by Diane Duane
McCoy scowled. “Bloody mnhei’sahe again. Not even the implant does anything about that word.”
Ael smiled. “Only people can do anything about it. And the day you understand it,” she said, “that day our wars are done. Meantime…we must still translate for others. By actions, not words. I have an Empire to rehabilitate. You have your own worlds to save, I shouldn’t wonder.”
He looked at her and saw no mockery. He had none for her either. “All of them,” he said.
She stood up and stretched. “A heroic goal, befitting a hero. But even heroes must start small. And for me, that means a ship to run. For you, a liter of ale to sleep off. Drink less next time…but dream well now. We’re going home.”
“Not to yours.”
“Someday,” she said from outside the door.
Arrhae i-Khellian t’Llhweiir stood in the dark silence of the garden and looked up at the aurora curtain hanging in the night sky. It was fading now—which was to say that it was no longer bright enough to be seen during daylight hours—but it still rippled and crackled wonderfully as it ran through its random color-shifts. Arrhae watched as the blue-green background glow became suffused with an astonishing chrome yellow shot with incandescent red, and the whole fragile structure seemed to billow like a drapery of finest silk. Scores of cameras had been pointed skyward and hundreds upon hundreds of recreational tapes had been made, regardless of what had been the cause of the phenomenon.
The public channels had claimed that brave and noble Fleet warships had brought the “pirate” vessel to battle just beyond ch’Rihan’s atmosphere, demonstrating with many and various models, diagrams, and computer-simulated animations the manner in which it had been englobed and blown apart as it tried frantically to flee from the engagement….
However, Senators knew differently.
It was probably unheard of in the long history of the Rihannsu for any House, no matter how noble, to be served both willingly and well by a hru’hfe with her own entirely independent House-name, much less one who held a seat in the Senate Chambers, though that was a nominal matter for the present, since the actual building was still closed for extensive reconstruction and, until another had been built, Arrhae could have held her assigned seat—or its fragments—in her two cupped hands.
The image of what that august body would have said and done had they known the true provenance of their latest member was one over which Arrhae preferred to draw a veil….
Once the dust had settled and various outraged persons had been mollified by the execution, suicide, or banishment of various others, Arrhae had found herself a hero. And after her collarbone had been set, regenerated, and, most important, had stopped hurting, she began to enjoy herself. It was rare behavior nowadays, but in the past the elevation of a trusted servant to a position of nobility had been a common reward for services beyond that normally expected. In her case, someone had spent a long time rummaging through the records to find sufficient authority for her promotion to the Senate.
Then there had been the interview with Commander t’Radaik’s replacement, which had become a sort of drunken picnic in the garden after the intelligence officer had arrived at House Khellian with enough food and alcohol for the entire household and had begged time off for everyone. Arrhae remembered that quite fondly, because the man had been very handsome—and, more to the point, had gone away entirely satisfied that nobody here had known anything about the shocking debacle at the last espionage trial but one.
Khre’Riov or not, intelligence or not, he hadn’t found it easy to get by H’daen tr’Khellian, who had promoted himself to honorary uncle, father figure, and, for all Arrhae knew, representative agent. The reprehensible behavior of the late Subcommander tr’Annhwi had soured him against his old practice of cultivating any and all who seemed likely to be of use; and with a Senator working under his own roof, he no longer needed such doubtful patronage anyway.
When that Senator was also a hero who had the good fortune to be a beautiful young woman and unmarried besides, what H’daen was finding he did need was a stick to beat the suitors away from his front door….
She looked up at the sky, at the aurora and at the stars beyond…. If they’ll listen…tell them that the rest of the family is waiting…. “They’re not ready to listen to me, Bones,” Arrhae said softly to the night and the darkness. “Not just yet. But they’ll be ready sooner than they think, and when they are, I’ll be ready too. I…or my children.”
She smiled at the notion, and because she had dared to say it aloud even to herself; then she turned from the stars and walked back into her House: her home.
PART THREE
Swordhunt
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN TWO VOLUMES AS SWORDHUNTAND HONOR BLADE)
For Wilma, T.R. and Sara,
who saw all this begin
in the House of the Dangerously Single Women
…and for Wes, Lee, Gene and Peter,
who left us all much less Single
(though no less Dangerous)
Prologue
The shadows of Eilhaunn’s little yellow sun Ahadi were slanting low, now, over the pale green fields all around the flitter port, as the work crews ran the harvesting machinery up and down the newly cut rows to bind the reeds into the big circular bales that Hwiamna’s family favored. Hwiamna i-Del t’Ehweia stood there off at the margin of the field, watching the two machines that her son and daughter were driving, and she sighed. They were racing again. They loved to race, each challenging the other every morning to do the work better, faster; and whichever one was the victor, on a given day, chaffed the other mercilessly about it until the next daymeal, when there might be another victor, or the same one. Hwiamna routinely prayed to the Elements that the victories should alternate; otherwise home life became rather strained.
