It was almost a day later that they finished evacuating the Babur Khan, which had been battered into scrap by three Rifter destroyers. Captain KepSingh transferred his command to a frigate and volunteered to wait for any remnants of their forces that might still find their way out of the battle area.
“I think we can even manage a few search-and-rescues,” he said. “With the tacponder net still running, we should be able to find just about anybody with a functioning comm.”
Ng nodded wearily. Her duty was clear: the FTL comm had to get to Ares as soon as possible. A courier was one way, but there were hundreds of wounded—including Mdeino Nilotis—needing medical care that now could be found only on Ares. Only the Grozniy could get them there.
“Very well, Captain KepSingh. We’ll be on our way, then. You have everything you need.”
The older man nodded. His face softened. “We’ll keep an especially sharp watch out for Metellus and his crew.” He smiled. “That pirate’s got a lot more light-years’ travel in him, I’m sure.”
‘Thank you, Captain.” She paused. There was so much to say—but not now. She took refuge in ritual. “Light-bearer be with you; Grozniy out.”
“And with you, Captain Ng.”
The connection terminated.
“Navigation,” she said, when she could trust her voice. “Take us to Ares.”
As the fiveskip engaged, she turned the con over to Commander Krajno, who would release her exhausted primary crew.
She left the bridge. The transtube took her to a hold deep within the Grozniy; the Marine on duty saluted and let her in.
The lights sprang on, revealing the rounded glowing form of the Urian communicator set on a table. They’d decided not to attempt any use of it—there were techs better fit for that on Ares.
Margot Ng laid her hand gingerly on the weird device, then snatched it away. It was warm, body temperature, and felt uncannily like human flesh. Like muscular human flesh, hard yet yielding.
Like Metellus.
A tear tracked down her cheek, then another. She was alone, she let them flow, remembering him, the twenty-five years they’d known and loved one another, snatched in brief, oh so brief moments. Brief, intense, loving, always knowing each might be the last.
Twenty-five years. She remembered his teasing about their bet. It had seemed a long time then. She’d been so sure she’d track down the port wriggle long before that. A sob caught in her throat. She’d give anything to have him there to claim the forfeit.
It wasn’t that she thought him dead; she wouldn’t think that.
It was worse than that: she might never know. Space was large, and human lives were short.
...and I will pay whatever price demanded... The Urian device blurred as the tears came freely, but she didn’t look away.
“You’d better be worth it,” she whispered fiercely.
o0o
As the Mbwa Kali sped toward Ares, Captain Nukiel entertained his two most exalted guests. He had out the best china, and everything was fresh.
The High Phanist Eloatri and the Aerenarch were the only ones who seemed at ease. Efriq sat, straight and still, and opposite him the Numen’s clerk waited with folded hands for the others to finish their coffee. The young man’s round face was impossible to gauge, but his eyes were never still.
Nukiel wondered if the magisters would be hashing over this conversation as closely as he and Efriq would be directly they left, and the thought made him smile.
Eloatri returned the smile. “Have I exhausted your patience with my questions?”
“That’s all I know about Ares,” Nukiel said, backtracking rapidly. “I was only there once, as a very green sub-lieutenant, and that was only in the Cap—the military sector. I never set foot in civilian country. Leontois?” He looked up at his first officer.
Efriq gave a quick shake of his head. Brandon looked from one to the other, his pleasant face completely unreadable. What does the prospect of Ares mean for him?
“It gives us enough to go on,” Eloatri said, sitting back in her chair. “I thank you gentlemen for your patience.”
Nukiel hesitated, then essayed a gamble. The High Phanist had taken them by surprise when she joined the Aerenarch and the Rifters on their return from Desrien. Her arrival had thrown his crew into almost as much turmoil as the appearance of the Arkad heir on the Rifter ship had.
But she had been a perfect guest, self-effacing, content for the most part to remain in her own quarters after the official tour, except for attendance at various religious observances she was invited to, in which she firmly declined any official participation.
