From Ruins

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  One of Qora's hands smoothed along the bottom of her arm, jarring her out of her ugly reverie. She knew she was trembling by the contrast of his steady palm, but he didn't say anything about it. Or rather he did, but not what she was expecting. "Yes. We put all our feeling into the words, through our bodies. The bad and the good, the cruel and the sweet. You will be good at this, with practice. You will speak."

  "I'm afraid I'm going to fall apart," Sediryl said, and it had been nothing she'd planned to confess and yet saying it didn't feel perilous. They were talking about art. Artists had doubts all the time.

  "Put that feeling into your body, and through your body into the world. When you speak this way, you transform that speech into beauty." He finished adjusting her arms and met her eyes. "Training will be difficult. You will strengthen your body, and marry it to your will and your emotions. You will have to concentrate. But to speak, you cannot wall away your ambivalence, your grief, your hope. They must go through your body and into the world."

  She swallowed, managed a smile. "So this is how you do the whole ‘mystic priest' thing."

  He tapped her nose with a finger. "This is how I help you help us stay alive. I am a pragmatist as well as a teacher."

  "And a sanitary engineer?" she said.

  Qora grinned. "We have long lives. One job would be boring."

  Sediryl surprised herself by laughing, and if it was a breathless laugh on the border of crying, at least it was a laugh.

  "Good. Now, show me ‘help'. Ah, Firedancing God, but you certainly need it. What was that? Surely your thighs are stronger than that."

  Vasiht'h had kept uglier vigils than the one he sat at the side of the Chatcaavan Queen. He found that unexpectedly comforting, and wondered what his past-self would think if he divulged that he would one day be grateful for the deathwatches at the hospital in Heliocentrus. Vasiht'h thought of all the many ways he was different from past-Vasiht'h and shook his head. What would he be like when he got out of this? Because he had to believe he would. Jahir had promised they wouldn't die apart, so he was at least safe until they met again.

  Granted, that didn't guarantee that they wouldn't die together at that point, but one step at a time had gotten many of his clients through their worst situations. He could do worse than to take his own advice.

  When Qora followed Sediryl into the bedchamber, he thought about objecting. But he wondered, watching the Faulfenzair vanish behind the closed door. Why had Aksivaht'h sent them a fire god's priest, if not to deal with a mind-mage's fire talent? That was too much coincidence for anyone to believe, surely. Except what could any of them possibly do? He sighed, resigned, and stroked the Queen's hand. "I guess we follow your example, and endure."

  Qora exited the bedchamber almost half an hour after entering it. "She'll sleep now."

  "Good," Vasiht'h said. "I wasn't sure she'd be able to."

  The Faulfenzair padded to the couch and leaned over the Queen, studying her face. They were close enough to touch, so Vasiht'h tapped on his aura, asking permission, sending a query. /I have begun her education,/ Qora said.

  /In the use of her talents?/ Vasiht'h asked, perplexed. /She accepts that she has one?/

  Qora slid to the floor, putting his back to the couch. /Absolutely not. There is no road out of her that takes a direct path. We will have to meander our way to mastery./

  /Not really surprising,/ Vasiht'h said. /Their culture reviles the mind talents even when they're innocent. ‘Burn people to death by wishing them dead' would be hard even for my people, who revere mind-mages. How are you going about training her?/

  /I am teaching her the dance,/ Qora said. /It requires discipline, and for her body and mind to speak with one voice. Enough of that, and she may make the connections herself./

  Vasiht'h frowned, trying to imagine it. /That's... a really nebulous approach./

  /You think anything else will serve?/ Qora let his head loll back and eyed Vasiht'h with a crooked smile. "A vigil for the sick and a vigil for the living. We have the hard tasks."

  "Sometimes I wonder," Vasiht'h said. "I can't sleep on a chair or couch, so I thought I'd stay here. You can have the furniture."

  "You are all that is kindness," Qora said, rising with a grunt. "It has been a long day."

  "I can't imagine they'll get shorter."

  "Wake me if there is need."

