by Col Buchanan
Nico smelled the reek of blood all over him, though none of it seemed to be his own. The sword was a dead weight in his hand as he stumbled back down into the camp, his feet snared by vines and branches now.
The women stared at him with the whites of their eyes when he shambled into the clearing. They were all on their feet now. The grieving mother nursed the child where she stood swaying, her full breast gleaming in what little light was left from the half-smothered fire.
Nico stared back at them all grimly. He was trembling, the shakes coming to him now that the action was over; an unsettling, debilitating sensation that he fought to control. But his father too was trembling, all of them were, knowing it was over, knowing they were free.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Diplomat
‘Sit down.’
The young woman’s voice was a snap of command that almost had him sitting in the chair before he could control himself.
Ché tensed where he stood in a small upstairs room of the inkworks, fighting the lingering urge in his body to do as she commanded him. He was still bound in chains and he stared hard at the woman, taking in the silver half-mask on one side of her face, and her black eyes matching his own for intensity. Her hair was dark, her fine features obviously those of a native Contrarè.
She was also a Dreamer, Ché realized as his gaze flickered over the subtle rainbow shimmers of her skin; the first glimmersuit he had ever seen. ‘Sit,’ she commanded again, more forcefully this time, and he realized she was using her voice in some way that was almost impossible to resist. Ché felt his body sag towards the chair, but he fought the impulse and straightened once more.
The Dreamer was tall and thin and dressed in a suit of dark leather. An array of black and white feathers sprouted back from the high collar of her coat, and combined with her sharp nose gave her the appearance of a pica bird, mischievous and clever. For all her presence she was younger even than Ché, and the more that he looked at her the more he liked what he saw. Here was someone who had gone beyond the ordinary realms of this life, and had made her home there.
‘Please,’ said the cripple Coya. ‘Do as Shard says. She won’t bite, despite appearances.’
‘You must be Shard.’
‘You are well informed, Diplomat,’ answered the woman coolly.
Ché had heard of her, of course. She was the only Dreamer in the Free Ports after all, a tradition that came from the Alhazii Caliphate to the east, where Dreamers were found in larger numbers; a smattering of men over the centuries who had supposedly, mystically, cracked the code of the cosmos. A sect that was shrouded in myth and secrecy.
Now here stood one of them in the flesh, trying to command him to sit in a chair.
She was testing him, he realized. Seeing how malleable he might be to her powers. Bored now, Ché sighed and sat down with his chains rattling.
‘He still has the pulsegland in his neck,’ she said, fingers cupped next to his face. She meant the gland implanted in his neck, the gland that all imperial Diplomats were given, allowing them to locate each other’s locations. ‘You want me to do something about it?’
‘No,’ said Coya quickly. ‘Not yet.’
Ché saw them exchange a meaningful glance.
He wants to use me as bait, Ché considered. He wants to see if other Diplomats will come after me.
‘What about his suicide implant?’
‘If he had wanted to, I’m sure he would have used it by now.’
Shard pursed her lips, moving closer. She smelled like earth and leather. ‘I see the Khosians debriefed him already,’ she said distastefully, taking in the bruising of his face, sensing with her hands all the damage inside him. Ché hadn’t pissed for weeks without expelling blood.
‘They play rough here in Khos, don’t forget that.’
‘You say he was cooperative?’
‘I believe so. Not that it did him much good.’
She was shaking her head. ‘If he’s really a plant, beatings won’t get it out of him. There’s only one way to be certain.’
As she spoke, Ché watched her drag a small table across the floor towards him. Carefully, her young assistant approached to lay an object upon it wrapped in red cloth. Around it he arrayed a series of items: tweezers, callipers, vials of liquid, a clean rag.
‘Why am I suddenly getting a bad feeling about this?’ said Ché, shifting in his chair.
His stare was fixed on the young assistant’s hands as they unwrapped the red cloth from the object. Within lay something resembling a giant mud-encrusted crab lying on its back, with a pair of pink tails extending from one end which flopped about on the desk like the tentacles of a dying squid. Its four claws clenched as the Dreamer touched them one by one, checking the thing over.
‘Relax, it’s only a Lie Teller,’ she told him. ‘In most respects, not all that different from a farcry. I promise it won’t hurt you.’
A farcry was something that allowed you to communicate mentally, over any distance, to anyone else with their own farcry. Something entirely harmless in appearance compared to this monster confronting him.
Ché cleared his throat. ‘I thought Lie Tellers were only available to the Guildsmen of Zanzahar?’
‘And to people with friends in their Guild. Now relax. Take a deep breath and hold it in.’
He did so, if only because she spoke in the soothing detached tones of a professional. Because he felt that he could trust her. He even sat there unmoving as she lifted the living thing and placed it slowly over his nose and mouth like a mask, feeling his heart racing as its legs dug into his face so that it gripped on to him lightly.
His composure only broke when the two tails whipped across his mouth then thrust themselves deep into his nostrils. Ché tried to jump up and tear it from him but suddenly he was immobile, his muscles refusing his every command.
