Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  Karrel Goza leaned into Lirrit’s hands, comforted by her strong fingers. “We’ve talked a lot about taking the ship, but whoever expected us to do it?” After a moment’s heavy silence, he said, “What about N’Ceegh? From what I saw, all he wants is to get back to his workshop.”

  “He does now, but what would happen if he had all that power in his hands? That changes everything, Kar. Tell you true, I wouldn’t trust me with that ship if I knew how to work her. Would you? Trust yourself, I mean?”

  He didn’t try answering her; he didn’t have to. “If there was some way we could get rid of her…”

  “We’ve got a month to think of something, the man said he wouldn’t take us up until he finished collecting the folk he’s come for. Kar…”

  “Yeh?”

  “Don’t tell anyone about this. Not yet.”

  “Geres Duvvar and some of my cousins know about the raid. If I don’t give them something, it’ll be worse than kicking over a karints nest; we’ll have them swarming about us trying to find out what happened.”

  “Mm.” She stared past him, fingertips tracing a merm scar. “Tell them this, the female alien pulled all the suspect files from the mainBrain, then she wiped them out of Memory so whatever the Grand Sech doesn’t have as hard copy is gone. She’s printing the files for us so we’ll know how much he knows and what he suspects. And she’s set up some safe corridors into the Palace, we’ll be getting the stats for those and passing them on to whoever’s interested. That ought to satisfy anyone who cares to ask. What time is it? The board clock has quit on us.” She frowned. “And where are we?”

  “We’ve got around an hour till dawn. The storm slowed us a lot, we haven’t reached North Bayshore yet.”

  “We can’t make the mines before sunup?”

  “No way. We’ll have to find someplace to lay up. Unless you want to risk day flying.”

  “Too dangerous. If we ran straight east for an hour, where’d we come out?”

  “Can’t go straight east. Skimmer can’t go head on against the wind out there, it’s blowing a gale still.” He tapped the glass over the fuel readout. “Look at this. Even beating to the southeast, we’ll be running on fumes in the emergency tank before we have land under us. We’ll have to leave her anchored somewhere until we can pack in fuel. Why not let the wind take us to the west shore?”

  “That’s Daz Musved, the Fehdaz there has a strangle hold on his people. I don’t dare show my face anywhere around. Remember the price on my head? Besides, the land is too open close to the coast, we couldn’t hide Skimmer and hope to get her back. And we need her.”

  “What’s all this about hiding her? Why can’t we just find a spot where people don’t go and anchor her?”

  “Because once the Grand Sech strips the blocks the woman set in the Brain, he’ll order the Warmaster to scan the country around Gilisim. She warned me that would happen, that we’d better go to ground as soon as we could. If we can tuck her out of sight, there won’t be anything for the scanners to see. That reminds me, they’ll probably rake through places like the mine. Jirsy.”

  “Um?”

  “You’ve got kin round the north end of the Bay, haven’t you? In Daz Kanath?”

  “I’ve got some Peltic-Indiz cousins living at Kuntepe Cove. You know where that is, Kar?”

  “Close to where the Incis drop down to the sea, isn’t it? I took a girl there for a daysail the week before I was adulted. I think it was Kuntepe.”

  “Right. Why, Elli?”

  “I want you to get to a com where you can send a warning to Ansla Civa at the mine so she can spread the news to keep their heads down. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. Kar, put me down near the point, I’ll walk round to the House. They’ll take me in and ask no questions.” She was a tiny thing with a face like a sealpup, and when she grinned her eyes almost disappeared. “They’ve been stilling teshfire on the sly since Settletimes and no Fehdaz or any of his Noses has ever caught them at it or anything else they feel like doing and no stinking bitbit’s about to do that now.”

  “Good. Will your cousins help you get back to gul Inci?”

  “Oh yes, one of these days I’m probably going to marry Imro Peltic. And even if that wasn’t so, none of them down to little Emin who’s just starting to talk would say anything to any outsiders, Huvved or Hordar doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, tell them what you have to, Jir, and warn them to keep close to home. If you can avoid it, nothing about the Warmaster.”

  “Elli, no no. It’s true this time, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Telling them that could hurt a lot.”

  “I see.” Elmas Ofka fell silent for a moment, tracing over and over the merm scars on her arm; she was thinking hard. “Kar, you said hide hunting?”

