A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  The sarcastic young man squinted at him, and Ivard tasted the acid of his unease. “Come on,” he said to the others, “it’s just one of the jumped-up Polloi infesting the station. You can find more interesting sport.”

  A faint breeze and the scent of herbs drew Ivard’s gaze up briefly, to find Tate Kaga watching from behind the Douloi. They were unaware of him. The old nuller winked at him, and Ivard resisted the impulse to wipe his sleeve over his face, and caught sight of the dancing animals on his cuff.

  Ivard laughed. “I’m not one of your tame Polloi,” he declared. “I’m a Rifter.” Overhead, Tate Kaga’s bubble whirled end over end, the nuller grinning broadly.

  Ivard shook back the sleeve of his ancestral shirt and held up his arm to display the Kelly ribbon. “I’m Ivard Firehead, wearing the weaving of the ancient Lakota, and bonded in the phratry of the Archon of *****”

  With blossoming delight he scented the girl’s spurt of interest as he whistle-honked the name of the Kelly home world flawlessly—“wounded in battle with the Avatar’s personal guards on the Mandala, haji of Desrien . . .” He paused, feeling the blush threatening to break through all over again, then went for broke, “and I’d very much like to free-fall dance with you.”

  “I’m Ami,” she breathed. “And I’d love to dance.”

  Ivard looked around, and chirruped to the dogs. They knew how to move in free-fall, now, so they could come with him if they wanted.

  Ami took his hand, and all four of them launched into space.

  o0o

  “I don’t know where he is, but I know who can find him,” Jaim promised. He looked up, and Vahn followed his gaze. Far above he saw a familiar red-haired figure soaring through the immense free-fall gym.

  Jaim made his way to an exit and Vahn followed, Roget staying behind and their backup moving to the exit and other key points.

  A short time later they emerged onto a platform jutting into the upper portion of the vast free-fall area, where youths shrieked their delight as they swooped through the air.

  Vahn watched as Jaim launched himself across the space to one of the jump pads in the middle, where the redhead Ivard was seated with a pretty Douloi girl, talking earnestly. Jaim interrupted; Ivard slid his hands over his eyes for a long beat, two, and spoke.

  Jaim lifted a hand in thanks, and returned. “This way,” he said.

  On the other side of the garden, in the little alcove with no exit, Vi’ya and Brandon stood silently, gazes locked. “A question.”

  She did not answer. His voice could have been lost in the rise and fall of the compelling Kelly music echoing from far below them.

  The pathway would only admit one. She moved toward it with deliberate step, counting on the ingrained habit of nick courtesy to force him to withdraw. But he remained where he was, hands open in question.

  She was near enough to see the patience in his demeanor, to feel his expectation. Stopping short of physical contact, she said, “What?”

  His lips parted, then his head turned sharply as the Kelly trinat stopped, and music from farther away reached them: a familiar melody that skipped rhythmically up the chromatic scale, dancing from dissonance to harmony, like the laughter of children. KetzenLach, Markham’s favorite.

  Of course the Arkad would have listened to KetzenLach. Of course.

  She shut out the music, and shut in her response, counting mentally until the Arkad’s keepers could get there to take him away.

  When he spoke, the subject took her by surprise. “What kind of person was Jakarr?”

  “Jakarr?” she repeated the name as though it were unfamiliar, which it was—but only in this setting, this context.

  “Yes. Your weapons tech on the Telvarna.”

  She knew that the Arkad had never met Jakarr, except as a target in a swift firefight that had ended with Jakarr’s death, directly following Brandon and Osri Omilov’s landing at the Dis base.

  A strange subject, but a safe enough distraction. She put back her head, gazing past the Arkad through a disorienting tangle of stairways leading nowhere. Most of the rest of the gathering were just visible, not as individuals, but as insect-figures moving about in meaningless patterns.

  She did not have to look his way; the familiar, high-intensity emotional signature was focused solely on her.

  Proximity was toxic. The buffer of distance must be regained, and soon. “Good shot,” she said. “Bad temper.”

  “That’s all?” he asked. “That’s all you can say about a man you crewed with, and then commanded, for eight years?”

