Pursued across the Thousand Suns by the implacable Eusabian of Dol’jhar, Brandon vlith-Arkad is safe at last on Ares, HQ of the Panarchist Navy—or as safe as he can be given the ritual deadliness of Panarchic politics. Hampered by his reputation as a wastrel and suspicions of treason, Brandon struggles to establish his authority as Heir so that he can command a Naval sortie to rescue his father, Gelasaar III, the deposed Panarch of the Thousand Suns.
Meanwhile, Brandon’s father, onboard the Rifter destroyer carrying him to exile and inevitable death on the prison planet Gehenna, is fighting his own subtle battle with his former fosterling and hostage, Eusabian’s son, Anaris. Resigned to his fate, and unsure of Brandon’s, Gelasaar must decide whether or not Anaris can rule the Thousand Suns, as his brutal father cannot. For despite his fall from power, Gelasaar still holds the power of life and death over everyone on board.
“The Rouge aegios on the Ivory temenarch,” said Lazoro.
Londri Ironqueen slapped the dwarf’s hand away from the ancient dyplast cards. “Don’t touch them, you snarky blot. You’ll get them all greasy.”
Her chancellor cackled and ripped another strip of flesh off the roasted joint he clutched in one misshapen hand, chewing noisily. Londri’s stomach lurched; early in her fifth pregnancy nothing was appetizing, but roast meat was especially nauseating.
Overhead, the sconces crackled as an errant draft toyed with the oil wicks; the thick shutters were drawn back from the deep, narrow windows, admitting the predawn breeze, heavy with the scent of the night-blooming bloodflowers that twined the tower of Annrai the Mad. Londri’s stomach roiled again at their overly sweet, almost carrion scent.
Lazoro looked more closely at her. “How long this time?”
“Two courses.”
The dwarf said nothing for a moment; the only sound was the slap of the cards on the low table between them. All her other pregnancies had ended in miscarriages by the third month.
Then Lazoro poked at the cards with his free hand. “Now uncover the Phoenix singularity and move it to the bar, which will free up...”
“I can see that better than you can, lump. They call this solitaire for a reason, you know.”
Lazoro stood up, which made little difference in his height, and performed an exaggerated bow, whacking his head into the low table between them. “Your pardon, O Great Queen,” he intoned.
When he straightened up, one of the cards was stuck to his high forehead, the starburst pattern on its back like a strange caste mark above his gray eyes. He peeled it off and peered at it owlishly as Londri snorted a laugh.
“The Nine of Phoenix,” Lazoro pronounced, flipping the card around to show its face: nine heraldic birds enwrapped in flames. “Opportunity and strife.”
“Opportunity and strife,” echoed a booming voice, startling them both. “What else is new, O farsighted one?”
The bulky figure of Anya Steelhand filled the doorway, shoving aside the hanging with one brawny, spark-scarred arm. The forge master pushed her way into the room and dropped into a chair, which creaked warningly under her weight.
“My passion for you, sweet flower of the forge,” replied Lazoro, grinning broadly, “renewed as always by the sight of your lissome frame.”
“Bah!” Anya snorted. She grabbed a flagon, pouring it full of thick, fresh-brewed beer from the pitcher on the table, and sat down, staring into the drink.
Londri snatched the card from the dwarf’s hands and slapped it back on the table. He sat down again, his face serious. “You really do have to decide about the Isolate woman at Szuri Pastures. Aztlan and Comori won’t wait much longer, and if they tangle, the Tasuroi will move through. You know they’re stronger than they’ve been in seventeen years.”
Londri felt a sudden, unreasoning rage and fought it down, along with a surge of bile as the scent of the meat wrenched at her again. The woman, an Isolate from the Panarchy, had been landed on the disputed border between Aztlan and Comori. When it was found that her fertility suppression was temporary, the two houses had nearly gone to war. Londri’s mother had imposed a compromise: when the treatment wore off, Comori should have her firstborn, Aztlan the next child, then House Ferric the third.
“The Telos-damned bitch would have twins,” said Anya without looking up. Londri rubbed her stomach, aware of Lazoro’s concern. Fertility was rare enough for those born on Gehenna, and child mortality was high—she was the only survivor of fifteen siblings, none of whom had lived beyond three years. Twins were unheard-of. Now Comori claimed both children, while Aztlan claimed the second from the womb.
The Ironqueen sighed and walked over to the tall window. Outside, the stars were paling, and fingers of actinic light reached hungrily over the distant Surimasi Mountains, announcing the onslaught of another day under the searing light of Shaitan, Gehenna’s primary.
