by Kate Elliott
A blast of wind caught her in the face, blinding her. The force of it scraped her skin raw. Blood welled and dripped onto the sleeve of her blouse, mixing with the layer of grime that contaminated the pristine white cotton. Droplets of blood spun away into the storm, and she focused on one, fixed her gaze on it no matter how much it hurt as the wind screamed against her face, and willed it to wink into existence as a portal. The blood flashed scarlet, and grew, and there was an arch, the plain white gateway of the Memory Palace. She threw her body to one side, twisting, and with that torque spun them down into it.
They tumbled down the great entrance hall spanned by a barrel vault and landed in the courtyard where the fountain’s cool spray bathed them and washed away the grime and washed away Valentin’s horrible guise until he became Valentin again. Looking sulky, and queasy.
“Oh, gods, don’t throw up,” said Ilyana.
“Much you care. Why can’t you just let me alone?”
“Stupid question.” She stood up, keeping a firm grip on him. There were only four arches on each side of the quadrangular courtyard, but the number was deceptive. Each one split into multiple archways, so that depending on the angle at which you passed through any individual archway, you found yourself at a different destination, at a different wing of the Memory Palace. “Where’s the room you built. Valentin?”
“We have to go upstream.”
She let him lead her. Gods, he knew this place well. Passageways branched off into vast warrens; chambers flew past, and then at a dock they clambered onto a barge. Towed by horses up a torpid river, the barge breasted the current and sent a lazy wake flurrying out from its stern. Wings of the palace lined the river, and suddenly they swung onto a side channel, passed under a bridge, and were back inside the palace, in a dark chamber that rang with the lulling slap of water against a stone jetty. The barge bumped placidly up against a piling.
Valentin scrambled up onto the jetty. Utterly lost, Ilyana climbed out and followed Valentin down a wainscoted corridor whose windows looked out onto the ocean. They turned a corner and walked into their flat in London, with the great etsana’s tent and the walls that masked the real world and pretended to show a false one instead. At once, her stomach clenched with the old familiar loathing, the awful feeling of being trapped.
“Now,” she said. “We’re going back to the ship.”
“I don’t want to,” said Valentin, straining against her. “Just let me go, Yana.”
“Don’t you have any idea what kind of trouble you could get us into?”
He looked about to say, “I don’t care,” but he didn’t. She dragged him over to the panel that opened the door into the hallway.
Aloud, she said, “I don’t know how this program works, but when we step through this door we’re going to be back in the cabin. In M. Unbutu’s cabin. And the program will be over. End run.”
She opened the door and stepped through.
And jerked her hands back from the sponge and yanked Valentin’s hands off, but he was already blinking, awake.
“Are you going to throw up?”
He gagged. “No. Why did you have to go so fast?”
“Oh, like I want to be found here when M. Unbutu comes back. You may not care about getting tutorials, but I do!” She pulled the patches off their eyes, and stood over Valentin while he replaced everything exactly as he had found it. “Hurry! Hurry! No, you idiot. Smooth out the bed. Any fool can see someone’s been lying there. Now come on.”
They got out the door into the corridor. No one was around. The dim lights made her feel safer.
“How did you get the door open?”
“It was unlocked.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care whether you believe me. So there.”
Voices sounded from the right.
“Come on!” She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him in the opposite direction.
“Slow down, slow down,” he gasped. “I feel sick.”
He was shaking. His forehead and neck were wet with sweat, and he felt hot. She stopped and put her arms around him, holding him.
“Valentin, why do you have to do this?”
He did not reply, just rubbed his face against her shoulder, back and forth, like he was trying to wipe something off.
David ben Unbutu came around the corner. He was alone. He pulled up, surprised. “Well. Hello. I see you found him.” His eyes widened, taking in the scene. “Is he all right?”
“Yeah, fine. I mean, no, he’s sick, but everything is fine. I’m just taking him back to the cabin now.”
“Oh, well. Maybe we won’t be able to meet tomorrow.” Was it her imagination, or did he sound a little disappointed?
“Of course we will! No, really, everything will be fine tomorrow.”
“I hope so.”
“Good night,” said Ilyana firmly.
“Good night.” He walked on, looking back once over his shoulder.
Ilyana waited until he had curved away out of sight. “I’ll get you nesh time somehow,” she said in a low voice. “But you gotta do it legally. You can’t sneak in—”
“Just let me go home,” he muttered, so she took him back to the cabin. He fell asleep at once.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BIRBAS
TESS WOKE SUDDENLY. Ilya breathed beside her. He was, and always had been, an extremely quiet sleeper. A curtained alcove screened off the tiny chamber in which the children slept. She listened, but she heard nothing. It was too early for the camp to be stirring, even on the day that the women and the army would ride out to the great hunt, the birbas.
The noise came again. A cough. Tess pushed back the blankets, stood, and deftly lit the lantern hanging from an overhead pole. She looked in on the two children. Natalia slept with her limbs all akimbo, Yuri more compactly, but both of them with such angelic faces in repose that Tess’s heart ached just to look at them. Yuri shifted and coughed again.
