The Thrones of Kronos (44 page)

He had known about her plans all along, and now he had set
her up with her emotions balanced against her ambition.

Checkmate.

“More coffee?” he asked. “It’s going to be a long night—”

Voices, close, interrupted. They both turned quickly, and
she saw, again, that he was as tense as she.

“Forgive me,” Artorus Vahn said, stepping out onto the
terrace and bowing. “A message from Admiral Faseult. Houmanopoulis wants access
to the hyperwave.”

Brandon’s head turned sharply. He looked back at Vannis, who
forced herself to remain still, her face blank, her hands void of expression.
In his eyes was not triumph, but perplexity.

“. . . 
it
is a thing you will never know if you persist in mistaking possession for
love.” It isn’t he who set me up, it’s I. He really thinks what I love is
power.

Swift as light, she reassessed all their interactions,
leading up to his offer. He wanted to leave, yes, but he was not abandoning the
Panarchy—instead, he was asking Vannis to serve in his place. Instead of
faulting her political ambitions, he acknowledged her goals as worthy. Such an
offer had not been made out of coldhearted gamesmanship, but out of generosity
of spirit—out of trust and faith.

Three times you were
right, Eloatri.

With one hand he held them all back, though the pressure of
time, of events, of the countless demands awaiting him towered invisibly over
them both. He waited, question clear in his countenance.

Vannis could not bring herself to answer.

She closed her eyes, and the voice she knew best sank below
the noise of other voices. And very soon he was gone.

Riolo tar Manjanhalli gazed at the flickering screen.

This console was little more than a toy, its crudity one of
the innumerable studied slights Riolo had learned to live with as part of his
mission among the descendants of Exiled Earth.

His chamber was small, unpainted, with merely two stasis
clamps, furnished with a bed, disposer, and only recently this console. Riolo
had not revealed how he actually preferred it to the ugly rooms forced into
cubes, with gray sloshed over the walls.

Though one could not pretend this place was anything like
his home Under, still, there were similarities. The warmth. The dim light. The
sense of movement; though of course the wall and floor Under did not move, the
days and nights were filled with the quiet slitherings of the Messengers moving
ceaselessly along their paths, and in Riolo’s dreams, at least, the station’s
flutterings were strangely comforting.

The toy console was the result of Riolo’s cooperative
spirit, his ready answers to the penetrating questions put to him by the
Panarchic exile Lysanter.

Riolo’s fingers absently caressed the skin-pucker above his
right collarbone as he considered the interchanges between himself and
Lysanter. It had taken all of his mental facility to hide the range of his
knowledge of the Ogre technology and to keep Lysanter from guessing that he was
hiding anything.

But it seemed to have sufficed. Barrodagh had permitted this
console to be installed, supposedly so that Riolo could occupy his time playing
games with unseen opponents in some recreational area deeper within the station
complex.

And for a time Riolo had played the games, making certain
that he neither won nor lost too many. And when he had judged that Barrodagh’s
increasingly distracted attention was no longer on him, he had broken easily
past the rudimentary safeguards that the Dol’jharians used to protect their
consoles.
They rely on fear more than
technology,
he had realized early on.
Fear
and arrogance. They do not seem to comprehend that the only truly secure system
is one that has no connections anywhere.

Nevertheless he had moved with care. It would not do for him
to become too arrogant: once indeed he had, and he had been discovered and
disgraced. His efforts now were to regain what he had lost, the ineffable joy
of Elevation.

As he carefully constructed workspace behind the perimeters
of the game space, he reflected how human beings outside of Barca, unaware of
the rightness of life Under and the achievement of Elevation, were like worms
groping their way through little cannulae above the rich, woven Cannulae of
civilization. But the worms were persistent, and nearly infinite in number, and
one must never discount them even in their lowliness.

He regarded the data ranking on the console, glad that he
had been so circumspect. Having broken free of the gates constructed by the
Dol’jharians, he had encountered traces of four separate entities, three as
adept at the manipulation of dataspace as he, or nearly, and one who far
surpassed him.

He touched the console tabs as he considered his next step.

