House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy) (27 page)

I don’t
know
. And the question was totally irrelevant now; he wondered if Olivet would ever understand that. A new era had been ushered in this day; an era in which the savage exponent of violent death had entered the equations of human interaction on the highest governmental level, and the restraints of law and convention no longer restricted the pursuit of power.

Power and survival were synonymous.

In this new era, politics had reverted to the basic natural criterion of success: survival.

Olivet said regretfully, “Forgive me, I shouldn’t force you to talk about it. I was only . . . surprised.”

“Surprised? What do you mean?”

“I just can’t believe it of Alexand. I didn’t know him well, but we were so nearly the same age, we met at quite a lot of social events. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of him when he thought he was unobserved.” She hesitated, looking out toward the smoke-palled city. “How much can you really learn about a person in that sort of situation? I think all I was really sure of was that he was . . . lonely. Profoundly lonely.”

That word, that concept, was entirely unexpected, and so was his response to it. Like a physical blow; his breath caught, and he had to stop himself from doubling over.

She reached out for his hand. “You must get some rest now. Please.”

“You go on to bed. I’ll be there in a short while. I need a few minutes alone to . . . think.”

She didn’t argue, not by word or gesture; she had a gentle capacity for accepting without question even what she didn’t fully understand. Woolf cupped her face in his hands, watching her lips shaping a smile while her eyes brimmed with tears. He kissed the smile.

“A few minutes, Olivet.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

He turned to the railing, listening to the silken sounds of her departure, trying to hold on to that; the only sound that filled the vacuum was the rumbling hum of the city, dimmed by distance and disaster.

Can you deny your genes in every cell of his body
?

Why can’t I forget? The back of his hand tingled with the impact of a blow struck five years ago.

I am betrayed. Betrayed then as I am now.

Sardonic laughter welled within him. Have I not betrayed Mathis and myself, made a pact with evil? And what is betrayal? An abstraction as meaningless as faith in a world where the only criterion of success is survival. Survival at any cost, because not even the cost is meaningful.

Then, abruptly, his every muscle tensed in alarm.

The hum of the city no longer reached him; someone had activated the sound screens. The artificial silence made him all the more aware of a sound directly behind him. A light footstep.

Orin won’t kill me now. That was part of the pact.

Olivet. It must be Olivet.

He turned, one hand raised, ready to snap the small laser into his palm; he’d worn the spring sheath since the attack in the Directorate Hall. Someone was standing in the doorway, framed in light, but it wasn’t Olivet. He stared at the woman before him, at an apparition, and wondered why at first he thought she was robed in lambent sheaths of pearls. She was, in fact, dressed in a simple slacsuit.

Adrien Eliseer.

His hand groped backward, seeking the support of the railing. She took three steps toward him.

“Forgive me, my lord, but I had no way to warn you of my coming, or of my living.”

He asked haltingly, “What do you want?”

That seemed to surprise her; perhaps she expected him to question her identity. He didn’t. There was only one thing he was sure of at this moment. He knew who she was.

Finally, she answered him.

“My lord, I’ve come to ask for my husband’s life.”

“Phillip? Is something . . . what happened?”

He closed the door behind him and leaned against it. There was no light in the room, but the windowalls were clear. The pallid glow from the city sketched Olivet sitting up in the bed. She was frightened. That was in her voice.

“Nothing . . . happened, Olivet. Nothing’s wrong.”

She would hear the lie of that in
his
voice, but how could he even begin to tell her what had happened? How could he find the words to encompass what was wrong?

He went to a chair near the door and began stripping
off
his clothes, trying to remember when he had put them on. Yesterday morning. Concord Day. Somewhere in that dim past era of a day ago. Olivet was still waiting, still afraid, but he couldn’t say anything to reassure her. He could only ask for her silence with his.

Dear wife, I just had a little chat with a ghost who told me an enchanting tale of a place called Saint Petra’s of Ellay, of the secret birth of twin infants, and the first born was called Richard. And you, my lady, who haven’t yet seen three decades, are by a magical stroke, a grandmother.

