by S. L. Viehl
Someone else was there with her. Reever squinted, trying to make out her face. But there was no face. There was nothing but a smooth patch of ivory. Then he felt the instrument at his throat, and fell back against the rubble. “Cherijo?”
“Rest now.” The fur covered him. “All will be well.”
Of course it will, Reever thought as the drugs dragged him down into the dark. The imperative driving him mad was now silenced forever.
Reever had found her.
Orjakis paced the length of his balcony, not bothering with privacy screens. These days few people had time to walk the streets of Skjonn, and those who hurried along below did not spare the time to look up anymore. The Kangal stunned himself by how little he cared about the lack of homage. How could a ruler pay attention to the proper priorities when half of his army was dead and the other half was losing a war they should have won the second day it was declared?
Losing to slaves. To slave animals, left to breed unchecked. How was this possible?
All the mirrors in the palace had been smashed by Orjakis and the pieces removed, and the Kangal had not bothered with a full-body treatment in weeks. He did not dare look upon his image now. The strain alone had been enough, he was convinced, to have turned him into Gohliya’s twin.
“I see Janzil Ches Orjakis, Kangal of Skjonn,” a protocol drone said from the arch leading into Orjakis’s bedchamber. “Representatives from the Allied League of Worlds have arrived to offer crystal and assistance to the great Kangal and his cherished kindred.”
“They were supposed to come here last season,” Orjakis snapped at the drone.
“The Hsktskt blockade prevented that—”
“They are too late.” The Kangal gave a delicate sniff. “We do not have time for them now.” He flicked his hand. “Send them away.”
“General Gohliya suggests—”
The Kangal wrenched a slat from the delicately carved mock palisade. “We ordered you never to utter his name in our presence.” He struck the drone with all his might, knocking its cranial case from its chassis.
“I see Janzil Ches Orjakis, and so can the citizens of Skjonn,” Gohliya said, stepping out onto the balcony. He caught the slat before the Kangal could club him over the head with it, and tossed it over the side. “You will have to improve your timing, Kangal, or you will never kill me.”
“Kill you?” Orjakis was so angry he could only whisper the words. “No, our dear inept fool. You are to be kept alive for years. Decades. We are planning every moment of them.”
“We will all die very quickly if you do not convince the League to help us win this war,” the general said. “They have finally broken through the Hsktskt blockade and have their ships in orbit. They have brought the crystal you demanded in payment. Where is that liaison officer they sent here, just before the war started? Deyin, wasn’t that his name?”
“Yes, Deyin.” Orjakis took a moment to savor the memory of what he had done to the League captain. It had been one of the last pleasures he had enjoyed. “Which portion of him do you want? You should be very specific; there are many.”
Gohliya shook his head. “I will have to do something about this.”
“Do you threaten us?” Orjakis had tolerated an exorbitant amount of disrespect from the general since the trenches had been taken, but Gohliya had never crossed this line. It is the final one. I don’t care how important he is to the army, or who will run it in his stead. He dies today.
“I mean Deyin,” the general said. He glared at Orjakis. “They are expecting him to debrief them on the situation.”
Orjakis waved a hand. “We will say that the animals killed him.”
“That is another thing, Kangal. You must stop calling them animals.” Gohliya turned his back on Orjakis and walked into the chamber. “They are rebels. That is how the League refers to them. They will not know who you are speaking of if you do not call them that.”
Orjakis considered wrenching off another slat, but his hands hurt and his head pounded. He pressed his hand over his heart—he was too young for it to fail, surely—and took several deep breaths, calming himself before he walked into his chamber. He did not summon the detainment drones. It was a bitter thing, but he needed Gohliya alive until the end of this war.
“We cannot see them until we have had a treatment.” Orjakis felt a little better, hearing the calmness of his own voice. He did have a very melodic voice, much better than Stagon’s had been. “Tell them to come back in a week.”
“In a week there will be nothing for them to return to. I had thought we made progress at Bjola, but—”
“You lost fifty ships at Bjola, and a thousand men.” Orjakis waved away the dressage drones and selected his own garments. “Fifty crystals. How is this progress?”
Gohliya gave him a narrow look. “I did not know you were aware of the losses.”
Orjakis went to view himself, cursing under his breath when he remembered how he had taken apart a drone with his bare hands and smashed all the mirrors.
“Kangal, who reported the casualties at Bjola to you?” The general sounded different now.
“What you mean is, how did we discover your latest ineptitude?” Orjakis sprayed himself with scent. “We are aware of everything that has happened in this war, General. Never forget that.”
“The point is, the rebels were not prepared for the secondary attack. They have no intelligence on our movements, and their ability to communicate between battalions is severely limited. Five hundred Iisleg died at Bjola. The Raktar’s resources grow thin. We have eradicated most of his underground hydroponics labs, so they are entirely dependent on synthetics for food. He cannot synthesize new troops. We have the League, ready to help us.”
“Only because they believe the trenches are still intact.” The Kangal made a bitter sound. “When they discover that we no longer hold the fate of ten thousand armies in our hands, do you think they will be quite as accommodating?”
