The Devil and Deep Space (32 page)

Koscuisko was the enemy, had carried him here into the heart of the enemy’s territory, was carrying him farther still to Chelatring Side to see the Autocrat’s Proxy and to meet the great–great–granddaughter of Chuvishka Kospodar himself.

Koscuisko was the three–times–great–grandson of Chuvishka Kospodar, the doom of the Sarvaw, the man who had unleashed the Angel of Destruction against an unarmed and defenseless population, a defiler of women, a murderer of children —

Koscuisko was the enemy, but Koscuisko was his officer of assignment. And Koscuisko himself was not Lek’s enemy, but had been a good officer to him, the best man Lek had seen assigned as Ship’s Inquisitor in thirteen years of bond–involuntary service.

Koscuisko was coming, walking slowly down the track to the motor stables with his lady at one side and his son at the other, talking to the Bench specialist while the Malcontent Cousin Stanoczk brought up the rear. Andrej Koscuisko, hand in hand with Anton Andreievitch. The four–times–great–grandson of Chuvishka Kospodar, who broke away from his father when he saw Lek standing there waiting and came running over the graveled apron with his arms outspread to embrace him.

Don’t run, little lord, you’ll fall, and scrape your hands
.

Crouching down on his heels, Lek watched Anton Andreievitch come. He could not frown at the child, anxious though he was. This child was the enemy of his blood. This child’s ancestor had drowned children as beautiful and beloved as he was for the crime of being Sarvaw, born of a Sarvaw mother and a Sarvaw father — vermin by definition; nor had those children been any the less dear to their parents than was Anton to his Excellency.

Was it Anton’s fault that his blood was tainted?

Anton Andreievitch put his arms around Lek’s neck and kissed him. Lek held the child in his arms, and the voices in his blood murmured in confusion as Lek spoke.

“There, now, little lord, you do me great honor, but we’re only going to Chelatring Side after all. You’ve heard of Chelatring Side, I know you have, and you’re to come next time, you told me so yourself.”

In all of Anton Andreievitch’s life, he had never met his own grandparents — not his father’s parents. Things were changed now. The Koscuisko familial corporation would receive Anton Andreievitch as the inheriting son of its inheriting son; Koscuisko had seen to that.

Chelatring Side was not ready to receive its new master–to–be, not ready to receive its new princess. There would be rank conferred on Koscuisko’s Respected Lady before that happened; it was too awkward that the mother of the Koscuisko prince should be a mere gentlewoman. All very complicated, but the only thing that mattered right now was that Andrej Koscuisko was going to Chelatring Side and his child was bereft.

“Be well,” Anton Andreievitch said with careful precision, kissing Lek one last time before he stood away. “Have care for yourself, Lek, until such time. As . . . ”

It was a formula. Anton Andreievitch had to learn an entire catalog of new formulae, now that he was no longer merely an acknowledged son, but the inheriting son. Lek kept his face as carefully clear as possible, willing the words into Anton Andreievitch’s mind.
Until such time as we shall see each other. Until such time . . .

“ . . . um, until such time as we shall see each other once again, and all Saints keep you in the heart of the Holy Mother.”

The Holy Mother was an Aznir whore. But that was beside the point. Surely. “Thank you, my lord, and all Saints under Canopy prosper thy purpose till we meet again.”

He knew some formulae as well. He’d just never imagined that he might ever say such a thing with affection. Shifting his weight, Lek put one knee to the ground so that he could bend his neck in solemn and traditional salute; the grave bow that Anton returned to him in response almost broke Lek’s heart. Anton would learn. Someone would teach him. Anton gave him face as a respected family retainer, and he wasn’t; he was a mere Sarvaw, which was to say a brute animal.

“Load courier,” Chief Stildyne said, with a note of amusement and tolerance buried so deeply underneath the layers of rubble and broken glass in his ruined voice that it was almost imperceptible. Koscuisko had taken leave of his Respected Lady; she came forward to take custody of her son.