Ilya stirred and a moment later stood beside her. He slipped past her and knelt beside Yuri, gently touching the boy’s cheeks with the back of a hand. “Hot,” he murmured.
Yuri coughed again and woke himself up. He whimpered and licked his lips and wiped his nose on his wrist. “My mouth hurts,” he said, his voice rising with a sick child’s wail.
“Shh.” Ilya moved his son to rest against his chest, stroking his hair. He glanced up at Tess, and she fetched a water-skin. As Yuri was drinking, Natalia woke up. Like her father, she was a light sleeper, one who woke from sleep straight into focused consciousness.
“He won’t be able to ride out on the birbas, will he?” Natalia asked, cutting to the chase.
Yuri began to wail in earnest.
“Hush, little one,” said Ilya. “I’ll stay here with you.” He looked up at Tess, anticipating her question. “The young riders and archers will have my aunt’s eye on them. That should be more than enough to convince them to perform well.”
That hadn’t been quite the question she was going to ask, but it served to answer it just as well. Would the young riders not want Bakhtiian himself to oversee their prowess? In fact, when she could untangle herself from her Earth-bound prejudices, Tess knew perfectly well that Mother Orzhekov’s stature was equal to her nephew’s.
“You cry too much,” said Natalia to her brother, which merely set him wailing again.
“That is enough of that,” said Ilya sternly to his daughter, and Yuri was not sick enough to miss the opportunity to stick his tongue out at her in triumph. The tongue was coated with a white film.
Tess sighed. “Talia, get dressed and run and get—” She almost said Niko. But he needed his rest. But wouldn’t it be worse to begin to overlook him just because he was getting old? “Get Niko.” Natalia jumped up and left. Yuri coughed again. What if, this time, it was a truly serious illness? She lived with that nagging fear all the time, that and brooding over how she was going to educate her children properly. Ilya kissed Yuri on the forehe
ad and whispered something to the boy which made him smile. Tess watched him. Ilya was impossibly patient with his children when they were sick; it was perhaps the only thing for which he had any patience. What was she going to do when they grew into adults? She did not want her children to live only in this world.
Ilya lifted his gaze and smiled at her. He seemed unconcerned about Yuri’s cough and fever, but Tess had discovered that Ilya was a better judge of illness than she was. “The truth is,” he said, “hunting bores me. There are some books in the library I haven’t read yet.”
Tess snorted. She crouched beside her husband and took Yuri’s hand in hers, but Yuri had already slipped into a doze again. “Ilya, what do you want?”
His smile vanished. When he contemplated his vision, his gaze narrowed until Tess could almost imagine it as a single beam, piercing to the heart of the universe, capable of vaporizing any object that stood in its path. “The world.”
It was at moments like this that Tess was forced to acknowledge that he was, in some small way, insane. Sometimes out here on the plains, she could forget his vision—or at least, not the vision, since Ilya would not have been the person she fell in love with without that vision, but the plain bald fact of what it meant.
“I was dreaming,” said Ilya abruptly, “before I woke up. I had a vision of a god with four arms, and he was dancing, and as he danced he created the world. I thought, this is a vision given to me, that with every great change comes a new making.”
Tess hung the lantern from a pole and favored Ilya with a wry smile. “Was it a true dream or a false one?”
“The gods only send me true dreams.”
She kissed him, and Yuri, and went outside. What could she say to him? Because he was right. His own children would not be jaran, not truly. Already his vision and his armies and the deadly influence of Tess and her brother Charles wove a new pattern into Rhui’s history.
Outside, dawn limned the distant hills. The Orzhekov camp rose and readied itself for the great hunt. Tess greeted Niko and packed saddlebags and took Natalia out to help her bring in her string of horses. She left the horses with one of the Orzhekov boys and returned to say good-bye to Ilya and Yuri. Irena Orzhekov met her under the awning of her tent.
“Your husband is not riding out with us.”
“Why is it, Mother Orzhekov, that you call him ‘your husband’ instead of ‘my nephew’ only when you are displeased with him?”
“Humph.”
“He is concerned for his son.”
“Ilyakoria spoils his children,” said Irena firmly. Tess knew better than to disagree. But for some reason Vasha’s image leapt to her mind. Ilya had never spoiled Vasha, but perhaps he had sheltered him too well. She wondered how Vasha was faring in Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army, but then Niko emerged from the tent.
“How is Yuri?” she asked anxiously.
Niko shrugged. “I saw four other children yesterday with the same complaint. I am not concerned. Nor should you be.”
Irena made a movement toward the tent and then checked herself.
“Are you going to go back in and try again?” Tess asked, amused despite herself.
“I know him too well,” said Irena. “We are leaving now.”
“I will come at once,” said Tess, but she went inside the tent first. “Your aunt is very annoyed with you,” she said to Ilya as she kissed him good-bye. Ilya merely smiled. He sat in the front chamber. Light streamed in through the entrance flap to illuminate the pages of the book he had set on his knees where he sat in a heap of pillows. Tess could hear Yuri’s soft snore from the back. “Anatomy?”
