“I don’t know exactly.” She ran one hand up and down the longer sword’s leather grip. “But they had enough of an idea what to—what to do with me, once they had me.” Shomoro swallowed the meat and could feel the lump pass all the way down her throat. “It was five months before I could escape them. By that time, I was as you see me.”
“They tortured you?” He saw her nostrils flare, incensed at his directness. He didn’t regret the question, or how he’d asked it. She was asking for a lot of his trust: even allying just for the journey away from Skraal would mean months sharing close quarters with this Osk. He had a right to know who she was.
Her fingers tightened around the lacquered shaft, then relaxed. “Short version? Yes, they did. And yes, I told them everything I knew, and some things I didn’t.” Fragile defiance in her black eyes as they rose to meet his. “You would have done the same, in my place.”
Daikar shrugged. Looked down at the half-finished sketch as he waited for her to take the thread again. He realized it wasn’t of any Skraal animal. He recognized a vulis of Oskaran’s grasslands in the low, powerful body supported on six thick legs. Its trunk an inverted triangle, toothed mouth open wide in a mating roar.
“So what now?” he asked when she remained silent. “You’re going to repay the White Arrows in kind with the resources of a single ship and a single ally?” He thumped his chest with curled thumb and first finger.
A smile edged Shomoro’s mouth. “I didn’t know you’d decided to be my ally.” Her voice was sardonic, but with something like hope flickering underneath.
“For now.” Daikar pincered a strip of meat between thumb and first finger, lowered it deliberately into his mouth. “I believe most of your story. And access to a ship would simplify things for me.” He swallowed, the meat slick and red and delicious against his tongue. “I’d still like to hear what you plan to do with it.”
“Leave Skraal.” She rose fluidly from her couch, snatched up her plate, and ferried it toward the galley’s disposal cavity. The pile of glistening meat still rode high upon it. He twisted to follow her with his gaze, but she came back around the other side of the neural hub.
“But not alone, and not with just one ally either,” Shomoro finished as she settled back into the couch’s curves. “The message you received was one of several, scattered throughout the city’s datanet. When I leave, I intend it to be with every seph in Skraal-Teklan alongside me.”
Daikar ate another of the meat strips. They really were good, far better than anything his own ship’s biosynth glands had managed. At least, that he remembered—he’d had to mortgage that ship a year ago, for the funds to survive on Skraal. Shomoro, it seemed, hadn’t had to make any such sacrifices. The ship would have provided for her every need: security, a warm nest, glands to secrete food and medicine. Transport off Skraal whenever she wanted. The only question was why in the suns Shomoro had stayed here so long.
“You could go back to Oskaran,” he voiced his thought. “The Surarchs would support your cause. Perhaps even the House.” If it wasn’t still busy licking the wounds sustained in the fall of Za.
He wasn’t prepared for the way her whole body stiffened. Legs drawn protectively into her belly. Hands grappling at the hard sheaths under her arms.
“I cannot—” She gulped for air; an acrid tinge turned her scent. Dread. “I cannot go back there. Not with nothing to show for myself.”
Her empty sheaths ached inside, from anxiety as much as remembered pain. Shomoro was suddenly ravenous, but she resisted the impulse to lunge for the ship’s galley. She might already have said too much; to leap up now would look like she was avoiding the issue—like the confirmation of guilt it was. She’d already as much as told Daikar she was a traitor; he didn’t have to know how deep that betrayal went, or what it had cost her.
She ran one hand up the reassuring hardness of the sheathed sword at her side. In a calmer voice she said, “Teluk is my destination. I plan to apply to the resources and sympathy of the High Council to take the war to the Arrows.” She took a deep breath. “And through them, to the larger Expansion.”
She heard the beginnings of an incredulous laugh building in his throat. “A secret war,” Shomoro amended. “Not like the last time Teluk and the Expansion clashed.” It would have to be secret at first, until they’d gathered sufficient knowledge of their enemies’ weaknesses.
