The Phoenix in Flight (47 page)

“Dogs,” Barrodagh repeated. “Why would dogs chew the
cables?”

“Someone is commanding them,” Almanor said, her voice
trembling.

At least she was fighting the same tide of fury. “Kill
them,” Barrodagh said. “That order was never rescinded. Kill them on sight.”

The grays exchanged looks as the Tarkan said emotionlessly,
“No one reports seeing them.”

“Did you put out more poisoned meat?” Barrodagh asked. “As I
recall, we got rid of a number of them when we did that.”

“Twelve,” Almanor reported. “Until they stopped eating the
poisoned meat.”

“So you put out a different type of meat, and make sure the
poison is odorless and tasteless,” Barrodagh said, scarcely restraining his
sarcasm. Why was this so difficult to figure out?

“Do you not think we tried that?” Almanor retorted. “It
worked precisely as well as sealing up the bot-hatches the dogs apparently use
for access, and destroying the sensors to unblock services, and just about
everything else we try in this damned maze...” She stopped, her lips pressed
together.

Barrodagh carefully unclenched his teeth until the tightness
of his throat relaxed, and his voice could be trusted. On Dol’jhar, Almanor
would have been more circumspect. “Then clearly someone is commanding the
animals. The order to shoot on sight stands, but institute a thorough sweep for
their human commander. Someone has to be directing the sabotage: the location
of this latest evidence is not random.” He had no idea where Green Corridor was
in relation to where they now stood, but surely at least one of those in front
of him did.
If the security system can’t be trusted, what is to keep them
guarded?

The vivid image of dogs somehow loosing the Panarchist
prisoners was real enough to shoot terror through Barrodagh’s nerves. They’d
chosen the Green Corridor because of the paucity of bot hatches there, and the
primitive nature of the cells, but still...

One of the Panarch’s sons...
Once again the memory
hit him with the force of a blow.

Dogs, sensors... He turned to the Tarkan in charge. “I want
chuqaths in the watch sector surrounding Green Corridor. Let them roam freely.”
The Tarkan evidenced surprise with the merest flicker of dark brows, and
Barrodagh added, “I know they can’t be trusted. I want that savagery on guard
here.” No dog would survive an encounter with a hungry chuqath. “Make certain
that the grays and other non-essential staff are told to stay clear of this
area.”

“It shall be done,” the Tarkan responded. She motioned to
one of the grays, who would have to relay the message using the nearest
functional console.

That gave Barrodagh an idea. “Order a cart to meet us,” he
told the Tarkan. “And make certain Ferrasin awaits our arrival.”

The gray hurried away, her gait an almost bounding run in
the lower gravity of Arthelion.

Barrodagh and Almanor watched the grays remove the junction
box. Its case had been quite deliberately torn apart—the teeth marks were
evident if one examined closely. The stench of urine was strong as he bent. Not
satisfied with shredding the internal circuitry, the dogs had urinated on the
remains as well. No dog would do that on its own. There had to be someone, or
someones, lurking in these very sublevels.

Well, the Tarkans would find them. In the meantime, he’d
have to reassign some of the cims to make metal junction boxes, and cable
cladding, until the techs could re-route the cables along the ceilings.
Danathar could see to that.

The cart arrived. Barrodagh noted the grays watching as he
and Almanor were driven away. There was less of the healthy fear in their
expressions that had been the norm on Dol’jhar, he thought. Another sign of the
ongoing erosion in discipline.

As the cart hummed through halls and corridors that all
looked the same, Barrodagh smelled dog urine now and again; some sections were
totally dark, and the driver sped through them.

The computer offices were deep under the Palace Major.
Barrodagh walked into a chillingly cold room filled with blank-faced compute
arrays, cables snaking everywhere and consoles on every surface. As Barrodagh
and Almanor stepped over the cables, all the consoles blinked once, twice.

“No! No!” howled Ferrasin, a huge, sloppy man, both hands
clutching unkempt sandy hair. “NonononoNO!”

The consoles all went dark. Several techs dived at the
keypads. Someone somewhere must have achieved something, for the displays
reappeared, the images bouncing in unison, then showing... the blue and gold
phoenix medallion of the Panarchy.

