“This way,” Lisinthir said. “We’re expected.” And led them outside, where the cedar scent of that forest struck Jahir like a blow, wafted to him on a cool breeze that blew in perfect contrast to the warmth of the artificial sun on his shoulders. He couldn’t imagine what sort of lesson Lisinthir had arranged for them that would require this, but it could hardly be a durance…!
“Are we meeting a teacher, then?” he asked, drawing abreast of his cousin.
“I’m afraid it’s just the two of us,” Lisinthir said. “And we’re doing nothing more strenuous than going out into the day to enjoy the weather.”
“And this will somehow contrive to teach us about our new capabilities.”
Lisinthir grinned again. “How skeptical you sound, cousin!”
“And I should know better than to question you by now?”
“No, not at all. I love that you question me. I find cowed people far less interesting.”
“If we have no teacher, then by whom are we expected?”
“By that Asanii there, in that office.”
That office was a small building adjacent to the larger lodge, in the same sleek wood-and-glass style. It was large enough only for the single office inside it, though a luxurious office it certainly was, and there was a curious flattop alongside it. If Jahir had thought Pads could be built to the size of a suite, he would have guessed it to be the same material.
There was no sign hanging above the door. Only a plaque with a silver horseshoe bisected by a thinned spiral flame he didn’t recognize.
The felid stepped outside at their approach and waited with all the patience of an extremely well-paid professional. Everything in her bearing implied the exclusivity of her clientele, and she wore her sleek silver tunic like the livery it apparently was.
“Lord Nase Galare,” she said. “I have your keys for you in the paddock.”
“Excellent, thank you.”
“Will you require my services?”
“No, I can make my cousin’s adjustments.”
The woman did not so much as glance at Jahir, and her supreme self-control impressed. Most people would have wanted to stare at an Eldritch, much less two, and related. But all she said was, “Enjoy your ride, aletsen.”
“We will, thank you.”
“Our what?” Jahir murmured, following Lisinthir toward the flattop.
“Our ride. That was a representative of the Maven Herd, which I am guessing you have never heard of before today because I haven’t either.” Lisinthir grinned at him and shook back the hair the breeze had blown over his brow. “And we shall be riding their product.”
“Their… product,” Jahir repeated, dubious.
“I’ve examined it, and I assure you, it’s worth the money. Or my cursory examination suggested so, anyways.” Lisinthir found a post and examined the bands depending from a hook on its apex, one blue, one multicolored. “And here are our mounts.”
“You have not found us solidigraphic horses,” Jahir said, dismayed. “I’ve ridden solidigraphic horses, cousin. They are nothing like the real creature.”
“Most aren’t, no. But these are apparently the finest solidigraphic horses in all the Alliance.” Lisinthir tossed him one of the bands, which he caught by reflex. “That one is yours. Over your wrist, cousin.”
Resigned, Jahir slid it over his left wrist and watched it tighten to conform to his skin. It was blue and purple in cloudy patterns, but narrow enough to be unobtrusive and flexible enough not to cut. “I would hate to suggest this will be an unsatisfactory way to spend the morning….”
“Which you are, anyway—”
“But you probably will be disappointed.”
Lisinthir shook his head. “Cousin, cousin. Look at the sky. Feel the wind on your back. Breathe—” He inhaled, face tilted upward. “And tell me it matters if these creatures end up being digital nags.”
Jahir paused, and chuckled. “Point taken.”
“Good. Maven Herd, arrive!”
Two horses shimmered into sight, and what small hope Jahir had been treasuring on his cousin’s behalf vanished at the sight of them. “God and Lady, surely not.”
Lisinthir laughed. “The look on your face, Galare! Go on, then. The starfield one is yours.” A twinkle of irrepressible humor, then. “His name is Nebula.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Jahir replied dryly, and approached the frozen shape of his steed. He admitted it had a noble enough conformation… certainly more of a paragon than any horse he’d had at home, given the weakness of the Eldritch horse strains. But it was almost seventeen hands of cobalt blue and deepest purple, and the gaseous patterns on its flanks were actually moving, revealing pinprick stars of dim red and silver. What he’d taken for soft feathering at its fetlocks were actually streams of cloudy vapor. “Nebula,” he said, repressive. “My, I can’t imagine where they found the name.”
