Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)
Chamber of Memory
May 19, 2000 AD
If the Thoughtful Grace on duty outside the personal chambers could have seen him now, Sajir sa-Tomond knew they would have dragged him bodily back to his bed and drugged him to keep him as quiet as the physicians wished . . . and then taken the Knife of Apology to their throats. Particularly their commander Adwa sa-Soj; she was young and zealous, sometimes beyond reason.
The thought made him smile a little as he sat back and let the tendrils grope toward the entry point on the back of his neck. Usually that contact was soothing; now he could feel the agitation that swept through the great protein machines that stored and manipulated data. He groped backward through layers of memory, the minds of predecessor after predecessor, until he reached the earliest days of the Age of Dissonance, the beginnings of the long decline.
Images flickered through his mind; the silverlike filigree of the Invisible Crown, and the experience of wearing it.
I feel intense pride in being her progenitor, he thought. To survive that without training, without assistance . . . this represents a degree of eugenic fitness unprecedented for hundreds of generations!
He had spent little time on the matter of the Crown. Even as his Lineage reckoned time, it had been lost for a very long while. But now . . .
Now I must know. Show me!
Mars, The Lost City of Rema-Dza
May 19, 2000 AD
“God, is she going to be okay?” Jeremy asked anxiously.
They’d all recovered from that weird momentary blackout, not even headaches or anything else beyond a few bumps and scrapes from falling. His watch said it had been a few seconds, though somehow it felt longer.
All except Teyud. She was still unconscious, resting on a nest of silks and furs in the antechamber. Baid knelt on her other side, applying the contents of the Traveler’s first-aid kit, much of it alive and wriggling. If you didn’t have a doctor on Mars, an engineer was the next best thing; they were the closest thing to vets anyway. The largest single item was a weird little creature with vestigial gripping paws and a bottle implanted in its back; it plugged into Teyud’s jugular and dripped fluids into her system. Every once in a while, you had to top up the bottle with water mixed with nutrient powder.
Jeremy found that even the squirming bait-box look of the Martian medical devices didn’t bother him now; he was simply too afraid. It wasn’t like fearing danger to himself, and to his surprise it was worse because of the added helplessness.
Does her face look better? A little less waxy? Or am I fooling myself?
Baid withdrew a worm from one of Teyud’s nostrils and looked at it. “Her temperature is rising, although still a percentile below normal. I would speculate that blood flow to the extremities returns.”
She peeled back an eyelid. “And pupil reaction is better, but only slightly; there may be neurological damage. There is little we can do but wait and apply hydration.”
“I . . .” Jeremy groped for the words in Demotic. “I anticipate improvement with intense desire for favorable outcomes.”
Baid nodded as she stowed the devices in the box and rose, dusting off the knees of her robe.
“I also entertain emotions of affectionate respect for this Thoughtful Grace,” Baid replied. “Even beyond the necessary terrified awe one feels at the display of Imperial tembst thought to be fictional or long-lost, and its response to her genome. Teyud za-Zhalt has repaired my economic status beyond reasonable anticipation—I will purchase the Traveler myself and enjoy sufficient security of income to breed and perpetuate my lineage.”
A group of De’ming pulled a sled through the chamber, with a crewman following behind. They’d stash the loot in the Traveler’s holds. Baid looked at it with a small, satisfied nod: Imperial-era artwork and records would fetch impressive prices.
Even then Jeremy felt an impulse to wince: This was a reversion to nineteenth-century tomb robbing with a vengeance, like Belzoni rampaging through the Valley of the Kings with a pickax and flogging the results to collectors. Then Teyud moved slightly, and his attention snapped back into focus.
He held her hand in his; long fingers slightly rough with callus, cooler than it should be—cooler than the lower Martian body temperature could account for. Her eyes had a slightly sunken look, too. Jeremy wondered what he’d do if she didn’t wake up, or woke up a drooling idiot, and swallowed convulsively at the sudden bleakness of the world that the thought laid before him.
