The Rifter's Covenant (12 page)

Gelasaar’s light
blue eyes were pensive, fixed on infinity. The expression was twinned in his
son’s denser blue gaze, the similarity between dead and living so striking it
broke Jaim’s focus. He forced himself to listen.

“. . . whether
the violent overthrow of the existing order resulted from the war your brother
dedicated his life to making ready for, or as a result of those very
preparations, it makes your task more difficult. The exigencies of lawful
government require that you find the perpetrators and examine them. I want you
to remember another of the Jaspran Polarities, ‘A faith unfulfilled is
loyalty’s pyre, for power can only compel, not inspire.’ To regain the faith of
the Panarchy’s citizens you will have to establish your own faith in them . . .”

He was talking
about Semion, of course, Jaim thought. The Panarch had to know that Semion
wanted to turn the Panarchy into a military dictatorship, but completely within
the rules
.

“. . . our
own communication has been minimal, but that is not because I lack faith in
you. Quite the opposite, as I trust by now that you have perceived. But the time
has come to prove it to you, by establishing a closer connection . . .”

Brandon’s head
lifted a fraction, his expression shuttered. Jaim’s breath hitched as the
meaning of the last statement hit him somewhere behind the ribs: the Panarch
must have updated the recording before Brandon’s Enkainion.

Two thoughts
occurred. First, this vid had been made shortly before Eusabian’s attack. Second,
‘The opposite?’

It had to mean that
the Panarch suspected Brandon might run.

Jaim only heard a
few words of the final exhortation, which were both personal and religious.
Brandon sat still and unbreathing until Gelasaar’s image bowed, low and deep,
as to a sovereign, and then Brandon surprised Jaim: he rose and bowed back to
the image, a deep deliberate obeisance to the maximum degree.

Then the console
lens darkened, and the image disappeared. Brandon sank back into his chair and
looked up at Jaim with an unsettling mixture of anger and grief. “Ought I to
send a message to Eusabian thanking him for his interference?”

Jaim said nothing,
knowing now what he had sensed all along: that Brandon Arkad had wanted his
father’s approval more than anything else. Jaim flashed vividly to that last
communication between Gelasaar and Brandon, as the Panarch’s ship filled with
smoke as the cruiser tried desperately to reach it in time.

“He knew,” Jaim
said with conviction. “He knew you were going to run.”

Brandon looked down
at his empty hands, then up again, his expression wry. “And here I exulted in
my own cleverness at having circumvented Semion’s watchdogs. I think . . .”

Jaim waited.

Once again Brandon
glanced up at what would have been skyward from a planetary surface. “I think I
completely misconstrued my father’s orders that day, not long after I was
kicked out of the academy. When he summoned Semion and me. I had no chance to
defend myself, but at least Semion could not mouth out his lies about what
Markham and I had been doing. Instead, my father gave my safety into Semion’s
hands.”

Jaim made a
startled noise, then cut himself off.

But Brandon heard,
and gave a quick, pained smile. “I see it now, though I did not then. Those
orders forced Semion to preserve my life. They were a warning against . . .
permitting . . . a way for me to suffer a convenient accident. In the meantime,
I continued my studies in every way I could. And Gelasaar contrived to make the
means available. I used to wonder why it was so easy to hide my identity in the
Phalanx tourneys.”

Easy, Jaim thought,
is relative. “He expected you to make the Riftskip?” Jaim struggled to
understand the convoluted reasoning here.

“I believe he
expected me to go outside the system. After all, isn’t that what Jaspar Arkad
did?” The grief sank below the surface again, replaced by Brandon’s habitual self-mockery.
But Jaim knew it was there, joining the grief over Markham’s death that Jaim
had suspected right from the beginning on
Telvarna
,
when Brandon had reacted to the news by getting stinking drunk.

Brandon turned away
from where the eidolon of his father had stood, and moved to the monneplat.
“Let’s have that coffee, and your report on the situation here on Ares.”

