by R. M. Meluch
The others thought he’d been poisoned.
Layla didn’t know what had happened or how, but she knew who. She turned on Hall. “What did you do to him? You did something!”
Hall opened his arms with an exaggerated shrug to say, Who, me? But his crescent eyes were merry, the sinuous lines of his beautiful wedge-shaped face upswept in barely contained glee.
A guttural cry came from the next room, and a crash and sounds of things being thrown and broken.
Hall had rearranged the cave.
With a groan, Alihahd hurled all the reordered jars against the walls and threw the twice-folded covers onto the floor.
Amerika and Vaslav cringed together at the table in the other room like children whose father was not well. They stared about them, their round eyes begging someone to make everything all right again.
Hall sat himself at the table, satisfied, and took up his pipe.
Alihahd returned, shaken, stiff, his face long and frowning, bloodless. He sat at the table. He clasped his big hands on the table, knuckles white, his back erect, teeth clenched, a muscle twisting over his jaw, eyelids stretched white around staring eyes, looking at no one. A muscle twitched under his eye.
He did not speak again until the days of the Witch Shandee were over.
• • •
The days of restraint enshrouded the Aerie, a somber time when the splendid warrior-priests, like drab birds in molt, put away their beautiful clothes for the thirteen days between the leaving of Shandee and New Year’s Day. The air was calm. Warm breath still showed in frosty clouds, but the ice on the sunlit slopes was melting at last. Spring had already arrived on the middle slopes in a haze of blue buds on the trees.
Harrison slogged along a path sodden with spring mud and snowmelt. Leathery green shoots of emerald spikes braved the weather and poked through the ice on either side. He felt a cold trickle on his instep and knew that his old boots were finally done for. He turned his foot to find the crack in the thinned sole.
He heard a strange sound. His ear was attuned to patterns by now, and this one was not usual. He straightened and drew his gun from his belt.
As he crested the top, he relaxed and lowered his gun. Alihahd was clad in his red Chesite tunic and red boots. Hall was forming a comment about Alihahd’s bony knees being the first sure sign of spring, but he perceived something wrong. Alihahd was smiling. Smiling wrong. Alihahd leaned against the rock face, shiny-eyed and wryly whimsical. His hands flopped strenghthlessly. Footprints in the slushy snow behind him wove on and off the path.
Hall pushed his gun into his belt and stepped down to take Alihahd’s head in his hands. He looked into his eyes, searching for signs of fever. “What is wrong with you?” he demanded. Then he got a whiff of his breath.
Alihahd smiled. His hands moved elegantly, almost in caricature of himself. His eyes were pale, drowned sapphires. “Mr. Hall, I am drunk.”
Hall’s face darkened, and he pushed Alihahd’s face aside—the motion was disgust—and he stalked past him in the direction from which Alihahd had come. Hall’s head turned left and right with the sharp motions of anger—and searching.
Alihahd scrambled after him. His own blundering foot tracks blazoned a conspicuous trail, and Hall would surely find what he sought.
Alihahd drew himself up on a rocky bluff and thundered at Hall’s back in the most commanding voice he could muster. “Mr. Hall.”
Alihahd had once been a magnificent man and could still summon power, even drunk. Most of the orders he’d given in the past ten years had been issued in varying states of insobriety, and he still had the voice of absolute command.
“Stop! This is no concern of yours!”
With insistence, his dignity slipped a degree. He took a step forward from the rise and immediately felt his vulnerability increase. “Mr. Hall!”
Hall ignored him and strode away. As he neared his hidden goal, Alihahd became shrill and frantic. He stumbled after Hall. “Mr. Hall! This is none of your affair!”
“I am my brother’s keeper,” Hall said. “As the Na′id would say.”
Alihahd scowled blackly.
Hall found the distillery behind a spreading thorn bush, and Alihahd lunged to put himself between Hall and his lifeline. He spoke in a deep, cultured, angry tremolo, each word precise, if thick. “Leave. Me. Alone.”
Hall started forward. Alihahd laid hands on him to restrain him. But at the height of his strength, Alihahd had never been a match for Harrison White Fox Hall. Alihahd felt a shift of balance and a sudden helplessness. Why is he doing this to me?
