Redemption of Light (The Light Trilogy) (34 page)

“What’s his name?”

“Yeshwah.”

The hot breeze gusted, setting whirlwinds to roaming the shores of the green lake like wayward ghosts, but young Nathanaeus didn’t notice. He squinted at the new boy, cocking his head in deep thought.

Sybil studied the tall willowy child, too. He had to be about twelve, but his expression bespoke a longer, harder life. The raw flame in his dark eyes made it seem that everything he gazed upon had already been devastated—that he’d pierced the veil of time and glimpsed a ruined world where no one ever laughed, where no birds ever soared in the skies, or sang in the trees. Sybil lifted a hand to her aching throat, for she, too, had seen such desolation, in a real universe just a heartbeat away.

Nathanaeus licked his lips nervously as he wiped his sun-blackened hands on his white robe. “Can I go play with him,
Paquid
? He looks like he needs playing badly.”

The old man laughed good-naturedly and ruffled Nathanaeus’ black hair. “Yes, you go. But be kind to him. He has a wound inside him that may never heal—not even with all our knowledge about bodies and souls.”

Nathanaeus leaned forward and quickly kissed the
Paquid’s
cheek before racing away toward the older boy.

And from a distance, Sybil heard her name being called.
Sybil? Sybil?
The scene faded into a tan wash of nothingness as Mikael’s deep gentle voice penetrated the dream. She found herself in the white hospital again. A medical technician pushed her bed across the floor. Mikael walked at her side, his strong hand upon her drenched hair.

“What’s … what’s happening,” she croaked.

Mikael shook his head uncertainly. “I’m not sure. No one will tell me anything except that we’re being moved.”

Soft cries permeated the night as Arikha Anpin ran through the dark woods on Satellite 4. A tiny woman with black hair and blue eyes, she wore only a set of loose white pajamas. She ran awkwardly, in the midst of a group of twenty-two Gamant women who’d been kidnapped from their homes on Giclas 9 at midnight, barely dressed, in bathrobes and slippers, dragging children by the hands. Magisterial soldiers in crisp purple uniforms urged them forward with shouts and guns, driving the women and children like a herd of beasts up a hill and down a deeply eroded ravine. A little boy of maybe four slipped and fell against the rocks. He burst into cries of agony, holding his ankle. Before the child’s mother could reach him, a soldier trotted up and calmly shot the boy, then shouted, “Move. Move! All of you! We told you to watch your feet! We told you not to fall or you’d be left behind. Now get moving!” Only the searchlights from the two fighters overhead lit the darkness. Snow fell lightly, frosting the branches and Arikha’s long dark hair.

One fighter swerved right, leaving the women in darkness and a series of floodlights came on at the foot of the hill. They illuminated a line of soldiers. A major stood nervously off to one side, hands shoved deeply in the pockets of his long purple overcoat. Beside him, a general fairly pranced as the women came down the hill. Tall, with sandy hair and piercing lime green eyes, he had a cruel mouth. Arikha stumbled through the darkness toward him.

“You’ve just arrived, Major Rasch,” the general explained professionally. “I wanted you to see what a routine liquidation of new prisoners looks like.”

“New prisoners, General? But I thought our primary duty was to flush out the rebel nests and eliminate them. Why are we bothering with harmless women and children who’ve only been here for a few hours?”

The general turned menacing green eyes on Rasch. “We want the rebel nests to know we’ll stop at nothing to get them. We want them to be worried about what we’ll do to their families if they don’t surrender as we’ve demanded. Terror has legitimate uses, Major. We’ll discuss it more later. Here come the prisoners.”

The general lifted his hand, and the soldiers knelt in firing position. Safety switches clicked off, sounding like perverse grasshoppers in the weeds.

As Arikha and the rest of the women and children flooded down to stand in a line before the general, Major Rasch reached up and gripped his superior officer’s hand, staying it.

