by Kate Elliott
Ilya coughed into his hand. “No, indeed,” he said mildly. “It would be more than a man could bear. It is bad enough having to please your sisters and aunts and cousins. You had been captured by the Lord of Sharvan, then, and were being taken to his holding?”
The abrupt change of subject threw Rusudani off. She looked down at her hands again as if recovering her composure. She had beautiful eyelashes, and the soft curve of her lips made Vasha’s palms damp. “That is true,” she said finally.
“Then who were you escaping from? Who were the men who attacked the holding? Why would you run from your father’s men?”
“They were not my father’s men. Otherwise I would have run to them instead of to…” She looked up at Vasha. Her gaze seared him. “Is it true he is your son?”
“You don’t know who attacked the holding, or if you were the object of their attack?”
“I cannot say, great lord.”
Ilya blinked. “You know whose men they were.”
This sort of tense silence had the interesting quality of magnifying nearby sounds, so that abruptly Vasha could hear horses and laughter and a man singing a lewd song. Afternoon had faded toward dusk, and the sun dipped down below the wall of forest, shading the road west. He felt Stefan’s body next to him, and on the other side, could sense Katya’s breath, in and out.
“I know, or at least I could guess,” she admitted at last. “I am not a fool. I was betrothed to him as an infant, but the betrothal was annulled when God marked me for the convent.”
“What is his name?”
A shout came from far away, and Vasha heard Konstans barking an order, but he could not make out the words.
Ilya waited.
Khaja were very strange, Vasha thought as he watched Rusudani struggle with herself and then, giving in, look up. They only looked you in the eye after you had beaten them. Except Tess, of course, but Tess was different.
“Prince Janos of Dushan,” she said in a low voice.
Hard on her words a cry rang through the gathered riders.
“Stanai! Stanai!”
The quiet scene centered on the carpet dissolved into confusion. A sudden maelstrom surrounded Vasha. Ilya jumped to his feet.
“Get that helmet on!” he snapped at Vasha as he fastened his own over his head.
Katya moved in a blur. She shoved Vasha and Stefan off the carpet and grabbed it by the edge. “Off!” she shouted to Jaelle. “Quickly! Get under it!”
Vasha gaped, but Jaelle moved swiftly enough, crouching on the grass and dragging the carpet up over herself and Rusudani for what little protection it afforded.
A sudden dark shadow covered the sun with the whirring of thousands of wings. Stefan yelped, staggered, and fell to his knees. He clapped a hand over one ear. Blood leaked through his fingers. Ilya had vanished. Men, mounted, pushed past, but already the screams of horses shredded the late afternoon stillness.
Katya wrenched Stefan’s hand down from his head. “Just flesh. It will only bleed. Get your helmet on, you idiot.” She slipped her bow from its quiver and fitted it with an arrow.
Another flight of arrows darkened the air.
And there was his father, on Kriye, with Konstans beside him.
“No,” Konstans was saying, “these aren’t bandits. We have been betrayed. Look there.”
Already the jahar had arrayed into ranks while Vasha and Stefan stood gaping. Already men had fallen under the awful rain of arrows. Another flight fell. Metal rang on Vasha’s helmet, and he started, coming out of his daze. He stared down to see two arrows sticking out of the quilting of his heavy coat, and an instant later he realized that something wet was running down his skin. He yanked out one arrow, but it had no blood on its tip. Twenty paces away, a horse reared, screaming, and threw its rider. Stefan moved, bolting for the horse.
Katerina swore. “Get up, you idiot,” she said, and he felt Misri’s comforting bulk shoulder against him. Reflexively he mounted.
Up the slope, coming out from the encircling forest, coming down the roads, and appearing all at once at the farthest edge of the fields surrounding them, appeared a phalanx of spears and shields escorted by rank upon rank of armored riders. No banner flew to identify them, but there were many, many more than Ilya’s five hundred riders. The last trail of the sun glinted on their helmets and on the bright points of their spears and swords.
