Plague of Memory (27 page)

I turned toward the grinning Jorenian.
"You
have a cure for the pathogen?"

"Indeed. I vowed to use it to put an end to the Hanar's suffering." PyrsVar strode up to the exhausted ruler and placed one of his hands on the old Hsktskt's arm, as if they were old friends. "Did I not?"

"I
cannot bear another moment of this madness. Not another moment. Do as you said." The Hanar closed his eyes and would have fallen if not for the war master. "End this before I end myself."

"As the Hanar commands," PyrsVar said softly.

A weapon fired. I watched in horror as the Hanar jerked, and then crumpled in a heap of tangled limbs and robes. ChoVa screamed in fury and rushed at the renegade Jorenian, but was knocked backward by a displacer shot to the side of her head and fell, unconscious and bleeding, to the floor.

I did not think, I ran. A gaping hole in the Hanar's abdomen told me his fate, but I checked for a pulse anyway and found none. I moved over to

•

PIAGUE OF MEMORY 25 7

ChoVa and tore off my jacket, using it to stanch the flow of blood from the deep gash creasing the side of her head.

"Healer."

I looked up. In my face was the pistol PyrsVar had used to kill the Hanar and shoot ChoVa.

"You see?" he said in a reasonable tone. "He no longer suffers from the plague. I told you, I always keep my vows."

FIFTEEN

PyrsVar left the Hanar where he had fallen, but dragged ChoVa over to a small adjoining room and shut her inside, using the pistol again to fuse the door-locking mechanism.

I used the opportunity to run to the doors and pound on them with my fists. "Help," I screamed, hammering as hard as I could. "Open the doors. The Hanar has been murdered. Open—"

"You are wasting your breath."

I did not look back or stop shouting.

"The throne room is completely soundproof," PyrsVar said as he dragged me back from the door. "You can scream until your throat swells shut, and they will still not hear you." He lifted me under one arm as if I were nothing more than a pack of supplies and strode toward the observation deck. "Now that I finally have you again, we will go."

I tried to look up at him. "You did all this for me?" You shot the Hanar only to get to
me?"

"I would have shot anyone else who came between us," he assured me as he shot out the protective screen covering the deck viewer and stepped through it. Outside a small scout ship hovered, and then swooped closer to extend a ramp. "You should not have drugged me, or run away from me."

"You abducted me and my family," I said, struggling with him as he put me down on my feet inside the scout's small passenger bay. "What did you expect me to do?"

"Keep your vow to me." His hand clamped around my neck, and when I felt the tips of his claws I went still. He used his other hand to retract the ramp and close the bay door, trapping me inside the scout with him. "You promised me that if I let the male and the young ones live, you would not attempt to escape. You lied to me."

"Yes, I did," I admitted. "But your grievance was with me, not the Hanar. You had no reason for murdering him."

"Perhaps you should not lie to me again." PyrsVar flung me into a small alloy cage made for some sort of animal and locked me inside. "For who knows who or how many I will kill to get to you the next time?"

He went up to the helm and spoke to the pilot, who was presently flying at high speed out of the city. Try as I might, I could not hear what they were saying. Through the viewer civilization rapidly disappeared, replaced by the featureless and endless sands of the desert. Dread settled inside me as I realized there was no one who knew I had been abducted. Back at the Palace, the Hanar was dead, and ChoVa lay unconscious in a locked room. It might be days before she was found. By then everyone might assume I had been killed.

No, Reever will know,
my common sense argued.

He knew my body lived the entire time I was on Akkabarr.

But with no witnesses, and no means with which to track me, how would Reever find me this time?

PyrsVar sat down at the copilot's console and proceeded to ignore me for the rest of the flight. He might have meant to unnerve me, but I was glad of it. I needed time to think, and to plan better. My daughter would not be here to slip me an infuser, nor my husband to fly me back to the city. If I was to escape, I would have to do it on my own.

Hours passed. Once the scout stopped, possibly to refuel, but it took off before I could see what was happening outside the ship. I thought I would end up in yet another outlaw encampment, but we soon passed over the last of the desert and moved into a maze of towering mountains and narrow, rocky valleys.

