The Phoenix in Flight

by Sherwood Smith

“I know about that. But you would fix it, if you could, am I right? Markham would have,” she went on, talking faster than she ever had in her life. “He did try—” She stopped, swallowed. “And died for it.”

  “We ‘nicks’ think as differently as non-nicks.” His grin flashed, then he said more seriously, “I promise, Greywing, if I can, I will.” He raised his right hand.

  Her eyes blurred again, and she struggled to get control of anger. Grief. Hope, which hurt worse than everything else put together.

  “Do you know what the Eya’a are doing there?” the Krysarch asked easily. She recognized the change of focus as a chance for her to recover her equilibrium, and she was grateful, but she would not show that, either. “That noise of theirs might shatter those crystals,” he said with a laugh.

  “Vi’ya would know,” she said in her flattest voice.

  “Shall we go ask?” He got to his feet, smiling down at her in invitation.

  She shrugged her good shoulder. “How come you aren’t raiding your own art? Got better money stashed somewhere?”

  He gave a slight grimace. “Prisoner of my training, I guess. I could take it, but I wouldn’t be able to sell it. And where would I keep a crate of priceless artifacts? I don’t seem to have an unoccupied home right now.”

  She answered his smile, though it took effort.

  “So I was sitting here trying to concoct a way to get the House computer to locate and deliver some large quantities of money to me—money the new tenants think is theirs now.”

  She did laugh at that.

  “I’ll see what I can contrive when we leave this antechamber,” he said.

  They reached Vi’ya, and Brandon made a gesture indicating the Eya’a. “What are they doing under that chandelier?”

  “They are praising its beauty, using something akin to song.” The captain regarded the Eya’a. “They rarely use speech, except in moments of great stress.”

  “You can understand what they say, or sing?”

  “Yes, through our mind link.”

  “But you’re a tempath, not a telepath.”

  The captain studied Brandon. “With them it is different,” she said.

  Brandon seemed to sense as well as Greywing knew that no further information would be forthcoming about her relationship with the Eya’a. “You don’t seem much interested in joining the free-for-all,” he commented, nodding in the direction of Ivard, who was prying at something affixed to a wall.

  Vi’ya shrugged slightly. “As captain, I receive fifty percent of everything they take.” Her smile was faint. “Having now seen a small portion of your home, I am not worried about being able to afford whatever Telvarna requires, so I can take the liberty of pleasing myself.”

  They had been slowly walking in no particular direction along the length of the hall and now stood in front of a pedestal displaying something that glittered softly in the light from above. It was a necklace, with a chain composed of large links—too large for a human neck—of a dark silvery alloy with an almost oily sheen to it. Suspended in a simple setting was a large elliptical gem. It was a soft gray, the indistinct color of morning rainclouds, and had no facets.

  Greywing sucked her breath in, mesmerized by the eye-tricking depths in the stone.

  Brandon lifted the necklace from the display and held it out to Vi’ya, and when she extended her palm, he dropped it into her hand. Slowly the gem came to life, apparently activated by the heat of her hand. It began to flicker with a holographic medley of colors that slowly flowed up her arm, layering her in an armor of light. Against the severity of her attire and the calm impassivity of her expression the effect was startling.

  “The Stone of Prometheus,” said Brandon, “found in the wreckage of an alien spacecraft in the Oort Cloud around the Ndigwe system some six hundred fifty years ago. No one knows anything about the race that made it, or where they came from.”

  He bowed with a flourish, his hand making an airy arc that somehow combined both grace and humor. “As my last official act, as Krysarch Brandon Takai Burgess Njoye William su Gelasaar y Ilara nyr Arkad d’Mandala, I give this to the captain of the Telvarna.”

  Vi’ya hesitated, her expression altering very slightly, but she did not return his smile. Her hand closed over the stone. She made a little, quick gesture—almost a nervous movement, though Greywing had never seen the captain display that emotion, even under fire.

  Brandon seemed to sense it, too. “What is it?” he asked, his smile changing to question.

  Vi’ya shrugged, this time a sharp movement. “The captain of Telvarna thanks you,” was all she said as she walked past.

