The Phoenix in Flight (15 page)

“But wethree have taken enough of your time,” said Mho. “You must
observe and interpret.” The trinity made a complex motion that took in the
whole hall. “Wethree depend on you.”

“Not at all, Your Grace. I would gladly continue.”

The Kelly pitched its voice for her ears only. “As would
wethree, but there is the High Phanist, and wethree smell your unease. Wethree will
distract him while you make your escape.”

So the almost preternatural sensitivity of the Douloi to
body language extended even to non-human members of the aristocracy. Leseuer
fought to suppress the worst attack of the giggles she’d ever had as the Kelly
withdrew with a full formal bow, performed with an impeccable snaky grace.
Despite their alien conformation, and the triple echo of their motions, she
could read perfectly the mode: superior to inferior modified by acknowledgment
of primacy of function. It was precisely the mode that would have been
appropriate to a Prophetae, and she heard a murmur of comment from the people
nearby as she returned the deference.

(Do you still think that Ansonia represents that much of
a challenge?)
Ranor’s tone held cool amusement mingled with affection.
(Compared
to the Kelly, integrating your people into the Panarchy will be child’s play.)

(I hope so,)
she replied,
(but you may have
misjudged the depth of our prejudice.)

(We’ve dealt with rationalist democracies countless
times—it’s a developmental stage all cultures go through. The principle is
always the same: those who deny the role of ritual and symbolism in their lives
are helpless against it.)

A swirl of motion at the entrance indicated that another group
of people had entered, at their center a tall man she didn’t recognize. He wore
a severe black tunic with the blason de soleil its only decoration. She framed
him with the ajna and triggered an interrogative.

(That’s Myrradin, Demarch Cloud Achilenga,)
said
Ranor.
(Perhaps the most powerful Highdweller in the Panarchy, with almost a
thousand oneills under him.)

She was struck again by the contrast between Arthelion and
Narbon. Here the blason de soleil was a common sight, there it was rare. Here
there was a mix of Highdwellers and Downsiders mingling in harmony, there a
predominance of Downsiders, close-mouthed and even more close-minded.

Now the Douloi were slowly forming a double line centered on
the Throne Room doors as the time of the Third Summons approached. As she was
carried along by the motion of the assembly, she noticed a hesitation to the
movements of the people around her that was foreign to the usual nature of
Douloi ceremony. The sound of the crowd had changed too: harsher, somehow, on a
note that made her neck hairs lift.

(What’s going on?)
she subvocalized.

When Ranor answered, she could sense the tension in him.
(Enough
of them, like you, have boswell contacts outside the room and the word is
spreading. No one knows where the Krysarch nyr-Arkad is.)

The Laergon entered the Hall of Ivory, followed as before by
the representative of the Polloi. His face was composed, but his gaze darted
about, his eyes reminding her unsettlingly of trapped fireflies.

(Then why are they continuing? Why don’t they delay the
third Summoning?)

Ranor’s voice was resonant with helplessness.
(There’s no
precedent for this. If his delay or absence is his own choice, it’s
unforgivable: the entire top level of government is here tonight, except for
the Privy Council. If it’s not...
) She could hear the noise that indicated
him swallowing.
(If it’s not, if it’s related to the absence of the
Aerenarch-Consort, it could be the first blow of a Family coup.)

(Vannis—and Krysarch Brandon?)
she queried in total
disbelief, trying to pair the diamond-cold Aerenarch-Consort and the handsome,
blue-eyed third son who always seemed half-asleep. In her year at Court, though
she’d seen the two of them at several functions, she could not recall ever
having seen them speak to one another.

The Laergon stopped before the vast doors now slightly ajar,
the Mace held overhead, his posture somehow radiating hopelessness. Once again
he bent from side to side, silencing the increasing buzz of comment in the Hall
with the strange music of the Mace.

The Laergon straightened up and grounded the Mace. “His
Royal Highness, the Krysarch Brandon Takari Burgess Njoye Willam su Gelasaar y
Ilara nyr Arkad d’Mandala!”

