The Last Hawk

by Catherine Asaro

Kelric sat bolt upright in the darkness, knocking down the boy. "What?"

  "You don't got to push me over" Ched sat back up. "You were thrashing around, moaning for water So I boiled some."

  Kelric practically yanked the flask out of Ched's hand. He swallowed its contents in huge gulps, nearly choking as the water quenched his parched thirst.

  "You feel better?" Ched asked.

  Kelric lowered the now empty flask, feeling a bit sheepish. "Yes. Much better."

  The boy leaned back on his hands. "Had me a big surprise today. I met my quota."

  "That quota is absurd." Kelric lay down again his surge of nightmare-produced adrenaline subsiding. "I don't see how you ever meet it."

  "I never do."

  "You just said you did."

  "I should maybe put it different. My trundles was filled when the captain came round to check. But it wasn't me who cut half them blocks."

  "You probably just lost track."

  Ched leaned forward. "So how come you didn't meet your quota? You cut more than you needed."

  "You must have misjudged the amount."

  "You been filling my cars. Winds know, I appreciate it, metal man. But I want you to stop."

  "Stop what?"

  "Cuaz me " Ched threw up his hands "You're impossible."

  Kelric smiled.

  "Well," Ched said "I'll just thank you for filling my cars you didn't fill and let you sleep."

  Kelric thought of his nightmare. "Don't go."

  "Bad dream, heh?" Ched nodded. "I get 'em too." He frowned. "We could play Quis, 'cept you left your dice pouch lying around and Ikav pixed it. You got to be more careful."

  "He can have it." Kelric closed his eyes "I'd rather sleep"

  "Now maybe. But we'll be off late shift in a few days. You'll see how boring it gets."

  Kelric opened his eyes "We?"

  "I asked for a third shift." Ched laughed. "Now the guards really think I'm crazy."

  "So do I. Why did you do it?"

  "To get ahead on my quota so you'll quit killing yourself to fill my cars Besides, Zev and them are off late shift tomorrow. I don't want to be here when they' are and you aren't."

  The same thought had occurred to Kelric What would happen to Ched if he escaped? He could try to break out the boy, too, but he doubted Ched would last long on his own. And when faced with Ched's vulnerability it was too easy to forget he was in prison for a reason.

  "Why are you looking at me like that?" Ched said.

  "I was wondering about the man you tried to kill."

  Ched tensed. "What about him?"

  "Why did you try to strangle him?"

  "What do you mean, why? He was sewer scum. He deserved to have his head popped off."

  Kelric could imagine the effect Ched's language made at his Tribunal. "What did he .do?"

  "He didn't do nothing. Never. Except put drink inside himself." The boy flinched. "That's when he decided I needed lessons." Ched made a fist. "That."

  "He hit you?"

  "He said I made him do it. That last time he was trying to kill me." Ched swallowed. "Seems I fight real good when I'm scared outta my head."

  Kelric stared at him "Couldn't you get help anywhere?"

  "Right. A kinsa. They would've laughed in my face."

  "You have as much right to civil protection as anyone else."

  "The right to get cooped in a city jail."

  "What about the Children's Cooperative?"

  "What about it?"

  "Couldn't you go there?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "None of your business why not."

  Kelric considered him. "Is there any way you can serve your sentence in a less severe compound?"

  "You mean transfer?" Ched laughed "If I kept ahead of my quotas, if Torv put in a word for me, if Zecha was in a good mood—not a chance."

  "Bonni would put in a word for you."

  Ched blinked. "You know, she might."

  A clang rang through the hall, the sound of the security doors opening. Ched jumped to his feet and ran to the archway of Kelric's cell "It's guards. Bundles of 'em."

  Kelric joined him Four guards were striding down the hall, the blades of their swords glinting in the starlight. More guards stood at the doors, keeping watch as Zev and the others appeared in the archways of their cells.

  The captain halted in front of Kelric. "Turn around."

  Disconcerted, Kelric turned. Someone locked his. Wrist guards behind his back—and then tied a blindfold over his eyes.

  "Leave him alone,",Ched protested. "He hasn't done nothing."

  "Heh," Zev called. "Torv planning to work him over again?"