“I confess to curiosity,” he said. “Is it the war that brings the Magisterium to Ares?”
Eloatri gave a small chuckle. “It’s not war,” she said. “It’s your passengers.”
Nukiel exchanged a quick glance with Efriq. On his other side, Brandon just smiled.
“All of them,” she said. Adding sympathetically, “Their appearance—so sudden—must have been quite a shock for your crew.”
Efriq choked on a sip of tea.
The clerk’s lips thinned, obviously suppressing a smile. Eloatri did not hide her amusement. “I thought so. Well, it was no less of a shock for us.” Then a slight line appeared between her eyes. “But there’s one more I... saw,” she continued, her voice musing. “I don’t know who he is.”
Her face smoothed. “But no mind. For now, I find I must try to communicate with the Eya’a better. And as for the youth bearing the Kelly Archon’s genome... ” She made a large gesture. “I am delighted, by the way, that your medical technicians report that he is on the mend.”
“Well, his fever is gone,” Nukiel said cautiously. “And his burn seems to be healing at last.”
Eloatri nodded. “He has excellent care. I will have much to say in your praise when I do meet your Admiral Nyberg.”
Relief ballooned inside Nukiel. Perhaps he would not face a court martial after all, but merely an inquiry. Regardless, he could hardly wait to hand all his passengers over to a higher authority. He knew that once he had done so, every action, every conversation would be picked over by anyone who had enough clout to get clearance. Brandon would be the civs’ responsibility—the civs and the Navy high brass, he corrected silently. There were laws set up, just to protect citizens against military encroachment, and these laws would in turn protect the military.
“Tell me, Your Highness,” Efriq said. “What did you think of Desrien?”
The Aerenarch looked up, his gaze abstract, then he smiled. “We only saw a small portion,” he said. “But what we did see was unforgettable.”
Eloatri chortled in delight. Even the clerk smiled.
“So I would imagine,” Efriq murmured, his tone so devoid of innuendo the High Phanist laughed anew.
Brandon glanced at her appreciatively and then introduced an unexceptionable topic: the artwork in the New Glastonbury cathedral.
They were still on the subject of art when Nukiel signaled to the waiting steward to clear away the dishes. The interview was at an end; his job was officially over, all except for delivering them to Nyberg.
He resisted looking at his chrono, but he did glance at Efriq, to see understanding in his old friend’s eyes. He was counting the hours.
o0o
The chronometer in his cell seemed broken even as it remorselessly counted off each hour that brought Lokri closer to Ares. He stood up and banged on it, then began pacing. He couldn’t sleep. Whatever drugs had guarded the secrets of New Glastonbury were still buzzing in his mind and through his limbs, days after their departure from Desrien, despite what the Navy medics said. They wouldn’t let him see Montrose.
His pacing brought him to the door of his cell. He raised his arms and slammed both fists against its hard-locked rigidity. Locked, locked, locked.
Locked, locked, locked. Lokri thought religious people were supposed to be more trusting. But here was a set of stairs leading down. Maybe there’d be an exit somewhere beneath the cathedral.
The halls below were cool, smelling of ancient stone, lit at intervals by iron-wrought sconces. The air was cool and still, as if it had not stirred for centuries. He never passed anyone, and all the doors he tried were locked.
From time to time he heard faint noise, and saw a rhythmic flicker around a corner. The first half-dozen times he saw this evanescent light he plunged down an adjacent hallway to escape populated areas.
But the seventh time he neared the end of a long, cold hallway and saw the now-familiar purple flicker he suspected that he was wandering around in circles. So he turned toward the light and noise, figuring he could hide among the crowd, and make his way to an exit.
Rounding the last corner, he was surprised to see an open door with lumensquiggles in an unfamiliar script above it, giving off the pulsing light. The noise, the smells, reminded him of the Galadium on Rifthaven. He laughed, breaking into a run. Why had he not guessed that the high-end religious nicks would have their own gambling den?
