotions surged again through his skin: no, of course. This was the shape he wanted to use. Nothing else would do.

Surela stared up at him, paralyzed, like an animal in the sight of a predator. What was happening to him? And did it constitute an opportunity?

Goddess
, she prayed. She shifted away from the ruins of her corset, giving herself some room to reach it.
Let me have my chance!

“You’re saying you like her?” Irine asked, voice rising.

“No,” Reese growled as she vaulted the stairs. It felt good to be moving, to be able to move without hitting a wall and having to double back. “Yes. I don’t know. Hell, how did you know you liked me? I wasn’t a great find or anything.”

“I’d prefer to call younger Reese a work in progress.”

“Well, then, Surela’s a work in progress, she’s just got further to go.” Reese leaped onto the landing and would have darted into the corridor, but Bryer grabbed her.

“Me first.”

“Fine.”

Reese hung back to let the Phoenix precede them, but it was unnecessary… the silence on the top floor made it clear no one had come up this way, that in fact the battle soaking the carpets downstairs belonged to some other universe. “Great,” she said. “Now all we have to do is open every door until we find them? We might be here forever!”

“Might as well get started, then,” the new Harat-Shar said, and reached for the first.

Every door they tried spurred Reese’s heart faster. They had to find the alien; for him to not be with Baniel couldn’t mean anything good. She felt the time passing and her absence from Hirianthial’s side like a wound, one the borrowed knife in her hand made her frantic to fix. That desperation was driving her when she tried the door that dumped her into the right suite. The noises from the adjacent room turned her stomach, but she recognized them and didn’t wait for the others to come, didn’t call them, didn’t want to warn the Chatcaavan she was coming.

She appeared in the door, took in the scene, and forgot all of that in her rage. “
STOP THAT! STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!
”

The alien’s head jerked toward her, eyes round… and in that moment, Surela groped along the bed, hissed, and lunged.

Flicker of silver.

Gout of pale fluid.

The Chatcaavan howled and reared back, sliding off the needle that had impaled the eye. He covered it, head turned away, and Surela fisted her hand on the metal and drove it into his neck. When no blood met her jab, she hauled it up through the flesh until she reached something—vein, artery? What did Reese know about it?—and then she tore the creature’s neck open with a scream that brought the others crowding in behind Reese.

“Quick!” Reese said, lunging for the dying alien. The Fleet Harat-Shar caught the Chatcaavan’s shoulders and pulled him away, leaving Reese to catch Surela before she slid off the bed.

“Oh, Goddess, oh, Goddess, is he dead, tell me he’s dead, tell me I killed him—”

“He’s dead all right,” Narain reported. “Battlehells, what did you stab him with?”

“Was that my pick?” Irine asked, incredulous. “You gave my pick to her!”

“She was the one getting raped every few hours,” Reese growled, and hunted through the layers of sheets on the bed until she found one that wasn’t stained. Dragging it around the naked woman, she said, “He’s dead, Surela. Really dead, he’s not going to touch you anymore.”

“Araelis! Baniel has her—”

“We know. Hirianthial’s gone after them. It’s all right, you’ve done everything you had to.”

Surela collapsed into her arms, sobbing, and Reese no longer thought it was strange to have the Queen’s enemy hiding her face against her vest. A work in progress. Maybe they were all works in progress.

“We’ve got to get back,” Sascha reminded her.

“I know. Narain, she needs a healer. Is there someone who can… do you know… she needs help, she’s bleeding….”

The Harat-Shar crouched alongside the Eldritch and squinted at her, then nodded. “There’s a Medplex in orbit we can use, though I’ve got to arrange the logistics if someone hasn’t already for the other wounded. I don’t know where our Pad is.”

“Can you find out? Quickly?”

“W-what?” Surela said, sniffling. “What do you discuss? Did you say healer? I want no healer!”

“You’re weak,” Reese said. “You need medical treatment.”

“I want to die here.”

Reese refrained from shaking her, but it was a near thing. “We had this discussion already. You’re not ruined!”

“The Queen will execute me anyway,” Surela said, wiping her eyes.

“Then at least you’ll die cleanly, on your own two feet, in a nice dress. Not torn apart by a Chatcaavan not five minutes after he’s raped you,” Reese hissed.

Surela flinched back, eyes wide. And then she laughed, reluctant, and if it was a little shrill at least it was a sign of life. “You know how to galvanize an Eldritch, human woman.”

“I’ve had some practice,” Reese said. Sourly, she finished, “A lot of practice by now.” To Narain, “You handle that, all right?”

“Time is wasting,” Bryer said.

“Yeah.” Reese glanced at the body of the Chatcaavan, still wearing the Eldritch façade. “But this had to be done.”

“I’ll take care of her, and the body,” Narain said.

“Let’s go, then.” Reese pushed herself to her feet. “God knows what that bastard is doing to Hirianthial.”

Surela’s voice stopped her. “Captain Eddings.” When Reese turned, the woman drew in a breath. “There, in the remains of my gown. There should be a centicore amulet. Take it and use it in my name; tell the people who still owe their allegiance to me to surrender. Show them the shield on the back and they will know it for mine.” She lifted her chin. “Save their lives. Please.”