The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  She flashed a hand up in general greeting. “Vi’ya! You won’t believe what I saw!” Her voice was high and flute-clear.

  Vi’ya glanced up briefly, her hands still testing the Heart of Kronos.

  “I was watchin’ our friends on the cruiser—let’m see me as usual so they’d know we got the message from the Archon—then all of a sudden they skipped out. Followed a hunch and hopped over toward Charvann, just in time to see the Korion blown to photons by the Lith. One skipmissile!”

  Vi’ya’s eyes widened slightly. “A cruiser, Marim?”

  Marim flung her arms wide in a quick gesture. “Blown away. Panarchists zapped a couple of ships when these two took off.” She motioned toward Brandon and Osri. “But with whatever Hreem’s got, Charvann isn’t gonna hold out too long, and we’d better hope Hreem never finds this place. He could crack Dis open like a month-old moong-egg.”

  “Pick up any EM from them?”

  “Yeah. Skipped around, sniffed some orders. Esteel’s out there. No, was. Bunch of small fry. And the Satansclaw.”

  Vi’ya gave a soft laugh. “Tallis Y’Marmor—allied with Hreem the Faithless?”

  The little blond scout chortled. “It was an order to Tallis I got, and you were right—only one mention, but that was enough.”

  “Dol’jhar,” Vi’ya murmured, her accent and intonation somehow darkening the word to Osri’s distorted perceptions.

  Osri shifted on his pillows, and the scout’s eyes flickered among them all, making Osri think of a pale-eyed rodent. Then she grinned. “You two gave Tallis quite a ride. Last I saw, he was still tryin’ to pull out of orbit around Warlock!”

  Vi’ya’s lip curled. “Marim, allow me to present to you Osri the Instructor, from the Panarchist Naval Academy, and Krysarch Brandon nyr-Arkad.”

  Osri made no attempt to hide how deeply offensive he found the many breaches of protocol made in this singular introduction, but Brandon smiled back at Marim. “Brandon will do.”

  Marim’s head cocked bird-like. “Arkad? Today’s the day for special visitors, looks like. First that blunge-bag Hreem and then a royal whatsit.” She turned to Osri. “You piloting?”

  He made a motion of denial, not trusting his voice. The scout’s casual confirmation of awareness—even understanding—between Rifter trash and the Archon of Charvann was yet another blow.

  “You?” Marim’s eyes widened as she gazed appreciatively at Brandon. “You’d definitely be wasted holdin’ down a throne, or whatever it is you high-end nicks do with yourselves. I saw you escape from that blunge-brain Tallis with an ablative across Warlock. Thought you’d burned it for sure—who taught you to fly?”

  “Markham,” Brandon replied.

  Marim’s grin vanished. Her gaze flicked to Vi’ya, who was studying the Heart of Kronos as if she had not heard.

  “Best pilot I ever knew.” Marim’s thin shoulders jerked up in a shrug, then she turned and swatted the tapestry aside again. “Goin’ to grab some eats,” she announced, and she was gone.

  Vi’ya said, “Where were you going before you lost your fiveskip?”

  “Arthelion,” Brandon offered, his index finger rubbing absently across the knuckles of his other hand.

  Vi’ya’s gaze took in this gesture, then she answered the unspoken question. “Your ship’s autopilot was destroyed, its information irretrievable.”

  Osri knew she’d sensed his relief by the way her eyes narrowed in bleak amusement. He clenched his jaw, determined to talk no more—though painfully aware that his intentions didn’t matter a jot to her.

  “So you came here to request help from Markham,” she went on. “In what form?”

  Brandon set his glass down, gaze on it as though reading an answer in the empty crystal. Then he said slowly, “Markham would have put me on a ship to wherever I wished to go.”

  “That’s true,” the woman acknowledged with surprising promptness, and then, with another flash of humor, “and your reminder of the loyal and inspiring bond of friendship is calculated to elicit a similar response from me, yes?”

  “Well, either that or a snarling threat to sell us to the highest bidder,” Brandon countered, matching her tone. “Affording us a clue to our status.”

  Vi’ya said, “Any enemy of Hreem the Faithless is a potential ally of mine. Tell me what it is you want, and I will consider what is to be done.”

