by N Lee Wood
He looked away, frustrated. “It was not intended as a threat.”
“I didn’t take it as one. Get dressed,” she said gently. He stood and retrieved his clothing, the gauzy silk dampened from the steam. Pulling the mati over his head, he kept his eyes averted from any of the watching women, his hands expertly pleating the sati around his waist, tying it off and looping the rest around his neck to let the end hang down his shoulder. He clipped it to the mati with the brooch Kallah had given him.
He followed his guards out passively, Mahdupi beside him, back to the circular room. Fewer people crowded into it now. Yronae sat before a low desk, three screens embedded in its surface. She looked up as he entered, unfocused, still locked into another world, although her eyes tracked him as he returned to the small alcove. Dhenuh was nowhere in sight. Mahdupi patted him gently on the shoulder. “When there is a need for you to know, I’ll come for you.”
As she left to speak with Yronae he settled back into the floor cushions. Someone had set up a small table, various covered dishes left on it. He lifted a lid to one, the sudden aroma of spice making his mouth water. He ate quickly, his hunger sharpened by his swim.
He fell asleep sometime later, waking only to notice that the table and empty dishes had been removed, and the light in the alcove turned down. He rolled over to look out into the circular room, not certain what had woken him. Yronae sat silently, staring up at the curved ceiling. Then he felt it: the low growl through the stone, too low to be audible but discernible enough to set his heart pounding.
He sat up, studying Yronae. He noted most of the others in the room also watched her intently. She sat as if carved in stone, listening to the bead whisper in her ear. Then she exhaled, her head lowered in relief, hands rubbing against her face. She nodded to whatever question had been asked from a distance, then spoke quietly. Even from the distance, Nathan could hear the words: alien, enigmatic, forbidden.
After several days, he had not lost his fear, but he was thoroughly bored. It had been like that during his childhood, endless periods of grinding monotony punctuated with brief terror. He worked on what he could on his reader, although he was uneasy when it wouldn’t access his library. Nor would it receive any of the news services, broadcasts being actively censored out of men’s readers. But his concentration was limited, much of his time spent watching the activity around him.
After the first few days, life had settled into a regular pattern, Yronae’s lethal household guard cycling through in shifts, those women who seemed to be coordinating whatever action was happening on the surface above staking out their own territory in the domed room. In the alcoves around the circle, women napped, including Yronae, before returning to the ethereal world built up of earbeads and shimmering scanner lenses. Mahdupi had taken to sitting on the shelf-seat nearest his alcove, although she spoke very little, either to him or to the transmitter on her throat.
He’d been halfheartedly trying to finish his translation from the ancient book when the room fell eerily silent. Alarmed, he looked up at a tableau of women frozen in place, mesmerized, as they took one synchronized indrawn gasp, their eyes wide in blanched faces.
“Oh, sweet Lady Goddess,” he heard Mahdupi murmur. Then she laughed quietly, a stricken sound.
Yronae stood slowly and removed the scanning lens from her eye, dropping it to the floor and cracking it under her foot. She picked the bead out of her ear and peeled off the throat transmitter, letting them fall carelessly from her hand. The earbead hit the floor, bouncing. Tick. Tick tick. Ticktickikikikik. It rolled under a table and vanished. No one spoke.
The pratha h’máy turned and stared at him unblinkingly. She strode toward him stiffly until she towered over him, glaring down with unfocused eyes that had nothing to do with her attention called elsewhere. His heart skipped.
“My mother, l’amae Yaenida dva Daharanan ek Qarshatha Nga’esha,” she said finally, her voice deadly calm, “was an utter mad-woman.”
He stared back at her with uncertain fear. Without another word, she turned and walked out of the circular room, the steel doors hissing shut behind her. Mahdupi held her hands together, rubbing her knuckles as if they hurt from arthritis.
“L’amae Mahdupi,” he said softly. She looked up, her expression vague. “Please...”
She took a deep, shaking breath. “The Worms.” He stared at her. “The Pilots have closed the Worms.”
“The Nga’esha?”
“Nga’esha, Changriti, Ushahayam, Hadatha . . . All of them, every single one.”
