Korval's Game

by Sharon Lee

  The Commander’s little beam of light danced across the floor, found a black smear rather like a grease stain on the floor nearly at his feet; a similar stain ran half-way down the wall he faced.

  “Did the mechanism take harm?”

  “Tests immediately after the incident indicated that the apparatus remained fully functional,” the technician said. “The material, you see, is highly reflective of that energy utilized by the dramliz. The bolt was thus sent back to the subject from the floor and all the walls, immolating her. An unfortunate loss of an interesting subject. I very much regret the waste.”

  “There is some waste in all experiments. You have found the second subject less volatile, I understand.”

  “It was understood that proper testing required that we utilize dramliza of greater rather than lesser ability, and the present subject, like the first, is very strong. He is, however, young; and we hold his cha’leket hostage to his cooperation. Also, I took care to show him the stains you have found, sir, and explain in depth how they came to be there.” The technician paused. “There was, of course, some danger that he would attempt to suicide, using this proven means, but he is, as I have said, young, fond of his cha’leket, and inclined to believe in the possibility of rescue.”

  Hunched, the Commander backed out of the box and flicked off his light. Straightening his cramped shoulders, he looked again to the technician.

  “You planted the belief that he might expect a rescue?”

  The tech inclined his head. “It seemed the best strategy, given the need to conceal our development from the dramliz.”

  The Commander took a moment to consider this. Ordinarily, he did not tolerate such innovations from mere technicians. In this case, however, given, as had been said, the need to conserve resources . . . He inclined his head.

  “You have done well,” he said. The technician bowed profoundly. “I will wish to speak with the subject in”—he glanced as his chronometer—“four hours, Standard. I suggest he spend the time before our meeting in there.” He flicked a negligent hand at the box.

  The tech bowed again.

  “Commander, it shall be done.”

  LYTAXIN:

  Mercenary Encampment

  CLONAK WAS ON the camp, engaging in poker with as disreputable a half-dozen card sharps as Daav had been privileged to behold in at least twenty years. He hoped, though without much optimism, that Clonak would allow them to retain their dignity, if not their pay.

  Shadia, sensible woman that she was, had retired immediately after their release from Commander Carmody’s dinner party.

  Nelirikk—or Beautiful, as Commander Carmody had it—had chosen to remain with the fearsome duo he referred to, with no irony that Daav could detect, as “the recruits”. The Rifle—one Diglon—appeared of a phlegmatic nature and would very likely follow Shadia’s sensible schedule. However, the winsome and biddable Hazenthull had been another kindle of kittens entirely. She had been most displeased to find that she was not to be allowed to sit sentinel by the autodoc enclosing—and gods have mercy, healing—her senior, and had only reluctantly accompanied Nelirikk and Diglon to quarters.

  Which left Daav, wide awake and content to be alone, sitting cross-legged on the bench by the ’doc containing the wounded explorer, eyes closed against the darkness.

  It was at times like this that he could feel her sitting next to him, her knee companionably pressing his; her silence sanctifying his disinclination to talk. Aelliana, his lifemate. Dead these last twenty-five Standard years.

  Daav sighed in the dark, and felt Aelliana lay her hand, comfortingly, on his thigh.

  It came to him that he was as much a ghost as she: his brother was dead, and his brother’s lifemate. Who of Clan Korval would remember Daav yos’Phelium, so long absent from kin and hearth? Certainly not the so-formidable son referred to, by explorer and mercenary commander alike, as “the scout”—as if there were only one in all the galaxy. The small boy he had given, weeping, into the care of his cha’leket had in some way become a man revered as a lesser god by the Yxtrang soldier he had bested in single combat; lifemate of a red-haired rakehell no less beloved of Jason Carmody.

  “What may we bring to these feral children, our kin?” he murmured into the darkness.

  “Why a working Rifle,” Aelliana answered, her voice warm inside the whorlings of his ears, “and a brace of explorers. It seems a gift they will know how to value.”

  Daav smiled and resisted the temptation to pat the hand that could not be touching him. “Why, so it does. And how fortuitous to have met them upon the road, to be sure.”