“It is less mysterious than mine, at least.” Lisinthir walked to his mount, which was two hands shorter than Jahir’s and far more compact in build, but just as beautifully proportioned and sporting an equally unnatural coloration. A black with a noticeably green sheen, particularly near the extremities, and across its buttocks a white blanket spattered with unlikely splotches of emerald, red, blue, yellow, black… colors that ran in streaks down its hindquarters as if the paint hadn’t dried in time. “My mount is Jackson Pollock, if you will.”
“I will if I must.” Jahir looked up the long way to his creature’s back and sighed. Starbase Veta had solidigraphic horses, but they were disappointing simulacra without the vagaries and personalities of real animals. One session had been sufficient to put him off the idea of maintaining his proficiency in the saddle. He was out of practice riding now, and he knew very well that the muscles developed while swimming would not save him from the atrophy of those particular to riding. Ruefully, he pulled himself into the saddle…
…and the horse woke beneath him with shiver, and suddenly there was a creature beneath him, a warm and responsive creature, and when he shifted in the saddle it gave every appearance of paying attention to his center of balance and his confidence level. He was so startled, in fact, that the solidigraph sidestepped beneath him, as if concerned he might take a tumble. “Good God!”
“Yes,” Lisinthir said, amused. “That was my feeling when I rode Jackson in front of the office this morning.” He patted Nebula’s uncanny shoulder and ignored the nose that came around to nudge him. “Up with the knee, cousin, and let’s adjust the stirrups.”
Nebula calmed under him as instincts he’d forgotten decades ago returned. Jahir watched Lisinthir let out the stirrups, bemused. The horse, he thought, was considering them both with every appearance of benevolent curiosity. “That’s good on that side, thank you.”
Lisinthir walked around the horse’s head to the other side and began anew. “I asked them to find you a reliable mount. Not too frisky. Does he feel steady to you?”
“Now that I’m no longer lurching in the saddle like a drunkard.” Jahir pet the horse’s neck before he remembered the horse wasn’t real. “I admit to astonishment.”
“The maven of the Maven Herd is apparently a human equestrian with a passion for horseflesh and programming. Every horse is a hand-designed individual, constructed in much the same fashion Alliance D-pers are.”
Jahir eyed him, torn between skepticism and awe. “Digital personalities are rare, complex, and expensive to create.”
“So much so that there aren’t many of them, yes? Apparently there aren’t many Maven horses, either, and paying for their licensure is quite expensive. Alpha has a license for several individuals, but it is apparently one of only three starbases in the Alliance that does.” He grinned. “Fortunately for us. You are solid in the saddle now?”
Jahir shifted: hips, knees, ankles. He flinched before resigning himself to the inevitable. Between his cousin’s attentions and their afternoon ‘adventure’ he would be nothing but a series of aches by the time nightfa
ll came, and God and Lady knew what Lisinthir had planned for their evening. “I am steady now, thank you.”
“Good,” Lisinthir said, and crossed to his smaller horse. With a creak of leather he was up himself, gathering the reins, and when the paint-spattered mount woke, it was far less patient than its solidigraphic herdmate. Lisinthir rode, Jahir noted, with the focused ease of someone who lived very deeply in his body. He would have thought it breathtaking before. Now it was also erotic. How had he not noticed?
“Shall we try one of the forest trails?” his cousin asked.
“After you,” Jahir said, forcing himself to concentrate.
The day was already idyllic; once they crossed into the forest, it became sublime. The rustle of the leaves overhead, the shifting patterns of sunlight, of coolth and warmth on his head and arms, the steady rhythm of his astonishingly convincing solidigraphic mount… even the woods themselves seemed perfect, predominantly tall trees with little underbrush to foul the horses, but owning a sufficiency of rills and rumpled folds and naps in the earth to make the ride engaging.