In the long pause that followed, the tension in the room
increased so sharply that at first Leseuer thought the faint whine she heard
was the blood singing in her ears. Then she noticed a blue glow slithering
around the edges of the doors to the Throne Room as they swung shut. Overhead,
the immense chandeliers, not yet lit in deference to the late-summer light,
began to flicker with an eerie fluorescence.

Now the complex lineaments of the
Ars Irruptus
blazed
with lurid glimmers of livid blue light, running along the inlaid metal strips
of the mural with fervent energy. The double line of Douloi disintegrated as
they began to back away from the strange display of energy; and as they moved a
strange piping chatter spread among them. For a moment Leseuer puzzled at the
sound, and then her boswell joined the chorus. She looked down with momentary
incomprehension at the device glowing an angry red, and realization hit her
simultaneous with Ranor’s anguished cry.

(Leseuer, my love! Get out of there!)

But it was too late. The boswell dispassionately announced
her fate in the privacy of her inner ear:
PLEASE SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION
IMMEDIATELY. LETHAL RADIATION LEVELS PRESENT;
and still the light from the
deadly doors intensified.

She read the same resignation on the faces of the people
around her that she knew must be on her own. Her skin prickled like the first
warning of a sunburn. A smashing sound twisted her around as the nuller’s
bubble punched through a stained-glass window, fleeing the deathtrap of the
Hall of Ivory.

Then a triple, anguished howl erupted from the Kelly trinity
in the throes of agony. The two larger Kelly were tearing great clumps of
ribbon off of Mho, assisted by the smaller Kelly in a savage act of
self-mutilation, throwing them into the air, where they fluttered frantically
away in every direction. Gouts of yellow blood erupted from the Intermittor as
the motions of her head stalk gradually lost coordination and she slumped
unmoving, supported only by her companions as they continued flaying her.

At the point of death, from sorrow and shock as much as from
the energy now flooding the room, amidst panic and rage, Leseuer’s talent,
which the Kelly had rightly ranked with the Prophetae, asserted itself. Without
awareness of her actions she faithfully recorded the death throes of the
Douloi, both those who clawed their way toward unattainable escape regardless
of those they trampled, and those attempting to shield their loved ones from
the penetrating rays with futile heroism.

(It’s too late, Ranor beloved,)
she replied.
(Let
this be my final gift to you, and to your wonderful, complicated, elegant,
doomed world.)

So it was that all her experience of the Thousand Suns and
its people flooded her inner being, and she saw with the single eye for the
last time. In the agony of her own dissolution, she pronounced the epitaph of
the Panarchy as it had been. And since her art was visual, not verbal, she
borrowed the words of a man long dead before the Vortex swallowed the Exiles of
ancient Earth and delivered them to the loneliness of the Thousand Suns.

(The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...)

A flare of light filled her vision, followed by the briefest
possible sensation of heat, and then there was nothing but a man’s anguished
weeping transmitted to a ruined boswell.

Sebastian Omilov, Doctor of Xenoarchaeology, Gnostor of
Xenology, Chival of the Phoenix Gate, and Praerogate Prime (Occult) to His
Majesty Gelasaar III, lifted his brandy snifter from the table next to his
chair. As he stared through it at the huge reddish-gold sun hanging at the
horizon, the light reflected and refracted through the amber liquid within,
washing his hand with flares of golden light.

He lowered the crystal to take a long and savoring sip,
gazing out over the flower-specked lawn beyond the verandah and the lengthening
fingers of shadow reaching across it from the forest verge.

“Why did you not to go Arthelion for the Krysarch’s
Enkainion?” Osri repeated.

‘
The Krysarch.’ As if he hasn’t known Brandon all his
life.
Omilov turned to his son. “Are you disappointed at finding me home?”
he asked, though he knew it would be useless to attempt a deflection through a
joke.

Osri said painstakingly, “I am never disappointed at finding
you here when I arrive on leave. In fact, I had prepared for the disappointment
of being alone. But I had thought I would be seeing you at the Enkainion when
the vids reach us. So why did you not go, Father?”

“That should be sufficiently obvious,” Omilov said. “I was
not invited.”

The frown on Osri’s face deepened. Omilov, looking
dispassionately at his son sitting stiffly in his naval uniform, wondered if he
ever wore civilian garb anymore.

