by Martha Wells
“Why would Raksura attack Imperial Kish?” Gathin asked suddenly.
Moon managed not to hiss, though he could feel the muscles in his throat work. “Raksura wouldn’t, because they’re completely indifferent to its existence.”
Ceilinel’s brows quirked. Gathin glanced at Doyen, then asked Moon, “You don’t trade with other species?”
“Only some of the swamplings who live in the Reaches.”
Doyen turned to Ceilinel to ask, “And what did the Raksura gain from this encounter with the Hians?”
Moon answered, “Nothing. We were trying to keep ourselves and the groundlings with us alive. We didn’t completely succeed.” Song. Magrim and Kellimdar and the other Jandera. Kethel. Hopefully not Callumkal, since it sounded as if he was the only one whose word the Kish would take. Doyen clearly didn’t believe Moon.
“What do you want?” Gathin asked.
“I want to go back to my family.” Moon was getting tired of stupid questions. “Why do you care?”
Ceilinel said, “Gathin will be your speaker in the conclave.”
Moon stared at her. “You’re joking.”
Gathin looked offended. Ceilinel said, “She is pledged to uncover the truth for the conclave.”
It was funny that they thought he was naive enough to believe that. “Is anybody uncovering the truth from the Hians? Are they locked up somewhere?”
Ceilinel turned to Doyen, who looked away. Gathin lifted a hand and said, “No, but they are members of the Imperial Agreement.”
Moon didn’t know what that meant, except that no one was going to believe his side of the story, no matter how well a speaker told it. He got up to go back to his cell.
He had passed through the doorway, and Doyen clearly thought he was out of earshot, when it said, “He should be restrained, Ceilinel. If he kills you all, you will be to blame.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Moon waited for armed groundlings to show up and drag him away to a more secure cage, or possibly just to chain him up here. But no one came, and eventually he fell asleep.
He slept off and on through the night, waking in the late morning to the scent of more food in the outer room. After he ate, he took the Kish history book and left his cell to explore some more.
He avoided the chambers on the upper level where the faint sounds of movement and voices indicated that Ceilinel and at least two or three other groundlings were present. The wind had changed direction, so he found a lattice window on the opposite side of the tower from the gallery, and attached another piece of bandage to an unobtrusive spot. Moon didn’t know if it was possible to trace a Raksura by scent in a groundling city this size, even with the help of cloth soaked with sweat and piss. But he knew how acute Stone’s senses could be. If Stone was still alive.
He found a sitting room with latticed windows looking out onto the market structure. Beyond it was a canyon formed by domed buildings lining what seemed to be a major street. The room had cushioned benches and couches centered around another shallow floor pool, but Moon carried a cushion over and took a seat in the corner of the wide windowsill.
As the afternoon light deepened across the city, Moon slept off and on, and read the book while keeping an eye on the bridges and walkways. Large numbers of people came and went from the market. He couldn’t see much of the inside, just occasional glimpses of bolts of gleaming fabric or tall urns and large pieces of pottery.
He tried to keep his attention on the book, tried not to think about where the others were or what might be happening in the Reaches. There were no maps in the text, but there was a description of the principal cities of Kish and their relations with each other, which told him where Kish-Karad was well enough to plan a rough route back to the Reaches, if he had to escape on his own. Or if Ceilinel kept her word and released him.
Finally the sunset washed the domes with gold, and lights began to gleam on the streets and bridges. The hanging bronze lamps in the room and the attached hall began to glow. During the day at least three groundlings had come to the door to peer at him and then retreat, probably to report to Ceilinel. The next one who came was Vata, and she said, “Ah, excuse me, but Ceilinel has asked to speak to you.”
Moon sat up and folded the book back into its cover, taking one last glance out at the market. This time his eye was caught by a stillness in the river of movement on the walkway along the lowest level. A lone figure stood in a patch of fading sunlight, a tall shape in the kind of loose robe groundling traders from the southern drylands wore. The scarf wrapped around its head was a gold pattern, very like the one Niran wore to protect his hair on the wind-ship. Most groundlings sitting where Moon was wouldn’t be able to see that much detail at this distance, and the figure standing there shouldn’t be able to see Moon.