“So,” he said at last. “This is contributing to our lesson how?”
Lisinthir looked up at the canopy. “By allowing me the opportunity to ask your advice on the proper use of these new talents.”
Surprised, Jahir guided his mount alongside his cousin’s. “I’m not sure why you would want it, given how I reacted to our revelation.”
“Who else shall I ask?” Lisinthir said. He smiled a little. “You are a xenotherapist, are you not?”
“But not a priest.”
“And we are so near to any priest I might consult.” Lisinthir shook his head. “No, you are what you are. That was good enough for me on the courier, and it is good enough for me now. So tell me, cousin. I am trying to convince myself that using this ability to stop someone’s heart is somehow less moral than using an arrow, a sword, or a palmer. I am failing, though. There surely is such a reason, isn’t there?”
“I would think,” Jahir said.
“So would I. And yet I cannot find one.”
Tempting to riposte with some flippant response, and yet it was a valid question, one that, now that Jahir considered it, had no simple answer after all. So he offered first, carefully, “Perhaps we should ask first whether it is necessary.”
“To go to war with people who would kill, enslave, and annex us?” Lisinthir cocked a brow at him.
That, at least, he could answer without qualm. “No. It is our duty to defend ourselves and our homes. The question is whether we should respond to war with potential atrocity.”
Jahir had expected a swift parry; receiving none, he glanced at his cousin and was startled at the grimness of his countenance.
“You have not seen it, I imagine,” Lisinthir said, low. “The recordings of the carnage that happens on the border worlds when the serious raids descend.”
“No,” Jahir admitted, surprised.
Lisinthir looked at him and Jahir’s breath caught in his chest at the rage and the anguish that flickered there, visible and then gone so swiftly behind the mask of his cousin’s self-discipline.
“It’s bad,” he surmised.
“They have already perpetrated atrocity,” Lisinthir said, switching to their language so he could shroud every individual word in the black mode. “No. I do not at all cavil at the thought of turning this weapon against them. That is why I must ask again whether to do so is immoral. If I am missing something in my zeal.”
Sobered by the exchange, Jahir said nothing for a time, letting the warmth of the sun and the scent of the duff soothe them both. At last, he said, “Some would say if kill one must, then it should be with the least cruelty possible.”
“We stray now into imponderables. One man might prefer a moment of blinding pain and then nothing—another would rather a long, wretched death from infection. Most would prefer not to die at all, at which point I’d think commanding someone’s heart to stop beating would be less of a cruelty than bleeding to death from a gut wound,” Lisinthir said. “Have you seen someone die from blunt trauma?”
“I have worked in hospitals,” Jahir said, low.
“Then you know.”
He had not worked for long in urgent care, but he hadn’t needed to. “I do, yes. But there are weapons that kill cleanly—”
“Even the best-designed weapon can still inflict a glancing blow,” Lisinthir said. “No. Tell me a better reason why the exercise of this talent to defend our homeland and our people would be unethical.”
Jahir urged his horse over a folded ravine; the seat came back to him, at least, though his legs were no longer accustomed to holding him so easily above the saddle. He heard Lisinthir’s horse hop after him and they resumed their amble. “Perhaps,” he said, “because it cannot be defended against.”
Lisinthir snorted. “You have not met Alliance snipers, then. A palmer from several hundred feet away? You die, unless God loves you.”
“Point taken.” He thought of using his own… talent… in an offensive capacity. “Then mayhap it’s wrong because it’s barbaric. There is a basic dignity all creatures are owed, and one imagines control of one’s own body and thoughts is part of that. To have that stripped from you is monstrous. Maybe even an offense against God and Goddess.”