“Ch-ch-chatzing...” the man uttered a strangled curse, spun
around, then spotted Barrodagh. His face was red and sweaty, his expression
almost demented. He blinked rapidly, then said, “At least wuh-wuh, we’ve
b-bounced. Back.” He slowed, fists clenched as he struggled to enunciate past
his stutter. “To the t-top. Top. Chthon.”

“Does that mean you can speed up progress in getting our
compads functional beyond line of sight? And the Tarkan and conscript comms?
Without the damned relays?” The need to wire independent access points had left
security stretched perilously thin.

“It’s t-taken us tuh, time to fuh, fuh, fuh...”

“Firewall,” someone murmured softly from behind. Barrodagh
could not see whom.

Rather than being irritated, Ferrasin seemed relieved, and
waved a tech forward, a Bori who didn’t look any older than fifteen. He
exchanged looks with Ferrasin, then said, “There are actually two problems
here. We’re trying to extend our control of the upper chthons of the computer
system so we can use the existing network for secure communications, rather
than laying our own cable. “

The boy’s knobby hands swooped on the word ‘upper’ signaling
symbolic rather than physical space. “While he’s trying to probe the deeper
chthons, which is where things like the security phages and sensors are.”

“Can you find out who is commanding these dogs? They must be
using their own communication system,” Barrodagh said.

“Dogs are deep chthon, too...” began the boy.

“No one,” Ferrasin interrupted. “N-no one is using the
palace comms. I wuh, wish someone would. So we c-c-c-could puh, puh, piggyback.
On their traffic. The d-dogs?” He swallowed, shut his eyes, and made an
enormous effort that Barrodagh could almost feel in his facial muscles. His
head began to pang.

“The p-palace system is almost a thousand years old. And
enormously c-complicated. Dogs are p-part of it. The bots... w-we’re seeing
em-muh-merrrr—”

“Emergent properties,” said the Bori tech. “We don’t think
anybody programmed some of what we’re seeing.”

Barrodagh waved a hand, cutting off Ferrasin’s painful
attempt to continue. “Just treat security of the prisoners as secondary only to
matters pertaining to the Avatar. And report any progress to my office.”

“We’ve got some progress already,” a woman called from
farther back in the room. She poked her head over a console, tired black eyes
blinking. “The
neuraimai
are settling down! I think we’ve finally got
them an upper-chthon space of their own that the system can’t get at.”

Barrodagh contained his impatience at the jargon. After some
initial disasters that had furnished subjects for Evodh but no advances in
understanding of the Palace compute arrays, he had learned to insulate
Panarchist technical staff from the realities of Dol’jharian discipline—it just
terrified them into stupidity. Unfortunately, that also tended to compromise
the attitudes of the Bori technical staff he’d brought from Dol’jhar, but as
with so much else on Arthelion, he had little choice.

“Translate,” he said to Ferrasin, who blinked, his face
relaxing slightly.

“That’s m-major progress, senz-lo Barrodagh. Now we have a
chance at penetrating the lower chthons of the s-system and undoing the
security blocks. Once that’s d-done, we’ll be a lot closer to the access you
want.”

Barrodagh nodded and walked out—followed by Almanor. So her
purpose was not just a status report from Ferrasin, but something private. He
wasn’t going to hear it in front of the gray driving the cart.

As they passed a lift, Barrodagh halted the driver with a
word, and climbed off the cart. Sure enough, Almanor hopped down as well,
showing the ten years of difference in their ages with her agility. The lift
took them back to ground level, opening onto a corridor supported by fluted
columns of rose marble. He knew where he was: his offices were in the building
across this garden, which held pools of fish gathered from numerous worlds.

The enormous glass door slid open, and they walked into the
garden. Both their compads chirped at the same time; they were now in range of
the external Dol’jharian system.

Barrodagh glanced at his and suppressed a groan at the
length of his message queue—what good was Danathar, anyway? But that could
wait. More important was whatever Almanor was working herself up to.

He scrutinized the complication of vines and flowering
shrubs surrounding the tiered pools, then said, “I imagine your com queue is
nearly as long as mine.”

