The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Morrighon announced their arrival outside Anaris’s chambers, then motioned her inside, his face wooden and eyes averted. Suspicion laced with a kind of angry amusement shot through Vi’ya, spiking her own adrenals.

  She walked in, her boots silent on the thick hand-woven carpets with their dark, ancestral images.

  Anaris sat in his great carved chair behind the massive desk, his strong-boned face saturnine.

  “Sit.” He waved at a second carved chair. “Want some real coffee?”

  He moved to a heavy beaten-gold service on a sideboard, and poured steaming coffee into two ebony ceramic mugs. Into both cups he dashed a liberal quantity of some kind of liquor; a pungent scent followed that of the coffee. Both aromas were sucked away by the high-powered tianqi, leaving the room clean-smelling and cool.

  The mugs had been made for large hands. Anaris set one down near her, and she closed her fingers around it, aware how well the mug fit her palm.

  She took a sip of the scalding coffee, then said, “We have better on our ship.”

  He grinned.

  She said, “Will I have to get the station powered in order to get some variety in our diet?”

  “There is no variety here,” he said. “Pander to the senses? Perverted softness!”

  She hid her surprise at this blatant mocking of the myths of their ancestors. But then he spent all that time on the Mandala as hostage.

  “I wonder if that will last past one generation of easy access to planets with excellent farming,” she said. “My crew and I have plenty of stores on my ship. Why can’t we access them?”

  “A whim of my father’s.” Anaris gestured toward one wall with his cup. Today he was dressed informally, in shirt, trousers, and boots. “Start the station, and you can cook and eat Barrodagh if you want.”

  She took one more sip of the coffee, enjoying the fire of potent liquor burning its way down her throat.

  “Cook,” she said, “but not eat.”

  He smiled, watching her over the rim of his mug. She took a third sip. The liquor had already begun to move into her bloodstream, muting the psychic bombardment. But all her other senses remained heightened; she felt Anaris’s focus, stinging and laser-direct.

  “Sit,” he said again, dropping into his own chair.

  She lifted a shoulder, leaning one hand across the back of the empty chair. “I don’t plan to stay long.”

  He grinned. “Warning or threat?”

  “Statement,” she said.

  He leaned back. “Talk.” He gestured. “Drink.”

  “No better prey?”

  He lifted his brows. “Of course not.” So he thought it was a matter of when he’d choose to exert himself. “It’s as well,” he said, “that you plan to move soon.”

  His tone had altered slightly. He didn’t bother to diffuse his appraising gaze when she met his heavy-lidded gaze. Knowing the effect her own gaze had on people, she returned stare for stare.

  His amusement increased. “Barrodagh won’t tell you this, and I expect he won’t permit Lysanter to, either, but your last attempt initiated an autonomic power-up sequence.”

  A sharp pang of fear lanced through her temples, but she hid it. “I take it the station has not fully awakened.” As before, he did not react to her organic simile. But he doesn’t know how accurate it is. She put aside thoughts of the vastness asleep at the heart of the Suneater; now was no time for that.

  “No,” Anaris said. “Lysanter calculated maybe sixty days.”

  So my life is measured against the Avatar’s patience. She would consider that—and what it meant for the Panarchists’ plans—later. Now she shrugged. Anaris had told her this for a reason, which she interpreted as an opening attack. It was time for her own return thrust.

  She set down her cup. “Who knows that you carry the taint of the Chorei?”

  He gave no visible reaction, but she felt his emotional spectrum—so complicated, and in incalculable ways similar to Brandon Arkad’s—beat with sharp discord, then ripple through the complexity of reassessment. “How did you know that?” he asked.

  She shrugged again. “No answer?”

  “No one,” he said, “of any importance.”

  She placed her other hand on the back of the chair and gripped. “Threat?” She matched his tone exactly. “Or warning?”

  He laughed. “Sit,” he said a third time. He drank off his coffee, then rose to his feet. “Stay! For the first time in days I am not bored. Tell me, what will you do with this piece of news—assuming, of course, you can get anyone to believe it?”

