Rift in the Races (74 page)

He tapped the com to life. “Singh,” he barked into it. “How long until Pewter’s boyfriend gets out?”

“Another six days, Captain. Why do you ask?”

“Because I need his help. Get him out now.”

Chapter 56

I
lbei ducked behind a corner and peered back around to watch the door of Gevender’s Thrift Emporium through which the elf had gone. He wasn’t sure if the elf had seen him, but he expected he probably had—reputation had it that the assassin didn’t miss much. Ilbei was willing to take his chances out of curiosity. Why would the royal assassin be patronizing a shop like that? Surely not to buy anything. The royal assassin had access to all the wealth in the land. There was nothing he couldn’t have, and certainly nothing he needed secondhand. Nothing. Which meant the only thing that could possibly be of value to him in that shop was information. That struck Ilbei as more than curious, and he couldn’t help wanting to wait and see why the Queen’s killer was sniffing around the same tree he was. His gut told him they had to be onto the same scent.

That could be either good or bad.

One thing was sure: he didn’t want to get caught spying on the elf. That wouldn’t go well. He might have been able to take a pair of trolls easily enough—though that was many years ago—but he had no illusions that he would fare well in an altercation with that … thing.

The more he thought about it, the more nervous he got. He pulled back around the corner and considered leaving. He could always return to the shop later and ask what the elf had inquired about. Except the woman wouldn’t tell him anything. He knew it the moment he had the thought. That was fear talking. Fear of the elf. Which meant there was no way he was leaving now. He was too stubborn. Worse than Jasper ever was. Besides, death at his age counted as a mixed blessing at the very least. He swung back around and resumed watching the door.

The black-clad assassin emerged several minutes later and looked straight at Ilbei as he came out. Ilbei ducked back, but he already knew it was too late. He ventured another glimpse, knowing that the elf would have already vanished by then, either on his way elsewhere or on his way to stab Ilbei in the back. So he was actually more startled to see that the sinewy killer was walking calmly toward him up the wooden sidewalk as if he were some ordinary citizen.

“Ilbei Spadebreaker,” the elf said. “Why do you seek the yellow stone?”

“Nice ta meet you too, master assass—” he cut that off, thinking it might be rude to call him that. “Nice to meet ya, sir.”

“The yellow stone?”

There was nothing in the expressionless nature of the elf’s face that hinted of humor, either presently or at any other time in history. There were no wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, no lines around those almond-shaped eyes to suggest he had ever laughed or even knew what laughter was. Which was unfortunate for the old miner because Ilbei typically handled nervousness with humor. It was a great weapon for disarmament, but he knew this particular opponent had no such vulnerability.

“It’s fer a friend,” he said.

“What friend?”

Ilbei fumbled for a lie but couldn’t think of one. “By Hestra, ya sure set a feller on edge.”

“What friend?”

Ilbei’s mind raced. What was he supposed to say to this walking pestilence that wouldn’t get him killed or at the least reveal what he knew and yet didn’t want to share.

“A girl. Someone I used ta work with.”

“Ensign Pewter.”

Tidalwrath’s fits
, Ilbei thought.
No wonder they signed a treaty to keep our races apart
. He kept his head, however. “Yes, Ensign Pewter. How did ya know?”

“Why are you looking for her?”

Ilbei fumbled for his gambler’s poise. “Why are
you
lookin’ fer her?”

The elf’s forest-green eyes narrowed and the flush of his skin showed slightly green as well. Ilbei had heard the elves were green, but he’d never actually seen one before, at least not other than this one, and that only at a distance. Shadesbreath’s skin resumed its paler, human-like hues.

“If you have information about the Earth woman, Her Majesty will have it now.” The elf said it without the least sign of emotion, no reverence for the Queen, no underlying threat for Ilbei. That was actually creepier than if he’d put some intentional menace in it. At least then he would have been trying to intimidate Ilbei. That would suggest the elf had some degree of respect for him as a threat.

He imagined the elf’s fingers twitching toward one of the many daggers that bristled from nearly everywhere on him. He hated feeling like he felt just then. He wasn’t used to it at all.