Hwiamna smiled, took off her sun hat, and wiped her brow, while taking a moment to beat some accumulated windblown reed-seed off the hat’s thin felt, against her long breeches. Since the twins were born, Kul clutching at Niysa’s heel, this kind of thing had been going on; and it would doubtless go on well past the end of the year, when their acceptances came through. Naturally as soon as they were both old enough, they had both applied to the Colleges of the Great Art on ch’Rihan; there being no higher possible goal, to their way of thinking, for anyone born on a colony world so far from the heart of the Empire, with so little else to recommend it. Hwiamna was not sure about their assessment—her foremothers on one side of the family had willingly come here three generations ago from the crowded city life of Theijhoi on ch’Havran—and once they had paid off their relocation loan, won their land grant, and tamed the earth to the bearing of regular crops of stolreed, they had found life good here. But farm life, and even the prospect of managing the family flitter port, was not good enough for the new generation. Their eyes were on the stars—which should possibly have been expected, for Hwiamna’s father was of Ship-Clan blood, native to Eilhaunn for two generations—where Hwiamna’s eyes were on the ground. She had no doubt whatever that both of the twins would be accepted. Then this rivalry would go on as always, but within the structure of the colleges, and later on, with appointments to Grand Fleet. Perhaps they would go further, into diplomatic service or the uppermost reaches of Fleet. Knowing her children, Hwiamna had little doubt of that, either. But right now all she could wish was that they would fail to destroy the farm machinery, which had to last for at least a couple of seasons more before it went back to the cooperative for recycling or replacement.
She put her hat back on and walked back over to what she had been inspecting—the piles of firewood carefully stacked up in hand-built racks twenty rai from the edges of the flitter port’s landing aprons. Hwiamna knew, for she had seen pictures of them, that on the Hearthworlds the ports did not have such, but the images always looked bare to her, and somehow underutilized, as if an opportunity was being missed. Here, out among the Edgeworlds, resources could be scarce enough that no possible energy
source could afford to be ignored. The resinous dense wood of ealy, a tree native to Eilhaunn, burnt hot and long; it was excellent for controlled combustion in power stations, and also for the small hearthfires of the householders in the area. They all helped to cut it—thus keeping the surrounds of the landing aprons clear—and they all helped to stack it in the racks; and each winter season, when the first snows began, all the householders gathered to take away bundles of the dried, cured wood, carefully divided according to how much time they had spent in the work of coppicing and stacking. The trouble is, Hwiamna thought, looking with some resignation at the racks, that time alone should not be the only criterion by which we judge the division….
The comm button clipped to her pocket squeaked. “Mother?”
She reached in and touched it. “Kul dear,” Hwiamna said, “pray, don’t pass so close to your brother in the middle of the rows. You’re going to make life harder for whoever has to pick up the bales.”
“That will be him,” Kul said, cheerful, “and it’s right that life should be harder for him, if I have anything to do with it. But, Mother, we’re almost done now; is there anything else needs doing out here before lastmeal?”
“I don’t think so, daughter,” Hwiamna said. “Though I may have some words for the two of you about the way this wood’s been stacked. Your supervision last cutting-day leaves a little to be desired, I think.” She turned away from the rack she had been regarding critically.
“Mother,” Niysa said, “that wasn’t her fault; it was the Droalls. Those people couldn’t be troubled to cut their own wood straight, leave alone anyone else’s. And they can’t be made to do it, either, stand over them how you like. I think you should cut them out of the coppicing rotations in future; they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
Hwiamna sighed, amused. As usual, there was no upbraiding one of the twins for anything whatsoever without the other coming straight in to his or her defense. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said; though privately Hwiamna was inclined to agree with her son. “Get yourselves finished, get yourselves in…”
“Should I come fetch you, Mother?”
“No, bhun, you go on ahead; the walk will do me good….”
She watched one of the machines half an irai away finish its row; then both machines made for the unplanted strip at the edge of the field and began racing down it over the slight rise in the ground there and back toward the apron, where their house was built a little ways back from the old road leading to the two low prefabricated cast-stone buildings which the government had installed as the flitter port’s administrative center.
Hwiamna gave the wood racks one last look and then began walking back around the edge of the apron toward the house. It had been a good year for the reed, for once; a welcome change from last year, when the growing season had been blighted by endless wet weather and what seemed equally endless uncertainty over what was going on in their region of space. They were a long way out in the Empire. That was one of the reasons it had been so easy for the family to move out all this way, in her grandfather’s time. New uncrowded worlds had been as plentiful as birds in the sky, it had seemed then, and the government had been easygoing about relocation finance and support for new colonists. Now, though, people were beginning to realize what the real price for such worlds might be. The government was not so forthcoming with aid anymore, a stance which was starting to cause complaints as the inhabitants of worlds like Eilhaunn began to realize that interplanetary trade and defense were matters they were increasingly expected to manage themselves—though there was notably no talk whatever of excusing them from taxes. It all made for nerve-racking times, as last year, when there had been talk of the government beginning a program of granting the farther-flung outworlds “autonomy”—code, Hwiamna strongly suspected, for leaving them completely to their own devices.
But that kind of talk seemed to have quieted down since, much to Hwiamna’s relief. And the weather had settled itself, too. This last season had been nothing but the dry fair weather that was normal for north-continent Eilhaunn-uwe this time of year, and there would be no lack of grain—a relief, for reed was Eilhaunn’s great staple, of all the plant foodstuffs the one that grew most readily here. But as usual, the growing was not the end of the business: nothing was guaranteed until the grain was out of the pod and into dry storage.
