The Phoenix in Flight (58 page)

When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, authoritative,
gutturals and rolled r’s emerging with an odd precision, the breathy pause
between syllables almost a grunt.

“I am Evodh radach’Enar, pesz mas’hadni to the Avatar, who
has entrusted your death to me.”

His assistant moved to the head of the gurney and busied
himself with the console.

“Whether or not you cooperate is a matter of indifference to
me. Since you are not a Dol’jharian you cannot be expected to understand the
honor of your situation, nor to die well. Thus there is no honor here for me,
only the extraction of information.”

Omilov did his best to preserve the Douloi poise. Although
the man was speaking Uni, the cultural premises behind his words rendered his
speech incomprehensible.

“However, so that you may understand in part the art of
emmer
mas’hadnital
—I
believe you would say, ‘the pain that transfigures’—I
will explain as I proceed, so long as you remain capable of comprehension.”

Omilov jerked slightly as the assistant lifted his head with
strangely gentle hands and fitted a metallic mesh cap over it. It felt warm
against his shaven scalp.

Evodh began speaking again, his gaze moving from Omilov’s
helpless body into the middle distance, his voice almost ruminative.

“There are many types of pain. All involve fear.” As he spoke
the assistant tapped a switch on the console, and Omilov heard a thin keening
commence. Something itched inside his head, just behind his eyes.

“There are the basic fear complexes: among them falling—”
Omilov gasped as the gurney seemed to drop out from beneath him. “—sudden loud
noises—” A prodigious explosion rattled his head, and he could even sense the
pressure wave on his skin. “—and suffocation.” Something abruptly snatched away
the air in the room and his lungs ached as he fought for breath.

“There is also the fear of the unexpected, which you are
already beginning to experience, and more complex and personal fears, which I
will discover and exploit during your transfiguration. The mindripper can
provide many other effects to aid my explorations. I can diminish or eliminate
any part of your sensorium.”

In rapid succession, each of Omilov’s senses vanished and
returned: sight, hearing, touch, proprioception, equilibrium...

“... and I can heighten them as well.”

Suddenly the surface of the gurney felt agonizingly cold and
the gentle breeze from the ventilator rasped his flesh. The sour scent of his
own fear and an odd, pungent scent from the two Dol’jharians filled his nose.
His heartbeat resounded in his ears like the engines of a starship in emergency
overload.

Evodh reached down and gently traced a line down Omilov’s
stomach with his fingernail; it felt as if he was being eviscerated with a
jagged piece of metal. Then the pain stopped, instantly. Omilov felt his lip
pop as his teeth met in it in an effort to repress the howl he felt building
within him. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the Dol’jharian
technology of pain.

Evodh paused. “Your culture holds that the fear of death is
the greatest pang. We of Dol’jhar know this to be false. A greater pang is the
fear of undeath, of continuing even after the body that has sustained you in
comfort for so many years is ruined beyond redemption.”

He picked up a small, stubby metal cylinder with a fine
spike jutting from its underside and rolled it between his fingers. There was
no hint of display in his movements, merely the unconscious gestures of an
artist with the tools of his trade, which was far more terrifying than any
overt threat would have been. “That is where the art begins. As its medium you
will not be able to appreciate its end.”

The whine from the mindripper increased and Omilov abruptly
lost control of his body. He could still feel, but not move. A sour stink
pervaded the room and he realized that his bowels had voided. Shame, rage and
terror warred within him as Evodh lowered the cylinder toward his face.

“We will start with stimulation of the trigeminal nerve.
Later you will have an opportunity to speak, if you desire.”

Omilov’s terror peaked as he realized the full extent of his
helplessness. Even had he wished to, he could not stop the torture by betraying
his oath. He had barely time enough for a brief prayer to the Light-bearer
before the needle tore into his cheek and an agony beyond anything he had ever
conceived overwhelmed him.

o0o

Greywing followed the rest of the crew out from between the
folds of the tapestry, and then stopped. Even the Eya’a paused.