Hall threw Alihahd to the ground. He marched up to the still, ripped out the condenser tube, and threw it at Alihahd as if onto a pile of rubbish. His driving heel came down on the soft copper still pot. Honey water gushed out over the coals. Hall kicked and scattered the painfully collected stack of firewood, and smashed all the clay jars of mead on the rocks.
Alihahd stood up, indignant. “Who do you presume to be? See the lord and master of Eridani. Thou art lord and master of nothing. And not of me!”
Hall rounded on Alihahd and gave him a slap that staggered him. His brain seemed to ricochet inside his skull. Alihahd tasted blood. And he fought, tried to. Alihahd’s blows landed uselessly, or did not land at all. Then Hall’s fist drove into Alihahd’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, and Alihahd crumpled to the ground. Hall picked him up and set him on his feet. Alihahd leaned on him, gasping. Alihahd lifted his head and in the next breath cursed Hall. Hall hit him again, harder, in the same place. Alihahd dropped, doubled over, sick and in pain up to his eyes. Hall stood over him, hands in fists, waiting for Alihahd to get up.
Alihahd crawled to his feet. Hall steadied him, then hit him with his open palm. And kept hitting him after Alihahd ceased to fight. The blows kept falling, and Alihahd could only wonder why.
And he cried, great drunken teardrops rolling down his sunken cheeks.
The blows stopped, and Hall hauled him to an icy steam and made him kneel. “Look at yourself.” Hall forced his head down over a reflecting pool. Alihahd resisted with a groan, trying to turn away, but Hall’s hands were like a vise holding him over the sotted, blubbering face in the pool.
Alihahd slapped the water with a cry, “I am trying not to!”
After a useless scuffle in the streamside mud, Alihahd was pulled to the rapids. Hall grabbed a fistful of blond hair and pushed Alihahd’s head under the icy cataract.
Alihahd’s hands scrabbled behind his head at Hall’s fingers. Frigid water filled his ears, and sounds were suddenly muffled and singing, otherworldly, like death.
Alihahd was afraid that Hall was trying to drown him. But Hall let him up for air, then pushed him under again.
After the fourth time, Hall pulled Alihahd up by the hair to a kneeling position and searched his red face. Alihahd’s eyes were shut and spilling hot tears. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
“Shut up and breathe, or you’ll be sorry.”
Alihahd breathed.
Hall could tell when Alihahd began to sober up. He stopped whimpering in between dunkings. Hall released him and crouched back on his heels.
Alihahd, on hands and knees, hung his head forward, water streaming down his face from his hair. “I don’t like you at all,” he croaked.
Hall smiled.
Alihahd knelt looking up, teeth chattering, his face scarlet, his tunic soaked darker red down the front. Water drained from his ears and he could hear clearly again. He felt the cold air as if it were blowing through his head. He brought his fingers to his eyes that felt too big for their sockets. “Oh.”
“Have you never been in battle, Captain?” Hall asked.
Alihahd answered shakily, “Of course.”
“Jerusalem,” Hall said.
“I was there,” Alihahd said. “If you must know, I
ran.”
Hall let go of Alihahd with a bark of gleeful surprise. “You deserted!”
“I left,” Alihahd said. He put his hand over his eyes. “You’re a sadist.”
“No, I’m not,” Hall said. Then, “Just a little.” He helped Alihahd to his feet, like helping up a grimacing doll of wood and rags. Alihahd brushed off the pebbles embedded in his purpled knees.
Hall was looking at the sky. “I think it’s time to get dried and presentable, Captain.”
Alihahd lifted his head in a mute question. Why?
Hall pointed up.
Alihahd narrowed his too-big eyes at the daylight sky, and emotion rushed with sober clarity.
A slow-falling star.
• • •
A spaceship descended and sank into the layer of cloud that hung over the valley.
Alihahd went to the Chamber of the Golden Dome to be there when Roniva received her returning warriors.
Alihahd’s hair, newly dried, kicked up in wispy cowlicks. He had changed clothes. He wore a dry gray tunic and sandals. His eyes were red and puffed, his face sporting bruises of all colors.
