The Crucible of Empire (14 page)

He had been entrusted with a great treasure and had let his kochan down. He needed to return home and lay his misfortunes before Amnst, the current kochanau. Delaying here only increased his dread of that final accounting for what he had lost.

But he said none of this. Kochan troubles were not to be spilled before alien primitives, even one that was a bit on the clever side, like this Ames. He closed his eyes and let a rising tide of dormancy overwhelm him. Kaln and Jalta were talking softly, while all around them, the great ship quivered in preparation for launching into the black night of space. There, at least, he would feel at home.

It was time. Dannet krinnu ava Terra settled into her chair and gazed around at the controlled bursts of activity across the command deck. The majority of the bridge officers were Jao, but about a third were human.

Narvo had sacrificed her promising career to this new taif as proof of its intent to fully associate with Pluthrak. So she would work to the best of her ability and captain their huge ship with its barbaric kinetic weapons. But her liking of the assignment was not required.

"On your order, Terra-Captain," her second, Pleniary-Commander Otta, said. His eyes danced with green fire. His stance was a sturdy version of
restrained-readiness
which betrayed his Nimmat origin.

"You may launch," she said with a careless flick of one ear, as though this were any other ship lifting for the first time and not a momentous occasion for both species involved.

"Proceed," Otta said to his bridge crew. They bent to their work and then the great ship roared into the sky.

The great devils, the Ekhat, had tracked the Lleix down. They were no longer safe in this out-of-the-way pocket of the galaxy where they had long ago gone to ground like terrified prey and where their ancestral guiding spirits, the
Boh
, could no longer look upon them.

That dire truth beat through the sprawling Lleix colony at the foot of the Valeron mountains as though all who had been conducting their safe respectable lives there now could think but a single thought between them. After more than a thousand local years secreted on this world, they had been discovered by their age-old enemies and no longer possessed sufficient flight-worthy ships to transport the bulk of their population elsewhere.

Young Jihan of the Starsifters
elian
watched as her mentor, Sayr, made his slow and careful way along the crushed stone path leading up the side of the mountain. Though tall with age, his pewter-skinned form was now bent, his dark aureole drooping around his seamed face like the dying petals of a flower. He was the wisest elder she knew, yet distress fluttered in her breast.

After much deliberation by her
elian
, he was going to present what she believed to be, at least partially, an erroneous conclusion. The readings the Starsifters had examined from the battle, the debris they had analyzed, had whispered far different findings to her than it had to the rest of the analytical society.

All agreed that it was the Ekhat who had penetrated the nebula and then fought the Lleix. Alerted by satellites put in orbit long ago, her people had launched their ancient ships, held together with little more than wire and red string for luck, fueled by prayer. There had been two intruding Ekhat ships. One, the Lleix had destroyed themselves, but the survivor fled and then inexplicably fought yet two other much smaller ships which had blessedly destroyed it. One of the newly arrived ships had exploded, but the second, badly damaged, fled the system without making further contact.

So—something else, actually
someone
else, had also been present out there in the swirling nebula which confused long-range instrument readings and reflected back scans. Something alien and cunning. The Starsifters had recovered genetic material from both the Ekhat and the Anj, a slave species sometimes employed on the great devils' ships as they carried out their wanton mission of destruction. A tiny amount of the trace organic material recovered after the battle, though, had not matched either and indeed did not indicate any of the usual enslaved client species used by Ekhat.

In the Starsifters' Duty Chamber, she had studied the records, analyzing and reading, researching for days on end until she'd found a passing reference to a great evil from long ago which seemed to match what they had in hand. She believed the physical evidence traced back to a species that had actually fought for the Ekhat in ships of their own, rather than just crewing their masters' vessels. Despite the conclusions of her elders, she was certain it had not only been the Ekhat in that savage battle. Their wily handservants, the Jao, had been there too.

Her mentors, led by Sayr, disagreed gently, pointing out that the trace evidence was indeed only that—a trace, a single sample. There was only a forty percent match with the record, hardly conclusive, and besides the Jao had not been seen for over a thousand years. No doubt the Ekhat had grown weary of them, as they did all sapient species, and put them down. The devils they knew were bad enough. Jihan should not invoke ancient fears just to make herself important. The situation was dire at any rate.

Added to that, they said, was simple logic: The strangers had dispatched the second Ekhat ship. The enslaved Jao would never have done that. No doubt it was another faction of the Ekhat, who were notorious for refusing to tolerate even their own kind. Most likely, the Melody had fired upon the Interdict, or the Harmony upon the Melody. That, the elders could believe.

The Starsifters were an esoteric
elian
, highly specialized, attracting few of the youth emerging each year from the Children's Court, then accepting almost none of those. She herself was the youngest full member by over ten years and little regarded, for all that she studied hard. Many of the elders had never seen an Ekhat ship outside of recordings until the recent battle.

The last recorded incursion had taken place before she was born, over thirty years ago, and had come to nothing with the bizarrely articulated Ekhat ship sweeping through the nebula without hesitation, evidently on its way to visit destruction upon some other unfortunate world. She had viewed the terrifying records repeatedly.

Before that, their last encounter with the Ekhat had been almost four hundred years earlier, battling in another star system where the Lleix had also maintained a refugee colony, now destroyed. The survivors had fled here, joining the settlement already in place, poor though it was, and now, as far as anyone on Valeron knew, the Lleix survived nowhere else.