“That is why you must handle these men,” Gohliya said, his voice oddly urgent. “Not in the usual manner, but as commander of the Toskald armies. You have proven yourself a worthy leader, Janzil. The other Kangal would never have given control of their troops to you, had you not. Forget your vanity for once and be the ruler we need now.”
“We need a manicure,” Orjakis murmured, studying his hands. “Perhaps the treatment unit can be persuaded not to tint our nails so pink this time. Do you have a spare pistol we may take with us?”
Gohliya sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You destroyed the last of the functioning treatment units three weeks ago.”
“Oh.” He frowned, not remembering the particular incident. “Was that before or after I ordered all the animal—rebel—slaves executed?”
“After. You wanted to watch.”
“Come here and help us with this,” Orjakis said, taking down his heaviest ceremonial cloak. “What do we wish to obtain from the League?”
Gohliya helped to drape the weighted, padded shoulders of the cloak over the Kangal’s. “Crystal, of course,” he said. “The loan of five hundred scout/strike vessels and one hundred troop carriers. We will also need infantry.”
“Allowing League troops on Akkabarr is dangerous.”
“We will not permit any of their troops to leave it. Lift your chin.” When Orjakis did, Gohliya fastened the jewel-encrusted collar. “There is something else. As they came through the blockade, the first signal the League sent us was to inquire about a Terran clone. The same one the man posing as Stuart mentioned to you.”
“Deyin was very excited about her. We found nothing of importance in his database, however.” Orjakis applied a thin layer of sparkling tint to his lips. “She was cooked up in a lab by some insane Terran genius, now dead. We cannot understand why anyone would want that female. She is only a surgeon, and not even an interesting one.”
“Deyin would not have had the interesting files on his database,” Gohliya said as he took the headdress that matched the
cloak from its storage case and set it carefully on the Kangal’s head.
“True.” Orjakis pursed his lips as soon as the tint had set. “So they came for her, as well.”
He had meant to interrogate Deyin about the female, but once he had entered the Preparation chamber, where his guards had chained the League officer next to the open display case with all of Orjakis’s favorite implements, such thoughts had rather slipped his mind.
“We will need to accommodate the ships and troops they give us at once,” Orjakis told Gohliya. “Make ready for them. We want the city prepared for the attack.”
“What attack?”
Poor Gohliya. His spies were so much less efficient than Orjakis’s. “Even as we speak, the rebels are preparing to launch their final attack. They are coming for the cities now, General. You had better make your men ready to defend us.”
Gohliya came around to face him. “From where are you getting your information? How? This is not the first time you’ve anticipated something the rebels intended to do.”
“Why would we give you one of the two things that keep you from assassinating us, General?” Orjakis swept out of the room.
The League contingent was a small army of officers, diplomats, and representatives from a dozen League worlds. Orjakis had to instruct the drones to herd them all into his ballroom; they wouldn’t fit into the receiving chamber.
Orjakis insisted on full protocol presentation, which took another hour. The League were marvelously courteous and carried out their part in the ceremonial introductions with few errors.
“I see Janzil Ches Orjakis, Kangal of Skjonn,” the senior ranking officer said once he had offered crystal and had been invited to speak. “I am Allied League of Worlds General Patril Shropana, Kangal. I sent Captain Deyin to respond to your request for assistance. Could he be brought to debrief us on the present situation?”
“We would be happy to summon him, General. Unfortunately, Captain Deyin was killed by rebels just as war broke out.” Orjakis produced a sad sound. “He died saving our life, as it happens. He was given an appropriate memorial service, one fit for who he was.”
“I see.” Shropana’s expression tightened. “We must then petition the Kangal for permission to search the surface of the planet for our missing property.”
“The Terran clone physician for whom you have half the galaxy searching, we presume?” Shropana nodded once. And you hate her, Orjakis thought, seeing it in the other man’s eyes. More than you love your life. “The rebels have her now. Many of our brave men have died trying to retrieve her.”
“So have mine.” Shropana broke eye contact to murmur to one of his aides. “Perhaps the League can be of assistance to the Toskald people in this conflict.”
Orjakis smiled. “Perhaps you can.”
SEVENTEEN
“How is that chest wound that came in?” Jarn asked Resa as she washed the blood of a dying rebel from her hands in the basin.
“Holding steady. I’ve put Malmi to watch him. She will come if there is any change.” Resa pulled the disposable surgical shroud away from her robe. The shrouds had come from a supply ship that had run afoul of the surface blockade and crashed mostly intact, which had also provided their field hospital with badly needed medicines. “These are convenient, but I wish there was some way we could recycle them.” She dropped the stained overgarment in the refuse bag. “Your patient?”
“I was wrong; the liver was destroyed. He won’t live past dawn. I gave him the last of the valumine to keep him asleep.” Jarn pressed her hands to the dull ache throbbing at the small of her back. “We should do rounds before the senior caregivers come on for the night. The three we had brought over from Bjola are here.”
Resa nodded and pulled on fresh gloves. “Any change?”
“The snowbite will have to have that foot amputated. I’ll talk to him now. The others from Bjola are still sedated but stable.” Jarn picked up the datapads they had converted for use as patient charts and led the way from surgery into the ward.
