The Phoenix in Flight (40 page)

Osri scowled at Brandon, only to meet a quizzical grin. With
a smothered exclamation he jammed his hand into the pouch, pulled out the Heart
of Kronos, and then dropped it on the table before Vi’ya, ignoring her hand.

She watched the dully gleaming sphere slip to the darkly
polished wood and rest there as if it had been glued. As her fingers closed
around it, she said to Osri, “I am a tempath, Schoolboy. So not only watch what
you do, watch what you think.”

Shock zapped through Osri’s already lacerated nerves. A
tempath! He knew little about such emotional sensitives, but shared the
widespread distrust common in the Thousand Suns. It was said that there were
only two kinds of tempaths: those who restrained their powers—these usually
found their way into the Order of the Sanctus Lleddyn—and those who used them
to
dominate the people around them.

Osri was sure what kind of tempath a Rifter would be.

Vi’ya ignored him as she tested the properties of the Heart
of Kronos for a few seconds, her face betraying nothing. Then she turned to
Brandon. “Where were you taking this?”

“Away from Hreem.” Brandon gestured with his crystal goblet,
watching the facets glitter and flash in the light of the globes. He hadn’t
reacted at all to the news about Vi’ya’s being a tempath.

“You were bringing it to Markham?” she persisted.

Brandon had reached to fill his glass again, an occupation
which appeared to claim all his attention.

The door-tapestry flared outward, batted by an impatient
hand, and a small, curvy female with a cloud of frizzy blond hair dashed in.
She was barefoot, and wore baggy, worn overalls with several unmatching utility
pockets sewn haphazardly on, stuffed with a variety of precision tools. Other
tools were clipped to her belt. She had a round-cheeked, sharp-chinned face,
darting light eyes, and a mischievous grin.

She flashed a hand up in general greeting. “Vi’ya! You won’t
believe what I saw!” Her voice was high and flute-clear.

Vi’ya glanced up briefly, her hands still testing the Heart
of Kronos.

“I was watchin’ our friends on the cruiser—let’m see me as
usual so they’d know we got the message from the Archon—then all of a sudden
they skipped out. Followed a hunch and hopped over toward Charvann, just in
time to see the
Korion
blown to photons by the
Lith.
One
skipmissile!”

Vi’ya’s eyes widened slightly. “A cruiser, Marim?”

Marim flung her arms wide in a quick gesture. “Blown away.
Panarchists zapped a couple of ships when these two took off.” She motioned
toward Brandon and Osri. “But with whatever Hreem’s got, Charvann isn’t gonna hold
out too long, and we’d better hope Hreem never finds this place. He could crack
Dis open like a month-old
moong-
egg
.”

“Pick up any EM from them?”

“Yeah. Skipped around, sniffed some orders.
Esteel’s
out
there. No, was. Bunch of small fry. And the
Satansclaw.”

Vi’ya gave a soft laugh. “Tallis Y’Marmor—allied with Hreem
the Faithless?”

The little blond scout chortled. “It was an order to Tallis
I got, and you were right—only one mention, but that was enough.”

“Dol’jhar,” Vi’ya murmured, her accent and intonation
somehow darkening the word to Osri’s distorted perceptions.

Osri shifted on his pillows, and the scout’s eyes flickered
among them all, making Osri think of a pale-eyed rodent. Then she grinned. “You
two gave Tallis quite a ride. Last I saw, he was still tryin’ to pull out of
orbit around Warlock!”

Vi’ya’s lip curled. “Marim, allow me to present to you Osri
the Instructor, from the Panarchist Naval Academy, and Krysarch Brandon
nyr-Arkad.”

Osri made no attempt to hide how deeply offensive he found
the many breaches of protocol made in this singular introduction, but Brandon
smiled back at Marim. “Brandon will do.”

Marim’s head cocked bird-like. “Arkad? Today’s the day for
special visitors, looks like. First that blunge-bag Hreem and then a royal
whatsit.” She turned to Osri. “You piloting?”

He made a motion of denial, not trusting his voice. The
scout’s casual confirmation of awareness—even understanding—between Rifter
trash and the Archon of Charvann was yet another blow.

“
You?
” Marim’s eyes widened as she gazed
appreciatively at Brandon. “You’d definitely be wasted holdin’ down a throne,
or whatever it is you high-end nicks do with yourselves. I saw you escape from
that blunge-brain Tallis with an ablative across Warlock. Thought you’d burned
it for sure—who taught you to fly?”

