The Thrones of Kronos (93 page)

“All the stars shall mark our passing, and the fulfillment
of our vigil and our trust.” The Guardian spoke to himself, but the acolytes
milling about his dais subsided into a respectful silence, except for those who
started scribbling on the writing plates hanging from their necks.

Droogflies!
he thought angrily, vexed by their
dependence on him. He had seen too many of their generations fleeting past him,
their brief lives blurring into anonymity, and he was tired.

Still confused by the apparent loss of a day, N!Kirr looked
down at the focus of the Shrine and of his people. At the base of his thorax
lay the Heart of the Demon, partially sunken in the spiral-incised stone of the
Guardian’s dais. Its perfectly-reflecting surface mirrored in curved distortion
his anxious face as he bent over it, and the faces of his frightened
attendants, waiting silently for his guidance. His age-reddened chelae stroked
his throat patches in a rasping sigh, and he cautiously sank his mind into the
small sphere, seeking the Pattern. The feeling of wrongness intensified and the
stone-prisoned sphere assumed a numinous clarity to his eyes as he found only
emptiness.

N!Kirr brought his forearms down and stabbed at the Heart of
the Demon with his killing-thumbs. There was a muffled pop and the
mirror-sphere vanished, leaving only its shape in the stone and a few silvery
tatters. The acolytes shrieked in unison and fled in all directions, their
limbs clattering in noisy terror against the inlaid stone.

The Guardian stilled as the shock overthrew the haze of
ancient ritual endlessly repeated, and left him completely alert. The Heart of
the Demon had been stolen, and a simulacrum placed in its stead while he slept.
The offworlders!

N!Kirr closed his eyes. Twenty thousand years he’d watched,
and generations of Guardians before him, and the Heart was gone. The Devourer
would wake again.

The vault seemed to echo to many voices, all familiar though
never heard before, multiplied by the carven wall of the Shrine to a tapestry
of compulsion and demand. N!Kirr surrendered to them gratefully, yielding up
the crushing knowledge of his race’s failure, so near the end of their long
vigil, and the voices swelled into a cold, blinding light that took him into
oblivion.

The next day, at the urging of its fellows, an acolyte crept
timidly back into the Shrine. It found the Guardian still standing there, its
carapace cold and lightless. Shortly after that, for the first time in ten
million years, the Shrine was empty of life and movement, a hollow shell
abandoned in the bloody light of a dying sun.

ONE

Soft music played in the Suite Royal of the glittership
Luxochronus.
The immense monocrystal viewport that made up one wall of the suite’s
richly-appointed parlor displayed a spectacular view of cloud-swirled
Arthelion. The planet curved away vast beneath the ship; above, the
Highdwellings in synchronous orbit were a golden arc disappearing over the
terminator into the planet’s shadow.

Eleris vlith-Chandreseki ignored the panorama from long
habit. As a girl, born a Highdweller and raised on a vast inside-out world
where the emptiness of space was unseen and underfoot, she’d found such views
threatening in a way that her Downsider cousins couldn’t understand. By the
time she’d returned home after her schooling and Grand Tour, she’d seen its
like too many times to be impressed.

To Eleris the glory of space existed merely as a backdrop
for the slim figure standing in front of the viewport, his hands loose, his
head a little to one side as he gazed out at the planet below—from which his
family had ruled the Thousand Suns for nearly a millennium.

Eleris shook back her tumble of curls to lie across her
naked back, and grinned as she padded barefoot across the floor of living
mosses, remembering a party in this same room seven years ago, when she turned
twenty.
Life is too short to waste on men who are not rich, pretty, and
powerful
, she’d said to her cousin.

You’ll never get all three
, Leda had retorted.

Brandon nyr-Arkad had proved Leda wrong . . . or was going to
prove her wrong. He was easily the handsomest of the three royal sons, and his
name brought wealth and prestige enough for the most discriminating taste.
Together they could lead Douloi society, which the rest of the Panarchy
emulated.

If only he had the wit to cooperate!

She closed the distance between them, her bracelets tinkling
faintly as she reached up to run her fingers through the silken black waves of
his hair. How could Brandon be so beautiful and yet so oblivious?

“What,” she whispered into his ear before nipping it, “are
you thinking about so passionately?”

