Huddled in the far corner was a shapeless thing. Dark eyes with faint glints of red in their depths stared at him. He lifted his hand to shine more light on it. It gasped and flinched back. An arm flung out, and he saw a narrow face blurred with fear. Dark hair tumbled down over one shoulder, and Asan relaxed slightly. Whoever she was, she posed him no threat.
The whimper came again, louder this time, strengthening into a wail. Asan frowned. A…a baby?
“Who are you?” he asked, taking a step forward.
At once the woman pushed a small bundle of soft fur robes from her lap and scuttled away from it to the most distant corner. Asan stopped, staring first at one and then the other. Finally he walked over to the baby, stooped, and picked it up.
A flap of the robes fell back, and there was the infant’s face, tiny and wrinkled from recent birth. Large eyes tinged yde blue stared up at him. He felt a tug at his mind as though this little one sought to order him to her bidding. He brushed the command aside and felt a harder push against his rings.
No, he said firmly, less amused this time. You may ask to share my mind, but you will not demand it.
Cirthe! I am Cirthe! shouted the infant at him. The shrillness of her tiny patterns made him wince. Where is the other? Where is the one who has made me complete?
Involuntarily he glanced at the woman. His nostrils detected the same scent from her as upon the baby. But she wasn’t who Cirthe wanted.
Puzzled, Asan felt the baby twist restlessly in his arms, kicking her feet against the coverings. There was an oddness to her, something not quite as it should be.
Cirthe, he said.
Where is she? I hunger. Aural, I hunger!
Asan fought the urge to push Cirthe aside as the woman had done. Instead, he touched her tiny forehead with his fingertips and made her sleep. Then he laid her gently down although the floor was no place for an infant. But there was no furniture of any kind.
He stared down at Cirthe, troubled. Was there no end to Aural’s atrocities? She had warped this child at some point before her birth. He could detect the deformed rings that only yde caused. Cirthe was strong for a baby so young. She would soon be dangerous.
He frowned and turned his attention to Cirthe’s mother. Was this also one of Aural’s monsters? What could produce such a child?
“Who are you?”
His voice, loud and angry, boomed off the walls. The woman stifled a cry and lifted her hands as though to ward him off. Asan paused, then approached her warily. Normally a person’s rings formed shifting circles and patterns. But the woman’s were flat against her as though unused. He tried to look upon her with truth, and she cried out again. He gained only confused impressions of pain and fear. He stopped, the dim light spanning the distance between them.
She held her cloak across her face so that only her eyes showed. He could hear the raggedness of her breathing. One ungloved fist was clenched hard at her side.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Tell me your name.”
For a moment she did not move, then she rose up suddenly on her knees. “They called you leiil! I heard them! You are Asan the usurper!”
“I am Asan.”
She hissed. “Henan dung! You killed Hihuan, my husband, and now you seek to depose his rightful heir.”
Asan blinked, and for an instant the light almost flickered out. “Cirthe?”
The woman cried out. “She has shared her rings with you? Am I to be the only one locked in silence? Did I not struggle to bear her living into the world? Why am I treated as a below caste—”
“Be glad you haven’t shared her rings,” said Asan grimly. “She has the yde madness. And if you let Aural complete her rings, you are a fool.”
“What choice had I, brought here against my will?”
Climbing to her feet, the woman let her cloak fall open, and for the first time he could see her face clearly.
She was beautiful. The breadth of her forehead, the high curve of her cheekbones, the petulant fullness of her mouth, all spoke of the best house lineages. Her skin was smooth and flawless, proclaiming that all her life she had lived well sheltered from the outdoors. She was tiny; the top of her head came barely to his chest. Her figure, what little of it showed beneath robes and cloak, was ripe with curves and enticing hollows.
For the first time since Giaa’s death, a sensation of warmth loosened the knot of bitterness within his heart. He felt his blood quicken, and his senses curled about him in an appreciation he did not attempt to hide.
