The Thrones of Kronos (45 page)

“You just now met Lord Eusabian’s pesz mas’hadni,” Barrodagh
said. “These physicians are trained in all the arts of pain.” He laid the tool
down with a decisive clink. “I decided it would save us both time if I showed
you the reality of disobedience among Dol’jharians. I know that you Barcans
consider us to be barbarians and fools. We may not have your expertise in the
manipulation of dataspace, but I assure you, we are not fools. Our skills have
gone in other directions, one of which you have just witnessed.”

Has Tatriman found my
workspace?

Riolo compressed his lips, waiting for word of his future.

And Barrodagh said, “You know how to program these Ogres you
brought. We both know that Hreem will betray anyone and everyone, and I am
certain he commanded you to place in them certain safeguards. Lysanter may not
have the experience that you do, but he learns very fast.”

The Bori laced his fingers together. “The Panarchists have
curtailed our time, Riolo. Given as long as he needed, Lysanter would have
mapped out your Ogres and found anything untoward. But we do not have that
time. You will remain here until we have secured our goals. Until then you have
certain choices. You can gamble on our ignorance—which will not last long—and
the mindripper will be your fate if we discover those traps I alluded to before.
I need not assure you that the pesz mas’hadni is also skilled in prolonging
one’s life. If the Avatar wills it, his enemies can lie there for months as the
physicians experiment on them. You can gamble on that, or you can choose to
serve us, in which case the rewards are commensurate with service. We have the
power, Riolo. Either way. Choose now.”

Riolo thought swiftly. He owed Hreem nothing. On the other
hand, there was no reason for the Dol’jharians to spare him once his usefulness
to them was finished. In the end, his only loyalty was to himself, and to the
Matria who had sent him. Remembering the crudity of the precautions on his
console, he decided on a gamble that was really his only choice in this twisted
simulacrum of the Under. He would show them how to remove the most obvious
traps, but with code that would help him install other, more subtle ones.

So he projected a sickening mélange of relief and horror.
“Hreem?” His voice croaked, not altogether voluntarily.

Barrodagh looked pleased. “He will never know. My promise.”

Riolo expelled his breath. “I will show you the traps he
commanded and how to disable them. But I will need a compad, and links to a
number of arrays . . .”

o0o

Anaris dropped the last of Norio Danali’s drugs into the
disposer and watched them vanish with a whoosh. The temptation to hold on to
them in case they might be needed was outweighed by the risk of Barrodagh getting
his goons into Anaris’s chamber long enough to do a thorough search. Though he could
not know why Anaris would keep drugs, the less Barrodagh knew, the better.

Especially now.

Anaris turned away and gazed into his chamber. If he ignored
the dimensions, it was almost possible to believe he was not standing in the
depths of the Suneater, but high in his ancestors’ stone tower at Hroth D’ocha.
How many hours had they spent together among these furnishings, Jerrode and
Barrodagh? Had the Bori secretary ever been invited to sit?

Probably not. And now Jerrode Eusabian had nearly attained
the goal of every Dol’jharian lord: total independence. He’d come aboard the
station as dependent as the lowest work slub upon Lysanter and Barrodagh and
their faceless, nameless commensals, but through the brilliance of a Rifter
noderunner and the calculated gift of a pair of Ogres by another Rifter, the
Avatar of Dol was very nearly as independently powerful as the ancient family
ritual and mythology painted him.

And that knowledge
makes him ever more dangerous.
Anaris remembered Gelasaar discoursing on
the illusion of autonomy—“an illusion Dol’jharian lords indulge in to a degree
often indistinguishable from insanity.” He had dismissed the Panarch’s comment,
but present events brought it back to mind with renewed force. Was his father’s
sanity eroding as he came closer to total power?

For Eusabian needed only one more thing to make him the most
powerful man in all of human history, and that he would have soon, perhaps
within twenty-four hours—the powering up of the Suneater. Then he wouldn’t need
Barrodagh anymore, or the army of spying, mutilated Bori underlings.

And he would find it very easy to control a troublesome
heir.