  “Passage to Arthelion,” Brandon stated immediately. “I don’t know if a courier was able to leave Charvann, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have headed for Arthelion. We must report on what we have seen... and take that—” He nodded at the silver sphere. “—to safety.” He said with an engaging grin, “I can make the trip very worthwhile—consider it a ransom.”

  She gave a soft laugh. “A ransom for royalty? A Rifter’s dream, yes?” She leaned forward to pick up the Heart of Kronos, then rose to her feet. “You may wait here. I will not be long.” She paused at the tapestry and added a threat aimed directly at Osri: “Perhaps I should say you will wait here. The Eya’a are in the adjoining room, as you surmised, and they are watching.”

  Then she left them alone.

  “She took my father’s artifact,” Osri whispered with fierce frustration. “May I respectfully point out, Your Highness, that your friends might be bluffing about those sophonts?” He lowered his voice, casting a quick glance at the tapestry through which the Eya’a had disappeared. Then he pantomimed grabbing a weapon and using it.

  Brandon leaned back against his cushions and laughed. There was a faint flush of color along the refined ridge of his cheekbones, and his eyes were fever-bright. The liquor had hit him hard—and no wonder. They hadn’t eaten since that dinner at the Hollows, and had had only a few hours’ sleep... if Brandon, who had gone to Merryn wearing the same clothes he’d dined in, had slept at all.

  Brandon’s laughter infuriated Osri. Danger not just to me, but to my father’s artifact—and I’m stuck with this drunken lackwit whose life I’ve sworn to protect.

  He leaned forward, pitching his voice to sting Brandon into some semblance of awareness. “You will pardon my obtuseness, but I fail to observe anything humorous in our present circumstances. What I do see clearly is our duty.”

  “Relax, Osri.” Brandon’s voice revealed that skipnose seemed to have hit him, too. “There isn’t much we can do about those circumstances yet.”

  Osri sneaked another glance at the tapestry, aware of his disloyal but sour satisfaction that Brandon was at last showing the effects of that disastrous landing—and the even more disastrous choice that had forced them to it.

  Then Brandon said, “What were you doing during your Academy combat-training days? Or did you opt out of it in favor of administrative refinements?’’

  “I was instructed in the same basic program you yourself should have undergone—”

  “If you’ve had level-one Ulanshu training, you should have seen that even if her tempathic ability were too weak to pick up our intentions, her training is high level. She could have taken care of both of us herself.”

  Disbelief made Osri forget his alien eavesdroppers. “Two of us?”

  “So you didn’t see it. Perhaps it is not so obvious, then... to one who did not see fit to augment the Academy Administrative Program’s basic physical-training regimen. I did, Osri.” Brandon’s smile turned sardonic. “With my friend Markham. Who may, incidentally, have trained this woman. I saw it immediately in the way she sat, the posing of her hands. What would have happened to you is academic; a crushed windpipe, I think. And to me—a myriad of possibilities, the best of which would be the weapon drawn on me. The length of the table would have prevented her from having to exert herself unnecessarily. Which is why she sat where she did.”

  Osri flushed, then looked around quickly, trying to determine if they were being overheard.

  He tried to find something to say, but Brandon’s attention had shifted to the statue of the jatta-carved feline in flight. Moving with deliberate rit
ual, the Krysarch refilled his glass and raised it. “To Lenic Deralze.” He drank, refilled the glass, then said in a lower voice, “Be well, Markham.” This time, after he emptied the glass, he hurled it against the wall.

  PART THREE

  ONE

  ARTHELION ORBIT—FIST OF DOL’JHAR

  The smoke from the incense rose in a straight column through the still air, its sweet-sour scent hanging heavy in the cabin. Subtle curves and flutings twisted in its diaphanous substance, drawing Anaris’s eyes upward until they met the empty gaze of his grandfather’s skull above the family altar. His knees smarted from his long vigil on the metal deck, but he ignored the pain, waiting.

  The cabin, deep within the battlecruiser, was cold and dark, lit only by the candles rendered from his grandfather’s flesh by his son Jerrode, now established in triumph on the planet below. Somewhere behind Anaris someone shifted uneasily, fabric moving against fabric; a quiet clink of metal came from where Kyvernat Juvaszt stood, and behind him, the unsteady breathing of the others in attendance.