The cripple, Coya, watched on with eyes widening in alarm. Ché’s own eyes flicked across to Shard standing over him. He felt light-headed. The pains in his body flooded out of him through the numbing flesh of his face.
Weariness washed through him. His eyes closed of their own accord.
‘Breathe easily. Relax.’
Ché slouched back in the chair and felt his head lolling to one side. Through his eyelashes he saw the Dreamer’s young assistant leave the room and close the door behind him. The door was shivering, swelling outwards as Ché watched it. Like it was breathing.
‘Now tell me everything inside you,’ commanded a voice from a long way away.
Ché began to babble.
*
Sunlight kissed the skin of his face with heat. What was this? Ché appeared to be floating on his back in a lake of blood-warm water, the blue sky reflected flawlessly across its mirror surface.
Through his fingers the silky water flowed against his caresses. Ché stared at the high sun overhead. There were birds up there circling in the thermals, slipping and diving around each other in play. For a long time he floated on his back and watched them rejoicing in their airborne freedom, as pacified as a baby in a womb.
Why return when there’s nothing to return to? he thought to himself after an unnoticed passing of time, and the response came, as it always came at such moments, from that usually silent witness to all that he did in life – his deepest self, his calm centre of awareness. His oldest friend.
Stay here then. Don’t go back.
Ripples washed over his chin and splashed his lips as he shifted his posture, so that his legs dangled below him. The lake water tasted as salty as tears.
With a silent grace Ché allowed himself to slip beneath the surface. The milk-warm water enveloped him. As he sank further into the cooling depths he watched the shimmers of sunlight growing ever dimmer above him. Sadness spilled from his heart. Bitter regrets. What had any of it amounted to, this short life of his – all that violence and pain and the following of a path laid down by others? Where had it led him, these expectations and commands from people who ha
d considered him their property, for no better reason than the higher positions they held in the order of things, a world of titles and powers that he had never consented to, had merely been born into?
Ché had remained on the path of an imperial assassin for the sake of his mother, or so he liked to tell himself; yet his mother had been as much to blame as anyone. She was a true believer, a fanatic, so unthinking in all that surrounded her that she considered the ways of Mann to be wholly natural, the only possible shape the world could ever take. Even her role in it as a Mannian Sentiate, a divine whore, she considered a blessing.
His mind turned away from that tangle of darkness. Turned instead to the Rōshun and his time spent in the monastery of Sato, high in the mountains of Cheem. For a handful of years he had lived with the assassin monks in those cold mountains, training as an apprentice, before his secret imperial conditioning had reminded him who he truly was, and he had fled the monastery to return to the capital of the Empire, carrying all the knowledge he had gained of the Rōshun.
It was only now that he fully realized how much he had lost; the life he had thrown away for a people he no longer considered to be his own, these priests with their designs on the world. With the Rōshun, Ché had experienced more than the bitter infighting he’d grown up with inside the Mannian religious order, that incessant dog-eat-dog competition of his peers at the expense of all else, most of all any real and trusting relationships. Instead he’d experienced something he had always suspected was out there, even if he hadn’t quite known how to find it – a different way of living, no less. A way that was as real as his previous life in Q’os had mostly been artificial, a facade of pretence, a dangerous game of power over the less powerful.
With the Rōshun he had known what it was to have a family, a home, at last. And he had betrayed them all, for what?
The Rōshun hated him now, and Ché felt the horror of that coiling through him like a child who finally appreciates the loathing of his own parents.
They would kill him the first moment they had a chance to, never mind how much Coya reassured him otherwise. Yet Ché didn’t mind that. Indeed he deserved such a fate, deserved far worse than their blades negotiating their way to his heart.
It was the look in their eyes that he could not stomach. As though they gazed upon a monster.
Stay here, said his sinking mind in his sinking body. Don’t go back.
Bubbles spilled from Ché’s mouth. He felt them tickling his gums, his lips even, as his lungs emptied of air. It was so easy, he realized now, and wondered what had taken him so long to arrive at this fateful end to his life.
Far above his head, a sound of laughter sprinkled itself across the surface like a shower of rain. It was the sound of his mother’s laughter, beautiful and mad.
Ché kicked his feet suddenly to stop his descent, and peered up through the gloom at the slanting spears of sunlight far above. He felt a fresh swelling of sadness for all that his mother’s life had been as a Sentiate whore within the order. He felt guilt, too, recalling all the blame he had lain on her over the years without even knowing it, blaming a girl for a life she had never asked to be born into either.
Silence. Only the dull thudding of his heart in his ears.
Again the laughter sprinkled across the surface, though it was someone else’s laughter this time, deeper in tone, rueful rather than mad.
Curl, he realized with excitement, thinking of the troubled girl who was so persistently on his mind these days. I can hear you.
He sensed that she was near and getting closer.
His lungs burning for lack of air, suddenly Ché’s limbs were propelling him upwards towards the surface.
He gasped fresh air and tasted the water on his lips like tears again. The light was too bright to look at.
‘Welcome back,’ said a woman’s voice in relief, and Ché blinked, seeing the Dreamer leaning over him.
‘What happened?’ he gasped.
