The questions were over for the time being.
Clausen left Liphar bound hand and foot in the sun and stalked across the dusty clearing to harry McPherson while she worked on the Sled.
A dull, outraged chanting rose from among the shattered stalks around the perimeter. Clausen tossed back Sawlish insults and waved his laser pistol.
“Haven’t laid a hand on him yet!” he yelled. “Just you wait!”
When the chanting continued, he fired a random bolt or two into the canes. The chanters scuttled for deeper cover.
“For Christ’s sake,” McPherson growled from the cockpit of the Sled. “The brush fires are close enough as it is, without you starting one right on top of us!”
“Less chat, more work,” Clausen chided, then leaned against the Sled’s hot white hull and offered companionably, “Do you realize that you and I are the only ones left who seem to recall what our job is? Relax, McP. We’re on the same side.”
“Yeah? So’s you can break my neck someday too? Go fuck yourself, Emil. I’ve done enough of your dirty work already.”
“Tut, McP. Such language from a young lady.”
Danforth eavesdropped from the shade of the Underbelly, dreaming of convenient accidents and home-built fantasy weapons of wood and clay. He pondered hopeless plans to rescue Liphar, whose shallow, shocked breathing was like the painful flutter of a captured rabbit.
Yet this small and frightened creature apparently concealed a will of iron. After eleven hours without food and water, of long sessions alternately threatened or cajoled by the prospector, the young Sawl had managed either to tire Clausen out or to bore him, but had not revealed Ibiá’s hiding place:
Maybe he’s willed himself to forget where he left him, Danforth mused.
Silently, he cheered Liphar on. He wished he’d had someone to cheer himself on those many weeks ago, when he was being made the victim of Clausen’s cruel amusements. He had not been surprised that the prospector mocked his helplessness as he lay crippled in the meager shelter of the downed Sled. At the time he’d thought it a habit of power, and he both admired and coveted Clausen’s. He’d not even considered it deliberate that, when Clausen disappeared into the storm for hours at a stretch, water and light were left just far enough out of his reach that the effort of getting to them made him scream and faint from the pain in his chest and legs.
He never laid a hand on me, either, and I thought him merely ruthless. Danforth shook his head. But the man is a sadist in his heart.
Danforth sneaked a look at Weng, standing in the shade beside him. Strands of silver hair leaked from her bun. She did not bother to tuck them back. Dust and sweat stained her white uniform.
A command is meaningless without a weapon to enforce it, Danforth told himself. A weapon and the willingness to kill. And yet Weng is as good a ship’s captain as any I’ve known. Should she have to kill to preserve the authority she needs, in order to do what she’s good at? Should I?
“He will have to sleep sometime,” stated Weng implacably.
Danforth laughed bitterly. “Least that’s the way it always goes in the pictures… Sorry, Commander. But this is getting to be like a bad holo. Let’s call this one Might makes Right, what do you say? We could make a billion with it.”
Weng’s eyes were red-rimmed from dust and exhaustion. She stared at him unblinking.
“Evidently you don’t share my loss of anchor in this reality,” remarked Danforth quietly.
She returned her attention to the clearing. “I imagine it all seems real enough to Liphar.”
Danforth shifted in his chair. “I didn’t mean to make light of anyone’s suffering, Commander. I was referring to the chaotic quality of recent events. The rules went down the drain and none of us noticed until it was too late.”
Her nose crinkled, a chill unborn smile. “I think, Dr. Danforth, that you were simply unaware or unwilling to admit whose rules held precedence.
“The fact is, however, that Mr. Clausen is not as our sister-deities seem to be. There are still some natural rules that will hold precedence over him. He cannot stay out there in that sun forever and he will have to sleep sometime.”
27
Stavros drifted, below the surface of awareness.
A scrap of memory slithered to the top intact, and pulled him unwilling with it.
He knelt at the feet of a brown old man who pressed both hands around his own. A teacher, teaching… what?
Kav…
The pain crowded in on his consciousness, pushing, pushing.
