The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (26 page)

When the web failed, it would drag her into oblivion.

14

Corridor of Ages

The Bard sat in the living room, his arms folded on the table in front of him, his head lying on his arms, his eyes closed. Taquinil had finally fallen asleep, and Eldrinson had put him to bed. He didn't know how much more his grandson could endure. Or himself.

He felt disoriented and too weary to move. He wasn't even sure how long he had been at the table. He was almost certain he had suffered a convulsion, but he remembered nothing, only a sense of blankness. It couldn't have been dramatic; he was still seated where he had been before. He hadn't fallen to the floor and no medics had come thundering through the door. But he felt as if he had been wrung through a press.

He had come to the Orbiter for treatment of his epilepsy. Why, then, had nothing improved? His doctors claimed they had made progress, but he was falling apart. Nightmares about Roca agonized him. He had never felt this sense of absence from her even when she was across the Imperialate. He dreamed he was running through tunnels calling her name, but she never appeared. Then once he saw her ahead, running, her nightgown torn and ragged. She turned a corner, and when he reached the junction, he found no sign of her. He woke up gasping, his sleep shirt drenched with sweat.

For Althor, he dreamed emptiness. Brain dead. His son breathed, took nourishment, slept, even woke, but without a conscious mind. Althor truly had become a machine. In other dreams, he saw Eldrin—not as an adult, but as a little boy reaching out to his father, his face lit with a smile. Swing me, Hoshpa! When the Bard reached for him, the boy ran away, his footsteps echoing in the halls of Windward, not the castie he loved, but an empty Windward with stone walls the color of snow, blue and icy.

A drop of water fell on the Bard's arm. Bewildered, he lifted his head. Another drop rolled down his cheek and hit the table. Its surface absorbed the moisture, but no magic technology would heal his grief or his fear. He rubbed his cheek with his palm, then slumped back in his chair. He couldn't seem to help anyone he loved. What could an archaic farmer do in this morass of interstellar hostilities? He knew they were at war. ISC could coddle him all they wanted, but they couldn't hide from his mind. He knew.

He also knew one other inescapable fact. The Kyle meshes were dying. It would leave ISC blind and crippled, as Raziquon had done to him—but on an interstellar scale. ISC had surely trained for this worst-case scenario. But unlike ESComm, they didn't have centuries of experience operating without the Kyle meshes. ESComm knew that weakness. When it came to managing with the more limited spacetime webs, they had the edge.

They were' sinking in a quagmire. The Dyad had to save the web. It was their reason for existence. Kurj couldn't do it, so it had to be Dehya. But something had happened to her. Although no one would tell him, he picked up flashes even from the guarded minds of his Jagernauts. This much he had guessed; if Dehya didn't reach a Chair soon, ISC would put someone else into the Dyad. Roca was their only realistic choice, but her presence in the Dyad would kill one of the three people in the link. Given Kurj's condition, he would probably die, but it could be Dehya. To kill her own son or sister would destroy Roca—and if anything happened to her, the Bard thought he would surely go mad.

Eldrin screamed and his body arched up from the deck. He was spinning apart, exploding. No longer could he feel the press of humanity in the cargo hold. People had surrounded him before, when they laid him here, but they had withdrawn. Maybe they had died; he no longer knew anything except this unbearable agony. He couldn't control the pain in his head, couldn't stop the endless, bottomless need that consumed him. Wraiths, fire-bright and fire-harsh, flamed within him, and burned his mind into ashes.

Someone lifted his head and held a glass to his lips. He clutched it and spilled liquid over his shirt even as he gulped down the water. The cup shattered in his grip.

"Please." His voice was raw from screaming. He grabbed the man in front of him. "Please. My medicine."

"You have to tell us how to get it." The man sounded desperate. He was kneeling next to Eldrin, leaning over him, his face haggard, his hands on Eldrin's shoulders. "I've been a doctor for twenty years and I've never heard of phorine."

"It's for telops." He gave up talking. The craving was too great. His thoughts would fly into shreds and tear apart his mind. Ah gods, he couldn't bear this—

Eldrin screamed again, his body rigid. Then he convulsed on the deck. When the seizure eased, he heard someone sobbing, pleading for them to stop the agony, and he barely recognized it as his own voice.