  “Derrigee Bol’s paying two to five alvs for erkelte hides. When I messed up my hand, Goza Ommar said go and don’t come back till you’ve walked the maggos out of your belly; if I could bring back a hide or two, that’d be froth on the beer, but she didn’t expect it. I could stay out another week, no problem.”

  “Good. It’ll take at least that long to get Skimmer refueled and flown home.” Her mouth twitched into a half-smile. “Maybe you’ll come across an erkelte and get your hide while we’re walking to the mine.” She looked down at her hands. “We’ll have to expel the ballonets and let the wind carry them off, collapse the bag so we can get it and the gondola under cover. Kar, if you can nurse her that far, take her up the K’tep. The closer we hide her to a waterway, the easier it’ll be to resupply her.”

  “Depends on the wind. And a favor from the Prophet wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Do the best you can.”

  “Don’t I always? Find another place to sit before I swing round. This could get rough.” He reached for the restrainers, clicked the catches shut, wincing as the straps pressed against his bruises. He waited until Lirrit and Elmas were settled, then he began easing the nose around, heading toward the northeast bend of the Bay and the Inci Hills.

  IX

  1. 8 months std. after Adelaar aici Arash hired Swardheld Quale and his crew. Aslan as fugitive, living at the Mines.

  The flarescreen spread across the wall inside the old smelter. Most of the smelter’s machinery had been salvaged for scrap when the mine shut down; the building itself was in fair shape, its brick walls were massive, its tiled concrete roof cracked but otherwise intact. A year ago, when Parnalee’s Spectacles had first appeared and were beginning to attract a considerable audience, some of the middlers among the Hordar exiles had plastered the walls and ceiling inside and pasted yosstarp over the plaster to make the huge room lightproof, others had picked up a comset in the course of a raid on a Raz strongroom and installed it here with a sunlight pickup and storage cells as its power source. The floor was littered with cushions and mats left here permanently because the Smelter had become one of the favored meeting places for the younger exiles, a combination Tavern and Dance Floor and ShowCenter; the greater part of the rebels and the outcasts were late middlers and young adults, fourteen through thirty-five, Hordar at their most energetic and prideful, male and female in nearly equal numbers; they came from every part of settled Tairanna, from the Duzzulkas, from the Sea Farms, from the east coast, west coast, south coast Littorals, even some up from Guneywhiyk the South Continent; desperate enough to chase a whisper; life on Guneywhiyk was even more constricted than it was here in the North.

  Three days after Elmas Ofka took her isyas to raid the Palace, Aslan strolled into the Smelter and settled on a cushion in one of the corners, apart from the others. Like most of the escaped slaves she lived in amiable contiguity with the rebel Hordar, but this tolerance was a policy based on the needs of the rebels, not real acceptance; she had to be careful to avoid triggering the xenophobe that lay not so far beneath every Hordar skin. It was dark out, supper was over and the cleanup finished; this was the hour when Hordar in the cities went to the Dance Floors or into the Taverns, when
parties began and lovers jumped the walls to meet in delicious secrecy. It was the eve of Gun Peygam, the Day of the Prophet, the one day in seven the Kuzeywhiyker Pradites set aside for rest and meditation. The eve of Gun Peygam was the day Parnalee chose for his weekly broadcasts.

  Aslan twisted open the flask of tea she’d brought, filled the lidcup and sat with her back against the wall, sipping tea and watching the screen as the warning eye appeared, then dissolved into a play of color. The rebels were drifting in, exchanging scrip for drinks and food from the bar at one side, wandering about until they found a group they felt like joining or an empty mat where they could make their own group. Because they came from different places there were frictions, lots of frictions, clawfights and fist fights, hurt feelings and hurt bodies, but their joint hatred of the Huvved helped smooth down the worst lumps and gradually these Hordar from everywhere were beginning to think of themselves as Tairannin rather than Incers or Brindarin or whatever. At the request of the Council that was attempting to govern this patchwork settlement, Aslan had devised several strategies for diffusing hostility; these seemed to be working well enough to keep the ever-increasing population at the Mines from flying into fragments.