Lek loaded courier with the rest of his team. This time he was not flying; the courier had its own crew. Chelatring Side was deep in the mountains of the Chetalra range, named after the goddess who had been sovereign here before the Aznir had come and their Holy Mother with them. Dasidar the Great — from whom all of the oldest, noblest families of Aznir Dolgorukij claimed descent — had set his name on the mightiest peak among the Chetalra, Mount Dasidar himself. Navigation at altitude through such a mountain range was difficult enough for a practiced crew. Lek was just as glad he didn’t have to drive.

Koscuisko boarded next to last with the Bench specialist before him, as befit his senior rank; and laid his hand on Lek’s shoulder as he went forward to take his place at the great windows that lined the courier’s skin. “You are very kind to my son,” Koscuisko said. “He is very fond of you. His mother asks that I praise you particularly for your care, and I thank you for it also.”

It sounded a great deal more formal in Koscuisko’s Aznir dialect than it was meant, Lek was sure. The Dolgorukij dialects in general did take on a formal sort of tone when translated into Standard, and Koscuisko with his Security spoke Standard without fail, even here. Even at home.

Lek smiled and nodded in appreciation of the compliment, while the voices of his ancestors raged in his blood.
Can you be bought as cheaply as that, Lek, and this the man who is Kospodar’s child
.

Maybe there was something that his ancestors didn’t understand, Lek mused, watching out the windows as the courier traveled forward slowly down the graveled drive toward the launch field.

He was only Sarvaw in an Aznir context. Outside of the Dolgorukij Combine he was Dolgorukij, and a bond–involuntary. Koscuisko did not honor him by treating him, a Sarvaw, as though he were actually a human being. Koscuisko treated bond–involuntaries as though they were human beings, when what they were was instruments of torture for Koscuisko’s use. That was how Koscuisko had purchased him. Not with praise as Aznir to Sarvaw; but with respect as man to man, in context of the Fleet.

At the launch field the courier idled for several moments as the flight engines were engaged, the fuel adjusted, the change from ground to air travel modes completed.

Then it took a short run down the launch corridor and leaped into the sky on a sharp angle of ascent that was so unexpected and extreme that Lek grinned almost despite himself, as though he was on a carnival ride and headed straight for the cold hard ground.

It was not very long by airborne courier between the estate of the Matredonat in the grain belt of Azanry’s largest continent and the mountains where Koscuisko’s family had first established itself in the days of the warring states long, long ago. A few hours, and the courier had covered the grain-growing regions of the continent; another short period of time, and the landscape began to rise to meet them.

Steep slopes. Barren crags. Long lawns of green at impossible angles, and grazing animals navigating all but the most extreme slopes; old–fashioned buildings, low and gray and thick walled with black slate roofs pitched at an angle to shed the accumulation of snow during the winter. There were dire wolves still in these mountains, Lek knew. They could no longer be hunted except by the permission of the Autocrat and by a member of the ancient blood, because they were a last remnant of what had once been an enemy as savage as the Dolgorukij themselves.

The courier flew steady and straight, but the mountains did not level off. The mountains continued to rise beneath them.

The pilot switched the propulsion mode of the courier from thrust to float, so that they could continue the approach at a much reduced rate of speed. Lek was just as glad. The rock grew closer by the moment — great jagged peaks that looked hungry to him. They made him nervous. He didn’t want to knock into any mountainsides.

It was quiet in the courier.

Nobody was particularly enjoying this but Koscuisko. Lek could hear Koscuisko making conversation with Cousin Stanoczk and the Bench specialist, noting the points of interest, naming the landmarks. Arguing with Cousin Stanoczk whether the battle of Mingche had been fought at the ford at Vsalja or on the bridge of Girnos, because
the song said stone but the bridges over the river had been wooden till well after the event but they were stone by the time the song was written down and the poet had realized that calling them “wooden” would just confuse people but people knew that they had been wooden and people weren’t stupid but the song also said the banks with the high–water so it had to have been the ford, and you just stay out of this, Stildyne, whose side are you on, anyway?

Lek couldn’t imagine the Bench specialist being unnerved by the nearness of the mountains. But he was. He wasn’t accustomed to land-based flights. His training had all been for engagements in deep space. That was his job, to defend the
Ragnarok
, and he couldn’t have defended the
Ragnarok
here, because there hardly seemed to be enough room to maneuver for a single Wolnadi, let alone a battlewagon.