  "All right," Vasiht'h said, and wondered when he'd started finding Qora comfortable. The Faulfenzair was definitely not a comfortable person, and yet... Vasiht'h knew implicitly he could trust him, so that made all the challenging comments and the strange worldview bearable. Maybe all priests had to be difficult friends, since they had to live as outsiders to a community to serve it. Didn't they? What were Faulfenzair priests like? Or was he even a priest? A ‘seer', he'd said, but what was that? Something like what Jahir did, with sensing the Pattern in time and space?

  How had he fallen into all this?

  Vasiht'h smiled a little. Probably because the Goddess knew with all these people wandering with their heads in the clouds, no one would get fed or put to bed or chivvied into taking care of themselves without someone like him around. He scavenged enough pillows to make himself a nest beside the Queen's couch, checked on Qora, who was already asleep on one of the chairs facing them, and settled down.

  He slept, but lightly, too aware of the unfamiliar sounds of a ship underway. His position at the base of a higher couch reminded him enough of his arrangements at home to make him miss Jahir painfully. It didn't surprise him when he woke in the middle of the night.

  It also didn't surprise him to see the eyeshine in the dark. The light from the windows just barely traced the outside edge of Crispin's head and shoulder before drowning in his uncanny uniform.

  The D-per was in their room, watching them sleep, and Vasiht'h had expected him to do something like it. The only thing he wasn't certain of was whether Crispin had been there a while, or if he'd arrived when he'd noticed Vasiht'h stirring.

  "Your heart rate is too steady," Crispin said. "You should be scared."

  Vasiht'h shifted his haunches into a more comfortable position and waited.

  "Don't ignore me."

  Vasiht'h said, "I am honoring your request not to talk to you."

  "Which you just broke."

  "You asked me not to ignore you," Vasiht'h said. "I'm pretty sure that means you want a response. If I'm wrong, I'll be quiet."

  Crispin gave no tells Vasiht'h recognized from years of therapy. His ears remained erect, unnaturally still. If he was breathing, it was impossible to tell, and what did a D-per need to breathe for, anyway? Vasiht'h couldn't see him well enough to tell if he was frowning. "I don't want to talk to you."

  "I know," Vasiht'h said. "You want to frighten me so I won't want to."

  Another pause. "That makes no sense. Explain it to me."

  "You're afraid if you talk to me, it'll hurt. So you are trying to scare me so that I won't want to say anything around you, and make you think about things that upset you."

  "Ridiculous," Crispin said. "If I didn't want to talk to you, you'd be dead."

  The threat should have terrified him; Vasiht'h knew Crispin meant it. But the tranquility that held him instead felt... unending. He had spent years honing his skills, helping people. This was one arena in which he trusted himself implicitly. And to heal was divine work, and he knew She was cupping him in Her hands. "Since you want to talk, then, what would you like to talk about?"

  "I don't want to talk to you!" Crispin paused again. "But I'm not scared of you either."

  "It's all right to be scared," Vasiht'h said.

  Crispin scoffed. "What do I have to be frightened of? No one can hurt me."

  "But someone did," Vasiht'h said. "Even I can tell that."

  "Ridiculous." Crispin stood. "You should watch yourself. When you irritate me enough, I'll arrange an accident for you."

  "Would you?" Vasiht'h asked. "Why do that, if you can just kill me outright?"


  Those hesitations... those were Crispin's tells. What created them? Some fight between his original personality and the corrupted one that ruled him now? "I like to keep people guessing. It makes them paranoid, and paranoid people are easier to control."

  "Paranoid people are unpredictable," Vasiht'h said. "Friends, though. Friends you can count on."

  "Anyone who buys into that lie deserves what he gets," Crispin said. "I can just leave you alive. You'll make your own torture, far worse than anything I could do to you."

  "Unless you became my friend," Vasiht'h said. "Then you could inflict this torture on me yourself."

  "I'm no one's friend," Crispin said.

  "Not even your own?"

  "Especially not mine," the D-per said, his tone mocking.

  "I suppose you're a very bad friend," Vasiht'h said.

