The Thrones of Kronos (40 page)

When Morrighon reached his chamber, his compad lit up with
an insistent message from his console. It was an alarm from one of the
discriminators Tat had programmed. As the heir’s secretary he had access to the
raw feeds from the surveillance net—except for the encrypted material that
belonged to Barrodagh—and Tat had given him a module that allowed him to set up
various alarm conditions.

This one told of an illicit gathering in a remote chamber.
Another karra-cult ritual, he thought. Idly he called up the feed and confirmed
his guess. Lysanter had some fairly horrible theories about the luminous
manifestations. “It’s curious about us, now that it knows we have minds,” the
scientist had said.

But he had insisted there was little harm in them. “Maybe it
sees it as another form of nutrition.”

Not a very palatable
one,
Morrighon thought as he reached for the tab to switch over to automatic
record. Then the floor threw one of the people into a suddenly gaping hole in
the wall.

Sickened, Morrighon cut off the sound, but stood watching,
helpless to look away. The floor rocked under him, a long shuddering motion,
and a deep foreboding gripped him, making his heart slam. He knew he would not
be able to save the heir if this happened during the next tempathic probe. The
station twitched and commenced a rhythmic shuddering that peaked and died away;
he gripped his console until the ground was still again.

His heart had barely had time to slow its frantic pace when
his comm circuit beeped demandingly.

The accept key windowed up Barrodagh, with Eusabian behind
him, his face grimmer than even than customary. Morrighon’s gut twisted. This
summons had been initiated by the Avatar himself.

“Where is the tempath?”

“The heir summoned her,” Morrighon replied, bowing deeply.

“Have her brought to the Chamber of Kronos at once.”

The images blinked out. Eusabian must have been watching the
feeds, and thought to use Vi’ya to root out the menace.

Morrighon’s heart seemed to be hammering its way up into his
throat. He would have to be with Anaris during Vi’ya’s attempt—could he return
quickly enough after delivering the tempath? And the drugs would not have had time
to build to the full effect needed to protect Anaris.

Morrighon tapped the tempath-experiment code to Anaris and
rushed out.
This will give him time to be
ready for my arrival
, Morrighon thought, hurrying his pace.

He had nearly reached the heir’s rooms again when a new
thought caused his footsteps to falter: would Anaris be wearing his belt com?

A demented combination of fear and hilarity swooped through
Morrighon, settling in his gut. The Catennach training had thoroughly
eradicated the desire for sex, replacing it with acute nausea, but even the
wash of unease did not completely douse an impulse to snicker.

Shoving back the sleeve of his tunic, he slammed the corner
of his compad across his scarred wrist. The lancing pain enabled him to regain
control of thought and emotions, for he knew he must be clear-headed for
whatever was to happen next.

Then he reached the chamber and tabbed the annunciator, and
when it went ignored, he gritted his teeth and used the code to force the door
open.

And what he saw caused him to stop dead in the doorway.

The chamber looked as though a bomb had exploded in it.
Furniture overturned, objects strewn over every surface, one of the tapestries
slashed down the center, as though ripped by a knife. Standing on either side
of the overturned desk were Anaris and Vi’ya, both disheveled, clothing torn,
faces like carved stone.

Both heads turned sharply, and Anaris’s teeth showed.

Morrighon realized his mouth was open, and shut it, his mind
shocked empty as the skull in the Avatar’s ritual chamber.

It was Vi’ya who broke the tableau. Looking about her, she
gave a snort of amusement.

Then a chuckle.

Then she leaned against the desk, convulsed with laughter.

Anaris looked at her, and at the room, and in one of his
lightning changes of mood, he too laughed as he dropped into his big chair,
which was the only piece of furniture still upright.

The laughter only lasted a few seconds, but it neutralized
the atmosphere enough for Morrighon to regain his wits. “Did you feel the
station move?” he asked.

“I thought it was us,” Anaris said, still grinning, then his
eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”

Morrighon said, “Some grays held another
Ekhaschen-karr;
this time the station
ate one of them.” He saw Vi’ya glance at him. “Barrodagh has informed the
Avatar, I believe, who has commanded the presence of the tempath in the Throne
Room. Now.”