And I . . . am a grandfather.

Then there was a charming little coda. By another magical stroke, it was given unto me the power, by the utterance of a single order, to destroy the great one-eyed ogre, Selasis.

The rumors are true, my lord
.

What
isn’t
true in the enchanted world on the other side of the rainbow?

But dear wife, I had to tell that lovely ghost that
I
live on
this
side of the rainbow, where there is no truth, only . . . survival.

She didn’t understand; didn’t understand that I can’t believe her—not in this world, in this new era.

But Alexand is innocent
.

She didn’t understand that Alexand’s father couldn’t believe that, and even if he did . . .

He tugged off his boots, let them fall, and sagged against the arm of the chair. Never since Elise’s death had he endured anguish so mordant.

The ghost left me with a curse; a potent curse.

He heard Olivet stirring and forced himself to rise. He tossed the rest of his clothing onto the chair, then stood naked, looking out into the dull glow that should have been the coming of dawn. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, as Olivet’s already had. He saw her there, waiting; she didn’t move except to tilt her head back to watch him when he went to the bed and leaned over her.

“Olivet . . . I love you. Don’t be afraid.”

She reached up and touched his cheek.

“If love were enough,
you
wouldn’t be afraid.”

But what else do we have?

He leaned closer until his lips touched hers. Trembling. He could feel it in that light touch, and knew no other way to stop it, except to seek something else in it. Slowly, savoring the languid distraction of the kiss, he carried her, let her sink with him, down into the cushioned warmth of the bed.

What else do we have?

My lady wife, love me, make love with me. It
will
be enough.

And yet it wasn’t.

Later, when she lay beneath him, and he lay closed in the soft constraint of her arms and thighs, when the darkness seemed to constrict and beat with a single impulse, he pulled away from her with a harsh cry he couldn’t restrain and lay panting, teeth clenched, eyes squeezed shut. All that stopped him from weeping for that encompassing realization of failure, even of shame, was some vague conviction that to give way to tears would be an even greater failure, a greater shame.

Never before. Never had this happened. Never.

Even my body betrays me.

Olivet stirred, took a long breath; she spoke not a word, moving in the darkness, drawing close to him, asking no more than his shoulder for her head, his hand in hers.

Here was love, warm and accepting beside him, but it wasn’t enough.

He stared up into nothingness, aware of an incipient nacreous glow. Dawn. It was coming finally.

The first dawn of the new era.

It was 07:30, only half an hour before the Directorate meeting. Still, when Phillip Woolf arrived at the Galinin Estate, he took time to check the security procedures in the infirmary wing and discuss them with Galinin’s Chief of Security. He was satisfied with Master Devron’s efforts, but well aware that total security was an impossibility.

He kept thinking of Commander Alex Ransom’s offhand assurance that the Phoenix could trans a bomb anywhere, even into the Directorate Chamber.

He encountered Galinin’s brother, Emil, and Rodrik, his first born, as they were leaving the infirmary wing, Emil bent and bewildered, too distracted for more than a few words. Rodrik seemed preoccupied, and Woolf noted the pretentious gravity in his bearing. No doubt he thought it appropriate to the probable heir to Daro Galinin.

Woolf passed down a long corridor filled with House guards into an anteroom where his sleevesheath gun was duly noted by a detector, and after an examination with a montector and a personal search, which he insisted on, he was allowed to pass into Galinin’s room.

Futile, all futile, the guards and detectors and searches. Mathis was safe now, made safe by the shadow that hovered over him almost perceptibly: the shadow of death.

Only Dr. Marton Stel, Woolf’s personal physician, kept vigil by Galinin’s bed. Above the head of the bed, a biomonitor screen registered in ticking calligraphy the wavering signals of his living. His face was almost hidden. An ugly turban of bandages bound his head, angling down over the left temple; a respirator mask covered the lower half of his face, the sigh of the pump audible in the pendant quiet.