Her hands, plump and adorned with rings, reached for the cloak to veil herself again, then her chin lifted and she faced him with hauteur.
“I am Zaula, the Tsla leiis,” she said. “You stare at me in violation of true Tlar courtesy. You are a savage, no matter how many titles you wear, and your barbaric manners proclaim it.”
It was difficult to hold back his amusement. “A Tlar leiil may gaze upon the face of any woman in his court, no matter how high her rank.”
“You aren’t Tlar leiil!” she shouted. “Cirthe is keeper of the blood. You are—”
“Chi’ka.”
Alerted to something in the distance, he tensed and moved to the door of the cell.
“I am not a slave, to be addressed in the tongue of heathen Bban’n—”
“Silence.”
He pressed himself against the door and let his rings eddy upward through the mass of stone over them. No sounds…the distance was too far. But a sense of approach…yes!
He whirled to face Zaula. “There is no more safety here. Someone is coming.”
“Dame Agate,” she said. “At least she knows the proper way of—”
“Dame Agate is as much my enemy as anyone else.”
Zaula lifted her chin so that her black hair spilled back over her shoulders. “She is my friend. She rescued me from Aural.”
Asan grunted, unimpressed. Dame Agate had done the same for him, not that it meant anything.
“Stop fighting for the rights of Cirthe,” he said. “She does not carry the true line. She must never mate.”
“She is my child!”
“Then why do you fear her?”
He let the silence spread between them a moment, then he extended his hand. “Come. Let’s get out of here.”
She looked bewildered. “We can’t seizert. Cirthe is too young.”
“I don’t intend to take Cirthe anywhere.”
He reached out and grasped Zaula’s arm, but with a jerk she twisted free.
“I won’t leave her! She is my—”
“No, Zaula, she is Aural’s. You know that. If you have any sense at all you know that.”
Zaula turned away with a moan of grief.
Torn between sympathy and the urgent sense of time running out, Asan watched her bend and pick up the child.
Leave her, part of him said. She isn’t worth it. Get out now while there is still a chance.
“Zaula,” he said. “Come. I’m leaving Ruantl. It’s your chance to escape this place once and for all. You could live where it is safe to be outdoors—”
“Liar! There is no such place. The Ways of Beyond are lost. You are an evil imposter who has come here and destroyed us. You took Anthi’s favor from us. You have left us at the mercy of the savages. Why don’t you seek out Aural and take her with you? She is of your kind. Go and leave us to the invaders!”
He wanted to shake sense into her, but there wasn’t time. He could hear the scrape of footsteps now. The rhythm wasn’t Tlar, the footsteps were too quick, indicating the strides of shorter legs, human legs. He drew in a deep breath, dragging his rings together, and seizerted.
He aimed for the upper tunnels, but instead he got no farther than the opposite wall of the cavern. He materialized, staggered, and bumped his shoulder into the wall to catch himself. All right then, he thought grimly. Shorter jumps.
But he was too light-headed from hunger. That tiny ache in the back of his skull became a pounding. His rings splinte
red around him, refusing to form. He glanced over his shoulder at the shadowy corpse that had been Saar. The pon had been right; he was too weak to reach the Spitfire.
Get out of here and hide, he told himself, hurrying around the circumference of the cavern in an effort to find an exit tunnel. He stumbled in the dark, seeking to realign his bearings. His fingertips were bleeding from being scraped along the rough stone wall. He curled them into his palm. Blood was too easy a scent to follow.
But humans didn’t rely on their noses. He must be registering on their hand-sensors now. Get out of here!
He saw the light first. Tightly focused beams speared the darkness, swinging up and around as the men clattered down the tunnel. Feeble though it was, the illumination showed him a slit in the wall ahead. He ran for it and was one stride short when the entire cavern blazed with light and someone shouted, “Get him!”
Sweet Demos, be kind, he prayed, launching himself in a dive. With all his remaining strength, he formed a wavering force field. The familiar sound of strifer fire filled the air as Asan’s hands grasped the lip of the tunnel. Seizert, tuck, and roll into it, he told himself.