Which meant that Anaris had to accelerate his own plans.
First order was to get off the station as soon as possible. Anaris was gambling
on the fact that his father would take some time to glory in his new toy, the
most powerful ever known to humankind, and would straightaway move to dispatch
Ares and Rifthaven. But even if fully mobile, the station could not be in two
places at once, and if Anaris was fast, he could be well out of reach before
his father remembered to deal with him.

A troublesome heir,
he reflected with acid humor as he tabbed his console to reflect the view on
space,
with equal freedom of movement.
And a fighting chance.

First, to confirm his ascendancy over the Tarkans.

Next, to secure the Rifter who had upset all their
calculations: Vi’ya.

He sat back, the ancient chair creaking in protest of this
unaccustomed treatment, and propped one boot on his desk while he contemplated
this latest unexpected twist in a life of unexpected twists. His last sustained
relationship had been with the beautiful Lelanor, a young, sensitive, and
delicate highborn Douloi woman who had had the mortally bad luck to be
traveling somewhere the same time some Rifter jackers had made a raid.

She’d been brought to Dol’jhar as a slave, and the Avatar’s
householder had bought her as a kitchen slub. Barrodagh had put her in Anaris’s
way for what seemed at that time incalculable reasons. Hindsight made those
clear: to gain Anaris’s trust and at the same time to have something to use
against Anaris if occasion warranted—both of which had come to pass exactly as
Barrodagh had planned.

Closing his eyes, Anaris reviewed the year he’d had with
Lelanor. Prompted by what he knew now was a taste for Gelasaar’s polite,
civilized Arthelion, he was immediately attracted to her. It had taken time for
him to gain her trust, which had been speeded when Anaris arranged for her
transfer from kitchen drudgery to the textile staff, whose job it was to repair
the ancient tapestries and rugs and upholstery throughout the fortress. She’d
liked this work, and for a time he had patiently listened to her marvel over
the fact that there was nothing—ever—new in such a household, whereas at home
they had changed their furnishings twice yearly. He had even helped her
speculate how many years it would take before the threads in a tapestried
chair-back would be completely replaced, though retaining precisely the same
design.

It had not taken long to win her trust and then her love. He
had visited her again and again, employing the sensual arts he had learned in
the bedrooms of the mannered Douloi. Even the need to leash his vastly superior
strength had served for a time as enticement, and adding its own dazzlement was
the knowledge of his deliberate flouting of custom. The real enchantment had
not been in Lelanor herself, which Anaris had not understood until he was
forced to kill her, but in the very fact of the relationship, conducted as it
was deep in his father’s house in direct contravention of custom.

So Barrodagh had finally miscalculated.
In betraying me to my father, Barrodagh had set me emotionally free.

He slid his peshakh from his sleeve and toyed absently with
it, reflecting how Vi’ya had closed her hand around it and launched herself
straight at his throat.

The custom-ordained struggle with other Dol’jharians had
come to be merely boring. The servants and soldiers were dull; those with
intelligence, and the rank to develop it, tended to be obsessed with political
gain. To speak of anything else was weakness, and their humor in comparison to
his years of diamond-bright wit on Arthelion was either nonexistent or
predictable. Lelanor at least had been intelligent and had known how to laugh,
and she had been willing to learn, within the limitations of her frail
strength, what Anaris had taught her.

Beloved. He’d used the word because she did, because Douloi
liked tenderness in language as well as in bed, but it had not meant anything
real to him. Did it now?

He’d had only three brief conversations with Vi’ya, and one
fight. Grinning as he looked around his room, he recalled that spectacular
battle. Between the two of them they had nearly trashed this collection of
antiques, and it had taken an army of two dozen workers to restore the chamber
to a semblance of normalcy. And all for exactly nothing.

I give myself when I
choose,
was all she had said—in the language of their ancestors. Then she’d
done her damnedest to bury his own knife in his neck.

It had taken all his strength to keep her from killing
him—all his strength and all his concentration. Though he was the stronger, it
was not by any vast margin, and she had superior skill in the art of
contact-fighting.

It had been a princely battle, all right, and Morrighon had
walked in right in the middle of it.

