Balidor himself had wept no tears at the death of that monster. He had seen him set entire cities on fire...destroy water mains and infrastructure that left populations starving for months, exploding ships and airplanes filled with soldiers and even civilians.
He’d been a death machine...a blunt instrument of the Dreng, nothing more. There had been no good to come of those years. Only fear in an entire generation of humans and their offspring...fear that rebounded back onto the rest of the seer population in the form of race-wide oppression and misunderstanding, restriction and segregation along with outright slavery.
Presumably, Dehgoies remembered him now, too. At least if his love letter to his wife had been telling the truth about that, as well.
Jon’s voice jerked Balidor out of his own head, like water being splashed on his face. Even so, he missed the first part of what the human said.
“...has she been talking?” he said. “Has she been conscious?”
Balidor paused, collecting his thoughts.
Frowning then, he made a negative gesture with his fingers.
“Not very much,” he said. “But that’s mostly been our doing, Jon...we’ve had to drug her.”
“Drug her? Why?” the human demanded.
“Why?” Balidor choked on a laugh, in spite of himself. “Because her mate will fucking kill us when he finds us, Jon,” he said in his broken English.
“You’ve got a collar on her already...” Jon began, angry.
“Jon...” Balidor stared at him, at a loss. “...do you have any idea of the danger we are in? All of us, Jon. Even you.” Seeing the human’s eyes grow colder, he bit his lip, gesturing with the same hand as before.
“You should go. Back to the States...or even Europe. She would want you to go. She would want you far away from this...”
“I’m not leaving her, ‘Dori!”
“Why not?” he said, exasperated. “They are brave words, Jon...but not very practical. What possible use are you to her, anyway? How can you help her with—”
“What use am I?” Jon said. He took a step closer, his light sparking with real anger. “Balidor, Allie isn’t some pawn in your war against Syrimne. She needs people here she can trust...whether we are deemed ‘useful’ according to your holy fucking quest or not...”
Balidor felt his jaw harden in spite of himself.
“You’re saying she can’t trust me, Jon?”
“I’m saying I think you would kill her,” Jon said. “For real. If you decided it was your sacred duty to do it. I think you would have shot her right in the heart, Balidor...”
“And?” Balidor said, his jaw hardening. “I would hope you would do the same yourself, Jon...if the greater good demanded it!”
“Wow,” Jon said, gesturing in an exaggerated backwards wave. “...And you just made my point for me.”
When Balidor clicked at him, Jon raised his voice.
“Jesus, ‘Dor! Greater good? You sound just like him, do you know that? That’s something the new and improved Revik would say. Except even he wouldn’t sacrifice Allie for some stupid ideal.” His hands clenched into fists by his sides. “Are you really such a fanatic that you’d shoot your friends, ‘Dori...? Really?”
Balidor started to answer that, then didn’t.
He found himself looking at the wasted form on the bed, then shrugged. His voice came out cold. Colder than he’d intended.
“She’s not my friend, Jon. She’s my job.” He met the human’s gaze.
“...And you should think hard about what your ‘friend’ would really want,” he added. “...What would serve her higher interests. She knows we need to defeat Syrimne. She knows this. She understands how dangerous he is...despite her personal feelings. She will make the hard choices with him, if need be...make no mistake about that.”
Jon just stared at him. “You think she wanted Revik tortured like this? She wants him back, ‘Dori...not ‘neutralized.’ What part of you isn’t getting that? This is all about what she’s willing to do for the people she loves.” His expression contorted in anger. “Jesus. Just because you want her free of him doesn’t mean she wants that. She’s trying to save the guy! She’d kill herself to save him, don’t you get that? Are you really so dense that you don’t see how much he means to her...even as Syrimne?”
Balidor hadn’t really a good reply for that. Mostly because, as much as he hated to admit it, he agreed with the human, at least in part.
As he admitted that much to himself, that sick, almost deadened feeling came back, making it close to impossible to think through his own motives in all of this, or even to see hers clearly.
He was letting his judgment get blurred. He was losing perspective, and therefore his ability to do his job effectively.
He’d promised her he wouldn’t. He’d promised her.
But he didn’t have a lot of time to think about that, either. The train was beginning to slow, and the next station was their final stop...as well as the location of their last true refuge, at least in the world of seers.
Balidor would need to focus all of his skill if he intended to pull off the negotiations required to gain entrance to its inner sanctum. He still entertained fears that they might simply say no, even after they had verified Allie’s identity.
If they did, Balidor was out of options.
This was their last real hope of surviving this thing...any of them, really.
But, Balidor thought wryly, himself more than the rest.
16
BEIJING
I CAME BACK to consciousness slowly.
It felt like wading through a wide, lost space...a sea of warmth and light with no markers or reference points. My body felt far away, like something foreign, uncharted. I felt sick from the drugs. My neck hurt.
I felt him there, too.
He never left me, not through any of it.
He was busy again. The focus behind it was a little overwhelming, even a little unnerving at times. His mind seemed razor-sharp, even through the lingering tiredness I felt on him...and well beyond any specifics, which were too clouded by the collar and the drugs for me to understand much of anyway.