Daikar did laugh then, a short sharp bark. “You don’t lack for imagination, I’ll give you that much.” She smelled the tangy amusement on him, but undercut with a hint of admiration. Enough to make her bite down on her sudden anger.
“Will you help me, then?” she asked.
He jabbed his snout forward. “As far as this goes. I’ll help you make contact with other sephs; two operatives will be better than one. And I’ll follow you as far as Teluk. Once we get there, I may reevaluate things.” Daikar turned his gaze toward the wall, seemed to look through it to the swampy wilderness beyond. “I’ve been here over a year. I survived by keeping my head down. Your plan interests me . . . but it’s going to attract attention. Much could go wrong. If that happens, I’m gone.”
Frustration rose in a hot cloud within Shomoro’s chest. She was about to protest—to say she’d never met anyone so suns-cursed evasive in her life—when she thought about what her side of the conversation must sound like, and let her mouth fall shut.
Instead, she inclined her head. “All right, then.”
The next couple of weeks passed liquidly, time stretching and contracting as their tasks grew to fill it. Leaving Skraal was not as simple as having access to a ship, the way Daikar had thought. He discovered he’d burrowed into his life on Skraal without really wanting to—almost without meaning to. There were many parts of it that must be cut away, cleanly, so as not to attract attention. He had an apartment to get rid of. Debts to settle, bartered away with goods manufactured by the ship’s resources. He’d no credits to speak of, so selling his few possessions to generate some also took up his time.
Then there was Shomoro. Her plan was the most audacious, absurd thing he’d heard since the news that Za was going up against the Terran Expansion. That didn’t stop him from helping her scan the datanet sites she’d seeded; he spent yet more hours crouched before the ship’s neural hub, watching its tiny interface screen for incoming messages, changes in the individual sites’ traffic. Any signs they’d made contact with a seph, any seph. He was as skeptical about Shomoro’s plan as he’d been two weeks ago, but something wouldn’t let him walk away from her.
Daikar would have said he’d never met anyone like Shomoro Lacharoksa, but that wasn’t quite true. He remembered one: when he was still a child, living on the far eastern point of Oskaran’s southern continent, a starving oldster had wandered into the hardscrabble settlement where Daikar had hatched. Lying in a hospital nest, his skin cracked and rubbed with sand from the desert he’d been traversing for weeks, the Osk recounted how his flyer had crashed and left him stranded ten hexaleagues from civilization. How he’d traveled when the suns were down, eating carrion and ground worms to survive. Even their meager settlement must have seemed the softest nest after that. The old Osk had settled there, anyway—Daikar guessed he really wasn’t so old; he’d lived another thirty years after his arrival—but that look Daikar remembered from the hospital never quite left the old one. A look like everything soft and comfortable in his life might be snatched away at any moment, leaving him stranded and starving again.
Sometimes, Daikar saw that same look in Shomoro’s eyes.
But not today. Today, she was excited.
“I’ve got something!” She waved him over to where she stood before the little pedestal of the hub’s interface, hopping from front foot to front foot and rubbing her hands as if to warm them.
“You found a response?” He set the small dart pistol he’d been cleaning down on the arm of the couch and came to
stand beside her.
She jabbed her snout forward in a terse yes. “It’s short,” she admitted. “Little more than a name and a request for contact. In a public place,” she added with an upward curl of her lips.
“Let me see.” Daikar took hold of one side of the interface screen and peered into it. Skraal’s datanet was refreshingly basic; her recorded message had been transcribed into the message window in plain white Bask text on a black background. Below it was the poster’s comment.
I was also a seph in Za. If this is real I would meet with you. Come alone. –V. Yureshenka. A time and address he recognized as one of Skraal-Teklan’s tiny city squares followed the brief message.