Behind her came the shuffle of irregular footsteps. She knew it was Stepan, the exiled gnostor who’d joined the Isolates in her mother’s reign; a sapper-wyrm had chewed half his foot away, six years ago.
But she didn’t turn around, looking down instead, past the tangled stone and timber complexity of House Ferric and over its surrounding wall. Beyond, the growing light from the sky threw into bold relief the awesome symmetry of the Crater, a perfectly circular gouge in the high, flat plain that sloped up slowly to the brooding mountains beyond. The foundation of her kingdom, and the center of human life on Gehenna, the Crater was the creation of the hated Panarchists, their jailers, who had steered a metallic asteroid into the planet centuries before. The metallic remnants at its center—the treasured iron so rare elsewhere on Gehenna—were the source of House Ferric’s supremacy; the rest of the asteroid, vaporized and wide-scattered by the impact, rich in the trace elements necessary to the human body, had created the Splash.
According to Stepan, it was a wickedly clever prison. “They could have dusted the planet to add the trace elements we need,” he had explained. “But this way, there’s just enough metal to ensure that we won’t try to build a civilization without it—just enough to keep us fighting over it, and so never a threat to them.”
She turned back to the others. “Why couldn’t it have been a man? They’re so much easier to share.”
“They’d probably fight just as hard over a stud that threw twins—no love lost there,” said Stepan, his precise Douloi accent grating on her ears.
“Easy for you to say. They’re both staunch supporters of our house, and they’re both right, in a way.”
“Right!” Lazoro cackled, waving his haunch of roast jaspar. “Right? Since when does that have anything to do with it?”
The hanging was pushed aside again, revealing the seven-foot bulk of her general, Gath-Boru. Moving with unlikely grace, he took his place at the table.
“You know what I mean,” she said finally.
The dwarf had been her mother’s chancellor until her untimely death twenty-five months before; without him, Londri doubted that the Lodestone Siege would still be hers. He was almost twenty, the same age as Stepan.
But Stepan would say sixty, and call it the prime of life.
However you reckoned it, she thought, twenty—what they called sixty standard years in the Thousand Suns—was old on Gehenna. Deprived in his youth of the supplements delivered from orbit by the hated Panarchists, he’d fallen victim to one of the numerous deficiency diseases that were the lot of so many on this strange planet. But it hadn’t affected his mind.
Lazoro smiled at her affectionately. “Of course I know. You’re just like your mother. But she learned, and so will you, if Telos gives you time, that right and might are uneasy partners at best.”
“And as long as I am here,” said Gath-Boru, his voice deep and resonant from his massive chest, “you needn’t worry about that.” He filled a flagon with beer. “There’s only one real question here,” he continued. “Which one of them do we want to fight? Whichever one of them you decide against will ally with the Tasuroi. Your army is ready, whatever the decision.”
“You cannot hope to make everyone happy with your decision,” said Stepan, spreading his long pale hands on the table in front of him. “The best you can do is minimize their unhappiness.”
“As well to say ‘water’s wet’ or ‘iron is rare,’” Lazoro commented irritably. ‘That’s a tautology of government.”
The chancellor used his short legs to push his tall chair back onto its two rear legs, bouncing precariously with his toes against the table’s edge. It was a habit of his when he was vexed; Londri had been waiting for him to tip over backward since she was a little girl. He never had.
She said nothing as the two bickered. A yawn cracked her jaws open, intensifying the ache behind her eyes; the onset of dawn signaled the usual end of the waking day for the inhabitants of Gehenna, and she had had little sleep in the past few days. Her stomach churned, threatening a return of the nausea that was never far away.
Underneath the table a hound commenced the rhythmic whimper of a dream, its legs scrabbling in the rushes.
“There, there, bitling, not to worry.” Londri smiled at the incongruous gentleness in Anya Steelhand’s husky alto. The muscles in the forge master’s arm flexed as she reached down to stroke the animal’s head. The whimpering stopped, replaced by the thumping racket of the big dog’s tail.
The big woman straightened up and glared at the two men across the table from her, her pale eyes lent even more intensity by the contrast with her glossy black skin. She slammed a big fist down on the table and heaved herself to her feet; the candlesticks danced and the mugs rattled.
“You two would argue over the Last Skyfall itself!”
Lazoro’s chair fell forward with a crash as the dwarf threw up his hands to cover his head in mock terror. Stepan merely looked at Anya, unblinking, his round, plump face blank.
