The Thrones of Kronos (7 page)

Vi’ya felt the restraint in his words, but she didn’t need
more than his bald recitation: the emotions of the crew filled in the rest of
the story vividly. She felt grim satisfaction that Eusabian’s heir had
collapsed while she remained standing.

“They haven’t told us anything of use,” Montrose finished.

“Lumpy little Bori that keeps narking us says null.” Marim
frowned.

“His name is Morrighon, and he says what is needful.” Sedry
pronounced the guttural with the precision of a gifted mimic new to a language,
her tone a quiet warning.

Marim shrugged, her emotional spectrum spiking jarringly.

“And safe,” Sedry added in a low voice.

Vi’ya wondered if the skews she sensed in everyone’s
emotions were a residual effect of the tranquilizer drug. It seemed as though
her crew members were becoming different people. Behind the immediate
distortions, the aura of the station loomed, a dark seethe of invisible
emotional energies. She wasn’t sure she wanted them to become clear. Not yet,
anyway.

“How do you feel?” Montrose’s rumble conveyed urgency, the
same pressure that was in all their minds.

She put her hands on the bed to either side of her and
pushed to her feet. She felt strange—too tall. “Well enough to do what needs to
be done. What are our hosts up to?”

“We’ve no way of finding out,” Montrose replied. “No
boswells, and the console’s useless.”

“Anaris’s Bori secretary’s been in here every hour for the
past eight or so.” Lokri’s mouth twitched in a half-smile. “Anaris is getting
impatient, it appears.”

“Morrighon smells scared,” Ivard said. “Like he’s never not
afraid.” He paused. “So did Barrodagh, in the landing bay.”

Vi’ya nodded. She had tried to prepare them in her briefings
for the reality of Dol’jhar, but experience was the best teacher. Memory thrust
its way past her mental guard: telling Markham they needed better plans, more
drills, that Hreem was coming for them; Markham’s laughing assurance that that
was just her Dol’jharian upbringing seeing vengeance seekers in every jacker
they bested . . . Markham dying in jac-fire, with Hreem grinning
behind the weapon.

Brandon Arkad’s sharp grief when she told him Markham was
dead.

She shook her head violently and almost lost her balance.
Once again, Jaim’s strong hand gripped her arm, steadying her.

Then something made a loud sucking noise and a puckered
section of one wall dilated, admitting a short, misshapen Bori. Vi’ya winced.
She didn’t need her tempathy to read him; indeed, as Ivard had said, the man
reeked of exhausted fear.

She spoke first, to take the initiative away from him. “Is
there not an annunciator?”

Morrighon merely looked at her. His reply—in Uni, not
Dol’jharian—was measured, his speech devoid of emotional tone. “Privacy, as you
must know, is a scarce commodity on Dol’jhar, and is a reward for service.”

She sensed no hostility in his mind. It was as Sedry had
said. This Bori, with his stilted Uni, only said what was necessary. It made
him all the more dangerous, for unlike his masters, he was subtle, as was
evidenced in his choice of Uni, by which he let the whole crew hear what he
said.

She caught a flicker of a look from Sedry, whose emotions
revealed a guarded warmth and pity for the Bori. The noderunner was learning
very fast how to serve a tempathic captain. Vi’ya decided to test Sedry’s
opinion of Morrighon. “Perhaps if the Tarkans had been a little less
trigger-happy, we’d be further along in our efforts,” she replied.

He hesitated, then said, “It may be so. If you are now able,
the heir requires your attendance.”

You weren’t the one
who gave the order to shoot, were you?
she thought. If this was Anaris’s
secretary, then there’d be no love lost between him and Barrodagh. That gave
her more leverage.

Standing had cleared her head to a remarkable degree. All
that remained of the tranks was a bone-deep ache and the slowing heaviness. “I
am able, but I must see the Eya’a first.”

Morrighon dipped his head in a short nod. She turned toward
the puckered depression near her bed and stepped around a pancake-like thing
with a flat cable coming out of it; more snaked over the walls and ceiling. The
cables all ran to a gray, rough-edged hole in the wall. There were no right
angles in the room.

