The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

  Brandon raised his eyebrows. “Dogs?”

  Vi’ya hesitated, her lips parted. Montrose suspected that neither the Dol’jharian captain nor the Eya’a had seen a canine in the flesh before the brief encounter in the forest. Once again she stood close to the Eya’a, all three still, then she looked away. “They do not perceive... life forms the same way we do. The best I can get from them is that one of the minds is like a raw hunger. The others are more complex.”

  Brandon said, “Now I see why you don’t need boswells to keep quiet. I shouldn’t have worried about needing the house system, after all.”

  She shook her head. “They can’t tell strange humans apart, so they can’t tell friend from foe until the person sees us and reacts.” She smiled slightly. “At that point we won’t need the Eya’a to tell us the difference.”

  Brandon opened the door. Opposite the closet was a flight of stairs.

  “We’ll come back down those stairs. For now, head left.”

  He stepped out, followed by Vi’ya, shadowed closely by the Eya’a. Montrose waited until the rest had exited and then took up the rear, his weapon held at the ready, his finger carefully away from the trigger.

  The corridor was paneled in a dark, subdued wood, the walls interrupted at regular intervals by wooden doors, many of which had smaller doors or hatches inset in them near the floor. Here and there framed paintings hung on the walls, set off by molding to either side. One of them had a hatch underneath it.

  About fifty meters farther on, they passed a latched-open fire door. Beyond it passages stretched off to either side, with similar open fire doors a few meters down them. Brandon led the group straight on.

  After the next fire door, Montrose detected a sour odor in the air. He was about to comment when Lokri spoke. “Is this area usually so empty?”

  “The Palace Major doesn’t have a resident staff, since its function is largely ceremonial, but even during a major function there wouldn’t be much activity down here. This is only used for storage.”

  Lokri looked around at the subdued elegance of their surroundings and whistled derisively. “Well, pardon me,” he drawled in a parody of aristocratic speech, switching his gait to an exaggerated, mincing saunter, “but I seem to have stumbled into a service corridor. I am so embarrassed—”

  He bit the word off when he slipped and almost fell. A sharp stench filled the air.

  “Blunge!” Lokri glared at the bottom of his foot and then at Brandon. “I guess there’s no servants to follow the Arkad dogs around with a blunge-scoop anymore.”

  Ivard snorted a nervous laugh and Montrose swatted him on the shoulder. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Is that what that stinks?” Ivard whispered. “Are the little doors for them?”

  “Right on both counts, Ivard.” Brandon said. “Dogs are conservative creatures. They don’t like change. Normally they’d consider the Palace their den, which they never soil.”

  One fire door later, about halfway down the corridor, Brandon stopped in front of a painting of an undistinguished landscape. He grasped the ornate frame on either side, and with a subdued click the paneling swung inward to reveal a narrow staircase. “This goes up all four levels to the antechamber of the Hall of Ivory. It opens behind a tapestry.”

  They began climbing. The flights were short, with four turns between each floor. At the top Brandon waited until everyone was on the last landing, then turned to Vi’ya.

  “There’s no one out there,” she reported, “although they say there are some below and some distance away.”

  Brandon tapped a sequence into a keypad next to the door. There was a flicker of red light, then a lens flashed green. “The alarms are off,” he announced.

  He eased the door open, separated a fold in the tapestry with two fingers, and peeked through. Then with a grand gesture, and a curious twist to his mouth that was not quite a smile, he swept the heavy hanging aside and ushered them into his world.

  o0o

  Sebastian Omilov was naked, strapped to a chill-surfaced metal gurney by cuffs around his upper arms, wrists, thighs, and ankles. A cold breeze blowing from the ventilation duct high in the wall across from him added to his discomfort, but this was nothing compared to the strain of waiting.

