Korval's Game

by Sharon Lee

  So, a team of four full Agents of Change had been dispatched to Lytaxin, to recover Val Con yos’Phelium—alive. Alive, he yet had value to the Department he had betrayed. Alive, he would serve as both bait and bridle to the remainder of Korval, for surely his kin would do nothing to endanger the life of the one who would be delm? Surely, they would do all they were bidden, in trade for a guarantee of his safe return?

  Commander of Agents was prepared to guarantee Val Con yos’Phelium’s safe delivery back into the midst of his kin. Val Con yos’Phelium, after all, had been an Agent of Change, fully trained by the Department. And those who had once been trained could be retrained.

  The second object of the Department’s attention was Anthora yos’Galan, the sole member of Clan Korval remaining upon Liad. She had prudently withdrawn from yos’Galan’s Line House, Trealla Fantrol, and established herself at Jelaza Kazone, Korval’s ancient stronghold.

  It was . . . daunting . . . that the masters of the dramliz, despite repeated testings, had failed to measure the limits of Anthora yos’Galan’s abilities. According to one confidential guild report, she was not merely the best of the current depleted population of wizards, but the most puissant dramliza to manifest since Rool Tiazan’s death, forty years after Cantra yos’Phelium brought her passengers safe to the planet they would name Liad.

  Wizardly power, however, is but a matter of degree. The results of research done some years earlier and set aside for lack of relevance suddenly proved illuminating. It had been found then that certain modifications to a standard stasis box produced interesting reactions in a dramliza confined therein, not the least of which was an effective neutralization of wizardly abilities. Commander of Agents had ordered such a box constructed, and rendered mobile. It was even now in the final stages of testing. When it was completed, Anthora yos’Galan would give up her residence at Jelaza Kazone, from which base she might provide unknown, and potentially disastrous, assistance to her scattered kin, and live at the pleasure of the Department.

  It was possible that Korval’s wizard had value to the clan, though the clan left her alone and unguarded upon Liad while the rest fled to safety—somewhere. The Commander accepted that Anthora, too, might hold value as a hostage. It might be—should Val Con yos’Phelium not survive his recapture—that his half-Terran foster-sister would fulfill the roles intended for him, even to the ultimate destruction of the clan. Commander of Agents allowed himself some flexibility on this point of planning, pending clarity from the team sent to recover yos’Phelium.

  Commander of Agents allowed himself a small smile before he pushed back from the desk and rose. Strike at the heart—once, twice, thrice—and Korval would fall.

  It was well.

  LYTAXIN:

  Erob’s Medical Center

  Catastrophe Unit

  MED TECH PER VEL sig’Zerba jumped to his feet as the door to the catastrophe unit slid open.

  “Sir, I regret,” he said to the white haired man who entered. “This area is forbidden to—” He stopped, staring quite open-mouthed at the second . . . person . . . to violate the area—all two-and-a-half meters of . . . it—magnificently shelled and bottle green, luminous eyes as round and as yellow as moons.

  The door slid closed. The med tech, with difficulty, returned his attention to the white-haired man.

  “Sir—Lord yos’Galan. We had discussed this matter, sir. The catastrophe room is forbidden to all but medical technicians. The instruments are very delicate and the life of your kinsman depends upon their unimpaired function. It is natural to wish to stand close to kin who are in such desperate case, but, truly, sir, he cannot know whether you are here or elsewhere. You best serve him now by recruiting your strength and preparing yourself to show him a calm face when he emerges from the unit.”

  “These machines, also, sing of discord,” the large green person rumbled. “Where is the device which imprisons our brother?”

  Med Tech sig’Zerba blinked. “The catastrophe unit is there.” He moved a hand toward the black rectangle, its domed lid bristling with readouts, monitors, alarms, and regulators. He looked again to Shan yos’Galan and bowed slightly. “Since you are here, I will tell you that the latest data has been analyzed. Repair has been successful on many fronts. Cerebral function has been stabilized, so we may put the fear of seizures and random states of alt behind us. Blood systems and the functions of the organs are as they should be.” He hesitated.