XLII
THE MURMUR OF VOICES BEGAN AGAIN, BUT YRONAE DID NOT RETURN to the circular communications room. After a few hours, Mahdupi beckoned to him, and he followed her with his omnipresent guards through the same door through which Yronae had retreated.
“Be careful what you say, Cousin,” she warned him quietly. “Our pratha h’máy is not in the best of moods.” She glanced at him. “And nothing that is said leaves that room, understood?”
“Yes, l’amae.”
A second set of double reinforced doors hissed and locked behind them before he found himself inside a small version of a woman’s apartment. Silk lace curtains stirred in the faint briny breeze through a large window, the constant motion of the sea rolling onto a black sand beach in the distance, all artificial and impeccably realistic. Quiet music played a soothing ambience, meshing perfectly with the sound of surf.
Cushions of muted colors embroidered in patterns of maroon, dark blue, silver, had been aesthetically arranged on a sleeping dais, the four pillars twisting to join at its peak. On it, Yronae lay propped against a pillow, staring dully at the synthetic vista. She wore only a sheer tasmai around her body, her hair loose over her shoulders.
As they approached, she glanced first at him, then at the household Dhikar, jerking her head slightly. They bowed and left as Mahdupi sat on the edge of the dais, taking one of Yronae’s hands as if she were a child. Yronae resumed watching the endless waves break over the ersatz sand.
Before he got halfway through his ritual bow and kneeling, she spoke without looking at him. “Come sit over here, Nathan.” He hesitated with one foot still hooked around his sati, then crossed the small distance to sit on the other side of the dais, his back to the ocean view.
“My mother called you Nathan, didn’t she?” She pronounced it Nay-teen, always and forever unable to say it correctly.
“Sometimes,” he said. “It is my name.” She stared at him, waiting. He smiled weakly. “And sometimes she called me other names less complimentary.” She didn’t respond to his feeble attempt at a joke, but Mahdupi winked at him, amused.
Yronae’s attention drifted back to the ocean scene. “What did you talk about with my mother?”
“Everything and anything, pratha h’máy. History, art, religion, sex, science, everything. Pratha Yaenida had an insatiable curiosity, and I was starved for conversation in my native language.” He faltered, glancing at Mahdupi before he added carefully, “Was there a specific subject we might have discussed that is of interest to you?”
She didn’t answer, gazing off bleakly over his shoulder. Mahdupi patted her hand and stood up, crossing to a small coffee set to place the ornate kettle on the microburner. The smell of fresh coffee made him suddenly light-headed with hunger.
He kept his hands laced together, focusing his awareness on the sound of porcelain clinking, the distant rumble of the fake ocean and placid music. When Yronae finally spoke, he started.
“I don’t know how to talk to you,” she complained, her voice bitter. She still avoided his eyes, her own haggard. “Why should I know how to talk with you?”
He said nothing, not knowing what to say to this woman, either. Mahdupi returned with two steaming cups, handing one to him silently. He took it, surprised, and watched as Yronae refused the one offered to her with an impatient flick of her hand. Unconcerned, Mahdupi sat on the dais, one leg drawn up under herself, and sipped from the small cup judiciously, th
e coffee scalding hot.
“Hostilities have been suspended,” Mahdupi told him. “Most of our people are unhurt, a handful of casualties, mostly Dhikar. We haven’t been able to assess the total damage to the House yet, but our internal security precautions survived—all data is intact.” She smiled with malicious scorn. “They seriously underestimated the Nga’esha. Vanar has no offensive capabilities, but we aren’t quite as ignorant of military technology as your Hengeli compatriots imagined, our defenses far better than they expected. Pratha Yaenida’s time spent serving in your absurd political conflicts came in handier than even we anticipated.” She gestured vaguely at the room. “When she had this shelter built the first year she was pratha h’máy, we all thought she was crazy. Her crazy idea for Sukrah Station made us rich, and it seems yet another of her crazy ideas has saved our lives. She knew from experience just exactly the sort of destruction it had to withstand.”
His skin prickled. “Hengeli?”
“Mm,” Mahdupi affirmed mildly. “Blowing up houses any idiot can do. Blowing them up without destroying the valuables inside you want to loot? Not quite so easy.”