Vi’ya’s long hair had come loose, lying across her forehead
and over one shoulder in a ruffled fall down to her upper thigh.

She lifted a hand to brush it back. Morrighon saw that one
sleeve was ripped nearly free, revealing her bare arm stippled with marks fast
turning to bruises. “Any time for me to change?” she asked Morrighon directly.

“I—I don’t think so,” he said. “I suspect the Avatar intends
you to suppress this menace without delay.”

She shrugged, sending a wintry smile of challenge across at
Anaris, then she walked toward Morrighon, who realized he was still standing in
the doorway and backed out hastily.

Anaris was laughing as he heaved the desk upright again, but
the hilarity was gone, replaced by the edge of challenge. Morrighon wondered if
Anaris was tasting some of the fear that made his own guts into a boiling of
acid: he had to be remembering what had happened during the last attempt.
Maybe this time the wall will get him,
he thought as the door closed.

Morrighon had to skip to keep up with Vi’ya’s swift strides,
but he did not complain. She said, “I will need the Eya’a.”

“I will get Larghior to bring them,” Morrighon replied,
annoyed with himself for not having thought of it.

“Just blunt the mind-blurs and have Lar open the door,”
Vi’ya said. “I can summon them.”

So she
is
a telepath.

For the rest of the walk, Morrighon’s thoughts ricocheted
between the formulation of plans to deal with this new disaster and trying not
to wonder what had happened in that room.

When the station convulsed, Ivard dropped down onto the
floor and shut his eyes, reaching for rapport with the Unity.

Had he missed a signal? Was Vi’ya in the Throne Room, after all?
Questions streamed through his mind, then stopped when he found the Kelly.
Aided by their telepathic reach, he tried to connect with Vi’ya—and was shocked
to encounter instead a great miasma of malevolence boiling, like a forming
tornado, through the station.

His recoil was so strong he found himself abruptly back in
his body, his senses swimming unpleasantly.

“What is it?” Jaim’s voice sharpened. “Are you all right?”
Sedry moved quickly to the console and tapped a code into it.

“There. That took out the last ten seconds of the loop.
They’ll blame it on the ruckus.”

Jaim turned back to Ivard. “Was it Vi’ya?”

“Can’t find her,” Ivard replied. His voice trembled. It was
hard to concentrate. He recognized that presence—the one from his dreams. But
now he’d found it while awake, and it was stronger than ever.

An inflowing of reassurance came from the Kelly, triplicate
and enfolding. Steadying himself within the tripod of support, Ivard forced
himself to examine the experience.

We fear,
came the
double voices of the Eya’a, so sharp it drilled like jac-fire between his eyes.
It was seldom they communicated with Ivard directly. Usually Vi’ya or the
Kelly, or both, filtered their communications.

He remembered Vi’ya’s thought pattern and framed the
response:
Why do you fear?

We fear the fang-worm
within the Distant Sleeper.

Confused, Ivard turned his awareness to the Kelly and heard
their answering thought:
Fang-worm seems
to be one of their natural predators, a parasite that enters a body and eats
its way out. The only way they “cure” the individual is to kill her.

Can you reach Vi’ya? I
don’t know what to tell them,
Ivard thought in despair.

Ivard felt the away-focus of the tripled green flame, and
then it was back.
Vi’ya is summoned. We
must all join together.

Ivard opened his eyes and cleared the vertigo from his head
by taking cleansing breaths. At once his own fear came rushing back, but he tried
to breathe it out.

Whatever that thing
is, it feeds off negative emotion,
he thought.
If I am calm, it might ignore me.

Ivard said to Jaim, “There’s something here, but it’s not
part of the station. It’s something on its own, and it’s almost sentient. At
least, it seems to be feeding off people’s emotions.”

Montrose cursed, long with an unstinting variety of
invective that, in another place, would have made Ivard grin with appreciation.
Sitting beside him, Sedry looked worried.

Lokri’s mouth tightened and Marim shuddered theatrically.

“Something happened in that direction.” Ivard pointed. “And
the thing is hovering there, like some kind of vortex. I don’t know what it is,
and the Kelly don’t have words for it that I can understand.”

