The Rifter's Covenant Read online

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but tabbed the holo again.

  The Panarch brought his hand from the dog’s head, and raised it, in an eerie echo of his last gesture aboard the escaping shuttle, the ring held toward the imager.

  “Brandon,” came the familiar light, serene voice, “my son. Crisis and destruction have brought you to my place—”

  At first the proleptic words fell on Jaim’s consciousness like a detonation, then he thought hazily: Of course it would be violence that would replace Semion with Brandon. This is old, maybe years old, and Gelasaar probably made one of these for each of his heirs, extrapolating likely circumstances that might bring each to power.

  “—and I will address that issue in a moment. For now, I wish to welcome you to the ranks of your ancestors. In annexed data you will be able to share their joys and sorrows, as well as assessments of their rules by their progeny and by others. But first, in the library of the Karelian Wing of the Residence you will find Jaspar Arkad’s Testamentary. This does not reside in the DataNet as must your new databank. Each of your forebears has viewed it from that same room, as have I, and I exhort you to do so without further loss of time.”

  A vivid image of the gardens at the Palace Minor on Arthelion replaced Gelasaar’s image in Jaim’s mind. The Dol’jharians had probably totally destroyed the place by now. As far as he knew, there was still no contact with any resistance on the Mandala.

  “. . . I assume that your brother Galen has refused the accession in your favor. I hope you will not see this as weakness on his part. Like your mother before him, Galen maintains that he does not perceive artificial political boundaries, which some may regard as the naïveté of the artist. I believe he does perceive them, but refuses to take them seriously. That is a luxury no ruler can afford, yet I hope by now you will have seen that there are times when the artist’s perception of the universe affords a kind of clarity of vision that political realities can cloud . . .”

  Gelasaar’s light blue eyes were pensive, fixed on infinity. The expression was twinned in his son’s denser blue gaze, the similarity between dead and living so striking it broke Jaim’s focus. He forced himself to listen.

  “. . . whether the violent overthrow of the existing order resulted from the war your brother dedicated his life to making ready for, or as a result of those very preparations, it makes your task more difficult. The exigencies of lawful government require that you find the perpetrators and examine them. I want you to remember another of the Jaspran Polarities, ‘A faith unfulfilled is loyalty’s pyre, for power can only compel, not inspire.’ To regain the faith of the Panarchy’s citizens you will have to establish your own faith in them . . .”

  He was talking about Semion, of course, Jaim thought. The Panarch had to know that Semion wanted to turn the Panarchy into a military dictatorship, but completely within the rules.

  “. . . our own communication has been minimal, but that is not because I lack faith in you. Quite the opposite, as I trust by now that you have perceived. But the time has come to prove it to you, by establishing a closer connection . . .”

  Brandon’s head lifted a fraction, his expression shuttered. Jaim’s breath hitched as the meaning of the last statement hit him somewhere behind the ribs: the Panarch must have updated the recording before Brandon’s Enkainion.

  Two thoughts occurred. First, this vid had been made shortly before Eusabian’s attack. Second, ‘The opposite?’

  It had to mean that the Panarch suspected Brandon might run.

  Jaim only heard a few words of the final exhortation, which were both personal and religious. Brandon sat still and unbreathing until Gelasaar’s image bowed, low and deep, as to a sovereign, and then Brandon surprised Jaim: he rose and bowed back to the image, a deep deliberate obeisance to the maximum degree.

  Then the console lens darkened, and the image disappeared. Brandon sank back into his chair and looked up at Jaim with an unsettling mixture of anger and grief. “Ought I to send a message to Eusabian thanking him for his interference?”

  Jaim said nothing, knowing now what he had sensed all along: that Brandon Arkad had wanted his father’s approval more than anything else. Jaim flashed vividly to that last communication between Gelasaar and Brandon, as the Panarch’s ship filled with smoke as the cruiser tried desperately to reach it in time.

  “He knew,” Jaim said with conviction. “He knew you were going to run.”