  Aelliana laughed softly and it was all he could do, not to open his eyes and turn to look at her. Instead, he smiled for her, and sighed, just a little.

  “Commander Carmody has promised to send a message to our son’s lady, desiring her to visit at her earliest convenience,” he said. “Perhaps we may meet her soon.”

  “Will she accept the Yxtrang, do you think?” asked Aelliana.

  Daav sighed again. “Commander Carmody thinks it. . . . possible. And we see that she has allowed our son to persuade her to one Yxtrang already . . .”

  “Singularly persuasive, this scout of yours,” she teased him.

  “You will hardly blame him whole cloth upon me,” he said, with mock severity. “Not only did I find you an enthusiastic participant during construction, but saw you thoroughly besotted with the result.”

  “You, of course, never named him ‘Little Dragon’, nor recited nonsense verses for hours on end to lull him to sleep.”

  “A man of my honors and position? I should think not.”

  “False, oh false, van’chela! A man of your dignity, indeed.”

  “Oh, and now I have no dignity?” He forgot himself and spoke aloud, rousing the tech on duty.

  “Everything OK over there?” she called.

  “Yes—” Daav began, opening his eyes, and then came to his feet, staring at the ’doc, which ought to be—which had been—aglow with readouts, and status lights.

  “Something’s wrong,” he called to the tech.

  She ran to his side, took one look at the somber ’doc and shook her head with a sigh.

  “Nothing wrong,” she said. “He’s just dead, is all.”

  Things that Go Bump

  in the Night

  THE HOUSE LAY shrouded in pre-dawn, its rooms at rest. Abovestairs, a woman slept uneasily in a bed beneath a silvering skylight, her hair a dark wing across the pillows. A gray cat, his pre-dawn nap disrupted by the lady’s restive habit, sat at the foot of the bed, meticulously washing his whiskers.

  “Necessity,” the woman said clearly, her voice full of unshed tears. The cat paused in his ablutions, paw poised by cheek, ears ticked forward, as if reserving judgment on the truth of her assertion until he had heard the whole.

  “Necessity, captain,” Anthora yos’Galan moaned, twisting beneath the knotted blankets. She gasped and abruptly sat up, silver eyes wide, staring toward the cat, but seeing something entirely else.

  “Yxtrang,” she gasped. “Suicide craft. Gods, oh gods—the Passage . . .” She blinked, eyes focusing at last on the cat, who met her gaze, looked away, and completed the suspended pass at his whiskers.

  Anthora threw back the blankets and swung to the floor, the ribbons of her bed shirt fluttering with the speed of her movements. Barefoot, she went across the room, snatched up a white silk robe and shrugged it on, knotting the sash as she moved.

  “Lord Merlin,” she called as she passed from the room.

  The cat shook out his paw, jumped to the floor and followed.

  ***

  HE HAD BARELY closed his eyes when the battle-dream formed, horrific as ever, shaking him out of slumber, as it did every third or fourth sleep shift. Lina, the ship’s Healer, assured him that the memory would fade in time and leave him in peace. Until that time, however, Ren Zel was left to devise his own strategies for outwitting the demon and gaining his rest.
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br />   With the room lights cycled to their brightest, he pulled a bound book of Terran poetry from the cache next to his bed.

  The volume was a collection of lyrical poetry on the theme of sensual delight; a gift from one Selain Gudder, with whom he had enjoyed a liaison of pleasure three trade trips back. He smiled with remembered fondness and, opening the book at random, soon lost himself in the rich, evocative language.

  Eventually, lulled by images at once alien and comfortable, he caught himself nodding and waved a hand to extinguish the light.

  He fell immediately into sleep. At once his sleeve was snatched by—well, he was not precisely certain who, save that the touch and the voice seemed—familiar—and whose evident distress had root in the same horrific incident which haunted his own sleep.

  “Peace, peace,” he soothed her, for she was crew—she must be crew, mustn’t she, who had such a memory upon her? It was no less than his duty as first mate to ease her.