Moon set the book on the bench and pushed to his feet, as flushed and weak as when he had woken the first time. Hope was painful. He might be mistaken or hallucinating. He had seen more groundlings of different species stroll along that walkway this afternoon than he had ever seen in one place in his entire life; some of them were bound to be the size of an Aeriat and wear head scarfs like the Golden Islanders. It might actually be an unusually tall Golden Islander.
He took a deep breath, got his expression under control, and pushed away from the window to go to Ceilinel.
Vata led him to a room off the upper level gallery, where another groundling was helping Ceilinel into a robe with a lot more brocade than the one she had been wearing before. Ceilinel sent that groundling away and turned to a polished metal mirror to brush back her feathery hair. She said, “I’ve been called to the speakers’ assembly and it will be better if you come with me. If the Hians present any claims tonight, Gathin may need to ask you more questions.”
Moon hesitated, most of his attention still focused on that waiting figure near the market. Maybe leaving the house right now, giving himself another chance to be seen, wasn’t a bad idea. “So you believe me?”
“My duty in this dispute is to find out the truth of what happened and I intend to do that.” She turned and gestured at him. “Is it acceptable to your people for you to appear in public like this?”
Moon looked down at himself. He was dressed about the same as some of the other groundlings in the house, so it didn’t worry him. She wanted the truth, so he said, “My people will be so furious at a consort being held prisoner by groundlings that it really doesn’t matter what I’m wearing.”
Ceilinel’s brows twitched in a way he wanted to interpret as annoyance. “Well, I’ll deal with that when—”
Moon lost the rest. A cry of pain and a crash of wood and metal sounded from somewhere below the house. He tilted his head, turning toward the noise, and tasted the air. “Something’s happened.”
Ceilinel and Vata stared at him. They clearly hadn’t heard it. Ceilinel demanded, “What is it?”
The draft had just changed. A door had opened somewhere. And the air carried a metallic taint. That was Stone, he’s breaking into the house . . . Except that didn’t make sense. If that was Stone, he had seen Moon sitting in a window reading. He would have waited until deep in the night and then tried to get close enough to speak to him. There was no point in attacking a place Moon might have been able to walk out of on his own. Unless Jade was with him and she was just that mad . . .
Then he caught the acrid scent of a Kish fire weapon. He snarled and ducked out of the room to the gallery. The big chamber below was empty but just beyond it he heard cries of alarm and the roar of more than one fire weapon.
Ceilinel and Vata ran to the railing beside him. From their reaction, this time they heard the screams. “It’s the Hians,” Moon told Ceilinel. The Hians who were so determined to conceal their part in the deaths outside Kedmar, who knew there was a surviving Raksura to be dealt with. “Unless you can fight them with magic, you have to let me shift.”
Ceilinel snapped, “Vata, run, hide.” As Vata darted away along the gallery, she told M
oon, “Follow her. She can show you a place to—”
Moon said again, “You need to let me shift or they’ll kill us both.” He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. The idea of being burned by one of those weapons again was a cold lump of fear inside his chest.
Impatiently, she said, “They wouldn’t dare—”
Wooden disks struck the balustrade. Moon grabbed Ceilinel’s arm and dragged her with him as he flung himself back against the wall. She cried out and Moon managed not to yelp as the burst of heat and flame washed over the stone railing. “That was aimed at you,” he snarled. “Now do you believe—”
Ceilinel tugged at a cord around her neck and pulled it out from under her collar. It supported a small stone, polished to a dull red. Looking at it seemed to still the air around Moon, as if the little object took up all the open space in the chamber. She snapped the cord and dropped the stone on the floor, then stamped on it.