Almanor looked around very deliberately, as though Barrodagh
hadn’t scanned. He suppressed his irritation. He had never liked her, but he
would not deny her thoroughness, which was as scrupulous as his own. And he was
as sure as was possible among the Catennach that she was no threat to him.

She said, “There’s something going on with Vox.”

Vox Populi. On Dol’jhar, nobody ever talked outside
Catennach quarters about the game that was so very much more than a game. Here,
in the complexity of the Palace, there was less reason to fear the lords’
attention, but the reticence remained. This must be serious. Barrodagh stopped,
facing her. “What?”

Almanor’s thin lips pressed into a pale line. Then she said,
“It’s...” She glanced skyward, as if the data was written there. “Vox is
changing. I still don’t think it was a good idea to run it on the Palace
arrays, although I realize we had little choice if we were to run it at all.
But the longer it runs, the more compute space it consumes, the odder it gets.”

When Barrodagh began to speak, she brought up a hand. “I
realize we don’t have time or wherewithal to deal with it now. But I thought you’d
better know.”

On Dol’jhar, Barrodagh had been only an observer of the
game, and occasional participant in the hidden conversations about Bori life it
made possible. On Arthelion he didn’t even have time for that.

“What do you mean, odder?”

She shook her head. “I can’t really define how, except to
say that players whom no one took seriously on Dol’jhar seem to be unusually
lucky. Like Danathar. And Nyzherian. Especially him. He’s gaining gravitas with
every round.”

“Nyzherian has too much free time,” Barrodagh said. “I shall
amend that.”

Her lips curled upward at the corners, then she turned away,
and walked rapidly in the direction of her own offices.

Vox Populi! There would be some changes in Catennach
playtime, starting today. For a few steps Barrodagh took pleasure in working
out the wording of the memo. But he must not let himself be distracted with the
easy problems. As he turned up one of the slate pathways, careful to avoid
stepping on the fragile-looking grasses, and swatting at things that buzzed
near his face, he forced himself back to one of the deeper problems, one he
yearned to delve into when he regained computer control.

Deeper problems were those with roots back on Dol’jhar, when
his control had seemed secure: how could he possibly have missed the connection
between Anaris and the slave Lelanor? More importantly, how could he have
missed that Lelanor had been taken aboard the
Fist of Dol’jhar
? It could
only be Evodh behind it, and his motivation to strike at Barrodagh’s careful
attempts to build trust with the conditional heir.

Barrodagh stumbled over some loose rocks on the path, and
paused to kick them back into place, with a swift and wary look to make certain
the Avatar was not roaming about as he’d begun doing so uncharacteristically.
The intermittency of their comms made it difficult to keep track of him, which
was another... oh, it was far too dangerous, and unsettling, to think of as an
irritation.

He never would have known about the incident with Lelanor if
Morrighon had not reported it. He did not have enough resources, that was the
fundamental problem. Without resources, how could he establish the control he
needed? His cheek ached, and that brought back Hreem’s face.
One of the
Panarch’s sons...

That vid replaced his surroundings: Brandon nyr-Arkad
exiting a flyer, and behind him, Barrodagh’s agent, the cashiered marine guard
Deralze. What really happened that day at the Ivory Hall? Barrodagh was
beginning to suspect that this question was the impulse behind the nightmares,
not merely the shock of discovering that Brandon nyr-Arkad was still alive, and
free, when he had expected to hear from Rifthaven that Deralze had delivered
the nyr-Arkad’s head and had then been killed.
At least he’s dead now. They
both are
.

Fortunately, Brandon nyr-Arkad’s death had followed close
enough on the news that he was alive that Barrodagh had been able to balance
the failure of the Enkainion plot with the Krysarch’s death in his report, thus
preserving the Avatar’s paliach, if not his paliachee. Even so, Barrodagh had
been astonished at how easily Eusabian took the news.

He rocked back on his heels when once again he almost ran
into a door—another heavy glass one. After a moment it slid open. He entered
the cooler hallway beyond, blinking to adjust to the shadowy lighting. His
compad chirped again as it lost access.

A short time later he entered his office antechamber.
Danathar was present at his desk, Barrodagh noticed with sour approval.