Riolo tar
Manjanhalli, disgraced polypsyche of Barca and noderunner of the Rifter
destroyer
Flower of Lith
, began to
tremble as the lift took him down from the terrible surface of his native
planet into the dim, warm security of the Under. He breathed out slowly, hoping
he had not betrayed his anxiety to the guards at either side.

But they were just
drones, with no hope of Elevation, their codpieces merely symbolic. It was not
they he had to fear. The penalty for return was death. That he had not been
dispatched out of hand—did it augur well or ill for his designs?

Riolo shrugged.
What was death, compared to the living hell of life as a monopsyche? He
fingered the poison collar Hreem had fastened around his neck, and fancied he
could hear his remaining hours of life fading toward finality. The gamble he
had essayed had trapped him between the greed of a Rifter captain and the anger
of the Matria, with death or triumph the only paths out.

He took off his
goggles as the light slowly faded toward normal levels. Despite his best
efforts, the lights in his quarters on the
Lith
had never quite reproduced the longed-for softness of the Under.

With a mild shudder
the lift grounded and the doors slid silently open. A wave of warm, moist,
heavily scented air rolled in upon the returning exile and his knees buckled as
pleasure overwhelmed him. His eyes filled with tears.

Home.

Before the disaster
that had forced him to flee Barca, he had shared his people’s disdain for the
art of the Thousand Suns: so much of it infused with the hopeless longing of
the Exiles for Lost Earth. The people of Barca had the Under. Who would wish to
live exposed to the sky on a planet as horrible as most of those in the
Panarchy? But after his own exile, he had come to understand and even enjoy
that art.

Now, returned to
the world that had nurtured him, every sense was alive, alert. He breathed in
deeply as the guards guided him toward a transtube adit, savoring all the
familiar scents of childhood.

Enwrapping him with
equally familiar sensation was the hum of the constant life of the Under, the
susurration of the ventilators that breathed for the teeming billions of Barca,
the echoing footsteps of the hurrying servants of the Matria, and, all around
him, the murmur of his own sibilant language.

His gaze caressed
the rich mosaics underfoot, the elegant tracery of mycokallein adorning the
walls and ceilings in muted tones of gold and silver, the iridescent flash of
the Watchers in their alcoves, and the occasional, barely glimpsed textured
muscularity of a shestek slithering from one wall cannula to another, bearing
one of the messages that were the life of Barca.

At first, Riolo
disdained to ponder their destination. He would find out soon enough. But as
their path took them deeper and deeper, he began to wonder. He had expected
perhaps an interview with a mater in the middle levels of the Matria, but he
was led lower down and further in, his ears popping repeatedly, deeper than he
had ever been before. He began to tremble again.

The soft, living
carpet underfoot muted their footsteps. Here all was silence, save for the
faint echo of chanting, ever ahead but never drawing nigh, the faint
palp-chatter of the Watchers thickly clustered along the corridors, and the
almost constant sound, like silk on silk, of the shestekli writhing in and out
of the walls and ceiling.

And the scents!
Heady, heavy, sharp, possessive, they lanced deep into Riolo’s hindbrain,
provoking pangs of emotions, not all of them identifiable, that swept through
him like irresistible tides. He knew his destination: the Labyrinth of the
Matria, the womb of the Barcan race. Hope and terror struggled for dominance
within him.

The guards stopped.
From a cannula overhead, a small shestek dropped on him, fastening itself to
the hollow above his right collarbone. Coolness infused his skin, spreading
inward.

Wordlessly, the
guards motioned him forward, but Riolo now needed no prompting. Under the
urgent summons of the substances streaming through his blood, he stumbled
forward, fearing and desiring with equal, fierce intensity what lay ahead.

His legs impelled
him into a vast room, glorious in its appointments, and it was both the shock
of recognition and the awareness of protocol he had abandoned hope of ever
needing that dropped him to his knees, and thence to his stomach. As he
wriggled toward the Thrones of the Matria in abject terror and humility, his
will virtually submerged by the pervasive scents of Life and the Seed, the
occupants of the thrones shifted massively, sending waves of blood-warm, salty
water cascading down the steps, soaking Riolo’s clothes.

