The Rifter's Covenant (39 page)

Vi’ya rose to her
feet. “Perhaps,” she said, “and perhaps the priorities on the data have
changed. You grew up with the DataNet stitching together your world and linking
it to the Thousand Suns. How much do you really know of its workings?”

Lokri sighed
sharply. “I know that the Anachronic hubs automatically deal with the constant
influx of new data, prioritizing and sorting it. I know the Infonetic techs on
them assign priorities only to the data the algorithms bubble up to their
attention, for no one could process it all—as fast as we are, the inflow of
data is faster.” He looked up. “So what’s your point?”

“Whole fortunes
have been built on the assignment of priorities, and how data gets processed
through the Hubs,” she said. “I have nothing but time. It might be illuminating
to probe some of these processes.”

He said nothing,
but she sensed a sharp surge of hope in him, and a resurgence of his will to
live.

She left then. They
had all agreed to keep their visits short. She knew someone logged visits to
the prisoners. Brief visits from his shipmates were, she had hoped, too
unremarkable to bear further investigation by inimical eyes within the
Panarchist government.

She walked out,
then once again the Eya’a flooded her mind. This time it was with their speech,
which they used rarely. The effect was like a skipmissile to the brain. She
stopped as if she’d walked into a force field, ignoring the people streaming
around her.

Images battered at
her: green limbs, weird colors, traces of smells that did not exist in the
clean, sterile-air corridor near D-Five. Fighting her way through this
hurricane of sensation, she sought the cause, and homed in on Ivard, flailing
desperately to make sense of . . .

“The Kelly ship,”
she said out loud.

Vi’ya!
he called, but immediately his thoughts swirled away, and she could not
find him.

The Eya’a’s mental
voice rose in alarm, excitement, and intensity until Vi’ya felt her head would
explode.

Digging the heels
of her palms into her eyes, she fought to shut all the voices out.

Again came a
change, a synthesis as vast and immutable as the voices chanting in her head.

Through that sound
came the booming of a great drum, steady, syncopated like the beat of a
thousand hearts in unison.

The Eya’a fell
silent. From the air around Vi’ya came sound: great chords, minor ones, running
melodies, distilled from the emotions of those in her proximity. A sudden spray
of color shot across her vision, scintillant as the radiants of a ship.

Drawing an unsteady
breath, she recognized enough of what was happening to force herself to run,
stumbling and half-blinded, for the safety of her own space.

A bright flurry of
brass notes summoned memory. She no longer saw the dyplast walls, the flat
corridor, but instead the high ceiling and fabulous chandelier of the concert
hall. And as the powerful Manya Cadena enmeshed her in its vast grip, she saw
instead of the accessway to Detention Five a lone figure, slim and straight,
standing high on a balcony, blue eyes blazing with light as bright, no,
brighter than a sun.

Breath rasping her
throat, she fought her way to the lift.

Sweet and yearning,
young voices wove KetzenLach’s melodies about her, and like gilded chains,
memories tightened on her heart.

The Aerenarch’s
concert; then, echoing from further back, the same music—KetzenLach’s
And Horses Are Born with Eagles’ Wings
—this
time with a beloved blond head lying next to hers, smiling and smiling.

“Markham,” she
said—she had spoken aloud.

But an instant of
clarity cleared her vision: she had made it to her crew’s quarters. And she was
alone.

And then the dark
and mournful rise and fall of men’s voices brought her stumbling to her room,
where she dropped to her knees. For it was no longer a plain cream-walled
chamber, furnished with bed and console. Instead she was surrounded by
soot-blackened stone, the air frigid despite the fitful red fire in the corner,
and tasting of ash. The battered wooden furnishings were huge, as if seen from
below—seen from the perspective of a child.

“Hreash ni remmeth ka hekaata, eppon enDol
bi-sechreash.”
The men’s
voices sustained a long note, the echoes slipping between stone walls as they
held back the ever-vigilant demons and wraiths crowded in the ever-present
aurora-thrown shadows of Dol’jhar’s too-bright nights.