But something slammed into him, stopping his impetus as though he had no force field at all. He grunted at the impact, biting his tongue as he hit the wall and fell. All the air felt jolted from his lungs. He struggled, but suddenly his arms and legs seemed to belong to someone else, jerking spasmodically and tingling with prickles of fire. He opened his mouth, gasping with the certainty that he was going to be sick, yet nothing happened except a deepening, all-pervading misery that was the by-product of a strifer stun.
The thunder of running feet filled his hearing. He heard high-pitched voices calling out to each other in excited Standard.
“What the hell was that piece of flin doing, flying?”
“Careful there, men. Stand back from him. Make sure he’s unarmed.”
Human laughter. “Ah, Demos, captain. He’s jammed up nice and tight. Caughton hit him broadside.”
Asan jerked although his body didn’t move. With all his might he strained to turn his head just a fraction so he could see the face of the human captain. This was the very man he needed. But his head wouldn’t budge. He gasped and gave up as fresh nausea rolled over him. Instead, he concentrated on the tonal structure of the captain’s voice and his mental patterns, such as they were.
For the first time since taking on this body, Asan wished he hadn’t deactivated Anthi. He needed her now to amplify his powers. If he could just speak one word, he could make the ceiling of this cavern come tumbling down enough to scatter the humans. But the paralysis had his throat too. He closed his eyes.
“That’s right, fellow.” A hand touched his numbed shoulder. It felt like being tapped with a block of wood. “Just take it easy. The stun will wear off quicker that way.”
Desperation filled Asan. This might be his only chance to probe the captain’s mind.
Captain…he began.
No! Aural’s rings cut across his. Do not touch his mind, Asan. You have lost this battle. Ruantl is mine.
Furious, Asan snapped his rings flat, refusing to share thoughts with her. Unable to see anything more than the dusty bits of rubble inches from his face, he listened to the rustling of her robes and the whisper of her slippered feet as she joined the humans.
“This is the man you seek, Captain McKey,” she said, her voice filled with triumph. “He can tell you where to find Blaise Omari.”
“Thank you. Men, get him up to the ship.”
“No!” Asan wanted to shout. “No!”
But he was helpless, a frozen lump as they hauled him upright and slung him over the shoulders of two men.
“Big ole thing, ain’t he?” said one.
The other one laughed as he snapped down the holster flap on his strifer. “He won’t be after, they whittle him down for a while in the TANK.”
“Watch your backs, men,” said McKey. “None of these people are to be trusted.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Asan was carried away, he saw Aural and McKey smile at each other.
“Well done, captain,” she said, spinning her translator on its cord so that it glittered in the light. “This almost makes up for your earlier tricks against me.”
McKey grunted, his smile fading. “As I’ve explained already, I’m a military man, not a diplomat. I saw fit to take this citadel and, by God, I did. Being momentarily stunned hurt you no more than it will this man.”
Inside, Asan grinned. Are you sure you want to play with humans, Aural? he taunted. Aren’t you afraid your human catalyst will come back to haunt you?
She whirled sharply, her face drawn tight with fury, and lifted both arms as though to strike fire at him. But the humans were busy maneuvering Asan into the tunnel, one lifting and the other boosting. He steeled himself, but she did not strike. Nor did she attempt to share rings with him.
“There is another prisoner down here for you, captain,” she said instead. “A woman whom I’m sure has knowledge of Saunders’ whereabouts. You should question them ruthlessly. We of the Tlar race are a stubborn people. We don’t break easily.”
In the main levels of the citadel, Asan expected the soldiers to take him outside immediately. Instead they carried him through the reception hall. He got only glimpses of more humans standing armed about the room, weapons trained upon the huddled knots of silent Tlar’n. The matriarchal dais was empty. Many of the fires in the braziers had gone out. The room was cold.
Asan began to feel sick again. He shivered, struggling to hold back a moan. The increased discomfort meant the stun was beginning to wear off. He could even move a couple of his fingers although he felt so bad he didn’t much care.