  “Peace,” he said a third time, as she thrust the dream forward, shrilling a warning of disaster to come.

  That brought him up for a moment, then he saw that she must be caught yet in the throes of the thing, where past and present were as one.

  “We are beyond it,” he told her, in the mode of Comrade. “We are safe. The battle is over. The war is ending. All is well.” He extended a hand and touched her shoulder, lightly, as a comrade might. “Sleep now; you have no cause for worry.” And with gentle firmness, he pushed her away.

  He half-woke, then, sighed, and subsided into dreamlessness, the book slipping from his fingers to the floor. A few hours later, he drifted toward wakefulness once more, roused enough to feel the cat kneading his chest. Drowsily, he raised a hand and stroked the creature, feeling the plush fur warm against his palm, and the vibration of a purr—his eyes sprang open in shock.

  “Cat?”

  The room lights came up at the sound of his voice. There was no cat on his chest; no cat glaring at him reproachfully from the floor, or the comm shelf or the desk. There was, however, a long white whisker caught in the weave of the coverlet. Ren Zel worked it loose and stared at it for several heartbeats before throwing back the covers and swinging out of bed.

  There was no cat under the bunk. There was no cat in the ’fresher. Truly, his cabin was catless. As it should be.

  And yet . . .

  He held the whisker up to the light, admiring its length and its sturdiness, then went over to his locker. A moment’s rummage produced a thin glass sampling vial—another reminder of Selain—with a re-sealing top. The whisker slipped easily into the vial. He resealed it with care and glanced ruefully at the clock.

  Two hours ’til the start of his shift; too late to court sleep a third time. Well, then, a shower and an early start, he thought philosophically, moving toward the ’fresher.

  He showered longer than was usual for him, invoking the cold, needling cycle twice, but the cat whisker was still in its vial when he emerged.

  ***

  THE SONG was everywhere; it filled the room, the planet, the infinite cup of space itself. At once a single note and wholly aside the song, Shan observed the bold, improbable and eminently correct pattern that was Val Con yos’Phelium.

  In the course of the Healing, they had come across other leavings of the interloper responsible for the insertion of the calculation program. When they did, Shan had reached forth his will and made the interloper subservient to the greater pattern of his brother. Now, as the song rested within itself, he inspected the work, tested the bindings and the connections, observed the brilliant shine of integration, and was satisfied.

  Shifting his regard, he considered the arc of living power flowing in unending waves of iridescence to and from the guarded center of the pattern, where Val Con kept his soul—and found it beyond anything he had ever before observed.

  The thing is done, he decided; and it is good.

  Gently, he brought his attention to the song, signaling completion. The note stretched, altered, quickened, and stopped.

  Shan shook his head and blinked his eyes, focusing first on Val Con, covered with a thin blanket and deeply asleep, and then across and up, into the luminous eyes of the enormously old being called Edger.

  “It is done,” he said, feeling his voice rasp in a dry throat.

  “It is done,” Edger returned, and lifted a three-fingered hand in what seemed a salute. “And done well. All honor to you, Shan yos’Galan.” He blinked. “Our brother sleeps now and will wake when the time is appropriate. We two should likewise seek our beds.”

  “That,” Shan said, abruptly aware of aching back and the grate of exhaustion immediately behind his eyes, “is a wonderful idea.” He hesitated, glancing at the figure asleep upon the gurney. “Should we—?”

  “I believe we may leave him here in all safety,” Edger boomed, moving toward the door. Shan hesitated a moment before bending and kissing his brother on the cheek.

  “Sleep well, denubia,” he murmured, and followed the turtle down the room.

  ***

  ONCE, IN A TEASING MOMENT, Anthora had asked her brother Val Con how scouts were able to persuade savage persons to divulge sometimes quite secret information about their world and culture, all without being ritually murdered and eaten.

  “Oh, there’s nothing to that,” Val Con had assured her, green eyes dancing. “It’s only a matter of asking the right questions.”