A hand touched
Vi’ya’s cheek, the skin of palm and fingers rough and callused. A furtive
caress, then a woman’s low voice in her ear.
Tomorrow will they come for you, my child. Talk little, work hard, and
never, ever, let the lords see your talents growing, for then they will have
you killed. If I can, I will buy you back.

A glimpse of a
long, dark-eyed face—

With all her
strength Vi’ya banished the old memory, but more snaked out, prodded by
flourishing melody. Emotion—her own, and not her own—surrounded her now,
transmuted into music.

Through it she
barely perceived the calm voices of the Kelly, cadenced in triple counterpoint,
with the Eya’a singing an eerie descant high above.

I know what this is. I know,
she cried, though no words made it past her
throat.

And with a last
effort of will, she forced herself to stand, and to move not to the bed and
welcome oblivion, but to her chair. Shaking hands stretched over the keypads of
the console—

And, heralded by
ancient trumpets, she fell into dataspace. It was information as music made
perceptible to all her senses, the harmonies forcing intuition to a visceral,
multimodal apperception of truth. She flew down corridors of light, buoyed by a
driving theme of string and wind instruments.

Her sense of her
body, sight, hearing, taste, touch, even her sense of time, all her senses
combined to guide her in a complex fusion that defied language. Her perception
of the net was inverted; not diving deep to pursue a thread, but soaring,
pulled by the ineffable pleasure communicated by music as a lure and surety of
progress.

She heard a hungry,
ponderous leitmotif, a stain of malice that stank of soft things rotting in
dark corners. Vi’ya darted into a tunnel of light, following it, as though
leaving Ares dataspace, the synesthetic distortion of her sense of time
bringing past events frozen in replicated data to vivid presence. A pentatonic
melody announced the planet Torigan, trampled by the stentorian tones of the
Archon Stulafi Y’Talob. But his motif was too simple, yielding to a silky,
darting counterpoint that wove Vi’ya through to the heart of a purulent decay
mounting on microtonal stems of disphony blatted by tubas and enormiums. She
plucked what she sought and the tube of light shot her back into Ares data and
she swooped up and up and up, the curving surface of dataspace falling away
beneath her in a network of light to a flourish of mellow horns and a rattle of
drums, crescendoing to a bright pinwheel of sound.

Now she perceived
the pattern of darkness spreading through the net with a hissing discord, like
air escaping from a shattered hull. Fingers of black lightning forked out of it
toward the decayed wreckage of a despairing leitmotif composed of the rage of
bass viols and a nasal woodwind.

She heard a choir
chanting, mournful, bending semitones to set her teeth on edge and rasp across
her skin. “. . . 
save
Galen . . . need Semion . . . betrayed . . .
betrayed
 . . .” And above, malevolent, a serpentine theme in
thundering percussion and string harmonics guarded the bright mouth of the tunnel
of light connecting Ares to the Thousand Suns beyond, forbidding her return.
The theme expanded, emitting a dry, musky scent, billowing into a lightless
circle that sucked at her, pulling her into discord and nullity. She knew its
source without words, the image Jaim had shown her foul in her mind. She fought
violently, hurling at it the dancing themes of KetzenLach and the lazplaz
intensity of the love she could not trust, slashing through its fabric with
knives of light.

But the malevolence
was too powerful and long-entrenched, anchored firmly to the substance of
dataspace with threads of malignant, fissiparous data. Her strength waned. Blackness
roiled up thick and hateful on either side, pressing in on her.

Then a theme of
mellow woodwinds, deep and chuckling, shot up from the deep levels of
dataspace, a bubble of bright merriment that danced around her with darting
movements, whirling through inversions of its theme in joyous flight. The dark
malignity recoiled from it, blown back upon itself as though by a sudden wind,
revealing an opening to sanity and light. With a last blast of lancing sun-heat
powered by her emotions, she broke free and fell at last into oblivion.

o0o

Ivard practiced
his new mode of perception on his way to see Tate Kaga. The blue whirl of the Kelly
Archon had diffused into his mental landscape; he sensed threm exploring areas
not accessible to him.

“We cannot help you
with the dreams,” the Kelly had said, and such was the richness of their
synesthetic speech that Ivard understood all the modalities of their reluctance:
spiritual, psychic, political, and others for which there were no human
concepts yet, and might never be.