I wonder if there's one for every faith? All designed to take money from the gullible, just like those long-faced fools upstairs do. And of course this place would give their off-duty clerics something to do with their time and money.
He passed through the door. A hulking masked man held out a hand.
Lokri lifted his own, palms out. “I'm broke,” he said with cheerful honesty. “But I won't be long if you'll point out the Phalanx or Xi tables.”
The man shrugged massive shoulders, reminding Lokri—uncomfortably—of one of Vi'ya's Dol'jharians. “We don't play in that kind of coin.” The man’s voice rumbled.
“I'll play in any kind of coin,” Lokri said. “Let me in.” And if I don't like it, I'm out the other side.
This time one shoulder lifted, and the hand waved him forward. Lokri passed on inside, breathing deeply of the head-twisting scents of expensive dream-smoke. The room was crowded with flash and shadow pleasure-seekers, their outlines diffused by a weirdly glowing red haze. Lokri watched the smoke swirl up from censers, back-lit by the ruby lumens overhead. The affect was like something from the lowest precinct of hell, an observation which Lokri found highly entertaining.
“Jess,” came a pleasant tenor voice, one Lokri hadn't heard for a long time.
Stung at first, for he hated reminders of his real name and origins, Lokri swiftly turned to see the crimson outline of a short, thin man with long, wispy hair.
Lokri choked on a laugh. He would never have expected to find in a place like Desrien the most dangerous man in Rifthaven. I never expected to see him again at all. “Digge Kelar,” he exclaimed aloud. “I thought you were dead.”
Kelar lifted his hands, his round, young-seeming face beaming with boyish delight. “Appearances belie.”
“What brings you here?” Though Lokri was beginning to appreciate Desrien—the real Desrien—more each moment.
“To play,” Kelar said. “For greater stakes. The greatest.”
Lokri laughed. “I might have known.”
“Come, Jess. Join us.”
“Willingly,” Lokri said, “but please. Call me Lokri.”
Hearing his old name reminded him of the damned nicks and their battlecruiser, waiting to take him to his execution—if he didn't escape them. Except I met Kelar after I changed identities, not before...
The anomaly made Lokri wary, but Kelar just laid his hand on Lokri's shoulder. “Come within. I'll have you know that we play for souls here.”
“Souls,” Lokri repeated, instantly diverted.
“Everything open and understood, always, in matters of play or pay.” It was the same thing he'd said when he first started the Galadium, out of nothing but a plasma-scarred derelict ship he'd flown in, empty except for a mysterious case in the cargo bay, and no hint where he'd been or how he'd gotten it. Within two years he had the best club in the station.
Lokri laughed. Souls. He'd walked into the Galadium without money before, which had not stopped him from the risk of betting anyway. How much easier to stake something that didn't exist? It's what you might expect on a planet like this—but still, finding Kelar talking religious comes as a surprise.
“Xi game's this way,” Kelar said.
Lokri followed to the most elaborate Xi setup he'd ever beheld. Twelve circles of speeding lights intersected in a tall, revolving column, with brief lineups of one color, then another, at odd intervals. Gathered around the base of the holographic display were intensely focused players, hitting their freeze-key when they thought the next color bar would line up.
Lokri watched. The circles spun faster than he was used to, and he'd never seen a tower of more than eight bars. But the odds for Xi had always been a lure—sometimes as much as fifty to one for color bars, and exponentially higher for repeated patterns.
Lokri gauged the players. In his experience, pilots and navigators were drawn to Xi; anyone who had a knack for seeing patterns in objects moving in space.
He remembered Ivard's sister Greywing being drawn to Xi, and felt mild regret at her loss, followed by a jolt of recognition. He blinked, tried to rub the reddish dreamsmoke haze from his eyes, and stared at the short, scrawny female in the old flightsuit. Short spacer-style haircut, ugly freckled skin, guarded expression: it was Greywing.
A player fell away from his position, giving a low cry, and Kelar, who had slipped into the dealer's cage, motioned Greywing to take the man's place.
