A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  Running her eyes down the list, she said, “I have two respectably aged Charvannese reds and a promising Locke.”

  “Whatever you prefer,” Brandon said courteously.

  My move, yes. Well, how will I move?

  Though Yenef stood by, silent and ready to serve, and Vannis knew that the Rifter could order and pour wine, she decided to do it herself.

  And ambivalence nearly paralyzed her.

  Aware of the lengthening of the silence, but unable to think of entertaining talk, she glanced at Jaim, who brought his chin down in a fractional nod. Of course all the wines were safe. She opened the Locke and poured out two glasses.

  As she joined Brandon at the rail, the barge began its slow circuit of the lake, and on prearranged signal the quartet—two strings, two winds—concealed behind a finely carved set of antique Rhidari panels in the draped pavilion at the stern, began playing KetzenLach’s “Variations on a Theme by De Blaukerln.”

  “So tell me,” she said, touching her glass to his, “how did you get that diamond from Charidhe?”

  His smile was slightly preoccupied. As tension increased its vise grip on her skull, she cast a quick look over the lake, and was startled to see a head above the shrub in front of a well-lit gazebo on the shore—but then the barge moved farther along, and it was only a tall young woman, absorbed in feeding some ducks.

  “I admired it,” Brandon responded, shrugging slightly as he watched the woman with the quacking, waddling ducks. “And then I asked her if I could borrow it.”

  “So simple!” Vannis laughed. “I guess it serves as another indication how things have changed.”

  “How is that?” he replied.

  “To borrow jewels would have caused a scandal not so long ago,” she said, humoring him with the obvious. At least he was talking.

  He bowed slightly, smiling, and she realized that he would have borrowed those jewels, anyway, careless of the results, back in the old days. And he’s an Arkad, so he’d get away with it.

  She dared a glance into his face; his gaze was almost a palpable blow. He does know something’s amiss.

  She suppressed the urge to start chattering like a child.

  What held her back? The visceral thrill of his title and proximity to power was almost as strong as her own physical response to Brandon himself. He would soon be relegated to mere figurehead—her old status. The strength of her regret nearly paralyzed her.

  o0o

  The bustle of activity in the Situation Room faltered and died as Sebastian Omilov led his unlikely troupe through the hatch. They’d turned off the mind-blurs.

  First the Eya’a drifted inside, then Vi’ya, then Ivard and the Kelly, Eloatri, Manderian, and finally Tate Kaga, his bubble squeezed down to minimum size. With each succeeding entrance the room became quieter, and Omilov felt himself the focus of several dozen pairs of eyes under the vast hologram of the Thousand Suns glimmering overhead.

  “Wait here,” he said tersely—an unnecessary instruction. During their passage through the heavy security surrounding the project, he had instructed them in the procedure that he and Manderian had worked out. All of the participants would wait outside until called; Vi’ya and the Eya’a, as the psychic focus of the experiment, would enter last.

  “Once they see the hyperwave, their actions will be unpredictable, and perhaps uncontrollable. Attempting to restrain them at that point could be fatal,” Manderian had said.

  That thought, and its corollaries, weighed heavily on Omilov as he approached the hatch with the Marine guards to either side, beyond which lay the Urian hyperwave. He barely noticed the security scan, wondering if it could read the knot of fear curdling in his stomach. He’d reviewed the interrogation chip from the Mbwa Kali, with the descriptions, by the Rifters who’d rescued him, of the carnage the Eya’a had left behind in Eusabian’s torture chamber underneath the Mandala. And his own College of Xenology had similar data in its records, replicated here on Ares.

  The door to the hyperwave room slid shut behind him, cutting off the stares of the officers and technicians in the Situation Room, but not before Ysabet, his head technician, slipped through behind him, her black eyes narrowed above a sympathetic grimace.

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “What in the Nine Shiidran Hells is that circus all about? I thought this was to test the Dol’jharian and the sophonts. Isn’t that Tate Kaga?”

  Omilov sighed heavily. “It’s very . . . complicated. But Ivard, the youth bonded to the Kelly, is evidently part of the poly-mental complex that is sensitive to Urian artifacts, and he will not cooperate without the Prophetae.”