“Damn, woman, don’t you die on me now,” he murmured softly. “I was just getting to know you. Yeah, we have absolutely nothing in common. That’s the point.”
Time passed. Jeremy remained, refilling the bottle of nutrient fluid as the slow drip emptied it and doing the ongoing nursing tasks; when he had to rest, he napped curled up in silks and furs of his own. Sometimes Sally came and spelled him, long enough to let him clean himself and change his clothes.
When he was alone with Teyud, he found himself telling Teyud about his family—she’d been fascinated by it—including his two sisters, his brother the jock, his father the physicist, and how his mother had played the cello. And about his life; high school in Los Alamos, studying archaeology at the University of New Mexico; the fencing team; the weird cave he’d found on that dig in Arizona, with the rows of skeletons hanging from the ceiling and the mummified body of the little old woman and her copper pot.
At last Sally came and put a gentle hand on his shoulder; Baid tu-Or was with her.
“Jeremy, we’ve got to get back to Zar-tu-Kan,” she said. “We have to move her. The Traveler is ready.”
He started violently, and his murmuring broke off. He coughed, shook his head. “Yes, of course, you’re right. Let’s—”
Teyud’s hand clenched on his, powerful enough to hurt. Her eyes fluttered open and sought his.
“I heard you,” she said, her voice dry and hoarse. “I heard you in my darkness and the darkness did not consume me, though it hungered.” Then: “Water.”
He held her head up and dribbled a little between her lips. She sipped, coughed again, drank a little more.
“Strange,” she whispered, when he’d laid her head back. “This has been a very strange experience. I express astonishment, wonder, a sensation of psychological displacement.”
“Are you all right?” he asked desperately.
“I am . . . physically undamaged beyond the effects of stress,” she said, her voice a thread. “I apparently retain continuity of experience—”
I’m still me, he translated to himself.
“—but I feel . . . extremely strange. Aspects of my . . . mind . . . have expanded. As if empty chambers were always there but are now unlocked, yet still bare and unfilled, in which I wander as a stranger to myself.”
“What was that thing?” he blurted.
Beside him, Sally tensed. Teyud looked at them both, and did the Martian double blink. Then her great yellow eyes looked elsewhere, as if they saw beyond the confines of the room. Her voice was stronger but pitched to a wondering softness as she answered:
“It was the Crown.”
“A crown?” Jeremy said.
“The Crown. The Invisible Crown of the Tollamune Emperors. S-smau ’i Taksim. That Which Compels. The Crown of the First Emperor, Timrud sa-Enntar.”
“But that’s a myth!” he blurted.
Sally cursed antiphonally in English and Japanese. Baid tu-Or made a choked-off sound and went down on one knee, bowing over a hand pressed to the sand until her forehead touched the ground.
Teyud smiled at Jeremy, and with that, he felt she had actually returned; it was the same ironic tilt of the lips he’d seen the first day they met.
“Not a myth, although I had strongly suspected the same, despite . . . privileged access to information concerning it. It was not a literalized metaphor after all. It is an objective truth; simply one that has been missing for a very long time.”
She touched a finger to her brow, tracing the line where the lower rim of the net of silvery metal had lain, or where what had seemed to be metal had rested.
“It has been missing since the beginning of the Age of Dissonance and the reign of Timrud sa-Rogol. The Supremacy whose identifying glyph rested in that wrecked airship.”
“Nobody ever saw it!”
“Hence the name,” Teyud pointed out. “It is visible only when removed . . . and only rarely was it removed except by the death of the bearer.”
She took his hand and touched it to her forehead; there was nothing there to feel, except smooth skin and dense, silky hair the color of bronze.
“Missing since the beginning of the Age of Dissonance,” Sally said.
“Exactly,” Teyud said.