“Markham,” Brandon replied.

Marim’s grin vanished. Her gaze flicked to Vi’ya, who was
studying the Heart of Kronos as if she had not heard.

“Best pilot I ever knew.” Marim’s thin shoulders jerked up
in a shrug, then she turned and swatted the tapestry aside again. “Goin’ to
grab some eats,” she announced, and she was gone.

Vi’ya said, “Where were you going before you lost your
fiveskip?”

“Arthelion,” Brandon offered, his index finger rubbing
absently across the knuckles of his other hand.

Vi’ya’s gaze took in this gesture, then she answered the
unspoken question. “Your ship’s autopilot was destroyed, its information
irretrievable.”

Osri knew she’d sensed his relief by the way her eyes
narrowed in bleak amusement. He clenched his jaw, determined to talk no
more—though painfully aware that his intentions didn’t matter a jot to her.

“So you came here to request help from Markham,” she went
on. “In what form?”

Brandon set his glass down, gaze on it as though reading an
answer in the empty crystal. Then he said slowly, “Markham would have put me on
a ship to wherever I wished to go.”

“That’s true,” the woman acknowledged with surprising
promptness, and then, with another flash of humor, “and your reminder of the loyal
and inspiring bond of friendship is calculated to elicit a similar response
from me, yes?”

“Well, either that or a snarling threat to sell us to the
highest bidder,” Brandon countered, matching her tone. “Affording us a clue to
our status.”

Vi’ya said, “Any enemy of Hreem the Faithless is a potential
ally of mine. Tell me what it is you want, and I will consider what is to be
done.”

“Passage to Arthelion,” Brandon stated immediately. “I don’t
know if a courier was able to leave Charvann, and even if it did, it wouldn’t
have headed for Arthelion. We must report on what we have seen... and take
that—” He nodded at the silver sphere. “—to safety.” He said with an engaging
grin, “I can make the trip very worthwhile—consider it a ransom.”

She gave a soft laugh. “A ransom for royalty? A Rifter’s
dream, yes?” She leaned forward to pick up the Heart of Kronos, then rose to
her feet. “You may wait here. I will not be long.” She paused at the tapestry
and added a threat aimed directly at Osri: “Perhaps I should say you
will
wait
here. The Eya’a are in the adjoining room, as you surmised, and they are
watching.”

Then she left them alone.

“She took my father’s artifact,” Osri whispered with fierce
frustration. “May I respectfully point out, Your Highness, that your
friends
might be bluffing about those sophonts?” He lowered his voice, casting a
quick glance at the tapestry through which the Eya’a had disappeared. Then he
pantomimed grabbing a weapon and using it.

Brandon leaned back against his cushions and laughed. There
was a faint flush of color along the refined ridge of his cheekbones, and his
eyes were fever-bright. The liquor had hit him hard—and no wonder. They hadn’t
eaten since that dinner at the Hollows, and had had only a few hours’ sleep...
if Brandon, who had gone to Merryn wearing the same clothes he’d dined in, had
slept at all.

Brandon’s laughter infuriated Osri.
Danger not just to
me, but to my father’s artifact—and I’m stuck with this drunken lackwit whose
life I’ve sworn to protect.

He leaned forward, pitching his voice to sting Brandon into
some semblance of awareness. “You will pardon my obtuseness, but I fail to
observe anything humorous in our present circumstances. What I do see clearly
is our duty.”

“Relax, Osri.” Brandon’s voice revealed that skipnose seemed
to have hit him, too. “There isn’t much we can do about those circumstances
yet.”

Osri sneaked another glance at the tapestry, aware of his
disloyal but sour satisfaction that Brandon was at last showing the effects of
that disastrous landing—and the even more disastrous choice that had forced
them to it.

Then Brandon said, “What were you doing during your Academy
combat-training days? Or did you opt out of it in favor of administrative
refinements?’’

“I was instructed in the same basic program you yourself
should have undergone—”

“If you’ve had level-one Ulanshu training, you should have
seen that even if her tempathic ability were too weak to pick up our
intentions, her training is high level. She could have taken care of both of us
herself.”

Disbelief made Osri forget his alien eavesdroppers.
“Two
of
us?”