Moon felt the block around him dissolve, like chains that had suddenly fallen away. He shifted, wrapped an arm around Ceilinel’s waist, and leapt up to cling to the side of the nearest column. She didn’t shriek but he felt her body go rigid with fear. “Hold on to the ridge above my collarbone,” he told her. He scanned the chamber below and marked the location of the Hians scattered there. At least half were armed, and three had seen Moon’s leap and angled their fire weapons up at him. Her fingers wrapped around his collar flanges and Moon leapt, timing it so the wooden disks struck the pillar just as he left it.
He caught the chain of the big hanging lamp, swung to the balustrade on the far side. He let go just as a crack told him the base had ripped out of the stone ceiling. It brought half the mosaic tiles down in a crash as Moon bounded along the balustrade. Ceilinel gasped, “The stairwell, the one on the western side.”
The Hians not staggered under the onslaught of falling tile ran to this side of the chamber to aim at Moon. Two bolted up the curving stairs to the gallery to cut him off. He flipped over the balustrade, bounced off a column, and landed at the base of a pillar on the opposite side. As the Hians spun to aim their weapons, Moon dodged around the pillar and raced down the corridor.
Moon had been through here earlier and didn’t need Ceilinel’s whispered directions as he ducked through rooms to a corridor in the outer section of the dome. A heavy metal gate blocked the large stairwell but Ceilinel pressed her hand to the lock and it sprang open. Moon leapt down the stairs to the next landing. From there he saw a wide hall opening into a dimly lit tile-floored space. He couldn’t hear any movement down there, and the scents were dry and clean, free of the acrid fire weapon moss. He asked Ceilinel, “Where does this go?”
“The colloquium archives.” Her voice was breathy with fear and he could feel her pulse pounding through her body, but she kept a firm grip on his collar flange.
Moon leapt down to the bottom of the stairs. As he landed he staggered and half-collapsed against the wall to steady himself. Ceilinel let go of him and stumbled away. He thought she might run; they still didn’t have much reason to trust each other, or at least Moon didn’t trust her. But Ceilinel cast a worried glance up the stairs, and whispered, “Are you all right?”
Moon looked down at his chest. Blood leaked between his black scales, the delicate new skin underneath torn by too-quick movement. His legs felt weak and unsteady, his wings as heavy as if he had been flying all day and night. What he wanted to do was shift to groundling and lie flat on the cool tile floor, but that wasn’t an option right now. “Where’s the nearest way out?” This was a junction with five archways leading to large dark hallways. He wasn’t scenting any outdoor air, which was worrisome.
“This way, the public entrance. It’s our best chance.” Ceilinel started toward an archway and Moon shoved off the wall to follow. She added, “They must have come through the private entrance, on the side facing the reservoir. They couldn’t walk up to the public entrance carrying weapons without causing alarm.”
Past the archway the light was just bright enough to ruin Moon’s night vision. It came from little bronze globes mounted on tall stone shelves that held wooden boxes. From the dry weedy scent in the air, Moon guessed the boxes contained Kishan books. A narrow stream of water ran down a channel in the floor, and Moon kept his foot claws retracted so they wouldn’t click on the tiles. It would have been faster and safer to carry Ceilinel and jump from the top of one row of shelves to the next across the chamber. Or better yet, from the heavy stone supports and arches dimly visible in the shadow above. But Moon’s side and chest ached and he could feel the skin under his scales tear and strain. He needed to conserve what strength he had left.
Ceilinel muttered, “They must be idiots to think killing either of us will help their case. It’s just going to make the conclave certain the Hians are at fault.” She hesitated at another junction, then turned right, and Moon realized this lower part of the dome was much larger than the upper section that Ceilinel lived in. She added, “Unless that’s what they want. But why . . .”
She let the question trail off, clearly talking to herself more than him. But she was assuming the Hians were all in this plan together, and Moon knew that probably wasn’t true. “When we caught up with the Hians who took the weapon, most of them were dead, killed by a faction on their own flying boat.”
Startled, Ceilinel stopped and turned to him. “What? You said nothing of this.”
