Auren winced. “I think we should find you a clinic.”
“Not unless you want Arateph to know you’re alive,” Tanza said. “Arateph Med survived the revolution. The archives will have your voice print.”
Auren paled. The undertones of a tephan voice were unique to each person. If Auren spoke to medical personnel or called a clinic, the voice-recognition technology could match him to his records in seconds.
But he persisted, “You need medical attention.”
Tanza gestured to the medical kit. “I have everything we need.”
Auren opened the red box to reveal an expansive display of bandages, ointments and medications. “I see. You brought the clinic with you.”
Tanza smiled faintly. “I have a good supplier.”
He unrolled a strip of cloth. “Bandages haven’t changed much. I’ll do my best.”
As Auren cleaned away the blood and applied sterilizing ointment, Tanza gave a more detailed account of her adventure with the deathtail. At the end she asked, “Did you actually hit the deathtail?”
He nodded but kept his eyes fixed on her bleeding leg.
She asked, “Why didn’t you run?”
He placed healing mesh over the scratches. “It would have killed you.”
He said it as if she didn’t know, as if that realization wasn’t spreading a shadow of terror through her soul. “Yes, but . . .”
Did he really not know what he’d done? What horrors he’d risked for a common thief? How deeply Tanza was indebted to him? If he didn’t realize, how could she explain it?
Finally she stammered, “No one runs toward a deathtail. Not even for family. One scratch could . . .”
Auren wrapped a thick white bandage around the ankle. “That’s why I had to help. I’m named Nivalith.”
Nivalith—courage that risks death to save life. Maybe virtue names were good for something after all.
“About that . . .” Tanza wasn’t sure whether she should start with thanks or with an apology, or what words to use for either one.
While she considered this, Auren wrapped several layers of bandage around the foot and ankle, then, with Tanza’s consent, cut away the bloodied tatters of her pant leg. He frowned at the sloppy results. “Are you sure you don’t want a clinic?”
“It’s fine,” Tanza gasped. The adrenaline had faded, and the wounds throbbed and burned beneath the bandages.
Auren’s brow furrowed. “You’re in pain.”
She thrust a hand into the medical kit, pulled out a syringe of pain medication, and injected it expertly into her arm. Then she swallowed a dose of an antibiotic and told him, “I’m fine. These meds are really good.” The pain faded in seconds. “Let’s get moving.”
Tanza clutched the empty syringe in one hand while Auren grasped her other hand and hauled her to her feet. She walked two steps unassisted before the world wobbled and she tilted to one side. Auren caught her just before she fell.
Tanza mentally cursed her supplier. “Human pain meds,” she slurred.
Auren lowered her into a sitting position on the grass. “What do you mean? Did you take human medications?” he asked, looking more frightened than he’d been by the deathtail. “Are they poisonous?”
Irritation and amusement swarmed sluggishly through the thick glaze of Tanza’s thoughts. “Supplier gave me . . . wrong kind. Bad label . . .” She sniffed the empty syringe. “Yes. Human. Had it before. Just . . .” Her eyelids drooped and her head fell.
“Tanza!” Auren shouted, tapping her cheek. “Stay with me!”
His terror jolted her into alertness. “I’m fine!” she yelped. “Not dying! Just sleepy!”
“You’re certain?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said with as much force as she could manage. “Don’t worry. I’ll sleep it off.” She shifted her arms and legs, trying to remember how to stand. “Help me walk.”
Auren helped her to her feet and supported her the last few steps to the car, where he eased her into the backseat.
“I’ll drive,” he said as he fastened her safety restraints.
“Not safe,” Tanza slurred.
“I probably have more experience driving a High-Runner than you have. We’re on country roads. I know the route you planned. We’ll be fine.”
Auren disappeared into the driver’s seat, and the car rumbled forward. The hum of the wheels and wind lulled Tanza to sleep before she could thank him.