Worse, however, was the gasp he heard as he was carried by.
“That is Asan,” they murmured. “Yes, I tell you. Asan. The Bban hordes defeated him, and now these little creatures.”
“Quiet!” ordered the guards. Although they spoke in Standard, they were understood plainly enough. The murmuring stopped.
Shame ran through Asan. He told himself sharply not to be stupid. None of what had happened was his fault. If these people were backward enough to sit around on a mineral treasure trove without any sort of orbital defense against invasion, they deserved what they got.
Only, he was the legendary Asan, the man of myth, the hero of their past history. At least externally he was that man. And so they were dumping all of the responsibility on him. Demos help him, he even blamed himself.
If these idiots had just listened to me, he thought. If they hadn’t been so proud and set in their damned antiquated ways. If they could have looked past their noses and stopped a futile civil war…
The humans would have still come. United or not, the people couldn’t fight the GSI.
At least, not yet.
“Where is Blaise Omari? Where is Ryhi Saunders? Where is the SIS Forerunner? You will answer.”
There were several kinds of pain: the low-level ache that wouldn’t go away, the throbbing that eased off as long as the body was relaxed and didn’t move, and the shattering kind that jolted every other conscious perception from existence.
“You will answer.”
The shattering pain came and went, leaving him gasping. Clammy sweat broke across him.
“You will answer.”
He was in no danger of obeying. It was only an interrogation machine talking, and its frequency set was not capable of breaking through his defenses. He held himself braced in the vil-thread straps and counted the four-second interval between the command, the pause in the case of an answer, and the jolt of punishment that always followed noncompliance.
There were several ways of enduring pain. It must be caught. It must be channeled away from nerve endings. It must be denied.
He’d quickly figured out that cushioning the jolts in his rings didn’t work. The more he cushioned, the harder the jolts became until his brain felt on fire and his whole body was b
attered from convulsions.
They’d nearly stopped the interrogation that time. They thought they’d killed him. But as soon as his heartbeat started again and his breath came back, the machine was switched back on.
It was easier to endure it if he didn’t try to relax, if he just lay there stiff and let the pain break him apart. Then the questions would resume, and he would manage to breathe again and blink the sweat out of his eyes and almost recover before the command tone came again:
“You will answer.”
He screamed that time, and the vil-thread straps dug deep into his flesh as his whole body convulsed. Then he came crashing down against the board, his breath rasping in a throat that felt raw and bloody. He coughed, tried to lift his head, and decided that a pretense of cooperation might be wise. It would not gain him a release, but at least he would be tortured in a different way for a while.
“Where is Blaise Omari? Where is—”
“Dead,” he said, gasping out the word. “He’s dead.”
For a moment he was so weak he wasn’t sure what language he’d attempted it in. But at least he’d spoken for the first time in hours.
The machine clicked over to a new track and hummed a moment.
“Repeat response.”
He nearly laughed. He’d forgotten how ludicrous some of this security equipment could be. He might have just gasped out his dying word, and the stupid thing missed it. Demos, didn’t they have recorders still built in?
He didn’t respond, determined to have human interrogators for a while. Where were they? Gone off to bed? Maybe their stomachs were too weak to watch what their machines did.
“Yes, sir,” said a voice that did not come over a machine tape. “He’s beginning to break. We haven’t made a direct translation. No, I don’t think it was an oath. It was definitely a response. Yes, sir. The scale registered it that way.”
The glaring light over Asan dimmed. There was a low whine slowing down as machinery shut off. Asan closed his eyes although the white glare still danced behind his eyelids. He drew in several deep breaths, his muscles stretching out degree by hesitant degree, burning and cramping as the lactic acid built up from so much tension spread out through his tissues. His body began to shake so hard he rattled against the board. He ignored this reaction. It was natural. He was just grateful for these few minutes of rest.
Requiem for Anthi: Anthi - Book Two Page 8
