Trader's Leap (Liaden Universe Book 23)

by Sharon Lee

  She looked to Lina.

  “Unless there is a reason that Healer Faaldom does not wish them Healed?”

  “Truth told, Healer, I was not certain that I might not exacerbate the situation. Healer yos’Galan and I are entangled on many levels. This is why I wished the assessment of another Healer.”

  “Prudent,” murmured Healer Ferin. “Of course, you would wish to be certain that you did no harm.”

  “Do you,” Lina said, “feel that these may be addressed, without risk?”

  Healer Ferin pursed her lips.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “that they may be addressed with minimal risk. Healer yos’Galan is perhaps not as robust as you would like, but there is a strong possibility that these minor wounds are leaching energy needed for a full recovery.”

  “Shan?” Lina said. “What would you?”

  “I am willing to accept a Healing of those injuries which Healer Ferin mentions as obstacles to my return to full function.”

  “Understand me,” Healer Ferin said, her disgust of him entirely obvious. “You still look to a long convalescence before your full Sight is returned.”

  “I understand,” he assured her.

  There was a small silence while the Healer collected herself, and managed to ask her next, necessary question.

  “May I give you relief, Healer yos’Galan?” she said, coldly formal.

  It would have been prudent to agree, but he shivered, the toothy beginnings of panic clawing at his throat . . .

  “Softly,” murmured Lina, and he felt her hand on his, warm and pressing gently.

  “I will not insist,” Healer Ferin said, her tone austere. “There are two Healers present, after all. Perhaps, Healer Faaldom, he will allow your touch.”

  “Shan?” she murmured.

  Gritting his teeth, he managed to step aside from the panic, and looked into Lina’s eyes.

  “Of your goodness, old friend.”

  There was a swirl, as of mist; the merest glimpse of Healspace. He breathed in, tasting cedar and vanilla, felt a brief bright pain—and the welcome chill of relief.

  The room solidified around him, and Healer Ferin, too, her eyes hard.

  “It is done,” said Lina.

  “And done well,” Healer Ferin said, sounding neither pleased nor impressed.

  “Healer yos’Galan, may I continue my inspection?”

  He took a breath and met her hard gaze with what frankness he could muster.

  “Of your goodness, Healer. Allow me to express my gratitude for your keen Sight and your patience.”

  That failed to win her, though it did demonstrate that he had some passing acquaintance with proper behavior. She inclined her head and said coldly, “We continue.”

  Shan relaxed, deliberately, and turned his eyes aside, looking over the Healer’s shoulders and focusing on the artwork framed on the wall behind her.

  The painting was well-suited for his purpose, so well-suited that it must have been placed there precisely to distract those under examination. Yet the Healer had not directed his attention to it.

  Possibly, she had been put off her stride; she had complained of being half-blinded by the rather extravagant display that was Padi. She might simply have for—

  “Ah!”

  An electric thrill focused his attention inward to a new scar, the area around it showing classic signs of emotional bruising.

  “What is this?” demanded Healer Ferin. “A link forcefully removed?”

  She was pressing on the bruise. He had no idea if she was doing it deliberately, to focus his attention, or if her own astonishment had again rendered her forgetful.

  Shan took a breath, and brushed her will with his, moving her off of the bruised area.

  “What!” she cried, and Shan met her eyes.

  “You were hurting me,” he said coolly, even as Lina began to speak.

  “The arrival of Emergent yos’Galan’s talent coincided with the event during which Healer yos’Galan was damaged. The first thing that met the Emergent’s full Sight was her father, depleted and bleeding energy. She instinctively reached out and created a conduit so that she might transfer some of her plentiful energies to him, for support and healing.”

  Healer Ferin’s shock and outrage sizzled across abused nerves. Shan thrust her back and slammed his shields shut. Beside him, Lina gasped, and he felt a spike of guilt that he had hurt her.

  Healer Ferin, however, seemed not to have felt the pain of his rejection, so exalted was her outrage.