Chapter 6
WHEN TANZA WOKE, RED light and shadow filled the air, and tall buildings crowded the street. They’d reached Debben, a city larger than Lorantz. Tanza ordered Auren to stop. The medication had faded, and she didn’t want Auren learning about new traffic laws in the middle of a crash.
Auren eased the car to the curb and stopped the engine. The sleek new metal-and-glass buildings along the road sported signs in three human languages, the tephan translation a tiny afterthought at the bottom. Near a storefront not five paces away stood four muscular young human males. At the car’s approach, their heads turned and their expressions darkened.
Tanza leaned over the driver’s seat and murmured in Auren’s ear, “Turn the car around. Now.”
“But you just said . . .”
“I don’t care. Get us out of here.”
Before he could move, the men blocked the paths of all four wheels. The tallest of them, a square-jawed man with sunburned skin, loomed over the driver’s door. “What are you doing here?” he asked in clumsy Common Tephan, pronouncing the words as though the language itself disgusted him.
Tanza said, “Just switching drivers. We only stopped for a moment.”
The tall man raised an eyebrow. “Two tephans stopping in a human neighborhood at sunset? I think you’re Cornerstone, come to blow up some humans.”
“We’re not, I swear,” Tanza said.
The man tapped Auren’s jaw with the back of his hand. “How many virtue names you have, small-brain?”
Auren nearly answered the question, but Tanza rushed to speak up first. “I wouldn’t take a virtue name to save my life. Neither would he. Just let us leave.”
“I asked him, lady.”
Tanza knew that one of Auren’s virtue names was related to honesty. These humans would think fourteen virtue names proof of Cornerstone involvement. Could she trust the virtue prince to lie?
Auren rolled his eyes and said, “If you must know, I think I took one a hundred years ago.” He flipped the ignition switch, and the engine roared to life. “We’re late, so if you’ll excuse us . . .”
The man smiled cruelly. He leaned over the door and reached toward the ignition switch. “You’re not leaving.”
Auren didn’t even glance at him. He released the brakes and pressed the accelerator, and the four men dove out of the car’s path nanoseconds before the wheels crushed their legs. Auren sped away, and despite his outdated knowledge of traffic laws, Tanza wouldn’t let him stop the car while they remained in the human neighborhood.
As they drove, Tanza shouted above the wind, “Are you out of your mind? You could have run them over!”
Auren adjusted a mirror as casually as if nothing had happened. “I knew they’d run. All bluster, no bravery. Not a virtue name among them.”
She stabbed his shoulder with a finger. “What if they hadn’t moved? You’d have injured four humans. The police would skin us alive.”
Auren’s eyes widened. “Literally?”
“Very nearly,” Tanza said. “You know who the police are? Humans. They’d see two tephans attacking humans, call us Cornerstone, and lock us away for life.”
“What is Cornerstone?”
Tanza had never heard anyone ask that question before. Cornerstone filled the infostreams, factored into political and personal debates, cast clouds of worry over most minds on Arateph. She hated to destroy Auren’s blissful ignorance. “They call themselves a tephan independence group, but mostly they kill humans and blow up their technology.”
“Why did tho
se humans expect Cornerstone to have virtue names?”
“Most Cornerstone members take at least three virtue names. They’re almost the only tephans who do anymore.”
Auren struggled to keep his eyes on the road. “How can they have virtue names and practice such violence?”
“Cornerstone thinks humans have destroyed tephan life and morals. They take virtue names to prove they’re ‘true tephans’ and show ‘purity in a fallen world.’”
“But that . . .” Auren would have driven into a lamp post if Tanza hadn’t shouted warning. “That’s a perversion of virtue names. They’re not meant to be trophies. They’re meant to inspire people to greater virtue.”
“Cornerstone’s not known for nuanced philosophy. You’re good or you’re bad, and if you’re bad, you’re dead.”
This so troubled Auren that Tanza refused to let him ask any more questions until they’d parked the car outside a tephan flower shop. Immediately he turned around in his seat.
His first question surprised her. “Did you mean what you said to those humans? That you wouldn’t take a virtue name to save your life?”