  “I should think that the mere accusation would be enough for your father,” she said, remaining where she was.

  He walked to his console. “I am the only heir. He was a little too precipitate in killing the others, and the physicians could do nothing to reverse the radiation damage he took at Acheront. If I die, his line dies.” He stepped back to his chair and stood facing her. “I suspect he knows about the taint. But he will do nothing as long as he gets what he wants.”

  “A commendable effort in adaptation,” she said.

  “More?” He moved to the sideboard to pick up the pot. In his hands the beaten gold gleamed ocher, the color of a dying sun. He set it down again and touched a control on the side, causing the thermal insert inside the gold pot to heat the water again.

  “No.”

  “Question,” he said. “What did you think of my old friend Brandon Arkad?”

  She did not mistake the use of the word ‘friend’ for anything but irony. “Gratitude.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder, brows aslant.

  “For the opportunity to make the raid of a lifetime.”

  Anaris gave a short laugh and saluted her with his cup. “You caused considerable annoyance.”

  “Got a respectable haul as well,” she said.

  “Yes, and I expect my father will take that up with you once all this is over.”

  “If he can find me.”

  Anaris did not answer, and she knew that even if she did start the station, sooner or later Jerrode Eusabian would order her to be killed. Sooner, if he can.

  “Your opinion of Barrodagh?”

  “If I were that hag-ridden, I’d be a hopper addict. Or dead.”

  Anaris said, “And Morrighon?”

  She shrugged, indicating neutrality. “What happened to him?”

  “No idea.” Anaris’s tone indicated he didn’t care, either. “Lysanter?”

  “Lives for his work. Will it threaten his life if I admit that I like talking to him about the Urian artifacts?”

  “If you tell Barrodagh, it will probably be just one more datum in a long list.” He set his cup down.

  She heard the decisive chink of clay on metal. To her left, the gold coffee service glittered in the light of two candles that flared fitfully. To the right, the light was from a lamp set high; the heavy metal candelabra were unlit. The stillness of the shadows in the alcove leading to the bed indicated a path that had been anticipated, and seeing it, she laughed.

  Her gaze returned, and met Anaris’s black eyes. The intent he made no effort to hide was almost a physical blow and sent her blood drumming in her ears.

  For a moment they stood thus, face-to-face across the width of the room, neither moving.

  Then he flexed his wrist and his peshakh dropped from its hidden sheath into his hand. Reversing the blade with a quick gesture, he sent it speeding across the room to thud, vibrating, in the back of the wooden chair between Vi’ya’s hands.

  She did not move or blink.

  “Take it,” he said, his handsome mouth curving in a merciless grin.

  “Why?”

  “So I can have the fun of taking it back,” he said.

  o0o

  Hreem jerked upright with a curse as the door to his chamber puckered open noisily. He’d forgotten the time.

  The dour Dol’jharian ordinary yanked the covered tray off the gurney-like conveyance outside his d
oor and stalked in. As usual, she said nothing, merely gave a grunt as she dumped the tray down on the dyplast table. Hreem could hear the constituents of his dinner sloshing around messily under the tray cover, but he said nothing. She was as big as he was, and the first time, when he’d protested, she’d casually backhanded him into a wall.

  Doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s just different kinds of slop. Hreem would have spaced any slub that dared bring him food this bad.

  The woman straightened up, but instead of turning to leave without any acknowledgment of his presence, she fixed him with a brooding stare that Hreem could not interpret, save it spiked a curl of danger in his gut as her pupils dilated and her jaw worked rhythmically. Her expression reminded him of the weird Dol’jharian vid on Juvaszt’s shuttle. His hand twitched in an abortive grab at a nonexistent jac.

  Her eyes shifted to his betraying hand, then her lip lifted in a sneer and she left.

  Hreem whooshed out his breath in a weird mixture of relief and resentful anger. He knew that fighting and chatzing were pretty much the same thing to Dol’jharians, and now was their karooshna thing.