“Please wait, General Ornias.” Rasch’s middle-aged face looked pinched. In the dim light, his bald head shone like a polished silver bullet. He strode forward to stare at Saaydya Deo, a young blonde woman with wide blue eyes. Her tiny daughter of three, Temnath, clutched her legs tightly. Arikha’s heart pounded sickeningly. She and Saaydya had been friends since kindergarten. Saaydya patted her daughter’s platinum blonde curls and held her head high, meeting Rasch’s probing gaze. “Are you a Gamant?” the major asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“But Gamants are usually dark-haired—”

“We’re Gamants!”
she cried fiercely. Pride and defiance oozed from every line of her oval face, but Arikha could see her knees shaking violently through her pale blue bathrobe. “You can take everything else away from us,” Saaydya whispered hatefully. “But not that.
We’re Gamants.
”

Colonel Rasch’s gaze wavered and fell, as though he deplored the fact that with that admission there was no way he could save them. Tiredly, he stepped away and went back to stand beside General Ornias. “Let’s make this quick and clean, General,” he requested tersely.

Ornias smiled, but the expression cut like a blade. “We can’t stand any milksops in our ranks. Try to get hold of yourself, Major.” He stepped out in front of his soldiers and lifted his hand, then slashed down hard. Flares of violet shredded the darkness. Screams rose to a din of horror as women and children toppled like thin saplings in a windstorm. Arikha tried to run, but two dead women fell over her.

Lying pinned beneath the corpses, Arikha tried not to breathe. She watched Rasch in silent horror; the major writhed and jumped with each renewed burst of fire, his face withering.

When the firing stopped, a wretched groan shattered the stillness. An old woman and Temnath Deo had been wounded. The woman, elderly with black hair, wailed miserably as she pulled herself inch by inch, gripping the grass to try and escape. Temnath clawed up out of the mound of dead that had tumbled over her and peered hauntingly at Rasch. Blood streaked her pale face and matted her blonde hair; she seemed ethereal, like a mortally injured angel at the end of time.

A small groan escaped Rasch’s throat. He waved his arms frantically. “General. Quickly! Kill them.”

Ornias leisurely took a rifle from one of his private’s hands and panned the area, slashing the old woman and Temnath in half. Arikha wept. Ornias straightened and handed the rifle back to his underling. He looked up gloatingly at Rasch—as though
proud
of his actions and the efficiency of his team.

But Rasch’s eyes were turned away. A pitiable expression creased his square face as he watched the river of blood running down from the slaughtered to stain the white, white snow. He took a stumbling step sideways as the river slithered toward his polished black boots. “General,” he said quietly, “may I speak to your troops?”

“Of course, Major. They’ll be your troops tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rasch hurried to the firing squad who still knelt, preparing to shoot anything that moved. Arikha swallowed her tears and kept still.

Rasch wiped sweat from his forehead and faced the squad. “You are soldiers fighting in a desperate cause,” he said in an unsteady voice as he walked down the line. “I know this duty is onerous. But you mustn’t feel conscience stricken. The Gamant threat to galactic security increases everyday. We seek not a temporary security but a permanent one. These operations are a necessity. I commend each of you for unflinchingly carrying out your duties. You are honorable men, performing an essential function. …”

Arikha’s sobs broke loose again, soundless, stomach wrenching. Did these soldiers believe him? Yes, she could tell they did. Blood drained from the slaughtered woman on top of her, flowing down in a hot sticky stream to drench her white pajamas. She lay motionless for another fifteen minutes, until General Ornias came over to Rasch and cut his speech short. “That’s enough, Major. Our soldiers are well aware of their duties to the government. Come, we’ve work to do back at military headquarters.”

Arikha watched in terror as the soldiers filed by and got into their ships. Lights flared and swerved over the dead as the fighters turned, then swooped up and away over the dark tops of the trees.

Arikha pulled herself out from under the corpses and crawled away through the snow into the trees. The general had said there were rebel nests on Satellite 4. She had to find them—to tell them what had happened here in this dark, dark forest. She got up on trembling legs and staggered through the dense forest shadows, hunting.