  She snorted derisively as she glowered at the small room with the red-glowing lump of the hyperwave wired into the wall opposite the door, and the various instruments now ranked along the other walls for the experiment. “Gonna be crowded. Hope those little brain-boilers aren’t claustrophobic.”

  Omilov nodded, and Ysabet began reviewing and confirming their preparations. Save for Omilov himself, all the technicians would monitor remotely, to avoid biasing the noetic and mental potentials of the participants, and for their own safety, should the Eya’a react negatively.

  He glanced at the ceiling, where neatly installed nozzles now protruded, ready to flood the room with a complex of gases that, based on the best guesses from the scanty biological data they had on the Eeya’a, might immobilize them. Might; it might also kill them or, perhaps worse, have no effect at all. He had a brief, chilling vision of a Situation Room filled with corpses, blood and neural tissue leaking from eyes and noses.

  “Gnostor? Are you all right?”

  He tried to shake off the mood. “I’m sorry, Ysabet. Too much work, too little sleep. You’ve done a fine job here. Why don’t you send in the first group of participants?”

  She departed with a final, indecipherable look backward. He sensed the tianqi shifting into a new mode, one he recognized as intended to subdue anxiety, but it had little effect on him.

  Omilov tried to steady himself with the sight of the gleaming instruments blinking their messages of logic and mathematics, the polished floor reflecting the banks of lights and the mysterious artifact of the Ur. Here he’d felt in control, in contrast to life outside. It had compensated, in a way, for his inability to help Brandon, who he feared was slowly drowning in the maelstrom of Douloi intrigue. Omilov had sworn ten years ago to stay out of the mephitic gutter of politics. All it did was besmirch one; science, at least, was clean and neutral.

  But now that control was slipping away, the clean symmetry of science pushed out by the amorphous pressure of mysticism, and there was nothing he could do about it. Old memories pushed up from the silence of the past, triggering the dull ache of regret that was never far away. Then the door slid open, admitting Ivard, the Kelly, Eloatri, and finally Tate Kaga.

  “We’d better hurry,” said the High Phanist. “Manderian says the Eya’a may not wait much longer.”

  But then, to his utter astonishment, Tate Kaga floated over to the hyperwave and commenced a guttural chant in an archaic language that resembled nothing Omilov had ever heard before, and Ivard echoed it. The Kelly swarmed around the youth, moaning in counterpoint, their head-stalks patting and stroking both him and the Urian artifact. On the walls, the lenses of the imagers reflected the scene in miniature as they recorded it all.

  The nuller handed something through the gee-bubble’s field to Ivard—some sort of burning herb, which Ivard flourished at the hyperwave and then at himself, breathing deeply. A sharp fragrance filled the air.

  Omilov took a furious step toward the High Phanist. “What are they doing? What is this nonsense?”

  “Tate Kaga is a shaman of the Shanungpa tradition. He is helping Ivard to prepare. . . .”

  Really angry now, Omilov cut her off. “I suppose they’ll sacrifice some small animal next.” He raised his voice. “That’s enough of that. This is a scientific experiment.”

  But the High Phanist grabbed his aim
and swung him back to face her with surprising strength.

  “Be silent, Sebastian Omilov! Your ignorance is willful and unforgivable.” She raised her hand, revealing the image of the Digrammaton burned into it in its unexplainable leap across the light-years from Arthelion, where her predecessor had died in the atrocity aimed at Brandon. “Have you so soon forgotten Desrien?”

  A chill caused his heart to ache, his diaphragm tighten. He fought desperately as the Dreamtime stirred within the vaults of memory, bringing with it an image of a man in archaic dress, facing a snarling leopard in a dark forest.

  Then the hatch hissed open and the Eya’a raced through, followed more slowly by Vi’ya. She moved as if exhausted, her eyes wide and unseeing. Manderian watched closely, not touching her but apparently prepared for anything, his countenance mirroring her agonized concentration.

