“It is my fault, of course. Stealing some new clothes should have been our first priority.”
“It’s Jazil’s fault,” Sanja insisted. “If he hadn’t starved you, your mind wouldn’t have been on food.”
“Regardless,” the Librarian said, “it only emphasizes the need for you to find some way to access your funds. Now that we have been seen walking about in desert attire, if clothing begins disappearing, someone may remember you.”
“I suppose we could just walk into a shop and take what we want,” I said, shaking my head, “the way the diner owner thought we were going to do. But I would dislike doing it.”
“It would not work in any event,” the Librarian said. “The diner was a Thoran establishment. The kinds of shops that cater to Nuum on a regular basis are actually owned by Nuum themselves, even if the staff are Thoran. They will expect payment.”
We watched another Nuum stroll by, his hair gently swirling and his red cape fluttering even though there was no hint of a breeze where we stood.
“He even creates his own weather,” Sanja observed dryly. “The technology he carries with him could transform the entire Zilbiri way of life.”
Her words struck a chord deep in my brain. “Yes, indeed, the technology he carries with him…”
Sanja looked at me with narrowed eyes. “What are you thinking?”
“Just because the Zilbiri cannot have his weather machine, he has other technology that could help us a great deal.”
In my time, a rich man walking down the street does well to pay attention to his surroundings, especially given that there were so many who lack what he has. In this time, a Nuum should follow the same advice; assassination, though rare, was not unknown, and not always at the hands of Thoran freedom fighters. Still, the Nuum had over the centuries of occupation developed a sense of entitlement that often overrode more pedestrian considerations, and so it was that I found the easiest way to follow my target was simply—to follow him. As a member of the class that literally owned the world, he felt, with some justification, that events moved to his whim, and that what he did not deign to notice had no relevance.
He had not noticed me, the veiled figure walking alone behind him, and I was about to become very relevant.
I was taller than he was, and my stride longer, so with a bit of care I was able to catch up to him just as he came abreast of a shadowed space between two buildings. At the very last minute he started to turn my way, but I pulled him suddenly off the street, hand clamped over his mouth, and he was so surprised that he did not even begin to struggle until it was too late. My army instructors would have applauded my “sucker punch.” I lowered him to the ground, and pulled out the Library.
“Where would he have the transceiver?”
“Typically it is implanted in the back of the hand,” came my friend’s disembodied voice. He did not need to manifest his hologram, and more people would have been more noticeable. For the same reason, Sanja had remained remote, though I doubted not she was acting as a hidden lookout.
“Can you read the codes? I don’t know how long he’ll be out.”
“My dear Keryl, I’m a branch library. If you want me to download the software, you will have to remove the subcutaneous transceiver and link it to me physically.”
“But the transceiver is under his skin.”
“Hence the term ‘subcutaneous,’ yes.”
I thought hard. “Sanja has a knife. But if our friend here wakes up, there will be hell to pay.”
“Then I suggest you move quickly.”
I ran into Sanja almost as I reached the street and briefed her as we dashed back. She showed no qualms about cutting open a Nuum.
“You hold him down,” she told me. With a small amount of holographic positioning courtesy of the Librarian, Sanja quickly sliced through the skin of the Nuum’s hand. His eyes flew open and his head jerked up. I slugged him again and his head hit the ground. He did not move after that. Sanja picked out the transceiver with a detachment I admired and held the bloody thing out to me. I held out the Library and a tiny section opened in its surface. Sanja plugged in the transceiver, and the Library ejected it almost immediately.
“Do you need this any more?” Sanja asked.
“No.”
She dropped it to the ground and stepped on it. I blotted the Nuum’s bleeding hand with his cloak. It still bled, but he wasn’t going to die from that.
“Help me tie his hands and blindfold him. The longer it will take people to find him, the better.”
Sanja did as she was told, helped me drag our victim to the darkest shadows, and we fled out the other end of the passage with as much dignity as we could muster. After a couple of blocks, we shed our outer robes. A Nuum in need of clothing would simply have asked the datasphere for the nearest clothing shop, but that was impossible, and for the same reason I could not ask for directions. It was a nervous half-hour before we found what we were looking for, but at least by then we were far from the massing skycars and the agitation that came of finding a mutilated Nuum trussed up in an alley.
Properly attired and settling into my new life as an eccentric Nuum who conducted his business through his Thoran servant, I turned my eyes to the next step in our flight: Dure. Although neither Sanja nor I could tap into the datasphere, there were other, if less sophisticated, news and information outlets designed specifically for Thorans, and Sanja was currently making use of these. I sat alone on yet another park bench, fidgeting. I was usually not an anxious soul, but walking around like this made me feel as though I had a target on my back, and given the telepathic nature of this society, I could not discount the idea that there might be some reason for that feeling.
The government had trained me to follow people, after all, and now I had the notion that someone was following me.