“On the Nature of the Body, an old text from Byblos written by the great physician, Antomis of Thene.” The book was open to a page illustrating a pregnant woman with a child curled up inside her. Ilya flushed suddenly and turned the page, as if such matters were only for women’s scrutiny, but Tess thought at once of Arina, dead for ten days now. She pressed her lips together and clenched one hand, so she would not cry. “Do you have to go?” he asked softly.
“Yes. I’m a woman. Of course I have to go. As does most every other person in camp, except those too old or too young or too pregnant. Or too self-important.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Yes.” She relented, grinning. “I don’t mind. I like it.” She kissed him a final time for good measure and left.
They spread out in a long line and rode southeast for six days, driving game before them. At dawn of the seventh day the jahars on the wings broke off, advancing ahead of the center until they vanished into the rolling hills. By the end of the eleventh day, the wings met up with each other again to form a vast ring of riders around the chosen hunting ground. When at last the call came that the circle had been completed, the advance began: The circle slowly contracted as they drove the animals before them in toward the center.
Indeed, this was the test of the birbas which Tess most enjoyed. It was forbidden to kill the game, but more importantly, it was a point of honor for each rider not to let any animal, no matter how small, how fleet, or how ferocious, escape out of the ring as it contracted. Children rode behind the front lines, which were made up on this birbas primarily of young archers and riders who would after this be sent out to the armies in the field. What worse fate, Tess reflected, than to prove oneself unworthy of riding with the army?
At night, a string of lights—campfires—curved off into the distance on both sides. Tess took her turns at watch and slept tucked in a blanket with Natalia.
On the fourteenth day as the ring contracted further and further, she dropped back from the second rank to ride with Natalia, who wanted to range along the ring itself.
A herd of skittish antelope had fallen back against the line, and Natalia watched with interest as a jahar of young riders shifted and drove the animals on. A single antelope bolted for freedom, heading for a gap that had grown in between this jahar and another, but at once a flag went up and riders split off from the other jahar to contain it. Tess was, as usual, impressed by the coordination of parts.
“Mama,” said Natalia, “why do women and men hunt together in the birbas?”
“It trains the army, little one. An army in the field must be able to accurately judge the ground it crosses, and in battle a jahar must judge distance and time.”
“Do the khaja armies train like this?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is that why the khaja must always fall to the jaran?”
“Well, that is one reason.”
“Is Papa really the emperor of the world?”
Tess glanced at her daughter, but Natalia’s expression was serious. “Who told you that?”
“I went to the market with Aunt Stassi, the khaja market in Sarai, and that is what one of the khaja said.”
“There is a great deal of ‘world’ out there, Talia. You might as well call me emperor of the world, as him.” It would be more true.
“Are you emperor of the world, Mama?” Natalia asked, and Tess supposed that she might well seem so, to her daughter. Or at least, to her daughter at this age. That would pass.
But the question made her ponder, and her mind wandered. How tempting it would be to enforce her views onto every society on Rhui. How hard it would be to stop once she started. Perhaps one reason she stayed with the jaran was to keep herself to some degree removed from the ability, the opportunity, to meddle outside of this one (rather significant) spot. Yet the simple fact was that even with the force of Earth’s knowledge behind her, she would need an army ten times the size of the jaran army, she would need a communications network far more sophisticated, which would all have to be laid in, and she would need time and more time yet, to achieve any wholesale unalterable change in the complex web of Rhuian culture.
So how did the Chapalii do it? They did not, as far as she knew, possess a standing army with which to control their great stellar empire. They had no obvious military presence on Earth except for the Pro
tocol Office, which was bureaucratic and not military, and the security force, which was drawn exclusively from the human population and which worked with the Protocol Office to prevent breaches of Chapalii law.
Yet they had crushed Charles’s first rebellion decisively. They had destroyed, or at least outlasted, the Mushai’s rebellion millennia ago, but in all the stories about him Tess had never once heard the name of a general or a battle; neither had she found any such stories or names or titles honored anywhere in what (presumably) little she knew of Chapalii literature, if it was even literature as humans knew it. There was one whole story cycle about the clever dealings of a probably mythical merchant house called Sashena, but nothing of the noble deeds and great sacrifices of a warrior class.
A great empire thrives on movement. But a great empire must be established somehow. It does not just spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus or from the angry frown of Brahma’s forehead.
“Mama! Look! Look!”
Torn out of her thoughts by Natalia’s shout, Tess blinked rapidly, accidentally turning her implant on and then off in quick succession. Slightly dizzy, she finally found Natalia’s arm and looked where the girl was pointing.
A clot of grim-faced young riders battled with poles and the flats of their sabers against a pack of terrified, furious sargis, wolves, who had struck out into the line.
Natalia looked pale. One of the young men had fallen back, his right arm hanging limp. The struggle was made more eerie still by its silence. The riders did not shout or curse except to give terse commands.
“Should we move back, Mama?” asked Natalia suddenly.
“No,” said Tess, caught up by the contest. “Those boys would rather die than let those wolves break back through the line. They won’t get to us.” Once, she had gone on such a hunt in the front ranks; once she had turned back a great cat, tawny and powerful. The memory made her heart pound fiercely. “Never run away from what frightens you, Talia.”
“Yuri once said he wished all the animals could get away free.”