“Stand up, Riolo,
once of the seed of Manjanhalli,” a deep voice spoke, its resonance stripping
mind and memory to the helplessness of infancy. He tried to obey, but his legs
were not equal to the task. After a time measured only by his too-rapid heartbeats,
a sensation of warmth prickled his skin where the shestek lay, and his mind
cleared.

He stood up, his gibbering
terror walled away at the back of his mind. Before him the rulers of Barca
glared at him, their vast faces shifting slickly in the glittering light of the
Labyrinth.

“You assumed the
Attributes of your own will,” one of them intoned.

“And defied the
Matria,” rejoined another, and then another, in a swelling chorus of
accusation.

“You sought to
wrest Potency from the Labyrinth.”

“And you have
returned without our leave or let.”

“All of your
eidoloi have been destroyed.”

“You have only the
life of the body now.”

There was a
dreadful silence, and then the Uberissima, the occupant of the central throne,
spoke, her voice deeper and more awful than any before.

“Tell us why we
should not take that also from you.”

Haltingly he began
to explain the new order in the Thousand Suns, the triumph of Dol’jhar and the
new mastery of the Avatar’s Rifter allies, two opposing fleets who hung in
orbits above Barca with weapons of fearsome power. Then he stopped as his true
position illuminated his mind.

He forced his
forehead to the slick step. “But you know all this, or my life would already be
forfeit. Instead, you have honored me with your presence in full assembly here
in the Labyrinth, whose prerogatives I once attempted to usurp.”

He pushed himself
to hands and knees, feeling the weight of their steady regard.

“Out there—” He
gestured upward, toward the surface that all Barcans abhorred, and beyond.
“—out there wait two fleets of warships in the service of Dol’jhar. You are, I
judge, already in communication with the Avatar, or his lieutenant, and you
know that to one of those fleets you will have to yield.”

The resulting
screams of rage flattened him again. He threw his hands over his face, quivering
and helpless, as they evolved into words.

“Up and out with
him!”

‘To the Surface!”

“May the winds eat
his bones!”

After another long
pause that left him feeling as though all the air had been sucked out of his
lungs, the Uberissima spoke again.

“True, as hateful
as that is. Why, then, should we prefer your master?”

Riolo bowed again.
“I have no master, Most Fruitful One,” he replied, emphasizing the masculine
case of a word rarely heard on Barca. “I am loyal only to the Matria, and the
sin that rightly banished me was simply one of excessive zeal and eagerness to
serve. But the captain I served in exile is a voluptuary, while his enemy is
well known as an ascetic. With which, then, would you rather deal?”

“You would have us
admit a
gajo
to the Mysteries?” Riolo
cringed at the anger in her voice.

“If you would
continue to control our destiny, yes. The Panarchy with all its might could not
stand against Dol’jhar, and unlike them, the Avatar recognizes no constraints
upon his power. You must then enslave the one who would enslave you.”

The shestek nestled
against his neck shifted. He tasted sweetness and lost the sense of their words
as the Matria fell into discussion. He stood quietly, awaiting his fate. Finally,
with another wash of chemicals, sense returned.

“Your argument is
cogent, Riolo,” the Uberissima said. “Go, then, and tell your captain that,
should he triumph, we will receive him; but that, in the face of the
communications we have received from Dol’jhar, we cannot do more.”

A smile lightened
the expression on her vast, moon-like face. “After all, as you well know, it is
only those who prove themselves fit who achieve Elevation—it can be no
different for your captain.”

Riolo bowed again.
Then, anxiety overcoming prudence, he asked, “And have I proven myself?”

“If you return here
with Hreem the Faithless, we will judge your loyalty proven, and, after your
return from the Suneater, those Attributes which you so desire will be yours.”

Riolo looked up,
startled. “The Suneater?”

“You do not know
the secret of the shestekli, which is shared with few, and never a gajo.” As
the Uberissima continued, Riolo’s eyes widened. If the Panarchists had known
this, Barca would have been Quarantined indefinitely, Class One.

“It will not, of
course, matter if Hreem should find out once he has one,” she continued, “but
we must have an observer when he takes his to the Suneater.”