The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (36 page)

The officer peered at the children. "What are your names?"

They hung back, the girl halfway behind Eldrin and the boy close at his side.

"I'm going to shine a light on your eyes," the woman told them. "It won't hurt." She scanned them with the stylus and recorded the results. Then she spoke to Eldrin. "You can go on through."

He inclined his head. "Thank you."

She gave him an odd look. He wasn't certain why. All he could tell from her mood was that most people didn't nod in such a formal manner. He didn't know what else to do; he had no referent for Skolian customs except the protocols of the Imperial Court that he and Dehya entertained at the palace.

Eldrin led the children through the gate and onto a case-crete plaza. Its brilliant white surface reflected the sunlight Many people were crossing it, and most looked as dazed as he felt. Beyond the plaza, meadows of stubbly grass spread out with the synthetic look of plants engineered for durability. IRAS workers were helping refugees set up tents and medical stations. People poured into the camp; by the time the deluge ended, the population here could be in the tens of thousands. He hoped it was that high. Over three million people lived in Selei City and its oudying areas. If the attack had continued as it began, few would survive who didn't go underground or offworld.

Eldrin wandered with the children, unsure what to do. Surrounded by so many people, he intensified his mental barriers, but their bewildered dismay still pressed against him. Some were in pain, injured in the attack or the rush to flee the city. He felt their distress like mental blows.

He stopped and gazed across the camp. Everywhere, people were sitting, toiling, staring. He caught sight of a familiar figure, Lane Kaywood, working in a makeshift infirmary. Patients surrounded the physician. A sudden thought came to Eldrin; he did have something to offer, a way he could be of some small use.

He smiled at the children. "Shall we go see the doctor?"

They looked up at him, silent. The boy nodded gravely.

The infirmary consisted of little more than a table strewn with equipment and tarps held up by poles. Patients lay on blankets. Kaywood was kneeling next to an elderly man in a bloodstained shirt.

Eldrin stopped a short distance away and spoke to the children. "You two sit here, so we don't disturb them."

The girl clutched his hand, her gray eyes wide.

"It's all right," Eldrin said. "I'm not going away." He put her hand in the boy's. 'This big fellow can look after you."

The boy pulled himself up straighter, and the girl eyed him with a skepticism that made Eldrin want to laugh, it reminded him so much of Soz. They sat on the tarp and regarded him with a trust that astonished Eldrin, given what they had seen him go through on the freighter.

As Eldrin turned toward Kaywood, the doctor's elderly patient groaned. Kaywood knelt and pressed an air syringe against his neck. Eldrin hesitated, reluctant to intrude. Listening to them, he gathered that several of the man's ribs had broken and he had sustained internal injuries when his hover car crashed during the evacuation.

Eldrin went over and knelt next to them. "I can help."

Kaywood glanced up with a start. Strain showed around his eyes, even more than on the ship. "Do you have training as a medic?" Hope surged in his voice.

"Not exactiy," Eldrin said. "I've biofeedback training."

"Ah." Kaywood seemed to sag again. "Yes, it can help you."

Eldrin spoke self-consciously. "I'm a psion. I feel and send emotions, sometimes even thoughts. It works with biofeedback, too. I can affect others as well as myself." As a Rhon heir, he had trained all his life to develop his abilities.

Kaywood blinked. "What can you do?"

"Ease pain. Aid healing."

The elderly man regarded him with bleared eyes. "What is your name, son?"

"Eldrin." He ached from the man's discomfort. "And yours, sir?"

"Rory Canterman Willham."

"My pleasure at your company, Gendesir Willham." Eldrin used the formal cadences of the imperial Court.

Willham gave him an approving look. "Nice to see our youth showing some manners."

"Do you need anything special to work?" Kaywood asked Eldrin.

"No. You can continue treating him." Eldrin indicated the children. The boy was watching him and the girl had laid down, curled next to her brother. "I won't be able to look after them, though.".

"I'll see they aren't left unattended." Kaywood's expression was carefully neutral. Eldrin had a sense the doctor didn't really believe a psion could help, but was willing to try anything at this point.

