Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Looking at those yellow eyes, I felt exhaustion wash over me.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice subdued. “We are staying. For a short time at least. I thank you again for your hospitality.” Gesturing to Voi Pai in the formal seer hand motion, I looked at Raven. “She may live… for now. I will not tolerate her in any room in which I am again, however, for as long as I am here. Not unless I specifically ask for her,” I added, thinking I might want to question her some more. Thinking about this further, I added,

  “And she cannot sleep within this construct. She must go, for as long as I am here. I don’t care where, as long as it’s away from me and my people.”

  Raven’s eyes flashed with relief.

  She’d really thought I was going to kill her.

  “Yes, Bridge Alyson,” Voi Pai murmured. She bowed to me, then looked at Raven, indicating with her hand for her to leave.

  I watched Raven slink out of the room. She glanced at Balidor as she left, her turquoise eyes nervous, but Balidor only mirrored my warning stare.

  Once she was gone, he glanced at me, nodding in understanding at my look.

  He would make sure she didn’t come back.

  I saw the question there though, and knew I wasn’t off the hook about Maygar. He would want to have a little chat with me about that, once we were alone.

  “I need to sleep,” I said, a little louder than necessary.

  Voi Pai glanced at Vash, who had a glimmer of humor in his eyes, too. Clearly this woman wasn’t used to being told what to do in her own home.

  But hell, she kind of forced my hand.

  As if hearing me, Vash winked. Then he answered Voi Pai’s silent question with a shrug, seer-fashion, indicating with a nod that she should look to me for clarification, instead of him. She turned to face me, a smile plastered stiffly on her face.

  “Yes, Bridge Alyson,” she said.

  I watched as she withdrew from the room.

  Patting my arm gently through the hole in the bed’s square frame, Balidor chuckled a little out loud before he turned to leave as well. Jon followed, shaking his head at me, and Cass and Baguen followed them, leaving only Vash.

  “Do you require anything of me, Bridge Alyson?” he asked humorously.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed at him, exhaling in a sigh before I let myself collapse back on the mountain of silk pillows.

  Smiling, he bowed, and removed himself from my presence.

  Curling up on the thick mattress, I closed my eyes.

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  Within seconds, he slid around me again, wanting to know what he had missed. I told him, as best as I could through the collar, wincing as the restraint charge kicked in here and there, paralyzing my light for a few seconds each time. I felt glimmers off him, humor at my standing up to Voi Pai and a brief flush of anger at Raven, personal enough that I realized he knew her somehow. I felt a pang of jealousy before I understood the cause.

  I couldn’t hear his response when he sent some form of reassurance.

  More flashes of frustration came off him when he couldn’t see what I described, when he wanted to know more about my location.

  I also felt wanting there, a thick pull that was starting to affect me again, even without the stress of what had just happened.

  When it intensified, I let him feel how badly it hurt.

  His light flinched against mine. He seemed startled at first, maybe at my openness.

  Then his light slid around me once more, trying to reach me in rising flushes of heat. It crossed my mind to be nervous that he could feel me so clearly. Given where I was, in the stronghold of the Lao Hu, he shouldn’t be able to get near me at all.

  His light grew cautious, and I realized he’d felt that, too.

  “You’re coming, aren’t you?” I murmured.

  Soon, I felt him murmur.

  Where are you?

  Silence. His light remained warm though, close.

  Please don’t kill my friends. Please, Revik. I know you’re angry…

  I felt more whispers off him––images of Jon, of Cass. I saw Jon’s face, angry, yelling at Balidor, and realized Revik was showing me how he knew that neither of my childhood friends had been privy to the Adhipan’s plan. He knew Jon and Cass had been in the dark, thinking I was dead, too. I nodded to myself, but still felt nervous.

  He’d left a lot of names off that list.

  Even so, I wanted him there. I couldn’t even pretend anymore that I didn’t.

  Emotion curled around me as I felt him react to that, too.

