Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  Wolff bent and picked up the female with one arm around her shoulders and the other under her knees, in much the same way as he’d lifted Jed when she’d been incapacitated on Satigenaria.

  “Use the escape pod. Return here afterward to assist with the airlock manoeuvre.”

  Wolff carried the Archer into the starboard corridor. She stirred faintly as he dumped her in the pod.

  “You think you’re so superior, don’t you? Well, you’re not. Without your computers, you’re nothing, and you can tell them back on the Bellwether that this is what happens to those who screw with Gerald Wolff. Now good riddance to you!”

  He slammed the door and hit the eject panel. He watched the light of the pod retreating into the night before returning to the bridge. Jed led him back through the port corridor to the airlock.

  “In order for the airlocks to separate,” Jed explained, “the locking mechanisms on both sides must release. I can control the one on this side.” Jed pointed to a mechanism on the wall. “But as you have broken the interface crown for the other ship, I cannot control that one. Go in there and release it manually, then return here.”

  Wolff climbed through the airlock aperture. He quickly identified the counterpart of the Shamrock’s lever.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to pull this with the doors open—”

  Wolff’s voice trailed off. A girl crouched in the corner against the joint between two walls of the myth ship’s airlock. Her wide, youthful eyes locked upon Jed, and they became even wider, and her lower lip dropped and trembled. “Vaila?” she uttered in a thin, reedy voice. Then her gaze fell upon Wolff, and fear was replaced by incomprehension. Then she looked back to Jed, and incomprehension was replaced by disgust. She slowly straightened her legs to stand, staring at Jed all the time.

  “Avert your eyes,” Jed commanded the girl, “for I am hortica.”

  “If hortica defiles its ships by letting common men tread in them, then I spit upon its Archers!” The girl’s head jerked suddenly forward on her neck, and she spat into Jed’s face. The child’s defiant attitude evaporated, and she fell back on bent knees. A horrified expression of dread and remorse suffused her face.

  “I will not be sullied by clan myth’s filth-spawn!” Jed was upon the child in two strides, and her knee flew up, her heel delivering a blow of such brutal violence to the girl’s abdomen that it threw her backward and hit her head off the airlock wall.

  “Stop it!” Wolff intervened. “You’ll kill her!”

  Jed turned to him with savage alacrity, eyes shining with outrage. Her voice was low and controlled. “That is my prerogative.”

  Wolff wanted to go to the child, but he dared not. She lay doubled up on the floor, struggling to draw breath. He turned back to Jed. “What good can any of this do?”

  “I will speak with you. Now.”

  They went back aboard the Shamrock, and Jed closed the door. “What would your proposal be? To do nothing would be dereliction of duty.”

  “You saw how frightened she was! None of this is her doing. Why make her another casualty in a war not of her making?”

  “Because that is the Code! She is the apprentice to an Archer of myth, a clan hostile to hortica. If I had defeated her mentor fairly, it would now be my duty to judge whether she is still malleable enough and suitable to serve hortica, or if she is irreconcilably contaminated.”

  “I suppose, then, if you deem the latter to be the case, it is therefore her duty to die at your hands!”

  “Be silent!” said Jed. “When I go back in there, you stand back and observe in a way befitting your station!”

  In the airlock the child had got to her feet, and she cowered at Jed’s approach.

  “The Shamrock was damaged. Vaila dishonoured the Code by attacking it and was justly terminated as a consequence. Her dishonour is your shame.”

  The apprentice lowered her head. Wolff could see the tension in her face and knew she must be in pain.

  Jed continued. “The Code states clearly that a man of the Blood, persecuted for a noble cause, may seek sanctuary with the Archers. Gerald Wolff satisfies such criteria. Do you not know the Code?”

  The girl raised her eyes to look at Jed. “Then I do not know the Code well enough, but I would know it if you would teach it correctly to me. Then I might honour the Shamrock, as recompense for Vaila’s dishonouring of it.”

  No one spoke for several seconds. The child dropped her head in genuflection, and Jed finally straightened.