He knew that lineage name. He also had a sharp memory of the person attached to it: Vorl Yureshenka had been a younger member of Za’s stable of sephs, full of the eagerness of one who’d never experienced combat. Daikar should know; he’d mentored the impetuous seph on his first few jaunts to Nheris, till Yureshenka knew how to carry out a mission plan without getting killed. Now he suddenly wondered how much of that caution had stuck to the younger Osk.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
Shomoro shrugged sinuously, rippling her light cloak. “The same thing I did with you. We bring them in.”
Daikar paced away from the hub, looking around the small, dark-walled confines of the ship. He reached for the cool smoothness of the dice inside his cloak pocket and rubbed them against his palm before turning back to her.
“I’ll go. Make contact with him.”
An edge of censure crept into her scent. “It would be safer if both of us—”
“I knew this particular seph, Shomoro. From before.” He lifted the pistol by its muzzle and slid the cleaning cloth along it delicately. “If he is who he says he is, we can trust him. Besides, one of us needs to guard the ship.”
And she wasn’t about to give that duty up to him.
She snapped the terminal shut. “And if I let you go, will you return?” She sounded as though she were talking more to herself than him.
Daikar didn’t know whether to be amused or angry at the idea that she would be letting him do anything. He decided not to press that issue and went for logic instead. “I’m not leaving Skraal except in this ship. I’ll return, and I’ll bring Vorl with me. Trust me.”
For a moment, he caught a whiff of her scent, suddenly pungent—as though he’d made some intimate request. But all Shomoro said was “I do . . . I think.” She pulled her cloak tighter around her bony chest and stalked past him to the cockpit. She’d mentioned she was going to run some diagnostics on its nav program. “I’ll have to, if this alliance is to work.”
Daikar felt the same; the only difference was he hadn’t said it out loud. There would be no point to it now.
The courier’s living area was strangely lonely without Daikar. She had gotten so used to being completely alone over the past year that his brief company made her feel more isolated now he was gone. But it would only be a few hours, and he would return with another ally for her fragile alliance. Shomoro would need their support when she went to Teluk; the High Council were no friends of the Expansion, but none of the Councillors were Osk, either. Getting their attention would be a matter of rallying as many voices to her cause as she could.
There was a small Surarchy on Teluk of course, to govern the Osk holdings there, but Shomoro no more dared approach them than she did the House of Oskaran. Either government would ask why she’d waited so long to return, and she could give no answer that wouldn’t be suspicious. For now, Shomoro was on her own—except for Daikar and Vorl, she reminded herself. And . . .
She looked at the metal blades sitting on one of the low couches. Shomoro knew she should be practicing with them, adjusting to their balance and weight, but she hadn’t unsheathed them since that day in Tek’s shop. The thought of Daikar walking in on her as she wielded the blades, the questions he would ask, dried out her mouth with dread.
Daikar isn’t here, a voice said. Now may be our only opportunity for a while. Swallowing her fear, she snatched the blades off the couch.
The heft of the metal blades immediately calmed her. They were about a third heavier than her own blades had been, and their weight centered on her wrists rather than her forearms, but she could compensate for those differences. The true challenge lay in learning how to wield blades that were not fixed extensions of her arms. She could change their angle and orientation by rotating her wrist; they would require an entirely different style to use effectively. She needed to learn more about them to even know where to start.
Shomoro held the blades before the neural hub’s optical scanner. “Computer, I need data on these objects.”
“Scanning . . .” Lights winked in the hub. “One entry found.”
Only one? She pressed down her disappointment and said, “Continue.”
“The katana and its shorter companion, the wakizashi, were the principal weapons of samurai, the warrior class of Japan, a small archipelago in Earth’s northeastern hemisphere. Though images of these blade weapons have proliferated far beyond their Japanese cultural context, and physical examples still exist in collections, they are believed to no longer be in active use.”