  This was the eglarhh hre-immash, the laying of the vengeful ghost, placating the restless spirit of Urtigen gyarrh’ka Eusabian, who had died at the hands of his son twenty-nine years before. Every month since, Jerrode Eusabian had sacrificed to deflect his father’s vengeance, offering both blood and the justification of a successful rule. Only these could avert the anger of the restless dead, condemned to watch in silence for thirty-three years before going on to join the honored ancestors in the Halls of Dol.

  But now, anticipating the next stage in the completion of his paliach—the greatest in the history of Dol’jhar—Eusabian had acknowledged his conditional acceptance of Anaris as a potential heir by delegating the eglarhh to his son. By tradition and law only a direct descendant could lay the ghost of one so powerful as Urtigen had been, for he had carried the spirit of Dol within him as an Avatar.

  Anaris smiled coldly at the skull, knowing that those around him would dare not look up on his face during the ceremony. You and I, Grandfather, will encompass his downfall. This is his first mistake. For Eusabian did not know the greatest gift the Panarchists had given him, opening the secret gate of his mind.

  Anaris gathered his will and breathed deeply, drawing in the pungent scent of the incense. Then he rose to his feet and bowed over the copper sacrifice bowl in front of him, now glowing red from the coals beneath it, coals he had formed himself of charcoal and a pinch of dust from Urtigen’s thighbone. Then he picked up the lancet and poised it over his left wrist, over the heart vein.

  “Darakh ettu mispeshi, Urtigen-dalla. Darakh ni-palia entasz pendeschi, pron hemma-mi ortoli ti narhh.” Visit us with your mercy, great Urtigen. Visit not with vengeance your lineage, take instead this my blood that once was yours.

  He plunged the lancet into the vein, twisting it to release a stream of dark blood into the bowl. It hissed and spat as it struggled with the hot metal. The smell of burning blood filled the room, dark as vengeance, pungent as fear. Smoke rose from the bowl as Anaris let fall the lancet and concentrated fiercely.

  Then, slowly, the smoke formed itself into the semblance of two hands, long thin fingers writhing into a benison above his head. The hands hovered, blurring into dissipation. The skull twitched.

  Through the buzzing of a fearsome headache, Anaris heard a sharp intake of breath from the others in the room, then a burst of awed whispers. “Urtigen mizpeshi! Anaris darakh-kreshch!” The mercy of Urtigen! Anaris anointed!

  Anaris propped himself on one fist and looked over his shoulder, fighting his fatigue and the growing nausea his efforts had induced. Glaring the watchers into silence, he issued a command. “Say nothing of this. It is between the ancestor and myself.”

  They bowed, the protracted obeisance of the utterly sincere. Even the kyvernat, technically his superior, with the power of life and death over all on the ship, was abashed before him.

  “Now go.” He turned back to face the altar and waited, rigidly still, until the door hissed shut behind them. Then he crossed the huge room at a run, barely making it to the lavatory before his stomach revolted and he was wrackingly sick.

  He rinsed out his mouth and washed his face, still nauseated from the blinding headache. He studied his face in the mirror. Its normal dusky tone paled to a dirty chalk, his eyes red, the veins in his forehead distended.

  The gift of the Panarchists. He remembered the strange woman from the College of Synchronistic Perception and Practice who had tested him and discovered his t’kinetic ability. He remembered also his disappointment at its weakness—not for him the tearing out of an enemy’s heart or the crushing of his larynx. He could barely move a piece of paper or divert the path of an insect, even after the extensive training she had given him.

  But they also taught me subtlety. It was the Ulanshu Kinesics, the art of using strength against itself, that first opened his eyes to the equations of power. And he remembered the final audience with the Panarch, before he returned to Dol’jhar. “Brute force can only kill, it cannot conquer,” Gelasaar had said, his blue gaze intent, as if searching Anaris’s soul to determine how much was Panarchist, and how much still Dol’jharian. The Panarch spoke quietly, using none of the formal honorifics, as if laying aside his rank to speak heart-to-heart, but to Anaris’s eyes his power had still shone through, like the heat from an unquenchable furnace. “I could have reduced Dol’Jhar to a flaming pyre, inhabited only by the restless dead, with no one to placate them—but what would that have gained me? I prefer the scalpel to the bludgeon; a lesson your father has yet to learn.”