  Eusabian’s Bori aide had turned him over to a silent hulk of a man, instructing him with a few guttural Dol’jharian phrases. The man’s long, dark face was pitted with sun-cancers, his huge hands horny and twisted with some degenerative condition, but his strength was more than a match for Omilov. He had efficiently and impersonally stripped him and bound him to the gurney. He didn’t even appear to notice Omilov’s resistance. The man had then shaved Omilov’s head and left him to his thoughts.

  Above and behind him was a console with some sort of mesh affair attached to a wire dangling from a swiveling arm. Against the walls were ranks of medical devices, including monitoring and resuscitation equipment. Next to the gurney, where he could see it if he turned his head, was a rolling table with neatly arranged, coldly glittering instruments with an unpleasant multiplicity of points and edges and serrated teeth.

  He looked away, recognizing this time alone as the beginning of the torture.

  The news of Nahomi’s death had shaken him, and not only because it denied him the relatively quick death of anaphylactic shock, from the hidden allergy to truth drugs that had been induced in him when he was named a Praerogate Occult. Contrary to the reputation she assiduously courted—her nickname had been one measure of her success—he had known her as an essentially gentle person, who subordinated her own preference for mercy to the demands of justice and fealty. She had also been a masterful administrator, wielding a deft mixture of firmness, respect, and understanding in her dealings with the Invisibles, men and women who had been entrusted with the authority of the Panarch himself, who were known only to themselves, the Panarch, and her. He would miss her greatly.

  The door swung open and Omilov turned his head, the surface of the gurney cold against his cheek. A tall man with an angular, arrogant face entered and studied him. Another, shorter man stood behind him. The tall man’s head was shaven, his scalp lacquered with a fantastic arabesque in almost metallic colors whose major themes seemed to be eyes and teeth and claws. He wore a long robe of some heavy, shimmering material the color of dried blood. The front of its sleeves left his arms uncovered to the elbow, while the back of the sleeves drooped in a fantastic spill of material almost to the floor. As he scrutinized Omilov he gathered up the excess material of each sleeve and clipped the tip of it under a claw-like epaulette on each shoulder, while his assistant pinned the mid-portions to his sides. The effect was unpleasant, like the furled wings of a large carrion bird, or a demon.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, authoritative, gutturals and rolled r’s emerging with an odd precision, the breathy pause between syllables almost a grunt.

  “I am Evodh radach’Enar, pesz mas’hadni to the Avatar, who has entrusted your death to me.”

  His assistant moved to the head of the gurney and busied himself with the console.

  “Whether or not you cooperate is a matter of indifference to me. Since you are not a Dol’jharian you cannot be expected to understand the honor of your situation, nor to die well. Thus there is no honor here for me, only the extraction of information.”

  Omilov did his best to preserve the Douloi poise. Although the man was speaking Uni, the cultural premises behind his words rendered his speech incomprehensible.

  “However, so that you may understand in part the art of emmer mas’hadnital—I believe you would say, ‘the pain that transfigures’—I will explain as I proceed, so long as you remain capable of comprehension.”

  Omilov jerked slightly as the assistant lifted his head with strangely gentle hands and fitted a metallic mesh cap over it. It felt warm against his shaven scalp.

  Evodh began speaking again, his gaze moving from Omilov’s helpless body into the middle distance, his voice a
lmost ruminative.

  “There are many types of pain. All involve fear.” As he spoke the assistant tapped a switch on the console, and Omilov heard a thin keening commence. Something itched inside his head, just behind his eyes.

  “There are the basic fear complexes: among them falling—” Omilov gasped as the gurney seemed to drop out from beneath him. “—sudden loud noises—” A prodigious explosion rattled his head, and he could even sense the pressure wave on his skin. “—and suffocation.” Something abruptly snatched away the air in the room and his lungs ached as he fought for breath.

  “There is also the fear of the unexpected, which you are already beginning to experience, and more complex and personal fears, which I will discover and exploit during your transfiguration. The mindripper can provide many other effects to aid my explorations. I can diminish or eliminate any part of your sensorium.”

  In rapid succession, each of Omilov’s senses vanished and returned: sight, hearing, touch, proprioception, equilibrium...

