A Prison Unsought (33 page)

The Eya’a chittered softly. One reached out and stroked his
face with its long twiggy fingers, so gently that the razor edges on their long
thin nails barely tickled.

Ivard blinked. They had never touched him. They had never
touched anyone. Vi’ya had warned everybody to avoid touching them because those
nails could shred flesh.

But inside the blue fire danced, and through it came a high,
double-voiced thought:
One-in-three fears
the unity-in-many?

The blue fire surged, providing the image of a single Kelly
trying to manipulate something complex, and failing, lacking the help of the
rest of its trinity.

The Eya’a lifted their chins in that weird, break-neck way,
then they leaped back up to the trinat platform, leaving Ivard standing alone
in a wide circle of space. A bunch of nicks stared at him, then one, the girl
with blue hair who didn’t look much older than he was, took a tentative step
toward him.

“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked. Her
soft voice with the singsong accent of the Douloi gave Ivard a funny feeling in
the pit of his stomach, which intensified as he noticed how well her shirt and
floaty pants modeled her figure, and how her hair matched her eyes.

“Afraid?” he replied, relieved that
his voice hadn’t cracked. “Oh, you mean the Eya’a? No, I’ve been around them
for a long time.” He hesitated. “I can even sort of talk to them.”

A tall, handsome nick standing behind Blue-Hair snorted
derisively. “You’re the only person in Ares who can, then,” he drawled. “Are
you giving Nyberg and the high council lessons?” He turned to the blue-haired
Douloi. “Can you imagine the poetry recitals they must have?”

“Oh, Dandenus.” She wrinkled her nose at him, but the others
laughed, and Ivard got that hot prickly feeling all over him, smelling the
burnt orange of shame.

The blue fire surged, and he remembered that he didn’t have
to put up with blushing anymore—he knew how his body worked. He constricted the
blood vessels at the surface of his skin and relaxed as he felt the warmth ebb
away.

The sarcastic young man squinted at him, and Ivard tasted
the acid of his unease. “Come on,” he said to the others, “it’s just one of the
jumped-up Polloi infesting the station. You can find more interesting sport.”

A faint breeze and the scent of herbs drew Ivard’s gaze up
briefly, to find Tate Kaga watching from behind the Douloi. They were unaware
of him. The old nuller winked at him, and Ivard resisted the impulse to wipe
his sleeve over his face, and caught sight of the dancing animals on his cuff.

Ivard laughed. “I’m not one of your tame Polloi,” he
declared. “I’m a Rifter.” Overhead, Tate Kaga’s bubble whirled end over end,
the nuller grinning broadly.

Ivard shook back the sleeve of his ancestral shirt and held
up his arm to display the Kelly ribbon. “I’m Ivard Firehead, wearing the weaving
of the ancient Lakota, and bonded in the phratry of the Archon of *****”

With blossoming delight he scented the girl’s spurt of interest
as he whistle-honked the name of the Kelly home world flawlessly—“wounded in
battle with the Avatar’s personal guards on the Mandala, haji of Desrien . . .”
He paused, feeling the blush threatening to break through all over again, then
went for broke, “and I’d very much like to free-fall dance with you.”

“I’m Ami,” she breathed. “And I’d
love to dance.”

Ivard looked around, and chirruped to the dogs. They knew
how to move in free-fall, now, so they could come with him if they wanted.

Ami took his hand, and all four of them launched into space.

o0o

“I don’t know where he is, but I
know who can find him,” Jaim promised. He looked up, and Vahn followed his
gaze. Far above he saw a familiar red-haired figure soaring through the immense
free-fall gym.

Jaim made his way to an exit and Vahn followed, Roget
staying behind and their backup moving to the exit and other key points.

A short time later they emerged onto a platform jutting into
the upper portion of the vast free-fall area, where youths shrieked their
delight as they swooped through the air.

Vahn watched as Jaim launched himself across the space to
one of the jump pads in the middle, where the redhead Ivard was seated with a
pretty Douloi girl, talking earnestly. Jaim interrupted; Ivard slid his hands
over his eyes for a long beat, two, and spoke.

Jaim lifted a hand in thanks, and returned. “This
way,” he said.

On the other side of the garden, in the little alcove with
no exit, Vi’ya and Brandon stood silently, gazes locked. “A question.”