‘Your suicide implant kicked in while we were questioning you. It tried to stop your heart.’
Curl, he thought in confusion, looking about him. Where is she?
But he saw only the Dreamer and the cripple Coya standing next to him in the otherwise empty room, and he remembered it was only a dream, a vision brought on by the Lie Teller.
‘Looks like he’s sincere. He’s no plant, anyway,’ she told Coya standing by her side. The cripple blinked at Ché as though he was surprised, and Ché thrust his manacled hands at him.
‘Now do you mind taking off these damned chains?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ocean
Where in hell am I? Ocean asked herself, for what must have been the tenth time in as many hours.
Frustration clenched her hand tight to the little boat’s wheel. Hunger gnawed at her belly. After days of fighting against the currents and winds it was hard to even know how much headway she was making, pushed along by the inflatable’s squid-jets that were always underpowered due to the clouded sun and the sheer coldness of the water. Already she was rationing what was left of the food, yet still she had seen no signs of land. For all she knew she was drifting round and round on some vast circular current taking her nowhere.
Sleep was snatched in whatever rare few hours she could manage. The rest of the time she fought the surging storm waters from the controls of the wheelhouse, her legs cramped and stiff from having stood for so long, even with the support of her ribbed skinsuit stiffening across her flanks, bracing the weight of her shifting body. Wrapped from head to toe in the suit’s warming protection, Ocean peered out through the visor of its hood at the deathly grey sea all about her, heaving and wild, thinking that if this was really the Sargassi Sea of the Free Ports, where she had aimed for, it was hardly the calm and shallow body of water she had expected. Winter had churned it into an icy-cold desolation with no end.
Where am I! she wondered again as another wave crashed across the forward window, causing the whole wheelhouse to flex backwards. But this time, when she glanced down at the directional transponder taped to the control console, its precious yellow light was shining noticeably brighter than before, and turning towards white. Her heart quickened in response.
She had been making some headway after all, for she was beginning to get close. Close to wherever this signal was leading her.
One last effort, Ocean asked of her tired body and mind, standing wedged in the rocking, flexing cockpit of the tiny boat, which so far had lived up to the model’s reputation of being unsinkable.
She was lit by the green glow of the console, stooped behind the shaking windscreens with one hand gripped around the wheel and her other clutching at the semi-rigid power lever, keeping it pushed in the red. Ocean squinted through the hard spray raining over the wheelhouse, out past the swamped nose of the tiny craft chugging over its millionth steepening wave with all the temerity of a drowning dog, pushing it beyond all design limits.
Nearly there! she coaxed from the struggling boat too. She kept the power in the red and watched the nose surge over the tilting edge of a sea that was a living thing beneath her, frothing white and throwing wave after wave of boundless energies.
It was like being back on Sholos, she thought as the boat dropped down the outer side of a twenty-foot wave, picking up speed, only to plough into the next rush of breaking water at the bottom. Except this was barely a squall compared to the superstorms on Sholos. On the water moon that was her home, the lower-gravity conditions could whip the small world’s ocean into waves that were higher than any ever seen here – into real mountains of water compared to these frothy foothills.
Next to the wheel her map was fixed with lengths of tape, a pale sheetleaf covered by an inked representation of the Midèrēs Sea. She squinted at it, taking in the stark X marking the planned spot of her splashdown amongst the Free Ports, trying to divine some kind of answer to where she really was from her course direction and rough distance from the transponder.
At least the
map was something to look at besides the heaving seas. Its names rolled in her mind, made familiar from having studied them for so long. Cheem. Minos. Markesh. Zanzahar. Right now she’d be grateful to make landfall at any one of them, never mind if it was a Free Port or not. Any major metropolis would do, anywhere she could sell some gold discs in exchange for local currency, perhaps even a little of the precious moondust she had brought along to properly fund her mission.
With hungry eyes she roamed the inked coastlines of the map. Back on her home moon, in the vaults of Opened Records, there were ancient maps that looked remarkably similar to this inner sea known as the Midèrēs, the Heart of the World. Remarkable not because they had been made from distant observations of this planet of Erēs, but because they had been recovered from the fragmented diamond hardfiles of a buried Sky Ark. The ancient maps did not depict the Heart of the World at all, but rather a sea on the dying planet of Dirt, or Terra, the legendary homeworld from which the Sky Ark had come. Indeed from which they had all come.
People still argued over the meaning of that coincidence. How an inner sea of the far-off homeworld could be so similar to the shape of the Midèrēs, down there on a seeded planet. Some took the mathematical approach, considering it to be only a matter of chance; that in all the living worlds of the galaxy, there were going to be some surprising matches to be found. But others, those of a more gnostic persuasion, tended towards much deeper implications; that it wasn’t random at all; that the correlation was instead a fingerprint of the Great Dreamer itself – a dramatic device, no less, of some unfolding cosmic narrative.
In other words, that the similarities held some kind of meaning.
The map’s corners flapped about in a sudden, howling gust that twisted the wheelhouse in its maws. Ocean looked up to see the world of water and sky being torn apart by the winds, feeling the sea lifting her up from below.
