Ruler of Naught (67 page)

“Can you tell me what happened?”

The voice was so soft he almost thought he'd dreamed that,
too. But when he dropped his hands he saw Eloatri standing where the little
musician had been. The slight emphasis on the verb meant, he sensed, not
are
you able
, but
can you bear to?

“It didn't happened like that at all,” he said, then stopped
as his voice came out shaking like Barin's had when he couldn't control his
adolescent emotions.

The old woman’s brows lifted in question. He didn’t know if
she’d seen the vision or not. Maybe it didn’t matter.

He sucked in a deep breath. “I was off-planet, attending a
medical conference. The officials had assured us that the troubles were
temporary. Then... the Vox Populi triggered a small nuclear device within the
Archonic Enclave. And—” He pressed his fingers hard against his eyes again,
sending stars shooting across his vision. “—Tenaya and the children were
visiting the museum in the Enclave. I should have been there,” he groaned.

“Why?” Eloatri asked. “They would be just as dead if you had
died with them.” She made a slight gesture, difficult to interpret. “Or do you
mean, you should have died in their place?”

“Either. No,” Montrose said. “The last.”

“So you would bequeath your grief to your wife.” Eloatri
smiled whimsically. “You would wish me to be trying to comfort her right now?”

“Your predecessor did once,” Montrose said. “Talked to her,
anyway.”

“Ah,” Eloatri said, the wrinkles in her face shifting as she
smiled. “She made her hejir?”

“Two months before,” Montrose said. The words came
unwillingly, but the talk was better than the lash of grief.

“She made her hejir alone, then?” Eloatri asked. Montrose
studied her, and found no accusation there. Nothing but an interest so open it
seemed childlike.

“She wanted me to come... ” Montrose said. He shrugged. “I
might have, but there were the children, and once she was back, I had my
professional commitments to meet.”

As he spoke, Tenaya's face replaced the old face before him.
He recognized the same expression, the smiling patience. He forced words past
his teeth, “She had changed. She was different.”

Eloatri accepted that with an open-handed gesture.

“But don't think I was running away, or we'd quarreled—nothing
like that,” he added in a rush. “I had to go to that conference. I'd promised a
year before. And she...” Tears burned.

We will be together in spirit
, that was what she'd
said. He couldn't speak that absurdity out loud, not with her dead, and gone.

But as he looked around at the clear light slanting in
through the Cathedral windows, for a heartbeat he felt her presence beside him,
as if she really was with him in spirit.

He frowned. It was too easy. “Do you use some kind of tianqi
here?” he asked. “Dispersing mind-altering drugs?”

Eloatri lifted her hands, revealing the burn on her palm. “Desrien
is what it is,” she said. “But we do not manipulate those who come to seek.”

“I didn't come, I was forced, and I don't 'seek',” Montrose retorted.

“We all seek,” Eloatri corrected, utterly without rancor. “What
we find... ” She lifted a shoulder, and then leaned out to look below. “As for
Desrien, sometimes even here some achieve the tangible.” She gestured and again
he saw her palm. “I believe you will find your patient improves with time.”

Montrose looked down at where Ivard was moving away from the
altar. From a distance he did not seem different, but Montrose was surprised at
the surge of hope he felt. He turned to Eloatri. “So you're telling me that
Tenaya's faith was real?” He shook his head. “That all her talk of spirits and
soul-paths and all that—” He ended, waving a hand.

Eloatri said, “Your regret. That is real.”

“True.” Montrose laughed, a harsh sound. “It's been riding
me like a devil since—”

He looked up, self-mockery providing his access to humor at
last. Humor, so steadying, so diverting. He could make a joke and end this
right here, but the woman's gaze was still steady, and he knew he would
probably never face such undemanding compassion again.

“In the vision,” he said, “I was told to obey the proctors, and
I didn't do it. I didn't believe them, I
had
to look back at the other
module, and make sure my wife was on it. And it blew up.”