  Her pulse drummed in her forehead with the effort it took to shut him out, yet even so she sensed a complexity of reactions, foremost being regret. Regret?

  She forced her attention back to memory, summoning up the unlovely vision of Jakarr’s narrow, suspicious face. “He was a liar. Liked games with risk but cheated, liked his partners young. His humor required a butt, a scapegoat. Enough?” An oblique glance, nothing more than a noting of position, so she could move away—as if a meter would afford much protection.

  “Did he have any other name? A family? Did anyone love him, call him friend?”

  His regret had sharpened into remorse.

  “Never mentioned any family. Temper kept friends at a distance. Names . . .” Somewhere, the Eya’a picked up her own increasing regret, and they sang to her mind: One-who-gives-fire-stone seeks to amend ceased ones.

  None of it made sense. She tightened her control, her answers random. “Just the insulting names earned by the unliked. Greywing was his bunk-partner for a time—was he who brought her and Firehead in. Then she grew up enough to bunk him out.”

  Talking took too much effort. “Enough?” Vi’ya asked again, no longer hiding the hostility.

  He’d shifted a pace nearer, hands clasped behind him—still between her and the pathway out. “Is it enough?” he repeated. “I want to know something of the man I killed.”

  With difficulty she forced her mind back to Jakarr’s abortive attempt to take over Dis, and the Arkad, bent over his dying liegeman, firing at the rock overhead; she had recognized in that moment who he was.

  And then came the slow, lethal fall of stone on Jakarr.

  A final image: the Arkad’s face as he held them all off, threatening to bring the entire cave down on them—himself included—just so he could listen to a dying man’s last speech.

  He would have done it. Even then she could read him without difficulty. She had kept them all away until the liegeman was dead, until the Arkad’s adrenaline shock had metamorphosed into something unreadable except to the Eya’a—and it had frightened them.

  Memory brought her back to the present. She had to end this interview, in any way she could.

  o0o

  “You taught the dogs to dance in free-fall?” Ami asked, clapping her hands as Gray spun through the air, tongue lolling, tail snapping back and forth for balance. “They are so cute!”

  “They like it,” Ivard said with satisfaction. “Once they got used to it.”

  Trev’s toenails clicked on the platform, then the dog vaulted into the air, spinning slowly, paws tucked under, ears flapping, eyes slitted with pleasure.

  Ivard sat back down on the edge of the jump pad, clasping his hands in front of his knees. He could feel the heat of Ami’s body, could smell the scent of her perfume, of her flesh and her hair. It made him dizzy, exultant. Not far away, the Eya’a swayed in front of the Kelly playing their trinat, piping and keening while people, mixed civilians and nicks, hung from cables and jump pads nearby, watching in fascination. The Eya’a were acting so strange now; he could hear them in the mental plane, but unless they shaped words for him, their thoughts were utterly incomprehensible. He wished he could ask Vi’ya about it. But, like when he’d tried to reach her for Jaim, he again felt a darkness that he shied away from.

  “What did you do just then?” Ami asked. “And who is Vi’ya?”

  “She’s the captain of our ship. Jaim th
inks the Aerenarch might be with her.”

  They looked down at the floor far below, where Douloi drifted aimlessly, the center of their attention now absent.

  “The Dol’jharian? The woman with the psi-killers?”

  “Mmmm. The Archon’s ribbon links me to her and them, somehow. I can hear them, sort of.”

  Ami stretched out her hand and ran a finger over the Kelly band in his wrist, leaving her hand on his arm. He liked the tingle her touch caused to spread through him in spicy-tasting, glittering crimson stars.

  “It must be very strange.” She leaned toward him, her breath on his face, her lips round and soft . . .

  Their lips met, and Ivard lost all sense of his surroundings. Then the jump pad rocked under them and Ami pulled back as the handsome blit who’d mocked Ivard earlier bent belligerently over them, breathing stale alcohol fumes and anger.

  “Dandenus,” Ami said reproachfully.

  Ivard sniffed. This Dandenus’s emotions whiffed of hurt and affront. He was clutching an unopened bottle of the sparkling wine, and two glasses.