“At least half of Sakhalin’s riders have vanished,” added Konstans in a voice so calm that he might have been talking about the layout of a khot board. “I believe we are surrounded.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Flower Night
ILYANA WOKE UP SUDDENLY. For some reason she had been dreaming of Kori’s Uncle Gus dancing the part of Lord Shiva, exotic, uncomfortable to watch yet impossible not to watch; but even as she remembered it the dream faded and vanished in the dark rather stuffy air of the tent. Abruptly she knew what was wrong: Valentin was gone. It was so still that above the quiet breathing of Evdokia and Anton she heard footfalls on the path outside, scritching on pebbles. She got up, checked the little ones, and slipped a skirt on over her sleeping shift.
Ducking out through the entrance flap, she was disoriented for a moment by the dark square of the caravansary in front of her, by the pale globes of moons in the sky above, by the slash of distant wall and ridge, by the faintest nimbus glowing in the air above which, as she oriented herself, she realized was the energy field of the huge dome which contained them. Valentin’s nocturnal escapes were so much a part of her life that she had forgotten where they were, and when she remembered it, she felt a thrill of excitement: They were the first humans to set foot on a Chapalii Duke’s private planet, in his very palace, or at least, in as much of it as they were allowed to see.
Valentin disappeared inside the gateway to the caravansary. She followed him. Pebbles slid under the soles of her feet and, as she passed under the gateway, became stone paving.
At first, halting inside the courtyard, she did not see him. He was hidden in plain sight: crouched in the gazebo, fingering the latticework with desperate concentration. His hands shook. When she came up behind him, he turned, starting. The gazebo’s lattice shone with just enough of an unnatural glow that Ilyana saw sweat break on his forehead, running down his neck.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“There’s a nesh port in here somehow,” he muttered, turning back to the latticework. “I heard M. Unbutu say so yesterday to Gwyn Jones. It must go with the map or something. I gotta get access, Yana. I can’t stand it anymore.”
She knelt beside him. “But Valentin, if there is one, then it was built by the Chapalii. That would be dangerous to—”
His hands, sliding over the lattice, abruptly stopped, and his face altered expression so quickly that she gasped out loud. Then he was gone. Not his body, but his mind. Spirited away from her so utterly that her limbs froze in terror.
Traceries of light shifted along the mosaic floor of the gazebo, and an aroma like incense brushed past her, fleeting, like a glimpse of a butterfly. She touched Valentin’s shoulder. A thrumming caught up in her blood, and she could almost see what he was seeing, as if the contact through their skin was enough to link her in as well. She smelled, suddenly, the scent of heat baking on stone.
She jerked her hand away. The movement woke her out of her stupor. She had to find M. Unbutu. She knew which tiny room was his: They had held tutorials there the last five days. Like all of these rooms his was screened off not by a door but by a curtain. She hesitated, fingers brushing the coarse weave, then coughed and said, softly: “M. Unbutu?”
No answer.
“M. Unbutu?”
From the other side she heard the sound of a person grunting in his sleep and shifting. She glanced up and down the corridor and slipped inside, pressing back against the cold wall.
“M. Unbutu. I’m sorry to disturb you, but—”
“Hmm?” He woke up suddenly and sat up. She could see him l
ike a bulky shadow, his wild hair, his naked torso, against the faint gleam of light that came in through the open window. “Yana!”
The room wasn’t large. If she took a step forward, she could touch him. He peered at her through the gloom. The silence was a third presence in the room. Ilyana felt acutely uncomfortable for a reason she could not understand.
“Uh, Yana,” he said finally, sounding very odd, “I don’t think you should be here.”
She got her breath back. “It’s Valentin. He’s been caught in the gazebo. I think he’s neshing.”
He began to stand up, froze, and said, “Yes. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She felt herself flush. Too mortified to speak, she stepped backward out of the room and fled down the corridor, back to the courtyard where Valentin crouched, locked into his strange union with the latticework. A striped moon hung squarely above the courtyard. Stars blazed. Valentin was unnaturally silent, only the lift and fall of his chest revealing that he still breathed. Ilyana shifted from one foot to the other, and back, and back, and waited forever.