The antechamber to the Hall of Ivory had the form of a
spacious hall, its floor covered with a plush, fine-napped carpet of midnight
blue deeply incised with a complex abstract design composed of sunbursts and
mandalic figurations in old gold. The high walls were interrupted at regular
intervals by tall stained-glass windows, illuminated from without, of many different
styles, preserving in glistening splendor a thousand years of the vitrine art.
Above, just below the high ceiling, a massive crystal chandelier hung
apparently unsupported, an inverted fountain of refracted and reflected light.

At the end of the hall most distant from them was a pair of
ten-meter-high doors, carved in a riotous abstract design that suggested an
eruption of energy from some unseen source into the phenomenal world. At the
other end, near where they had emerged, a spiral staircase sprang gracefully up
out of a sunburst mosaic set in the floor to a mezzanine level, its risers
fashioned of exotic stone, no two alike. Whatever supported the staircase was
invisible. It hung in the air, suggestive of the flight of a bird rising from
the surface of a still pond.

Scattered across the floor in a pleasing relationship to
each other and the space they graced were pedestals displaying
objets d’art.
Similar displays hung on the walls between the windows.

At first the beauty hit Greywing like a blow. Numbly she
studied object after object, trying to memorize them all for recollection later
when she was back in the ugliness that had seemed to be her place in the
universe. “Beauty” was another of those words that had seemed to have lost its
meaning, yet here it was, in forms she could never have imagined, the gifts of
unknown cultures, fashioned by long-dead hands. She had to see the names of the
artists, though her eyes were stinging and it was hard to read the engraved
plagues: this was immortality, a kind she would never achieve.

A sick kind of desolation chilled her. Except for distant,
beckoning glimpses when she was very small, there had been no beauty in her
life, and so in turn she had denied the existence of beauty.

Her eyes blurred as she tried to find Ivard. He bounded
excitedly from figure to figure, grabbing whatever was small and stuffing it
into pockets, and when those were full, into the front of his coverall.

Lokri, too, moved with uncharacteristic haste along the
displays, grabbing indiscriminately. He backed into something, knocking over a
blown-glass figurine that glittered with a desperate rainbow of colors before
it smashed on the floor.

“Sgatshi!”
Lokri exclaimed in disgust, and Ivard
snickered.

It seemed a kind of rape to Greywing, and she turned away.
Her bitterness increased when she recognized in Ivard’s laughter the hardened
cynicism that she had carefully taught him as protection. It had never been his
nature.

Her gaze was caught by a small silver object gleaming
against a matte-black background, just beyond her shoulder. Closer examination
resolved the object into a roundish medallion, with a broad-winged bird in
flight carved on it. The carving was worn in places, and clumsy in others, but
there was a kind of power and majesty in the soaring bird. Around the medallion
words had been engraved, in a roundish script completely unfamiliar.

She bent to look at the display plaque, and a thrill burned
through her nerves when she read the words “From Lost Earth.”

She lifted the medallion away from its setting, ignoring the
pain in her shoulder. The cold metal was heavy against her hand. A silver bird:
Greywing—like the name she had chosen for herself when she left Natsu behind
forever. Maybe this was even the original ‘greywing,’ all the way from Lost
Earth. Anything seemed possible here, anything.

Her fingers closed around the coin, then she turned around
and surveyed the antechamber. Already many of the displays were bare. Ivard and
Lokri joked back and forth as they made their way along an adjacent wall.
Montrose strolled at an unhurried pace, gravely considering each item and
choosing with care.

The Eya’a had taken a stance directly under the chandelier,
at which they gazed unwaveringly, their necks kinked in an inhuman curve. They
began keening together in a high, teeth-shivering counterpoint.

Poetry? Music?
Maybe Vi’ya knew. Greywing saw her
moving slowly from exhibit to exhibit, at least as interested in looking as
looting.

The Krysarch alone seemed uninterested in his antechamber.
He sat on the stairs, elbows propped on his knees and hands dangling empty, his
face pensive.

She crossed over to him. “Why aren’t you taking anything?”
she asked, her voice coming out like an accusation. That surprised her. She
didn’t mean it to. “Is this stuff boring to you?”

