The Phoenix in Flight (8 page)

The gray-clad conscript outside came to attention as the
door slid open and Barrodagh shuffled out, and then stiffened even more as he
saw the expression on the Bori’s face. Apparently what he himself knew to be
overwhelming fatigue appeared as mere displeasure to the Dol’jharian.

The faces carved in riotous profusion in the stone of the
corridor walls seemed to leer at him as he passed in the slow shuffle-walk that
was a Bori’s best speed on this miserable planet, their eyes mocking as he
remembered the triumphant mood of earlier that day.
In control... in
control.

The Bori shuddered, and not from the cold of the drafty
hall. Eusabian’s paliach against the Panarch, twenty long years in the making,
might even now be crumbling to ruin. As he began to descend the stairs toward
the corridor leading to his quarters, he stumbled ever so slightly, and
adrenalin flooded his body as he realized how dangerously fast he was moving.
He stopped, great shuddering gasps convulsing him and exacerbating the
bone-deep pain of too much weight. It might be better to just let go: falling
down the stairs would almost certainly kill him. But
almost certainly
wasn’t good enough. If he survived, every breath would be a burden of
insupportable, unending pain in the mindripper.

No. He would not accept defeat so close to the triumph he
had long anticipated.
Cheruld tried to alert the Panarchists, but our
communications are faster and it may be—
he
allowed himself a small
glimmer of hope—
it
may be that the space-time lag will work in our
favor.

Barrodagh grimaced as he remembered the head computer tech
condescendingly explaining how impossible it was to give him the answers he
needed in the time he demanded. When Barrodagh threatened her with the
mindripper and worse, she had nodded jerkily and broken the connection. He
would have the answers before dawn, as required.

He reached the door to his suite and stepped onto the
half-circle before it, again bracing himself as the floor seemed to drop out
from under him with the return of Bori gravity. He stepped through and stopped
just inside to enjoy the blessed release of breathing without the oppressive
weight of Dol’jhar pulling on heart and lungs, letting the warm ambience of the
room soak into him. Here, deep within Hroth D’ocha, there was nothing of
Dol’jhar, except the occasional swaying of the tower, and that was lessened.

Without warning, as if released by the comparative safety of
his private quarters, the vibration deep within his body that had not left him
since Morrighon’s report erupted outward. Barrodagh lunged desperately for the
disposer as he felt every bit of bodily control reaved away from him by terror,
felt himself fall to the tiled floor, and gratefully surrendered to
unconsciousness.

o0o

Jerrode Eusabian, Avatar of Dol, stood at the same window at
which he had stood throughout the Siege of Dol’jhar, and where the Great
Paliach had begun.

A black silken cord writhed with sinuous motions around his
fingers as they wove it in an intricate pattern, every loop and knot in the
dirazh’u
a reckoning of injuries endured and vengeances promised. Above him the light of
the karra-fires flickered across the carven ceiling, stirring the ancient
figures of gods and demons to fitful life; the rumbling crackle of the distant
volcano came muffled to his ears through the invisible monocrystal wall before
him.

He stood at the edge of a dizzying drop. From his tower the
fortress walls fell sheer to the city below. There were no other towers; the
low angular buildings gleamed dully in the gray-green dawn of a Dol’jharian
spring, while beyond, the land rose in craggy, snow-streaked terraces to the
fiery heart of his demesne.

Eusabian’s gaze swept up, past the looming
lightning-stitched cloud of ash billowing from the riven peak of Karra D’Ocha,
and fixed on the bright point of light rising swiftly over it in the slowly
lightening dawn. It looked like a dagger pointed at Jhar D’Ocha, threatening
the heart of the Kingdom of Vengeance. As he watched the Panarchist Quarantine
Monitor loft higher into the northern sky, his fingers recalled the end of
empire, knot by knot.

...The corvette fled the lock of the mortally-wounded
battlecruiser just ahead of the Arkadic Marines, whose successful lance attack
had doomed Eusabian’s flagship, and with it, his conquest of Acheront. From the
bridge of the little ship, the Avatar watched the hull of the
Blood of Dol
dwindle
from looming wall to an immense ovoid marred by a crater whose jagged walls
vented huge jets of flaring gas. An ardent spark of light deep within the vast
wound blossomed into a fierce glare that blacked out the imagers. Eusabian’s
skin prickled as radiation slashed through the corvette’s shields, and then the
fiveskip engaged and hurled them to safety and the long voyage back to
Dol’jhar...