She gave Jeremy’s hand a gentle, careful squeeze and released it. He flogged a brain that felt stupid with fatigue, and drugged with the endorphins of relief that had flooded him like a bath of warm water. Then something clicked.
“And which began when they lost it. Wait a minute! Wasn’t . . . wasn’t the Invisible Crown linked to the Imperial bloodline? Wasn’t it supposed to kill anyone who touched it without the right?”
“Without the genome of the Kings Beneath the Mountain, yes,” Teyud said.
Her breathing quickened, and she sat up; he leaned forward quickly to put an arm behind her, and she rested against it.
“There’s something you haven’t been telling us, Teyud za-Zhalt,” Sally said grimly.
Teyud turned her head until her cheek touched Jeremy’s for an instant.
“Which I have not informed you, Sally Yamashita,” she said, her voice proud as a sky full of eagles. “I told Jeremy Wainman that my mother was of the Thoughtful Grace, and this statement was truth. I told him that my father was of the highest caste and ruler of a city . . . and that statement was also truth, though incomplete. He was Sajir sa-Tomond, and the city he rules is Dvor Il-Adazar.”
“Ooohhh, shit,” Sally said, almost reverently.
Jeremy simply stared. She smiled again.
“I am of the Tollamune line, to an acceptable degree . . . acceptable to the Invisible Crown, and since I bear it, I am rightfully Emperor and King Beneath the Mountain, holding and swaying the Real World. Or at very least, the Designated Successor.”
“You find the Crown, that makes you Emperor?” Jeremy asked.
Uh-oh, you meet a nice girl and suddenly she’s a planetary princess. Life just sucks sometimes.
“The Invisible Crown is not found. It finds you,” she said. “And chooses its own moment to depart. Often, if ancient records are accurate, at the most inconvenient of moments for the bearer. It has its own purposes.”
Then her eyes snapped wide and she leapt to her feet; she staggered and would have fallen if he had not jumped up as well, and caught her by the arm.
“Danger!” she said. “We are in great danger. We must depart now.”
Teyud allowed Jeremy to support her as they shambled back toward the Intrepid Traveler, even though strength flowed back into her with every pace. His touch seemed to bring strength of another sort, of a kind that defied easy definition. Sally Yamashita snatched up her portable as they left the antechamber; nothing else remained except the bedding—even the portapotty had gone back to the landship.
They were halfway down the sand-choked avenue toward the ship’s hiding place when the alarm wailed from the tower where she had set the lookout. It went on wailing in the lookout’s arms—they did, once you’d twisted their tails sharply—as the scout herself dove off the window and into space. The parachute blossomed out above her, a rectangular thing of boxes of fabric fastened side by side, swooping and circling down toward the street. One of the Paiteng swooped over itself to examine the strange thing that invaded the air, then sheered off at the high-decibel wail that hurt its sensitive ears.
By the time they reached the shattered wall of the gas storage plant, Teyud felt strong—stronger than she ever had in her life, as if her brain was moving like a mechanism of jewels and steel precisely formed. The conviction that the two hostile ships were close was strong; for now, she simply accepted that. With Jeremy at her side, she halted until the parachutist landed; as they did, the cable came taunt and the stern of the Traveler began to emerge.
Activity boiled on deck as the fifteen remaining crewfolk made ready to depart, but the crew took a brief moment to do obeisance—going to one knee and bowing with right hand on the ground. They had heard, and even the most ignorant knew what the Invisible Crown meant.
“Two landships approaching from the northwest, Supremacy, currently approximately eight miles in that direction,” the lookout said, pointing. “Two-masters, large and low-built, apparently fast.”
They must have waited out the storm, Teyud thought. Probably in a hollow, and then had to dig their hulls and outriggers free of accumulated dust. They are between us and Zar-tu-Kan.
“What is your command, Supremacy?” Baid said.
“We run,” she said succinctly.