Roniva spoke to him directly. “Art thou ill?”
“He’s fine,” Harrison Hall said.
Alihahd’s teeth clamped tight, and he stood rigid in silence.
Roniva appeared a harsh figure without jewels or soft colors. She wore a dark green robe. Her hair was confined atop her head. She beckoned Alihahd to her with a ringless hand, and he moved around the low lattice barrier onto the dais with her. She took his arm and made him stand beside her throne. “Stay thee here with me. I shall speak through thee.”
And when two strange warrior-priests entered and greeted her, she said to Alihahd, “Ask my warriors why they return after a single year. What is wrong?”
In answer, the travelers unfolded a long tale of a series of mysterious attacks on Na′id installations. Reports of a man with a sword and a hawk, who left many dead behind him. The warriors had been following the deadly trail, site to site, but could not catch up with the assassin.
As Roniva listened, her face smoothed in slow-growing shock and dread, then hardened into eaglelike planes. Her long fingers closed around her sword hilt and tightened until her midnight skin paled.
Her warriors opened their arms, powerless in the face of an unacceptable conclusion. “An Itiri.”
“A Wolf,” Roniva said. “A wolf that walks like a man.”
“We would stop him,” said one warrior-priest. “But we know not where he is now or whither he will go.”
“Has Omonia Station been hit?” Alihahd asked.
Roniva’s head turned sharply toward him. Her voice was speaking without her. Roniva looked again to her warriors and bid with voiceless command in her burning onyx eyes: Answer that.
The warriors exchanged doubtful looks. “Omonia? Not that we have heard.”
Roniva tilted her dark head up to Alihahd, her intermediary who spoke with a mind of his own. “This is significant?” she asked.
“I think so, Fendi,” Alihahd said. “There is a pattern to the attacks as they’ve been reported.”
“What pattern?”
“They follow a path a conscript of the Na′id might take from first capture to final assignment. First to a conscription force base for classification. Then to a reloc center and orientation camp. Then to a training center like Alpha 4. All of Alpha 4’s trainees begin service in Omonia Station. If the pattern holds, Omonia is where Ben will go next.”
“Ben is dead,” Roniva said.
“Call him what you like, he will attack Omonia Station,” Alihahd said. He was peripherally aware of tawny eyes studying him from a shadowed corner of the Great Chamber. Harrison Hall watched him talk to Roniva as an equal, a contradiction of the sniveling human wreck at the streamside.
“Tell my warriors to take a ship and stop him,” Roniva said. “Take Topaz. Thou shalt guide them.” Her face softened and she gazed up from her throne at Alihahd’s bruised face and red-shot blue eyes. She reached up to touch Alihahd’s chest. “And I fear I shall lose thee once I let thee aboard one of my spaceships, thou so restless to be gone.”
“I shall not return if I have any choice,” Alihahd admitted.
“Then I bid thee, once thou art free, leave us lost to humankind, if thou carryest any memory from this Aerie. Bring us no human war.”
“It may be too late for that, Fendi,” Alihahd said, thinking of Ben-Tairre loose on the Empire, even now on his way to Omonia Station.
“This I fear,” Roniva said. She did not look frightened. “Go now.”
“Fendi.” Alihahd bowed. He turned away in a forceful motion and took long strides to the archway, on fire with mission, freedom, and command. The Itiri warriors fell into step behind him. His sinister shadow, Harrison White Fox Hall, appeared at his flank. Alihahd swept out of the nine-sided chamber into sunlight.
He could not believe he was free. He was actually leaving this alien world after all this time.
He found himself oddly reluctant.
PART FOUR:
True Colors
15. Rogue Wolf
AS THE SPACESHIP TOPAZ broke through the ceiling of clouds into bright sunlight, Alihahd glimpsed the twin mountain crest of the Aerie gleaming with ice-glazed brilliance in the snowy sea of vapor. The ship quickened its ascent, and the great mountain became small, then lost entirely. The atmosphere thinned, cleared to black, and the Topaz was in space.