The pratha h’máy was still preoccupied by the artificial seascape, ignoring them.
“But we were still very lucky, little brother. If the ambassador’s aide had not tipped her hand, it might have been too late.”
“I don’t understand, l’amae. Why would either the Changriti or the Hengeli attack the Nga’esha?”
Mahdupi frowned at him disapprovingly, but shrugged. “Sukrah Station is a vital link between many of the Hengeli worlds and those accessible through the Changriti Worm. It’s ours. We built it, we financed it, we maintain it. It gives us a monopoly the Changriti have long objected to. It has taken many decades of careful mediation with contracts and concessions to keep the balance as fair as possible between all the Families without significant loss of revenues to our own. I won’t go into the details. Family business affairs are far more complicated than you would be capable of understanding.”
Naturally, he thought sourly.
“However, one of the compromises reached was that while every Family maintains their own household Dhikar protection, all Station and Vanar security is overseen by the Changriti, and the Dhikar Qsayati appointed by Eraelin herself. Which is how the Hengeli knew about your daughter.” Mahdupi smiled dryly. “Ruuspoelk inadvertently gave us that first thread. Pull on one and it all begins to unravel.” Her smile vanished. “We haven’t untangled everything yet, but it seems the Dhikar credibility has been severely tarnished.”
“Dhikar?” Nathan said. He glanced around, remembering Yronae had dismissed them all. “I thought—”
“They were incorruptible?”
Yronae choked a bitter laugh, and muttered to herself, “No one is incorruptible anymore, it seems.”
“But I have nothing to do with any of this. Why is anyone after me?”
“Because someone on Sukrah Station reported to Pratha Eraelin that you were a plant our late pratha h’máy had arranged to marry into the Changriti Family in order to pass on information about them to us and our so-called ‘allies,’ the Hengeli. When Pratha Yronae included you in the talks yesterday, that only served to confirm her suspicion.”
Nathan’s mind seemed to function too sluggishly. “Wait, wait...” he said in dawning anger. “They think I’m a spy? The Changriti believe I was spying for the Hengeli? But that’s impossible ...”
Mahdupi waved his outrage away nonchalantly. “A thousand inquiries to prove it otherwise would never change Eraelin Changriti’s fear of the outside. The Changriti strategy to undermine our security in order to take over Sukrah Station was going much too slow for the Hengeli. When negotiations with the Nga’esha looked unfeasible, they were about to offer to expose the Changriti conspiracy. Fortunately, our intelligence, like our defenses, isn’t that ineffectual.” She grinned fleetingly, ruthless. “We figured it out before we had to pay for the information. That left the Hengeli only one option. Eraelin, or someone representing her, accepted the off-worlders’ offer to help her cover her tracks and destroy any incriminating evidence. But I suspect the Changriti misunderstood the scale of violence your people are capable of. The damage to our property has been extensive. If it had not been for our Pilots, there might not be a House still standing above us. And we might not be here talking about it.”
“Our liberators,” Yronae growled under her breath.
“In any case, with the Worms closed, the Hengeli can’t go on to Novapolita or back where they came from, and they certainly aren’t going to be welcomed downside. So they’re just as stuck as we are, waiting to see what happens, only their cages are less comfortable than our own.”
“That’s good... right?”
Yronae inhaled a deep, ragged breath. “They can outwait us,” she said.
“Who, the Hengeli, l’amae?” he asked after a moment of silence. She wrenched her gaze from the scene behind him, eyes dark with anger. “No. Your devoted friends, the Pilots.”
He glanced helplessly at Mahdupi, gaining only raised eyebrows and a taciturn shrug in return. She sipped her coffee.
“What do they want?” he asked.
Yronae laughed softly. “Only the death of Vanar.”
He blinked. Before he could speak, Mahdupi had frowned. “Yronae—”
She turned her baleful expression on Mahdupi. “What else would you call it, then?” she cut the older woman off sharply.
“An exaggeration,” Mahdupi responded mildly.
Yronae snorted, and glared at him. “We must give you your freedom, allow you to leave Vanar.”