"Gods, what do I do?" the man said. "I've never treated psions." He had an air syringe in his hand and he was frantically rotating its cuff. "Could phorine have another name?"

Eldrin rolled onto his side and curled into a fetal ball. "I don't... it's bliss ... node-bliss."

"Ah, hell," the doctor whispered. "Bloody hell."

Eldrin clawed at him. "Help me."

The man took Eldrin's arm. "How strong of a psion are you?"

Eldrin tried to answer, but he couldn't form words. Anonymity was his only protection, but gods knew, if the truth would bring more bliss, and if he could speak, he would tell them.

Another man said, "Do you know what he meant?"

"I've heard the slang," the doctor said. "The effect of the drug depends on the strength of the empath. The greater his Kyle rating, the stronger the addiction."

Eldrin rolled onto his back, chilled, though moments ago a fever had blazed through him. He kept rolling, onto his other side, clutching at the deck. He couldn't stop shaking. How long had he been on this ship? A day? Longer? He didn't know. It was only an endless, fractured misery.

"Can't you give him something!" someone asked.

"I don't know the chemical composition of the drug or its other effects." The doctor sounded agonized. "If I give him the wrong medicine, it could kill him."

Eldrin doubted it mattered. He couldn't survive this agony.

Blue Dales. Blue mists. Blue snow. Blue Archers. In a blurry atmosphere saturated with glitter, the universe turned blue. Shannon's mind blended with mist and snow. Blue.

Kyle Blue.

The Eloria touched the blue with their trance and lent him their strength while he searched for his family. The Kyle meshes were vanishing. Disintegrating. His family would disintegrate with them—followed by the Imperialate. ISC didn't know how to deal with it, not like this. They would fail his family because they couldn't walk the blue.

He searched for the answer, deep in trance.

Blue chaos encompassed Soz: threads, strings, cables, meshes, nodes—all crumbling. Tattered remains of the web billowed as if they were buffeted by the gales of an oncoming storm. She clenched the lines and braced herself against the destruction.

Memory fragments whipped around her: years ago, just after her sixth birthday, she had spent hours building a tower of bagger bubbles outside. Then die wind had knocked it over. She had wept terribly, hunched over her destroyed masterpiece. Her sister had known. Nine-year-old Chaniece had come out and held Soz in her arms, rocking her back and forth until her tears slowed and her loss didn't hurt so much.

Another memory: her brother Del, twin to Chaniece, had been sixteen when Soz was thirteen. He taunted her con-stantiy about what he called "her silly business," training with a sword—until she trounced him in a practice bout He had clenched his fists and stalked away. That night she had been wandering outside the castie when she had heard him composing one of his wild ballads. It was about his regret

that he couldn't understand her. She had never told him that she overheard, but after that she hadn't resented his challenges as much.

Another memory: Kelric, her youngest sibling, when he had been seven and she sixteen. Strapping Kelric, with his gold skin, hair, and eyes, and his sweet-natured laugh. He would be as big as Kurj, and probably as dangerous if he chose the military as everyone expected. A metallic warlord. But to her he would always be her little brother with his hair sticking up in unruly curls, hooting as she tickled him with a bubble-reed until they collapsed in the reeds, out of breath from laughing.

And Aniece: her little sister, always wanting to follow Soz around. It had exasperated Soz no end during the throes of her adolescence, but right now she would have given anything to be home with Aniece tagging after her.

Memories swirled in Kyle space, this universe of thought They brushed the mesh she held so desperately, and as the strands slipped, so did her memories, her thoughts, her essence. She was losing the web bit by excruciating bit, and with it herself. She had too litde strength. But if she loosened her grip, these lines that crisscrossed Kyle space would snap away and cease to exist.

The web would cease. So Soz hung on.

The web, and her life, continued to dissolve.

The hand on his shoulder startled the Bard, and he jumped to his feet before he was fully awake. His hip hit the table and he stumbled, his bad leg giving out under him. Both legs were biomech, but the right one responded less to his brain than the left. Flailing for the table, he started to fall.