  “It’s your moves,” Greywing said. “Like this.” She flicked her hand up in a parody of his mocking bow. “Don’t know whether you got ’em from Markham or he got ’em from you, but sometimes looking at you is like a ghost come to life.”

  Brandon’s smile vanished. He gave her a sober nod, then his expression altered again when his gaze moved past her shoulder.

  Greywing turned to look at what had caught his attention and saw the captain approaching the big double doors.

  o0o

  “Got room for this one, Firehead?” Lokri asked.

  “Sure,” Ivard said, happy at the comtech’s friendliness.

  “Good. Here’s another one for Marim. If we don’t bring her plenty, she’ll hack our balls off while we sleep and have Montrose cook ’em for our breakfast.”

  Ivard winced as he shoved another pointy art thing down the inside of his sleeve. He could barely move. He’d have to stop somewhere and figure out a way to shift all this stuff around better.

  Snorting a laugh, he thought about the fortune he was carrying inside his clothes. How he wished old Trev back on Natsu could see him now! He still couldn’t believe it. Him and Greywing actually in the Palace belonging to the Panarch—and robbing it! And with one of the Krysarchs cheering them on!

  He checked to see if Greywing was having fun, but she was frowning. And the captain was coming his way! He gulped and faded back defensively, but she passed by him without a glance.

  Curious, he ducked around Lokri, who was digging with the point of his springknife at the jewels encrusting a huge statue. The captain stopped before those big doors with the things carved on them.

  “What’s that?” the Krysarch said, walking fast.

  Ivard followed.

  A thin yellow sash with purple blotches was draped across the carved doors that separated the antechamber from the Hall beyond. Its garish color clashed horribly with the old-gold of the design in the carpet. Ivard’s skin prickled as the blotches resolved into the ancient and terrible symbol of the inverted trefoil.

  “Radiation?” the Krysarch said sharply. “In the Hall of Ivory?”

  He pulled at the door handle. The yellow plastic sash stretched and snapped as the doors swung open under the impulse of the hinge engines, and the sight thus revealed wrung a shout of anguish from the Krysarch as he ran through— “No! “—and fell to his knees.

  EIGHT

  The vast interior of the Hall of Ivory was a charred ruin, illuminated only by the light from the open doors and the few lamps left unshattered in the blackened ceiling. The tapestries on the walls were mere traceries of ash and tattered cloth. The windows—evidently destroyed by whatever energies had been released within the Hall—had been covered with opaque dyplast sheets. The sweet stench of burned flesh loured faintly in the air. At the far end of the Hall the immense doors that guarded the Ivory entrance to the Throne Room were seared and blackened, their inlaid design reduced to twisted strips of metal.

  Ivory.

  The words that Deralze spoke just before he died came back to Brandon: “Trust him. He didn’t know... Plot. Ivory...

  Now he understood Deralze’s uncertainty in the Palace, the day of the Enkainion. Lenic knew about this.

  If it hadn’t been for Markham, Brandon would have died with the others in the Ivory Hall.

  The Faseult r
ing burned on his finger. Brandon gazed down at it sightlessly, his eyes aching as he remembered that day. His ridiculous conversation with the Archonei Inesset, the irritation he’d felt when he said his farewell to Eleris without her knowing. The worst she could have been accused of was ambition.

  Farewell. Eleris, I thought it was I who chose danger, not you.

  He trembled, helpless in the grip of rage and grief, but he forced himself to observe every detail of the room, and remember. Shallow or calculating, foolish or devious—as so many of them had been—loyal and dedicated, faithful and faithless, none of them had deserved this.

  He became aware of Montrose’s bulky form, and heard without comprehending a strident burring noise from his boswell and the one on Montrose’s wrist. A pair of huge hands grabbed him under the arms and threw him out of the Hall. He tried to back on his hands and knees toward the Hall of Ivory as the tall doors swung shut in his face; he could not abandon them, his mourning should not be interrupted.

  Montrose grabbed his upper arms in his huge paws and hauled him to his feet, whispering fiercely, “Fool! Stay out of there! The rads in there would kill you, and not quickly. We have nothing on the Telvarna to deal with the likes of that!”

