The Thrones of Kronos (23 page)

Despite everything, laughter fought its way to the surface
of Vi’ya’s thoughts.
As well he died,
she responded.
I confess nothing that has
occurred so far misgives me so much as the prospect of having had to go into
rapport with Norio to awaken this station.

Do you think we can do
it by ourselves?
Ivard thought, his disbelief a minor discord.

We have to,
Vi’ya
replied.
It’s the only way we can gain control.

She felt Ivard’s wordless skepticism as the Kelly trinity’s
musical thoughts wreathed her consciousness:
Anaris summons Vi’ya.
Following that was a vivid flicker, much too
rapid for her to follow, between the Kelly and the Eya’a.

It seemed scant seconds later that Morrighon himself
arrived, though by now Vi’ya knew that she could not trust her time sense when
involved in such rapports.

She looked up, shadows skittering at the edges of her
vision, and practiced breath control while Morrighon and Montrose held short
speech.

She heard the sounds, but the sense did not yet reach her.
Instead, the Eya’a flooded her mind, their high keening indicating that they
were in distress.

Apparently the keening was not just mental. She saw
Morrighon recoil, his squinty eyes widening in shock as the little beings
emerged from their chamber, their blue mouths open, their twiggy fingers
gesturing semiotics at an impossible speed.

Eya’a hear the Distant
Sleeper.
Strange that the Eya’a still thought of the Suneater as the
Distant Sleeper; it suggested a distance in degree, somehow, since they now
stood within the station.

Is there proximity,
Eya’a to the Distant Sleeper?
Vi’ya thought carefully, trying to project
calm emotions. Soothing song flowed from the Kelly, and the Eya’a halted their
keening.

The Eya’a are near,
and not near. Vi’ya, the One-in-Three, the Three, are in the hive of the
Distant Sleeper, but the Distant Sleeper slumbers in the Winter Sleep.

Soon we will call to
the Distant Sleeper,
Vi’ya said, and as their emotions spiked to an
excruciating intensification of anticipation, she felt the Kelly once again
send their complicated, calming harmonics.

Now the Eya’a must
celebrate the hive of the Distant Sleeper,
Vi’ya thought.
Sort and celebrate one-patterns in the
Distant Sleeper hive.

We celebrate
one-patterns in the hive of the Distant Sleeper,
the Eya’a responded, and
Vi’ya drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes.

“It’s all right,” she heard Ivard say to Morrighon. “They
always wake up like that. They won’t hurt you.”

Where did Ivard get the energy? She forced herself to stand,
and with a look expressive of relief, Morrighon slapped the door open and
retreated. Vi’ya followed, fighting vertigo.

Morrighon was disposed to hurry, but Vi’ya forced him to
slow to her pace. Thus she had some semblance of control by the time they
reached an area she had never seen before. Tarkan guards stood ready at most
tunnel intersections, and the jagged hum of mind-blurs nagged at her
consciousness from time to time.

Morrighon tabbed an annunciator, then the door control. He
stood aside and Vi’ya walked into a room straight out of the nightmares of
childhood.

Fighting for balance, she forced herself to look around
slowly. The heavy, carved furniture, the tapestries, even the patterns in the
rugs evoked the wealth and power of the rulers of Dol’jhar.

Seated at his ease behind a big table, Anaris observed her
with a sardonic curl of his lip. “Remind you of home?” he said.

“My home,” she said, “was a stone cottage, with two old wooden
cupboards no one else wanted. But we saw this kind of thing on the vids—” She
waved a hand around the room. “What is it, the once-proud belongings of some
minor lord who had the temerity to permit his shadow to cross your father’s?
Brought here piece by piece by a fleet of warships in order to bolster your
prestige?”

Anaris leaned forward to tap at his console as he said, “Was
this admirable piece of bravado intended to prove how you’ve managed to rise
above your ancestry?” He swiveled the screen around with a careless swipe of
his hand, adding, “If so, you’ll need to try harder at burying the evidence.”

The screen showed Vi’ya herself on the bridge of the
Telvarna
. “I want,” she said in precise
Dol’jharian, “the heart of Hreem the Faithless on the point of my knife.”