“Well, harpy spit,” he said. He wasn’t going to win this hand, and he knew it. He didn’t have to see them to know the elf had better cards. However, unlike the rest of the Queen’s people, the fat aristocracy and the greedy bureaucrats, this was the one individual in Her Majesty’s employ with which, if he had to give out what he knew, it would probably be for the best to share. This conclusion came more easily with the acceptance of the fact that he didn’t want to have the information carved out of him. “The orcs were a lie,” he said, committed to it now. “A ruse set up ta put us off the scent. There was no orcs. I don’t know whose bones ya found—maybe they was Tytamon’s, maybe they wasn’t—but I can tell ya sure, that weren’t the doin’s a’ no damned orcs.” He reached into his pouch and produced the bullet he’d found in the mud. “I found this where they found them bones. I could smell it, even in the mud. If’n I could, they could. No orc leaves somethin’ like this behind. They’d hang it from an ear if’n nothing else.”

The elf took it and turned it over in his fingertips. “It is a projectile used in Earth weapons.”

Ilbei nodded.

“We found a weapon on a merchant in Crown,” said Shadesbreath.

“Dragon’s teeth! Did ya now?” Ilbei had not been expecting reciprocal candor, and the revelation caught him off guard. “An Earth weapon like what goes with this?” He pointed at the bullet the assassin held.

The elf’s nod was barely perceptible. “I traced it through several hands in Crown back to here.”

“So now what?”

“I believe they’ve taken Miss Pewter to Murdoc Bay.”

Ilbei grimaced. He didn’t have to be told why.

“Who are you working for, Spadebreaker?”

“Bein’ truthful, sir, I’m working fer myself.” Ilbei saw no point now in trying to cover anything up. “I mean, Lieutenant Roberto, ya know the burly feller from Orli’s ship, he asked I check in on her. I followed up at Calico Castle, and after, well, when they hadn’t seen her at
Citadel
neither, I went back. That’s when I heard she’d gone missin’ with the orcs. So, I took it on myself ta go and fetch her personally if’n that’s what it takes.”

The elf studied him again, his contemplative gaze hovering for a moment on the preponderance of Ilbei’s gut. But he also seemed to take in with that look the wide shoulders, strong arms and powerful hands. His scrutiny lingered an extra heartbeat on Ilbei’s pickaxe. He reached a hand up and turned Ilbei with a grip on his shoulder that was firm but not quite painful, just moving him enough so that the runes on the weapon might be more easily viewed.

“Come with me,” he said a moment after that.

Chapter 57

O
rli slept now. Sleep was all she had. Anger wore off after the first few weeks of futile protestations, pleas and threats. After that went hope of escape, and after that went hope in general. Now she had only sleep remaining in her survival kit. She’d taken to talking to the creatures in the cages around her, but none responded. She was the only thinking one. The only dreaming one. So she slept and dreamt.

The great blackness that swelled in her dreams became a constant companion in the loneliness and the dark. A great looming sadness, a spherical solitude that seemed to cry out every night in desperation, sorrow and rage.

She dreamt of it every night. It always came with the awareness of some nearby smell, some odor or stench, even remembered ones as she drifted in and out of sleep. She began to recognize the pattern of it as days went by. The connection with her sense of smell. Always some scent would occur to her, begin to become more pronounced, and then, slowly, the dream came, the big black thing with the luminous pink corona hanging, bloated, in a starless sky. She began to realize it was happening with that dim consciousness that begins to accrue in dreams that repeat with power and relevance. She began to wait for the smells, anticipate them as one expects a visitor, even tried to conjure them on purpose, though this met with no discernible success.

She lay on her dirty mattress one night—the night of the frightening and loud live birth of a large avian creature, rather like an emu but with two heads and very long teeth—and tried to sleep. The air was humid and heavy with the stench of fluids and afterbirth that came with the event, a cloying essence that might have repulsed her were it not for her experience with the sick and dying on her ship during the Hostile disease outbreak. She breathed it in as slumber took her, steeped in it as she tossed and turned, optimistic that it might bring the dark companion of her dreams. Finally, she drifted off.