Moon nudged her to keep moving. “You didn’t ask.”
She continued on toward the end of the hall. “What were these factions?” she asked urgently.
“Vendoin was the one who stole Callumkal and the others. It was her plan to get the weapon. She wanted to kill Fell, mostly, and didn’t care if some Jandera died. She wanted the Hians to be able to go back to Hia Majora. Lavinat led the other faction. She didn’t care as much about killing the Fell as killing Jandera. Then Vendoin realized it was going to kill Jandera and Hians and every other species descended from the foundation builders. We think she started to change her mind. So Lavinat stole the weapon from her and killed half the Hian crew. Lavinat was the one who took it to the ruin and made it work.” They reached a wide cross hall and Moon caught Ceilinel’s arm to stop her. He tasted the air and took a careful peek up and down. “Which way?”
“There.” Ceilinel pointed to another hall that branched off the main one. In that direction, over the tops of the endless shelves, Moon detected a glow of brighter light. “How do you know this?”
“I was there. I tried to stop Lavinat and she burned me with a fire weapon. I don’t know what happened after that.” Moon’s throat went tight, thinking about that moment and who might and might not have survived it. If that wasn’t Stone he had glimpsed near the market . . .” There were other Raksura there. They must have made the ruin fall, trying to stop the weapon.”
Ceilinel whispered furiously, “Why didn’t you tell me this? If you had—”
“Would you have believed me? Gathin’s supposed to speak for me and she doesn’t even think I’m a person!”
She didn’t answer, and by the time they reached the end of another hall, he thought the conversation was over. He heard the faint sound of running footsteps, maybe the creak of a door opening, but from the echoes they were some distance away. Then Ceilinel admitted, “I don’t know if I would have believed you.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so didn’t say anything. She added, “This Lavinat, did she care if she survived? Or those with her?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t even know if they thought about it.”
Ceilinel made a distracted gesture as she considered it. “So . . . The point of this attack is not that you and I are killed, it’s that we are killed by Hians.”
She was probably right. Some Hians wanted the Jandera to attack them, either so they would have an excuse to fight or for some other less apparent reason. Other Hians didn’t. Killing an important Kishan like Ceilinel might force a violent response from Kish-Karad and the Ja
ndera in Kedmar and take the choice away from the other Hians.
They had been drawing closer to the area where the sunset tinge of natural light still shone. The hall opened out onto a broad balcony, with a wide stair leading down to a chamber below. Three big windows, all sealed with faceted crystal, stretched up the far wall, allowing in the last of the day’s sunlight. The water channels ran out from the halls of shelves to become miniature waterfalls at the balcony’s edge. The falling water sound covered small movements. Ceilinel lowered her voice even more, saying, “The public entrance is down there.”
Moon caught the scent of outdoor air. “There’s a door open.” The Hians must have gotten here first.
“The main doors are kept propped open. It’s symbolic, so anyone can enter the archives at any time.”
The Hians still might have gotten here first. Moon held out an arm to Ceilinel. “We’ll go fast.” All he wanted to do was curl up in a corner and collapse. Just get outside, leave her where she can get help, and find a place to hide, he promised himself.
Ceilinel reached for his hand, then her face went still. “Someone’s performing an arcana.”
Moon hissed, thinking of the collapse that had blocked the shaft down into the docking structure. “Watch out for these arches. The Hians could bring them down and trap us in here.”
Ceilinel turned to stare at him. “Hians don’t have that kind of arcanic ability.”
Moon snorted. “Hians lie a lot.”
Something cracked overhead, a deep ominous reverberation. Moon grabbed Ceilinel around the waist and bounced to the balustrade. Below he caught a quick glimpse of the big foyer at the bottom of the stairs, the large oblong fountain pools to either side, and the heavy chased metal doors standing open just enough for a broad-shouldered groundling to step through. Someone shouted and just as Moon leapt the air moved around him, pushed by the sudden force of a heavy object’s plunge. He twisted to avoid it and knew he was about to fall badly.