The wind gusted and she drew the folds of her brocaded robe more closely around her body. The cold bit bone-deep and her breath plumed in a white cloud. Ahead of her, Sayr ascended the path to the waiting wheeled transport which would take him up to the towering hall with its exposed beams, carved
Boh
faces, and sacred pennants, situated halfway up the mountain.

Although no Ekhat ships remained in the area, at some point they would seek their missing fellows. And when they did, they would find the Lleix here, hiding. They had always known the Ekhat would discover them at some point. It had been bred into each generation, that knowledge, the understanding that at any moment, they might have to fight, or flee, or perhaps even surrender to extinction, as had so many other species under the maniac ministrations of the Ekhat.

Only now they could not flee. They had lost two ships fighting off the Ekhat, two they could not spare. Their numbers had grown since retreating to this hidden world, while the refuge where they'd gone to ground was resource-poor. There were too few ships and no way to replace them.

The Shipbuilders'
elian
was defunct. They had not been able to recruit new members when there was no material for construction and its last elders had died a number of generations before she was born. The Shipservicers did better at replenishing their ranks, but even they could not craft the replacement parts needed when the necessary metals did not occur on this world.

Jihan paced back and forth, her short legs eating up the distance with swinging strides. Sayr was wrong. They were all wrong. It was not just the Ekhat, it was the Jao too, no doubt as bad in their own way as the great devils they served. Though it was forbidden, though she would break
sensho
by appearing without permission, she had to present the truth to the Han.

She set off up the winding path, determined to catch up to Sayr. She would make the elders understand before it was too late.

Grijo arrived early, but the Hall of Decision was already close-crowded. The Hallkeepers, a tiny
elian
of only three, had done their duty, lighting the space brightly so that the colored woods with their attendant carvings showed well. The silent
Boh
faces gazed down within, a reminder of what they had lost. Everyone was painfully aware that the ancestral spirits could not find the Lleix in this alien place. As had been true since their initial diaspora, they were alone.

All the
elian
were represented: Childtenders, Waterdirectors, Groundtillers, Stonesculpters, the most plentiful, down to the more obscure, such as the Gameconductors and Scentcrafters. Tall and well filled out with age, they still trickled in, one delegate each, always the most senior, who would take back the decision here rendered and disseminate it to the rest of the colony. Each assumed his or her place according to
sensho
, proper rank sorted out by age, the youngest and least experienced seated in the back.

Representing the Dwellingconstructors, Grijo climbed laboriously up to sit in the raised immense ornate chair in the center of the vast hall and then waited. As eldest of all, it fell to him to conduct the assembly. His bones were old, though his sight was still quite good, and he possessed the experience of many such sessions to help him maintain order.

Soon the Starsifters' representative, venerable Sayr, who was nearly his match in seniority, would present their findings and the assembled
elian
would be called upon to decide how next to proceed. As if there were any sort of real choice, he reflected. He feared there was not.

He gazed out at the assembled
elian
. The Lleix were a graceful silver-skinned people with varying shades of aureoles framing their concerned faces, gold, silver, black, and even the occasional startling russet. Only the comeliest were allowed to produce the next generation, so that the Lleix physical aspect was uniformly pleasing. One and all, their black eyes were properly upswept at the corners, which some vain individuals accented with sticks of black
vahl
. Down to the last individual, their robes fell in properly draped folds, the styling unchanged in over two thousand years.

The great doors stood open so that the morning sun streamed in from the east, red and angry. It was the leading edge of winter, and even colder up here on the side of the mountain than down on the plains below. Grijo settled his blue and silver brocaded robe more closely around his age-thickened body. Propriety must be served, even if this turned out to be the long-feared Last-of-Days.

Two more representatives scurried in and took their place in the assembled ranks, Treebinder and Enginetuner by their robe patterns. Their aureoles fanned out about their faces, carefully dressed for this significant occasion. Dread seethed through the room, along with fear and loathing, so palpable Grijo could taste the emotions.

The Ekhat had found them.
The impact of that knowledge was much like being told one was going to die before the next breath could be drawn. The incursion thirty-two years ago, though the Ekhat had seemed to take no notice at the time, had probably marked their location for later action. Thirty years was but a gust of breeze to an Ekhat, the tumble of one leaf to the ground. No one knew exactly the length of a single Ekhat's life-span, but it was apparent the devils measured their plans in thousands of years.

A solitary figure appeared in the doorway and stood, awaiting recognition, its face in shadow. Grijo stood, his sinews paining him, and the great hall went silent but for the whisper of heavy robes and shuffling bare feet. "Have the Starsifters arrived at a conclusion?" he asked, holding his head high, his back straight.

"We have," the figure said, and Grijo recognized the voice of Sayr, an old and highly respected authority on the esoteric flotsam of space.

"Present your findings." Grijo settled back carefully in the ornate chair, which was noteworthy for its size and carvings, not its comfort. The Lleix did not intend their leadership to find itself too eager to sit here.

"It was most certainly the Ekhat," Sayr said, taking the center of the room, gazing at the circles of benches filled with his fellow Lleix, all well grown. His aureole, limp with age and long ago darkened to pewter, drooped around his wise face. "We cannot yet say which faction, though in the end, it will not matter. The Interdict is no better than the Harmony, the Harmony no better than the Melody. All seek our extermination."

A ripple of anguish ran through the assembled representatives. Many heads turned away, as though they could not gaze upon this bearer of such unwelcome news.