Tanza laughed. “Remember who you’re asking. A virtue name wouldn’t do me much good.”
“Would anyone outside of Cornerstone want one, or are virtue names tainted beyond repair?”
Tanza felt a stab of pity for Auren. Virtue names were vital to him, but modern Arateph considered them irrelevant and old fashioned. No one wanted a virtue name because no one cared. But when Tanza saw the sorrow and desperate hope in the prince’s face, she couldn’t tell the blunt truth.
“Well,” she said, “people associate virtue names with Prince Auren as much as they do with Cornerstone.”
He let out a sigh of relief. “Then . . . would you mind if I chose one for you? I’d like to, before we reach Alogath.”
Tanza’s jaw dropped. “Why?”
“I don’t want to be the only person outside Cornerstone with a virtue name. I think you’d bear one well.”
“Me? You’re crazy if you think I have any use for virtue.”
“You wouldn’t be helping me if you had no sense of virtue.”
That wasn’t virtue. That was guilt. Tanza couldn’t have come with him at all if not for those two illegal packages hidden in the car. Auren thought Cornerstone perverted virtue names, but giving one to a tomb robber wouldn’t be much better. If he knew her whole history, he wouldn’t talk about virtue. He wouldn’t want to talk to her at all.
Tanza sighed and asked, “Does this really matter that much to you?”
“It does.”
Well, he had just saved her from a deathtail. She could humor him.
Shoving aside thoughts of tomorrow’s delivery, Tanza said, “All right. Name away. Just keep your expectations low.”
He slid over into the front passenger seat. “I will give you a fitting name,” he said, “once I take a few days to consider. I have more practice receiving virtue names than giving them.”
She climbed over the seatback into the driver’s seat and started the car. “No rush.” If it took long enough, maybe he’d abandon the idea entirely.
Having slept away the day, Tanza drove through the night. Even though the car broke down five times the next day, they arrived in Verith at sunset. The only available tephan hotel had only one un-booked room.
As Tanza fretted in the hotel lobby, Auren suggested, “We could keep driving.”
“Can’t,” she said quickly. “I can’t drive any farther, and you can’t drive through cities.”
A good excuse, since she couldn’t tell Auren about tomorrow morning’s package delivery. This hotel was less than ten minutes’ walk from the delivery point Keffer had provided.
As Tanza and Auren settled into separate beds, Tanza planned her mission. She couldn’t let him catch her on her errand. His century of slumber had made him reluctant to sleep, but he usually slept most deeply in the hours surrounding dawn. She sent a datapad message to the client, confirming a delivery time just after sunrise, then turned off the light and tried to snatch a few hours of sleep.
When she woke, gray light filled the sky and Auren slept as heavily as a molting brushbeast. She retrieved Keffer’s brown box from her pack, threw a black jacket over her sleep-rumpled clothes, and moved toward the door as quickly as she dared.
Auren remained sleeping as Tanza slipped into the hallway. Her trip would take less than half an hour. In the unlikely event that Auren woke, he would assume she’d slipped out for breakfast, and she planned to return with food before he suspected otherwise.
She left the hotel and hastened along the winding streets until she reached the city’s edge and found a giant, brown brick house dripping in angular, animal-inspired Evris statuary. Two hundred years ago, Evris statuary, which mocked that king’s infamous wildlife gardens, had been faintly subversive, but its modern admirers romanticized the old monarchy.
Tanza tore her mind from the history and focused on the more important matter of security. The house boasted two towers and was surrounded by enormous, lush gardens. The fence of energy-net filament—strong enough to stop a car—could sustain four different security nets at once.
Tanza walked behind the house and waited outside a giant gate. A jungle—trees, shrubs, flowers, vines, and grasses in every color Tanza knew—flourished on the other side of the fence with far too much vigor for this autumn weather. Tanza couldn’t even see the house. Such a garden needed a micro-climate generator, which meant Berimac was a serious gardener with a serious amount of money.