  He knew he’d just come close to rape. Strange, how unsettling he found that. He’d killed uncounted people up close and personal, but he’d never raped anyone. In all the sexual adventures he’d had, trying every arcane position, combination, and toy he had ever heard of, his partners had to want him to stick his nacker in whatever orifices they offered. And he liked his partners—male, female, or whatever gender they claimed—to be small, rounded, and frisky. That Dol’jharian brute was a combination of the worst aspects of male and female. Br-r-r-r.

  He pulled off his trousers, rolled over on his cot, and groped for the shestek’s case, seeking the anodyne of its white-light orgasms. There wasn’t anything else to do, anyway, and the food was no worse cold than hot.

  The shestek shifted in its nest as he opened the case, then its blind head lifted and it crawled out. Hreem lay back as it fitted itself to him, slowly drowning in the mounting pleasure as every sensation, even the scratchiness of the coarse blankets, was transmuted into irresistible fire.

  It had gotten more intense each time since he’d reached the Suneater. Now his vision started to pulse, making the ceiling above bulge in synchrony with his increasingly fervid movements.

  Terror cut like a cold gale through the shestek’s cloaking ecstasy as a pucker formed in the ceiling, but Hreem no longer had control of his muscles. Helpless in the grip of pleasure transformed into nauseating fear, Hreem tried to thrash off his cot, but could only watch as the ceiling blistered open in an elongated slash, with a reddish blob extruding from it. It had Norio’s face, the lips working silently.

  Hreem screamed. The head was followed by a human skeleton, and the entire horror fell on him in a tangle of bone and sinew. The unyielding hardness of the bones against his sensitized skin was horrible.

  The face nuzzled against his, the lips crawling for an agonizing moment across one of his cheekbones, but immediately it began to slump into formlessness. Its obscenely flaccid embrace as it sagged across his face triggered a rush of hot bile into the back of his nose, and he choked explosively. The pain released him, and he shoved the skeleton away.

  It flew across the room and clattered against one wall, slumping down as if sitting wearily. The head-blob molded itself against the Urian material and Norio’s face took shape again.

  The shestek released its grip on him, fell to the floor, and began thumping and jumping about the floor like a hooked eel. Puckers formed wherever it hit; the thick gray paint started to peel away, revealing small fistulas. Hreem dashed after it, vainly trying to grab it, until it dove into one of the fistulas and began thrashing to and fro. The Rifter grabbed it and tugged; it was stuck. Panicked, he pulled harder.

  Abruptly the middle of the Barcan construct thinned and stretched drastically. Hreem stumbled backward and the shestek snapped. The forepart disappeared into the fistula, leaving the no-less-active remainder twisting in Hreem’s hand. Roaring incoherent curses, he jammed the frantically writhing thing into its case, ignoring the strange, fruity belches coming from the skeleton’s head behind him.

  He finally got both ends in at once and slammed the case shut. It continued to jump about, one end or the other lifting off the floor, like the dancing gourds he’d seen on Memserrat. Satisfied it couldn’t escape, Hreem turned to the intruder.

  The apparition’s mouth worked, opened, and emitted a belch-like noise that sounded like his name.

  “Shut up!” he shouted as his terror mutated into welcome, ego-restoring rage. “You sound like a talking fart, you sneaking mindsnake! You’re dead, dead, dead, and you’re gonna stay that way. Dead! Dead! Dead!”

  Ramming his feet into his boots, Hreem punctuated the words by stomping on the bones, reveling in the crunching noise as they cracked and splintered underfoot. An agonized series of squeaks and farts from the head accompanied the destruction, each sounding less like his name as the head sagged into obscene senescence and the noises ceased.

  The head-blob melted away into the wall, which smoothed out, and the shestek stopped thumping about, but Hreem hardly noticed. He didn’t stop his assault until there was nothing but shards and powder on the deck,

  Then, dazed and breathless, he staggered back to the cot and sat down heavily, clutching the now-quiescent case on his lap and staring at the remains of his undead lover’s skeleton.

  o0o

  Esaran’s scalp prickled as the two Appeasers extinguished the harsh yellow light, leaving its scaffolding silhouetted against the eternal red gloom of this chamber of the Maw, far from the barracks and safety.