Vi’ya reached toward what she guessed was the door control,
mounted on a dyplast scaffold around the pucker. When no one warned her away,
she tabbed it, and a dart of energy lanced into a small hole above the door.
She winced again as the pucker dilated with an unpleasant organic slurp.

A waft of frigid air bathed her face. Within the small,
ovoid chamber the two small forms lay curled together in a nest of moss and their
micro-filament weavings. Only now could she sense them. They were deeper into
hibernation than she’d ever seen them. Fear pulsed: what if they didn’t—or couldn’t—come
out of it?

Vi’ya shook her head firmly. Time enough to deal with that
when, and if, it happened. Right now she faced an interview that would
determine her degree of freedom, and that of her crew, on the Suneater.

She returned to Morrighon. “We will go now.”

Morrighon stopped Jaim with a gesture when he tried to
follow. “The Lord Anaris summoned only your captain.” He smiled, a strangely
painful expression. “I will return her to you as promptly as may be.”

Morrighon led Vi’ya through a maze of corridors, flattened
ovoids in cross section, glowing red with the disconcerting, directionless
illumination of Urian material. Marim’s comment about digestion was an apt one,
she decided.

Morrighon was careful to point out the mind-blurs, currently
set very low, at every nexus. “When your assistance is not required, they will
be radiating at highest intensity.”

“You intend to confine me to my quarters, then?” The answer
was obvious, but she was concentrating on the dark aura of the station, which pressed
harder on her psyche as they proceeded. She was careful to show nothing of this.
Although the direction of Morrighon’s gaze was hard to discern, she sensed how
closely he was listening to her.

“It would be best. The Tarkans and grays will see you as one
of the Chorei. You will find no companionship outside your crew.”

The reactions of the people they encountered had already
demonstrated this convincingly. None of them met her eyes or stood in her
pathway. The short Bori underlings appeared to ignore her, but she felt their
unease, and the tall Dol’jharian ordinaries in their anonymous gray clothing
reacted with stomach-twisting fear. Vi’ya saw no Tarkans.

“No other Rifters here?” Was this why Marim was so angry?

“None.” A flicker of avoidance in his thoughts, but now was
not the time to probe it.

Then they reached a long, curving corridor without
branchings, no one else in sight. Morrighon said, “We are almost to the Chamber
of Kronos, to which the device you lost on Rifthaven has been returned.”

Vi’ya looked down at him.
Why did he bring that up?

“This and Lysanter’s examination room are the only other
parts of the Suneater you will see.” He stopped and faced her. “It is important
you understand your position. Anaris and the Avatar have begun their duel for
the succession. You, your crew, myself, this station, are but counters in it.
You are only important to the heir if you can advance his interests. And do not
think to ally yourself with his father. He is of the old beliefs. You are
Chorei. It would not take much to make him order your death.”

Vi’ya pondered Morrighon’s surprising outburst. The emotions
behind it hinted at a situation of even greater complexity than the words
implied.
He is dueling with Barrodagh. I
had forgotten how, among Dol’jharians, place is not earned by merit so much as
taken by strength.

To provoke further revelations, she said with heavy irony,
“Then if I have a patron on this station, it is your master?”

Once again Morrighon gave that painful smile. “You well know
you could not even ask that question in Dol’jharian. That should be answer
enough.” He shook his head and began walking again. “But he is your only
possible ally.”

Ally
. An odd word
to use under these circumstances. And he’d used it twice, implying that she had
more power here than she knew. Very odd. Vi’ya could not imagine that Anaris
would have directed Morrighon to reveal this and decided that Morrighon was
even more dangerous than she had first assumed.

The tunnel ended in a broad surface with a large pucker in
it. To either side stood Tarkans, a man and a woman. They were bigger than
Vi’ya, but when their black eyes encountered hers, the impact of their fear was
almost nauseating. They did not move as the door blurped open.

Vi’ya was surprised to see light in the chamber beyond, so
heavy was the dark emanation of the Suneater. It pressed on her, accentuating
her fatigue.

Her eyes at first refused to comprehend the room; it felt
larger than it looked, a dichotomy that only intensified as she entered. A
dyplast shield blocked direct entry, with ranks of instruments along it, from
which heavy cable bundles ran out of the chamber through a gray-edged, ragged
hole. She noticed imagers placed to cover every portion of the room.