Brandon flicked a fast glance across the wide space at Ivard
and Lokri and then away again, so quickly she knew that he, too, felt the
looting as a kind of rape. It made her spiraling thoughts dissolve into
confusion.

“The art here belongs to the citizens of the Panarchy,” he
finally said. “Not to me.”

“We aren’t citizens,” she retorted in a stony voice. “We’re
Rifters.”

“You were once,” he replied. “This won’t redress our
failure...” He paused, and shrugged as he gave her a twisted smile. “Better you
have this stuff than the Dol’jharians.”

She said, “If Markham had still been alive. And no Hreem
attack. What would you have wanted from him?”

Brandon’s eyes widened, and he hesitated. This pause was as
unnerving as anything Greywing had ever experienced: his answer was important
to her, though she could not have told him why. And she would have died before
bowing or using any of the Panarchist honorifics she’d seen and heard in vids,
yet it seemed to her that this man was a part of this vast palace and its
silent hall of beauty, or else the hall was a part of him.

She addressed him as equal to equal, for that was a promise
she’d made to herself many years ago, but at the same time she felt the yawning
gap between the Douloi Krysarch who had been bred up to power amid all this
wealth and beauty, and a name-denied Rifter scantech who was scarcely able to
protect one small brother.

But he did answer. “I would have asked him to join me in a
rescue mission,” he said. “A raid against my brother’s fortress on Narbon, to
free the singer he held captive to force my second brother’s compliance. After
that...”

He spread his hands. “To tell you the truth, I never thought
beyond that.”

Greywing did not know if that was true. She didn’t really
care. The important thing was... “So you
do
believe—in justice.”

“It’s why I left,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear
him.

“So it’s not that you nicks don’t care, but you don’t
know,”
she said. “Am I right? You didn’t know about the combines on Natsu Four and
the way they buy us when we’re too small to know anything else, and snuff out
our lives in the mines?”

Brandon’s mouth tightened. “Under the Covenant of Anarchy—”

“I know about that. But
you
would fix it, if you
could, am I right? Markham would have,” she went on, talking faster than she
ever had in her life. “He
did
try—” She stopped, swallowed. “And died
for it.”

“We ‘nicks’ think as differently as non-nicks.” His grin
flashed, then he said more seriously, “I promise, Greywing, if I can, I will.”
He raised his right hand.

Her eyes blurred again, and she struggled to get control of
anger. Grief. Hope, which hurt worse than everything else put together.

“Do you know what the Eya’a are doing there?” the Krysarch
asked easily. She recognized the change of focus as a chance for her to recover
her equilibrium, and she was grateful, but she would not show that, either.
“That noise of theirs might shatter those crystals,” he said with a laugh.

“Vi’ya would know,” she said in her flattest voice.

“Shall we go ask?” He got to his feet, smiling down at her
in invitation.

She shrugged her good shoulder. “How come you aren’t raiding
your own art? Got better money stashed somewhere?”

He gave a slight grimace. “Prisoner of my training, I guess.
I could take it, but I wouldn’t be able to sell it. And where would I keep a
crate of priceless artifacts? I don’t seem to have an unoccupied home right
now.”

She answered his smile, though it took effort.

“So I was sitting here trying to concoct a way to get the
House computer to locate and deliver some large quantities of money to me—money
the new tenants think is theirs now.”

She did laugh at that.

“I’ll see what I can contrive when we leave this
antechamber,” he said.

They reached Vi’ya, and Brandon made a gesture indicating
the Eya’a. “What are they doing under that chandelier?”

“They are praising its beauty, using something akin to
song.” The captain regarded the Eya’a. “They rarely use speech, except in
moments of great stress.”

“You can understand what they say, or sing?”

“Yes, through our mind link.”

“But you’re a tempath, not a telepath.”

The captain studied Brandon. “With them it is different,”
she said.

Brandon seemed to sense as well as Greywing knew that no
further information would be forthcoming about her relationship with the Eya’a.
“You don’t seem much interested in joining the free-for-all,” he commented,
nodding in the direction of Ivard, who was prying at something affixed to a
wall.