  “And the damage to the nervous system?” Shan asked quietly, tasting the man’s reluctance almost as his own. “How goes the repair there?”

  The tech sighed. “Not well, alas. Repair may only occur where some system remains. Regeneration . . . has met with variable success. The latest analysis yields an estimate of forty-five percent function.” He inclined his head.

  “This means that your kinsman will not be able to pilot a spaceship, an airship, or a landcar. With practice, he will very likely regain his ability to walk, to grasp objects, and to throw them.” He took a breath and met the white-haired man’s intense silver gaze. “This is not so bad, if your Lordship will but recall the state in which his kinsman entered the unit. We had all despaired of his life, then. That he has regained so much is . . . cause for joy. That he has lost some things which he will never regain—that is . . .”

  “Not to be tolerated,” the large green person said, in a voice that made every dial in the room jiggle and jump.

  Med Tech sig’Zerba jumped, too, and stared up into the huge, luminous eyes. “I . . . I beg your pardon, ah . . . ?”

  “This is Twelfth Shell Fifth Hatched Knife Clan of Middle River’s Spring Spawn of Farmer Greentrees of the Spearmaker’s Den: The Edger,” said Lord yos’Galan. “He also claims kin-right to your patient. He has heard distressing reports regarding our kinsman’s course of treatment, which your latest analysis supports. We had come here because of those reports. There is a . . . Clutch healing . . . that we propose to try.”

  “Propose—” Per Vel sig’Zerba took a hard breath, and retained his hold on calmness. “Lord—Sirs. The condition of your kinsman is precarious. This is not the time to ‘try’ alternate healings, but to allow the known method to stay its course. The time for alternative healings is when we have brought the patient safely out of his crisis and back into daily life. Then, after study and analysis, a regimen of rehabilitation and additional measures will no doubt be prescribed. Now, however, we must bow to proven methods, for the best eventual health of your kin.”

  “With all respect to yourself and your craft,” Edger said, while the instruments jittered in their places, “the method now employed dangerously leaches my brother’s strength.” The big head turned. “Open your eyes, Shan yos’Galan, and look at our brother. Does he seem to you to be mending as he should?”

  Shan frowned and widened his perceptions, ignoring the orange and yellow flutterings of alarm that were beginning to infuse the med tech’s pattern, and waited for the familiar and well-loved pattern of his brother to appear.

  Moments passed. The med tech’s alarm showed more orange, less yellow, and a spike or two of red.

  Shan opened his shields wider still, caught a glimmer of Edger’s seductive intricacy, but yet nothing remotely resembling Val Con’s precise complexity or—

  “Sir—” Med Tech sig’Zerba began and Shan held up a hand, hurling aside his shields entirely, desperate now to find his brother, his outer eyes on the readouts fixed into the roof of the sarcophagus, which told of him being alive . . .

  Suddenly, he had it—a hint; nothing more than a faint touch of acerbic sweetness, as familiar to him as his brother’s face. Sternly keeping himself to a Healer’s discipline, he followed the hint, slowly, and with an eye to peril.

  And found Val Con at last: diminished, lackluster and fragmented, surrounded by a sticky gray quag. Distantly, and engrayed, like a dirty rainbow, he could see the bridge that linked Val Con’s soul to Miri’s.

  “No!”

  “Sir
! I really must insist that you both leave. Now. You are doing your kinsman no service by becoming overwrought on—”

  “Stop.” Shan opened his outer eyes and fixed them, with difficulty, on the med tech’s face.

  “What have you done to my brother—cerebral function has stabilized, you said. How was it found to be unstable?”

  The tech blinked. “Why, there were—surges. One might almost say power surges. Also overactivity; extreme excitability, in what should have been an at-rest state. These anomalies led the seniors to suspect damage—not unexpectable, in light of other traumas. Steps were taken to normalize brain activity, and those efforts have been successful. We need no longer fear debilitating seizures or fatal lapses of attention.”

  “You . . .” Shan took a breath, for once at a loss for words.