Hwiamna glanced up one more time as she ambled across the landing apron—the habitual gesture this time of year. No one wanted to see cloud moving in when the reed was being cut, since it needed at least a day on the ground in the sun before it could be threshed—otherwise the enzymes in the seed pods would not activate to let the grain loose. Hwiamna scanned the turquoise sky, and breathed out. No cloud.
Yet she squinted into the brightness for a little longer, her curiosity aroused. High up there, very high up, were some thin pale lines of white…
Getting less pale, more white.
Not cloud. Contrails.
Hwiamna looked at them and swallowed. The contrails were growing steadily broader toward their arrowy approaching ends. Dropping into atmosphere…
Her heart went cold in her side. The children, she thought, where are the children? For everyone knew what contrails like those meant. The news services had been full of the pictures of them, in the last few months.
Hwiamna started running across the apron. As she ran she missed her footing once, and under her the ground shuddered, faintly at first, then harder. O Elements, Hwiamna thought as she ran, no, not here, why here?!
And then there was no more time for questions, for over the hills at the edge of the valley came a terrible rumbling, and Hwiamna saw the cruisers come up low and fast over the hills, five of them, firing as they came. She knew the shapes all too well, those long bodies and down-thrust wings and nacelles, like oiswuh diving, their long necks thrust forward, the terrible claws out. They too had been in the news services…but far away, at what had seemed at the time like a safe distance.
The ships came screaming down and over, and the ground all around the port shuddered as the phaser bolts and photon torpedoes slammed into the fields. Great blooming black-shot clouds of orange fire came boiling up from the impact sites as dirt and rocks shot out from them in all directions, and the biggest one of all from the torpedo that the foremost ship fired into the airport buildings.
Charred and burning wreckage flew, and Hwiamna flung herself down on the shaking ground, the air knocked out of her lungs by the force of the explosion. When she struggled up to her knees again, she peered desperately through the smoke and fire to try to make out what was happening. Wind whipped up by the passage of the second and third Klingon cruisers blasted across the apron, pushing the smoke aside for long enough that Hwiamna could see someone moving out on the edge of the flitter port, well away from the buildings—Kul, running for one of the flitters.
“Kul!” Hwiamna screamed. Then she slapped at the comm button. “Kul! Daughter, no—!”
But her daughter would not listen to her in this, as in most else. She had already slapped the side of the flitter, and the canopy was levering itself up, and Kul was climbing in—
That was when the phaser blast from the next cruiser hit it. Hwiamna knelt there frozen as shreds of glittering and burning metal and flesh blasted out from the site. Billowing smoke then veiled the spot where the flitter had stood, but not before Hwiamna had seen too much of what preceded the smoke. Her hands clenched together. There was nothing she could do. “Kul…” she whispered.
Motion from elsewhere on the apron distracted Hwiamna. The other flitter, rising, its engines screaming. “Niysa,” she whispered. She would not call him now. If she did, he might be distracted. “Fly, my son, fly for it, get away—!”
It was the last thing on his mind, for he had seen them kill his sister. The flitter was in the air now, and came wrenching around in a high-grav turn that should have pushed the blood right out of his brains; but Niysa was a pilot born, with neirrh in h
is blood, as his instructor had said, and he flew like one of those deadly little birds, racing after the closest of the Klingon cruisers. He’s mad, Hwiamna thought in anguish, it hasn’t enough weaponry to do anything at all.
But her Niysa did not care, and flung his craft at the cruiser, firing its pitiful little phasers. “No,” Hwiamna whimpered, for he was actually gaining on the cruiser as it plunged over. Niysa fired, fired again, poured on thrust—
Almost absently the phaser bolt lanced out from the back of the Klingon vessel and touched his ship. It bloomed into fire, vanished in smoke. Lazily the cruiser arced around; and the cloud behind it began to rain splinters and fragments of metal, and lumps of scorched burnt stuff.
Hwiamna screamed then, wordlessly, a cry of total horror and grief. The world, all her world, was over, finished, destroyed. Her face streaked with tears of rage and loss, Hwiamna stared up into the turquoise sky, now hazed and blackened by the smoke of burning reed, and raised her clenched fists to the heavens, and screamed to the pitiless Elements, “Why?!”
Her only answer was the disruptor bolt that killed her.
Chapter One
Deep in the longest night, in a ship passing through the empty space thirteen light-years from 33 Trianguli, a Rihannsu woman sat in a hard-cushioned chair behind a desk and looked out through a small viewport at the stars, waiting.
Her surroundings were blessedly familiar; her own small cabin, in her own ship. It was everything outside, now, which was strange to her—the spaces in which she was a barely tolerated guest, the stars that filled them, either unheeding of her presence or subtly inimical to it….
She raised her eyebrows briefly at her own fancy. I grow whimsical, she thought, and her gaze slid sideways from the surface of her tidy desk to the chair which now sat by itself against the far wall. But perhaps, having you around, there is reason.