At first she dreamt of the birth itself, the tiny creature tumbling out into the straw as the mother screeched from both her heads, the flat yellow bills wide, fangs trailing saliva that dripped like silver ropes from the sound of her agony. Then came the nudging first contact as she prodded the newborn, encouraging it as it wrestled with its own spindly legs and tried to get them to work as some primal instinct told that it could.

But then Thadius and his men came in to snatch the newborn away. One man held a bag while another pinned the mother to the bars with a long glowing pole. Thadius grabbed the youngling and stuffed it into a sack. Orli could see greed glinting in his eyes like silver coins, but as she watched through the dream space, a darkness spilled out from the pupils of his eyes, sweeping over him and filling the space of Orli’s dream like seeping hate. Soon after, the dream had shifted and the great round darkness had returned. It felt to her, even in its hate and sorrow, like a lost relative, a familiar if unpleasant friend.

She was used to the emotions now. She shared its misery. The two of them communed in the agony of loss and loneliness, the fullest fathoming of betrayal. They shared a bond that began with scents and smells in the moment, and Orli’s memories filled the space between them with fragrances from her fondest past. Food, often, and even people with some frequency. Especially Altin. The scent of his hair. The skin of his neck and face. His clothes. But most often she dreamt of flowers. She knew them best, had loved them longest, and most of all, because the darkness liked them very well. So they shared them. There were not so many emotions to be had with them. At least no awful ones. So they exchanged them like stories between old friends. The scents of lilacs, roses and magnolia. Cherry blossoms, almond blossoms, and sometimes plainer trees: pines and redwoods and eucalyptus, flowerless but all whirling through Orli’s memories. The darkness traded back the most exquisite olfactory flavors of its own. Impossible scents of things too beautiful to construct images for. Scents that had no origin, no shape or form to bind them. Scents that simply were.

The images came later.

And it was through these days and nights of dreaming, through the darkness and physical misery, that Orli began to understand.

Slowly. Scent by scent. Image by image, un-visual in the strange way that they were, concepts with earthly analogies, perhaps … slowly, Orli realized that it was trying to speak to her. The darkness. The dark thing.

It knew her.
I know you
, it seemed to say.
I know that you are there. You are. I am. I am aware of you.

Orli was aware too. She spoke it back. Not in words. Not even in thoughts. Or perhaps the thoughts of deepest prayer, where the heart is the voice that speaks and the words of the mind are barely written as if in twisting rings of fading smoke sent heavenward. That is how she spoke to it. To her. To Blue Fire.

She knew it was Blue Fire. Blue Fire was the sense of it. A sense of the self for which it was aware. Blue Fire. The fire that was not hers, but belonged to someone else. Something else. Him. The thing of sadness. And loss. Blue Fire was love of the Blue Fire beneath the blue sun, the Blue Fire that was gone. Death. And sorrow. He was gone, his light shining without him. And so she took his name. She was Blue Fire now. Blue Fire alone beneath a golden sun.

The agony of the memory was so powerful that Orli woke with the violence of her own sobbing. Even awake she felt the crush of a grief so vast that, for a time at least, she forgot all about her own. Blue Fire had lost the greatest love Orli could possibly conceive. A love as vast as a hundred million years. Somehow, without knowing how, Orli understood it all to be true. She understood what it was all about. Blue Fire’s mate was dead. Her lonely soul soaked in the torment of uncountable millenniums, a span of time so vast it might as well have been eternity.

Orli could hardly bear the shame of having labeled such colossal mourning
Hostile
. She bore the shame of an entire race for that, and the sense of it was so powerful that now she feared going back to sleep. Feared that she, that Blue Fire, would know how Orli’s people, how humans, held such sublime and unspeakable grief in nothing but contempt. Her suffering was nothing; they wished to kill her, to snuff out a beauty of such magnitude that its sorrow filled a galaxy.