  Laying my head back on the pillow, I closed my eyes. As my body started to unclench, I was caught off guard by a stronger wave of longing, so dense it caught in my throat, tightening my hands, then my jaw. I realized it had come from me, my own light.

  I felt him react again––another near flinch.

  Then a flood of liquid heat swam over me.

  The tug carried so much it left me panting on my back, my skin flushed hot. His emotion swam through me, love that clenched my chest, nearly made me forget where I was. I pulled on him for real, and felt the want on him worsen, until he was fighting to get past the collar when it kicked in, bringing a different kind of pain into my light.

  Eventually, we both gave up.

  I felt him withdraw, frustration pulsing at me briefly before he slid around me affectionately and drew away.

  Lying there, I felt another flicker of nerves wash over me at how close he’d felt, even with the collar––much less the military-grade construct I had to be in, given where we were. Something about being shot and both of us nearly dying had torn down all the walls between us. It didn’t seem to matter anymore, where I was. Or even who I was with.

  I knew something had changed in me, though, too.

  Being with him again no longer felt like a hypothetical, or a pipe dream. I don’t think I’d ever wanted him so badly. Maybe it was knowing finally that we really couldn’t be separated. It might’ve even been something more biologically-driven, some kind of base, biological need after having him absent so long from my light.

  In any case, guilt lived around the admission, a near shame.

  It didn’t change anything. He was still Syrimne. But more and more, my light didn’t care.

  I wasn’t altogether sure the rest of me did, either.

  Either way, I could admit to myself now that Balidor had been right about me, when he said I couldn’t be trusted around him.

  I definitely wasn’t going to be thinking clearly when I saw him next.

  24

  LIAISONS

  JON TRIED TO quell his apprehension as he left the chamber where Allie was housed.

  She still didn’t look right. Her skin was overly pale, even taking into account all the time they’d spent indoors over the past few weeks, in trains and underground and far away from the sun. Her cheekbones looked hollow to him, in a way that worried him almost as much as the runway-model-thin body––and he definitely meant that not in a good way.

  She seemed distant, too.

  It could be from the collar, which Jon knew Balidor had jacked the limits up on a number of times, trying to keep Revik out.

  Jon had his doubts the collar explained it really, though.

  She seemed always to be listening these days, like a part of her was somewhere else. He’d noticed something similar about Balidor as well, but didn’t want to think too clearly about what that meant, either.

  He’d caught the insinuation of that terrifying seer, Voi Pai, too. They’d been in the garden when she made that crack about “only a fool” and they’d all heard it. They’d all seen her aim the same comment at Balidor once they’d gone inside, too.

  Now he couldn’t help wondering… was Voi Pai right?

  Had Allie and Balidor been involved?

  She’d kept it pretty damned quiet if they had been. They’d seemed pretty tight for awhile now, at least until they got into that yelling match under the Old House in Seerto
wn. Even now, after he’d almost killed her, she’d joked around with him in there, and gave him looks that indicated some kind of secret communication between them.

  Jon never picked up on anything else, though. Even their secrets struck him more as military-grade secrets than anything personal.

  Balidor might have looked at her a little too long, here and there, but seers did that. All seers did that, seemingly––and Dorje told him Allie affected more seers than most, male and female, mainly because her separation from Revik messed with their light.

  Usually, it didn’t mean a damned thing.

  Reaching the end of the corridor outside her bedroom, he hung a right past the shrine-like alcove that formed a kind of foyer to the building where they had her housed. Barely glancing at the ornate wood carving of two dragons twisting over a second set of circular doorways, he walked down the stairs and entered the outdoor courtyard.

  They’d given him his own quarters, somewhere, but he needed to be outside, at least for a little while. Allie wasn’t the only one who’d spent way too much time indoors.

  Finding a corner of the garden next to a winding creek that curled around rock sculptures and more flowering cherry trees, Jon sighed, sitting down on a stone bench.

  He closed his eyes as he tilted his face up to the sun.