I felt the promise behind it, too.
He was coming for me.
I couldn’t even pretend that the knowledge didn’t fill me with relief.
THEY’D BROUGHT ME somewhere.
Since the soft, warm place where I lay no longer vibrated, jerked, jostled or hummed, I had to believe we’d stopped somewhere, at least for a time. The view behind my eyes no longer spun or dipped periodically, either, so the drugs were wearing off, too...which meant some kind of construct.
Knowing Balidor, it meant the Fort Knox of constructs, to use another of my dad’s out-of-date expressions.
I fought to sit up.
I got as far as propping my shoulders up under my elbows. Then I had to stop, mostly because it felt like something evil pounded at the back of my head with a mallet covered in glass shards.
I couldn’t remember a time where I’d ever felt quite so badly.
Well, excluding that blank stretch of hell in the tank.
The collar hurt my throat. My light refused to leave it alone, to stay behind the artificial boundaries it erected, so a constant, throbbing pain remained with me from the second I opened my eyes.
I could feel him there, in faint whispers, beyond it.
By then, I knew exactly what Balidor had done. He’d tested the bond, and it held. In fact, his little “test” nearly killed me.
It only occurred to me afterwards that I’d known that it would.
Gripping the thick mattress, then the wooden wall behind me, I tried to pull myself up to a sitting position. My arms felt as weak and as tentative as a child’s. The painted wooden walls on four sides confused me, along with the feather mattress that sank under my hands. The bed’s walls seemed to sit in a larger space, but I felt like I’d been squirreled away inside a cubbyhole that felt too much like the tank right then. Surround
ed by a heavy, ornately-carved wooden frame and thick curtains, the bed felt more like the inside of one of those forts I used to make with Jon when we were kids, with couch cushions and blankets. The walls beyond the wooden box felt very far away.
Briefly, I felt trapped. My breath grew short...
Revik surrounded me within seconds, coiling into my light...at least as much as the collar would allow.
Pain arced through me as he tried to understand where I was, what had happened to make me afraid. I found myself reassuring him that no one was hurting me, or shooting me in the chest.
He relaxed slightly. I still felt him trying to determine where I was.
I looked around, unsure myself. As I did, I felt myself calming down, and him along with me...although slower, more warily.
It crossed my mind that the last time I remembered being awake, I’d been on a train. Or it felt like a train anyway...rhythmic thrumming under my body as it clicked and clacked at each connecting rail.
I remembered Jon had been there, and Cass, although for less of the time. Balidor had been there, too. I couldn’t look at him for long though, even inside my mind, not without feeling Revik’s rage rise to a near heat behind my eyes.
I’d never felt him angry like that before...never.
I realized at least part of the reason lay in the fear I felt around his light. I was vulnerable from his perspective, still in the camp of the enemy.
I avoided thinking about Balidor after that.
I pushed open the drapes and found myself facing a room that bewildered me somewhat, and also filled me with awe. I gripped the thick curtain in one bony hand, letting Revik see pieces of the same view through me.
Cavernously large, the room was so richly furnished I felt like I’d been locked inside an ancient temple. Wooden walls formed the boundaries of a wide open space, stretching around the fort-like bed and covered with more of those detailed carvings. One of those walls had been cut with a circular door, and stood directly across from where I lay. In the light from the parted curtains, I saw silk sheets wrapped around my legs, which still looked way too thin, even to me. The long, round pillows looked distinctly Asian, especially with the elaborate silk covers and tassels. I leaned on square pillows too, also covered in embroidered silk.
Outside the bed, swords hung on one wall above a shrine with incense burning. Delicately painted vases and silk paintings lined the walls on either side.
It all looked very, very Chinese, I realized. Like Ancient China, Chinese.
When I peered up, a stained and carved wooden ceiling met my eyes, mainly consisting of dark, reddish-tinted wood cut and placed in square segments, each painted with a similar pattern, almost like wooden tiles. Lanterns hung down with silk tassels, tiered so that they looked like bird cages, or silk kites. Thick drapes stood corded on either side of the circular door. Jade figurines and ivory carvings decorated low, lacquered tables inlaid with abalone and different-colored stones. I saw a game board as well, placed on one of those delicate tables between two wooden chairs.
The doorway itself, of a darker wood than the red of the ceiling, had been carved intricately so that its patterns jutted out into the room. The carvings made it look as if the branches of two trees intertwined in the door’s center arch.
Overall, the whole setting looked like something from a kung fu movie. I half expected a fight to break out in the middle of the room, or someone to jump down from the ceiling to steal a sacred scroll.
Or maybe I’d just watched way, way too many kung fu movies with Jon, staying up late in his apartment in San Francisco.
The memory made my chest hurt briefly.
I felt amusement on Revik, though.
He tried to say something to me, but I couldn’t quite get it through the collar. I was still straining to hear him when a voice jerked me out of my attempt.
“You might want to take care with that, Alyson,” it said.
I looked up, a little thrown to see Vash standing there. I admit I felt relief looking at him, too.
Then I noticed he wasn’t alone.