Greywing stepped forward, her thin, wary face underlit in ghostly hues by the glowing colors on the console at her fingers.
“Five tries, pilgrim, five tries,” Kelar said. “Your call or mine?”
“Mine,” Greywing said. It was definitely her voice. Lokri stood back, nausea crawling up his gut; he knew he’d seen Greywing fall to a Tarkan's jac in the Mandala.
“Red,” Greywing said.
“Try red,” Kelar repeated.
The whirling lights reflected in Greywing's unblinking eyes as she watched the tower, her chin uplifted, shoulders braced. She'd always faced the universe in that stance, ready for attack, but she'd had courage. Lokri hoped she'd win now.
“Bets?” Kelar turned to the crowd. Some raised hands, betting for or against Greywing's ability to call a solid line of red lights intersecting. Her head moved unconsciously in the rhythm, her gaze abstracted, then her hand pounced on the large key—and the tower froze, nine red lights, two yellow and one blue.
“Ooooh,” a sigh went up.
“Four left,” Kelar said, smiling. “Your call or mine?”
“Mine,” she said firmly. “Red again.”
This time she hit only seven; she caught all the rest orange. She called for red a third time, and lost to three lights.
“Two left,” Kelar said. “Your call or mine?”
“Yours,” Greywing said, looking uncertain.
“Green.”
A green line-up was promised, and she only had to watch for it. But the lights whirled faster, and when she hit the key, she was badly off. A cry went up from the watchers.
“Last try,” Kelar said. “Give you four to one. You get this, walk free. Pattern: blue-white-yellow.”
The patterns were the hardest, and took the longest to pay off, but when they did, the payoff was great. Bets ran up into high numbers among the watchers, but Lokri’s focus stayed on Greywing, who stared up at the tower, her lips parted and her breathing still.
She slammed her hand down—and missed the pattern by four lights. As Lokri watched, her eyes went wide with horror and a neat red hole appeared in the center of her chest, then she fell away into the crowd, swallowed by the shadows.
“What's—” he started to say, but the roar of the crowd swelled, and a new victim took Greywing's place: a huge, broad-faced man who Lokri recognized as his very first captain.
“Ghosts,” Lokri whispered as Kelar told the man he had five tries. “The place is filled with ghosts.”
Lokri watched, tightlipped and silent, as the old man lost. At the end, his face grayed and he too disappeared into the shifting shadows behind the game.
Whatever the game behind this game is, I will not play, Lokri thought narrowly, and turned to go, but the crowd pressed against him, keeping him in place.
He fought the urge to shove his way out and smash his knuckles against Kelar's smiling teeth. But when he looked at the nearest players, he recognized people he'd killed in action, others he'd crewed with or had known. All dead.
The ones who played the Xi game appeared as he had seen them last, and when they lost, their death-wound took them from sight. Four times this happened as Lokri tried gently to sidle free, a step at a time. Yet somehow the smoke and shadows led him inexorably right back to the Xi game.
So he crossed his arms, his jaw aching around clenched teeth, determined to wait it out. Three more people from his past came and lost and disappeared, and then a tall, rawboned figure sauntered through the crowd, his grace and assurance painfully familiar.
Lokri tried to look away but couldn’t, and there the laughing blue eyes of Markham vlith-L'Ranja, the long yellow hair as Markham smiled at Lokri, then stepped up to the Xi console.
Markham had always admitted that Lokri was his superior in this game. The urge to push through and take his place gripped Lokri, but he shook his head. Markham was already dead; whatever Lokri did would make no difference to the nightmare being spun out here.
“Blue,” Markham said.
“Blue!” Kelar repeated, his teeth showing in challenge.
Markham lost, and lost again. And when his fifth time came and went, Lokri tried to look away, but he couldn't. He saw Markham's features crimson and run together and his smoking skull gleam, bony and white, while around him the crowd yelled and laughed.
And then he, too, was gone.