This was one of the unsettled regions of Vtaga, too cold and steep to appeal to the heat-loving Hsktskt. I sat down in the cage, exhausted and defeated, and watched the snowcapped peaks flash by as the scout flew between them. Back at the Palace I had managed to bandage ChoVa's head by tearing off the sleeve of my jacket, but until she regained consciousness and was subjected to head scans, there was no way to know if being shot had caused any more serious damage. Then, too, someone would have to find her, something I doubted would happen soon. Whoever entered the throne room would see the Hanar's body first.

What will they do without a ruler?
I closed my burning eyes.
Who will succeed him? Will it be
TssVar,
even though he is infected?
At least ChoVa had seen

PyrsVar shoot the Hanar. If she had not, they might have blamed it on me, and taken out some sort of retribution on Reever and the Adan. My hand crept up and touched the place on the side of my head where I had been shot twice at point-blank range by Daneeb.
Unless she has no memory of it.

I must have slept, for the next time I opened my eyes the muscles of my neck were stiff and the launch engines were reversing. We were landing again, somewhere, and from the change of scenery in the viewer it was someplace so high that there were cloud formations floating by and beneath the scout.

Through tired eyes I watched PyrsVar walk back to me. He opened the door of the cage, and then reached in to help me out. His claws had retracted, but his expression was, if anything, more uncompromising than it had been.

"Are you not going to ask me where we are?" he asked as he bound my wrists together in the same type of manacles he had used on the children at his desert camp. "Or are you thinking of how you will plead for my mercy this time?"

"On my homeworld, women are taught to be silent when they are being beaten or punished." I turned my face away from him, bracing myself to endure what would come. "Do as you will, War Master."

He jerked me around to face him. "You would like that? Is this what that Terran male, your master, has done to you?" He looked all over me. "You are not afraid of me or him. Why do you pretend to be so?"

"There are more important things than what happens to me." I nodded toward the pilot. "The people are dying. ChoVa and I were working on a cure for their sickness. Without one, their symptoms will overwhelm them, as they did the Hanar."

"The fear." His eyes narrowed. "I could smell it on him."

"Fear is an emotion that Hsktskt do not experience," I said. "They do not know how to cope with it. They are already burning the dead. Soon the madness will set in and send them into the streets, where they will fight each other like wounded animals."

"The strong will survive," he assured me, taking my arm and making me walk to the hull access panel. "Those who do will be worthy of my rule."

So he wanted to be the ruler. "You will survive, no doubt, because biologically you are not like them. But who will you rule, War Master, when the last of your outlaws has gone insane, and all of the cities on Vtaga are empty or burned to the ground? What will it be like for you, Hanar of a lifeless world?"

PyrsVar hesitated, staring down at me, and then flashed his pointed teeth. "That was better than the begging and pleading. You should have said this in the desert; then I might have let you go." He jerked me out of the scout and into frigid, snowy wind.

We had landed atop a high mountain, on a transport pad so small the scout barely fit on it. Above us, a round structure made of rough-quarried stone had been built into the side of the mountain and camouflaged to appear as nothing more than natu
ral outcroppings. A primitive-looking lift descended, so small as to barely accommodate the two of us, and raised us up to an aperture in the lower stone vault of the structure.

As the lift halted, I saw someone standing just beyond it. A Hsktskt male in his prime, from the shape of his body, but he had draped his head and shoulders with a curious headdress made of dimsilk. I recognized the alien material because Resa and I had made use of it to disguise our own bodies when we had posed as vral on the battlefields of Akkabarr.

PyrsVar hauled me out of the lift and shoved me down on my knees. I did not resist, but I showed no particular deference toward the disguised male.

"How long I have waited for this moment," the Hsktskt waiting for us rasped. "Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil, here on Vtaga, come to save the Hsktskt from themselves."

He called me by the name Cherijo used before she had mated with Reever, but why?