CHAPTER 33

Amirah wandered around her cabin, slamming her fists into walls, kicking chairs and anything else that didn’t move out of her way. The gray blankets on her bed lay in a tumbled heap, half on the mattress, half on the floor. Only the light from the latrine illuminated the room, casting a bright rectangle over the table and chairs near the entryway.

For the first time since she’d almost died in her parents’ fire-engulfed home, she felt completely helpless. She hadn’t eaten or slept well since her capture and it was beginning to take its toll. Her tired legs trembled as she walked to the mirror by the table and tipped her chin up, gazing hard at herself. The reflection startled her. Framed in a mass of blonde hair, her turquoise eyes had the same desperate look as a caged animal’s. Lines of strain etched crow’s feet around her eyes and across her forehead. She looked so overwrought that it depressed her. No wonder the guards outside the door cringed when they had to deliver messages.

Folding her arms tightly, she crossed to stand before the holo of the scorch attack that adorned her wall. The planet spun amidst a violet haze of dust and debris. In the upper left corner, a Magisterial battle cruiser floated, purple beams from its cannons streaming down to slash the lush forests in carefully calculated patterns of devastation.

“Gamants are morose,” she muttered, eyeing the holo malignantly, wondering about the identity of the vessel and who’d commanded it during that scorch attack. “What reason could Baruch possibly have for adorning the guest quarters with pictures of devastation? It’s like keeping a wound raw by ripping the scab off every time it heals.”

But Gamants were like that—
she knew.
Her grand mother had burned the words, “In remembrance lies redemption,” into her brain. Every time Amirah had tried to interrupt a story of the miseries of Gamant history, Sefer had grabbed her by the chin, glared into her tiny face, and said, “This isn’t something you can forget, Amirah.
Now, repeat the story I just told you!”
She recalled clearly the pain and the fear—not understanding why Grandmama found such things so important—while she tried to recite the story. Sefer always coached her in the parts she’d missed. Then Grandmama would pat her affectionately and praise her for being so smart.

And for a brief moment, the last rays of the wintry sunset on Rusel 3 splashed down over the small bed where Amirah lay drowsily gazing out the window. The sky glimmered a pale green, the winds whirling sunlit dust up to the thin transparent clouds. She’d been seriously ill for a week with Janus fever and felt tired to her bones, so feeble she could barely lift her head from her pillow.
“Ninety percent die,”
she’d heard the doctor whisper yesterday—just before Sefer had bodily thrown him out of their house.

Sefer sat at Amirah’s bedside, as she had, day and night, since the onset of the illness. Only the creaking of her rocking chair against the cold plank floor fought for dominance with the sizzling of the wind against the windows. The old woman had been talking for days, telling her to stay strong, that she’d been born under the House of Ephraim and … “Not a single Gamant in history with that honor has ever died without putting up a fight. You feel that strength deep down in your soul, Amirah? God put that there so you’d be able to survive no matter what happened. All the women in our family have it. And don’t you forget it.”

Amirah remembered the dizziness that had swept over her when she turned to smile up into her grandmother’s scarred and withered face. Sefer had patted her arm lovingly. “You’re going to live, Amirah. I know it. God won’t let you die.”

The buzzing of her door com made Amirah jump. The memories burst like soap bubbles on a hot day.

“Captain Jossel?” A deep voice penetrated her room. “It’s Commander Baruch. May I see you?”

She sucked in a halting breath. “If I said no, Commander, would you go away?”

A pause. “Probably not.”

“Then come in.”

She dropped her hands to her sides and spread her legs defensively as the door opened. He stood tall in his black battlesuit. He had a thick stack of crystal sheets beneath one arm. He defiantly stepped inside and the door closed.

“What do you want?” She demanded straightforwardly.

His broad chest expanded as he took a deep breath. He gestured to the table. “May I sit down?”

“This is your ship, Commander. I think you can sit wherever you want to.”

“Thank you.” He eased into a chair, and put his papers down on the table. They looked like a great white block against the black background. His gaze never left her. “How are you?”