  As suddenly as it had gripped him, the storm of emotion broke and receded.

  o0o

  Ivard watched the Krysarch straighten up after Montrose let go of him. He took a deep breath and clawed his hair back from his face, his hands shaking. Then his face went polite again, but Ivard could still see the evidence of emotion in tears and the tremble of his fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” the Krysarch muttered. “This was where my Enkainion was held.” He took another deep breath and said with a bitter smile, “Except I wasn’t here. I’d gone off to join you.”

  “Best for you that you did,” said Montrose grimly, tapping his boswell. “According to my boz’l, whoever settles into this palace will first have to tear down that hall and launch the rubble into the sun. They used an obscenely filthy radiation device. There could have been no survivors.”

  Ivard turned his back on the blasted Hall and on the Krysarch still struggling with his reaction. Witnessing his transition from cool control to wild grief and back again had been more unsettling than the sight of the destruction inside the building.

  He found Greywing crouched on the ground, painstakingly picking up gemstones from the floor. Lokri was still prying stones from the statue with his knife. He caught the biggest ones, but let the smaller stones fall to the floor, where Greywing gathered them.

  “There’s better things,” Ivard said to her.

  Greywing hefted a handful of stones. “Oh, these’ll bring a good price, if we don’t sell ’em at once. Good bargaining.” She snorted softly, lifting her chin in Lokri’s direction. “Already ruined the statue anyway.”

  “So what? Nicks can buy themselves a new one,” Ivard said.

  Greywing squinted at him, and he knew he’d said something wrong. “New stones can be dug up,” she said. “But you don’t find things like this twice.” She pointed at the statue, now scored with knife scratches and pocked where jewels were missing.

  “So. These rich nicks—”

  “Look, Ivard.” Greywing put her hand inside her coverall, wincing slightly, and pulled out a small round silver thing—like a misshapen coin.

  “That don’t look like much,” Ivard said, poking at the thing on her callused palm. “Won’t bring a big price—”

  “That’s all you know,” she said. “It’s from Lost Earth.”

  Ivard gasped. Fancy as all these other gemmed and gold things were, he knew that anything purportedly from Lost Earth was priceless. “You could buy a ship—for us,” he breathed.

  “Not selling it,” she stated, her eyes wide and intense. “See it, Ivard? There’s only one, and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

  He wanted to say, “So what?” but he could see that this was important to her. So he looked at it more closely, then discovered what the shape was. “It’s a bird!”

  Greywing grinned like she had when they were small. “‘Greywing.’ See?” she said. Her fingers closed over it. “Gonna keep it forever.”

  Ivard thought it over. “Like my flight medal? Except you didn’t do anything for it,” he amended.

  To his surprise, his sister shook her bristly head. “Krysarch gave me a promise. About Natsu. They’ll get their freedom, too.” She slid the medallion back into her pocket.

  Puzzled by this odd turn of events, Ivard looked away, then made a discovery. “Hey! More stones over there.” He’d help her gather them—he couldn’t get anything more into his coverall anyway.

  Greywing bent to pick up some small rubies, and Ivard saw a gleam of emerald in a corner behind a statue. He reached to grab it, then snatched his fingers back with a yelp when a bright ribbon of what looked like green plastape rustled out and wrapped itself around his freckled wrist.

  “Yow!” he yelled. It prickled, not painfully. And, “Hey!” with real fear when he tried to rip it free, and the ribbon bound tighter.

  “What’s that?” Lokri said from behind.

  “It jumped me,” Ivard quavered, holding up his arm. “Gimme your knife. I want to cut it off.”

  Montrose appeared, frowning. “Looks like Kelly ribbon,” he said. “Where was it?”

  “Under there.” Ivard pointed. “Please, get it off.” He didn’t know much about the Kelly, who seemed such strange and jolly beings, but he didn’t trust anything inanimate that suddenly took on a life of its own.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” Lokri said, producing his springknife from his sleeve. “I’ll just—”

  Montrose put his hand on Lokri’s arm, restraining him. Lokri tried to shake him off, then stilled as Vi’ya said sharply, “Silence.”