Stavros pushed back with the gram of will left to him, struggled to preserve the image of the old man in his heat-wracked brain. A thought lurked there somewhere, beyond the image, a hope, an answer.
A chunk of dull silver. A liquid fire in his palms.
Kav…
He had offered himself willingly to the guar-pain. It had repaid him with a glimpse into the Void, followed by a miracle.
Kav, I need another miracle…
Dying though he was, this seemed an audacious request.
Yet beyond the image, the answer. The answer had something to do with the pain…
With not resisting the pain…
With unlocking the vicious feedback loop that had kept him energized to evade pursuit but now devoured his body like fire through dry wood.
Stavros imagined his resistance as a single fist clenched around a swaying tree branch, suspended above dark, swift-flowing water, slowly weakening.
Letting go might be the same as dying. Didn’t one always speak of fighting for life?
No Kav here this time to lead him through the mysteries.
If only the pain would leave him alone and let him think. But now, beyond its fierce internal static, he heard another roaring. The river, perhaps, rushing by beneath him.
The fist on the branch slipped ever so slightly.
No, not the black water at all. A great wind swept past at lightspeed. Life-hungry, it sucked the fire from his limbs, the breath from his lungs.
Voidwind.
Memory returned and with it, terror, as his grip slipped further.
Liquid ice enveloped him.
His eyes jerked open to darkness. The girl, familiar as a fever-blurred presence leaning into his delirium, was gone. Stretched on the rack of his own body, Stavros cried out in pain and awful loneliness.
The fist let go.
Stavros fell…
The girl started out of thin sleep when Stavros screamed beside her. She scrambled up, fumbling for the shuttered lantern.
Ard grabbed it before she did, on his hands and knees at Stavros’ side, spilling light across the pale floor. He swore harshly as the young man’s breathing caught and stilled, the eyes and mouth gaping open in some final horror or surprise.
The girl sank to the tiles and began to weep. Ard put his balding head to Stavros’ chest, muttering, then straightened slowly. His jaw tight with failure, he reached to close…
… into the wind and discovered he was not alone. The Void was not empty. Power danced in its howling swirl. Power sailed the swift wind currents like the white water of a mountain rapid, busy, intent on unknowable purposes.
Stavros was sucked into the stream unnoticed, a mote against vast dark nebulae lit from within by the slow birth-fire of stars and the explosive flaring of their deaths. He floated free, transfixed by his own insignificance…
… the staring eyes, and let his fingers linger. The dead man’s fever sweat was already a chill rime on his brow. Ard muttered, puzzled by the body’s abrupt cooling.
A low urgent knocking shuddered against the locked doors. The girl whisked away, still weeping, to answer. The old herbalist’s eyes widened to see the Master Healer striding across the tiles. Disturbing scents of dust and brush smoke invaded the quiet dampness of the Hall. Ard’s response to his guildmaster’s desperate query was a brusque shake of his head. Ghirra bolted the last few steps to…
… as he floated, Stavros grew aware of certain tensions
, certain lines of force, crisscrossing the Void like the strings of a cat’s cradle, stretched taut in an invisible tug-of-war. The currents were being stretched, space distorted, his own void-self pulled in opposing directions.
He thought again of magnetism, feeling caught between two poles.
Two…
He could sense them now, discern the shifting loci of their immense and separate entities. They danced with the currents, playing out their force-lines with an angler’s give and take, give and haul back hard again, playing with each other, tugging, feinting, rolling in the Voidwind like the surf, intent—oh, so intent—on the other alone.
Was the Voidwind born from their blind and whirling dance?
Stavros recalled another dancer’s dance, and knew what he had found but could not put a name to them or determine their nature. Was one dry, one wet, one icy, the other hot? Such qualities were mere constructs in his mind, remnants of a more sensual reality. They had no existence in the Void. The quality of the Void was force.
Tension, then, and intention. Contention. Push and pull. Action, reaction. Force and counterforce.
No accompanying aura of emotion, no joy or rage. A simple, burning energy. An eagerness as bright as hunger, as focused as greed, as single-minded as the beam of Clausen’s laser.