Two of the entities he had names for. Both noderunners, one
based on far-distant Arthelion, and one here in the Suneater, a Rifter named
Tatriman. The latter’s dataspace was hidden behind the formidable protections
surrounding Lysanter’s space. To break those would take time and tremendous
care if Riolo wished to go undetected.

The third was relatively new, and he only found out about
him or her because of furtive, well-camouflaged exchanges with Tatriman. The
workspace of this individual would be difficult to find. The fourth one, though . . .
It carried the taint of the Panarchist rulers, and it was as fast and as
effective as a laser. How to encompass this?

Riolo was still considering this when without any warning,
his door slurped open. Two quick tabs, and though the screen did not change,
now he was in the midst of a game. It had been run by a construct; the code not
only changed the metaphor to a game but released control of his side to him.

A gray-tunicked Bori entered. “Come with me,” he said in
Uni.

Beyond, in the harsh light of the hallway, Riolo glimpsed
the silhouettes of two armed gray-clad soldiers.

His eyes were already watering. Amusement flickered through
him as the Bori looked around the naked red-glowing walls and made a face of
fear and disgust. Riolo had never turned on the harsh light that these fools
preferred. He pulled his goggles on as, behind, he heard a soft beep. The game
had shut itself down—and his workspace behind it.

The Bori’s gaze went from Riolo’s goggles to his codpiece,
then back up again, contempt tightening his features.
Yes, you despise what has been denied you, eh, neutered worm?
But
Riolo pretended, as he always had, that he was not aware of his guide’s
reaction, and followed in silence as they traversed long tunnels.

Curiosity trumped fear when Riolo saw Barrodagh waiting for
him. The Bori was scarcely two centimeters taller, but his mass was probably
little over half of Riolo’s. Thin to the point of emaciation, Barrodagh’s
muscle rigidity, his skin tone, the lambent pinpoints of light in his blinkless
gaze, all betokened the attributes of a madman.

He walked away, not watching to see if Riolo was following,
as of course he was. They stepped into a transport, which whisked them along a
considerable distance to a door before which stood two Tarkans, weapons ready.
In silence Barrodagh opened the door.

Riolo followed into a room filled with a bizarre combination
of technical equipment and what looked like religious artifacts.

A heavy, unpleasant tang lay in the cold air, making the
skin on the backs of Riolo’s arms roughen and his neck feel tight.

Barrodagh tabbed an annunciator on an inner door, and at the
query, spoke only his name.

The door opened, and a strange figure emerged. Tall as the
Dol’jharian Tarkans, but instead of wearing the ubiquitous gray, this
individual wore robes with ugly patterns embroidered on them, and
his—her—hairless scalp bore scars with similar patterns and colored tattoos.

“Senz-lo Adhasz,” Barrodagh said, his tone formal and
obsequious.

“Serach Barrodagh,” came an unexpectedly mellow feminine
voice. “You interrupt.”

‘The service of the Avatar requires that we witness the
Transfiguration in process.” Barrodagh also spoke in Dol’jharian, and the first
pricklings of terror seized the back of Riolo’s neck.

He had never admitted to anyone that the Matria had sent him
on this mission because of his language training, but Barrodagh somehow had
found out. There was that in his demeanor that seemed to make it plain that he knew
Riolo understood his words. What else had he betrayed?

The women gestured with a lean, scarred hand and Barrodagh nodded
at Riolo to enter the next room.

If he could have found a way to avoid it, Riolo would have,
for the thin, high whining sound that emanated therefrom sent shudders of
terror along his nerves. Barbaric these people undoubtedly were, but it was
never more apparent than now that he was utterly in their power.

Barrodagh indicated the long form of a Dol’jharian strapped
to a gurney. A mesh cap was fitted over her head, which was attached to the
machine that made the noise. Riolo looked at the victim, whose eyes were
distended; blood ran in a thin trickle from her compressed lips.

The robed figure moved to the other side of the gurney, and
Riolo heard the cold, precise clink of metallic instruments being shifted on a
metal tray.