  The Eya’a emitted an ear-tingling chatter. Vi’ya spun around with her jac in a two-handed grip and fired at a figure that appeared at the top of the staircase. The man dropped his weapon and slumped down the stairs. The heavy jac bumped noisily down several risers and then clattered to the floor below. His body followed a short distance, then his foot caught between two risers and twisted him over the edge, leaving him hanging upside down like a carcass in a meat locker.

  “Your emotions blocked the Eya’ a from hearing him until too late,” said Vi’ya, looking from the Krysarch to Greywing. “We had better leave here with what we have. We won’t have much time once he’s missed.”

  She pushed the Stone into her pouch with the other small items she’d chosen, and gestured with her weapon. “Where now?”

  “But this—” Ivard squawked, scratching at the Kelly ribbon now wrapped tightly round his wrist. It itched fiercely.

  Ivard’s question flared to terror when the Krysarch and Montrose exchanged looks he could not interpret.

  “I’ll take care of it when we get back on board, boy,” Montrose said. “Come on.”

  The Krysarch’s face was grim as he led them across the chamber. Ivard followed as closely as he could, wincing as his treasures poked his body unmercifully. He rubbed hard at the thing on his wrist.

  They passed the dead soldier hanging from the staircase, a neat, smoking hole marring the red fist of Dol’jhar on the chest of his gray uniform. Then Brandon twitched aside another tapestry to reveal a narrow door. He turned to Vi’ya. Behind her the Eya’a stood unmoving, their eyes gleaming.

  “This will bring us down onto the level of the old Hegemonic detention areas,” the Krysarch said. “How far off can they sense humans?”

  “They can localize and sense something of their minds up to a hundred meters away—walls are no obstacle. Beyond that they can sense their presence, and sometimes strong emotions, but nothing else.”

  “But they can’t tell us apart?”

  “Only humans they know. We will have to assume that anyone we meet is an enemy.”

  He pushed open the door, motioning them to the landing of a narrow spiral staircase.

 
The crew filed past him. Brandon glanced back at the plundered hall once more, then let the tapestry fall.

  They ran down the echoing steel into the darkness below, Ivard lagging behind. He struggled to stay with the rest, but prickles and pains shot up his legs and arms from the things he’d thrust into his coverall, the prickles far worse than they’d been, as if everything had grown sharp points and edges. His skin hurt all over, but the worst was the green thing on his wrist.

  “Ivard.” Greywing loomed out of the shadows. “Why can’t you go faster?”

  “The things I got—” he gasped, then felt her hand run over his body.

  “Dump some of it. You got enough to buy the Telvarna twice over.”

  “Not mine—got some for Marim...”

  He winced when she yanked his zipper down, but then the worst of the pricks and jabs disappeared. He closed his eyes. Even sounds hurt. The clinks and chings of the treasures being set down on the cement sent tiny green and orange needles through his ears.

  He shook his head and opened his eyes. Greywing had carefully lined up the art objects along the wall behind the door.

  “There. You leave Marim to me,” she said grimly. “Now run.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed, and he nearly fell down the spiraling stairs in his effort to speed up. He and Greywing caught up when the Krysarch had to stop at another passage access.

  Brandon tapped at an inset console, then turned to the crew. “Weapons ready?” he said softly. “Let us endeavor.”

  o0o

  “Why haven’t you found that ship yet?” Barrodagh snarled at the miniature image of Rifellyn on his compad. He carefully kept his right hand out of sight of the pickup.

  “I told you, pesz-ko Barrodagh, I don’t have enough techs to manage the Node as it is. Most of the Panarchists refused to cooperate, and those that did were worse than useless. If they weren’t incompetent, they were busy committing sabotage. I shot twenty-three of them before I decided to expel them from the Node entirely.”

  Barrodagh gritted his teeth at Rifellyn’s insulting use of the minimal-difference mode of address. He had encountered it elsewhere and knew the motivation behind it: an attempt by suborned officials to disassociate themselves from the realities of Dol’jharian power. Specifically its punishments. It doesn’t work that way, Rifellyn. I think one of you is going to have to serve to demonstrate.