She did not answer. His voice could have been lost in the
rise and fall of the compelling Kelly music echoing from far below them.

The pathway would only admit one. She moved toward it with
deliberate step, counting on the ingrained habit of nick courtesy to force him
to withdraw. But he remained where he was, hands open in question.

She was near enough to see the patience in his demeanor, to
feel his expectation. Stopping short of physical contact, she said, “What?”

His lips parted, then
his head turned sharply as the Kelly trinat stopped, and music from farther
away reached them: a familiar melody that skipped rhythmically up the chromatic
scale, dancing from dissonance to harmony, like the laughter of children.
KetzenLach, Markham’s favorite.

Of course the Arkad
would have listened to KetzenLach. Of course.

She shut out the music, and shut in her response, counting
mentally until the Arkad’s keepers could get there to take him away.

When he spoke, the subject took her by surprise. “What kind
of person was Jakarr?”

“Jakarr?” she repeated the name as
though it were unfamiliar, which it was—but only in this setting, this context.

“Yes. Your weapons tech on the
Telvarna
.”

She knew that the Arkad had never met Jakarr, except as a
target in a swift firefight that had ended with Jakarr’s death, directly following
Brandon and Osri Omilov’s landing at the Dis base.

A strange subject, but a safe enough distraction. She put
back her head, gazing past the Arkad through a disorienting tangle of stairways
leading nowhere. Most of the rest of the gathering were just visible, not as
individuals, but as insect-figures moving about in meaningless patterns.

She did not have to look his way; the familiar,
high-intensity emotional signature was focused solely on her.

Proximity was toxic. The buffer of distance must be
regained, and soon. “Good shot,” she said. “Bad temper.”

“That’s all?” he asked. “That’s all
you can say about a man you crewed with, and then commanded, for eight years?”

Her pulse drummed in her forehead with the effort it took to
shut him out, yet even so she sensed a complexity of reactions, foremost being
regret.
Regret?

She forced her attention back to memory, summoning up the
unlovely vision of Jakarr’s narrow, suspicious face. “He was a liar. Liked
games with risk but cheated, liked his partners young. His humor required a
butt, a scapegoat. Enough?” An oblique glance, nothing more than a noting of
position, so she could move away—as if a meter would afford much protection.

“Did he have any other name? A
family? Did anyone love him, call him friend?”

His regret had sharpened into remorse.

“Never mentioned any family. Temper
kept friends at a distance. Names . . .” Somewhere, the Eya’a
picked up her own increasing regret, and they sang to her mind:
One-who-gives-fire-stone seeks to amend
ceased ones.

None of it made sense. She tightened her control, her
answers random. “Just the insulting names earned by the unliked. Greywing was
his bunk-partner for a time—was he who brought her and Firehead in. Then she
grew up enough to bunk him out.”

Talking took too much effort. “Enough?” Vi’ya asked again,
no longer hiding the hostility.

He’d shifted a pace nearer, hands clasped behind him—still
between her and the pathway out. “Is it enough?” he repeated. “I want to know
something of the man I killed.”

With difficulty she forced her mind back to Jakarr’s
abortive attempt to take over Dis, and the Arkad, bent over his dying liegeman,
firing at the rock overhead; she had recognized in that moment who he was.

And then came the slow, lethal fall of stone on Jakarr.

A final image: the Arkad’s face as he held them all off,
threatening to bring the entire cave down on them—himself included—just so he
could listen to a dying man’s last speech.

He would have done it. Even then she could read him without
difficulty. She had kept them all away until the liegeman was dead, until the
Arkad’s adrenaline shock had metamorphosed into something unreadable except to
the Eya’a—and it had frightened them.

Memory brought her back to the present. She had to end this
interview, in any way she could.

o0o

“You taught the dogs to dance in
free-fall?” Ami asked, clapping her hands as Gray spun through the air, tongue
lolling, tail snapping back and forth for balance. “They are so cute!”

“They like it,” Ivard said with
satisfaction. “Once they got used to it.”

Trev’s toenails clicked on the platform, then the dog
vaulted into the air, spinning slowly, paws tucked under, ears flapping, eyes
slitted with pleasure.