  The keening of the Eya’a mounted above the chanting and the alien threnody of the Kelly, as they ran their twiggy hands over the hyperwave. Then they stilled, their white fur fluffed out. Omilov felt a pressure in his head, and heard Manderian’s breath hiss. Ivard’s voice ceased.

  As one, Ivard, Vi’ya and the Eya’a all pivoted to face in the same direction.

  Omilov’s ring finger tingled, rising to an ache up his left arm. He took a step forward, another, fighting off a buzzing tide of blackness. He heard Vi’ya gasp a name: “Arkad!”

  Then she, Ivard, and the Eya’a crumpled to the floor.

  The Kelly bent over the prone youth and the little white-furred sophonts. They made space for Eloatri, who knelt next to Ivard’s head. Omilov looked from one to the other, helpless to act or to intervene. The last thing he saw was the limp body of the Dol’jharian woman borne up into the air below Tate Kaga’s bubble, her dark hair streaming like a banner in the wind as the nuller sped through the open hatch and away.

  Then the mystery of Desrien claimed him finally and once again, and he fell into the Dreamtime.

  o0o

  Sebastian Omilov knew he was dreaming.

  Then the knowledge fled and he found himself standing in a street in Merryn, on Charvann.

  Above, the light vanished from the sky over the city, taking with it the last traces of his sense of direction. The buildings around him jutted in as darker night; no windows glowed, no lumen-panels broke the darkness, only the streetlights casting no illumination beyond weak puddles of light directly beneath them. A restless wind scourged the street, and the air bore the tang of dust and ozone.

  Omilov heard in the distance the confusing roar of a crowd in that uneasy state between excitement and riot. He walked toward the sound, but it receded from him.

  Finally he entered the great square before the Archonic Enclave as the crowd smashed through its gates, pursuing some sort of banner or guerdon—it was too dark to see the device emblazoned on it—that twisted in the air in front of them, ever out of reach. Douloi and Polloi alike, in finery or in rags, they scrambled through the towering doors and vanished from his sight.

  Omilov made to follow them, seeking some refuge from the strange emptiness of the streets, but the solid darkness within repelled him. Deep within the Enclave their shouts and cries sounded like the growl of some vast beast lying in wait.

  “There is no safety in there for you, Sebastian. You must take another path.”

  He turned, startled. At his side stood Nahomi il’Ngari, his superior in the Praerogacy, her gaunt features clear to his eyes in spite of the darkness. Something was missing. He had it: the blason de soleil that had been the sole adornment of her sober garb.

  Her hand strayed to her breast, then dropped to her side. “My aegicy issues from another now. Come.”

  She walked away. The set of her shoulders forbade speech. Omilov followed, the only sound the grit of their shoes in the dust underfoot.

  They encountered no other people; the buildings dwindled, giving way to open fields, the restless breeze carrying a sour tang.

  The sky flickered less frequently. After a time measured only in heartbeats and the solemn tread of their feet, an angular form took shape against the horizon, glowing with the light of first moonrise. Then Tira bulged over the distant mountains, and Omilov gasped as its magenta orb, swollen by the horizon effect, silhouetted the archaic, terrible form of a gallows. A body hung suspended from it.

  As they neared, he saw that the gallows was guarded by two Marines in battle armor, as unmoving as the deadly framework above them, their visors closed, reflective.

  Nahomi stopped. Omilov perforce stopped too and looked up at the gruesome burden, swaying slightly in the wind.

  “No!” The word was impelled from him as if by a fist in the stomach. Despite the corpse’s swollen face, its blackened, protruding tongue and glaring eyes, he recognized it: Tared hai-L’Ranja, Archon of Lusor.

  Omilov ran to the foot of the gallows, where a ladder lay on the ground. He bent and grasped its rungs, trying to heave it against the upright; a foot pinned it to the ground, bruising his fingers. He stared into Nahomi’s face.

  “You cannot help him now.”

  “Why? He was the most loyal of all!”

  No reply. Rage seized him; he turned on the nearest Marine and pounded his fists against the unyielding surface of the battle armor, shouting wordlessly. Then he stumbled back, terrified, as the Marine’s visor popped open. The armor was empty; the taint of carrion wafted out.