  Gossi laughed. "Glad it's you, Calani, and not me."

  Kelric tensed, disoriented by the blindfold. A guard slipped a hand under his elbow and guided him forward in the darkness. They took him out of the corridor and through the building, leading him by touch. Then they were outside, in the stinging sandstorm where the wind blasted unseen grit at him.

  He forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, having to trust their guidance.

  Eventually they entered a protected space, walking down an incline. After a short time they stopped and a door clanged shut. Someone freed his hands. and removed his blindfold. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw a room paneled with glossy amberwood and carpeted by a lush gold rug.

  In the center of the room, Zecha sat at a Quis table.

  She motioned to an armchair across the table. "Sit down."

  Kelric stared at her, then settled into the chair.

  Zecha glanced at the captain. "Where are his Quis dice?"

  "Ikav had them." The captain pulled the pouch out of her jacket and set it on the table.

  Kelric blinked at the warden. "You brought me here to play dice?"

  "We'll wager work shifts." She took out her own pouch. "For each game you lose, you work one extra shift."

  I don't believe this, Kelric thought. "What if I win?"

  "Then you don't have to work the shift."

  "That's not much of a bet." He pushed at the thick curls spilling down his neck. "How about a haircut for a win? A shave for a second win."

  Zecha shrugged. "Whatever." She set a blue cube on the table. "Your move."

  It was hard to change mental gears to Quis. He felt too tired. But the prospect of more shifts or being beaten again by Torv was worse. So he poured out his dice and set a blue cube on top of Zecha's die. She added a red cube to the stack.

  "You can't do that," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "Red can't go on blue."

  She snorted. "I thought you knew how to play Quis."

  Bolt, he thought.

  SDFJ$(

  Bolt, come on. Can you access my files on Quis rules?

  FD5A87+++++ .

  Kelric gave up and fell back on intuition, placing a rod on the table to pull Zecha's play away from the cube stack. She set a sphere near the rod, and he added a rosewood arch between the sphere and stack.

  Zecha laughed. "My game."

  "Your game?" He looked at her. "It's not your game."

  "You made a bridge. Both ends touch my pieces. A baby knows better than that."

  Damn. He hadn't even noticed his arch touched her sphere. By bridging it to the stack, he had formed a structure. The combined rank of Zecha's pieces in it easily surpassed his, so she could claim it for the win if she wanted.

  The warden cleared the playing area and set down a dodecahedron. Kelric put a blue triangle on top of it.

  Zecha smirked. "Extra shift number two."

  "I lost?"

  "Miserably."

  "Why?"

  "My dodecahedron has black edges."

  "So what?"

  "So you can only play black on it." Zecha flipped his triangle back to him and left her dodecahedron. "New game. Your move."

  Kelric rubbed his eyes, trying to stay awake. He set a heptahedron on the table.

&nb
sp; Zecha laughed. "Shift three for you."

  For pugging sake, he thought.

  "I thought he was a Calani," a guard muttered.

  "If you can't give me the reason why you lost," Zecha added, "you get a fourth shift."

  Kelric wondered what possessed the head warden of the entire prison to drag him blindfolded across Haka in the middle of the night for a Quis lesson. "It's a continuity law," he said. But which one? Color? Shape? Dimension. That was it. Dimension.

  "I lost on the first move of the last game," he said. "You opened this new game with the dodecahedron you played before. So continuity holds. I had to fix my losing move from the previous game by properly placing a piece with the same dimension as the one I misplayed before. Which means a flat piece. Two dimensions. But I instead played a three-dimension piece."

  "Fourth shift," Zecha said smugly.

  He gritted his teeth. "What for?"

  "Your piece also had to supersede my dodecahedron."

  "Nothing supersedes a dodecahedron."

  "That's right." She took away his die and left the dodecahedron. "Your move."

  Kelric scowled. The more sides on a polyhedron, the higher its rank. In Quis, no polyhedron had more than a dodecahedron's twelve sides and in the current structure no other shape would outrank a polyhedron. She had him trapped in an infinite loop of losses.

  "Looks like another shift," Zecha commented.