Anaris laughed when he remembered the shock on the
secretary’s face. He had never seen Morrighon so totally nonplussed. At first
he himself had not known how to react; the ready Dol’jharian anger had not had
time to manifest itself when Vi’ya had reacted first. Not with the anger of
their progenitors, or with the embarrassment or pique of Douloi whose privacy
had been breached, but with unsuppressed gusts of hilarity. Unafraid,
unpredictable: complex, elusive mind.

Vithya. Vi’ya

Anaris had scorned, in private, the Dol’jharian enslavement
to the meaningless lunar myths, but at the same time he was too much a product
of his forefathers not to feel the lure—and he was too honest to deny it.

He shut his eyes and concentrated. Was she, too, aware of
the symbolic tidal pull from the light-years-distant moons?

Of course there was no response, for he was no telepath, and
he knew she wasn’t, either, unless the brain-burners were linked up with her
and Ivard.

Opening his eyes, he let the chair fall forward with a
crash. Time to find out.

o0o

“Is the pain bad?”

Montrose’s rumbling voice broke into Sedry’s thoughts. She
blinked hot, dry eyes and looked up. Her neck ached, and for a moment she
didn’t recognize the silhouettes across the room. Her eyes insisted on trying
to resolve them into data glyphs.

But then she saw Montrose, big and burly and grizzled,
bending over Jaim, who lay flat and still on his bed. Jaim never complained,
but sometimes his breathing changed; Sedry had begun to notice it only after
Montrose had reacted several times, dispensing tiny dosages from the small
hoard of elixirs that Barrodagh had permitted him to bring from the
Telvarna
.

Sedry sighed, realizing it was the station equivalent of the
middle of the night, and she had been working far longer than she had intended.
Better stop before tiredness makes me
stumble.
She began to close down her work, careful to eradicate any traces.
Grateful as she was for the dataspace Tat had managed to win for her, it was not
nearly enough, and she’d been forced to compact too many functions into
compressed holding matrices, keeping track of their various functions only with
her mind.

The stress had taken its toll. When she stood up, darkness
dopplered across her vision, and she began to fall.

Montrose crossed the chamber in two swift strides.

Within another minute he had Sedry in the bain and began
stripping off her clothing. She mumbled a protest, then the smells of stale
sweat and caf rose, and she closed her eyes and submitted gladly, passive as a
small child.

Gently, impersonally, the hands washed her clean, then
toweled her skin dry. Montrose wrapped her in another towel and led her back
into the room. Modesty made her steps lag, then gave way before the greater
needs of plain human exhaustion and reeling emotions.

As she passed Jaim, she met his eyes and read only concern
there and patience. And nearby, Vi’ya sat, awake, her face blank, her attitude
impossible to interpret. Sedry had tried hard to understand what could have
prompted Jaim to bait Vi’ya as he had. And how could she have beaten him so
savagely—and afterward . . .

She winced away from the thought. Stranger still was the
fact that it was Vi’ya who had tended Jaim the longest, and he had permitted
it. Mostly in silence, but sometimes the two had conversed in the soft tones of
intimates, as if this violence had never occurred between them.

“Stretch out,” Montrose said, and Sedry glanced down, saw
her bed—recently neatened—and lay obediently on her stomach.

Montrose began to knead, working the stress from muscles and
fascia. The little stabs and zaps of pain diminished, like ice shards melting
and draining away. She was now wide awake, though still unable to move.

So she turned her head and gazed with open eyes into the
room, and gradually she became aware of a change. Nothing specific could be
pointed at to explain it, but the air was different: she felt it across her
sensitive flesh. The others were now all awake. Marim, laughing softly, leaned
over to poke at Lokri, who slapped lightly at her hand. They fell across his
bed in a playful wrestling match, and for once, Sedry had no wish to look away.

She had been celibate for over thirty years, for it was not
in her nature to enter intimacy with someone she did not love. Not until
recently, when she had thought her life was beginning its wane, had she found
the companion she had never thought to have, and old desires had rekindled, only
to be denied. They were all imprisoned in this room together, without privacy,
and though Sedry did not fault the younger ones for giving into natural
physical urges, it was nothing she could bring herself to do before their
smooth youthful bodies and critical eyes. She considered it a gift to aesthetic
harmony to keep herself covered up and her increasing desire for Montrose
controlled.