A high, weird keening sound was their only warning, and the
door to the Eya’a’s chamber sucked open. The beings emerged, semaphoring so
fast that Ivard’s temples panged as he tried to read their sign. Already tired,
he felt drained after all the extra effort he’d expended.

“Uh-oh,” he said as the signals started to make sense. “I
think—I think Vi’ya is waiting for them in the Throne Room, or wants them—”

The door scroinched open. Lar jumped through, his face
blanched with terror. “The Eya’a,” he said hoarsely. “The Avatar—the Throne
Room.”

“It’s all right,” Jaim said. “They won’t hurt you. They
probably won’t even notice you.”

Ivard shook his head. “Lar,” he said, “it isn’t anything to
frighten you—the Eya’a, I mean—if you know this sign. They use it as an
acknowledgment.” Ivard pantomimed the
We-see-you
that the Eya’a used.

Lar’s fingers repeated it automatically. The Eya’a moved
past and he whirled and followed, the door closing behind him.

o0o

Vi’ya insisted on waiting outside the Chamber of Kronos
for the Eya’a to arrive, but Morrighon’s fear and agonized impatience almost
made her nauseous.

He fears for Anaris.
There were no clues to which Chorei talent the heir possessed, only that he was
not a tempath. Did it make him vulnerable to the malevolence that haunted the
Suneater?

Eya’a fear, we fear
the fang-worm inside the Distant Sleeper. We cannot amend the Sleeper without
cessation to all hive-ones and to Eya’a.

But regardless of its impact on the Eya’a and Ivard’s
dreams, despite its growing power, it was not what she touched through the
Heart of Kronos: That vast presence, still only dimly perceived, lay deeply
dormant—her mind avoided the word “sleep.” The Unity was still too fragmentary
to attempt true contact. The fountaining energy of that vast power’s full
activity would destroy them.

And we are missing a
member.
Before Desrien she would have scoffed at the old woman’s vision,
but not now. But she dismissed its import, all the same. The Unity would have
to be strong enough without the extra one Eloatri had promised, she resolved.

When the Eya’a arrived, Morrighon rushed her into the
chamber and turned her over to Lysanter before departing. She could see the
strain in his body as he tried to avoid arousing Barrodagh’s interest, but
Barrodagh no sooner saw the Eya’a than his fear lanced through her head like an
ice pick.

Eager to get physical distance from Barrodagh, Vi’ya began
to walk around the dyplast screen toward the terraced mound holding the Heart
of Kronos. The mound had changed. It had grown higher, more throne-like.

Barrodagh stopped her, a crabbed motion from what he
apparently assumed was the safety of the other side of the chamber. She felt no
desire to let him know how fruitless was his attempt to hide himself from the
Eya’a.
I hope one day to show him
firsthand.

“We await the Avatar,” Barrodagh said.

She heard a rhythmic whining above the tread of heavy feet:
power armor. Scornful amusement warmed her.
Did
Eusabian think armored Tarkans any use against
fi
?

Then the Lord of Vengeance strode into the chamber, and her
amusement vanished at the sight of the two inhuman figures with him, one
preceding and one following. They towered over the Avatar, their dark armored
bulk dwarfing him. Vi’ya had seen these in one of the history chips Markham had
given her: Ogres, the most feared weapon in the Thousand Suns.

The Panarchists had never used them against humans. Eusabian
had no such compunctions. He had even had them made in the image of the
kipango. She suppressed the spurt of fear that welled up from childhood
memories. These were only machines.

But being such, they were immune to
fi
.

She reached for the Eya’a to gauge their reaction, to find
none. If they even noticed the Ogres, they had already dismissed them as
another of the incomprehensible machines made by the one-entities; their
worries were still with the fang-worm.

But a sharp mental tang from the Kelly went straight to her
limbic system. The Kelly recognized them—and knew of ways of dealing with them.

Eusabian spoke directly to Lysanter. “The tempath’s efforts
have awakened something. If it is part of the normal function of the station,
it must be controlled. If not, it must be destroyed.”

Lysanter bowed. “I have already diverted all optional
computing to the stasis clamps for this attempt.” He escorted Vi’ya around the
shield, his movements jerky, his forehead gleaming with moisture as he spoke to
her in a low voice. “The stress monitors around your chamber indicate its
interest in you. Do you know what it is?”