  “She only reached out and smashed a hole in the wall of someone’s psyche—without asking permission, I apprehend!—and forced herself onto a wounded person? Has no one taught this girl anything? She might have done irreparable damage! She might have killed this Healer—her own father! In such a diminished state, without protection—”

  “I hardly needed protection from my own daughter,” Shan snapped. “She acted from the heart; there was no ill intent, nor—”

  Someone screamed.

  III

  “Now, Emergent yos’Galan, one has seen quite clearly that you are the bearer of a large and, forgive me, unruly talent.

  “Of course, we may none of us take credit for the nature or strength of our gifts. These things are as the gods, and genetics, will have them. We may, however, discipline ourselves, and show respect to our fellows. That is why the very first lesson taught an Emergent, no matter her strength or her station, is control.”

  “I had controlled my gift,” Padi said, as one would who was merely imparting information. She was reasonably certain that she did not sound sullen. “That technique very nearly proved fatal.”

  Actually, it had proved fatal, to two persons who had been trying to kill her, but that was surely a fact that Healer Osit did not need.

  Indeed, it may have been well not to have spoken at all. Healer Osit positively frowned at her.

  “If I have understood your attending Healer correctly, you had not controlled your gift so much as you had confined—even denied!—it. Our talents may not be denied, and they cannot be confined. They are, however, subject to discipline. Your gift is not your master; it is an additional aspect of yourself. As such, it is your responsibility to act with discipline, integrity, and respect with regard to your gift, as with all other aspects of your nature. Which brings us to the core of your problem, Emergent yos’Galan.”

  Padi arranged her face into the expression of faint good humor which, as a trader, she had found suited her character and her talents far better than Father’s look of affable stupidity. She said nothing, merely leaned forward slightly, as if breathless to hear what Healer Osit had to say . . .

  . . . which was not quite a sham. She did want to learn what this stranger thought the core of her problem was, with regard to her stupid so-called gift. While it seemed unlikely to her that this mediocre person was capable of insight beyond that available to Father, Lina, and Priscilla, it was true that she was new to his eyes. An irregularity familiar to, and passed over by, her intimates might be obvious to him.

  She waited.

  Healer Osit’s mouth pinched and he drew himself up, straight and stiff, directing a hard glance directly into her eyes.

  “You, Emergent yos’Galan, are spoilt.”

  She did not laugh. She was . . . reasonably certain that her face did not betray her.

  Healer Osit, however, had access to other senses, and he was impolite enough to use them.

  “You’re amused?” he asked icily.

  “Healer, I am,” she answered politely. There was clearly no point in lying.

  “And yet you have been much indulged. We will leave aside that you are a member of what was until very recently the Highest of the High Houses seated upon the homeworld. Not even the fall into clanless outcast has diminished your pride or your expectations that everything will go as you wish.”

  “I am not,” Padi said, when the Healer paused to take a breath, “clanless. Only the delm may dissolv
e a clan, and Korval has not done so. We are—” She held up a hand, forestalling the Healer when he would speak again—

  “We are banished from Liad, forbidden to trade or to settle any of our business or our blood there, but we remain Clan Korval.”

  The Healer’s eyes were angry, and his face was somewhat pale. He took a moment, and a visible breath.

  “We wander from our topic,” he said. “Which is that you have not learned to master yourself, or to regard the circumstances—or the persons—of those who are exposed to you.

  “Even in this matter of the arrival of your gift, you have been indulged. You have not been taught the most rudimentary lessons, nor have you been schooled in the respect that is owed your elders. You will be found much more pleasing to those elders who are constrained by their own gifts and oaths to train you, when you have mastered shielding. Why this was not taught you immediately, I cannot venture to say. I suppose it is possible that you are inept. But, in the case, Healer Faaldom ought to have shielded you.

  “Now, attend me. Open your Inner Eyes. Tell me what you See.”

  Padi bit her lip.