“So you didn’t see it. Perhaps it is not so obvious, then...
to one who did not see fit to augment the Academy Administrative Program’s
basic physical-training regimen. I did, Osri.” Brandon’s smile turned sardonic.
“With my friend Markham. Who may, incidentally, have trained this woman. I saw
it immediately in the way she sat, the posing of her hands. What would have
happened to you is academic; a crushed windpipe, I think. And to me—a myriad of
possibilities, the best of which would be the weapon drawn on me. The length of
the table would have prevented her from having to exert herself unnecessarily.
Which is why she sat where she did.”

Osri flushed, then looked around quickly, trying to
determine if they were being overheard.

He tried to find something to say, but Brandon’s attention
had shifted to the statue of the
jatta
-carved feline in flight. Moving
with deliberate ritual, the Krysarch refilled his glass and raised it. “To
Lenic Deralze.” He drank, refilled the glass, then said in a lower voice, “Be
well, Markham.” This time, after he emptied the glass, he hurled it against the
wall.

The smoke from the incense rose in a straight column through
the still air, its sweet-sour scent hanging heavy in the cabin. Subtle curves
and flutings twisted in its diaphanous substance, drawing Anaris’s eyes upward
until they met the empty gaze of his grandfather’s skull above the family altar.
His knees smarted from his long vigil on the metal deck, but he ignored the
pain, waiting.

The cabin, deep within the battlecruiser, was cold and dark,
lit only by the candles rendered from his grandfather’s flesh by his son
Jerrode, now established in triumph on the planet below. Somewhere behind
Anaris someone shifted uneasily, fabric moving against fabric; a quiet clink of
metal came from where Kyvernat Juvaszt stood, and behind him, the unsteady
breathing of the others in attendance.

This was the
eglarhh hre-immash,
the laying of the
vengeful ghost, placating the restless spirit of Urtigen gyarrh’ka Eusabian,
who had died at the hands of his son twenty-nine years before. Every month
since, Jerrode Eusabian had sacrificed to deflect his father’s vengeance,
offering both blood and the justification of a successful rule. Only these
could avert the anger of the restless dead, condemned to watch in silence for
thirty-three years before going on to join the honored ancestors in the Halls
of Dol.

But now, anticipating the next stage in the completion of
his paliach—the greatest in the history of Dol’jhar—Eusabian had acknowledged
his conditional acceptance of Anaris as a potential heir by delegating the
eglarhh
to his son. By tradition and law only a direct descendant could lay the ghost
of one so powerful as Urtigen had been, for he had carried the spirit of Dol
within him as an Avatar.

Anaris smiled coldly at the skull, knowing that those around
him would dare not look up on his face during the ceremony.
You and I,
Grandfather, will encompass his downfall. This is his first mistake.
For
Eusabian did not know the greatest gift the Panarchists had given him, opening
the secret gate of his mind.

Anaris gathered his will and breathed deeply, drawing in the
pungent scent of the incense. Then he rose to his feet and bowed over the
copper sacrifice bowl in front of him, now glowing red from the coals beneath
it, coals he had formed himself of charcoal and a pinch of dust from Urtigen’s
thighbone. Then he picked up the lancet and poised it over his left wrist, over
the heart vein.

“Darakh ettu mispeshi, Urtigen-dalla. Darakh ni-palia
entasz pendeschi, pron hemma-mi ortoli ti narhh.”
Visit us with your mercy,
great Urtigen. Visit not with vengeance your lineage, take instead this my
blood that once was yours.

He plunged the lancet into the vein, twisting it to release
a stream of dark blood into the bowl. It hissed and spat as it struggled with
the hot metal. The smell of burning blood filled the room, dark as vengeance,
pungent as fear. Smoke rose from the bowl as Anaris let fall the lancet and
concentrated fiercely.

Then, slowly, the smoke formed itself into the semblance of
two hands, long thin fingers writhing into a benison above his head. The hands
hovered, blurring into dissipation. The skull twitched.

Through the buzzing of a fearsome headache, Anaris heard a
sharp intake of breath from the others in the room, then a burst of awed
whispers.
“Urtigen mizpeshi! Anaris darakh-kreshch!”
The mercy of
Urtigen! Anaris anointed!

Anaris propped himself on one fist and looked over his
shoulder, fighting his fatigue and the growing nausea his efforts had induced.
Glaring the watchers into silence, he issued a command. “Say nothing of this.
It is between the ancestor and myself.”