  “What is your name?”

  “I am called Samphrey.”

  “An apprentice does not get to choose her mentor. That is why you are being given this opportunity. Now honour hortica, as myth dishonours us all.”

  Samphrey left the airlock and entered the Shamrock, a drawn, stiff figure, her expression tense and her complexion drained of blood. Wolff entered the other ship, opened the locking clamp, and returned quickly. He thought it correct and proper to stay out of Jed’s way as she finished disconnecting the ships, and went aft to look for his IR-UV bifocals.

  He detected a metallic taint to the air as he passed into the rear section of the corridor. When he looked down, he spotted a dark shape lodged in a gap in the bulwark wall.

  “Arrol, you wretched coward!”

  His spectacles lay on the floor a few strides away, and he picked them up. When he put them on, the IR emissions from the morran’s body glowed dim, and he saw another object lying against the opposite wall. Approaching it, he saw it was Rh’Arrol’s leg.

  Chapter 14

  Sanctuary

  Cross darkness I journeyed,

  For all light was lost,

  I came here seeking wisdom,

  Yet I found only dust

  Jed stood behind Wolff, arms folded, her gaze fixed on his broad back as he scraped the earth like a beast.

  “Where’s Samphrey?” The man spoke breathlessly with the effort of digging.

  “Inside.” Jed gesticulated in the direction of the Shamrock with a jerk of her chin.

  “Then bring her.”

  “I will not.”

  Wolff took his filth-covered hands away from the ground and leant back on his haunches, looking up at Jed through sweaty locks of hair that had come loose during the exertion. “You want her to embrace hortica as her own clan? You want to convince her she’s been saved, been brought into something better? Rh’Arrol played a part in that. Let the morran be honoured as is fit!”

  Jed wanted to argue, but she was tired and had not the strength. She said nothing and returned to the ship.

  Samphrey sat on the floor in the corridor. She rose abruptly when Jed entered.

  “The morran, Rh’Arrol, is dead. Nothing more can be done. You are to observe the funeral.”

  Samphrey dipped her head. She looked up, opened her mouth, and hesitated. “May I ask a question of you, Jed my mentor?”

  “Yes.”

  “The man, Gerald Wolff. What is the nature of the persecution from which he flees?”

  “He stands convicted of a crime he did not commit,” said Jed, as this much at least she believed to be true.

  “And the morran, it sought sanctuary with him? An Archer may give sanctuary to a morran?”

  “The morran was his ally. For him to abandon it in such a place as it might meet its death would be to dishonour it.”

  “But the Code does not say—”

  “The Code does not say we must eat, yet we must and we do! Sometimes the knowing of the Code is the understanding of the subtleties of its omissions, not in the surety of its statements. There are those who would mutilate the meaning of the Pagan Atheist’s words, those who would use them to justify atrocity. That is not the Pagan Atheist, and that is not Steel and Flame. To know the true meaning of the Pagan Atheist and to hold fast to it, that is to be of Steel and Flame!”

  Samphrey closed her mouth. Fear was in her face.

  “You asked of me one question, and you have yet had three. That will be eno
ugh. The morran was murdered by Vaila, who dishonoured the Code, and you will honour it and that will be the end of the matter.”

  Samphrey walked in front of Jed from the Shamrock's airlock. Jed saw her trepidation, the faltering of her step, as she met the chasm of the sky without. They had both lived in ships too long.

  It appeared Wolff had finished. He threw down the blunt stick he’d been using to aid his digging, and rose. He walked the few paces to the water’s edge and waded in. He bent, washing his hands together and planing his forearms with his palms. Jed did not observe the same fear in him as she did in Samphrey. She knew that same fear must be apparent in her, to Wolff.

  A stiff wind blew inland from the sea, the ocean reaching to a horizon of blue patterned with the white crests of many waves. The land rose on the right in a vertical cliff, boulders piled against its tide-harried foot. The waves came in, pounding the stony shore and the foot of the promontory with a rush, and retreating with a rattling sigh of a million smoothened stones settling in the backwash. A shudder of fear ran down Jed’s spine at the vertigo of this raw nature. The Shamrock’s senses showed her the empty constellations and depths of the Universe above and below this vast mass of rock. She feared the unroofed immensity of it.