And slightly mad…
Stavros sank into his insignificance as into a protective cloak. He floated unnoticed.
He drifted toward a taut and singing force-line. He was curious, delighted that it rose out of invisibility to glow for him in changing neon colors as he approached. It pulsed like a live thing, its beauty poignant, so brave against the darkness. It occurred to him to wonder if it was hot, if it would burn him if he touched it. But he decided that he could be no deader that he was already. He did nothing to alter his drift.
The glowing line neared, magenta shifting through salmon to vermilion. Stavros admired its bright clarity. Childlike, as if reaching for a new and fascinating toy, he grasped for it with an insubstantial hand. The line sparked and parted in green and yellow violence as his mind-fingers closed around it, a circuit shorted. The ends recoiled invisibly. The shock spun him away, tumbled him in the currents like water over rocks.
Had he felt the Void quake? Could a nothingness pause ever so briefly in its game of push and pull, release a fraction of its awareness from focusing on its opponent, and swing its great head around in search…
In his terror, Stavros summoned the wind.
Whirl me away, lose me in the depths…
He must be a mote again, insignificant and invisible, safe from accounting for his unthinking, irrevocable ACT…
Ghirra shoved Ard aside as he skidded to his knees.
The apprentice girl caught her breath, tears suspended in shock. Ard said nothing, moved away, adjusting the lantern to shed more light as Ghirra put his fingers to the pulse point on Stavros’ throat, then both hands to his temples. The dank chill of the skin forced from the healer a soft exclamation of despair. Ard began to murmur, offering details.
The ravaged shoulder precluded ordinary attempts at resuscitation. At his guildmaster’s order, Ard resignedly began mouth-to-mouth respiration. Ghirra did not hesitate. He tore at the knots belting Susannah’s mini-kit around his waist. He unfolded the pocketed sash, laying it out flat on the tiles. Stainless steel glinted in the lamplight, reflected in Ard’s quick glance of suspicion and disapproval.
Ghirra slipped a syringe from its plastic sheath and fit the shining needle to a vial. His long fingers shook just once, then steadied as he laid the point to Stavros’ chest and eased it into the skin, so accurate an imitation of Susannah’s swift, clean motions that he felt for a moment in full control. He tossed the empty syringe down, then nodded Ard aside and took over the artificial respiration, determined to breathe warmth into the chill…
… in flight again. There was no shelter in the Void. The Void was the Power. The Powers. Them. Still obsessed by pursuit, he was sure they would find him and punish him for disrupting their game.
Desperate, Stavros imagined himself on the crest of the dark wave, sweeping past that same overhanging branch. Terror gave him breath and wings. He leaped, grabbed and…
… his fingers on Stavros’ wrist, Ard gave an astonished cry. Ghirra felt the lungs swell on their own beneath his hands and threw his head back in silent, unbelieving joy.
“ValEmbriha!” old Ard breathed.
The apprentice girl eyed the Master Healer with new awe.
Stavros stirred faintly. His back arched in reawakening pain.
Ghirra murmured soothingly and laid probing fingers to either side of his patient’s jaw, pressing gently until Stavros quietened. He lifted the dressings from the shoulder wound and his mouth tightened, anger mixed with dismay. He did not understand a thing that could burn flesh and bone more deeply than the pure guar fresh from the rock.
He sent the apprentice girl off to scavenge more ice and reached for the second syringe.
28
The caravan straggled homeward, pursued in the final hours of its journey by lines of fire closing in from the north, west and east. Susannah squinted up at the smoke-shrouded cliff, hoping to make her anxious scanning of the cave mouths appear merely casual. It surprised her that she waited to see him so eagerly.
“Lord, what a welcome sight!” Megan’s voice sounded like some ancient version of herself cracked with thirst and muffled by the layers of her face wrappings. The masks were protection as much against the thick smoke as against flying sand. “We keep this pace up much longer and I’ll drop!”
“You couldn’t have kept up at all a month ago, look at it that way. Neither could I.”
Megan grinned invisibly. “What is this, absurd predilection of yours, always seeing the bright side?”