The Quarantine Monitor faded swiftly as its circumpolar
orbit took it higher, and Eusabian’s gaze shifted to the distant volcano.
Around him the tower shuddered and groaned momentarily; as the gravitors
compensated for the rolling quake, his fingers grasped another knot in the
dirazh’u.

There was no longer night in Jhar D’Ocha. The planetary
Shield, almost fully excited by the relentless hammering of the Panarchist
battlecruiser, now wrapped the planet in a coruscating aurora from poles to
equator.

But there was no longer day, either. The fulgent display
at the edge of space penetrated only dimly the clouds of ash exploding from the
volcanoes at the heart of Jhar D’Ocha. The planet’s crust was beginning to
resonate, provoking the karra fires to a level of activity they had not seen
for centuries. The ground shuddered almost continuously now, punctuated by
fiercer spasms.

Another blow from space—a distortion in spacetime
itself—shivered through the Avatar’s bones, followed almost immediately by a
violent temblor that wrenched viciously at Hroth D’Ocha. Eusabian could hear
the crash of falling masonry but could see nothing of the city below, now
half-buried in ash and pocked with craters from falling ejecta.

And Jhar D’Ocha’s plight was not the worst of it;
elsewhere pyroclastic flows and tsunamis had claimed countless victims. But
Eusabian would not order the Shield down. The Avatar did not surrender; to do
so would prove him a false vessel of Dol. The Panarchists must batter it down,
no matter the cost ...

Twenty years later, Karra D’Ocha, and volcanoes all over
Dol’jhar, had yet to settle back into somnolence. Air flight was still
difficult. Machinery wore out quickly, and agriculture, never very fruitful,
had become even more marginal. Eusabian blinked as light flared from the
distant volcano, a lightning-wreathed jet of gas spearing upwards, and his
fingers found another knot.

The Shield had fallen, the resonance induced by the
battlecruiser’s punishment finally overwhelming the generator. The mind-numbing
blows from space had ceased, the trembling of the ground abating.

But there had been no communication from the Panarchist
admiral in the almost ten days since. The Avatar knew that subordinate lords,
especially those that had fled back to Dol’jhar from planets in rebellion
following Acheront, had attempted contact, to no avail. He had not, waiting
with increasing confidence to see if his enemy would play out the struggle as
Eusabian hoped, the only way he could survive as Avatar.

Then his answer arrived as a streak of light stabbing out
of the sky onto the spaceport northeast of Hroth D’Ocha, which blossomed into a
dome of light followed by a double concussion that was immediately overwhelmed
by a blast that shook the tower fortress like a
chuqath
with an
arrachi
in its jaws
.
Eusabian’s heart swelled with triumph as he
recognized in the timing, identical to the interval between the arrival of the
Trucial Commission after Acheront and the Karush-na Rahali that had swept it
away in a night of terror and vengeance, the answer he had hoped for.

Even the report a few minutes later that every spaceport
on Dol’jhar had been simultaneously destroyed by kinetic strikes could not
dampen his exultation. The timing acknowledged his supremacy: they intended
further negotiation through him. He would remain Avatar.

He dismissed the messenger, and as the door closed behind
the Bori, Eusabian lifted up his dirazh’u and began the weaving of his Great
Paliach. He knew not how he would accomplish this revenge upon his enemy, and
all his enemy held, but his revenge would not be denied, for was he not the
Lord of Vengeance?

The last glimmer of the Quarantine Monitor faded from sight.

Soon the Avatar would obliterate that symbol of defeat
hanging insolently above his planet, and annihilate those who had placed it
there.

His Paliach against the Panarch Gelasaar, twenty years in
the making, was now unfolding with crushing force: first his sons, then his
kingdom, and finally his life.

Soon Eusabian would receive news of the heirs’ deaths and
the simultaneous capture of the Panarch, and terror far beyond what he had
inflicted on the Panarch’s consort and her Commission long ago would be
unleashed on the Thousand Suns. Soon he would hold in his hands the key to his
enemy’s destruction—how would Gelasaar react to knowledge that the Heart of
Kronos had been in his control for 30 days, indeed, had been free for the
taking for over seven hundred years?