In front of the instruments, his back to her, stood a
slender man of middle height, with mouse-brown hair and bony shoulders under
his lab coat. Barrodagh beside him; his eyes slid away from hers and lingered
on Morrighon, evincing a wave of hatred and anxiety that radiated through the
emotional veil of the station.

Vi’ya walked around the shield, toward the tall, powerfully
built man she’d seen in dreams but only briefly in the waking world. He stood
with his back to her, on a section of floor that seemed to reach out over
nothingness—she could not see where the walls connected. To one side of Anaris,
the floor humped up into a tall, complex mound, like a broad, stepped organic
stalagmite.

It peaked in a semicircular lump, vaguely like a high seat.
She could not see it, hidden as it was by the slightly raised back of the
throne-like construct, but she sensed clearly the distinctive aura of the Heart
of Kronos, here stained by the same darkness that pressed on her mind. She
reached out experimentally, sensing a reassuring flicker of the Kelly and a
pulse of trust and respect from Ivard. Nothing from the Eya’a.

“We call it the Throne of Kronos,” Anaris said.

He spoke Uni as well as she did, with exactly the same
Dol’jharian intonations. That and the reference to Kronos, which formed no part
of Dol’jhar’s mythology, made her wonder who was represented in this ‘we.’

It was unsettling, which of course was the purpose. In the
second it took to comprehend these things, she perceived that Morrighon, until
now the most dangerous person she’d met so far, was not nearly as dangerous as
his master, who in so few words conveyed a distinctive and perilous blend of
Dol’jharian brutality and Panarchist subtlety.

He went on, his tone informative, “It was flat on top when
the Heart was first brought here, but it’s changing slowly. The last attempt
changed it even more.”

Vi’ya didn’t reply. In rapid succession she gained further perceptions:
Anaris’s emotional spectrum, a strange inversion of many of the themes she
associated with Brandon; his unusual gambit opening their conversation; the
fact that he was standing well back from the edge of the floor.

She ventured a few paces further in and halted. Here the
Chamber of Kronos opened into a kind of immense well, the floor forming an
elliptical balcony with no rail, with the Throne at the focus closest to the
edge, facing out. The featureless glow of the encircling walls rendered the dimensions
of the well impossible to guess, while the vertical dimensions assailed her
with an impossible perspective. There was no narrowing with distance as she
gazed down and then up; the well became indistinct with distance, and somehow
distorted, in both directions.

She turned her back on the infinite fall, noting with
amusement a pulse of discomfort—of vertigo—from Anaris. Good. That would help
balance their discussion, as long as she kept her mind off the uncanny depths
behind her.

“An interesting view,” she replied, and felt an appreciative
spurt of ironic amusement from him. He knew she had correctly identified his
reaction, but it didn’t seem to disturb him. Indeed, he stepped toward her,
accepting her own gambit and forcing her to look up.

“I wonder how the Ur saw it,” she added, aware of
Barrodagh’s narrow eyes watching from the other side of the Throne’s hump.

Anaris said, “If they were as perverse as humans, I’d say
they were probably vermiform.”

“Snakes?” Vi’ya’s own mental image of winged beings
vanished. Anaris twitched a shoulder, watching her with sardonic amusement.
Perverse—vermiform—psychological compensation for male inadequacy.

It surprised a laugh from her; it was just the sort of jest
Brandon might have essayed. Anaris did not laugh, nor did his emotions follow
the quicksilver paths Brandon’s might have, but the quirk to his mouth
deepened. His glance sharpened into an assessment that reminded her of their
meeting in the landing bay.

She said, “Is the . . . seismic activity
frequent?” She avoided the organic term.

“That will depend on you,” Anaris said. “The convulsions
seem to attend almost any tempathic probe of the Heart of Kronos.” She sensed
his watchfulness, and perceived his deliberate emphasis of the organic simile
she had refused. A pulse of vertigo accompanied the realization that the
subtleties of this conversation were typical of the Douloi—but there was no
time to consider that now. The stake for this verbal duel was her life.

“The display we experienced while in the landing bay was the
most intense yet,” he continued, “and it seems to have accompanied your
predecessor’s death, here in this chamber.”