“House Ferric has the right to the third child,” said Anya. “We get that all the sooner if we decide in favor of House Aztlan and divide the twins, but that will leave us facing Comori and the Tasuroi—a larger force than if we decide against Aztlan.”
She peered closer at Londri. “That’s the decision, Your Majesty: is getting our hands on a fertile woman that much sooner worth the risk?”
“Our spies say she is in fragile health,” said Lazoro. “We can’t risk waiting.”
Twins. A wave of nausea welled up in Londri’s guts, and that decided her, but before she could speak, the attention of everyone at the table was riveted by a sound from the corridor outside.
THUMP, drag, THUMP, drag... As the noise grew louder, it was accompanied by a hoarse grunting in synchrony with its rhythm.
The hanging in the doorway bellied out at its base and fell back over a naked figure, albino-white and epicene, that leapt clumsily on all fours toward the table like a child-sized toad. It was human, but no one could have guessed its sex, if it even had one. Its face was blank of meaning, somehow even less expressive than a corpse.
It stopped behind Londri’s chair; she twisted around, not wanting to look, but afraid that if she didn’t, it would touch her.
“Oracle... Oracle... Oracle,” it piped in a high, thin voice, thick strings of spittle hanging from its blubbery purple lips. Its eyes were pink and crusted with rheum. “Szuri... Szuri... Szuri.”
Londri shrank back in her chair as it humped closer, repeating its mindless litany. Anya was beside her, one big hand on the Ironqueen’s neck, its horny weight comforting. The forge master kicked the creature away, her voice hoarse with rage.
“Go away, you wretched abortion!” She bit off the last word—the vilest curse on Gehenna—with disgusted precision. “Go tell your master we will come, and not to send you again.”
The creature retreated, thump-dragging itself out the door, trailing behind it a wailing cry: “Hurt... hurt... hurt.”
Londri caught a glimpse of Stepan’s face. The only Isolate among them, his expression was one of horror—the others, born and raised on Gehenna, merely looked uncomfortable or angry.
They don’t have things like that in the Thousand Suns. They don’t have to.
“Are you all right?” Anya asked. “We can put him off.”
Londri shook her head. “Yes. No.” Her voice shook. Her mother had never discussed this with her; her death had prevented Londri from learning the true nature of the link between House Ferric and the exiled Phanist who dwelt in the lowest levels of the castle. She only knew that every time he called, her mother went, and so must she.
She stood up. “This just confirms that the Szuri Pastures are important. Let’s get it over with.”
o0o
“Ow ow ow! R-run it again!”
Kedr Five’s voice, a squeal of laughter, was nearly drowned by the guffaws of the others on the bridge of the Samedi.
“I can’t watch it again,” Sundiver cried, her slanted green eyes running with tears. “Send it over the hyperwave—Brotherhood’s gonna love this one.” She bent over her console, still whooping, her thick mane of silver hair hiding her face.
“Got an idea. Don’t send it yet,” Moob put in, red-filed teeth bared in a fleering grin. She hunched over her console, keying quickly.
Hestik clumped his fist on his own console, running the com back. Tat Ombric turned her gaze to the viewscreen overhead, her emotions a strange mixture of laughter and guilt.
Once again they all watched the Panarch and his advisers, all of them old, dressed in the grimy gray prison garb that Emmet Fasthand, captain of Samedi, wouldn’t let them wash. They were sitting at their barren table eating. Tat sat forward slightly, trying to catch the conversation. They talked so quick, in those musicky voices, it was hard to follow.
Without warning the gravs went off, and anyone in motion floated right off their benches, some of them reaching hastily for anchor. Food on lifting spoons or in glasses about to be drunk from splashed out in messy globules, which several of them swam to catch.
Two of the old people bumped into each other, gnarled arms and legs pumping for purchase, and when most of them were in midair, Sundiver had hit the gravs again, and the prisoners thumped down hard, their food on top of them—that which hadn’t splattered on walls and bulkheads.
“Look at that old bald one,” Hestik sobbed. “On top of the ugly one with the squint! ‘Wanna chatz?’” He parodied a quivering, senile voice.
The bridge crew whooped again, all except Moob, who still worked—and Tat, who smiled reluctantly.
Tat looked away from the tiny old woman on the floor cradling a broken arm. She tried to suppress the discomfort, figuring that these nicks were shortly going to be duffed, anyway. Moob and Hestik had decided to belay needling that despicable Morrighon; at some point his Dol’jharian master might find out what they were doing, and no one was certain how he’d react. This was, of course, Fasthand’s ship... but Tat didn’t think even Fasthand was ready to hand out commands to Anaris achreash’Eusabian, Jerrode, Eusabian’s son and heir.