  Omilov began to run. He heard a harsh cry behind him, a creaking, inhuman sound, and the beat of vast wings.

  He left the fields behind, fleeing into the closeness of a dense forest of twisted trees. His breath froze white: the air was cold, bitterly cold, and the trees cried out in the crackling speech of branches split by freezing sap.

  Finally he emerged into double moonlight and the welcome sight of home: The Hollows, its marble walls and high-peaked roofs gleaming. Omilov slowed to a walk, and his breathing eased.

  He stopped. A coldness deeper than the frigid air settled in his heart. The windows of The Hollows gaped empty, lightless; the doors hung askew, and the gardens were brittle, not with the natural sleep of winter’s rest, but with the blighted death of an aborted spring.

  Omilov stumbled into the sculpture garden outside his library. Thick rime coated the limbs of the stone figures, furring their outlines into distortions of their former grace.

  And then he saw the other figures, standing here and there. He approached one and found a man encased in ice, unmoving. He bent over, peering through the blurry armor frozen on his face, and hissed in surprise. It was the Archon Srivashti, whose betrayal of the norms of power had ruined Timberwell. Omilov straightened abruptly and backed away when Srivashti’s eyes moved, his gaze a mix of mute appeal and madness.

  Something cold touched his back, stopping his retreat. He spun around, recognizing another frozen form: Semion vlith-Arkad. The ice around his body was even thicker, but his eyes, too, tracked Omilov as he moved away.

  Omilov fled toward the library, ever his refuge, and ran headlong into a third figure. The impact cracked the ice on it, thinner than the layer on the others, and the figure’s head turned.

  “Sebastian, I didn’t know,” whispered Brandon. As Omilov watched, horrified, the ice grew back over Brandon’s face and neck, crystallizing in patterns like frost on a window, immobilizing all but his eyes.

  Weeping, Omilov climbed the steps to the library and pushed open the doors, seeking safety, security, the familiar.

  The roof had fallen in, leaving the room open to the sky. The two moons peered over the jagged edges of the walls, brightly lighting the ruin within. Books littered the floor, their bindings torn, pages scattered; daggers of ice hung from every shelf, like the teeth of dragons.

  In the center of the room, miraculously spared the destruction all around, he found his carven reading stand, an opened book upon it. He looked down. It was no book he’d ever known, the pages brown with age and their edges ragged—hand cut—and printed in a font he’d never seen befo
re. It was a relic of Lost Earth.

  He bent, angling his head to see past the double shadow from the moons. The words sprang out at him.

  “Where are you damned?”

  “In hell.”

  “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?”

  “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

  Thinkest thou that I who saw the face of God,

  And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

  Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

  In being deprived of everlasting bliss?”

  Omilov jerked backward, trying to retreat, but the only result was a grating, almost musical crunch as his legs refused to move. He looked down, horrified, to see the ice creeping up his torso: he was already encased in ice from his hips down.

  He looked back at the book, as if the answer might lie there. A shadow fell across it and he gazed up into Ilara’s eyes, soft blue-gray and understanding. She closed the book firmly with one slim hand and smiled at him. He drank in the sight of her hungrily, forgetting his desperation; but then the cold settled in him even deeper as he saw the gaping wound blooming like an evil rose in the center of her chest. The ice mounted to his throat, across his chin, sealed his mouth, and finally blurred his vision of her face.

  And then Ilara touched her wound and laid her hand in the center of his chest. Warmth flared, ice shattered and fell away in musical relief.

  And she vanished, taken up in a motion so swift his eyes refused all but the direction.

  He looked up. High in the southern sky, the bright ring of Highdwellings arched up into the sunlight still denied the surface of Charvann as night retreated westward. He sustained the dizzying sense of the heavens wheeling about him, or him about the heavens, all about all, center about center, in the ceaseless dance of intention and delight that is Totality. Somewhere a voice spoke, declaiming:

  “High phantasy lost power and here broke off;

  Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,

  My will and my desire were turned by love,

  The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”