  The color flow took on shape and definition, changing into a swirl of male and female dancers filling the screen with explosive movement timed to a music more guessed at than heard. Parnalee was using her data here as he would later on, as he did in every show, ignoring the distortions she’d tried to introduce, perhaps they were canceled out by what Churri brought him, it didn’t matter, it’d taken her less than a month to recognize the futility of her attempts to buy moral absolution without giving up her comfortable life, without facing and accepting the danger implicit in challenging the dominance of the Huvved; having recognized that weaselthink, she went missing from gul Inci when Tra Yarta sent her spying there. Her data, yes. It told him that Tairannin never settled immediately to anything other than work, they circled, approached and shied away, as if they were sniffing at each other and the air around them, as if they had to get the feel of place and people before they could settle to enjoying themselves; he was programming spectacular dance sequences at the beginning of each show so he could snag the eye and draw in the peripatetic viewer before the serious business of drama began.

  Churri showed up at the Mines about six months after she went down the slide. One day in early spring when rain was turning the world to mud and the honeycomb inside the mountain was sweating and dank, he came strolling into the stubby shaft where she and Xalloor were living, grinned at her and went out again. He usually joined them at the Smelter when Parnalee’s Spectacles were on, watching the shows with a contagious glee as he ran a whispered commentary on the strings the Proggerdi was pulling. He wasn’t here now, he and Xalloor and her group were having a prolonged argument over their latest script, that’s what the note said that Xalloor sent round to her before dinner. If they managed to work things out before the Spectacle was over, they’d join her. She wasn’t expecting them. Conflict was foreplay for the Bard her father, probably that was what attracted him to her mother, Adelaar’s fierce and instant attack on anything that tried to control her. He’d quickly lost interest in Aslan; his daughter wasn’t the kind of woman he admired and there were no shared memories of her childhood to reinforce the bio-tie; the accidental fact of their relationship went back to being a thing of no importance to either. At least, that was the face she put on for him. She was too experienced an observer to place any pressure on the fragile bond that still existed between them, but his indifference hurt her badly. There were times she woke before dawn and lay on the crude pallet unable to sleep, caught in what she called the deadash grays, asking why she kept on living and finding no answer.

  The dancers melted again to streamers of light that wove a garland about a small dark man holding a stringed instrument like a cross between a lute and a lyre. The rebels greeted his appearance with whistles and thumbsnapping, his name went skittering about the Smelter like the game ball at an ogatarka match, Murrebai, Murrebai, Murrebai, then the room stilled to a silence so intense it seemed nobody breathed as he began to play a simple plaintive, tune; he finished the tune and began repeating it but somewhere in the middle his agile fingers and his agile brain took hold of it and twisted it up down around… and brought it back to a simplicity no longer naive, having passed through complexity as through fire and come out stripped clean and immensely strong. He allowed them no time to recover but began a cheerful old child song. The rebels sang with him, holding on to each other, many of them crying silently as they sang.

  Parnalee, ah, Parnalee… What a job he’d done for Tra Yarta. When he got here, there was no such thing as an entertainment network; on the coast the Hordar thought in terms of family and city, up in the Duzzulkas family and estate; they didn’t care what happened outside the communal walls. The Huvveds arrived with other ideas, but in the three centuries they’d been here, a lot of Hordar concepts had crept into their worldview; most of them had Hordar mothers though Huvved boys were removed from female influence as soon as they could walk. Merchants talked to each other and the Seches kept in touch, but no one thought of using the universal comweb to deliver entertainment into the homes, not before Parnalee arrived.

  Murrebai bowed and strolled offstage. As if he pulled it after him on invisible strings, a title scrolled across the screen in carefully brushed calligraphy: The Calling of the Prophet.

  There was a murmur of approbation from the rebels, then they settled back in pleasurable anticipation.

  The sonorous voice of an unseen speaker rose above solemn, portentous music, naming the actors, setting the time and place of the events to be portrayed.

  Aslan hid her smile behind the lidcup, missing Churri and his pungent commentary; she doubted whether anyone else in that room understood how much Parnalee was dumping on them, mocking their sacred cows. There seemed to be few skeptics on Tairanna when it came to the life and teachings of their Prophet; the Eftakites from Guneywhiyk believed with equal fervor in Pradix, they simply had a later gloss on his teachings from their Prophet, Eftakes. She had a fair idea of what would happen to their comfortable, comforting certainties when the Universe outside began crowding in on them; she found it rather sad.