  Using her Inner Eyes made her dizzy, at best, and most of the time she didn’t know what she was looking at. Father—she had seen Father’s wounds clearly, and had known exactly what he had needed. But the patterns and other subtleties that Lina had several times asked her to view with her Inner Eyes might as well have been meaningless smears of spinning colors. She did not, however, explain this to Healer Osit, who, she felt certain, would merely have sneered at her for providing yet more proof that she was too spoilt to put her hand to hard work.

  “Well?”

  She closed her . . . well, her Outer Eyes, she supposed they were, and opened those Others.

  “I see an expanse of hull plate,” she said, and her heart quailed in her chest, recalling the room in which she had imprisoned the tentative beginnings of her gift. A room that she had, in her naivete, thought imaginary, and which she now was beginning to understand had existed in some reality available only to the new senses that had been forced upon her.

  “Very good. Observe it closely. This is what a shield looks like from the outside. I will now demonstrate what a shield feels like from the inside.”

  The hull plate ran, widened, and curved. Padi started back, but it followed her; a panicked glance showed that it was sweeping around, about to seal her inside, and—

  Padi pushed.

  Shields wide open, Shan threw himself against the closed door. What he might have done, had it been locked—but it opened, and he was through, into and past a wall of bitter cold, the air tasting of hull plate. He paused, rapidly Sorting through terror, anger, dismay—

  “Padi!”

  “Father!”

  She was there, she was safe. Dismayed and determined, but unharmed. He put a hand on her shoulder—

  The screaming had not abated.

  “Osit!” cried Healer Ferin, clearing the door belatedly. She stopped on the threshold, her hand clutching the front of her robe.

  Shan followed her horrified stare, found the younger Healer, his eyes wide and not so merry as previously, back flat against the wall directly across from Padi, arms and legs wide, all of him seemingly pinned firmly to the wall.

  He was, Shan calculated, about a meter off of the floor. Screaming. Well, and who could say that it was an overreaction, though he seemed in no imminent danger of falling.

  “You are,” Shan said sternly, “upsetting my daughter.”

  Healer Osit stopped screaming.

  “Thank you. Padi, what has happened here?”

  “Father, he was—it was a trap. He was going to, to enclose me, and I—” She swallowed and looked slightly shamefaced. “I pushed.”

  “And held, or so it appears.”

  “I don’t want him near me.”

  “Perfectly understandable. I wonder, are you able to release the Healer, if he will grant your safety, and promises not to attempt to entrap you again?”

  “I—” She hesitated, which was perhaps not as comforting to the Healer as one might wish, and whispered. “Yes. I—think so.”

  “Very well, then. Healer Osit!”

  “Sir?” the Healer answered faintly.

  “My daughter desires your good word as a Healer that you will not attempt to imprison her, should she release you to the floor and your own will.”

  “I give my word, Healers. I will attempt nothing.”

  “Excellent. Healer Ferin?”

  “Healer yos’Galan?” Her voice was ice cold. Shan felt the tremor of her fury in his bones.

  “My party and I are leaving. Pray grant us safe passage to the garden so that we may gather up our security and be gone.”

  “The House grants safe passage. The House, in fact, insists that you leave and never return.”

  “I believe that we have an accord. Lina?”

  “I am here, Shan, unthreatened and ready to leave as soon as our arrangements are fixed.”

  “Excellent. Padi, please release Healer Osit from your displeasure. Do try to release him gently.”

  She swallowed, and nodded, and he saw her hands, which were fisted at her sides, begin to relax. Across the room, Healer Osit slid slowly down the wall.

  The fact that he did not land on his feet was due entirely to his own lack of coordination, in Shan’s estimation. That was understandable, as his nerves appeared to be entirely in disarray. He sat on the floor, tears running down his cheeks. His colleague went to him and knelt at his side.

  “We go,” Shan said, and took Padi’s hand, pulling her with him toward the hallway.