A woman stood beside him. The first thing I noticed about her, apart from her delicate, almost porcelain beauty, was her eyes. Bright yellow and sharp as the sun, they contained vertical pupils, like a cat’s. They stared at me unapologetically, holding an overt curiosity, tinged with the faintest flavor of aggression. She wore an embroidered Chinese dress of deep, indigo blue, and a black sash. Her face was striking, hard to look away from.
She asked Vash something in what sounded like Mandarin. Not like I spoke Mandarin. Or could tell it from a half-dozen other languages, for that matter.
I gave Vash a questioning look.
“Yes,” Vash said to the woman. He spoke Prexci, smiling at me a little. “Yes, this is indeed her. Alyson the Bridge.”
The woman’s mouth quirked.
I wasn’t sure how to take that expression.
“Is she as young as she looks?” the strange woman said, switching to heavily-accented Prexci. “She looks very young...her light, I mean...” she clarified, still fixing me with that narrow stare. “She looks only recently awakened. Untrained...”
Frowning, and suddenly reminded of Kat’s initial reaction to me in Seattle, I found myself taking in the woman in more detail.
She stood at probably six-two. Not unheard-of for female seers, but still fairly formidable. Her black hair had been done up in what looked like a traditional Chinese design, with a high bun fixed in place by a jeweled comb that left long pieces hanging down on either side of a face with dramatic cheek bones. The black sash cinching her silk dress showed a narrow waist between long, butterfly sleeves that made her look, yet again, like someone out of a Kung Fu movie.
She didn’t look Chinese, though, not exactly. She did look like she belonged there, however. The clothing and the hair appeared so natural on her, I could only assume she’d adopted the style as her own, and quite some time ago.
Maybe she was the assassin.
Vash smiled a little wider. “This is Voi-pai, Alyson. She is the head of the Lao Hu...a sort of Adhipan-like group based out of China.”
“The Tiger People,” I muttered.
I struggled to sit up more, interested in spite of myself.
I remembered hearing about the Tiger People from Balidor’s debriefings, way back when Terian had been starting wars between the Americans and the Chinese, and a few hundred thousand seers still lived in Seertown. To counter some of the problems Terian had started, I’d been trying to strengthen ties with some of the Chinese seers, who tended to be standoffish with the rest of the seer community. At the time, I’d wanted to approach them for a possible alliance.
Terian’s one and only human body, Wellington, had been President of the United States at the time, and seemed hell-bent on starting war between the two most heavily-armed human nations. He’d come pretty close to succeeding, too.
I’d gone to the front lines almost daily for a few months before Revik got back and everything went down in Seertown and with the boy, and with me getting kidnapped by Terian. A few thousand got killed in border skirmishes before the incident in D.C., but luckily, all of the war-mongering with China died down when the Speaker of the House took over, since neither the President nor the Vice President survived the raid on D.C.
I was reasonably certain the woman in charge of the United States now wasn’t affiliated with Terian’s old group...or even a seer...but I couldn’t be absolutely certain. In any case, President Brooks had deescalated the war with China within weeks of stepping into office.
Not like she had much choice. She had her hands full with the rampant paranoia about seers and extremist human and seer terrorism at home. Hell, half the country had been rioting for those first few months. If they’d tried to fight China, too, the government might have imploded.
So far, anyway, I liked Brooks. She seemed pretty level-headed.
The Chinese humans had a different relationship to seers than the res
t of the world. Seers, in one form or another, had been incorporated into Chinese mythology for millennia...although they hadn’t always called them that, of course.
Therefore, following official first contact between seers and humans at the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese reacted differently than the other human nations. From the very start, they adopted seers in almost a proprietary fashion, as a kind of cultural mascot. A select group of seers from the ranks of monks in the Pamir were invited directly into the royal family of the Chinese Emperor at the time, and brought to live in the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Since the Chinese Royal Family requested this of the seer’s Council of Seven formally and only accepted volunteers, the arrangement was never viewed negatively by the seers themselves. If anything, it had been seen as more of a sociological experiment of sorts...even an honor.
The children of those early monks had become the Lao Hu, or Tiger People.
Now, a little more than a century later, the Lao Hu were considered some of the most elite infiltrators in the world.
A number of those same monks supposedly peopled a monastery in Beijing as well, but the majority of the second generation had opted to be trained to aid their human patrons. By then, seeing the carnage and mistreatment of their seer families by the other human societies of the world, they had become intensely loyal to their sponsors among the Chinese humans.
Mythology blended on the two sides.
As the Chinese incorporated elements of the Third Myth of the seers into their own national religions, so the seers themselves grew to believe that they were warrior sages who would lead the worthy among the Chinese to the next evolutionary level.
Ancestor worship played a part in both religions as well. In the Chinese version of the myth, the Lao Hu had been incorporated into the halls of the most ancient of the Chinese families, thus entwining their futures even further.
Because they viewed the approach of most humans to seers as barbaric, at best, the Chinese continued to allow their elite, the Lao Hu, to live within the Forbidden City’s walls...as a form of mutual protection.
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