  Anaris straightened up slowly. A lesson that will destroy my father in the end, for he is but a blunt instrument in the hands of destiny. He smiled at his reflection. So, Gelasaar, perhaps it should be your ghost to whom I sacrifice, once I sit upon the Emerald Throne.

  The Emerald Throne.

  Anaris would have liked to recover for an hour or two, but he could not risk showing any sign of weakness. He had to get down to the planet, for Eusabian had summoned him to witness the assumption of his vanquished enemy’s throne, and the judgment of his defeated foe.

  Anaris would see Gelasaar again, not in a position of power, but in its lack. How would Gelasaar Arkad wear defeat?

  Anaris left the lavatory and paused before the altar. The candles flickered from his movement, the shadows in his grandfather’s eye sockets shifting eerily. Even his father was helpless against the superstitions of Dol’jhar. Indeed, they were an essential part of his power.

  Favored of Urtigen. Anaris laughed, and winced at the pain. That was something else he owed the Panarchists—owed, in fact, the now-dead youngest son, whose inferiority Anaris had exerted himself at first entertainingly, and then (he recognized only after he left) obsessively, to force him to acknowledge. Brandon had retaliated with an escalating series of practical jokes. It had been one of the most complex of his irritating pranks that had purged Anaris once and for all of his belief in the afterlife, freeing him to turn those beliefs against his father.

  Thank you, Brandon. I do appreciate the irony of your having set me free. A shame you are not alive to be brought to appreciate it.

  Now, despite Anaris’s command, the word would spread.

  Best of all, no word would come of this to his father. Who would dare his wrath at the suggestion that the shades of the ancestors favored his son?

  Anaris leaned forward and snuffed out the candles. Then he caressed the skull, smiling mirthlessly, and left to summon the shuttle.

  o0o

  ARTHELION

  Eusabian stood before the Phoenix Gate of the Emerald Throne Room, his hands on his hips, staring up at the colossal doors before him. Inlaid into their surface in a complex mosaic of precious metals and minerals was the image of a Phoenix enwrapped in flames, its eyes gleaming in ecstatic triumph. He had waited for this moment for twenty years, and he savored each slowly passing second.

  Not long ago he had landed with his vanquished enemy in
train. Shortly he would humble Gelasaar hai-Arkad in the center and symbol of his power, but first the Lord of Vengeance and Avatar of Dol would take possession of the Emerald Throne at the heart of the Mandala.

  He nodded to the guardsmen standing alert at either side of the massive doors. They swiveled, marched to the center of the portal, and grasped the enormous handles. Hidden engines subtly hummed as the guards pulled, and the doors slowly swung open. Each leaf was over a meter thick, yet the doors’ height balanced the proportions, rendering them fine-drawn.

  He strode through the still-opening portal and stopped abruptly, held against his will by the majesty and authority of the room before him. It was the biggest interior space he had ever seen, had ever conceived, its distant corners lost in a confusion of color from the impossibly tall stained-glass windows that rose rank upon rank in the distant walls, reducing their bulk to a weightless lacework that mantled the room in a mystery of light. High overhead, a galaxy of lamps sprang to life, creating a perfect simulacrum of a starry sky, leaving Eusabian with the dizzying sense that the room was of infinite height. The light from above infused every part of the chamber with clarity while leaving the enigmatic colors from the windows in command. Banners and blazons of every description hung from the walls and below the lights, a glory of history and a forest of legend.

  Yet despite its overwhelming scale and the multitude of ornaments, everything conspired to draw Eusabian’s eyes irresistibly to the center and focus of the room. Even the pattern of the thick-strewn stars and nebulae above redirected his attention to the Throne on a vast dais in the center of the space, an emerald glory transfixed by a beam of light from an unseen source. He suppressed a shiver of awe and strode forward.

  As he drew nearer, the Emerald Throne resolved into a graceful, organic form, alive with flickering internal light, that seemed to grow up out of the polished obsidian dais. The Throne and the architecture of the space surrounding it formed the undeniable impression of a tree so vast that only a part of it could fit within the hall, its roots plunging deeply into the foundations of the Mandala, the heart of the Thousand Suns; its branches, perceived through suggestion and design, upholding the sky and bearing aloft the stars.