The Rifter's Covenant (37 page)

The first touch of
the serpents on her skin was chilly. She felt the cold feather touch of
questing, forked tongues, delicately sampling the blood of the Opening. Then
the chill transmuted abruptly into warmth at the first of the needle-sharp
bites that announced their acceptance of her sacrifice.

Her mind expanded
as the venom and the antivenin of the numathanat-transformed blood warred
within her. She saw the Panarch, Brandon hai-Arkad, kneeling before her,
begging for the hand of her daughter, who was finally convinced of obedience by
her long imprisonment.

She felt a stronger
presence and opened her eyes. Standing above her, Felton looked down at her,
rampant, his long face split by a blood-tinged grin. He knelt between her legs,
holding a messenger which he then carefully released, and she shrieked with
mindless, helpless intoxication as the god entered her and swept her away in a
wave of pleasure indistinguishable from pain.

The starboard bay
was chilly; the crisp air seemed to amplify the snapping of the static
discharges as the shuttle eased through the lockfield in rainbow display.

Norio was shocked
at Hreem’s appearance, the more so when he sensed the captain’s curious
emotional flatness. The big man’s face was haggard, and he walked with a slight
stiffness, as though he’d been beaten. A large dyplast case gripped in his left
hand slapped against his leg as he stepped out of the little ship.

Hreem glared at the
staring faces surrounding him. “What’re you narking at?” he snarled. His voice
was as powerful as ever, echoing in the bay. But the affect behind them was forced,
even subdued. Hreem’s emotions had always been far more violent than most men’s.
What had the Barcans done to him?

“You all right,
Cap’n?” Erbee asked, his pimply, buck-toothed face worried.

Hreem laughed.
“You’d be walking like this, too, if you’d just bunnied nonstop for twelve
hours. Those little trogs got some sextech you wouldn’t believe. And the Maters,
they don’t seal a deal with a handshake!”

The crew guffawed
and Norio sensed Hreem relaxing fractionally.

He relaxed, too.
Perhaps the flatness was the result of extended passion. Norio sustained a
surge of jealousy: he loathed being left out. Had Hreem encountered another
tempath down there? There was no trace of that in his emotions.

But Hreem never had
a vid of the most hated man in his world burning to death, either. Wait until
Hreem saw the show Norio had assembled to celebrate his success at obtaining
the Ogres!

Hreem strode to the
lift and Norio followed him through the hatch. “News?” Hreem asked, but in a
preoccupied voice.

“Barrodagh has
issued a call for tempaths.” And Norio waited for questions. Dissent. But all
his carefully worked out explanations—teases about why he should go, the
rewards, even—all so Hreem could argue against it were so much wasted effort.

Hreem grunted with
indifference. Norio flared hot with resentment, sensing that he could be leaving
at that moment, and Hreem would not
even
notice
.

Norio probed with
jealous urgency for the usual undercurrent of sexual tension that registered
awareness of his presence. It was absent.

“What should I send
as answer to Barrodagh?” Norio asked, to break Hreem’s fixed stare.

Hreem grunted. “Later.”

To his surprise,
Hreem tabbed the lift not to their quarters but to the engine room. Norio
forbore to query him. Even a non-tempath would sense that he didn’t want to
talk.

He might as well be
null for all he was getting from Hreem
.
Norio
clenched his hands, loathing the vivid memory of the old Phanist Chenkrit at
Glen Lleddyn on Desrien.
You have chosen
the path of entropy, to destroy instead of build. There will come a day when
you will pray to be null, and there will be only one answer.

Norio twitched his
head, dispelling the image. Desrien was long ago and far away. Perhaps, when
Dol’jhar triumphed, he could persuade Hreem to take him back and let him fire
the skipmissile that would put an end to the world that had rejected him.

In the engine room,
Hreem stood for a time in front of the Urian relay, a slouching hulk whose
vaguely organic form was contradicted by the strange visible texture that
suggested the inorganic orders of existence. Norio had only touched it once.
The experience had shaken his conviction that it was just a machine, despite
its lack of any affect. It was a sensory contradiction, and Norio hated it,
especially since there always hung about it an aura of concealed emotions that
might steal into his mind at any moment.