Laughing softly, Anaris killed the screen, then jerked a
thumb behind Vi’ya. She turned and regarded her own reflection in a polished
steel mirror. Anaris joined her, and they stood side by side, both tall,
strong, with the marked bones, brown skin, and dark eyes and hair of their
race, and both dressed in uncompromising black.

Vi’ya stared at her own eyes in the mirror and was reassured
by her stony lack of visible reaction. She could have told him that she had not
worn black until the day after Markham was killed, when she swore an oath of
vengeance on Hreem the Faithless. She knew—had always known—that it was a very
Dol’jharian thing to do.

But she had never attempted to deny her past. Her gaze now
encompassed them both, and the differences were made manifest. Her clothing was
the comfortable, loose garment of the spacer, worn by either sex. His shared
only color; the refined texture, the heavy weave, the design of tunic and
trousers which made the most of a powerful build, were meant not so much to
conceal as to intimidate.

Last, she lifted her head and met his gaze in the mirror,
and knew her own held nothing but disinterest.

Whatever he was watching for, he manifested no more reaction
than she did. Turning away from the mirror and resuming his seat, he said, “The
furnishings in this room were once my father’s, from our tower at Hroth D’ocha.
What are your blood antecedents? Do you know?”

The subject, of course, was the Chorei. Because she knew
that he carried Chorei genes and he didn’t know she knew, and because he used
the truce-neutral form of address as did she, when he could have used half a
dozen other modes, all conveying different types of insult, she said, “My
mother’s foremothers were all weavers, and none of them carried any of the talents.
She thought I was the result of an unlucky encounter with a scion of the House
of Gaerjhrun during a winter Karusch-na Rahali.”

“City?”

“Ephin Hoch’jhan.”

Anaris squinted up at the ceiling, then gave a soft grunt.
“The year Gaerjhrun commenced the paliach against Tharchas.”

So he knew the year of her birth?
Of course Morrighon would have been ravaging the records within moments
after he had learned I was in-system
, she thought grimly.

He added, “You said you will not experiment again without
the Eya’a. I suggest you awaken them.”

“They are awake,” she said. “We can begin anytime. I told
Lar to advise Lysanter not to attempt any of his physical tests on them. They
will not tolerate their bodies being touched.”

Anaris snapped a data chip into the console. “The
transfiguration room underneath the Palace Major, when the gnostor Omilov was
taken. Was that the Eya’a?”

She brought her chin down in assent.

Anaris smiled. “Barrodagh would have it you’d unleashed some
type of Panarchist secret weapon. Did you know he thought Brandon’s pastry
attack was this same weapon?”

She grinned. “What happened?”

“Jesserian found him in a dead faint. Apparently one of the
mechwaiters caught him head-on with one of your acid pies.”

Though she knew he had a reason—most likely a nefarious
reason—for sharing this data with her, she still thoroughly enjoyed the mental
image of Barrodagh’s terror and did not attempt to hide her enjoyment.

Anaris said as he tabbed the summons, “I don’t think I’ll
tell him. He’d probably have your crew shot, and you tranked out of your mind
except when Lysanter wants you.”

She said, so he would not mistake her silence for gratitude,
“And it serves some purpose besides annoying Barrodagh for us to remain free?”

He said, “It provides amusement.”

The door dilated with a slurping noise, and Morrighon
entered and bowed. Anaris dismissed them both with a lazy wave of his hand.
Morrighon bowed again; Vi’ya turned her back and walked out, and the door
closed on Anaris’s mocking laughter.

A short time later, Morrighon glanced longingly toward the
nest of furniture he’d constructed under the sardonic gaze of Anaris, who sat
cross-legged on his bed.

“He will not advance the time,” said the Dol’jharian, his
black gaze pinioning Morrighon. The dirazh’u twisting around his strong fingers
froze in a new pattern.

Morrighon looked down at his compad. He didn’t like to see
the ways Anaris warped his woven curses when he was drugged in anticipation of
another tempathic session in the Chamber of Kronos.

Anaris’s faint, crooked smile made Morrighon even more
uncomfortable than the thought of any treachery by Barrodagh. The drugs did
nothing to tame the increasingly frequent, increasingly strange moods that
seemed to possess the heir. It was as though they came from a totally different
part of Anaris’s character. Morrighon remembered the first time he’d seen his
lord’s Chorei power manifest: one of the images his TK had stirred up had been
of Gelasaar.
It’s no wonder he is
interested in the Dol’jharian tempath. Another hybrid.