  “What distresses you, Shan yos’Galan? Does our brother not thrive beneath the known method of healing?”

  “They have—In their care to normalize they have weakened the link between our brother and his lifemate—the same link which allowed him to survive his injuries until the field ’doc received him. They have—he is fragmented, without form . . .” He looked at the tech.

  “I myself told the seniors that this man is lifemated,” he said, his voice sounding thin in his own ears.

  The tech inclined his head, nervously. “Indeed. It is so noted in the file. However, normal cerebration is not—”

  “Out,” said Shan.

  The tech blinked. “Sir?”

  “You will leave,” Shan repeated and heard the power echoing within each word. “You will not return here until Val Con yos’Phelium has departed the area. You will not report this to your superiors. Go!”

  The tech’s face wavered, eyes going cloudy. He bowed, precisely, and walked briskly down the room and out the door.

  Shan slapped the lock up as the door closed and strode back to the brooding black unit and the enormous, patient turtle.

  “I am able to end the healing cycle,” he told Edger. “Some time will elapse before our brother may be removed from the unit, for systems need to cycle down in an orderly manner.”

  “I understand you,” Edger rumbled and looked about him. He raised one three-fingered hand and swept it toward the wall with its profusions of equipment. “And are you able to silence those, as well?”

  “Yes.” Shan was already at the unit’s control panel, flicking switches, turning knobs; withdrawing sensors, shutting down the flows of drugs and nutrients, canceling the muscle toners. When every light on the panel was dark, saving the master, he went over the wall of instruments.

  Gods, gods—normalizing cerebral function? Fools! And if Val Con were crippled because they had denied him his lifemate . . . Shan took a breath, deliberately leashing his anger, and threw the last switch, then cast about him for—there.

  He rolled the cot over to the healing unit, shook out the blanket, and took a moment to master an urge to pick up the nearest heavy object and have at the delicate instruments lining the walls.

  “While we await our brother’s release,” the Edger’s voice rumbled him out of his thoughts of mayhem and despair, “there is a matter we must undertake.”

  Shan looked up at him. “Yes? And this matter is?”

  “A thing—you might perhaps call it ‘fine tuning’,” Edger said. “Your sight, your love and your understanding will aid me in what work I undertake, for the best health of our brother. You will guide the song—and deny it, should it wander from its purpose or reach beyond its bounds. Before we meet together in the field of mutual labor, it is prudent to test our partnership and strengthen that which may not be as strong as will be required.”

  “A dry run,” Shan said, and nodded. “I understand the concept. What would you have me do?”

  “Only listen, while I sing, with the scales behind which you shield your seeing eyes put aside.”

  Yes, of course. Shan took a deep breath in preparation, focused and brought down his shields, completely, as Priscilla had warned him not to do, his inner self exposed entirely, so that any with eyes—or other senses—to see might find him revealed in all his faults.

  “Ah.” A sound like the purr of an impossibly large cat. “You are a blade to behold, Shan yos’Galan. Who crafted you may be justly proud of his work. Hear me now.”

  The first note was an iron-tipped bolt through the living core of his heart.

  The second note was a dash of acid across his eyes.

  The third note flung his essence out into the snarling winds of Fortune and Mischance. Harried by their teeth of ice and iron, he struck back, willed walls and walls there were—stone walls and a stone floor on which he knelt, doubled over and sobbing, making no sense of the hand held down to him, until a stern female voice scolded him.

  “This is no safe haven—and well you know it! Rise now and return. Quickly!”

  Long strong fingers closed around his wrist. He rose, whether by her will or his he could not have said, and stood looking into the chill blue eyes of a raw-cheeked blonde woman no longer in her youth.

  “Priscilla.” How he was certain that this woman was she—but certain he was. “Priscilla, the song is changing me.”

  Her face softened. She let go his wrist and cupped his face in her two hands.

  “The song changes us all,” she said softly. “Do not fear it. Now go.” She kissed him, the stone walls faded, and he straightened, his face wet with tears and his mouth warm from her lips, to face Edger the Clutch turtle in the room of catastrophes.