Tat looked down at her hands, small and square on her console. Moob and Hestik loved perpetrating jokes while Fasthand was on his Z-watch, the crueler the jokes the better, and if they hadn’t realized that those nicks were theirs to play with, they might have turned on the rest of the crew—like Tat herself—who were too weak to defend themselves, or to get a clique to defend them. The smallest on the crew, Tat felt anew the ambivalence of being posted to the bridge: her cousins couldn’t help her here.
“Let’s watch this,” Moob said, baring her Draco teeth.
The viewscreen flickered to what the imagers in the prisoners’ cabin were recording right then.
The nicks had picked themselves up and straightened some of the mess as best they could, with the sparse linen Fasthand allowed them. A big old nick crouched over the tiny woman, trying to wrap her arm with strips torn from a sheet.
Suddenly they all looked in one direction, their bodies tight with alarm, their faces varying from disgust to blank. Moob reached over to Sundiver’s console and hit the gravs again, and moments later a nasty brownish cloud of matter rolled into the room.
Kedr Five wheezed, pounding the back of his pod. “You backed... up... the... disposer!” he squealed.
Renewed shrieks of mirth made the walls ring. Tat wondered if the damned Dol’jharians were watching and laughing as well. No one knew for certain if they had the imagers programmed to send to their quarters; they all assumed that Morrighon was spying on them, but no one knew to what extent. Almost his first action after coming on board was to designate a huge block in the ship’s computers for his own use, and as yet no one could break his codes. Tat kept trying, on Fasthand’s orders; he wanted to know how much of the ship’s functions the Dol’jharians had interfered with.
“You’re a Bori,” Fasthand had snarled at Tat. “You been twisty with systems for years. Get around that ugly popeyed zhinworm.”
Tat had just nodded, not pointing out that Morrighon was a Last Generation Bori. Any of those who had survived cullings, purges, and the terrible training one must endure in order to serve the Dol’jharian lords had to be exponentially much twistier.
She glanced once again at the viewscreen, then let her eyes unfocus. Bile tickled at the back of her throat; it was too easy to imagine what that room smelled like.
Behind, she heard Hestik choke. Sundiver wiped her eyes, but Kedr Five and Moob avidly drank in every disgusting detail, gibbering with such delighted abandon they missed the hiss of the door opening behind, and those first thumping steps.
Heart pounding, Tat scrunched low; though her father had skipped off Bori when she was small, just before the Panarchists defeated Eusabian’s forces, she still felt terror whenever she sighted a Dol’jharian, and this time it was two of the big black-clad Tarkans, Anaris’s personal guard, who strode in.
Silence fell, Kedr Five hiccupping, as the Tarkans made their way to Moob.
She was up at once, teeth bared and her knife out, but the Tarkan swatted her arm aside and grabbed the front of her tunic. Big as she was, he lifted her right off her feet, as the second one grabbed Sundiver’s arm.
“I’m coming,” she said, getting up fast. “What’s the problem?”
Neither of the Tarkans spoke; Tat wondered if they even understood Uni. They just walked out, their boots clunking on the deck plates, the one carrying a choking, cursing Moob, and Sundiver hurrying in the grasp of the other with rather more speed than she usually displayed.
The door hissed shut behind them. Overhead, the viewscreen showed that the gravs had come on again, and Tat saw a corresponding green light on Sundiver’s console: Interesting, she thought. I was right, they do have access to ship’s functions. She watched, her thoughts speeding, as several gray-clad Dol’jharians efficiently herded the nicks out of the disgusting cabin.
A moment later the Tarkans showed up; Moob hung limply, blood running from her mouth. Sundiver’s hair stood out around her face, which was still beautiful even in anger. She managed a defiant stance as without warning Anaris himself appeared, taller even than the Tarkans, with a face like some carving of a warrior king out of the long-lost past. Tat hunched down further in her pod, even though he was just on the screen.
“The prisoners are to arrive at Gehenna alive, and unharmed,” he said, in his incongruously accent-free Uni. If anything, he sounded like the nicks. He smiled just slightly, then indicated cleaning gear being dumped on the floor by another of the silent gray soldiers. “When this chamber is habitable again, we’ll discuss this further.”
The Tarkans let go of the two women and went out. The door shut on them; Sundiver bent over, retching. Moob leaned on a table, unheeding the brown-green slime she sat in.