Holding up a thin steel prod with a curved hook at its end,
the robed figure bent over the woman on the gurney. “Now, Kulusan, we will
discourse on the proper modes of the Karusch-na Rahali among those so depraved
as to choose other than True Men for the struggle,” she said.

Lightly, almost caressingly, she touched the hooked object
to the prone woman’s eyelid, and with a practiced twist, impaled the thin
flesh. “You will be grateful for the honor done you in helping school your eyes
to look upon suitable targets for the struggle . . .”

A racking gasp from the victim made Riolo react. He tried to
unfocus his eyes, endeavored not to hear the tortured, keening breathing, as he
fought against unconsciousness.

The torturer’s voice went on, smooth, calm, even intimate as
the victim uttered wordless expressions of pain.

After an eternity, the whine on the machine changed, and the
victim emitted a low, hoarse moan that rose to a breathless shriek punctuated
by the clink of instruments. Riolo gritted his teeth, wishing the figure on the
gurney would die already, or faint.

A touch on his elbow made him start violently.

Barrodagh regarded him with a thin smile. “We will depart.”

The robed woman ignored them both. Barrodagh gave her a
short bow and tabbed the door open.

Riolo was grateful for the lengthy journey away from that
terrible chamber. He managed to get control of his breathing and to banish the
faintness that had threatened to drop him. Though he knew he was still very far
from being safe, the more distance put between himself and that place, the more
he could regain some semblance of thought. Mindripper! He’d heard the term, but
nothing could prepare one for its horrible reality.

Finally the transport stopped before another pucker in the
walls, anonymous like all the others. They entered and Riolo recognized they
were in Barrodagh’s work chamber.

The door squelched shut, leaving Riolo alone, face-to-face
with Barrodagh. Riolo fought the urge to swallow, to touch damp palms to his
clothing. He would have to proceed with extraordinary caution, after that
effective threat.

“What is this?” Barrodagh tabbed his console.

The screen flickered.

Riolo recognized Hreem as he fell onto his bed, reaching
with eager hands for the case in which the shestek nested.

“The Messenger?” Riolo asked, watching Hreem’s bliss.

“Messenger?” Barrodagh repeated with obvious distaste.

In the vid the ceiling bulged and a hideous face appeared.
Barrodagh and Riolo both watched in silence as a skeleton fell onto the Rifter
in a horrible parody of birth.

Riolo tasted acid at the appearance of the fistulas in the
floor, analogous to the cannulae of Barca, and the way the shestek behaved as
if it was trying to achieve a passageway in the Under. Hreem wrestled violently
with it until it thinned and broke, then he closed the half he’d kept hold of
into its nest where it could not reunite itself with its missing part.

“What is it made of?” Barrodagh was more insistent now.

On the screen, the still-half-naked Hreem shoved his feet
into his heavy boots and began stomping on the skeleton the wall had extruded
onto him. Barrodagh had damped the sound, so Riolo could not tell what he was
shouting; the Bori tabbed impatiently and the screen froze on the captain
mid-stomp.

“What is it made of?” he demanded.

Riolo’s heart accelerated at the insane anger radiating from
the Bori. Now he knew why the visit to the mindripper. But, ironically, this
vid, by bringing vividly to mind his distant home, had calmed him, enabling him
to think rationally again.

“You will have to address this question to the Matria,”
Riolo said. “It is not given to us to understand the secrets of the Labyrinth.
I only know that the shestekli are the Messengers of the Matria. We obtain one
when we have earned the right.”

Barrodagh tabbed his console again, and Hreem lifted his
feet, backed to the bed, jumped out of his boots, took his hands away from the
vibrating shestek case, then fell forward as the two parts of the shestek met.
The screen froze, then moved forward, image by image, until the pink forepart
disappeared into the floor.

Riolo’s heart beat painfully.

“How long have you Barcans been using these things?”

Riolo shook his head. “They are there, as far back as our
history records.”

With a decisive flick of his hand, the Bori shut down his
console. His thin, restless hands picked up a stylus and he played with it
idly; Riolo’s gaze shifted to it as he noted how it resembled the steel
instrument in the torturer’s hands, and he could not prevent a shudder of
memory.