She set the blades back down on the couch and unsheathed the shorter one—the wakizashi. Holding it before her snout, Shomoro examined the jagged point where the tip had snapped off, the small chips of wear along its edge. This was no collection piece. A warrior had wielded this, though a Terran one. She didn’t know if samurai had served the same purpose as sephs, but a warrior class spoke of a tradition and a status that carried honor.
Self-loathing swept her in its tide. Shomoro had retained so little of what it meant to be a seph. She had her training, but it hadn’t been enough to keep from betraying her people. She cowered in hiding from the House that should have protected her, playing with metal blades while her own crumbled to dust somewhere. Her long seph’s mane, glinting white in the broken blade’s depths, seemed a hideous joke. She seized a sheaf of her hair, brought the short blade underneath, close to her scalp, and began to saw at the white strands.
What are you doing? Shomoro of the White asked.
What I should have done long ago. A hank of hair fell beneath the blade. Cutting off the White Arrows’ insulting mark.
They took your blades. Would you have them take another part of you?
Shomoro stopped cutting. She looked at the hair clenched in her fist, pale and glistening as a lamchra blossom, and let it run through her fingers. Her other half had spoken a truth: her mane was different now, but it was still part of her. She could fight it, keep cutting it away as though that could reverse what had been done to her . . . or she could make it hers. Shomoro Lacharoksa had worn a seph’s mane. So could Shomoro of the White.
She set the blade aside.
“Vorl’s dead.” Over the ship’s comm unit, Daikar’s voice was tight with anger. The tinny words sent a coldness into Shomoro’s gut that spread upward to her lungs like a splash of ice water.
“What do you mean, dead?” It was an idiotic thing to say; not what she’d intended at all. She’d meant to ask, Where in burning Krenkyr have you been? Daikar had left her ship for the rendezvous with Vorl Yureshenka half a day before; they were supposed to have returned hours ago.
She heard him snort through the connection, but he went on without acknowledging the question, for which she was grateful. “Are you able to leave the ship?” he asked in a calmer voice.
“Daikar, what happened?” Her voice sounded too loud in her ears, but at least she’d asked a sensible question this time.
“I was delayed,” he said, and this time she could hear irritation creeping into his tone. “As for the rest, I can’t tell you over this connection. I’m at my apartment; you know where it is.”
She almost jabbed a yes, then remembered he cou
ldn’t see her. “Right.” She was already calculating the fastest route she could take that would still give her plenty of cover. As she was strapping the matched swords to her side, the comm unit crackled again.
“And Shomoro?” His voice was low, cautious.
“What?” Hers was a growl of irritation as she threw on her cloak.
“Don’t use the landing hatch. Go out through the emergency airlock.” At the stern of the ship, out of sight where her craft pressed up against the docking cradle’s angular scaffolding.
“You think we’re being watched?” she said, equally low.
“After what happened, I think it’s a strong possibility.” He cut the connection.
Daikar’s first-floor apartment had an air of well-kept shabbiness about it, much like the one that surrounded Daikar himself. The place was a single room not much larger than a freight elevator, with dingy metal walls and yellow lighting that permeated the space with a subtle but persistent hum.
He himself was humming with energy as Shomoro came in the door. She saw him jerk to a halt in the center of the nearly empty room, as though he’d been pacing its small length and only stopped at her arrival. She stepped in cautiously, absorbing the sour scents of agitation and fury coming off him.
“You weren’t followed?” he asked.
Shomoro cut the air with her hand; no. Not that he’d given her any indication of who or what he thought might follow her here. There was a counter jutting out from the left wall of the room. She sidled over to it—out of the path of Daikar’s pacing—and leaned the heels of her hands on its ledge.
“All right; I’m here. Now will you tell me what happened?”
He glared—though not quite at her, it seemed—and kicked at a small huddled pile in the center of the room. It resounded hollowly. She saw the silver glint of steel and realized she was looking at the decoupled pieces of a set of body armor. Primitive protection at that: simple steel plate rather than the complex weave of carbon fiber and spun diamond that had composed her own long-lost seph armor.
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