“Any more offensive than stripping the life from that child of God?” Lisinthir asked. He sighed. “I am not intending to be obstreperous, cousin. But there is a great deal at stake in front of us. I would like my soul to remain as clean as I can keep it, but the truth is that I have killed people, not just to preserve us, though it did, and not just to free slaves, which it did, but out of anger and a desire for vengeance. And those deaths were not cleaner than one I could obtain by claiming a victim from across the room by stopping his heart.”
“Or by shock,” Jahir murmured. He saw his cousin’s glance from the corner of his eye and said, “People do survive heart attacks. Massive anaphylactic shock may be more certain a death. Aneurysms might suffice as well, if you could learn to pop blood vessels. Or clot them. Though all these ends are terrifying and painful, they have a better chance of being over more quickly.”
Lisinthir barked a laugh. “You would be far more dangerous with this talent than I shall be!”
“Maybe that’s why you have it, and not I.” Jahir sighed. “I can’t think of a use for my talent that does not involve the invasion of privacy, or spiritual voyeurism.”
It surprised him when his cousin had no ready reply, given his cousin’s usual response to anything that bordered self-pity… or self-flagellation. Jahir was about to say something to that effect when Lisinthir rolled his shoulders and said, “Do you trust me, cousin?”
It seemed a strange thing to ask, and a stranger thing to realize that there was only one answer, one that bypassed all rational thought. He simply knew it, the way he knew Vasiht’h loved him, and the God and Lady did. He shaded the words white for truth. “Yes. Always.”
Lisinthir seemed to receive his reply with the solemnity the words deserved. They rode in a cocoon of quiet.
And then his cousin flashed him a grin. “Good. Then I believe it is time for our afternoon’s entertainment.”
“Our…what?”
“Our entertainment. In which, cousin, I give you the task of catching me. Keep up if you can, Galare! YA!”
Nebula shied as the paint lunged forward, showing them the spattered blanket, his heels, and a streaming tail, and then Lisinthir was out of reach and dwindling quickly.
Jahir mastered his shock and sent his own mount lurching in its herdmate’s wake, and only when the horse had stretched into a gallop did he wonder what he was doing. The terrain had been fine for a ramble, but the headlong pace Lisinthir had set was insane. Could a solidigraphic horse break a leg? Even if it couldn’t, a real man could break his back falling off of one!
Nor, he realized, was he anywhere near Lisinthir’s equal as a rider. His cousin pulled steadily ahead of him, and t
he smaller horse seemed to pour over obstacles and up embankments, threaded trees as if blessed with a cat’s spine, and on the few straight courses showed speed to shame a stooping falcon. Merely keeping them in sight was exercising Jahir harder than he’d ever ridden, and it was too difficult to split his attention between the terrain and their quarry. If Nebula had been a real horse, he might have trusted it not to run into a tree. But a solidigraph, no matter how clever? He couldn’t possibly take the chance. He fell further and further behind, cursing his cousin’s suicidal dash. What was he thinking, taking such risks? And yet—God and Lady!—how magnificent he was! Slow down! he thought, and also, Go on! Go free!
Some part of him yearned to have that total trust in his own perception. To be, briefly, as puissant as his cousin, whose abilities allowed him to navigate unfamiliar and uneven ground at breakneck speed without flinching. No matter his steed’s superior size and stride, there was no winning this without Lisinthir’s supernal skills. Jahir concentrated merely on not losing sight of him through the trees, on the heat of the animal beneath him, on the shock against his seat as they scrabbled down another ravine and up it again, the raw effort of it, all of it became him, and he reached—
Reached—
He was not aware of the connection at first, but there was a taste in his mouth like wine, and he found he wanted to laugh. And then he twitched Nebula around the flaw in the terrain before he saw it. Another obstacle: again surmounted, hands and legs confident. The knowledge came faster and faster, until he found himself riding hard at Lisinthir’s flank and there was nothing in him anymore but the communion, the one that wedded him to the earth and the beast and the man who made their headlong flight possible. Lisinthir was steering them both as if they were one body.
It was impossibly dangerous, insane. It was exhilarating. It was perfection.
Amulet Rampant Page 13