  Gods, he’d missed the sun. Before he could really relax enough to enjoy the warm rays, a shadow fell across his face.

  He opened his eyes.

  Dorje stood over him, his face showing impatience.

  Not impatience, annoyance.

  Maybe even edging into anger.

  “What is this?” the seer demanded. “What is this? Were you going to tell me, Jon?”

  Jon blinked against flickers of sharp sunlight that reached his eyes from behind the seer’s head. Then he looked down, staring at what the seer had thrust angrily into his lap. It was a large, square notebook with a hard cover.

  “I hear you have been hanging out with your torturer,” Dorje said in clipped Prexci. “That you visited him? In Nepal? Daily, they said. What is that, Jon?”

  Jon sighed, lowering his hand from his face.

  “You seem to know all about it, so why even ask?” he grumbled.

  “Jon,” Dorje said, exasperated. “Are you going to explain this to me?”

  Jon gestured dismissively, flipping open the notebook Dorje had given him. Looking at the lines sketched in black charcoal, he squinted, trying to make out the numbers alongside the diagrams’ boundaries, noticing the different shadings and textures within the same image. Some of those lines looked to be made up of dark dots, others appeared to be dashes. Still others were so light as to be mere shadows across the page.

  He turned several of the diagrams a few different directions, but still couldn’t make sense of them.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “You tell me,” Dorje said. “What are you doing, Jon?”

  Frustrated, Jon exhaled, squinting again against the sun, as the seer had moved his head and now no longer blocked the light.

  “Will you sit down at least, so I can see you?”

  Dorje sat promptly. His face didn’t relax. Neither did his eyes, which stared at Jon in an open accusation verging on hurt.

  Jon was growing used to the seer method of staring. It had struck him as invasive at first. Now, on Dorje, he found the concern behind it sort of sweet.

  “Do not distract me,” Dorje said. “What are you doing, Jon?”

  Jon frowned. Then he threw up a hand.

  “Look, it wasn’t a big deal.” He sighed, flipping through more of the pages. He gestured towards the marks. “His fingers were all bloody from drawing his crazy shit on the stone. I gave him paper. And charcoal pencils. Big deal.”

  “You are helping your torturer now?” Dorje said.

  “Jesus. Drama much? Do I have to act like him to convince you I’m not up to something?”

  Dorje caught hold of Jon’s hand, the one with the missing fingers. “Is he your friend, now? Your new pal?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jon said, extracting his hand. “I thought it might be helpful, seeing what he was writing. For all I knew, it was the secret formula to finding Shangri-la.”

  Dorje hesitated. His eyes grew baffled. “Secret formula to the what, Jon?”

  Jon grinned at him. “You know… THE secret formula. That one.”

  Dorje’s frown deepened.

  “Come on,” Jon said. “Lighten up.” His smile grew a bit stiffer. “Anyway, I was just trying to kill time while you bastards were off torturing my sister.”

  Dorje’s hard look faltered.

  Jon waved him off with his mutilated hand. “Forget it. I’m not in the mood for some speech about duty, honor and the American way of life.”

  Dorje looked puzzled again, but Jon cut him off when he started to ask.

  “It’s a human expression, Dorj. I just mean I know you have some long, convoluted seer explanation about how there was no other way, and you were really helping Allie by starving her half to death while she screamed in pain.”

  Sighing, he looked back at the book.

  “I don’t want to hear it right now, okay?”

  Dorje hesitated, then looked out over the gardens. His gaze tilted up towards the cherry blossoms while Jon pored over the book, flipping from page to page, pausing on some of the more coherent-looking scribbles.

  “You guys looked at this, I assume?”

  Dorje clicked softly, folding his hands in the lap of his jeans. “If by ‘you guys’ you mean the Adhipan, yes. We looked at it.”

  “And?”

  “Barrier diagrams mostly. There is some chemistry. Biology. Genetics. Much of it is pure garbage, Jon. Refuse from his mind. It only seems important to him because he is grasping for coherence… like a person speaking through a fever-dream.”

