The Thrones of Kronos (47 page)

In an altered voice, with a hint of amusement, Vannis added,
“Cormoran will present his story tomorrow, and your Rifters will be heroes.
There will be nothing on Ares for you to fear.”

And dide his
herte into hirë brest to gon,

Of which she
nought agroos, ne nothynge smertë;

And forth he
fleigh, with hertë left for hertë.

Brandon bowed, low and sustained, with both hands out in
gratitude.

But Vannis did not bow back. She took one of his hands, with
the other gestured toward the hallway leading to the suites.

Brandon laced his fingers in hers, and they went out
together, leaving Fierin alone with the impassioned singers, and the quiet
room, and the guttering candle.

Four hours afterward, Vannis and Fierin stood together in
silence, watching the departure of the
Grozniy
.

It was strange,
she thought,
that for all the Douloi love
of ritual, this most important departure was so lacking in drama.
But, as Osri
had explained to her, the Dol’jharians were undoubtedly watching the station
with a VLDA, and so no signal of this ship’s importance could be given.

Still, for those who knew what it implied and who had room
in their hearts for inspiration, the silent ascent of the vast ship from its
docking pit on glittering wings of dust-scattered radiance lifted spirits in
spite of anguished hearts. Fierin’s own heart ached for the lover she already
missed, and wonder for the two lovers whose presence would be forever entwined
in memory with soaring arias from an ancient tragedy.

Vannis stood straight and dry-eyed, her hands quiet and
composed, her face like a carving from burnished wood, but as Fierin watched
the ship lights winking out one by one, leaving only cold stars, the music
played again in her mind and brought images of Troilus finding Criseyde’s house
closed and shuttered and knowing she has left Troy.

Instead of the vast darkness of space, she saw him weep at
the sight of the barred doors as he cried out to the house as to a body from
which the spirit is gone. “The lanterne of which queynt is the light.”

She closed her aching eyes, fiercely willing herself not to
weep. She was not the only one who had to face the terrible wait ahead, to be
lived hour by painful hour, until they found out who won—who lived, who died.

Vannis stirred and smiled. “Shall we return? There is much
to be done.”

“Tell me what I can do to help,” Fierin said.

Fro thennesforth
he rideth up and down,

And every thyng
comm hym to remembrauncë

As he rood
forby placës of the town

In which he
whilom hadde al his plesauncë.

“Lo, yonder
saugh ich last my lady dauncë;

And in that
temple, with hire eyen cleerë,

Me kaughtë
first my rightë lady derë . . .

“And at that
corner, in the yonder hous,

Herde I myn
alderlevest lady deerë

So wommanly,
with vois melodious,

Syngen so wel,
so goodly, and so clerë,

That in my
soulë yet me thynketh ich herë

The blisful
sown; and in that yonder placë

My lady first me
took unto hirë gracë.”

Leontides Halkyn stood beside the man known to the rest of
Arthelion Resistance only as the Masque, reflecting on how what had begun as
identity suppression out of necessity had metamorphosed into a symbol so
powerful it was taking on mythic proportions. The Masque stood at a console,
watching the sunlit garden pathway three hundred meters directly above them,
and Halkyn watched the Masque.

Tall, with the muscular leanness of the born athlete, a
shock of iron-gray hair queued at his nape, the upper portion of his face not
scarred by plasma fire harsh in outline, he had once been handsome, and now,
with the red silk mask that concealed all but his eyes, he was intimidating to
the human viewer, though not to the Arkad dog and her two pups who gamboled
around him, tongues lolling.

Above them, Jesserian, commander of the Dol’jharian
occupiers, stood motionless, gazing at the struggling figures caught in the
coils of the serpents in the ancient marble statue Laocoön. The Dol’jharian was
tall, heavy-boned, his aspect martial. It did not seem in character for him to
be contemplating an old statue, but so he had been—for nearly a quarter of an
hour.

And the Masque had stood as long watching him via spy-eye.