Hestik tried to kill the viewscreen—and failed.
The remainder of the bridge crew exchanged looks. On the viewscreen the women painfully began to clean up; some on the bridge watched, or busied themselves at their consoles, trying not to watch.
o0o
Morrighon tabbed the volume down on the communicator tuned to the bridge, laughing as he set it neatly in its place on the row. Leaning back, he watched on his personal screen the pleasant sight of the Draco and her companion scrubbing bilge off the walls. He wondered whether he ought to insert a worm into the ship system, that would cause the tianqi to waft an occasional breath of fetor—a little reminder—into their cabins.
Reluctantly he abandoned the idea and logged the entire scrubbing session under his personal code. Enjoyable as it would be once, he knew they’d just force some other luckless slub into those cabins, and while all the Rifter trash crewing this ship deserved being spaced, some of them were much worse than others.
He had not gotten as far as he had by being unsubtle. Enough for them to find this coded log in the system—they would know that he had the session recorded, and could send it over the hyperwave at any time. That at least would clip the Draco’s wings: to be shamed publicly was worse than death for Draco.
As for the silver-haired blunge-eater... He tapped his nails on the edge of his console, thinking with renewed fury of the disgusting things the Rifters had done to torment him. He knew that she had been the one to spray the clearmet on the wall above his bed and tap it into ship’s power. He flexed his feet within his shoes: the burns still hurt. And it was she and that boil-faced blit at the nav console, Hestik, who had released the plasphage into his tianqi vents, so that his bed linens had dissolved into a disgusting pink slime.
They were not united, Morrighon knew. He smiled, getting up to pace about his cabin. Of course he could never tell Anaris about this silent war going on: the assumption that he could not defend himself against a pack of Rifters would destroy his future as Anaris’s right hand. Instead, he would use his subtlety to divide them against themselves
The comm at his waist vibrated: Anaris’s personal signal. Morrighon activated the new security locks on his cabin; the next intruders would encounter a nasty surprise, which they might, if particularly unlucky, even survive.
He hastened down the narrow corridor, wondering if Anaris had decoded some new data from over the hyperwave—or if he had decided to hold another private converse with the Panarch.
Morrighon gnawed his lip, finding the idea of discourse between those two strange and unsettling. He longed to discuss the meetings with Anaris, but as yet Anaris had not indicated to him that they were a topic of discussion. Further, he wanted them utterly private, so it was Morrighon and not one of the Tarkans who brought the old man when Anaris wanted him, and waited outside until they were done.
Morrighon’s step quickened, and he turned his thoughts back to the best ways to deepen the discord in Fasthand’s crew, and to amuse himself while doing it.
o0o
Caleb Banqtu drank deeply of his mug of caf, then sat back, enjoying the burn on his tongue and in his throat and stomach. Sitting across the table—the clean table—from him, Gelasaar sipped at a steaming mug, eyes closed. Next to the Panarch, tiny Matilde Ho cradled hers in her one good hand, the broken arm now secured in a proper cast.
Caleb had ceased to feel surprise at anything. Torment by the Rifters had been predictable. Unforeseen, though perhaps more sinister, was the rescue by the Tarkans followed by the dramatic improvement in their maintenance.
No one spoke, but he read their intent clearly.
The Panarch, by his pose, invited discussion, so the others shifted a haunch, turned a shoulder, adjusted their seat so that each could see the others. Padraic Carr limped over to the bench and sat down on Matilde’s other side, moving easier since the visit to the medic; until this surprising rescue, his pain had been obvious in every step, every harsh breath, though his long, craggy face had shown nothing. The admiral had not told any of them what the Tarkans did to him that first terrible week after they were captured, but Caleb knew they had exacted their own kind of vengeance for the defeat at Acheront twenty years before.
Separated without warning; imprisoned alone for unknowable periods of time; always, always spied upon, they had learned to read one another’s thoughts in subtle movement.
At first the semaphores were mere signs, meant to cheer one another during those rare encounters. Heightened awareness, the need to communicate, to reassure and be reassured, invested a whispered word, a glance, with a weight of meaning. Those first signs were simple: a fist for interrogations, a sniff for drugs used; lifted fingers for times compatriots had been seen, and later, their positioning indicated levels of well-being. A brush against one’s side meant hunger; a scratch on the ass signified Barrodagh. And a nod meant news, whether real or not they had no way to discern.
Many backsides itched in those early days. Caleb wondered if all Barrodagh’s recreational time was spent in dreaming up new torments for the prisoners in his charge.