M. Unbutu’s white shirt and trousers appeared like a pale flag at one corner of the courtyard. A moment later she saw the shadow of his face and hair. He hurried over and halted an arm’s length from her.
“Oh, Goddess,” he exclaimed under his breath. “I see what you mean. When did this happen?”
“It just did. But when I touched him, it was like I could almost nesh through him, the connection is that strong.”
“I don’t know how that could be. But why would he risk neshing on a system we know nothing about and which might be antipathic to the human mind? Valentin is not stupid.”
Under her bare toes, the gazebo tiles felt slick, almost damp. She chewed on her lips.
“Oh,” said M. Unbutu suddenly. “He’s addicted. The signs all point to it, once you think to put them together. So that’s why my portable nesh was tampered with on the ship out here. I thought it was odd.”
Ilyana cringed.
When he spoke again, he sounded angry. “Why isn’t he getting help? Your parents must know how dangerous—”
“They don’t understand.”
“They don’t understand? Yana, do you know that nesh addiction can kill?”
She gulped down panic. “Yes.”
“Oh, Goddess, of course you do. I’ll have to talk to them.”
“No. Don’t. They really won’t understand. But… maybe you could help me.”
“I’m not licensed or experienced in—” He glanced at her and stopped. She felt more than saw him wince.
“There isn’t anyone else to help him anyway, not here.”
“Yana! Your parents have to—”
“Don’t you see? They already know, they just pretend that they don’t. They can’t. They can’t help him!”
He swore, something long and convoluted, under his breath. “We’ll discuss this later. Right now we’d better get him out of there.” He placed a hand, fingers splayed, on Valentin’s back. Ilyana’s eyes had adjusted to the dark well enough that she could see details now: The way M. Unbutu’s eyes began to track something that wasn’t there; the way his nose twitched, sniffing. He licked his lips, and with his free hand reached and touched something that didn’t exist. With an effort, he dragged his hand away from Valentin’s back.
He whistled softly. “Damn me to hell. I don’t know what kind of interface they’re using, but that field is emanating through him somehow. All I got was shadows, but still… you know we just can’t pull him away.”
“I know. I’ve done this before. Gone in myself and guided him out.”
“We’ll have to try. But I’m going with you.”
She swallowed. Her throat was dry. “He might not look like himself.”
“Oh, tupping hell. You mean he guises, too? I thought they’d stopped letting minors do that.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry. I’m not usually that naive. All right. Take position on either side and imitate how his fingers are positioned. Wherever we end up, stick with me. We will not split up.”
She nodded and knelt beside Valentin, making sure she didn’t touch him. M. Unbutu knelt on his other side. Valentin breathed. A breeze had come up, and it tickled the stray hair that had escaped from her braid and lay now along the back of her neck. She placed her fingers on the latticework.
A great web, thrumming with light, set over (into?) an abyss of endless nothingness. Ilyana stood on a strand of light and it pulsed with the warmth of blood against her bare feet, filling her, drawing her in.
She dissolved into sound.
“Valentin!”
She stood in a vast echoing space ringed with pillars of black stone. She was alone. A floor of obsidian stretched out to the pillars, and above and beyond was a darkness so absolute that it had texture, as if it was a dome of velvet. Then she smelled Valentin’s trail. Or not him, precisely, but camel, and knew that it marked his passage through here.
She followed the foul smell, walking carefully, and just as she crossed between a set of pillars she heard a stutter in the thrum that lay so quiet along her consciousness that she had forgotten it was there until it was, so briefly, interrupted.
“Yana!”
She turned. M. Unbutu ran over to her. When he halted beside her, he took hold of her wrist. His hand was solid, warm.
“Complete perceptual immersion. We could just as well be here in the flesh.” He dropped her hand and tapped at the pillar instead. “Solid. I just spent about an hour wandering around a huge reconstruction of what must be the palace here, about waist-high models, just amazing. Needless to say, I was the only living soul there, and there was no obvious way out.”