Hreem, too, looked
as though he expected something to reach out of the ancient machine and grab
him. His emotional level rose, a queer melange of fear, unease, and lust that
made Norio almost nauseous. Then he hefted the case in his hand, and abruptly
strode out.

Norio followed
hurriedly, curiosity so intense it bordered on anxiety. When Hreem reached the
captain’s suite, he locked the case in his safe.

Norio said, “Did
you meet another tempath down there?” He hated the rise in his voice.

“Is that what
you’re worried about?” Hreem smirked, briefly his old self. Then his face
blanked out again in that uncharacteristic way that Norio already loathed. “No
tempaths on Barca.” Hreem’s eyes unfocused, his emotional spectrum subsiding
into a curious placidity. “I don’t think there could be,” he said, his tone
utterly unlike him—enigmatic.

Hreem then returned
to the bridge to hear the primary crew’s reports. Even the vid of Neyvla-khan
in agony failed to arouse Hreem; he gave a perfunctory laugh, turned over
command of the ship to the secondary crew and left the bridge again, heading
straight to his cabin.

Norio lagged
behind, waiting for a summons—an explanation. Even a growled “Where are you,
you lazy mindsnake!” would do, because it would prove that Hreem saw him.

But no summons
came, and Norio resisted the temptation to follow Hreem into the cabin. Hreem
must notice his absence on his own.

Restless and
furious and worried by turns, he began to prowl Deck 3 in crew quarters, currently
in Z-watch.

Another bright
lance of emotion arrested him, no, two, rising in mutual passion; but his own
jealousy spoiled it and Norio hurried back toward Hreem’s cabin.

He was almost there
when the ship exploded.

Norio lay on the
deck and struggled to comprehend. The deckplates beneath his head and hands
felt cool. Unchanged. Where was that light coming from, as though he peered
into the center of a sun? Then he recognized, powerful beyond previous
experience, his lover’s emotional signature, swollen to terrible proportions.
Norio writhed on the deck outside their cabin as wave after wave of hideously
distorted lust and other emotions he could hardly put a name to bored through
his nerves and mounted to his brain, triggering an answering reflex that was
the flare of a match to the nova of emotional plasma pouring from Hreem.

Finally it ended,
ebbing away in waves of intensity very much like pain. Norio had to try four or
five times to get up. His pride forgotten, he leaned against the hatchway and
with a trembling hand pawed the annunciator. A flicker-scan recognized him and
he staggered in.

Stopping in the
doorway to the inner room, he stood staring. Hreem sprawled naked and
unconscious on his back across the platform of the dormaivu. But a quick glance
at the shelves and attachments showed the appliances—every sex toy
conceivable—in their places and untouched.

Instead, leeched
firmly to his now-hairless groin, an utterly enormous dilenja sprawled across
one thick, hairy leg. Noting the curious inorganic texture of the appliance,
Norio realized why Hreem had stared at the Urian engine as he had.

Then horror seized
him, rendering him unable to speak or even breathe, as the thing sprouted palps
and raised its head to look at him eyelessly. He fell senseless to the deck.

When Norio came to,
Hreem was sitting on the edge of the dormaivu, looking at him. He was still
naked, but the thing—Norio’s mind shied away from recalling it in any wise—was
gone.

“Now you know.”
That was all Hreem said.

Norio could read
the rest. He looked emptily at Hreem, who turned away and stepped into the
bain. Water hissed.

Norio was alone.

He picked himself
up and limped out of the cabin to see the quartermaster. He needed a new cabin.

Norio had accepted
the fact years ago that Hreen had a roving eye. Until now, he had always been
successful in getting rid of any man or woman who snagged Hreem’s wayward
attention for longer than a few days. But he had no weaponry, either physical
or psychic, against a
thing.

Norio drifted back
to Deck 3, still in Z-watch. The hatches to the cabins were as varied as the
occupants, some bright with paint or surrounded by dyplast bas-relief, others
sterile, anonymous—except to him. He knew where every crewmember dossed, and
with whom. Under normal circumstances, he took pleasure from the way occasional
crew passed him with lowered eyes or turned aside into a side passage to avoid
him.