  She had laughed then, as she had been meant to do. And it had only come to her slowly, over a course of years, just how often success in any endeavor hinged upon asking the right questions. Even when one was a dramliza at the height of her not-inconsiderable powers.

  Especially when one was dramliza.

  Now, as she sped along the path to the garden’s center, horrific visions of the Passage beset by countless numbers of mine-bearing Yxtrang in tiny craft, she berated herself for her stupidity. Every evening since she had removed to Jelaza Kazone, just before retiring, she had gone out to the heart of the garden. Leaning thus cosily against the Tree, she had, bumblebrained, asked the question, “Are those most dear to my heart alive?” and flung her mind out into the void.

  Every evening, she counted the fragile, brilliant flames of her kin, and was thereby comforted.

  And never once had it occurred to her to ask who—if any—reposed in danger, who was their enemy and if there were any means known to the dramliz, or hidden in her own untapped talents, to aid them.

  Of course, it was true that they all reposed in danger, with Plan B in effect. To Anthora’s mind, however, there was danger and there was danger, into which latter category attacks by armed and desperate Yxtrang plainly fell.

  The stone pathway ended at a glade dimly illuminated by the night-blooming friatha. Anthora did not slacken her pace, but sped across grass that chilled her feet and soaked the hem of her robe, straight to the faintly phosphorescent enormity of the Tree. She lay her hand against the warm bark.

  “Good morning, Elder,” she said, though she hardly needed to speak aloud. “I’m an idiot.”

  Above her head, leaves rustled in a light chuckle, though the air elsewhere in the glade was still. Anthora sighed.

  “Yes, all very well. But the Passage will be—or perhaps already has been!—under attack by an Yxtrang force. I must warn them, or—” She broke off, biting her lip. What if the attack were past? If the Passage was already an Yxtrang war prize; Shan—and his Priscilla, too—dead or dying of unspeakable tortures?

  She felt a soft, reassuring pressure against her shin and glanced down, finding Merlin in the shadows at her feet. She looked up into the dark, attentive leaves.

  “I must warn them,” she said again to the Tree. The leaves directly over her head were still, though there was a commotion higher up, as if a squirrel had thrown a small stone forcefully groundward. Anthora stepped back and a seedpod struck the turf by her right foot.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, warmed. Bending, she gathered up the gift, skri
tched Merlin’s ear and straightened. She cracked open the nut and ate the kernel, savoring the minty taste. Then, she set her back firmly against the trunk of the Tree, closed her eyes, and brought before her Inner Eye the construct of emotion, intelligence, and power that was uniquely in this galaxy known as Priscilla Delacroix y Mendoza. Priscilla was a Witch, with talents and abilities uncannily close to those Anthora held, as one of Liad’s few remaining wizards. If any on the Passage had the ears to hear her message, Anthora thought, it would be Priscilla.

  Thought was swept away in the tide that drew her from herself into timelessness. Light flickered in tongues like flame, and there was wind, upon which souls strange and unsought swirled like so many alien leaves. Within the maelstrom, Priscilla’s pattern flared, brilliant.

  Anthora exerted control—but, instead of making the expected contact, she hurtled past her target, tumbling out of control—no. Control was there, abrupt and rather startled, as if she had someway stumbled and landed in the arms of a stranger, who now took care to set her gently upon her own feet. Puzzlement emanated from the one who had caught her; puzzlement and a dim, sweaty horror, doubtless the residue of an ill dream.

  Anthora snatched at that hint, trapped it, wove it to her own dream—and even as she wove saw it shaken into another image entirely, accompanied by a brief, warm touch of comfort.

  Contact was broken then, and not by her will. Blackness swirled, thick and comforting as a favorite blanket.

  Anthora sighed, opened her eyes and discovered herself all a-tangle at the base of the Tree, her head resting on a moss-covered root, and Merlin staring down into her face.

  Painfully, she sorted her limbs into seemliness and sat up, her back against the Tree. Across the glade, sunlight touched the bank of night-bloomers, which were folded tight in daytime slumber.

  She had been asleep, Anthora thought in disbelief. Asleep for hours.