  There was a concerted gasp from the audience, wordless cries of outrage. What’s he done now? she thought and frowned at the screen. As soon as she realized what she was seeing, she felt like gasping too. The actor playing the Young Pradix in his Violent Revolutionary phase was a Huvved. Or so it seemed. My god, she thought, he’s gone too far this time.

  In a minute though, when she saw several of the Councilors pushing through the disturbance, she knew he’d judged these people to a hair; he knew what he was doing, that twisted crazy monster. He knew.

  Councilor Belirmen Indiz slapped hands against hips and roared down the mutters and shouts, “Use your head, not your gut. You make me ashamed to call myself a rebel. You heard that cast list. Any Huvved patronymics on it? Eh? Any? That boy up there, sure he looks Huvved, but no Huvved has given him a name. Eh? He’s got no name but one he makes for himself. You, know how he got that face. Some Fehdaz got him on a servant girl and booted them both out when her time was on her. You think her family did better for him? Eh? What about when he was old enough to show his father’s face? Think about that. I see Huvved hair out there, light eyes, Huvved ears and noses. What was your life like, you with those marks on you? Eh? Think about it. You’re here, where would you be if your soul’s stains laid his load on you? Honor that middler up there for his pride and his skill, and curse the father, not the son.” He stalked back to his seat, folded his arms across his chest and sat massively upright, daring anyone to answer his argument.

  Parnalee, ah, Parnalee. I wonder how many Houses are listening to a speech like that? You don’t need me or Churri either, you despise the men you manipulate but you understand them in some deep sadistic way better than I ever will, however much I prob
e and study. I think I am a little jealous of you. I know I am afraid of you…

  When he came out of his room after the beating, he came like a storm. He raged through the house, tearing up whatever he could get his terrible hands around, he kicked holes in the walls, trampled computers into twisted wrecks. He was crazier than a tantserbok driven mad by must; wholly out of control. With his strength and mass and his rage he’d just about frightened the stiffening from her bones. Then, abruptly, standing in the center of the shattered common room he went still, quiet; between one breath and the next he stopped his rampage, turned and walked back into his room. Quietly, with terrible control, he shut the door. A day passed.

  The second time he emerged, the beast had vanished though Aslan thought she saw it looking at her now and then; she saw it surface and sink again when, hesitating and afraid, she told him of the Warmaster and what it meant to them.

  The Smelter was quiet again. Looking around her, Aslan could see eyes flicking from side to side. Looking for those Huvved marks, she thought, hoping no one would see Huvved blood in them. On the screen a battle was over, the two commanders were standing face to face, meeting each other as equals, warrior to warrior. Parnalee had dug up more Huvved bastards to play the empire soldiers and there was a tense silence in the room as the two men confronted each other; the Empire’s Captain accepted his death at Pradix’s hands, taking the sword thrust with a stiff nobility that made Aslan hide another smile behind her hand.

  Parnalee was playing all the themes that Tra Yarta had asked from him, but he was putting a spin on them that undercut the Huvved; he was playing to species memory and the depths of Hordar pride, deflecting their present angers only to intensity them, laying a clutch of bombs for the future. Future? As close as tomorrow, maybe. Despite Aslan’s training, Churri was aware of what the Proggerdi was doing before she was; she was too tangled in guilt to use her brain, but once he pointed out what was happening it was obvious to her. Parnalee was seeding in the general population the same change that was taking place in the rebels, teaching the Hordar indirectly but effectively that they belonged to Tairanna and had a common enemy no matter where they lived; he was making possible the final overthrow of the Huvved once the rebels solved the problem of the Warmaster, but that wasn’t what he wanted, oh no, what he wanted was Huvved dead and he didn’t care what it took. He teased at the Hordar by slyly putting down the Huvved, so slyly he couldn’t be pinned on it, but every Hordar who saw the Spectacles knew what he was getting at and felt the pride and saw the possibility. Aslan watched and was afraid; she thought of warning the Council, but doubted they’d believe her or understand what she was saying. The best there is, he told Xalloor once, and perhaps he was, but he was also crazy and men were going to die of that insanity. And she saw no way of stopping it.