  Brandon looked down at his empty hands, then up again, his expression wry. “And here I exulted in my own cleverness at having circumvented Semion’s watchdogs. I think . . .”

  Jaim waited.

  Once again Brandon glanced up at what would have been skyward from a planetary surface. “I think I completely misconstrued my father’s orders that day, not long after I was kicked out of the academy. When he summoned Semion and me. I had no chance to defend myself, but at least Semion could not mouth out his lies about what Markham and I had been doing. Instead, my father gave my safety into Semion’s hands.”

  Jaim made a startled noise, then cut himself off.

  But Brandon heard, and gave a quick, pained smile. “I see it now, though I did not then. Those orders forced Semion to preserve my life. They were a warning against . . . permitting . . . a way for me to suffer a convenient accident. In the meantime, I continued my studies in every way I could. And Gelasaar contrived to make the means available. I used to wonder why it was so easy to hide my identity in the Phalanx tourneys.”

  Easy, Jaim thought, is relative. “He expected you to make the Riftskip?” Jaim struggled to understand the convoluted reasoning here.

  “I believe he expected me to go outside the system. After all, isn’t that what Jaspar Arkad did?” The grief sank below the surface again, replaced by Brandon’s habitual self-mockery. But Jaim knew it was there, joining the grief over Markham’s death that Jaim had suspected right from the beginning on Telvarna, when Brandon had reacted to the news by getting stinking drunk.

  Brandon turned away from where the eidolon of his father had stood, and moved to the monneplat. “Let’s have that coffee, and your report on the situation here on Ares.”

  SIX

  BARCA

  Riolo tar Manjanhalli, disgraced polypsyche of Barca and noderunner of the Rifter destroyer Flower of Lith, began to tremble as the lift took him down from the terrible surface of his native planet into the dim, warm security of the Under. He breathed out slowly, hoping he had not betrayed his anxiety to the guards at either side.

  But they were just drones, with no hope of Elevation, their codpieces merely symbolic. It was not they he had to fear. The penalty for return was death. That he had not been dispatched out of hand—did it augur well or ill for his designs?

  Riolo shrugged. What was death, compared to the living hell of life as a monopsyche? He fingered the poison collar Hreem had fastened around his neck, and fancied he could hear his remaining hours of life fading toward finality. The gamble he had essayed had trapped him between the greed of a Rifter captain and the anger of the Matria, with death or triumph the only paths out.

  He took off his goggles as the light slowly faded toward normal levels. Despite his best efforts, the lights in his quarters on the Lith had never quite reproduced the longed-for softness of the Under.

  With a mild shudder the lift grounded and the doors slid silently open. A wave of warm, moist, heavily scented air rolled in upon the returning exile and his knees buckled as pleasure overwhelmed him. His eyes filled with tears.

  Home.

  Before the disaster that had forced him to flee Barca, he had shared his people’s disdain for the art of the Thousand Suns: so much of it infused with the hopeless longing of the Exiles for Lost Earth. The people of Barca had the Under. Who would wish to live exposed to the sky on a planet as horrible as most of those in the Panarchy? But after his own exile, he had come to understand and even enjoy that art.

  Now, returned to the world that had nurtured him, every sens
e was alive, alert. He breathed in deeply as the guards guided him toward a transtube adit, savoring all the familiar scents of childhood.

  Enwrapping him with equally familiar sensation was the hum of the constant life of the Under, the susurration of the ventilators that breathed for the teeming billions of Barca, the echoing footsteps of the hurrying servants of the Matria, and, all around him, the murmur of his own sibilant language.

  His gaze caressed the rich mosaics underfoot, the elegant tracery of mycokallein adorning the walls and ceilings in muted tones of gold and silver, the iridescent flash of the Watchers in their alcoves, and the occasional, barely glimpsed textured muscularity of a shestek slithering from one wall cannula to another, bearing one of the messages that were the life of Barca.

  At first, Riolo disdained to ponder their destination. He would find out soon enough. But as their path took them deeper and deeper, he began to wonder. He had expected perhaps an interview with a mater in the middle levels of the Matria, but he was led lower down and further in, his ears popping repeatedly, deeper than he had ever been before. He began to tremble again.