He practiced, too,
suppressing his new ability, a difficult process he likened to looking at a
word but not reading it. But he persisted, for he found that synesthetic
perception was little use among humans. They were oblivious to the ancient
unities that lay behind their language and their symbols, so that when he
slipped into the new mode the Kelly had taught him, what he perceived was random:
sometimes ugly, mostly drab, once hilariously funny.

Ivard was glad to
get off the transtube at the nexus. The people on it had stared at him when he
laughed out loud. He smelled their mix of suspicion and fear and the constant
tense anger engendered by overcrowding as a whirl of nested polygons with razor
edges trying to enclose his head, smelling of jagged music like old soap in a
filthy pissoir.

He shook his head
and spat, ridding himself of the taste.

“Please!”

Ivard started and
looked up. A large man in elegant attire stared, affronted. Next to him a small
man with a round, red face, equally well dressed, looked at him unsmiling.
“Control your Polloi habits, boy.”

Despite the finery
of their apparel, Ivard knew flash when he saw them. The little man moved
forward smoothly and lifted his hand, which had an override in it.

“Sorry, this
transfer point is temporary closed,” he said to the other passengers debarking
behind Ivard. The others grumbled but complied, intimidated by the air of
authority projected by the two.

Ivard turned, too,
but the big man laid his hand on his arm, saying nothing. The youth recognized
an Ulanshu restraint, knowing it was invisible to anyone watching.

Ivard started to
apologize, trying to twist his arm away, and then a sensation of cold leather
and shattered glass stroked his forehead and the backs of his hands, drawing
his attention to the third man standing before the adit from the terminal.

The flush of fear
prickled Ivard’s skin, and he wished Gray and Trev were with him. Maybe he
could call them, he thought as he controlled the physical manifestation of fear,
but the foul psychic miasma beating on his mind from the tall, thin figure with
long black hair could not be so easily dealt with. He’d seen him before, at the
Ascha Gardens: Archon Srivashti’s bodyguard.

“Death breathes
through his nostrils,” Portus-Dartinus-Atos had said, and Ivard was glad the
dogs were not there. Instinct convinced him that this man would breathe death
on Trev and Gray if they got in his way.

Because it was
clear that these men had been waiting for Ivard. The little transfer terminal
was empty. That alone should have alerted him on crowded Ares. He reached for
Vi’ya, hoping that his fear would drive a signal to her.

And he reached her.
Shocked, he pulled away and lost the sense of her, buffeted by a maelstrom of
sensation almost akin to what he had experienced in the first few minutes on
the Kelly ship. She couldn’t help him—had she been trapped, too? He couldn’t
find the Kelly presence, either. He was alone.

The big man smiled,
not a reassuring sight. “You have been granted a signal honor, boy. It will
take but an hour of your time.” He applied pressure and turned Ivard toward the
adit. The man knew higher levels of the Kinesics than Ivard did, so resistance would
be wasted energy. He knew he must preserve his energy.

“Where are you
taking me?” he asked, hating the tremor in his voice. His physical control
seemed to be deserting him.

“The Archon
Srivashti wishes to speak to you.”

Ivard endured an
adrenaline spike of danger-fear. “Why?”

The man tugged him
toward the wall, where an access hissed open, and Ivard was pushed into a small
pod. The bodyguard—Felton, he remembered now—followed as his captor stepped
back. “Don’t be impertinent, boy,” the captor said a moment before the hatch
closed, leaving Ivard alone with Felton.

The rest of the
journey passed in silence. Ivard didn’t want to talk to Felton, and was
relieved when he remembered that the man was mute. He concentrated on shutting
down his synesthetic sense: in the confines of the little pod the associations
radiated by the man were painful.

The pod debouched
them into a small, sparsely furnished room and Felton withdrew. Ivard looked
around at the elegant appointments. It was a typical nick room. But the table
should be five-sided, not round, he thought as the angular scent of the flowers
in a vase on it stroked his cheeks. And the deep rug underfoot was the wrong
texture for the colors in the tapestry above the sideboard that was too squat for
the color of the subdued lighting. The nicks seemed blind to the wrongness.