Omilov saluted Osri with his crystal. “So we will watch it
together tomorrow. Will you drink, my boy?” He nodded at the empty snifter.

Osri jerked his head in negation. “There must be a reason.
Your position as friend to the Panarch, as tutor to the Krysarchs—it’s an
insult.”

It’s a warning,
Omilov thought, but he said nothing.
He’d tried to stand against Semion in the L’Ranja affair ten years ago, and had
lost. The retreat to Charvann was to spare his family; Osri’s best protection
was his ignorance.

Not that he would have confided in his only son if he’d had
the chance. Looking at Osri’s angry face, he thought a little sadly,
You’ve
too much of the Ghettierus love for the sound of rules, and too little of the
Omilov savor of their sense.

A flock of
jezeels
winged their way raucously over
head: dipping, deceptively clumsy flyers, like clowns tumbling headlong into
the center ring. Osri was distracted by them, rubbing his hands down the arms
of his chair as he watched their flight. The evening breeze stirred his short
hair, the lowering sun glowing in his dark eyes.

Omilov was old friends with the birds; his attention stayed
on his son’s unsmiling countenance. It was a well-made face, despite the long
Omilov earlobes, but one rarely graced by a smile.
Burdened with my ears and
your mother’s lack of humor.

“Even a space as large as the Ivory Hall would not hold all
those whose positions would seem to require that they ‘should’ have been
there,” Omilov said, trying to deflect his son from brooding. “To the luckless
compiler of the guest list the importance of an old tutor who has officially
retired—”

Omilov paused as a bell toned.

“What is that?” Osri asked. “Why do you have these
comsignals? Why not wear your boswell?”

“It seems we’ve a visitor arriving,” Omilov said,
sidestepping the last two questions. “Someone who has the passcode to the
estate.”

“Whom were you expecting?” Osri frowned again. “Father, you
ought to wear your boswell.”

Omilov laughed as he scanned the azure horizon. “One of the
benefits of official retirement is freedom from immediate access,” he said.
“Ah. Here we are.” He stood up and moved to the edge of the verandah, followed
by his son.

A golden egg-shape moved with deliberate grace over the
forest treetops, arcing down across the lawn. A wide swath rippled through the
grasses as the phaeton hovered; then it moved sideways toward the verandah.
Omilov stepped back as the breeze kicked up by the geeplane fanned his face.

Almost as if the unknown person inside read Omilov’s mind,
the pilot moved the taxi back again a few meters. Then it settled on the grass,
releasing the pungent smell of crushed blossoms.

The curved door slid up and two male figures sprang down
from the taxi, the first just above medium height and slender, the second big
and burly. The big one carried luggage; the other looked up at the verandah,
walking swiftly toward them as the phaeton lifted off and slid away,
disappearing around the side of the manse.

Omilov stared in amazement as his brain registered the
familiar planes of Arkadic bone structure. He recognized Brandon nyr-Arkad just
before Brandon vaulted the low railing and advanced, smiling, both hands held
out. So soon after the Enkainion?
Too soon.

“Sebastian! I thought I might find you back here.”

Omilov hesitated, then bowed with formal deliberation,
extending his hands palms-out for the formal touch.

“Sebastian,” Brandon said softly. “I thought this was the
one house where precedence is teacher-before-student, and titles have no
place?”

“That was when you were a boy, and for a reason,” Omilov
said, searching the opaque blue eyes. “I don’t think you’ve been here to The Hollows
since...”
Since your disgrace at the Academy, and mine before the Douloi.

“I haven’t,” Brandon said. “Though not through design. Can
we go back to the old rules?”

“We can,” Omilov said. “Welcome, Brandon.” Omilov clasped
Brandon’s right hand in both of his.

Then Brandon turned to Osri, his face polite and unreadable.
“Osri. A surprise.”

“Your Highness,” Osri said, performing a faultless salute.

His formality was deliberate; Omilov was saddened, but not
surprised.
Even as boys they were too different to ever be friends, and ten
years after the fact Osri is still shocked and offended over his perception of
the Markham vlith-L’Ranja affair at the Academy.