Had the Nuum identified me, they would surround me with immediate, overwhelming, and if necessary lethal, force. Had I been seen attacking that man in the alley, guardsmen would quietly arrest me. Most likely I was merely paranoid. Given, however, that in the last 24 hours I had assaulted three Nuum and stolen a skycar, all of which were capital offenses—not to mention that I was carrying the Library—being paranoid merely meant that I was taking due care. On the other hand, Sanja’s errand was taking longer than I had anticipated.
Her arrival put the brakes on that train of thought, and her pensive look started an entirely new thread of apprehension.
“Maybe we should walk,” she said by way of greeting. “I’m not used to sitting around.”
This did not ease my mind. I stood, picking a direction at random, and she trotted to keep up.
“The library here has newsfeeds from all over,” Sanja continued, “but I had to browse through a lot of them so no one would notice I was taking any interest in Dure. That’s what took so long. But I got a general idea how things are over there.”
I suddenly wanted to shake the girl, to rattle her head until the information I needed fell out. A Nuum could have done it without penalty; he would have, without hesitation. I held my impatience, but I think she saw my thoughts in my face.
“Lady Maire is still alive, and she’s still in charge, along with a Lord Farren, who’s her—”
Now I did grab her arm and pull her about. “Who?”
Sanja stood perfectly still, although I did not ease my grip. “His name is Lord Farren. Apparently he and Lady Maire are co-consorts. They…”
I released her. My world had narrowed to a thin line where all else was darkness. I could no longer hear Sanja’s words, but then, I had no need to hear them.
I knew precisely who Lord Farren was. Twenty years ago he had kidnapped my one-time Thoran lover, Hana Wen. He had tried several times to kill me, and Maire, as well.
And now she was married to him.
Chapter 7
I Am a Fugitive
“Keryl! Keryl, are you in there?”
I came to the world again with Sanja fiercely hissing my name ov
er and over again. Her mental focus in trying to keep her thoughts from being broadcast the length and breadth of the square almost gave me a headache. I held up a hand to signal that I was once again cognizant of her.
Sanja breathed a deep sigh. “Thank God. I was afraid you were going to attract attention. Your thoughts were so loud.”
“You could read my thoughts?”
“No.” She shook her head slightly, and glanced around to be sure we were undisturbed. “But you were putting out a lot of emotional energy. Nuum usually leave each other alone, at least in public, but pretty soon somebody was going to come over here to make sure you were all right.” She looked closely into my face. “What happened?”
In short, clipped sentences, I gave her the background of my experiences with Lord Farren. I had expected shock, or sympathy, but all I saw was puzzlement.
“I don’t understand. You’ve been gone for a long time. People have moved on.”
“But she’s taken him on as her consort! I have been waiting to find a way back to her for twenty years—I thought she would be waiting for me!”
“And—?”
Again I wanted to shake her, if just for the crime of being young and naïve. “And…nothing. We have things to do.” I had no right to lay my problems—or at least this problem—on her inexperienced shoulders.
Sanja rolled her eyes. “Fine. What’s your plan?”
I took a breath to steady myself. My first priority was once again to leave this place, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.
“Did you find anything concerning me?”
Sanja gently took me by the arm and we started walking. She was right to do it; we had been standing too long in one place. My earlier feeling of being watched reestablished itself, and I struggled to remain calm and walk slowly. Too much had been happening and I was losing my focus; I needed to find a sanctuary where I could gather my thoughts, at least for a few hours.
“I was planning to look you up, but the Dure search took longer than I thought, and then I was afraid even mentioning your name might trip an alarm—especially if Jazil told the Nuum who you were.”
A wise move on her part. If sufficient time had passed that the Nuum had forgotten me—or at least stopped looking—then it would be the height of folly to risk alerting them to my renewed presence. And pursuant to her report, it hardly mattered in any event: If Farren met me, or heard of my return, he would have me killed on sight. I could not march up to Maire and declare myself any more than I could dive into a pool of man-eating sharks. I would have to approach her obliquely.
“Librarian, can you buy us two tickets to somewhere well away from here?”
“I’ve already purchased two tickets, one first class, one steerage, for Carthal, 523 miles to the south,” he answered smoothly. “From there you may obtain transport to any port in the world.”
“Wonderful. Now find us the nearest ticket broker. Sanja is going to buy us two more tickets, in cash, for somewhere in the opposite direction.”
She gave me a look of grudging respect. “Now you’re thinking like a fugitive.”
I smiled. “Oh, I have only just begun. I hope you like traveling, because we have a long way to go.”
Long enough, I hoped, either to lose whoever was tailing me—or confront him.
Chapter 8
Return to the City of the Apes
“You walked this?”
“At the time, I had little choice.”
Sanja returned to her incredulous examination of the jungle below—or rather, she abandoned her questions and continued watching the ground pass by, for even while she had been talking, her face had been glued to the window of our air-car. For all of her veneer of sophistication, the sheer mass of vegetation on display was so far outside of her imaginings as to overwhelm all other considerations. Even the ocean had not so completely entranced her.
“It’s just like the desert, except it moves differently,” she had explained. The jungle, apparently, moved in its own fashion, each piece going its own way.