Bright slivers of
emotions impossible to a waking mind reached his awareness from the cabin
ahead. Norio stopped and shivered, drawing his hand lightly down the bulkhead
as though contact could heighten his perceptions. This was Metije’s cabin. He
came this way often: her animus was grossly swollen, and her unconscious moved
through strange waters. He wished he dared tap the tianqi controls again, to
steer her dreaming into tastier regions of affect. But Hreem had beaten him
severely when he found out that Norio was doing that.
My crew are off limits to you. You brain-chatz who I tell you, and save
the fun and games for us
.

Norio shook his
head and moved on as Metije passed into deeper sleep and ceased to dream. He
wasn’t sure Hreem would care anymore.

As he walked, his
mind poked at the oozing sore of Hreem’s indifference, then returned to the
strange construct of the Urian relay in the engine room. Perhaps the aura that
teased at his psi could be exploited; the way back to dominance could be at the
Suneater.

He licked his lips
then smiled, mentally composing his message to Barrodagh.

The man in Ivard’s
dream was tall, taller even than Vi’ya, and stronger in build. Straight
blue-black hair fell in waves from either side of his high brow, beneath which
an uncompromising bone structure framed a pair of black eyes narrowed with
sardonic humor, and below them a long merciless mouth.

Terrified, Ivard
tried to break the dream but couldn’t. He knew what was coming. The man stood
in a room the color of blood, whose walls pulsed like the rhythm of a heart.
Across his palm lay a black-hafted knife.

With a deliberate
movement the man shifted his grip on the knife, then slashed with swift,
deliberate efficiency across his other wrist. Blood welled, and dropped down to
the reddish, glowing ground.

The man looked up,
and Ivard had to as well. A patch of the ceiling drooped, as if filling with
liquid, until a great bladder hung like a giant teardrop.

Then it burst, and
a great wash of blood splashed down, foaming around the man’s boots, rising to
his waist and higher. The man threw back his head and laughed, the sound echoing
as a sea of foaming red swept him away.

Nooo!
Ivard screamed voicelessly.

The dream released
him at last, and Ivard sat up in bed, gasping for breath. His tongue moved
dryly in his mouth, and he tasted the iron tang of blood. His gorge rose, but
he controlled it. It wasn’t the dream, he told himself, looking down at the
wreck of his bed, and the red drops on his pillow. Cautiously his tongue probed
at his cheek, where he’d bitten it in his struggle against the dream.

The fourth, and
strongest, in a week.

Despite the fact
he’d only slept a couple of hours, he rose, dressed, and slipped out—finding
the suite empty.

He poked his head
into all the rooms, last trying the chilly chamber the Eya’a lived in. They
were both there, twiggy fingers moving in a mesmerizing pattern as they wove
thin threads of metal and crystal together.

Ordinarily he would
have liked to watch, for they rarely permitted anyone to see them actually at
the creation of their weird hangings, but now he just wanted Vi’ya.

“We see you,” the
Eya’a semaphored.

Ivard signed the
same back and then covered his eyes with his hands. Reaching toward them with
his thoughts, he said:
Where is Vi’ya?

A flicker in his
mind, and their twinned voices said:
We
hear her with the moth-one.

“Lokri,” Ivard
breathed. Maybe he could get a thought to her if the Kelly were around, but not
on his own. He looked at the small white-furred beings, wishing he could ask
them to send her a message. But they’re not like a boswell
,
he thought, grinning to himself. Vi’ya had already explained
that, because they could listen to anyone anywhere, they still could not
understand that humans couldn’t do the same thing. They’d never understand the
concept of a message.

He rubbed his tired
eyes, wondering if he should dial up some caf. He wished Portus-Dartinus-Atos
were there to talk to, but he knew where they were: communing with the newly
arrived Kelly up in the Cap. Why didn’t he talk to threm there?

He thought about
the long transtube journey to the Cap and looked back at his room, wishing he
could fall back into bed and sleep. He shook his head, fearing that he would
dream again
.

Military people
crammed the tube. Ivard practiced his scent-sorting until they reached the
terminal for the bay set aside for the Kelly ships. He stepped off, then
hesitated when he saw the two Marines standing on either side of the lock. One
tabbed a console; behind him the transtube doors reversed and opened again. A
soft buzzer began pulsing.