  Lina led the way to the front door, which was opened by a wide-eyed doorkeeper, and out into the front yard. Dil Nem and Karna were just rounding the corner of the building, and the five of them exited via the gate, Karna hurrying ahead to the curb, to wave down the approaching omnibus.

  Off-Grid

  * * *

  “Great Ones?” said Kencia afrinBorer. “Our poor aunt grows weary in her bondage. There are no gods.”

  Tekelia looked at him with sudden interest. Kencia’s talent was chaotic in the extreme, to the point where it was best to scrutinize any odd utterance closely.

  “Who,” Tekelia asked, “said anything of gods?”

  Kencia frowned.

  “I . . . did I say gods?”

  “You said gods,” Tekelia assured him. “What vaulted you to that opinion?”

  Kencia held up his hands. “The words came out of my mouth, Cousin. Chaos speaking, I fear it.”

  “And yet it makes a certain sense,” Emit torikSelter said in her turn. “If we posit those who are more powerful even than the dramliz, what can we have but gods?” She moved her shoulders. “Small gods, perhaps, but surely that is the next step?”

  “Being gods—even small ones—what can they want from such as us?” Kencia said. “No, it’s as I’ve said, our aunt is in need of a rest. The Civilized push her too hard, and she’s become confused.”

  There was great respect for the Oracle among the Haosa. She was, after all, one of them—a chaotic talent who dealt directly with the ambient field. There was also anger among the Haosa on behalf of the Oracle, imprisoned by Civilization and put to use for its benefit. The Oracle belonged with them, that was the feeling among the Haosa, who felt a fondness for the idea of the Oracle, though most had never seen her, though she did join their celebrations and deliberations from time to time, in spirit, when the ambient favored them.

  “My notion,” Tekelia said carefully, “is that these Great Ones are the Reaver masters, and the service they will require from us is the return of their slaves.”

  There was a small silence.

  “There is some weight there,” murmured Emit, who had Sight of a sort which made Civilization uneasy. A Seer ought not, said the rule-bound Civilized, be able to judge the most likely future by weighing the lines of probability. “The question then comes: How do we answer?”

&nbs
p; “I think the truth must be our best answer,” Banedra said. “They died—and not at our hands. Surely, even Great Ones—gods or not-gods—must accept that mortal creatures die. The ambient will attest our innocence.”

  There was some murmuring at that, for the slaughter of Reavers had been discussed by the Haosa, who had supported employing other options—first. The ambient could not . . . always . . . be counted upon to differentiate between idea and action.

  “Our innocence would be a deal more obvious if we could demonstrate a likely cause of their deaths,” Tekelia murmured and held up a hand. “Whereupon we have my question, which I had placed before the ambient during our last dance, to resounding silence—”

  Tekelia looked ’round at what Civilization understood to be the governing body of the Haosa—counselors, they called themselves, for they both gave and took counsel. They did not, however, govern. Haosa associated governance with Civilization, and Haosa were, at best, scornful of the Civilization which had determined that they were both dangerous and dismissible.

  Until such a riddle as the Reavers arose, and the Warden called upon the Haosa to stand up as Civilization’s champions.

  The irony of this escaped none of the Haosa.

  However . . .

  “My question,” Tekelia said now, “is very simple, Cousins. It is only, why did the Reavers die?”

  Maradel arnFaelir, who was a medic and a Healer, leaned forward.

  “They died of a massive shock to their autonomic systems,” she said. “The signs were very clear upon those I examined.” She moved her hand, rocking it back and forth slightly. “I did not examine all of them, but every Reaver I did examine had died of shock. We are, I think, within our rights, and the realm of what is reasonable, to assume that all fell thus.”

  She frowned at Tekelia. “I told you this.”

  “You did,” Tekelia agreed. “I have perhaps phrased my question clumsily, and therefore earned the ambient’s rebuff during our last dance. What I mean to ask is why did they die here? How could they have died here, Cousins—particularly here—where the ambient informs and supports us all?”