He struck his hand lightly on the carved wood below the
magnificent keyboard. “The officials assured me Timberwell was safe to leave. I
never really believed them. I didn't believe Tenaya, either. Yet I blamed... ”

“Your wife for coming here, and being away for two months? Or
for her beliefs, which separated you more surely than the distance had?” she
asked gently.

“I didn't blame her for that—”

“And so you blame yourself for believing the officials, and
for believing her when she promised you that she and your children would be
safe whatever happened.” She smiled. “Where would you have been if you had not
left your planet? At the museum with them?”

He started to say yes, but then he shook his head. “Probably
in another part of the city.”

“Ah.”

“‘We are all carried forward in the hands of Telos, to our
ultimate fulfillment. Never doubt that, whatever happens.’ That is what she
said to me,” Montrose said. “I wish—beyond any amount of money—that I could
believe that.”

Eloatri touched his shoulder lightly. “You want to be
assured what is real, and what is dream,” she said. “I think you know it
already. As for the demon of regret... ” She smiled. “May I offer you one of
our platitudes that also happens to hold true?”

“You can try me. I can’t promise to believe it, either.” His
fingers ran lightly over the keys of the organ, but as yet there was no sound.

“Here there is neither past nor future, only act... ”

Which is what she said
. He felt Tenaya's closeness
again.
If I feel her close, that is as real as the grief and regret
, he
thought.
That's what the woman is trying to tell me
.
I can't claim
the one is real and the other is not; either both are—or are not.

He looked around, breathing deeply. He could envision—so
clearly!—Tenaya doing exactly the same. Holding the image, this time he reveled
in it. Truth? Not truth? He didn't know, but right at this moment it didn't
matter.

The demon of regret might come back to ride his shoulders, but
it didn't now. And when it did, he could evoke this other reality. For the
first time in years, he felt a measure of peace.

“Play for her,” Eloatri said.

He brought his hands down on the keyboard, launching again
into KetzenLach's
Memoria Lucis
, but this time with understanding, and
around him the cathedral of New Glastonbury filled with glorious sound.

o0o

Osri stayed close by his father, looking about him with
increasing uneasiness. He watched the small woman talk first to Ivard, and
Osri’s gut twitched with bleak humor when he recognized the habitual reaction
of outrage at the inversion of precedence. Vi’ya, who stalked out. Then
Brandon. Then the Rifters.
Freedom of Desrien
, he thought scornfully. The
phrase meant no more than anything else here.

Osri was determined to follow the Rifter captain as soon as
the audience was over. The Marines had left a telltale in the
Telvarna’s
lock
that would report their return. “We’ll go as soon as she’s finished with us,”
he murmured behind his hand, conscious of how the stone overhead made sounds
carry.

His father did not reply, and Osri jerked around,
irrationally afraid. The gnostors gazed in the direction of the altar, his
profile tense. Ivard, face upraised, stumbled a step or two, then crumpled slowly
to the ground. “Telos,” he breathed. “What happened?”

“He was drinking, I believe,” Omilov replied in a curiously
absent tone. “I only saw him from the back.”

“Well, I would say that drinking or eating anything here
seems an invitation for drug-poisoning. How else could they inflict their
ill-famed nightmares on people?”

Omilov did not answer. Osri suspected that he hadn’t even
heard as he watched a pair of dark-robed figures approach Ivard. They seemed in
no hurry. Before they reached Ivard, the boy stirred. The Marine who hadn’t
followed the Aerenarch joined them.

Sebastian let out a sigh of relief as the two figures gently
brought Ivard to his feet and walking him slowly around the altar. Ivard’s head
lolled back, as though he could see the organ music that poured down from the
intricately groined ceiling far above.

Then Omilov blinked. “What’s that, son?”

“I said,” Osri raised his voice slightly, “we’d be wise not
to eat or drink anything here.”

“We poison people, of course,” an amused female voice came
from behind them.

Father and son turned, Osri flushing.

“We poison them so that they freeze into statues, which we
put out in the gardens. Then we send back in their places clones made from
carnivorous fungoids.” The small, grandmotherly woman in the many-buttoned robe
smiled, her eyes crinkling to slits of silent laughter. “It was a great story.
I saw it on a serial chip when I was a girl.”