  The turtle blinked his enormous eyes, once, and inclined his body as far as the shell would allow.

  “All honor to you, Shan yos’Galan.”

  Stiffly, Shan returned the bow, equal to equal. “May our work together return perfect health to our brother,” he said, his voice chill in the High Tongue, and turned to open the lid of the sarcophagus.

  The interior lit itself, dimly, casting cool blue shadows across the slender, naked body of a man. Shan unsnapped the locks and lowered the front wall of the box. The pallet slid out of twilight and into brightness; the man was revealed as gold-skinned and unscarred; lean muscled, and somewhat longer in the leg than the average run of Liadens. His chest rose and fell with the blessed, unhurried regularity of deep sleep. His face was smooth—achingly innocent, in repose—the well-marked brows at rest, firm mouth tightly closed, long dark lashes smudging golden cheeks. And Shan saw with an absurd feeling of relief that the gash which had disfigured his brother’s face had been erased by the ’doc’s scar-cancelling program.

  “Time passes, Shan yos’Galan,” a big voice rumbled behind him. “And I fear that haste must be made.”

  “Yes, of course.” Blinking away tears, he slid his arms gently beneath his brother’s shoulders and knees and lifted him from the pallet to the cot. Val Con sighed and nestled his cheek into the pillow, his lips relaxing into what Shan dared to call a smile, but did not approach true wakefulness. Shan spread the blanket tenderly over the slim body and looked up into Edger’s eyes.

  “Now what?”

  “An excellent question,” the turtle said. “Let us ascertain. Your whole attention is required in this time and place, Shan yos’Galan. Do you place your regard upon this our brother and guide me in my exploration.”

  “Guide?” Shan stared at him. “How am I going to guide you?”

  “I subvert my will to yours: Should the song go beyond its bounds, only will me nay and I will contain it. Should it quicken that which is best left sleeping, your touch will give it back to hibernation. It must be so, for the best health of our brother.”

  Shan inclined his head, glanced down at Val Con’s sleeping face and, for the third time in a single day dropped his shields completely, focusing his entire attention on the murky disorder of his brother’s once scintillant pattern.

  “First, we question,” Edger boomed, and formed a series of three short, interlocking notes. Watching with Healer’s eyes, Shan saw fires sequentially awake a
nd die within the murk, illustrating a pattern both broken and feeble—the damaged nervous system.

  Edger sang again, and Shan saw a quickening of color, a sparking of passion, fading almost immediately back into the ambient grayness, displaying the med tech’s proudly achieved normalized cerebration.

  A third time Edger sang and the lifemate bridge blazed in glory, alive with the force of two willful, passionate souls, joining each to the other in—muddy melancholy.

  “What,” Edger inquired, his voice approaching a decibel level that Shan thought might pass for a Clutch whisper, “was that last?”

  “The bridge that connects our brother and our sister, soul to soul and heart to heart.”

  “Those who heal by machine dared tamper with this?” Edger demanded, albeit rhetorically. “They are fools, Shan yos’Galan.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Shan said, more than half of his attention still on Val Con’s mired pattern. “They have forgotten what ‘lifemated’ means—what it had meant, in the past.”

  “This joining is not . . . usual among the Clans of Men, I know. Is it more usual among your Clan Korval, or among my sister’s human clan of Erob?”

  “Erob bred mighty wizards, once,” Shan said, dreamily. “Korval has always been—Korval. Wild cards, pirates, and random elements. The luck moves roughly about us.”

  There was a pause, long enough for Shan to register as too long, in his stretched state astride two worlds, and then a gusty sigh.

  “I am ever more in awe of these my kin, who live with such passion, creating thereby an artwork the like of which has not been seen in my lifetime! I am—I will seek the words, betimes; they elude me at this present. Mayhap I must learn new words to describe new art and encompass new endeavor. In this time and place, however, we have before us a work of love and artistry. May we sing as truly and with passion akin to those we would serve. Are you able, Shan yos’Galan?”