“One thing still lies unresolved,” Anaris said. “I did not
manifest TK in the landing bay when Norio made his attempt.”

“Do you think it was caused by the presence of two . . .
Chorei together?” Morrighon asked carefully.

For a panicky suck and wash of heartbeat Anaris gazed narrow-eyed
at him. Morrighon swallowed. The only way to test that would be for Anaris to
go to the Chamber of Kronos during an attempt. Is that what his lord wanted him
to say?

Then Morrighon’s compad beeped, rescuing him. “The final
injection, lord,” he said apologetically.

With no change in expression Anaris reached over, picked up
the sprayjector, triggered it into the pit of his elbow, and then dropped it in
Morrighon’s hand.

He carefully locked it away as his lord lay back, staring at
the featureless ceiling, then Morrighon retreated with alacrity to his flimsy
bunker. He peered anxiously between two file cabinets as the moment approached.
This was their only real function, for the flimsies and hard copies in them
contained nothing of real interest to Anaris. That went into Morrighon’s
compad, and nowhere else.

He looked at the compad, its face reflecting the countdown.
Yes, Barrodagh could read it, if he could divert enough arrays for decryption;
but he could never do that without Morrighon knowing. Barrodagh, on the other
hand, could never be sure that those under him weren’t conspiring to read his,
so he had to use hard copy to hide his thoughts. Morrighon smiled. His opponent
was drowning in flimsies.

The countdown reached single digits, and anxiety shot his
heart-rate high again.

But for a short time after the counter zeroed, nothing
happened, save a brief, almost subliminal twitch of the station. There was no
apparent response from Anaris. Morrighon was still trying to figure out if he
had truly felt something when the lights flickered in familiar prolepsis. The
air thickened. The station shuddered, the sonic components suggesting a
protracted groan, and the heavy carpet on which the bed lay rippled uneasily
like a sea creature awakening from dreams of prey.

Then Morrighon felt a prickle of uncertainty as nothing
further moved. By now, in Norio’s next-to-last attempt, there had been a storm
of objects bursting from the furniture. He hadn’t known if the locks would stop
this or merely slow the onslaught. But now it looked—

His throat clenched as he saw the hand-span of air between
Anaris and the bed. Anaris lay quiescent, his body relaxing into what Morrighon
recognized as the curved posture of free-fall sleep. His body slowly rotated in
two dimensions at once until he lay facedown at right angles to the bed.

The movement brought Morrighon beyond fear to the dynamic
seethe of utter terror, like a bomb detonating in his chest as a pucker formed
in the wall in line with Anaris’s head.

Morrighon forced himself to move on watery legs, his compad
dangling from its tether. As he emerged from behind the furniture, a spasm of
the station unbalanced him and he crashed painfully to his knees, shuddering
under a wash of malevolence, brief as the flicker of an eyelid. The pucker
dilated with a loud smack and Anaris’s body shot into it.

But it was too small for his shoulders. The pucker snapped
shut, stretching out in an obscene lip-like bulge as Anaris collapsed.

Morrighon screamed in horror. It had taken his head. But no,
he saw as he scrambled to his feet, Anaris was hanging by his head and neck. It
was strangling him. Morrighon looked around frantically. Then he noticed the
faint asymmetric elliptical shape of the pucker. Like the doors and their
control glands.

Morrighon cursed Anaris’s refusal to have a jac in his
quarters: increased political vulnerability was preferable to strangulation by
an alien obscenity. He fumbled in his lord’s sleeve, grabbing at his peshakh.
To touch the ceremonial knife of a noble demanded death among the Children of
Dol, but Morrighon was beyond fear. He ran to the door and jerked the opener
down from the scaffold, cutting the ties that fastened its cable to the frame.
When he had enough slack, he sighted over it on the minor focus of the
elliptical pucker, where the control gland should have been, and groping for
the compad with his other hand, tapped the door key.

A lance of radiation sizzled across the room and flared
against the pucker, which dilated with a loud snap, allowing the heir’s body to
slump to the floor. His face was red, but he breathed.