The gnostor chuckled, and Osri felt the old rage again—just
as he had as a boy when his father had found Brandon’s and Galen’s meaningless
jokes so funny. “Why were we brought here?”

His voice sounded a little louder and ruder than he’d meant
it to, but the woman merely raised her shoulders. “I do not know. It is for you
to tell me.”

Osri gave a sigh of annoyance.

His father spoke quickly, deflecting attention. “I’m worried
about young Ivard. If we don’t get him to proper medical attention on Ares soon...
”

The woman smiled. “We are not ignorant of the healing arts,
here on Desrien. I do not think that this diversion in your path will have
harmed him any.”

Osri’s ironic reaction must have showed in his face, for the
woman looked up at him in inquiry.

“We started out for Ares weeks ago,” he said. “Every
nightmare since has been a diversion not of our choosing. This is just
another.”

The woman smiled, but she looked past him at his father, who
shook his head. “If something about this place does that boy any good, then I
will consider this diversion well worth the time it took.”

It was a diplomatic reply, in a peacemaking tone. The woman
nodded to them and passed on toward the stairway to the organ loft.

The gnostor sighed again, studying the nearest of the huge
wall murals. “Some of the Panarchy’s finest artists are represented here. We
shouldn’t miss this opportunity to examine their work.”

Osri assented, trying to get control of his anger. He
recognized this as another manifestation of the obligation towards the
Aerenarch that his father felt imposed on him by his Chival’s oath. He would
not leave until Brandon did. So even though Osri had little interest in artwork
of any kind, much less religious, he followed along with his father and
obediently looked at the paintings, mosaics, and statues along one wall.

And indeed, some of them began to absorb his attention. If
nothing else, one had to admire the way the painters could use a few splotches
of color to paint figures that seemed to live and breathe, to move in three
dimensions. He could appreciate with his aesthetic sense the way light and dark
were used to infuse the figures with power and majesty.

His father lingered, looking intently at a painting of a
dark forest, with a man in archaic costume confronted by some sort of beast. He
bent down, reading the inscription on a small plaque below the canvas, but Osri
couldn’t catch the words.

“What’s that, Father?” Osri asked.

His father shook his head again, as if something pained him,
but did not reply.

Osri walked on purposefully, determined to get something out
of this imposed diversion, but some of the art defeated him. He turned to make
an observation, to discover that his father had vanished.

Osri craned his neck in his effort to locate him. Then he
peered more intently into the alcoves along the wall. No one else was visible,
not even the Marine guards.

Unsettled, he began to retrace his steps until a flicker at
the periphery of his vision caused him to jerk around, wariness tightening his
shoulders. The twinkling of stars in a broad field make him blink with vertigo.
The painting he stood before looked real, like a window on space.

But he laughed at himself, forcing the image to remain a
painting, a panorama of a galaxy. With reality re-established, he bent to
examine it more closely. In the foreground, tiny against the swirl of stars,
the painter had placed a small asteroidal habitat, a bubbloid, like Granny
Chang’s. Lights glowed from viewports scattered over its craggy surface. Near
it hung a decrepit ship painted in garish colors.

Rifters again, he thought in disgust. Then he bent lower.

Below, a small brass plate gleamed at the bottom of the
picture’s frame. “The stone rejected by the builders has become the chief
cornerstone.”

He snorted, only to find he couldn’t pull his eyes away, and
the Dreamtime took him.

o0o

Osri discovered he was standing before a vast painting, a
panorama of a galaxy. Under his boots was stone, and around him the massive
cathedral of New Glastonbury.

He blinked dry, itchy eyes, then rubbed them, trying to
banish the terrible images crawling through his mind. Vertigo made him tremble
as he backed away.

The painting was only a painting again, but Osri could feel
it between his shoulder blades as he slowly made his way back towards where he
thought he’d left his father.

o0o

Roget turned as the two medics led Ivard away, and saw Jaim
approaching. He stopped a few paces from her, respecting her space, and so she
answered him mildly when he enquired after Ivard.