His utter lack of any hint of passion made her statement a
tease, but she might as well have saved her breath.

“That last game,” he admitted. “There was an interesting
tactical tradeoff that I might have handled better, if . . .”

“Brandon.”

“Eleris?”

He turned, his blue-gray eyes as guileless as a child’s.

Exasperation caught in her chest, and she forced a smile.
“Brandon, Phalanx is a game for children.”

“Not Level Three.” He turned out his hands, smiling
ruefully. “I thought you enjoyed betting on me.”

The exasperation intensified to irritation. She breathed in
slowly and consciously dismissed it. He was never haughty or tiresome about the
deference due his rank, unlike (for instance) Krysarchei Phaelia Inesset, whom
he was expected to marry, and he never sneered dismissively at anyone outside
of the Navy, or the Council, like his oldest brother, the Aerenarch Semion.

She leaned up to kiss Brandon. He tasted of blue-wine.
Pay
attention
, she thought, but she’d learned that saying so was useless, you
had to give a lover something to pay attention to.

He was always somewhat cloud-minded, but today he was worse
than usual. Why? He’d only had that single glass of wine since their arrival
back. Maybe he was more like the middle brother than she’d assumed. Everyone
said that Galen was kind, and gentle, but all he thought about was art and
music.

Eleris leaned against him. “Brandon, we need to . . .” Not
‘talk.’ That was too serious. Brandon was never serious, and she had no
intention of lecturing him on his duty, as she had overheard the Krysarchei
Phaelia (who never let anyone forget her title) and her horrible mother doing
once. “What are we doing next?”

He grinned, his eyelids lifting—now he was seeing her. She
wore only her body art of climbing roses, a gem embedded in the center of each
blossom, and an elegant bracelet on each wrist.

She stepped back and struck a pose, tossed her hair back
again, and reveled in his appreciative gaze. “Afterward.”

But his answering grin began fading to distraction. She knew
very well the effect she had on her lovers, which meant his distraction had an
external cause. She dropped the pose and closed the distance between them.
“Brandon, is something wrong?”

His head tipped. “We haven’t sampled all the delights of the
old
Luxo
yet. Ship layover is only three more days. We could stay on for
the next leg. What are you in the mood for? Winter or summer? Grav-skiing in
the Gargantua Range on Thisselion? Delph-tag in the Bhopal Archipelago on
Hanuman?”

She caught his hands, and began sliding her fingers up his
arms. “Brandon, your Enkainion is only a month off, right here on Arthelion.”

He seemed genuinely surprised. “And so? We can’t get in a
little more fun before the harness slips on me for life? I can get us a
last-minute courier back from anywhere.”

Eleris laughed. She’d been trained to laugh beautifully. It
hid the exasperation. “Brandon, you sound as if you’d have to report to that
Naval academy again, or something equally dreary. You know very well what you
will be doing after your Enkainion: exactly what you do now.”

His breath hitched, so slight a break in the fremitus of his
breathing that she would not have caught it had she not had her arms twined
around him. She looked up, startled—there had been nothing in what she said to
trigger such a reaction—but his smile was the same rueful grin. “Contrary.
There will be no more asking if you like summer or winter.”

Ah. Was it the prospect of having every day scheduled that
he resented? Why, when it would be nothing but parties, galas, celebrations,
and maybe some formal rituals at which he’d preside as the Arkad
representative, so that his older brother and his father would be free for
their boring politicking?

“Is it spontaneity you wish for? Surely you cannot resent
the necessity for schedules—think of how long it takes to plan the very best
parties!”

“Spontaneity?” He set his hands on her shoulders, his gaze
steady, wide with question. “I thought you wanted to run away.”

Eleris stared back, trying to get past his obtuseness. Did
he want to be alone with her for even longer? They’d been as good as alone for
weeks. She hadn’t even known how many guards he had, they were so unobtrusive,
until her staff had contacted her about all the supplies they ordered; she’d
only noticed them sweeping the area when they arrived or departed ports. And
once, at one of those exclusive clubs where high stakes Phalanx was played (and
they were certainly not alone then) Brandon had dived into the crowd and pulled
forward a huge man, insisting on him joining the game. Together they’d taken on
all comers until Brandon, laughing, said he was forced to drop out, after which
he’d lingered, watching his guardsman win game after game, until he, too, was
defeated—by some old woman from somewhere out-octant. Some fun!