  “... and I can heighten them as well.”

  Suddenly the surface of the gurney felt agonizingly cold and the gentle breeze from the ventilator rasped his flesh. The sour scent of his own fear and an odd, pungent scent from the two Dol’jharians filled his nose. His heartbeat resounded in his ears like the engines of a starship in emergency overload.

  Evodh reached down and gently traced a line down Omilov’s stomach with his fingernail; it felt as if he was being eviscerated with a jagged piece of metal. Then the pain stopped, instantly. Omilov felt his lip pop as his teeth met in it in an effort to repress the howl he felt building within him. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the Dol’jharian technology of pain.

  Evodh paused. “Your culture holds that the fear of death is the greatest pang. We of Dol’jhar know this to be false. A greater pang is the fear of undeath, of continuing even after the body that has sustained you in comfort for so many years is ruined beyond redemption.”

  He picked up a small, stubby metal cylinder with a fine spike jutting from its underside and rolled it between his fingers. There was no hint of display in his movements, merely the unconscious gestures of an artist with the tools of his trade, which was far more terrifying than any overt threat would have been. “That is where the art begins. As its medium you will not be able to appreciate its end.”

  The whine from the mindripper increased and Omilov abruptly lost control of his body. He could still feel, but not move. A sour stink pervaded the room and he realized that his bowels had voided. Shame, rage and terror warred within him as Evodh lowered the cylinder toward his face.

  “We will start with stimulation of the trigeminal nerve. Later you will have an opportunity to speak, if you desire.”

  Omilov’s terror peaked as he realized the full extent of his helplessness. Even had he wished to, he could not stop the torture by betraying his oath. He had barely time enough for a brief prayer to the Light-bearer before the needle tore into his cheek and an agony beyond anything he had ever conceived overwhelmed him.

  o0o

  Greywing followed the rest of the crew out from between the folds of the tapestry, and then stopped. Even the Eya’a paused.

  The antechamber to the Hall of Ivory had the form of a spacious hall, its floor covered with a plush, fine-napped carpet of midnight blue deeply incised with a complex abstract design composed of sunbursts and mandalic figurations in old gold. The high walls were interrupted at regular intervals by tall stained-glass windows, illuminated from without, of many different styles, preserving in glistening splendor a thousand years of the vitrine art. Above, just below the high ceiling, a massive crystal chandelier hung apparently unsupported, an inverted fountain of refracted and reflected light.

  At the end of the hall most distant from them was a pair of ten-meter-high doors, carved in a riotous abstract design that suggested an eruption of energy from some unseen source into the phenomenal world. At the other end, near where they had emerged, a spiral staircase sprang gracefully up out of a sunburst mosaic set in the floor to a mezzanine level, its risers fashioned of exotic stone, no two alike. Whatever supported the staircase was invisible. It hung in the air, suggestive of the flight of a bird rising from the surface of a still pond.

  Scattered across the floor in a pleasing relationship to each other and the space they graced were pedestals displaying objets d’art. Similar displays hung on the walls between the windows.

  At first the beauty hit Greywing like a blow. Numbly she studied object after object, trying to memorize them all for recollection later when she was back in the ugliness that had seemed to be her place in the universe. “Beauty” was another of those words that had seemed to have lost its meaning, yet here it was, in forms she could never have imagined, the gifts of unknown cultures, fashioned by long-dead hands. She had to see the names of the artists, though her eyes were stinging and it was hard to read the engraved plagues: this was immortality, a kind she would never achieve.

  A sick kind of desolation chilled her. Except for distant, beckoning glimpses when she was very small, there had been no beauty in her life, and so in turn she had denied the existence of beauty.

  Her eyes blurred as she tried to find Ivard. He bounded excitedly from figure to figure, grabbing whatever was small and stuffing it into pockets, and when those were full, into the front of his coverall.

  Lokri, too, moved with uncharacteristic haste along the displays, grabbing indiscriminately. He backed into something, knocking over a blown-glass figurine that glittered with a desperate rainbow of colors before it smashed on the floor.