  The soft, living carpet underfoot muted their footsteps. Here all was silence, save for the faint echo of chanting, ever ahead but never drawing nigh, the faint palp-chatter of the Watchers thickly clustered along the corridors, and the almost constant sound, like silk on silk, of the shestekli writhing in and out of the walls and ceiling.

  And the scents! Heady, heavy, sharp, possessive, they lanced deep into Riolo’s hindbrain, provoking pangs of emotions, not all of them identifiable, that swept through him like irresistible tides. He knew his destination: the Labyrinth of the Matria, the womb of the Barcan race. Hope and terror struggled for dominance within him.

  The guards stopped. From a cannula overhead, a small shestek dropped on him, fastening itself to the hollow above his right collarbone. Coolness infused his skin, spreading inward.

  Wordlessly, the guards motioned him forward, but Riolo now needed no prompting. Under the urgent summons of the substances streaming through his blood, he stumbled forward, fearing and desiring with equal, fierce intensity what lay ahead.

  His legs impelled him into a vast room, glorious in its appointments, and it was both the shock of recognition and the awareness of protocol he had abandoned hope of ever needing that dropped him to his knees, and thence to his stomach. As he wriggled toward the Thrones of the Matria in abject terror and humility, his will virtually submerged by the pervasive scents of Life and the Seed, the occupants of the thrones shifted massively, sending waves of blood-warm, salty water cascading down the steps, soaking Riolo’s clothes.

  “Stand up, Riolo, once of the seed of Manjanhalli,” a deep voice spoke, its resonance stripping mind and memory to the helplessness of infancy. He tried to obey, but his legs were not equal to the task. After a time measured only by his too-rapid heartbeats, a sensation of warmth prickled his skin where the shestek lay, and his mind cleared.

  He stood up, his gibbering terror walled away at the back of his mind. Before him the rulers of Barca glared at him, their vast faces shifting slickly in the glittering light of the Labyrinth.

  “You assumed the Attributes of your own will,” one of them intoned.

  “And defied the Matria,” rejoined another, and then another, in a swelling chorus of accusation.

  “You sought to wrest Potency from the Labyrinth.”

  “And you have returned without our leave or let.”

  “All of your eidoloi have been destroyed.”

  “You have only the life of the body now.”

  There was a dreadful silence, and then the Uberissima, the occupant of the central throne, spoke, her voice deeper and more awful than any before.

  “Tell us why we should not take that also from you.”

  Haltingly he began to explain the new order in the Thousand Suns, the triumph of Dol’jhar and the new mastery of the Avatar’s Rifter allies, two opposing fleets who hung in orbits above Barca with weapons of fearsome power. Then he stopped as his true position illuminated his mind.

  He forced his forehead to the slick step. “But you know all this, or my life would already be forfeit. Instead, you have honored me with your presence in full assembly here in the Labyrinth, whose prerogatives I once attempted to usurp.”

  He pushed himself to hands and knees, feeling the weight of their steady regard.

  “Out there—” He gestured upward, toward the surface that all Barcans abhorred, and beyond. “—out there wait two fleets of warships in the service of Dol’jhar. You are, I judge, already in communication with the Avatar, or his lieutenant, and you know that to one of those fleets you will have to yield.”

  The resulting screams of rage flattened him again. He threw his hands over his face, quivering and helpless, as they evolved into words.

  “Up and out with him!”

  ‘To the Surface!”

  “May the winds eat his bones!”

  After another long pause that left him feeling as though all the air had been sucked out of his lungs, the Uberissima spoke again.

  “True, as hateful as that is. Why, then, should we prefer your master?”

  Riolo bowed again. “I have no master, Most Fruitful One,” he replied, emphasizing the masculine case of a word rarely heard on Barca. “I am loyal only to the Matria, and the sin that rightly banished me was simply one of excessive zeal and eagerness to serve. But the captain I served in exile is a voluptuary, while his enemy is well known as an ascetic. With which, then, would you rather deal?”