  Behind Kelric, the door opened. A girl came over and spoke to the warden in-a low voice. Zecha frowned and nodded.

  After the girl left, Kelric balanced an ebony ball on the dodecahedron.

  "I'm sorry," Zecha said. "But that move is illegal."

  His mouth almost fell open It was the first civil phrase she had ever uttered to him. When he recovered from the shock, he said. "It's legal. I misplayed a three- dimension piece the last game and a ball is a three-dimensional piece."

  "True," she agreed. "But it doesn't supersede a dodecahedron."

  "Yes it does."

  Her polite veneer cracked. "Don't contradict me. You need a piece with more than twelve sides. You don't have one."

  He grinned "A ball has an infinite number of sides. It's the limit of letting the number of sides on a polyhedron go to infinity."

  With a scowl, Zecha knocked his ball off her die. Then she took her dodecahedron out of the playing area. "Well? You won. So open."

  Kelric resisted the urge to laugh. He put down a pyramid and the game took off rapidly evolving into a complicated series of structures. After a while something began to tug at him. What. .? Yes, , there. Zecha had built a convoluted snake of green dice and was trying to close the coil.

  She drummed her fingers on the table. "Are you going to take forever?"

  "No." He played a blue pyramid.

  She shoved a green pyramid into a structure. "Your move."

  He smiled. "My game"

  "It's not your game Make your move."

  Kelric tapped his finger along a line of pyramids winding through the structures. "Black, brown, red, orange, gold, yellow, green blue purple violet, black All mine except for the red and green " He laughed. "Grand augmented spectrum my advantage. You owe me a shave and a haircut Warden."

  Zecha glared at him. Then she turned to the octet. "You can take him back now." .

  When he stood up, they locked his wrists, then blindfolded him and led him away.

  Zecha leaned against the table in the Interstice room that connected the Estate to the underground tunnels of Haka. It irked her that Rashiva insisted she hold her Quis sessions with Sevtar here, where a window of one—way glass allowed the Manager to watch unobserved. Spying, that's what Rashiva was doing. Smart idea to put that girl on lookout, to warn her if the Manager showed up.

  Across the room, the door opened and Rashiva Haka entered.

  Zecha bowed. "Manager Haka."

  "Morning, Warden." Rashiva chuckled. "He caught you with the infinite-sided polyhedron, heh, Zecha? And that spectrum was a beauty."

  "You missed his first games. He played like a child,"

  Rashiva stretched her arms. "Why did you schedule the session before dawn? If my aide hadn't seen you come in, I would have slept right through it."

  Zecha had intended to be done with the "lesson" before the early-rising Manager awoke. "I didn't want to bother you, ma'am."

  "It's no bother." Rashiva leaned against the table. "Do you need to, blindfold and restrain him that way? It must be unpleasant for him."

  "If we don't blindfold him, he'll learn the route here from the prison. Without restraints, he could break into the Estate." Maybe she ought to let him loose. If Sevtar knocked around Rashiva's staff, it might cure the Manager of this rehabilitation nonsense.

  "He doesn't act dangerous," Rashiva said. "He seems a pleasant fellow."

  "That 'pleasant fellow' killed Llaach Dahl."

  Rashiva exhaled. "Yes. He did." She thought for a moment. "Let him off quarry crew today. He's obviously exhausted. And give him that shave he wanted. Just trim his hair though. It's too gorgeous to cut off."

  Bones and bugs. Rashiva expected her to manicure crooners? "It could be dangerous to let him near a razor. He might go for the blade."

  "Take whatever precautions you think necessary."

  "Yhee, ma'am."

  After Rashiva left, Zecha brooded. So she was supposed to coddle Sevtar, heh? No chance. Maybe he expected his beauty to get him special treatment. She'd seen his smiles. His seductive behavior might blind Managers but it wouldn't work on Haka's warden.

  But Sevtar got to her in another way. Somehow he crept into her brain. It had been years since she suffered nightmares of people talking in her head. Back then, she had feared she was going insane, until finally she stopped it by putting up an emotional wall that shut everyone out. It made her lonelier than a kinsa lost in the desert, but it kept her from hearing other people's thoughts.