“You offered that already. I refused. Surely they must know that, pratha h’máy.”
“Not just you, Nathan. Anyone,” she said thickly. “Including all our Pilot bloodline males, any who wish to leave Vanar.”
His head reeled. Anyone.
“This will never happen,” she said sharply. “We will destroy all the Pilot males before that happens, every last one of them. Without their males, it will not matter how long they wait, they’ll eventually die. We can survive on Vanar for all the generations it takes to wait, and once the last of them are dead, we’ll create new Pilots.” He said nothing, staring at her in disbelief. She laughed harshly, almost hysterical. “We created them once, we can do so again.”
Mahdupi cleared her throat, examining the back of her hands as if to read portents in the traces of veins under the sun-baked skin. “Unfortunately,” she said, her tone casual, “the ‘we’ you are speaking about is not, at least at the moment, unanimous. Others of the Nine Families are displeased over the prospect of long-term lost revenues. And the Changriti are not alone in their claim that since Pratha Yaenida’s irregular acquisition is at the root of this unhappy turn of events, the Nga’esha should be liable for any deficits.”
“They had their voice at Council!” Yronae shouted at her, sitting upright, her rigid body trembling. “They voted with the rest, so are as much responsible for him being here as the Nga’esha.” She thrust a finger at him.
“Your mother—” Mahdupi began.
“Shut up!” Yronae screamed, her hands balling into fists. “You will not say one more word, Mahdupi, not one!” Nathan flinched, certain she was about to strike either him or Mahdupi. The older woman remained unafraid, well within Yronae’s reach.
Yronae was breathing hard, her nostrils flaring. “Be glad Yaenida is dead,” she said, more quietly, “because if she were still alive, I think I would strangle her myself.” Pulling the tasmai around her shoulders with angry jerks, she leapt from the dais, pacing the room like an enraged leopard.
“What could she have been thinking of? Not the Family, certainly not the honor and welfare of the Nga’esha. Willful, selfish, stupid, thoughtless bitch.”
Nathan’s hand holding the coffee trembled hard enough to spill hot liquid onto his fingers. Quickly, he put down the cup and sucked the spilled coffee from his skin. He looked up, hand still
in his mouth, meeting Yronae’s spiteful glare.
“The instant she was dead, I should have had you stuffed back into a whitewomb and left you there to rot,” she said softly, chilling him.
Mahdupi sighed dramatically, breaking the tension. “Are you finished with your tantrum yet, child?”
To his surprise, Yronae closed her eyes, her shoulders slumping. “Quite,” she said softly.
“Feel better now?” “Infinitely.”
“Always healthy to have a good screaming temper once in a while, so long as it’s kept private.” Mahdupi glanced at Nathan, smiling tightly. “And now that you’ve indulged yourself with a delightfully gratifying sulk, Yronae, it’s time to face the problem.”
Yronae sat back down on the dais and swept the mass of loose hair back from her face, fingers raking her scalp. “The terms are totally unacceptable, as they well know,” she said directly to Nathan, her voice calm, businesslike. “We will be expected, of course, to offer a counterproposal.”
“What sort of proposal, pratha h’máy?” His own voice shook. “First, allowing our male Pilots to leave Vanar is out of the question. They would have precious little opportunity to enjoy their so-called freedom before they were seized and exploited by potential off-world competitors.” Her tone was brisk, pragmatic. “Second, I will not permit you to go anywhere outside the Family jurisdiction. You would be murdered inside an hour.”
“What exactly, then, would you be offering them, Yronae?” Mahdupi asked wryly.
“We’ll offer a share of the revenue income.”
“Which they have little use for,” Mahdupi said, earning a glare. “More control over their own reproduction,” Yronae continued. “Another useless offer,” the older woman said, pouring herself another cup of the strong, thick coffee. “They can’t leave the Worm long enough, and the boys can’t survive there.”
“And his safety,” she answered, ignoring Mahdupi as she studied him, her eyes narrowed. “He can’t stay here, and we haven’t had complete reports on how badly Dravyam has been hit. Have Calidris Station evacuated, and all personnel completely replaced with Nga’esha Dhikar.”