  Wolff returned to the shore and lifted up the stained, cloth-wrapped bundle lying by the river’s mouth. He unwrapped Rh’Arrol’s body and waded back into the water, kneeling to wash the dead morran in his arms.

  “I don’t know why, in the name of the Pagan Atheist, it is that you do that.”

  Wolff glanced over his shoulder, and looked away when he spoke. “Why, because it’s just a morran?”

  “Because ultimately you are going to put it in a hole in the ground and cover it with earth so it can decompose and turn into dirt itself.”

  “Would you not like to think that others would honour you in death?”

  “That would be entirely up to others. I would be beyond caring. Whatever becomes of the mind after death, it does not persist into the world and time we here know.”

  “Then I honour Rh’Arrol for myself, because I believe ae was honourable.” Wolff stood and turned. He put Rh’Arrol’s leg back against the morran’s body as best as it would fit, and folded up the limbs inside the sheet so only the blunt muzzle showed. He gathered up the slight burden of the dead morran and rose.

  Jed went to him, leaving Samphrey behind, staring at the sky.

  “Jed, walk with me. You owe it to Rh’Arrol. I brought it into a situation not of its making, and it died defending you, to whom it owed nothing.”

  Jed turned away from the sea. Solemnly and side by side with Samphrey following behind, they made their procession to the site Wolff had chosen. Wolff had to kneel to lower the body into the grave.

  He brushed himself off. “Say something to honour Rh’Arrol, and don’t go all condescending and say ae was just a morran.”

  Jed glared at him. “What am I to say?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one among us with an education. Say something from the Teachings of the Pagan Atheist. You go on about it enough at other times.”

  Jed looked at him. Wolff was an idiot who destroyed any modicum of sanctity the event had held with his facetiousness. At length, she inhaled deeply, released her breath, and said, “Look into your comrade’s soul, and see if his alliance is truly unto your very essence. If it is, he is surely a friend of honour.”

  Wolff bowed his head in obeisance. “Is there something to be said, by the Pagan Atheist, at a funeral?”

  Jed breathed again. “Beasts of the field,” she said in a low, controlled voice.

  “Something proper, fit for a man!” Wolff interrupted.

  “If you will not heed until I am finished, there is no point in my saying aught.”

  Jed and Wolff stared at each other for a moment before she continued, “Instruments of propagation and products of instinct, live and die unknowing. Our curse and our gift is the ability to evaluate, to compare, to pity and wonder at ourselves and mourn the finite frailty of our own being. That is why our lives can only ever be tragedies.”

  The Archer stooped to gather up a handful of the dusty earth, and scattered it upon the sheet that wrapped Rh’Arrol’s body. “Be of Steel and Flame.”

  The three of them stood and looked upon the grave for as long as seemed appropriate. Then Wolff knelt and gathered the earth in his hands, and began refilling the hole. In the bottom of the pit, half covered with earth, the morran’s shape beneath the sheet looked even more bony and pathetic than it had in life. Jed turned aside with Samphrey beside her, and the girl kept pace as she walked slowly back down the slope of the shore.

  Samphrey did not speak to Jed, but stared out at the ocean, and as they walked on in silence, Jed noticed that the girl’s face had become strained and distorted, and that her eyes began to water.

  “You humiliate yourself,” Jed berated her. “Do not think it has gone unnoticed.”

  “I am sorry!” Samphrey’s voice broke into a sob.

  “Because of the circumstances, you will be excused the punishment fitting. Now go and be alone in your disgrace, and do not come into my presence again until you are fit to be seen.”

  Jed watched as the child struggled over the loose stones toward an outcrop of bare rock. She went behind it until she was hidden from Jed’s sight. Jed watched via the Shamrock as Samphrey sat on the stones. Her head dropped and her shoulders began to tremble.