  Now Sevtar came, eating away at her fortifications.

  Zecha gritted her teeth. This Sevtar business had gone too far. She had to get rid of him.

  When Ched entered the cell, Kelric was holding himself up by the skylight, peering out at the blue sky.

  "Cuaz and Khozaar me," Ched said.

  Kellie looked down. "What does that mean anyway?"

  "It's just something people say. Cuaz and Khozaar are wind gods, Akasi to the sungoddess Savina." Ched frowned at him. "You can't break the skylight bars, metal man. We've all tried."

  Kelric dropped to the floor. "Want to play Quis?"

  "No. You always beat me." Ched flopped down on the pallet. "Know what I'd like? A big feast, with lots of wine. Afterward, two beautiful warrior women carry us off and have their way with us."

  Kelric smiled. "Sounds interesting."

  "You ever been in love?"

  "Twice." Kelric sat by the wall. "The first time I was younger than you. Fourteen. Shaliece used to sneak up and watch me swim in the river. One day I saw her. I was so mortified that after I got my pants back on, I chased her all over the woods."

  "What happened when you caught her?"

  Kelric laughed. "That, young man, is private."

  Ched grinned. "She got you in trouble, heh? Happened to me too." His smile faded. "I was thrown out of the Children's Cooperative in Lasa 'cause of it."

  "Thrown out? Why?"

  "I let this girl talk me into stuff." Ched sat up. "Next morning she wouldn't have nothing to do with me. But she talked. Pretty soon all them girls was telling stories about me. It was all lies. I wouldn't touch those clawcats. I only liked that one but she wanted someone else. And you know what? She got him in trouble. To protect him she said I Was the father. With all those stories about me everyone believed her." He swept his hand across the floor and sent sand flying. "So the Cooperative guardians kicked me out."

  Kelric frowned. "They had no business turning you out."

  "That's why I went to Viasa. No Lasa House would take me. People called me trash." He shrugged. "Guess th
ey was right."

  "They weren't, Ched. Never believe that about yourself."

  The boy hesitated. "You think maybe different?"

  "Absolutely. You've a lot of potential. You just need a chance to develop it."

  "Heh. Well." Ched gave him an embarrassed smile. "You know, you're all right."

  Rashiva paced across Zecha's office. "He looks so vulnerable."

  Zecha sat back in her chair. "Don't let Ched's innocent face fool you."

  "Bonni says he's a model prisoner." Rashiva stopped pacing. "She suggested transferring him out of Four."

  Model prisoner? Zecha almost snorted. She knew his kind, how they manipulated women. Her father had been Ched's age when he propositioned her mother. Maybe her mother had been happy with the unexpected result of that night's pleasure, but Zecha still burned from the childhood taunts: kinsaborn.

  Whore-baby.

  "Ched's always been a problem," she said. "He's kept ahead of his quotas lately, but I doubt it will last."

  Rashiva frowned. "What quotas?"

  Bones and bugs. Didn't Rashiva ever miss anything? "It's a reward system. If prisoners meet certain quotas they get privileges." As soon as Zecha had realized Rashiva didn't intend to doze her way through her- reign like her doddering predecessor, she had cleaned out her files. Certain records could have been misinterpreted, particularly those detailing how she routed profits from the extra quarry shifts to her own accounts So she got rid of them Her files were pristine now. "I can show you the records."

  "All right," Rashiva said. "And go ahead with Ched's transfer. Put him on another crew. Maintenance maybe. He doesn't look strong enough to work in a quarry."

  Zecha stiffened. Who was warden here? Still, better to win Rashiva's confidence on a trivial matter like this. It would give her a stronger bargaining position on critical issues.

  "I can send him to Compound Two," Zecha said. "They do maintenance."

  "Good " Rashiva resumed pacing. "How is Sevtar coming along?"

  "He isn't. You've seen his record He started a fight his first night here and attacked Torv Haka his first day In the quarry."

  "Perhaps you should separate him from the others." Rashiva considered. "Let him concentrate more on Quis. Working in a quarry is a waste of his talent anyway."

  A plan was forming in Zecha's mind. "I think that's a good idea." Yes an excellent idea.