With his hand pressed to the viewport, Alihahd watched the blue world dwindle. With a jump to faster-than-light, it was all gone.
He was overcome with sudden déjà vu—the depressing sameness of starships, the isolation of faster-than-light. The familiarity of it overwhelmed. He had for so much of his life been a nomad living onboard one ship or another that coming back to this life was like never leaving it. The short year on Iry was reduced to a dream, as if it had never happened.
He was free at last. Why was he feeling so ill?
He knew what was waiting for him. He wished to anyone’s god that Hall had not destroyed his hard-made mead.
He glowered aside at Hall, who lounged easily in the next seat, his feet up on an unoccupied seat across from him. He was puffing Iry weeds in his one-eyed fox-head pipe. He wore his bandana gypsy-fashion. His teeth flashed white in his dark bronze face.
Alihahd wore Na′id type clothing that Amerika had made for him at his instruction. She’d expressed a liking for the design. Hall had told her to bite her tongue.
There were four Itiri warrior-priests aboard Topaz along with Alihahd, Hall, Vaslav, and Layla. They had a plan to intercept Ben at Omonia Station, take him back to Iry, and leave Alihahd behind on Omonia under one of his many Na′id guises. An elaborate plan, full of contingencies, it left all kinds of openings to go wrong.
Things went wrong before it had even begun.
Topaz sublighted for its approach to the space station and arrived to silence.
The great polymer triple torus of the station turned in the sunless void, dark as if deserted, without ships coming or going, without radio chatter, without signals of any kind.
There was no question of what had happened. It was only left to wonder if anyone was yet alive on Omonia and if Ben was still there.
The Itiri ship Topaz attached itself to a station lock and sealed the passage. Topaz’s lock opened. Omonia’s lock remained closed against them. The Itiri were about to blast it with their taebens when Alihahd motioned them aside. “Don’t do that.”
“Canst thou open it?” the eldest warrior asked.
Alihahd moved to the manual access panel at the side of the lock, keyed in an imperative code, then crouched before the sensor and waited for his retina to be scanned. “I can open any lock in the Empire,” he said. They were in Alihahd’s territory now. Na′id ship
s were a world he knew.
Harrison Hall came to crouch at his side, his gun drawn and resting across his muscular thighs. “How about the Bel’s door?” Hall said. It was supposed to be a joke.
“You want to see the Bel?” Alihahd said very softly and without humor. It was flat affirmative.
Surprise rippled Hall’s perennial nonchalance. That level of infiltration into the Na′id security system was beyond belief. That kind of clearance simply could not fall into the hands of an imposter.
Omonia’s lock spun in answer to the imperative, and it released. The outer iris dilated. The lead warrior gave the inner hatch a push with his bare foot, and it swung heavily open.
From the first moment of the lock’s opening came the assault of wrongness, alarms blaring, miasma of death, smell of blood.
The Itiri bounded through the hatchway like hunting cats and fanned out, listening, looking.
Alihahd followed them aboard. He had originally intended to dye his pale, telltale skin, but there was probably no one left in here he need deceive.
Hall shadowed close behind him with ready weapon.
They came upon the first corpses right away. The slaughter was absolute, the station corridors splattered with blood as far as could be seen.
There was a squeak from Vaslav, who had crept out of the Topaz and tripped over a head torn from its body, which lay several paces away from it.
The neck was not severed. It was ripped. The head had come off in the hands of someone of great strength. The wide pool of blood was not yet dry. The killer could have simply choked this man, or broken his neck. This was overkill, tremendous force used out of no necessity, no reason. The lack of control, the madness of it, was un-Itiri. It was human. The kind of thing humans liked to call inhuman.
Alihahd had backed away and flattened himself against the bulkhead, sweating, face paled to ash, lips bloodless. Something darker than fear haunted his white-ringed eyes. He was shaking, his neck stiff.
Then he steeled himself in a deliberate moment. His head lowered until he was staring out of the tops of his eyes. The crevices in his face deepened, his breath came shallow as if loathing the air, and he moved away from the wall, not talking, meeting no one’s gaze, sickened, dangerous. Layla did not know him. Even Hall would not approach him when he looked like that.