  Samphrey must have been taken from a planet. Perhaps she had lived by the ocean. Her family might have owned an isle, a continent, a whole planet, even. Seeing this place must have triggered the same memories Wolff’s expression had once triggered in Jed.

  She would leave Samphrey alone. Jed had no wish to punish another for a crime of which she herself was guilty.

  Jed went back up to Rh’Arrol’s grave. Wolff stood before the mound of earth, wiping his hands on a cloth. As Jed approached, he glanced at her, said nothing, and began to walk off along the coast. Jed followed him. They arrived at a place where the stones of the shore were covered over with pale silt, and the mouth of a stream from the higher ground opened into a broad, shallow delta. Wolff splashed into the water and bent to wet his hands and the cloth.

  The liquid glittered in the sunlight where it flowed around the ankles of Wolff’s boots and over the contours it had etched into the sand. When he had finished washing his hands, he wrung out his cloth and shook it, sending droplets of water flashing into the sky. He tied the cloth by its corner to his belt and stood upright, arms akimbo, gazing inland along the path of the river.

  “What is it you look at?”

  “Come here,” said Wolff, and he held out his hand.

  Jed stepped into the water to stand beside him. She followed his line of sight. The stream emerged from between stony banks and its course meandered over a barren tract of rock and dust, which merged into the scrubby undergrowth of the plain. Far beyond this the topography reared into dusky, purple-tinged mountains. Airborne dust and distance blurred the landscape into a bruised and indistinct form.

  “Where is its source?” he said.

  Jed frowned. “Likely no one place. If we were to pursue it up the gradient, we would probably find it dividing upon itself into its tributaries, and beyond them, merely sodden ground.”

  Wolff began to move forward into deeper water. He held Jed by the hand, and so she came with him. The noise of the current overcame the sound of the waves upon the pebbles of the shore, and with Jed’s every step the water clung to her shins with a heavy viscosity and a deep sloshing sound.

  “Go no farther,” she warned him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the water will flood our boots and wet us! And if we fall in it, we will inhale it and drown in it!”

  Wolff laughed in a manner that disconcerted Jed. “I think it is harder than you imagine to drown, Archer!”

  Jed struggled to suppress her irritation at his patronising tone of voice. �
��What might you know of it?”

  “I fell in the bilge just above the graviton machinery of an old freighter. You don’t just drown instantaneously, and you don’t breathe in water by mistake. Unless the water’s so deep you can’t stand with your head in the air, you’re all right. Oh, it’s unpleasant, but I managed to stay alive until Rogan pulled me out.”

  “A pity,” said Jed. Wolff gave her arm a sudden jerk and her foot slid, and a shrill noise escaped her. She stumbled against Wolff, who had started laughing. “You stupid fool!” she shouted, and she could feel the prickling red heat in her face that was more than the climate—the embarrassment that such a ridiculous sound could have issued from her own mouth. “Why are you grinning like that, idiot?”

  “Let us discover whence this water originates.”

  “Do not waste time! We are pursued by assassins and hunted by those who uphold the Code, and it is your desire to wander in a wilderness?”

  “How else might you propose we occupy our time while the ship repairs itself?”

  “Planning what we are to do once it is repaired might be a good point of start!”

  “Planning? Sitting and fretting, more like! They’re pursuing us! We’ve got three options. Fight, hide or run.”

  “It is more complicated than that!”

  Wolff uttered a humourless bark of laughter. “No, it’s not. Not unless you count giving them what they want as an option.”

  Jed used the Shamrock’s surveillance to check what Samphrey was doing, fearing she might have heard her and Wolff. She remained in the shadow of the rock, but had wandered toward the water’s edge and was taking off her boots. For a moment, Jed wondered if the child intended to drown herself, but then she stepped into the shallows, gingerly placing her feet, and stood looking out to the horizon. What if Samphrey did drown herself? As she grew older, the benefits of life over death seemed fewer and fewer.

  “What are you doing?” Wolff asked.

  “Checking,” Jed replied, and she quickly made a scan of the skies.