  "The worst."

  Vasiht'h nodded. "Obviously you should be my friend, then, so you can make me suffer."

  Crispin laughed softly. "Oh yes. You want to talk me into that because you think you can save me, don't you? You think I don't see through you. But you can't save me. And my friendship would doom you."

  "Sounds like a win-win situation for you?"

  Crispin said, "I don't need you."

  "No," Vasiht'h said. "I know that. But everyone needs somebody."

  "That's where you're wrong," Crispin said, and vanished.

  Vasiht'h waited for him to return, not expecting it but wanting Crispin to see him doing it. Then he fluffed up the pillow he'd been using for his torso and sank into it. That had been more engagement than he'd anticipated out of the D-per, and definitely enough for a first session. He didn't have high hopes that he'd be able to heal Crispin; a case this extreme would have been challenging in a person with a physical body he could have examined for additional organic causes, or affected with exercise, scents, touch, sleep, even selective hospitalization. Vasiht'h had no idea how a D-per managed to make himself this torn up inside... did the codebase change? Had he overwritten his own personality?

  How useful it would have been to have Maia to ask!

  All he could do was keep on, and hope something would help. In the end, that was all any of them could do. Closing his eyes, he thought wistfully of his partner, and slept.

  CHAPTER SIX

  System defense was an endeavor best left to fighting males, and thus was conducted by males Inside. They operated the satellites, the stations in orbit, the platforms at the system limit; they oversaw security for space mining operations, incoming and outgoing traffic, and the shell of space around the throneworld. The newest Emperor's connections with the Navy had made those policing the imperial solar system factious, but that was hardly surprising. External threats were polarizing forces, which is why, the Surgeon thought, one should be careful when issuing them. His situation being a case in point.

  The males Inside were too insular to listen to a foreign Outsider. But any hierarchy of males Inside resulted in injuries that required tending, and the education of the males who treated them was conducted in cohorts... cohorts which often kept contact with another long after they departed the halls of education.

  Those Outside talked to one another. Which was yet another example of why the Usurper was an incogitant ruler.

  The male assistant on the other end of his call to the system's major space station announced, "The Head Surgeon," before vanishing for Kuuvel, whose face hadn't changed much with age or his exalted status as Head Surgeon to the males who oversaw system security in the throneworld. Nor had his personality undergone any transformation, either, because Kuuvel took one look at the Surgeon and barked a laugh. "Well, if it isn't the Valedictorian! And as sour-faced as ever. Poor drake. Found a sponge in someone's chest cavity lately?"

  The Surgeon sighed. There was a reason he persisted in thinking of Kuuvel by his name rather than his title. He suspected his peer would never cease to be that madcap youth. "You know I never close anymore without triple-checking for sponges?"

  The other drake spread his hands. "You see? I saved all your patients from the inconvenience of having to go back under the knife! Think of all the grief you avoided! Particularly given your clientele. I can't imagine courtiers being forgiving of mistakes. How is your position working out for you, by the way? And dare I ask the reason for your call?" He put his cheek in his palm and grinned. "Need a prank?"

  "Actually... yes. Of a kind that will likewise save all our future patients from a great deal of grief."

  Kuuvel frowned. "This sounds serious."

  "I'm afraid it is more serious than you will find comfortable," the Surgeon said, with a surge of affection for the irredeemably jocular male he'd survived school and a painful residency with. People underestimated Kuuvel, assuming his levity evidence of a frivolous nature. They both knew better. Laughter was sometimes the only response to an insane world. "But it's important. I need your help."

  The male sighed dramatically. "I knew our association would get me in trouble one day."

  "Our association got me in trouble faster," the Surgeon replied dryly.

  "Payback," Kuuvel said, mournfully. "My day has come. All right, then." He pointed between his eyes. "Give it to me right here. So I won't remember it tomorrow."

  There was no waiting for the quips to stop because the male would make jokes to his pyre. The Surgeon leaned forward and said, "Let me tell you a story."

  The Surgeon was mulling the conversation he'd just completed with Kuuvel when Triage popped his head in and said, "Did you ask for a servant?"