From the base of the cliff, three hjalk riders rode out through the dust and smoke to meet the head of the caravan.
“Welcoming committee,” Susannah noted. “Aren’t they in a hurry!”
The riders’ faces were masked. Their hjalk looked thin and unkempt.
“Maybe it’ll all be resolved when we get there,” she continued. “This situation with CONPLEX, I mean.”
Megan snorted. “That’s if for some foolish reason you assume that the wheels of justice turn with miraculous speed, and that when they do, they turn in your direction.”
“The case is clear-cut, surely,” Susannah countered lightly. She would see Stavros soon, and the thought preoccupied her. She lacked the heart for another of Megan’s weighty discussions. “With what we’ve seen of present Sawl culture alone, never mind what may have gone before, what court could dispute the Sawls’ right to their own planet?”
“Easy for you to say, being here with the Sawls. The Courts however are on Earth, with CONPLEX.” Megan hooked Susannah’s elbow with a restraining hand. “Listen, it is crucial that you not say a word about any of this until I give you the okay.”
“Or Stavros does.”
“… yeah. Or Stavros.”
Megan’s tone left Susannah uneasy, but she put it down to creeping paranoia. “What if he’s not even here, Meg! What if he’s been chased into hiding somewhere else?”
Hesitation again belied Megan’s offhand reply. “Where else would he go?”
Susannah’s gay mood wavered.
I want this to be over.
She watched the riders speed up as the caravan neared the outskirts of the wind-torn fields. Solemn chanting drifted with the dust. To the west, along the sickle curve where plain met cropland, small parties were digging fire breaks.
Megan measured the fire’s advance behind them. “They’ll never get those done in time,” she predicted gloomily.
“We’re all home now. We’ll pitch in.”
The hjalk riders met up with the lead wagon as it wound among the partly flooded terraces. One rider left his companions and pushed his lathered beast through the dust to where Aguidran walked beside the PriestGuild wagon that carried the
still-unconscious Kav Daven. Susannah recognized the rider’s tired stoop even before he slid from the hjalk’s back and pulled aside his mask. Ghirra let the heaving animal wander loose while he fell in close step beside his sister. After several paces, Aguidran stopped short and turned to face him. Her incredulity was unmistakable even at a distance. Ghirra nodded and put a sympathetic hand to her shoulder.
“Uh-oh,” muttered Megan.
“Maybe whoever it was he came back for didn’t make it,” Susannah suggested.
She did not see Megan glance at her pityingly.
A ranger came running from the front of the caravan. Several others followed more slowly, converging on Aguidran. All wore the same look of bewildered shock. The Master Ranger spoke to them quietly, her back stiff. Only the sharp chop of her hands hinted at emotion. When she dismissed them, they trotted off in all directions, bearing the news. Ghirra glanced in on Kav Daven, then left his sister in conference with a quickly summoned Kav Ashimmel. He hurried back toward the Infirmary wagon. He was dirty and grim and as much without hope as Susannah had ever seen him.
“What happened?” she asked.
Ghirra met Megan’s worried eyes, shook his head once, faintly. “Edan is dead. Murdered, Ibi says the word is.”
Megan relaxed briefly at his use of the present tense, then said. “Murdered?”
“Murdered?” Susannah repeated. Astonishment made her feel stupid. “But how? Do they know who did it?”
Ghirra’s tired eyes lidded. “Oh yes. This is known.”
Megan tugged her dust mask aside. “I give you three guesses,” she growled. “The goddamned laser.”
“No, he did not use this… lazher… for this killing.”
Ghirra told them what he knew of Edan’s death and Liphar’s interrogation, leaving out any mention of Stavros’ injury.
Susannah listened with growing indignation. Megan stared off in the direction of the Lander’s white-and-silver cone.
“Maybe we really have him on the run,” she mused when Ghirra was done. “This is clumsy, blatant stuff for a guy like Clausen.”
Susannah stared at her. “Is that all you can think about? Edan dead and now he’s got poor Liphar…? Why didn’t anyone stop him?” she exclaimed to Ghirra. “What’s the matter with them down there!”
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