Woolf looked down at Galinin’s hands, motionless against the sheet. Broad, strong hands, more the hands of a craftsman than a statesman. On the right was the topaz Crest Ring of Daro Galinin, on the left the golden seal of the Chairmanship.

“Marton?”

Dr. Stel understood that unstated query. He turned away, staring bleakly at the monitor.

“He’s a man of courage, my lord; the will to live is there. Otherwise, I doubt he’d be alive now. If he were twenty years younger . . .”

“But he’s not.” How often had Mathis, in rueful annoyance, called himself an old man. Woolf had never believed it until now.

“No, my lord, and I . . . can’t offer any hope for him, short of a miracle.”

Stel seemed silenced by his own pronouncement, then he roused himself, a bitter hatred taking shape in his features that was stunning in someone so typically reserved and conscientiously detached in his demeanor.

“The man who did this—I wish to the God there was some way to make him pay for it with more than his life. That’s not enough!”

Woolf nodded, wondering how Stel would feel if he knew the real identity of the man who had done this. At least, the man who
would
pay for it with his life. Stel had brought Alexand into the world.

But he would never know. No one outside the Directorate would know. That was part of the pact.

Woolf went to the door without looking back.

“ ’Com me if . . . if there’s any change.”

Alexand spent most of the hour between 08:00 and 09:00 at the window, watching morning come to Concordia in murky veils of rain. The city roused itself from the long night, not to full wakefulness, but, like an invalid, to pendant alertness, feeling out its aches and pains.

Ben’s voice sounded intermittently in his ear. Once it was Erica. Never Adrien. That was an act of mercy on her part, and he understood it, as she knew he would.

There was nothing new or unexpected in the reports, and finally he stopped listening to them except as a link with hope, an axis of assurance to keep his thoughts aligned.

The other axis was Rich.

Rich his brother, not his son.

Reach out to me, Rich, my linked-twin soul; reach out and give me your courage
.

Fear was an alien entity taking possession of him, cell by cell. Already it occupied his heart and commanded the quickening beat of his pulse; it had seized the fragile network of his nervous system, distorting the signals of his senses. He couldn’t depend on his muscles to function as he ordered them, and he knew if he lowered his defenses for an instant, it would take up tenancy in his mind.

At 08:45 Alexand turned from the window, tucked his shirt under his waistband, fastened the cuffs and collar. Then the uniform jacket. He worked with little success at restoring a strand of braid loosened in his encounter with the Directorate guards. He had to concentrate on it; it was one of those small tasks his left hand was unaccustomed to, made all the more difficult by its wayward trembling. The front fasteners presented no problem, but the cloak was more difficult. It slipped off his left shoulder twice before he got it snapped in place.

At 08:50, Ben warned him that the SSB ’car had landed on the roof.

That was the last message he heard from the miniceiver. If the SSB found it, they’d wonder where it came from, and suspicion would fall inevitably on Dr. Cambry; no one else had been close enough to him. Cambry had also left a monitor in the room, but Alexand couldn’t risk searching for it, and he assumed it had a destruct mechanism.

The ear ’ceiver couldn’t be so equipped, however. Alexand went into the bathroom, where he removed it under the guise of washing his face and smoothing his hair with his fingers. His comfortable accommodations did not include a comb or anything that could conceivably serve as a weapon.

The ’ceiver went into the syntegrator with the disposable towel. The bottle of pills Cambry had left waited by the soft plasex cup. The pills were exactly what they seemed; oral analgesics. He knew that from Ben, and he’d already taken one this morning. Now he studied the pills through the transparent walls of the bottle. There were at least ten left. He filled the cup with water, then swallowed them all at once. Within half an hour, he would be very nearly unconscious, but that didn’t concern him. Within a few minutes, he could be unconscious in another sense. The TAB would be in effect.

He knew what he had to look forward to, and knew the pills were only capable of blunting pain, and would be effective only until the SSB psychocontrollers recognized their symptoms and administered a counterstimulant. Still, it might mean a few minutes’ delay, a few minutes’ relief. In an SSB interrogation room, minutes become important.