They were flying between mountains, now, following the course of a river back toward its birthplace. And the terrain was rising fast, or they were sinking fast, skimming over a ferocious and forbidding landscape of sharp black peaks whose wind–scoured flanks were like obsidian–edged knives; heading straight for the great shield–wall of the Chetalra Mountains, whose steep peaks pierced the clouds.

The black peaks rose up into the visiports of the transport, as if eager to examine its contents for a meal as the courier worked its way into the body of the goddess Chetalra. From what Lek could hear, Koscuisko was saying they had had reached the flanks of awesome Dasidar, towering above them and before them steep and frightening. The valleys were all filled and hidden with mist; there was no seeing how deep those valleys were. As they flew steadily onward toward the mountain, they ran through alternate stretches of ice and snow that shut their visibility down to nothing with brutal suddenness.

But the variant text says glassy slope. Glassy slope. Not grassy slope. So it was higher up than the bridge, there would have been grassy slopes, so it had to be the fort. Stildyne, name of all Saints, you haven’t been reading the revisionists, have you? Holy Mother. Just when you think you know a man.

They were going to run into the wall.

The mountain filled their vision on three sides, with an unfathomable chasm on the fourth; the walls of Dasidar’s fortress rose into the very heavens, and they were continuing to make straight for them, rising as they went. The side of the mountain was as smooth as stalloy here, polished over the ages by wind and snow and cold, and the sheer size of the rock — the closer one came to it — was terrifying, in its way.

Lek braced himself, biting his lip to stifle his cry of fear. They were going to crash. Why hadn’t the officer noticed? Because the officer knew where he was going. The courier made straight for the wall, closer and closer, and Lek slowly began to realize that they were not as near to the wall as he had thought. The scale of that great wall was almost unimaginable.

Rocks he had taken for boulders were great towering crags, bits of green that he had taken for moss or lichen were clumps of trees as large as small forests, and the courier just kept heading on steadily toward the wall. But continued to climb. The wall fell away beneath them, but it did not end. There was more and more and more of it; and then the courier topped one final rise, and Lek gasped in involuntary shock.

Chelatring Side.

The ancestral seat of the Koscuisko familial corporation, set into the side of the mountain like a babe against its father’s bosom, curved close into the embrace of Dasidar himself where he sat in majestic glory looking out over his conquered world, a stronghold huge and invincible, dwarfed by the rock around it for all its size.

Chelatring Side.

The walls went on forever, and the towers could not be counted. Its fortress walls were monumental, and its ranks of solar panels glittered forever–long in the bright sunlight. There was nothing beneath them now but clouds, and of the peaks that stood sufficient tall to stand in array with Dasidar the nearest was veserts upon veserts away, even by direct flight.

This was not a fortress, this was a city. This was a large city, and that such a piece of work should be the personal possession of anyone man or even group of men was almost obscene. No. It
was
obscene. There was no “almost” about it.

The courier cleared the first banked wall, and there were walls behind walls behind walls, each rising higher and higher into the sky with the weathered gray of the stone of the fortress almost the same shade as the mountainside itself. Wall upon wall, and tower upon tower, and Andrej Koscuisko sighed happily where he sat. “Home,” Koscuisko said. “What do you think, Specialist Ivers, do you like it?”

The Bench specialist was staring out the window, as transfixed as any of them. “I don’t know what to say, your Excellency. Description fails to capture the actual impact of the place.”

“I suppose when one grows up in such surroundings, it seems more homely. Also one was accustomed to approaching it in stages, when one was a boy, before the entire installation was sealed for supplemental air. And still my brother Iosev got the nosebleed. Every year. Finally they let him stay at Rogubarachno, but he was the only one left there of my brothers; he learned bad habits.”

Supplemental air? Well. Yes. Altitude. How high were they? Lek didn’t want to know. Was it his imagination that he could see the curvature of the planet itself, on the horizon?

The courier cleared the second set of walls and settled to a halt in a motor court. They were well to one side of the fortress itself, but there were fortified corridors, and transport waiting. Fortified? Lek wondered. Or were those obviously thick walls, the steeply pitched roofs, the half–buried foundations simply accommodations for the winter? There was no snow on the ground within the compound, but outside the walls it lay undisturbed. How much of it was there?