Ivard sat back down on the edge of the jump pad, clasping
his hands in front of his knees. He could feel the heat of Ami’s body, could
smell the scent of her perfume, of her flesh and her hair. It made him dizzy,
exultant. Not far away, the Eya’a swayed in front of the Kelly playing their
trinat, piping and keening while people, mixed civilians and nicks, hung from
cables and jump pads nearby, watching in fascination. The Eya’a were acting so
strange now; he could hear them in the mental plane, but unless they shaped
words for him, their thoughts were utterly incomprehensible. He wished he could
ask Vi’ya about it. But, like when he’d tried to reach her for Jaim, he again felt
a darkness that he shied away from.

“What did you do just then?” Ami
asked. “And who is Vi’ya?”

“She’s the captain of our ship.
Jaim thinks the Aerenarch might be with her.”

They looked down at the floor far below, where Douloi
drifted aimlessly, the center of their attention now absent.

“The Dol’jharian? The woman with
the psi-killers?”

“Mmmm. The Archon’s ribbon links me
to her and them, somehow. I can hear them, sort of.”

Ami stretched out her hand and ran a finger over the Kelly
band in his wrist, leaving her hand on his arm. He liked the tingle her touch
caused to spread through him in spicy-tasting, glittering crimson stars.

“It must be very strange.” She
leaned toward him, her breath on his face, her lips round and soft . . .

Their lips met, and Ivard lost all sense of his
surroundings. Then the jump pad rocked under them and Ami pulled back as the
handsome blit who’d mocked Ivard earlier bent belligerently over them,
breathing stale alcohol fumes and anger.

“Dandenus,” Ami said reproachfully.

Ivard sniffed. This Dandenus’s emotions whiffed of hurt and
affront. He was clutching an unopened bottle of the sparkling wine, and two
glasses.

He gave Ivard a haughty sneer, then swung toward Ami. “Never
had a Rifter, huh?”

Ami’s flushed, and Ivard’s innards squeezed into the
familiar ball of hopelessness. Was that why she was with him, because he was a
Rifter, an exotic toy? Marim had used him for the loot from the Mandala. Was
Ami doing the same thing?

But Ami wasn’t paying any attention to Dandenus. She peered
anxiously at Ivard, curiosity and tentative friendship and a kind of
light-hearted attraction all breathing through her skin.

She touched his arm, then rounded on Dandenus with a fierce
movement. “If it hadn’t been for this Rifter, and his friends, we’d be mourning
all three of the Panarch’s sons.” She gestured at the floor far below where
earlier the Aerenarch had held court. “He earned personal access to the
Aerenarch—which of your exalted Family can say the same?”

“The Aerenarch!” The boy snorted,
swaying slightly. “He’s not so important. There are others who . . .”
He broke off, looking confused, then afraid.

Ivard stood up, conscious of Ami’s regard. “Others who
what?”

He knew the Douloi made a big thing about honor and
obligations. It was time they learned that Rifters knew it, too, only they
didn’t waste time with big words about it.

“If you have to ask, you couldn’t
understand the answer,” replied Dandenus, but he seemed to hear the weakness of
his own reply and turned to the girl. “Come, Ami, you’re better than this
no-family chatzer.” He put the glasses on a little pedestal at the edge of the
jump pad and held up his bottle, working at the release tab. “Here, I brought
this for you and me.”

Dandenus was too drunk to know what he was doing. Ivard
heard the beginning of a hiss from the bottle, and then he lunged forward and
pushed Ami aside.

Bang! Something punched him cruelly in the temple, sending a
shower of stars across his vision. He fell to his knees as pain shot through
his head.

Ami shrieked his name: “Ivard!” Then his vision cleared.

o0o

“Too late for regret,” Vi’ya said
to the Aerenarch in her hardest voice.

She sustained his regard, intense as a laser, as he said
softly, “Is that Dol’jharian practicality?” His light voice almost blended with
the singing of the distant choir, but the humor was still there. “Yet your
mythology is more ghost-ridden than any I’ve encountered. I wonder,” he
drawled, “if Eusabian sleeps easy at night. I know Anaris never did. Though he
didn’t manage to kill anyone on Arthelion—not for lack of trying.”

Behind the musing voice was a temporary easing of intent.

She drew a breath in, let one out. Said: “Tried to kill the
Panarch?” The idea, later, somewhere else, would be amusing.