Eusabian smiled. Between his fingers the cord twisted like a
living creature trying to escape inevitable death, the knot growing ever more
complex, shifting and changing as Eusabian contemplated his coming triumph. The
precise timing of those deaths formed a clue to the nature of what faced his
enemy, although it would be too late to help, even if the Panarch had the
breadth of vision to perceive it.

A subtle tone interrupted his thoughts.

The Lord of Vengeance scowled. No Dol’jharian would
interrupt the solitude of this hour; of the Catennach only Barrodagh would have
the temerity, and then only for the most momentous reason.

His fingers stilled for a moment, then he spoke.

“Enter.” He turned back to the window, his fingers again
weaving the silken cord into an ever more intricate web.

o0o

Barrodagh tried one more time to rub the sting of exhaustion
out of his eyes, but yanked his hand to his side when he heard the edge of
menace in Eusabian’s voice. On Dol’jhar, among the nobility, the hour before
dawn was the
orr norhach pelkun turish—
the
Hour of the
Unsheathing of the Will.

Barrodagh had never before dared intrude on the Avatar at
this time and wished he didn’t have to now. But he had no choice. His tongue
found the slight roughness of the wafer he’d placed on his back molar as soon
as he’d awoken from his fugue in the disposer, even before he’d stripped and
cleansed his aching and befouled body and then sat down, sleepless despite
overwhelming fatigue, to await his underlings’ reports.

A hard gritting of the teeth, and Eusabian can do as he
wills with my carcass.
Barrodagh didn’t know or care if the poison was
painless—anything was preferable to falling into the hands of Evodh, directed
by the vengeful passions of the Lord of Vengeance.

The door slid open silently, and a wash of light from the
corridor briefly illuminated the Lord of Dol’jhar’s brooding, strong-nosed
profile as Barrodagh forced his gravity-wracked body through. His stomach
griped when he caught sight of the dirazh’u
in his lord’s hands and the
complexity of its knots.
Has he been curse-weaving all this time?

Barrodagh tried to calm himself as he bowed, his back
spasming with pain. His report to Eusabian would be, must be, a masterpiece of
management. He must give the Lord of Vengeance the answers he would demand
before they were voiced, lest Eusabian ask a question that could not be
answered without revealing the magnitude of Barrodagh’s failure.

Eusabian did not look at him, and said nothing as Barrodagh
tried to find his voice.

“Lord...”
began Barrodagh finally, but for a panicky
moment he could not continue, for to his finely-tuned senses, honed by years of
service to the Lord of Vengeance, the tower room was slowly filling with the
force of his lord’s anger, and the promise of future pain. Then the words came
in a rush.

“Lord, Cheruld tried to defect.” At the words, Eusabian’s
hands stopped moving and his fingers clenched on the dirazh’u, but he did not
turn around. “Our agents on Qoholeth intercepted him trying to flee—he had
discovered our intentions toward Galen ban-Arkad.”

Barrodagh swallowed painfully; Eusabian stood absolutely
still, staring out the window at the tortured expanse of Jhar D’ocha, the
domain his ancestors had held for centuries, which his grandfather had made
supreme on Dol’jhar when he established himself as the Avatar of Dol. The
growing light deepened the lines that absolute power and its exercise had
graven in the Avatar’s face.

Barrodagh continued quickly to prevent Eusabian from asking
what had alerted Cheruld to the plot.
No one could have known what the Heart
would feel like.
The Lord of Vengeance would not accept such an excuse,
especially since it had been his orders, in accordance with hallowed ritual,
that had involved Cheruld with the artifact in the first place. “I interrogated
him under veritonin. He had sent messages via scheduled couriers to Arthelion,
Narbon, Talgarth, and Lao Tse. But analysis of probable spacetime delays makes
it unlikely that any will be received in time.”

Barrodagh hurried on, anticipating the next question. “There
is thus no threat to your paliach against the Panarch or his sons. The message
to Narbon might get there before the scheduled assassination, but our backup
plan will ensure success even if the Tarathen woman attempts to warn the
Aerenarch.”