A man hobbled out of the lush greenery on a walking stick and two unsteady legs, clad in a scarlet dressing gown as brilliant and expensive as any of the flowers. Even in his frailty he looked like a man who commanded empires and captured souls with fresh-carved coins, and Tanza recognized Denfor Berimac.
As Berimac approached the gate, he pressed some buttons on a black box in his palm and the energy walls outside the fence fell. His deep voice could have come from a man half his age and twice his size. “Do you have my package?”
Tanza held the box through the fence, and Berimac tore it open. Two orange and yellow falls of silken petals flipped over the edge, while smaller brown capsules rattled on the box’s moist bottom.
Mizzen swampblossoms! This whole trip was for a flower? An illegal flower, yes—highly endangered after invasions of Earth species and not allowed outside the marsh reserves—but not the crime that Tanza had feared. Nothing dangerous.
Suddenly, electronic screeching filled the gardens, startling several birds and making Tanza shrink inside her skin. Berimac’s face became stone. The energy walls whipped across the gate again, and Tanza took several steps back. What had she done? How had she angered the old man?
Two heavily muscled tephan men, attired in gold and brown suits that resembled those of the historical King’s Guard, walked toward Tanza along the outside of the fence, dragging a man who resembled the historical king.
One guard hit some buttons on a black box on his belt, and the alarms went silent, but Tanza’s ears still rang. “A-Arthur?” she exclaimed, calling Auren by his assumed name at the last second. “You followed me?”
Berimac turned on her, his face harsh. “You know this man?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Tanza called back. She gave Auren a glare sharper than any spindle. “You should be back at the hotel.”
“So should you,” Auren replied.
“I had an appointment. You weren’t invited.”
“An apt phrasing,” Berimac said. “My instructions were clear. The courier was to come alone. I rarely approach the gate in person, and I don’t want the whole city to see when I do.”
Tanza leaned as close to Berimac as the energy walls allowed. “I didn’t know he would come.”
“Clumsy of you.” Berimac’s face twisted in a sneer. “People in your line of work should be capable of detecting a tail.”
“I swear he’s the least dangerous person on Ara
teph. He doesn’t approve of my line of work. He’s harmless.”
Berimac stared at her for a long moment. “I believe you,” he said at last. He nodded to the guards. “Make sure he doesn’t come back.”
The heavier guard nodded. The other guard twisted Auren’s arms behind his back while the heavy guard threw a punch at Auren’s torso.
“You said you believed me!” Tanza shouted at Berimac, fury almost drowning her fear.
“I do,” Berimac said. “But mercy doesn’t keep a man safe. A beaten man has a better memory.”
Tanza had a horrible suspicion that beaten man and dead man were not vastly different concepts to Berimac.
Panic obliterated all thought. Before she realized what she was doing, Tanza found herself standing between the gasping Auren and one very large fist. It collided with her abdomen and expelled her breath in a pained grunt, but she had endured harder punches from harder men. She immediately lashed at the guard’s vulnerable areas, fighting with all the desperate savagery she’d learned as a child in Alogath. After a few jabs she landed a blow on her guard’s chin, which dazed him long enough for her to dart out of his reach.
As she turned to help Auren, she found the prince doing his own fighting. He threw his head into his guard’s chin and smashed his captor’s foot. Then, in motions almost too fast for Tanza to follow, he twisted his arms out of the guard’s grip, threw his elbows into his opponent’s stomach, and swept his foot behind the guard’s legs. The guard fell like a stone.
Tanza’s guard had recovered, but before he could strike, she grasped Auren’s hand and pulled him away from the fight. They dashed past the gate and along the rear fence, and old Berimac watched with a disgusting expression of amusement.
Tanza fumed at Berimac’s cruelty. All this trouble for a few endangered plants? The old tyrant must have thought them sufficiently chastised—or sufficiently amusing—because as Tanza and Auren disappeared around the corner, she heard Berimac order the guards to come back into the garden. Even without pursuit, neither Tanza nor Auren slowed until they reached their hotel.
Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories Page 36