Lokri drew in a shaking breath, and then the last blow knocked his lungs airless. Through the crowd glided a small figure, no older than Ivard and already beautiful: Fierin ban-Kendrian, Lokri's sister.
She looked this way and that, and her face changed when she saw him. Uncertainty gave way to delight. He stared at her, unable to move or speak. How could she be dead? Four times he'd checked on her, always from a distance. The latest one was mere weeks before Eusabian's attack: she'd been alive.
More unsettling, she looked just like she had when he last saw her, which had been years ago. He knew she was an adult now. She’d inherited Lokri's place. She would not be this child.
But she came right up to him, and threw herself in his arms. He hesitated, then closed his hands about her thin shoulders, and hugged her warmth against him.
“Jess,” she whispered, tears of joy gleaming in her eyes. “How happy I am to find you! Where have you been?”
“Hiding,” he said, trying to force a distance, to regain control. They said she was part of the plot, he reminded himself. To gain my inheritance. But there were times—when he was very, very drunk—when he'd not believed it. “What are you doing here?”
“I've come to play.” She lifted her hands and spun around, her glinting silvery dress the same shade as her eyes. Silver eyes, the same shade as his—the same shade as the dead eyes of their father—
“Get out of here,” Lokri said.
Fierin looked hurt. “But I found you at last!”
Lokri met Kelar's gaze. I know what it is, I'm already dead, Lokri thought. The thought brought a mixture of self-mockery—and relief. I must have already gone through the farce on Ares and they've executed me. But he didn't really believe it.
What he did believe was that Fierin, the only one of the family worth anything, was in danger.
With one hand he thrust his sister behind him. “You go home,” he said. “I'll run their damned play for them.”
“You know the risk,” Kelar said.
“Yeah, you told me. Souls.” Lokri didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“You have to understand,” Kelar said. “This is not for a night's fun, and it's not for a decade of bond-slavery like Piriag's favorite forfeit. This is forever.”
The platitude There is no forever came to Lokri's lips, but in his mind was a terrifying image of falling, falling, through the void of space.
“Call it blue,” he said.
Fierin's thin fingers gripped his tightly.
The circles whirled, faster than ever, but Lokri watched, feeling the patterns... losing them. Catching them—losing—catching—Hit.
He slammed his hand down, then looked up the line. Blue... blue... blue... blue... blue... green—
The crowd yelled.
“White,” Lokri said.
Murmurs around him splintered his attention. He shut them out, concentrating, and again thought he had the pattern, and missed. Kelar laughed, his face cruel. “Give up, Kendrian? Give up?”
Lokri tried again, this time letting the house declare the pattern. When he lost for the third time, fatalism seized him. He clung tight to his sister's fingers, feeling her pulse racing under his hand.
Kelar's words echoed in his mind. Give up? That means there’s a choice, and that means there is an exit somewhere... a way out. “If I lose, does she go?”
Kelar gestured back toward an open door. At either side stood two shadowy figures with ready weapons. It was either Lokri or Fierin. He studied her face, her steady, trusting gaze. He could leave her and try his own escape, or he could—
“Call it,” he said.
The lights whirled, this time so bright it hurt the eyes. The roars of the gamblers rose to a scream and then died in a weird echo. Lokri felt a cold wind blow against his face, and he staggered, righting himself against a wall.
Opening his eyes, he stared straight into one of the flaring torches. He shifted his gaze to his own hand, fingers spread against a stone wall. His hand slipped, leaving a sweat-mark.
“Kelar?” He swallowed. “Fierin?”
His voice echoed. He was alone.
Rage burned through him. He began to run, faltering when he rounded a corner and nearly ran down a short figure in a long robe standing just before a stairway.
It was the High Phanist. Without slowing, he raised his fists to strike her out of his way. She remained still, even when he was three strides from her. He was angry enough to slam her against the wall, but he made the mistake of looking at her face first.