  “You would have us admit a gajo to the Mysteries?” Riolo cringed at the anger in her voice.

  “If you would continue to control our destiny, yes. The Panarchy with all its might could not stand against Dol’jhar, and unlike them, the Avatar recognizes no constraints upon his power. You must then enslave the one who would enslave you.”

  The shestek nestled against his neck shifted. He tasted sweetness and lost the sense of their words as the Matria fell into discussion. He stood quietly, awaiting his fate. Finally, with another wash of chemicals, sense returned.

  “Your argument is cogent, Riolo,” the Uberissima said. “Go, then, and tell your captain that, should he triumph, we will receive him; but that, in the face of the communications we have received from Dol’jhar, we cannot do more.”

  A smile lightened the expression on her vast, moon-like face. “After all, as you well know, it is only those who prove themselves fit who achieve Elevation—it can be no different for your captain.”

  Riolo bowed again. Then, anxiety overcoming prudence, he asked, “And have I proven myself?”

  “If you return here with Hreem the Faithless, we will judge your loyalty proven, and, after your return from the Suneater, those Attributes which you so desire will be yours.”

  Riolo looked up, startled. “The Suneater?”

  “You do not know the secret of the shestekli, which is shared with few, and never a gajo.” As the Uberissima continued, Riolo’s eyes widened. If the Panarchists had known this, Barca would have been Quarantined indefinitely, Class One.

  “It will not, of course, matter if Hreem should find out once he has one,” she continued, “but we must have an observer when he takes his to the Suneater.”

  Once more the Barcan exile bowed and then withdrew, the shestek falling from his flesh and wriggling away as he departed the Labyrinth. He would return to the Flower of Lith, where Hreem would remove his collar. And then, if fortune smiled on them in the struggle with Neyvla-khan, his Rifter captain would wear an even stronger collar, invisible and irresistible, enslaving him to the Matria of Barca.

  And then, with the Panarchy swept away, the Thousand Suns would lie open to their blessed fecundity.

  SHIAVONA: OORT CLOUD, BARCA SYSTEM

  Their path to the starboard lock of the Shiavona took Lochiel, Messina, and Bayrut first to the dispensary. The plangent booming and keening of the Kelly’s trinat echoed down the corridor in spit
e of the closed hatch.

  “Why do they keep playing that thing?” Messina winced.

  “It’s music to them,” Lochiel reminded her, giving her mate’s shoulder an affectionate rub.

  “They seem to play it every watch,” Bayrut commented from Messina’s other side. “They don’t even bother to take it apart each time anymore.” He laughed. “If I hadn’t known what it was first time I saw it, I would have run out of the dispensary—hell of a thing to see when you’re going in for medtech.”

  Messina shook her head, her brow tense. Lochiel guessed that Messina was more sensitive than most to the overtones generated by the bizarre Kelly instrument, which did look something like some kind of ancient torture device.

  “Every time I hear that music I feel like I’ve grown a third leg,” Messina muttered.

  “Funny,” Bayrut retorted, “it doesn’t do that to me.”

  Messina elbowed him and he sidestepped, chortling, as they reached the dispensary hatch.

  The keening music stopped as Lochiel tabbed the annunciator, and Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4 swirled out, undulating in triple-time.

  The Marine guards at the hatch saluted them. Lochiel acknowledged, making some effort to hide her sourness at the sight of nicks on the Shiavona, although she had to admit that in Cameron’s position she would have done the same. She was still worried about some of the crew, despite Cameron’s assurance that the bonus chip on the Shiavona and all its crew was sequestered, and would be wiped at the completion of the mission. There were a few who couldn’t believe that.

  The shuttle took them quickly to the Claidheamh Mor, where they found the captain and officers from all the ships of Cameron’s squadron already in the plot room.

  Cameron greeted them in civilian language, with careful politeness. Lochiel responded with equal care, aware of the humor narrowing her cousin’s eyes. Their reunion had been joyful, once away from official protocol, and now they shared an undercurrent of adventure that echoed their childhood escapades.