As Kaywood cut away his patient's bloodied shirt, Eldrin sat cross-legged on the other side of Willham, who studied him with faded blue eyes. Although Willham made no sound, Eldrin felt the pain splintering through the man's body. The medicine Kaywood had administered either hadn't worked or wasn't enough. Unfortunately, medical supplies were limited.

Eldrin bent his head and closed his eyes. He imagined blue mist spreading through his mind until his sense of place and time blurred. He linked his internal node with the picoweb produced by the nanomeds within his body, augmenting his natural abilities with his technological enhancements. The meds were depleted after laboring so hard during his withdrawal, but he had enough left to establish a weak link. Then he turned his concentration outward, similar to the way he

would send thoughts to another person. He shut out the creaks and clatter of camp and focused on Willham.

Eldrin sank into a universe of muscles and blood vessels. He knew only damaged tissues, ripped arteries and veins, the sharp edges of broken ribs. He went deeper, to where molecular catalysts aided repairs and carriers ferried nutrients or hauled away cellular debris. He submerged into the chemicals striving to heal, those molecules the body naturally carried and those Kaywood had injected. He followed threads of pain to Willham's brain and damped the neurological centers that registered them. He helped ragged membranes knit together. He supported energy cycles that provided strength. Wilhelm's full recovery would take more than Eldrin could give, but he could aid the natural healing processes.

After a while Eldrin tired and his concentration lagged. Surfacing from his trance, he opened his eyes to find the light had become dimmer, as if a thin layer of clouds covered the sky. Willham was asleep, his torso bandaged, his hair damp and smelling of soap. A medical monitor hummed by his head.

Disoriented, Eldrin rubbed his eyes. When had all that happened? Although no clouds covered the sky, it had darkened into a deeper shade of aqua. Only one sun was up, a small disk in the sky. The camp had become a city of tents. People talked in quiet voices or sat staring at nothing, as if they couldn't yet take in what had happened. The children were sleeping under a blanket. Packages of food lay next to them and a hologame that glimmered with starships.

"Welcome back," a voice said behind him.

Eldrin turned as Kaywood crouched next to him. The doctor set his hand on Willham's forehead. "No fever. I was worried his wounds were infected. But he seems all right."

"That's good." Eldrin tried to sharpen his fuzzy mind. "What happened to the other sun?" His voice was thick, and he slipped into his natural speech patterns, bom his Trillian burr and Iotic accent

Kaywood squinted at him. "Say again?"

Eldrin spoke more carefully. "The sun is gone."

"Ah. Yes. The yellow one set."

Bewildered, Eldrin said, "It couldn't have crossed the sky that fast" "It took about eight hours."

Eldrin gaped at him. He had been in a trance for eight hours? No wonder he was worn out "It hardly felt like any time at all."

"Maybe it's a lingering effect of the phorine."

"Perhaps." Sometimes after he had taken it he had spent hours staring at a work of holoart or swirls in a glass of wine. Phorine. Node-bliss. Never again would he know its ecstasy. He would crave it forever, but he was done with that lie. It had turned his days into heaven and left him in hell.

Kaywood was watching Eldrin with an odd look. "It's amazing how fast Willham is healing."

Eldrin wondered at his strange expression. Kaywood seemed more reticent with him than on the freighter. Eldrin had dropped his mental barriers to help Willham, and it left him more open to the doctor. Although Kaywood was trying to guard his mind, he had litde experience with psions. He also had natural empathy, as did many healers, and his mood came through clearly. Awe.

"What you did," Kaywood said. "It was incredible."

His reaction disconcerted Eldrin. "It isn't much. I'm just glad I could help."

Kaywood started to speak, then stopped.

"Yes?" Eldrin asked.

'If you feel up to it—" He indicated the people sleeping on tarps in the mfirmary. "I've more patients."

Eldrin felt the haze of their minds. He wasn't close enough to distinguish any one person clearly, but he sensed their need. "I will do what I can." Self-conscious, he added, "I need a meal first And rest." He had lost everything he ate on the freighter.

"Yes, certainly," Kaywood said. "It must take a lot out of you to do such healing."

"I—it's not something I talk about." How it felt to be an empath, that vulnerable sense of living without a skin, had always been intensely personal. He wasn't comfortable discussing it even with Dehya, let alone someone he hardly knew.