Not that she had any arcane powers. She just stood there, her eyes steady with the same sort of stillness that rested in Jaim’s gaze just before a fight. But Lokri sensed no threat. She was just... there.
As was he.
The realization shocked him into dual awareness. He was lost under New Glastonbury, and he was in a cell on Grozniy. He seemed to see himself standing before the door of his cell; for a moment the thin, bruised figure leaning against the door with upraised fists, his head hanging down, was the teenager who’d discovered that justice was just another word. Lokri didn’t know if anything he remembered after this moment under New Glastonbury was real. Or even since that day his teenaged self had found his family—
He faltered to a stop, and lowered his arms, but his fingers were rigid with anger. “Damn you,” he said hoarsely, “and damn this chatzing hellhole.”
“It is not an easy one, I take it?” she said.
He glared down at her. “No, it wasn’t,” he said, trying to force the experience into the past, where it belonged. “How do you arrange these things?” he asked. “And where,” he felt his voice rise and forced it to flatten, “do you get the ghosts?”
“You bring the ghosts with you,” was the reply.
He shook his head, expelling his breath in a strangled sound midway between a laugh and a shout of anger. “Are they all dead, then?” A chill shook him. “Am I?”
She gestured invitingly, and sat on the next-to-lowest step. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Ghosts. In your gambling den.”
Her brows lifted.
“You're going to tell me there is no gambling den here.”
“If you wish... ” She left it at that.
“What I wish is to be out of here, and free,” he said. “And I want to know why my sister was forced into your farce.” Her jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
“I don't know anything about your sister,” the woman said. “But I would hazard a guess that there is business left undone, perhaps something on her behalf, which you might attend to. Does that strike a chord?”
“It strikes a death knell,” he said sardonically. “Any business I try to take care of will end with me in the execution dock, for a crime I did not commit.”
“Ah,” she said. “Then there's a question of justice.”
“There is no justice,” he rejoined. “There's power, which buys all the 'justice' it needs. I don't have any power.”
She pursed her lips, then looked up at him. Her eyes in the flaring torchlight were tired, but very kind. “You are from Torigan, are you not?”
He said nothing, disgusted with himself for letting his speech fall back into the unmistakable Torigan cadence after so many years of successful disguise.
She shook her head slightly. “Never mind. You need tell me nothing.”
“Then why are you here?”
“It seemed the right place to be just now,” she replied. “My clerk reported an angry young man ranging about the corridors down here, probably lost. I wouldn't want you to miss your flight... should you choose to leave Desrien.”
“'Choose.'” He scorned the word.
“Well you could stay and become a pilgrim,” she said, smiling teasingly.
Pilgrim. It was the word Kelar had used. The echo made the hairs on the back of Lokri's neck prickle, and he knew that he could spend his lifetime denying whatever it was that had happened in that lower-level gambling den, but it would never leave him. There was power here, something he could not even remotely understand, much less subvert.
“Maybe it'll be easier to take my chances with Panarchist notions of justice,” Lokri said, leaning against the wall to disguise his trembling.
The woman put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to her feet. “I am not one given to predictions, but from what little you told me, it seems there is a family member important to you who might need your aid. And,” she added, frowning a little, “it may transpire she will aid you.”
He shook his head.
“Will you run forever, then?”
“The universe is big,” he said.
“And often leads back to the same path, and the same nexus, to be confronted yet again.”
He thought of the gambling den. “So,” he said finally, “if I do go to Ares—I assume that’s where we’re headed when you let us go—and face their justice—do you promise me I'll get out of it alive?”
“In the end we get out of nothing alive,” she said with irony to match his. “And I promise nothing. But I ask you again: will you run forever?”
He heard the other, unspoken question clearly. How many times do you want to go through this?
“This way,” she said over her shoulder.
Lokri opened his eyes on the familiar blandness of his cell. But now the restraining walls seemed as substantial as moth-gauze. He wasn’t sure he’d end up anywhere on Grozniy if he walked through one.
He’d stay right here.