She vented a disgusted laugh. “Terrible. Why do you care?”

“I want you to be as comfortable as possible. I know this is hard—”

“Well, that’s great. Why don’t you give me a rifle so I can kill every soldier aboard and then I’ll feel much better?”

He leaned back in his chair and stared at her hard. “Having been captured by the enemy before, I understand that sentiment.”

Amirah tilted her head dubiously. She’d researched his military career thoroughly, from his birth on Tikkun to the last battle he orchestrated in the Asad system. “You? Captured? I don’t recall any records of you ever being apprehended by us, Commander.”

“There aren’t any records. Cole took care of that rather efficiently when he blew the hell out of Block 10 on Tikkun.”

She started, remembering all the horror stories Tahn had told her about that installation. Why hadn’t he mentioned that Baruch had been incarcerated there? Or that he’d
blown the hell
out of the place? Magisterial historians had always assumed the installation had been damaged during the Underground’s clash with government cruisers. “You were captured by Lichtner?”

“Yes.” His blue eyes glimmered like Lytolian sapphires—hate and old anger visible beneath the shroud of professionalism.

Amirah started to walk to the table, but her knees went weak before she could make it. She caught herself and stiffened them, but Baruch noticed.

“Captain,” he said quietly, “sit down. Can I have my physician prescribe something to help you sleep or—”

“I don’t need anything from you, Commander,” she responded wearily, and purposefully paced in front of the table, passing in and out of the rectangle of light streaming from the latrine. “What did you want to see me about?”

His handsome face etched with wariness. “I’ve been doing some research. On Sefer and Zakuto Raziel.”

Amirah’s steps faltered. Fear rose hot and blinding. But that was silly—no condemning records existed. The only thing Baruch could have accessed would be birth and tax records and a few incidental reports. Amirah braced a hand against the wall to steady herself. “And?”

“I want to talk to you about them.”

“Sorry. I don’t discuss them. I didn’t even know my grandfather—he died before I was born—and my relationship with my grandmother is private.”

He stretched his long legs out across the carpet and crossed them at the ankles. He looked around the room, noting her disheveled bed, then his eyes came back to her, wide and blue and unsettlingly piercing. “I’d been looking in the wrong place, in the Magisterial records. When I checked the Gamant Archives, I found some very interesting documents. Did you know that records existed?”

Off-balance, she responded, “I didn’t even know Gamants had archives.”

Baruch carefully put a hand against the stack of sheets he’d brought and shoved them forward, to the edge of the table. Amirah studied them pensively.

“These are yours,” he explained. “I thought you might be interested in your family history. Your grandparents were courageous, loyal soldiers in the last Gamant Revolt. Your grandmother in particular. Did you know she served as a spy in the Underground and was stationed on Palaia?”

Amirah drew in a sharp, surprised breath. Her grandmother had always been reticent about discussing her own personal life and so it didn’t shock Amirah with the impact it might have. Still, she felt a hollowness that this stranger knew more about her beloved grandmother than she did. “No,” she said simply.

Baruch continued, “For three years, she lived in constant danger, trying to maintain her cover. She allowed herself to be captured and put in the Relocation Camp just outside of Naas, hoping she could work her way into the domestic service of the camp controller’s home—a human from Giclas 7 who had intimate contacts with the Magistrates. It took a year of life in the regular camp—where she was repeatedly tortured—before she worked her way into Controller Heydrich’s service as a laundry woman. For two years she passed information through the camp to the Underground outside the walls. The data she provided was essential to Zadok Calas’ victory on the plains of Lysomia. Without Sefer’s information, the strategy Zadok received from Epagael would have been useless.”

Amirah’s stunned mind pulled up Sefer’s deeply scarred face, her dark eyes shining like jewels. So that’s how Grandmama had gotten the number on her arm and thick ridges of white tissue that crisscrossed her face and hands. When Amirah had been young, she’d rubbed her fingers over the scars constantly, asking endless questions—none of which her grandmother had ever answered. She’d have liked to find those men who’d hurt Sefer, so she could slowly and expertly kill each one.