  He gave Ivard a haughty sneer, then swung toward Ami. “Never had a Rifter, huh?”

  Ami’s flushed, and Ivard’s innards squeezed into the familiar ball of hopelessness. Was that why she was with him, because he was a Rifter, an exotic toy? Marim had used him for the loot from the Mandala. Was Ami doing the same thing?

  But Ami wasn’t paying any attention to Dandenus. She peered anxiously at Ivard, curiosity and tentative friendship and a kind of light-hearted attraction all breathing through her skin.

  She touched his arm, then rounded on Dandenus with a fierce movement. “If it hadn’t been for this Rifter, and his friends, we’d be mourning all three of the Panarch’s sons.” She gestured at the floor far below where earlier the Aerenarch had held court. “He earned personal access to the Aerenarch—which of your exalted Family can say the same?”

  “The Aerenarch!” The boy snorted, swaying slightly. “He’s not so important. There are others who . . .” He broke off, looking confused, then afraid.

  Ivard stood up, conscious of Ami’s regard. “Others who what?”

  He knew the Douloi made a big thing about honor and obligations. It was time they learned that Rifters knew it, too, only they didn’t waste time with big words about it.

  “If you have to ask, you couldn’t understand the answer,” replied Dandenus, but he seemed to hear the weakness of his own reply and turned to the girl. “Come, Ami, you’re better than this no-family chatzer.” He put the glasses on a little pedestal at the edge of the jump pad and held up his bottle, working at the release tab. “Here, I brought this for you and me.”

  Dandenus was too drunk to know what he was doing. Ivard heard the beginning of a hiss from the bottle, and then he lunged forward and pushed Ami aside.

  Bang! Something punched him cruelly in the temple, sending a shower of stars across his vision. He fell to his knees as pain shot through his head.

  Ami shrieked his name: “Ivard!” Then his vision cleared.

  o0o

  “Too late for regret,” Vi’ya said to the Aerenarch in her hardest voice.

  She sustained his regard, intense as a laser, as he said softly, “Is that Dol’jharian practicality?” His light voice almost blended with the singing of the distant choir, but the humor was still there. “Yet your mythology is more ghost-ridden than any I’ve encountered. I wonder,” he drawled, “if Eusabian sleeps easy at night. I know Anaris never did. Though he didn’t manage to kill anyone on Arthelion—not for lack of trying.”

  Behind the musing voice was a temporary easing of intent.

  She drew a breath in, let one out. Said: “Tried to kill the Panarch?” The idea, later, somewhere else, would be amusing.

  “No—he and my father seemed to get along quite well. It was me he went after, with a single-minded focus that I never could explain. My brother Galen came in for a few shots as well, probably because of proximity to me.”

  I wish he’d succeeded, she thought viciously, and from far off came the Eya’a: Shall we amend one-who-gives-fire-stone with fi? Something like panic lent force to her No! And far in the distance she heard the Kelly echo her negative.

  The exchange worsened the vertigo. Nausea clawed its way up inside her.

  “Am I boring you?” Now he was in front of her, the blue eyes on a level with her own, searching, and she understood that he had tried to provoke her.

  He was trying any way he could to get her to respond, but he didn’t see how deeply every word he spoke cut. “You knew Markham,” he went on quickly, with disarmingly apologetic sincerity in voice and face. “You knew him after he left the confines of Panarchic society. Here our violence is circumscribed, most of it diverted into word, tone, gesture.” He spread his hands, palms up. “Did he kill anyone? How—” He faced her again. “—did he live with the regrets once the danger was over, and time permitted the endless reviewing of one’s actions?”

  “Every man’s death diminishes me.” It was something Markham had said to her after their very first meeting.

  Again memory claimed precedence, though it was no longer a refuge. The parallels in her meeting with the Arkad and his friend were an ironic counterpoint: both times; a firefight first, both times centered around her. Only with Markham it had been his chivalric rescue. With Brandon, it was his chivalric protecting of his dying liegeman.

  She looked up, knowing what was coming just before it came: “‘Every man’s death diminishes me,’” the Arkad said. “I found that in an old book when I was a boy, and we used to debate its meaning, Markham and I, before we had any idea of its real significance. Did he—”

  “Yes,” she said, stepping back. Looking away.