"I remember you being larger and noisier, but perhaps the years have taken their toll on you." Beneath the dimsilk, some sort of mechanism clicked and whirred. "Well, Doctor, have you found a cure for
this
plague?"

"Not yet." I had an eerie sense that I knew this male, but it might have been the voice. He spoke with the synthetic speech sounds of a drone.

"Such optimism, even under the duress of being a captive held at the mercy of a killer. Your bravado is useless here, although I do appreciate the effort." The shifting lines of the dimsilk concealed his head
movements, but his body turned slightly toward PyrsVar. "Does the Hanar yet live, or did you manage to neutralize the correct target this time?"

The renegade Jorenian bowed. "The Hanar is dead, as you commanded, sire."

My shock must have shown on my face, for the veiled Hsktskt made a low, chuffing, mechanical sound. "You are not mistaken in what you are thinking, Doctor. PyrsVar is my son."

I did not know what to say. How could this Hsktskt father a Jorenian? Given that one was a reptilian life-form and the other humanoid, crossbreeding seemed unlikely even if he had used a female Jorenian captive.

"Have you not guessed who I am? I am disappointed." To PyrsVar, he said, "Go into the desert and gather up your men. The city will fall into anarchy now that the Hanar is no more. We have only to wait a few more days."

"What of the sickness?" PyrsVar demanded. "What if my men grow sick?"

"I have told you that they will not." He made an abrupt gesture, and the renegade Jorenian slowly turned and went to the lift.

Part of me wanted to jump up and run after him. Of the two males, even as angry as PyrsVar was with me, he was definitely the less menacing.

"Come inside," the veiled Hsktskt said, gesturing as he might to a guest. "The air is warmer, and we have much to discuss."

The interior of the structure held a large, sophisticated laboratory, more massive than any I had yet

PLAGUE OF MEMORY 26 5

seen on Vtaga. Twice the size of the scout, the main lab area served as a wide hub, ringed by many door panels and open corridors that twisted out of sight. It did not seem right that it was empty, barren of anyone but me and the disguised Hsktskt. There should have been an army of technicians and workers making use of the place.

That the complex had been built into the mountain rather than on its surface also troubled me. On Akkabarr, the Toskald had made my people dig trenches deep in the ice to conceal and store massive armories of weapons, as well as the control crystals to command a thousand different armies.

What was this Hsktskt trying to hide?

"I see you are admiring my stronghold," my captor said as he led me toward a comfortable-looking area set with chairs and other furnishings. "It took some years for me to gather the funds and means to return to Vtaga and build it."

"What purpose does it serve?" I asked. "Do you provide sanctuary for the outlaws?" That might explain the absence of others.

"Please, sit down." He gestured toward the furnishings. "I hardly ever entertain, but I have both Terran and Jorenian teas. My son is naturally fond of the latter."

He had PyrsVar abduct me, and yet he treated me as an honored guest—and competently ignored my questions. The latter frightened me more than if he had tossed me into a detainment cell or had me seized by interrogation drones and tortured.

"I thank you." Cautiously I sat down in one of the chairs closest to a door panel and looked about for something I could use as a weapon to defend myself. I saw nothing. "Why have you brought me here? Am I your hostage?"

"I have no need of a hostage, Doctor." He moved to a food unit and prepared a server. "But if it pleases you to think of yourself as such, you may do so. I doubt anyone will be coming to save you. This region is too cold for my kind to attempt it, and your kind has no idea where you are, do they?"

"No." I might have lied, but he had to know how effective PyrsVar had been in abducting me. "No one does." I paused. "Yet."

He brought the server of steaming liquid to me, but I only warmed my hands with it. I was not ingesting anything until I knew why this male had gone to such lengths to bring me here.

"I admit I am surprised that you have not guessed who I am." The Hsktskt began slowly removing the dimsilk covering his head. "We spent so much quality time together on Catopsa. I think of all the slaves there, you proved to be my finest test subject. We might have discovered great things together, you and I."

I suddenly knew who he was, for I had read about him in Cherijo's journals. "You are SrrokVar, the Hsktskt scientist who tortured Ch—me?"