Amirah scuffed a boot on the carpet to create some sound in the silence. She could hear the passion and heartache in her grandmother’s voice when she related stories of the war—of course Sefer had never told her about being a spy. And no wonder Amirah’s father had been so desperate to wipe away any taint of Gamant ancestry from his wife’s and daughter’s lives. “What happened in the end?”

Jeremiel put a hand on the stack, as though laying it on a cherished holy book. “She was discovered. Heydrich beat her almost to death, raped her, and gave her to the camp soldiers. She scrambled to survive their brutahty for six months before Calas won the war and all prisoners were released.”

He kept quiet for a long time, looking at Amirah, his eyes filled with speculation—as though assessing how she, a Magisterial officer, could have come from such loyal Gamant stock. “Your grandmother was a very great lady, Captain.”

“I know that, Commander. She was my best friend during the hardest year of my life.”

He got to his feet. Standing only three feet away, he looked taller than she’d remembered, more imposing. “Do you know what happened to her, Captain?”

Adrenaline rushed through her. “No. Do you?”

Baruch’s handsome face was bland, but his eyes flashed. “No. Sefer’s clandestine contacts on Rusel 3 reported that Magisterial soldiers surrounded her house on the 20th of Tishri, 5411. You and Sefer were dragged out forcibly and shoved into a small transport vessel and taken to Palaia. No one ever heard from Sefer again.” He paused ominously. “Do you remember that day, Captain?”

Amirah shook her head violently, on the verge of an inexplicable outburst of panic.
What the hell’s the matter with you?
She shouted, “I don’t believe it ever happened, Commander!”

Baruch watched her intently, assessing her taut face and twitching hands.
Why did her hands always twitch when she thought about Grandmama?
Scenes flashed in her memories … strange … dark, so dark … Grandmama’s terrified face staring at her, screaming….

Amirah gasped suddenly and bent double. Pain ravaged her like a dagger repeatedly thrust into her heart. She crumpled to the floor, landing hard on her knees, and began sobbing uncontrollably.
What’s the matter? For God’s sake, get up!
her logical side raged, but she couldn’t. She felt like her soul had been ripped from her body. More images stirred in the back of her mind, like malignant tendrils of disease—
but she fought them down! Fight them … fight!
After several seconds, her sobs subsided into bare breathless whimpers.

She heard Baruch move. He knelt in front of her. He looked as stern as an avenging angel straight out of Sefer’s colorful old stories. “You can’t control them, can you? Are they getting worse? More frequent? More vivid?”

So Tahn had told him about her delusionary episodes. God … She stared at the gray carpet, refusing to answer.

Baruch stood up again. “Why did the Magistrates want you in the hands of the Underground, Captain Jossel?”

She laughed bitterly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He walked a short distance away to stand in the rectangle of light. It frosted the side of his face, leaving his eyes in shadow. “One or more of our officers survived the Kiskanu attack—and broke under the probes at Palaia. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. The Magistrates had accurate inside knowledge of our attack plans for Horeb. Yet they sent you no reinforcements, Captain. And they ordered you down to Horeb with a security contingent of
two.
They sacrificed four battle cruisers to let us capture you.” He strode briskly back and knelt again, staring at her so penetratingly she felt she’d been bludgeoned.
“I want to know why.”

Amirah sat stiffly. He’d made it sound so logical, but the premise was ludicrous. Slothen would never throw her to the dogs, unless he had no choice. And if the government had known any critical details about the impending Underground attack, it had a choice. Slothen would have notified her. Baruch was up to something else. What was he doing? Fishing for information about Kiskanu survivors? His wife had been at the Kiskanu battle, hadn’t she? She bowed her head and laughed disparagingly. Of course. Cole had talked endlessly about Carey Halloway in his sleep. Both Tahn and Baruch must be worried sick that Halloway had been captured and sent to Palaia’s neuro department. And that was what Baruch was fishing for—data on his wife.