  The interruption surprised him, and his intent stilled, pooled into question.

  Time to thrust back. Now. “But only until the reality of survival stripped away the futility of sentiment.” A deep breath. “He changed, Arkad. He wasn’t a nick, mouthing philosophy and ordering servants to do his killing for him.” She unleashed some of her anger, hearing it color her voice, sharpen her words. Knowing how her anger made others afraid of her.

  It had taken time to accustom to that, but the fear had proved to be useful: it bought her distance.

  Using the anger as a shield, she turned to gaze straight into his eyes, standing close enough to hear his breathing, to see the pulse in his temple just beneath the soft fall of hair. He returned the gaze, his pupils so wide his eyes darkened. All his attention was on her now, a danger she’d risked once before. All his focus, the entire spectrum of emotion—except fear.

  “But he didn’t survive,” the Arkad said gently.

  o0o

  Ivard gasped.

  Propelled by the violence of the sparkling wine escaping from the bottle, Dandenus staggered off the edge of the platform into full free-fall and shot away like a comet, trailing a fizzy tail of yellow wine, straight for the bubble of water, just as the ear-torturing keening of the Eya’a rose to a climax above the frightened shrieks of the youths diving away from the Kelly platform in all directions, and the sharp barks of Trev and Gray. The noise cut like knives in Ivard’s ears. Ami buried her head in her arms and screamed.

  A series of loud detonations, each accompanied by a shower of sparks, erupted from parts of the structure around them as the ultrasonics disrupted the delicate electronics of the Gardens. The water bubble distorted, then as Dandenus impacted it full-on, morphed slowly and sickeningly into a fractal chaos of oscillating, ever-dividing blobs of water bejeweled by the lights all around.

  Far below, the Douloi stared up in amazement. A whooping siren added to the chaos as the fail-safes engaged; a forest of reddish beams erupted from the walls, spearing the human figures flailing in space and bearing them to safety. Ivard saw Dandenus carried off upside down, his eyes manic.

  But the overload had left no spare capacity in the safety devices. With awful slowness, the countless globs of water, wr
ithing like demented slugs, accelerated toward the distant floor. The ant-like figures scurried in all directions, but too late, as thousands of gallons of water deluged the floor of the gardens, upending tables and washing the Douloi and all their elegance into tangled heaps of sodden splendor among the ruins of the landscaping.

  The Eya’a stood unmoving, their white fur fluffed up, then at a questioning bark from Gray they seemed to notice the dogs, and followed them as Trev led them away.

  Ivard shifted his attention from the disaster far below to Ami. She met his eyes, hers wide. Then her mouth twitched, Ivard snorted, and a tide of hysterical laughter overwhelmed them both. And when that died away, a very different passion took its place.

  o0o

  But he didn’t survive. Vi’ya’s anger flared.

  The Arkad released her gaze a heartbeat before she could have struck—would have struck—to smash that face, feel bone splinter and brain spurt, closing those eyes forever . . .

  “Vi’ya.”

  Jaim’s voice. Speaking twice.

  “Vi’ya. You better come. Some nullwit trashed the free-fall gym. People are panicking and the Eya’a are with the dogs.” And then, “You all right?”

  Nausea burnt acridly at the back of her tongue, but she swallowed it down. Reached for words. Found two. “I’ll come.”

  She met Jaim’s gaze and felt him flinch. The fallout continued, magnified: the Eya’a, probing for meaning, their thoughts resonant with fear; Ivard’s dizzying melange of emotions; triumph and desire and consummated lust smothering his remorse at her anger. And the Kelly, a remote, compassionate presence, their question unspoken.

  She longed for removal, to be alone. But she would not be alone, until she could get away from Ares—or unless she died.

  “I’ll come,” she said again. “It’s nothing.”

  (Found him,) Jaim reported.

  Vahn let out a long breath of relief. The Aerenarch and the Dol’jharian woman appeared to have been alone, or they were coincidentally in the same place. If she’d wanted to kill Brandon, she could have done that when they were running to and from Arthelion; far more likely she’d acted as backup bodyguard to Jaim.