  Jon grunted, still looking at the images. He paused, finding a page that was neither numbers nor a diagram nor any kind of language. He stared at a sketch made from the charcoal sticks he’d given the crazy seer, a little flabbergasted.

  “He did this? Feigran?”

  Dorje looked over his arm. “Yes. It appears you made quite an impression, Jon.” His mouth firmed. “Balidor believes he likes males quite a bit… but you likely knew that, yes, Jon?”

  “I more meant that he can draw,” Jon said, ignoring the seer’s jab. “Jesus. Who would have thought? Even before he was a babbling looney, I wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who could do this.”

  Dorje shrugged. “Seers live a long time. He’s lived in many bodies. A lot of time to kill. You pick things up.”

  Jon only half-heard, staring down at the image of himself.

  In it, he sat on a three-legged wooden stool in the cell in Nepal.

  His eyes looked serious, holding a scrutiny that wrinkled the skin around them slightly, highlighting the wind-worn lines he’d collected in the past year or so. His mutilated hand stood out visibly against his dark coat, long fingers curled around his elbow where his arms crossed over his chest. In the drawing he wore the same leather coat he’d worn for most of his time in Kathmandu.

  It struck Jon, looking at the image, how long his hair had gotten.

  “There are more,” Dorje said.

  He leaned over Jon’s lap, flipping to later images.

  Jon frowned down at one of Allie.

  In it, she sat on the floor of a cavernous room with waterfalls flowing down a hill covered in boulders. She was laughing with her head thrown back, wearing a sun dress, her bare legs splayed in a casual pose. It wasn’t a sexual image, though. She was playing chess on the floor with a boy who looked astonishingly like Revik––only Revik at about twelve years old.

  “Did the boy—”

  “No,” Dorje made a line in the air with his finger. “He did not look so much like Dehgoies in real life. It is eerie though, yes? Allie told me she played chess with Nenzi while Terian and the boy held her captive. That and Go. You
know, the Chinese game.”

  Jon’s mouth hardened. He remembered other things Allie told him about the boy.

  Like how he’d try to touch her at night, insisting she was his mate.

  Dorje flipped to another page, tapping his finger on the paper.

  An image of the terrifying woman with the slitted, yellow eyes of a cat stared out of the page, wearing a hanfu dress with a deep black sash.

  Jon looked at Dorje. “Did Feigran know we were coming here?”

  Dorje gestured negative. “We told him nothing.”

  “Are seers normally prescient?”

  Dorje shrugged, flipping his hand sideways. It meant “not really,” more or less, in seer hand language.

  “Normally, no. Some are. It is something we can all do to a small degree, if we really work at it, but frankly, it is not as useful of a skill as you might think, Jon.”

  At Jon’s puzzled look, Dorje shrugged again.

  “The future changes,” he explained. “All the time. Free will, you know? It can be maddening, trying to keep up with that. Most of us don’t bother. It confuses as much as it helps. Too easy to get married to possible futures we like.” He smiled. “…Too easy to get married to those we don’t like.”

  Jon nodded. “I get that.”

  “True prescients––meaning those who can see things that are much more likely to happen, who see past the randomness in individual choice, who see more the fates of a species, or a life-wave even––they are rare, Jon. Very, very rare.”

  “Does the Adhipan think Feigran is one of those?” Jon said.

  Dorje smiled at him grimly. Jon didn’t know how to read that expression.

  “One more,” Dorje said, flipping pages towards the back of the book.

  But Jon stopped the turning pages before Dorje got to the one he’d wanted to show him, clapping a hand down abruptly on a drawing Dorje would have skipped over.

  On it, Jon recognized Allie again. Only that time, it wasn’t a boy she was with.

  She was also, notably, without clothing.

  He stared at the drawing for a full minute before he could make himself understand it well enough to form a mental explanation for what he was seeing. Despite his casual musing as he’d left Allie’s chambers earlier, he hadn’t really believed Allie and Balidor had slept together.