Halkyn suppressed a sigh as the mother paused, ears alert;
then, at some sound or signal beyond Halkyn’s perception, she bolted off,
followed by the pups, the only noise the clicking of their toenails on the
cement of the corridor.

Now there was nothing to look at but the still figure of the
Masque, but patience was a lifelong companion. Halkyn permitted his mind to
range freely.

It was rare enough to have time for thought. In fact, it was
probably a direct result of his having had scant opportunity for reflection
that it was difficult to believe anything that had happened within the last
year as real.

Reality to Leontides Halkyn was being steward-in-residence
to Gelasaar hai-Arkad, forty-seventh Panarch of the Thousand Suns. From his
earliest memories he had always known he would be steward and had taken great
pride in the fact that Arkads, while in their ancestral home, had been able to
summon a Halkyn to their aid for over four hundred years.

Reality had been knowing the best artisans for new porcelain
tableware and how to buy properly hemmed linens for table, bain, and dormaivu.
He knew all the support staff families whose expertise had been handed down
through generations: those who carved ice, those who repaired tapestries, those
who customized air cars, monitored aviaries, tended gardens, cleaned rooms full
of treasures, served food with grace and artistry, and guarded the Net.

By the time he was fifteen he had known the names and
vocations of most of the staff in the Residence and Palace Major. By the time
his grandmother indicated that she was thinking of retirement, and that he
ought to be officially appointed as her heir, his knowledge had extended to the
network of support staff all over the planet. For nearly fifty years he had
taken pride in how smoothly life ran in the Palaces. His grandmother had often said
to the young Leontides,
The craft of
stewardship is organization. The art of stewardship is invisibility.
No one
ever had to throw out faded flowers or ask that a carpet be cleaned. Guests had
only to state preferences once, and those would be provided without further
reminder, even if the visits were once every decade. Order, tranquility, grace.
Halkyn bywords.

Then Dol’jhar had blown all that to chaos.

It was by the merest accident that Halkyn had been left
alive. Horrified by the then unthinkable—the non-appearance of the Krysarch at
his Enkainion—Halkyn had not trusted a runner or a comm, but himself had
crossed the great distance to the Residence Wing, to find Krysarch Brandon’s
rooms empty when they should have been full of personnel.

He had gone straight down to the service level, a severe
lecture forming in his mind, to find the valets and cleaners and servers lying
dead in a lake of blood. Only then did he find that the comms were not working.

He never made it back to the Ivory Hall: hurrying down the
last short service corridor to return to his station, he had been knocked to
his knees by the concussion of the blast that killed everyone within. And only
some long-dead Arkad’s suspicious nature had kept him from dying of radiation,
as the walls and floors had proved to be shielded.

From there his memory was queerly blank. An instinct of
self-preservation had prompted him to hide deep in the old Hegemonic maze, with
which he had been familiar since childhood.

Eventually he had found some of his old staff, one at a
time, most as dazed and lost as he, and wit and motivation had returned when he
discovered that too many others had been imprisoned by the conquerors.

There was nothing they could do for their dead, save quietly
remove their bodies and bury them when the huge, heavy-booted Dol’jharian
soldiers were not prowling around. But they could—and did—use the House system
to fight against the enemy’s attempts to master the Palace. And not just the
system, they used the orphans left by the Dol’jharians, and they also used the
Arkads’ dogs.

From these three elements the Resistance had been born.

Halkyn understood that the knowledge he carried in his head
was all the more valuable when, at last, the Dol’jharians succeeded in
crippling the House computer enough to force entry, and the planetary DataNet
had fallen soon afterward.

It was about six weeks after the attack when, like a
lightning bolt, the former Krysarch had reappeared, and before anyone on either
side knew of his presence he vanished again, snatching the gnostor Omilov from
Eusabian’s torturers—along with a goodly portion of the treasures in the Ivory
Antechamber.

After that visit the House computer had begun to change. At
first no one comprehended quite how much, distracted as they were by the
Dol’jharians’ violent reactions to the holographic ghosts that Aerenarch
Brandon had released, then by the Battle of Arthelion.