The field hospital was arranged as a treatment center, not a true hospital. They moved too often to keep any sort of a permanent ward. Yet while they were at a battle site, Jarn and Resa insisted on providing as many beds as they could for the surgical patients who had a good chance of survival, as well as those who could not tend to themselves alone.
Malmi, who was with the patient Resa had operated on, stood as soon as she saw the two women enter the ward area. She had been the skela who had taken to nursing with the most ease, and was now their caregiver supervisor in the unit.
When they were on the ice, she was one of their deadliest killers.
“The drainage continues, Healer,” Malmi told Resa. “It is streaked with blood, but not a great amount.”
“Good.” Resa went over to check the patient’s vitals and inspect the surgical site. “Send someone for me if there is any change.”
Jarn went to the young rebel with the gangrenous foot. He had been caught in a shelter collapse and lain there three days before someone found him, and only then by seeing a twitch in the blackened foot sticking out of the rubble. He was awake and lucid now. “Are you in any pain?”
“No.” He looked around him with large eyes and shivered with awe and fear. “Am I with God? Did the vral bring me to the otherworld?”
“You are in a hospital,” Jarn told him, tucking the furs up around him. “We are healers.”
He frowned at her. “Healers are men.”
“Men are soldiers. For now, women are healers.” She didn’t think he would give her trouble, as some of the older men did. Much had changed between the men and women of Akkabarr since the beginning of the war. “Do you remember about your foot?”
“It is black.” He stared at it. “That means I will lose it and be a cripple. I should keep it so I may walk when I give myself to the ice.”
“You were found worthy by the vral, were you not?” Jarn watched the doubt fill his eyes. “We need men to protect the women and the children in the trenches. These men need not walk, only monitor the defense systems and activate them if there is a threat. Could you do that for your Raktar?”
The young man nodded eagerly.
“Good. Then rest, so you will be ready for the morning.” She moved on to the next bed.
When Jarn and Resa had finished rounds, they stepped into a curtained corner where they donned their vral masks and robes. They wore the disguises whenever they went beyond the walls of the field hospital’s shelter. The few times that there were enough shelters for them to sleep outside the unit, they left the masks off there, but otherwise never revealed their identities to the men.
Resa felt it was becoming unnecessary. The faceless vral fought alongside the rebels now, and they were respected as soldiers. Most of the men had their suspicions, although they never voiced them. Jarn was the one who had insisted on maintaining the illusion. When they were vral, they were untouchable.
Without their masks, they were women. Worse, they were skela. The men would not fight with them if their suspicions became known facts.
The rebel encampment was small and well concealed beneath an enormous portable canopy of reflective material that mimicked the surface crust in appearance and when scanned by the Toskald patrols. Sometimes the canopy was taken down to be carried to their next location; sometimes the camp moved only with the canopy, propped on pack sleds, still shrouding them.
“Vral.” The word chased the wind whenever Resa and Jarn walked under the sky. Rebels who carried the blood of the dozen men they had slain that day would draw back in fear. Other, more knowledgeable souls would bow. Everyone knew they belonged to the Raktar now, and saved the men who fought for him because he was worthy. The Raktar had become more than a leader; he was a god among men, for he commanded the vral.
“Hold.” Hasal came out of a shelter flap and intercepted the two women. He treated them with a combination of suspicion and mild contempt, but the general’s second seemed t
o regard everyone save Teulon as a potential threat. “Is the work finished for the day?”
Jarn inclined her head.
“The Raktar would see you in the training shelter.” Hasal walked ahead of them, glaring at anyone who stepped into his path.
“I didn’t know he had returned,” Resa murmured. “Usually he comes to the unit first.”
The Battle of Bjola had been a difficult campaign for the rebels. They had deliberately repopulated the iiskar, hoping to lure patrol ships within range of their cannon, at first concealed by flimsy tents that only imitated Iisleg structures. The initial phase had been successful, and they had brought down ten ships. It had been while they were salvaging the crash sites at dawn that the second wave of forty ships had converged on the rebels. Half of the men were killed before they could cross the ice and take cover. Those who stayed inside the wrecks were not spared, either; the Toskald now destroyed all of their grounded ships.
As soon as word filtered back to the general’s encampment, Teulon had sent up his reserves, but it had not been soon enough, and three companies of rebels were lost.
Hasal stopped outside the training shelter and waited for the two women to go inside. He permitted Resa to pass, but held Jarn back with one raised hand.
“What is wrong?” she asked him.
“This.” Hasal handed her one of the mouth straps the rebels all carried. This one was bitten through and stained green. “It is the tenth he has discarded this moon.”
Jarn hated the silencer; the men used it when they were wounded to keep from screaming. She also knew Teulon was not wounded, at least, not where anyone could see, or anywhere she or Resa could fix. “This would be the Raktar’s private concern, not mine.”
The men are concerned. They have heard him now, several times.” Hasal looked around before adding, “He needs rest, but he hardly sleeps now. Battle does not tire him. Neither does walking the ice, or visiting that empty cave he favors.”
Jarn knew what the Raktar’s second was asking. “We are not here to play ahayag.”