A strong hand caught his arm, and held him firm. Flustered, he looked up, and up, at a dark Abaj towering over him. Eldrinson only came to his shoulder and had about half the Abaj's mass. An insignia on the man's chest indicated he was a captain. His black hair, sleek and straight, was pulled into a warrior's knot at his neck and fell halfway down his back in a thick queue.

Eldrinson swallowed and looked around. More dark blurs

stood in the room. When the captain released his arm, Eldrinson felt nervously behind himself on the table until he found his glasses. He fumbled them on and the scene came into focus. Abaj filled his living room, all just as large as this captain, with black hair, black eyes, black uniforms, black boots, and the glittering black bulk of Jumblers on their hips.

Gods. Eldrinson instinctively stepped back, then stumbled and grabbed the table to steady himself. He didn't know what to think about this plethora of giants. He felt like a wild animal caught by hunters, except they didn't regard him like predators. Instead, he sensed—concern. They were solicitous.

The Jagernauts all bowed to Eldrinson from the waist Then the captain spoke in accented but otherwise flawless Iotic. "Our honor at your presence, Your Majesty."

"What may I do for you?" Eldrinson asked in the careful Iotic he had learned years ago from Roca.

"Imperator Majda requests your presence in the War Room," the captain said. "And Prince Taquinil."

Eldrinson knew ISC well enough to interpret "request." It was an order. In the past he might have bridled at such a summons, but now he could think only that Jazida Majda might have news of his family.

He inclined his head. "I will get the boy."

As Eldrinson limped past the Abaj, they bowed again. It unsettled him to receive such deference from these technc-warriors who epitomized the power of his wife's people. He thought of getting his cane, but he didn't want to appear any more frail than he already looked. Self-conscious, he went down to Taquinil's room. Its door rippled open, a molecular airlock in the middle of a house. It seemed strange to have airlocks here, but he understood it was another method ISC used to guard his family. If the habitat suffered a major breach or anyone succeeded in releasing poisons or other dangers into die house, the airlocks could protect them. Then he remembered Vitarex Raziquon. For all its astonishments, the technology of his wife's people had hmitations.

Taquinil's bedroom was dim. The boy had nesded under a blue comforter and blue sheets, with stuffed animals tumbled

all around him. He was sleeping with his arms around a fluffy white one with large eyes and a long tail.

Eldrinson touched his cheek. 'Taqui?"

His grandson burrowed deeper under the comforter.

Eldrinson nudged his shoulder. "You must wake up."

Taquinil opened his eyes, groggy, his gold irises shimmering even in the dim light. "Grandhoshpa?"

Eldrinson's heart melted. "My greetings, Sleepy-ears."

Taquinil's drowsy contentment washed over him. Appar-endy his mental shield was having an effect; the boy seemed free of the anguish that had tormented him these last few days. Hope stirred in Eldrinson. Perhaps his grandson felt better because the people they loved were better.

Taquinil sat up, yawning, and tugged at his shirt, which was patterned with smiling animals. "It doesn't feel like morning," he said, his voice softened by sleep.

"It isn't." They were in the middle of the fifteen-hour night on the Orbiter. "We have to go see General Majda."

Taquinil rubbed his eyes. "Why?"

"I'm not sure," Eldrinson said. "Many Jagernauts came for us."

"Oh." The boy seemed confused. Eldrinson sympathized. He felt the same way.

After Taquinil climbed out of bed, Eldrinson pulled out some clothes for him and helped his sleepy grandson dress. Then the boy padded toward the door, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. They went to the living room together. The Jagernauts were still there, eight of them filling the place with looming black.

Taquinil stopped and stared at the formidable company. Then he backed up against his grandfather. Eldrinson put his arm around the boy's shoulders. "It's all right," he murmured. "They're friends." He took Taquinil's small hand in his large one.

The Abaj bowed to Taquinil, eight giants making obeisance to a slender and not very tall seven-year-old boy. Taquinil tried to nod the way his parents would have done, but he looked more afraid than royal.

"Well." Eldrinson strove to project confidence. "Shall we go?"

The captain moved aside for them. Taquinil's grip tightened on Eldrinson's hand and he stayed close to his grandfather. As they walked forward, the Jagernauts closed around them, taking up formation, two in front, two in back, and two on either side.

Their bodyguards took them away from the house.