And then by the need to hide the survivors turning up in
unexpected places.

Soon after, Halkyn began to perceive that there had been
some kind of fundamental change within the House computer. He had grown up
working with this system and was familiar with all its peculiarities. It had
been a kind of unseen companion all those years, and watching from a distance
as Ferrasin tried hobbling it in order to master it had been as painful as
watching a friend suffer dismemberment.

It was when the survivors of that battle had landed at
various points around the planet that the computer had undergone one of its
mysterious shutdowns. This one was system-wide, sparking desperate measures on
the part of the Dol’jharian techs to get it running again. When it did,
Ferrasin had made no real attempt to reconstruct the lost data.

Halkyn soon discovered that the shutdown lasted just long
enough to mask the descent of the battle’s survivors. As if someone had
deliberately shut the system down, then started it again when it was safe to do
so.

There was no time to pursue possible meanings, for it had
fallen to Halkyn to find safe refuge for the battle survivors. This task was
the more difficult as by then the Dol’jharians had the civilian population
numbered and their movements regulated. All military personnel who had not been
shot outright had been imprisoned, to be used in forced labor.

It fell to Halkyn and a small circle of others, including
the head gardener’s young daughter, who had put together over painfully slow
weeks, and then months, an elaborate, and tentative, network of communication
that reached over the planet.

The Masque’s life pod had landed at the very edge of the
Mandalic Archipelago. For a time the badly burned commander had hid out in the
forest, dodging Dol’jharian search teams until he was discovered by one of the
roaming packs of Arkadic dogs.

One of the computer’s oldest tasks was keeping track of the
dogs, whose collars (so the story went) had been designed by the first Jaspar,
when he came to Arthelion with his Nemo by his side.

What made Halkyn queasy was how successful the computer had
been at hiding that function from Ferrasin’s best noderunners; it showed . . .
almost human cunning.

Again it was the House computer that had alerted Halkyn to
the dogs’ find. Halkyn had been introduced to yet a new Hegemonic tunnel, this
one with its terminus—unused for centuries—on that far island.

The man soon to be known as the Masque and Halkyn had agreed
to keep the newcomer’s identity secret, but as the former recovered he took on
more and more of the military aspects of the Resistance, leaving to Halkyn the
communications and logistical areas with which he was familiar.

The computer cooperated with them, offering data and comm no
matter where they were, and it participated in the creation of the Masque. Not
only did this mythic figure work against their enemies, evoking deep racial
guilt from the Dol’jharians by its anamnesis of the genocidal Red Plague they’d
unleashed against their former masters, the Bori, but the symbol worked to
boost morale in the Resistance.

Orders from a scarred destroyer captain that might have been
questioned were accepted without demur from the red-masked figure who faced
down vicious Tarkan soldiers and walked with ghosts.

The computer knew it—and created its own version of the
Masque.

Halkyn gritted his teeth, fighting the nasty sense of
vertigo that these thoughts caused. Was the computer really exhibiting volition
(his mind jinked away from the word sentience), or was this merely a symptom of
the general sense of unreality, of life changing too swiftly for proper
thought?

A young dog trotted out of a side tunnel, thickly-furred tail
waving. A muzzle snuffed Halkyn’s automatically extended fingers. The cold nose
touched, then the dog trotted to the Masque, repeating the ID check.

It disturbed Halkyn that he no longer knew all their names.
This one had been born somewhere out in the Gardens not long after the
Dol’jharian landing.

On the screen, Jesserian’s chin lifted abruptly. He tabbed
his belt com, his head at a listening angle.

“Comp,” the Masque said in the harsh voice his still-healing
flesh had forced him to use. “What is the report Jesserian is receiving?”

“From section four, level two, now designated barracks for a
technical detachment of the Dol’jharian ground forces,” came the flat voice of
the computer. “Someone has broken in and scattered poisonous insects in the
bedding.”