Kaywood didn't push. Instead he ushered Eldrin to a spare corner of a tarp. The children were awake now, sitting side by side, watching him with uncertain gazes. When Eldrin beckoned, they scrambled to their feet and ran over. They hugged him, and he put his arms around their shoulders.

Kaywood smiled. "Your children are charming."

"They aren't actually mine," Eldrin said. "I shared my hammock with them on the freighter."

"I had wondered. They didn't seem to know you that well. But they stayed with you during the entire trip."

Eldrin couldn't fathom why they gravitated toward someone they had seen in the throes of agony. His withdrawal must have been terrifying. He looked down at them, one under each of his arms. "Why me?" he murmured.

They watched him with that inexplicable trust.

"From what people told me, you were kind to them," Kaywood said. "Even after you were ill." He smiled at the girl. "I sometimes think children have an innate ability to recognize goodness."

Eldrin spoke quiedy. "Thank you." It meant a great deal to him that someone he respected saw him in a positive light, all the more so because the doctor gave it genuinely, with no idea he was speaking to a Ruby Heir.

After Eldrin ate dinner, he tried to sleep, but his thoughts went around and around, keeping him awake. He had spent the last six years confused. At times he was happier than he would have thought possible; other times he couldn't cope with his life. He was lonely. He had gone from a big, close-knit family to living in an empty palace with a wife who was gone for days on end. His marriage to Dehya was wrong, forbidden, maybe illegal, but he would die before he gave her up. For all that they shouldn't have had a child, he loved Taquinil more than life. The Assembly and Imperial Court saw him as deficient and inferior, and he often feared they were right. The alcohol and the phorine had made it easier to forget why he loathed himself.

He was too young for Dehya, too inexperienced, too closely related, too slow, too unpolished, and too confused, but somehow, incredibly, she loved him anyway. And she had

given him Taquinil. Seeing these children look at him with the same trust as his son, he swore he would make himself better, that he would become a person his son could admire, even someone he could admire himself.

White light.

The Bard became aware of a diffuse glow. Squinting, he made out the blurred oudines of a circular chamber with metallic struts around its perimeter. He was ... in a chair. But this was the wrong place. How had he come to this Dyad Chamber? Techs were unfastening his exoskeleton, taking out lines that fed him, reading monitors, clustering around. He rubbed his eyes. He distinctly remembered sitting in the command chair in the War Room. Yet here he was in the Dyad Chair.

No. Not Dyad. Triad.

Eldrinson didn't claim to understand the ramifications of forming a three-way powerlink; he knew only that in becoming a Key, he had come home. Scenes from his experience with the Chair swirled in his mind: Soz, holding the web; Shannon, half in the blue; Dehya, brilliance and clarity; Kurj, immense power.

Roca.

Roca! The memory hit like a blow. He tried to lunge out of the Chair, though he was attached to lines and monitors.

"Your Majesty, please." A tech laid her palm on his arm. "If you pull out too fast, you can injure yourself."

"Where is my wife?" he demanded.

"I'm sorry. I don't know."

His pulse beat hard. "Who would know?"

"General Majda. We notified her that you were corning out." She clasped a ring around his upper arm and it flickered with lights. Then it beeped.

"Is Majda corning here?" he asked, scowling at the ring.

"Right away," the tech assured him.

Eldrinson forced himself to stay put while she examined him. He sifted through his memories: Soz, Shannon, Dehya, Kurj—they had combined their minds to help Roca. Where

had they gone? He looked around the chamber. "How did I get here?"

The woman glanced up from reading a monitor. "You came with a group of ISC officers."

"But I was in the War Room. I rode up its command chair with Belldaughter." He would never forget; she was the last surviving member of his son's squadron.

The woman took the ring off his arm. "Pharaoh Dyhianna once told me that sometimes the Chair creates virtual scenes that seem real." She hooked the ring onto her belt "Perhaps it did that for you."

He supposed it wasn't any less plausible than anything else that had happened today. "Do you know when Jazida Majda will be here?"

A throaty voice came from beyond the techs. "Now, Your Majesty."

Eldrinson looked up. Jazida stood a few paces away with Taquinil at her side. Four Abaj waited with them like obsidian statues.