The engine gasped as the landship came free of the building, then subsided into a shuddering, panting wheeze beneath their feet as they vaulted over the rail.
“Get my harness and weapons,” Teyud said to the scout.
It was not factually of much importance, but she felt more natural as she buckled the straps around herself and settled the sword and pistol. The quarterdeck gun was crewed and charged.
“Set all sail,” she said, and looked up; the sun was a little past noon, and the wind was out of the northeast, about seventeen knots, she estimated.
The hands bent to the winches, sending the long, triangular sail up the mast and the V-fork the upper boom formed with it. The sail thuttered and then snapped taut as the impermeable sheet caught the breeze, wasting nothing. There was a burring sound of sealed bearings turning in their races as the ship leaned against its suspension and began to move.
I earnestly hope that no dust penetrated the suspension, she thought. Spontaneous combustion at this point would be a very negative factor.
Jeremy was beside her—not touching, but close enough to feel the odd, comforting warmth radiating from his warmer than natural body.
“What is your plan?” he said, offering her something.
She took it, and peeled back the odd metallic foil that covered it. Most Terran foods were either boringly bland or disgusting, but chocolate . . . well, that was a different matter.
“We run,” she repeated, as she bit into the bittersweet, nutty stuff. “Anticipation: that we run until full dark, and then elude them by a cunning maneuver in which you will be of great assistance.”
A sudden enormous hunger made her want to gobble, and she suppressed it with an effort of will. Her digestive system was probably in partial shutdown mode.
“What happens if they catch us first?”
“My custody of the Invisible Crown becomes the briefest in all the annals of the Real World,” she said, and looked at him with her face blank.
He stared back, and then slowly began to grin. “You have quite the sneaky sense of humor,” he said.
She smiled back. I am not excessively apprehensive, she thought. Remarkable. Is that caused by the Invisible Crown . . . or Jeremy?
Jeremy looked back at the four black sails behind them, holding on to a stay and shielding his eyes as the cold, desiccating torrent of the wind blew into them. Rema-Dza’s towers had dropped out of sight, and the enemy landships were as far away as you could be on Mars and not drop below the horizon, which wasn’t as distant as it would be on Earth. They were spread far apart—forty-five degrees if you used the Traveler as the central point of a circle.
And they were catching up. Slowly, but surely; a stern chase was a long chase, but this would be barely long enough.
“What, exactly, are they trying to do?” he asked.
“They are forcing us out into the plains of Tharsis, farther into the Deep Beyond,” Teyud sai
d. “Rather as in the atanj move known as “isolate-to-destroy.”
“Dvor Il-Adazar is that way, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, it is three weeks sailing that way. Between here and the edge of the civilized zone is the most desolate portion of the Deep Beyond in this hemisphere.”
“Oh.”
“Their disposition makes it very difficult for us to turn back, because if we do—”
She held her hands out, palms vertical and one pointing to each of the pursuers. Then she brought them together with a slap. The gesture had an unpleasant finality.
Sally glared at the Martian. Jeremy suspected she had the same feeling that he did, that events were spinning out of control, but reacted to it more strongly, mainly because she was more used to making things happen than he was.
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked.
“Options are limited. No hills are immediately available. We might try to get past them in the dark, but our heat will be very conspicuous at night. Once we are in the twom, the flatlands, their superior speed will enable them to close with us. However, steep dunes would do, and after the storm there probably will be mobile dune fields sufficiently near.”
“I don’t think they’re pirates, somehow,” Sally said.
Teyud sighed slightly. “Perhaps not; though the ships are such as one would expect in that trade. There is a high probability that they are commanded by Coercives in the employ of political opponents of my father. I would leave the ship, but it would probably do very little to alter the fate of ship and passengers. If those opponents have pierced the deceptions surrounding my identity, they will leave no associate of mine alive.”
“Isn’t that . . . Invisible Crown . . . supposed to do things?”
In the Courts of the Crimson Kings Page 17