Being alone with Brandon was plenty of fun, but the
irresistible seduction was the image of herself presiding over the Mandala.
With Brandon’s pretty face at her elbow, she would become the greatest social
leader in at least three centuries.

“We’ve been glitter-skipping for the past . . .” She glanced at
her boswell, its tiny face built into her bracelet. It showed Arthelion time.
“Two months. And I have loved every moment,” she said quickly. “But your
Enkainion . . .”

He shrugged. “So? It’s all planned out. There’s nothing for
me to do except show up and trot through the ritual like a trained dog.”

Steward Halkyn, who had charge of the Palace Major and
Minor, was famous for being the most perfect of a long line of Halkyn stewards.
He would see to it that the Enkainion was exactly as it should be, though why
Brandon didn’t want to oversee it, she didn’t know. She’d loved overseeing
every aspect of her own Enkainion, when she was twenty-five.

She had tucked herself against him. One of his hands
caressed her shoulder and stroked through her hair down her back, but the
gesture was more absent than insistent. She tipped her head, and yes, his gaze
had wandered to the viewport again.

Was he annoyed about the reminder of his approaching
Enkainion? No, there was no anger in the curve of his lips, just absence. He
didn’t seem to care at all. Maybe it was his age. The Arkads traditionally held
their ‘coming of age’ ceremonials late. Historically, after the last royal
child went through his or her Enkainion, the Panarch or Kyriarch usually
announced which child would be heir, if there was more than one. But that would
be no surprise. Everyone knew that the oldest son, Aerenarch Semion, would be
heir, in spite of the fact that he’d not been in court for five years. He was
effectively running the Navy already.

Politics! Eleris shrugged. She didn’t care about politics.
Brandon had to make a political marriage—word was, it had been arranged by
Semion himself, in order to bind the Vandraska shipyards tighter to the Arkads
through the Inesset family. But Brandon would never be involved in politics, he
was the center of Arthelion’s social life.

A new thought occurred: maybe he wasn’t lost in thought, but
in communication. Did he have neural induction on his boswell? His throat
wasn’t bobbing in that horrible awkward way that most people subvocalized.

She shifted her stance and stood squarely in front of him.
“Brandon . . .” She sighed his name.

“Eleris?” Brandon asked, then his forehead puckered, and
finally he really seemed to see her. “Have I done something wrong?” His smile
twisted, mocking, but she sensed . . . regret? “Or is my joke about running away
together so terrifying that . . .”

In answer she began untabbing his tunic. Then she paused,
and ventured a small gamble, since her main game hung unresolved. “It’s just
that when I proposed this journey, I, well, I didn’t quite count on how lengthy
it would be. And I have loved it, but . . .”

Brandon’s head tipped in quick concern. “Is it money?” he
asked bluntly, without any insinuations whatsoever. He grimaced. “Eleris, I
never think about those things. You should have brought it up.”

She couldn’t prevent a retort, but she kept her tone light,
“You don’t have to think about those things.”

“I know.” He grimaced again. “Does that sound intolerable?
My . . . someone I knew ten years ago once . . . but then people who go on about a
third party are usually bores.”

Eleris bit her lip.
I don’t care about anyone you knew
ten years ago
. But she couldn’t say that. She forced a smile. “You know
that many deem it vulgar to make any reference to resources. ‘The life of art
requires art to appear effortless.’”

Brandon lifted a shoulder. “My brother Galen, whom I
consider the expert on art, says that that rule is more posturing on the part
of the wealthy, and for an example of resource and effort being part of art, we
have only to look at the mystery of the Ur.”

Eleris fluttered her fingers, dismissing that long-dead race
and their immense ‘art’ projects involving entire suns and planets. She’d won a
small victory—her credit would survive this venture—and she had no intention of
giving up her campaign. She’d succeeded in removing his tunic and shirt, her
hands running over his smooth skin, enjoying the taut musculature, by habit
avoiding the ugly pucker of the scar on his back. Why didn’t he have it
removed? It would cost a fraction of what she spent on her body art.