“But I just got here. I mean, just a minute ago we were in the gazebo.”
“Huh. I found this, though.” With great care he fished into a pocket and drew out… nothing. She looked closer and saw that it was a short strand of blond hair. “Do you think it’s Valentin’s?”
“How could a nesh lose a piece of its hair?”
“Can’t. How could I have noticed it? But I did, and as soon as I picked it up it gave me a kind of pulling field, as if I could suddenly sense where you were. That’s how I found you.”
“Quick!” The camel scent was moving off. “He’s this way—”
She stepped off between the pillars only to realize that she was stepping into nothing.
Winds buffet her. Sand stings her face. This place again, the barren, storm-wracked desert. Always this place. She gropes blindly and finds a solid hand and grasps it as if it were a lifeline. Its fingers work in hers, but the storm is so fierce that she cannot even see the person beside her, so hard does the grit and sand batter her eyes and grind and groan in the streaming air. The wind howls.
They emerge into an eddy.
“This is his place,” she cries, cracking open one eye that swells with tears, aching and dry. M. Unbutu holds tightly on to her and stares at something ahead. The blistering sand doesn’t seem to bother him as much, but his lips are shut tight against it. “He always comes here.”
“Look,” he murmurs, awestruck. “He’s building it.”
She lifts her chin against the weight of the wind and squints upward, toward the hills. But they aren’t hills. They are detritus, they are the streaming wind that pours out of the back, the arms, the legs, the head, the whole being of the slight adolescent boy trudging forward head bent slightly as against a steady grinding force and that wind is both the storm and the desert he leaves behind him.
She gulps in sand and chokes on it. “Oh, gods. Is this what’s inside him?”
The boy presses forward, receding from her, and the wind moans and shoves her after him and thrusts her back, caught in the whirlpool of his creation. A blinding light frames Valentin’s fragile outline, as if he is the conduit through which it passes.
“It’s like the old conundrum,” says M. Unbutu, canting his voice high to pierce above the torrent, “about grav
ity and time and the edge of the universe—that explorers could never find the edge of the universe because their very presence, their mass, would cause the universe to keep expanding in front of them because of their gravitational field.”
“How do we get him back?” she wails.
“Formless matter. It’s like the formless matter out of which Earth, the universe, any cosmological order is made.”
She realizes he isn’t listening to her. She drops his hand and plunges forward into the maelstrom. Sand pelts her. Pebbles scrape her skin. The dry barren heat is overpowering. Sheer frantic force of will brings her to Valentin in sixteen agonizing steps. She grabs his arm and tugs him to a stop. What else can she do?
He strains away. “Let me go. Let me go, Yana. Can’t you see it? I’m almost there.”
She sees nothing but light. Stillness shudders into being around them.
And there, maybe, something golden, like a shimmer, like a golden sea seen through a tiny, distant gateway.
She hesitates. She can feel the strength of his yearning, can taste it, like the husk of grass on her tongue.
“Yana! Valentin!”
M. Unbutu is solid. His hands have weight where they close on her arm and pull Valentin into her. He swears. “We’re going out of here.” His tongue wets his lips. “I don’t know how the hell you did this, Valentin, but—” As he says the last word the stream of sand still pouring out of Valentin coalesces and begins to form an archway, turns into wood, and then Ilyana smells the leafy mold of thick vegetation, rotting.
“Damn it,” says M. Unbutu mildly, surprised. “Oh, well. Good enough. Through here.”
Valentin goes meekly.
They step through into a pocket of dense jungle. Vines trail down from tree trunks that shoot up into a dome of leaves. The vines twine and curl and form a lattice and they place their fingers on the latticework.
Ilyana heard the softest scrape of a shoe on stone and she started back, but the three of them were alone in the courtyard. Valentin slumped backward and she caught him, and together with M. Unbutu eased him down onto the smooth mosaic tiles. She still smelled the desiccating heat of the sandstorm.