As if reading my memories, the Librarian said, in his most pedantic tones: “The ocean has much more in common with this jungle than it does with the desert, despite your observations to the contrary, Sanja. The diversity of fauna in both cases is almost incalculable, albeit hidden below the surface. If you were able to see the animals beneath the leaf canopy, you would be amazed—and even more amazed that Keryl was able to survive down there.”
Somehow his words snagged her attention where mine had not. She turned to face him in the form of his professorial hologram.
“Really? There are a lot of desert animals that hide underneath the sand, you know. It’s not so different.”
“I met only one, and that was enough,” I said.
Sanja and the Librarian exchanged a sardonic glance. “And not even the worst,” she said. He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
One of the oldest games among comrades-in-arms is one-upmanship. I had seen it many times while men were huddled in the trenches of France. I did not intend to play it here.
“We should be getting close, should we not?” It had been twenty years; I had last traversed this area on foot, and for the last part of the journey I had been unconscious. But the Librarian had been active the entire time, if hidden in my pocket, and he knew exactly where I needed to go.
“Direct the skycar to land at the next clearing.” He looked out and down. “You may be walking, after all.”
I had no intention of walking. Despite Sanja’s confidence in the ferocity of subterranean desert predators, I had first-hand experience with creatures in this jungle that made a sandclaw look like a bunny rabbit.
“Landing” in a clearing was more akin to “making” a clearing, when all was said and done, but the skycars available for rental in this region had modifications that models in more civilized locales could not boast. Here, a low-powered laser cutter was more than a luxury; it proved essential, after the radar detected a large enough resting spot under the upper trees. After so long in the air—and so long on the run—it felt good, after cutting the engines, simply to sit and enjoy the silence. Outside, I knew the animals would have gone to ground upon our noisy advent, but soon they would resume the cacophony of cries, hisses, calls, roars, and screams that marked daily existence in this place. For now, however, the audio pickups heard nothing, and this warm, verdant garden was a true Paradise.
I was quiet for several minutes, taking in the peace, letting my body relax. Sanja was quiet, too—because she was totally in shock. Her eyes darted everywhere, taking in every detail she could see through the front viewport, then dashing from side to side, craning her neck at an angle attainable only to the very young. I let her be, unable to comprehend how gloriously alien must this landscape be to her, but I had to break the spell when she at last pushed up against the exit panel.
“Stop!” I shouted, at a volume that surprised me, and only afterward did I realize that the Librarian had issued the same peremptory command, only using greater force. Sanja froze, her eyes staring wide at us, like a child caught with at forbidden play.
I rose and took her arm gently, leading her back to her seat. “You have no idea what is waiting out there.”
She had the grace to frown and lower her head in shame. “I’m sorry. I acted like a child her first time outside of her mother’s tent. You’d think I’d know better.” Then she looked up and smiled. “Kind of like the way you were when I found you.”
Hmm. “Point taken. So now we are even. Don’t worry, you will get to go outside. But we are waiting for somebody.”
The resultant, “We are?” came from both of them.
“How far is it, by the way?” I asked the Librarian. “There are more than a few mountains around here.”
“It’s actually less than a thousand yards to the entrance they took you through the first day,” the Librarian said. “They have apparently made good use of the last twenty years in hiding themselves.”
/> “‘They’?” Sanja echoed. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“Some friends of mine. They live in an underground city.” I was being vague on purpose; not because I didn’t trust her, but because some secrets were not mine to tell, and I had already disclosed more than I would have had I possessed another option. “I am hoping that one of them can tell me about Maire, and what happened after I left.”
“Great! So let’s go. The Librarian can lead us there.”
“Soon. I have to ask you a favor first.”
“Oh. So? What do you want me to do?”
It was my turn to smile. “I want you to put up your shields.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I want you to put up your shields. We could never have approached this close to Tehana City without them knowing, and we probably activated a dozen defenses that are just waiting for us to do something before going off. But if I know my friends, they will have sent out a scouting party, too, just in case we really are only lost. In a minute, if no one shows up, I am going to start mentally shouting my own name as loudly as I can. With any luck, my friends will hear it. But I would rather not be rude.”
Sanja assumed a look shared by all adolescents who believe adults are simultaneously simple-minded and inclined to over-complication, but after a second she nodded that she was ready.
Although I had no reason to believe it would matter, I faced the windshield, opened my mind, and silently projected “Keryl Clee! Keryl Clee!” into the ether, over and over again. I stopped after a full minute. If no one had “heard” me by then, I was wasting my time.
“And now we wait.”
Time trod on feet of stone, one ponderous moment following in another’s footprints. Sanja had returned to watching the scenery, more fascinated than ever when the animals began to emerge stealthily from the bushes and the raucous life of the jungle reasserted itself, but I could tell that the delay was rubbing her nerves with sandpaper. For me, I retreated within myself, afraid that something had happened in the last twenty years, that the Timash and his fellows had moved, or been found by the Nuum—and yet equally afraid that Timash might appear, holding the answers to many questions that perhaps I did not really want answered.
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