  But there was no safety, not for grays like herself and those around her, not for the sullen Tarkans, not for the Lords themselves. The karra had eaten all of them, swallowing them into this place far from Dol’jhar. All one could do was stave off the inevitable. It had even devoured three Chorei, and a fourth one—a Dol’jharian—was treading the same path.

  The two priests took up positions at the narrow end of the egg-shaped sac that held them all, their stiff, handmade vestments rustling over their gray coveralls.

  Esaran looked down at her cupped hands: on Dol’jhar they would have held a chip of stone furred with the prrakha-lichen, which let one see the karra. Not here. Instead she held an Ur-fruit. The spidery white veins that webbed its purple sheen almost seemed to form words; the compulsion to eat it was very strong, but she forbore, waiting.

  The Appeasers, male and female in the ancient polarity, commenced a whispery antiphonal chant, the woman’s clear soprano winding eerily around the man’s resonant bass. Galjhyr and Umm’jhalith had the finest voices in the Avatar’s barracks. But the odd vents and pouches in the livid walls around them threw their voices back in multitude of distortions, and Esaran shivered. The voices of the karra.

  The wall behind the two chanters smoothed out and a pucker began to form on it—perfectly round, unlike the doors.

  The karra were gathering.

  A shiver of anticipation moved over the congregation, and Esaran could smell the tang of fear from those crowding around her in reflexive huddling away from the walls. Not that it would do any good if the karra demanded an offering, she thought. They hadn’t yet.

  And how would it be made? The priests had no sharp ritual kalleath in their hands: all weapons were forbidden here in the Maw, except to the Tarkans.

  The chant ceased on a sharp command, and she obediently placed the fruit in her mouth. It was hard, like a nut; she crushed it with her back teeth. A spurt of warm saltiness flooded her mouth, but strangely the tang of blood did not gag her. Instead it seemed to reach up through her sinuses, filling her head with a dark illumination. The eternal glow of the walls seemed to brighten, condensing into wisps of phosphorescence that writhed and began to coalesce together. She waited fearfully. The priests warned that those who did not partake of the Ekhaschen-karr might be devoured at any time. Better to appease the demons
with your fear than with your body, they said.

  One particular section of the surrounding chamber, every surface of which was now alive with a swirl of shapes and nascent images, drew her attention, and she felt a prickle in her bladder as the face of her father began to materialize, his mouth gaping open in silent anger, the only gift he’d ever had for any of them. Flies and wasps crawled in and out of his mouth and buzzed around his head. Esaran gasped and flinched. It was true, then: in this horrible place the karra knew your inmost fears and would manifest in that form.

  But she did not turn her gaze away. Nearby the floor convulsed, knocking Rekallje to his knees—he had probably closed his eyes. But it was forbidden to scant the karra in this ceremony. There was no withdrawing from this congregation.

  Other faces, shapes, and horrors ballooned and withered on the walls. Moans rose from the gathering, punctuated by muffled gasps of terror. Esaran whimpered quietly. Instinct warned her it would be deadly to let the horror burst out in full voice.

  Rekallje had remained on his hands and knees, apparently dazed by his fall. He looked up at the pucker, which was creasing outward from its center in a horrible simulacrum of a smile. The man’s eyes seemed fixed on an abstract swirl of forms, but Esaran couldn’t interpret what he was seeing.

  Then he screamed rackingly. The floor beneath him erupted into a forest of hands, clutching at his limbs, the ones behind melting back into formlessness as new ones grew ahead and pulled him forward. The two Appeasers, as karra-ridden as everyone else, stumbled aside; the hapless gray shot between them as if riding a sled and was thrown headfirst into a suddenly gaping orifice in the wall. Esaran caught a brief glimpse of multiple eyes and a forest of taloned hands in the darkness within before it slammed shut. Rekallje began shrieking like a fowl being dismembered as the chamber went utterly dark, all the light concentrating into the pucker, now boil-like, which flickered with an internal illumination that followed the sickening rhythm of the man’s weakening cries. She felt her bowels let go with an oddly comforting warmth as she slumped to the floor, hardly cognizant of its shuddering convulsions.