  “Sgatshi!” Lokri exclaimed in disgust, and Ivard snickered.

  It seemed a kind of rape to Greywing, and she turned away. Her bitterness increased when she recognized in Ivard’s laughter the hardened cynicism that she had carefully taught him as protection. It had never been his nature.

  Her gaze was caught by a small silver object gleaming against a matte-black background, just beyond her shoulder. Closer examination resolved the object into a roundish medallion, with a broad-winged bird in flight carved on it. The carving was worn in places, and clumsy in others, but there was a kind of power and majesty in the soaring bird. Around the medallion words had been engraved, in a roundish script completely unfamiliar.

  She bent to look at the display plaque, and a thrill burned through her nerves when she read the words “From Lost Earth.”

  She lifted the medallion away from its setting, ignoring the pain in her shoulder. The cold metal was heavy against her hand. A silver bird: Greywing—like the name she had chosen for herself when she left Natsu behind forever. Maybe this was even the original ‘greywing,’ all the way from Lost Earth. Anything seemed possible here, anything.

  Her fingers closed around the coin, then she turned around and surveyed the antechamber. Already many of the displays were bare. Ivard and Lokri joked back and forth as they made their way along an adjacent wall. Montrose strolled at an unhurried pace, gravely considering each item and choosing with care.

  The Eya’a had taken a stance directly under the chandelier, at which they gazed unwaveringly, their necks kinked in an inhuman curve. They began keening together in a high, teeth-shivering counterpoint.

  Poetry? Music? Maybe Vi’ya knew. Greywing saw her moving slowly from exhibit to exhibit, at least as interested in looking as looting.

  The Krysarch alone seemed uninterested in his antechamber. He sat on the stairs, elbows propped on his knees and hands dangling empty, his face pensive.

  She crossed over to him. “Why aren’t you taking anything?” she asked, her voice coming out like an accusation. That surprised her. She didn’t mean it to. “Is this stuff boring to you?”

  Brandon flicked a fast glance across the wide space at Ivard and Lokri and then away again, so quickly she knew that he, too, felt the looting as a kind of rape. It made her spiraling thoughts dissolve into confusion.

  “The art here belongs to the citizens of
the Panarchy,” he finally said. “Not to me.”

  “We aren’t citizens,” she retorted in a stony voice. “We’re Rifters.”

  “You were once,” he replied. “This won’t redress our failure...” He paused, and shrugged as he gave her a twisted smile. “Better you have this stuff than the Dol’jharians.”

  She said, “If Markham had still been alive. And no Hreem attack. What would you have wanted from him?”

  Brandon’s eyes widened, and he hesitated. This pause was as unnerving as anything Greywing had ever experienced: his answer was important to her, though she could not have told him why. And she would have died before bowing or using any of the Panarchist honorifics she’d seen and heard in vids, yet it seemed to her that this man was a part of this vast palace and its silent hall of beauty, or else the hall was a part of him.

  She addressed him as equal to equal, for that was a promise she’d made to herself many years ago, but at the same time she felt the yawning gap between the Douloi Krysarch who had been bred up to power amid all this wealth and beauty, and a name-denied Rifter scantech who was scarcely able to protect one small brother.

  But he did answer. “I would have asked him to join me in a rescue mission,” he said. “A raid against my brother’s fortress on Narbon, to free the singer he held captive to force my second brother’s compliance. After that...”

  He spread his hands. “To tell you the truth, I never thought beyond that.”

  Greywing did not know if that was true. She didn’t really care. The important thing was... “So you do believe—in justice.”

  “It’s why I left,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear him.

  “So it’s not that you nicks don’t care, but you don’t know,” she said. “Am I right? You didn’t know about the combines on Natsu Four and the way they buy us when we’re too small to know anything else, and snuff out our lives in the mines?”

  Brandon’s mouth tightened. “Under the Covenant of Anarchy—”