  "Send him in."

  Tsonet slid past and faced him. "The alien is annoying. Can't we sedate him?"

  "Sedate him?" the Surgeon asked. "Why, is he agitated?"

  "No, he's just determined to fly face-first into a wall." Tsonet perched on the stool in front of the desk. "He won't stop bleeding. Or dying. I'm fairly sure he's trying to expire."

  The Surgeon thought of the impressions he'd received during the alien's mental contacts. The anger and determination that had clustered around the words of their talks like the song of temple bells. "I don't think he's trying, but I do think he might not be as careful of himself as we would like, given how useful he is. Did the liquid sutures work?"

  "They seem to be holding on his face. I can't make them work on the inside of his mouth."

  "You'll have to dry the area first." The Surgeon opened one of his cabinets and pulled out a package of chafing cloths. "Have him open his mouth and then hold one of these to the affected area until it sticks. Be quick when you do the application, or the flesh will acquire too much moisture from the rest of the cavity."

  Tsonet wrinkled his nose as he received the bandages. "It would help if the stupid Tyrant would stop gagging him. If he wanted to kill the alien, he could do it outright."

  "Doing things outright is only in the Usurper's character when he feels he can predict the results." The Surgeon folded his arms and leaned back, studying his unlikely partner in this endeavor and considering the news he'd learned from his talk with Kuuvel. "I hear we have guests. Have they arrived yet?"

  "You heard, did you," Tsonet said, brow ridges rising. "Interesting. I didn't think the newcomers had reason to need your services yet."

  "They haven't, and I doubt they will. The Usurper's huntcircle will not be interested in fighting with talon and wing."

  "Not when they have guns, no, which they've brought plenty of," Tsonet said. "They've been installed in some of the best suites-displacing several courtiers, I might add-and now they're skulking around the halls, where they've replaced palace security. The guards were seething before the Tyrant sent them packing. This group is only the first, too; we've heard it while arranging their rooms, their dinners, and their females. The Tyrant is reinforcing the throneworld."

  "Something frightened him," the Surgeon said. "Do we know what?"

  "Not yet," Tsonet said. "But we will. They think they can hide things from the people who clean their toilets. Tha
t will kill them in the end."

  The Surgeon tilted his head. "In some hypothetical new world order, Tsonet, who cleans toilets?"

  "In my hypothetical new world order, they clean themselves," Tsonet said. "Because some of the money used to build warships dedicated to killing aliens who die well enough without our help is diverted to more useful ends. Barring that..." He grinned without humor, all sharp teeth. "Someone who wants the job."

  "Does anyone want that job, I wonder," the Surgeon murmured.

  "If you pay anyone enough, they'll dance." Tsonet padded to the door. "I'll be back when I know more." He lifted the bandages. "And I'll inflict these on the alien. He seems to enjoy martyring himself. These will please him."

  The Surgeon stared after Tsonet, long after the male had gone. Did the aliens have self-cleaning toilets? What good were they if the money they diverted from warships into servantless bathrooms left them prey to the people who did spend all their gross imperial product on the tools of aggression?

  Something to ask. If he judged the alien well, such questions would distract him, and a distracted alien might live long enough to see the Usurper dead.

  The Usurper's aura jittered, sending nervous pulses through its dark fog in an erratic rhythm that mimicked his heart rate. Jahir found it corrosive, like being rubbed in sandpaper, but the discomfort occupied him far less than his curiosity. The Usurper was waiting for something, attempting to concentrate and failing. Not a call, but-

  One of the guards said, "Logistics-East, to see you, Exalted."

  "Send him in and then close the door." And the moment it did, the Usurper rose. "You're here, finally."

  "We came as quickly as we could. There are more behind us. We will be reinforced within the week."

  "You said you have news."

  This new male's aura exuded cold. If he was anxious, Jahir sensed no sign of it. Touching his mind brought him no evidence of mental disorder. Or any emotion at all. He reminded Jahir of a bird of prey, with their predatory gazes and alien minds.