Caleb himself had to endure vids of the rape of Charvann, and the use of his island home as target practice by a squad of Rifters. He told himself that it was not real—why would Eusabian bother with Charvann at all, which had no vestige of strategic importance?
But his sense of reality had become unhinged until waking and sleeping seemed alternate forms of a dream state. Rage, sorrow, grief, anger again, despair, all haunted him like a pack of howling specters. But specters were unreal; reality intruded just once, in the Ivory Hall, when he was forced to watch his mate die just after the Kelly Archon. The floor ran with red before a halt was called. Eusabian made it clear enough that Caleb and seven Privy Councilors were spared not because of any merit, but because they were deemed too old to be worthy prey.
After that, solitary confinement once again, interspersed with Barrodagh’s vile persecutions. Caleb endured it all by rebuilding his wind-skimmer, one stick at a time, in the sunny refuge of his imagination.
He had nearly finished stitching seams on the broadcloth sails when they were abruptly transported aboard the Fist again and told they were to be taken to Gehenna.
Then, finally, they were imprisoned together. And despite the reverberations of battle, and the prospect of Gehenna, they were with Gelasaar again, whose gaze lifted with visionary intensity when he said, the moment they were locked in a small cell together: Brandon is alive.
The lights in their cell had dimmed to the night setting, and in the gloom they had talked, quickly.
“The Gnostor Davidiah Jones once said that the power of symbols resides in their ambiguity,” Gelasaar had murmured.
Padraic then rumbled in his native Ikraini, “I read a commentary on that passage, by the Angus of Macadoo, where she noted that the hand that too readily wields a sword cannot grasp the symbols behind the words.”
Matilde had whispered, “The Sanctus Gabriel said that words were the first gift of Telos:
‘The Hand of Telos has five fingers
Forth from the first came first the word
The echo of that act still lingers
Yet to the proud a sound unheard.’”
Fingers, word, lingers, unheard. Subtle shifts of a limb, a shoulder, a chin, indicated understanding, and that had begun their pattern: to begin a discussion, usually about history or philosophy, ranging freely among several languages. At some point the real conversation would begin, conducted through isolated words indicated by finger movements.
That night, Gelasaar had revealed his goal: the education of Anaris, already in progress. To this end, six of the best minds of the Panarchy would willingly bend their focus. Then, by mutual consent, the conversation had lapsed into pure entertainment.
Now, many days later, Caleb sipped at his caf while three of them carried the discussion. To have a purpose again gave them all a semblance of youth and strength. Caleb, Mortan Kree, and Yosefina Paerakles sat silently, each absorbed in thought.
Caleb thought about Teodric sho’Gessinav, who had committed suicide rather than release Infonetics codes. His death at least had been to a purpose, but Casimir Dantre’s had not.
Was it being stripped of our powers and privileges? Or our belongings? Or merely imprisonment? They would never find out; they knew only that he had drowned himself, head down, in the disposer.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the dirazh’u,” said Padraic. “Do the Dol’jharians truly believe a person’s fate can be bound up in a knot?”
Caleb abandoned his musings and turned his attention to Carr. This conversation would proceed along entirely symbolic lines, its subject signaled by the faint emphasis on the word “knot.”
For that was a crucial question still unanswered. Do we reveal the Knot that guards Gehenna, or take the ship and all aboard with us into death? He shivered slightly. Death might be preferable to whatever awaited those who stumbled into the chaotic fivespace anomaly that warded the Gehenna system.
“Belief is a complex concept,” Matilde commented. “Do we ‘believe’ in the symbols we use to rule?”
“That may well be the difference between Dol’jhar and Arthelion,” Gelasaar replied. He smiled. “I believe that it is unlikely Eusabian understands anything by the term as we do. His son, however, was raised among us.”
“So, does Anaris believe his fate is determined by those knots?” asked Padraic. Caleb sensed interest from Mortan and Yosefina as well now. They were debating the fate of the Samedi: unbeknownst to their captors, this unlikely tribunal held the power of life and death over everyone on board.
“If so,” said Mortan Kree, suddenly breaking his silence, “there is little to choose between them.”
“Perhaps,” said Gelasaar, “during our next conversation I can determine the role knots play in Anaris’s life.”
Or death, thought Caleb.
“Do that,” Padraic Carr rumbled. “I’ll be interested to hear what you decide.”
The others agreed that, in the end, it would be the Panarch’s decision whether Anaris, and all of them, lived or died.