The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 25

She told it what Giyan and Sagiira had told her about banestones.

"The banestones, mined by daemons, were originally used in Za Hara-at. They powered the great engine that staved off the destruction of Kundala. After the crisis was averted, Za Hara-at was deemed too powerful to remain intact. By sledgehammer and sorcery it was dismantled, the banestones scattered, buried, so none could reharness their power.

"But someone has. The sauromicians."

"The information you were given is correct. They have eight. They are searching for the ninth."

"Why? What do they mean to do?"

"They are building the Cage of Nine Banestones, for once the nine are linked their power becomes steady, accurate, immense. They will be able to open the Portals to the Abyss and free the daemons.

They have already made a pact with the archdaemon Pyphoros. With the daemons and the nine banestones they will be able to resurrect the great weapon of Za Hara-at. They will annihilate those who have sought to destroy them-the Ramahan. Then they will enslave all those who remain on Kundala."

"If I had The Pearl, if it actually existed, I would be able to stop them."

"You must forget that line of thinking, Dar Sala-at. It will only lead to despair."

"What other path have I now?"

"I do not know. But whatever it is you must discover it inside yourself."

"Will you help me?"

"I will try. I have located one of your companions. At least, she says she is your companion."

Riane's heart leapt. "Eleana?"

And out of the darkness popped Thigpen.

"Thank you for that overwhelming greeting," she sniffed as she shook out her fur.

"Thigpen!" Riane knelt down, embraced the Rappa. Briefly, she outlined what had befallen her and Eleana after the mishap on the stairs. Then she turned to the Hagoshrin. "But what about Eleana, the female who was with me earlier. She was left outside the Storehouse Door when-"

"She is of interest to you, Dar Sala-at?"

"She is my beloved."

The Hagoshrin's hideous head moved from side to side. "I am afraid she is not where you left her."

"Where is she, then? Do you know?"

"She is in the hands of the regent."

"Kurgan!" Riane cried. "How could you let her be-"

"Even if I had known she was your beloved, I would have not been able to save her. The regent has the ninth banestone."

"You knew where the ninth banestone was all along?"

"Of course."

She ran her hands through her hair. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

The creature shuddered. "Banestones can kill Hagoshrin." "You have got to get us to Kurgan. Who knows what he means to do with her?"

"Ah, Kurgan Stogggul," the Hagoshrin said, nodding. "He loves her, you know."Riane's heart skipped a beat, and she felt a sickness in her belly. "What do you say?"

"Foolishly, recklessly, absolutely."

Riane felt as if all the breath had been knocked out of her. "Kurgan loves Eleana?" Riane's thoughts raced back to the golden afternoon when Annon and Kurgan had come upon her bathing in a sylvan creek. "But he only met her once."

"Who can explain love?"

"This is a nightmare. Kurgan raped Eleana. She hates and fears him. You must help me rescue her and get the banestone."

"As you wish." The Hagoshrin uttered three words in Venca and Riane shivered as a current went through her. The lights winked out, the black sphere was gone. They were in the garden again.

Gimnopedes twittered as they darted here and there.

"A word of warning," the Hagoshrin said. "Should we succeed, Kurgan Stogggul will stop at nothing to get her back. You must understand fully the implications of what I say, Dar Sala-at, and act accordingly."

"Fine, fine," Riane said, as she stooped to wake Thigpen.

A tentacle rose and wrapped itself gently around Riane's wrist, making her turn.

"You cannot allow Kurgan Stogggul to see you, Dar Sala-at," the Hagoshrin said gravely. "For if he does, he will hunt you down and kill you."

Riane took a deep breath, her heart beating fast. "I understand. Let's get on with it before-"

"Before I die?" The Hagoshrin laughed dryly. "Yes, yes, best we hurry then."

Amid the humid, ghostly whispered warren of chambers, halls, loggia, oculi, and other ornate unfathomable abandoned s.p.a.ces that stretched beyond the regent's quarters was a bedchamber. It had ceased to be lived in the moment the V'ornn had arrived and dragged the Ramahan from their lair. In the years since then, it had remained forgotten, unlooted, and unexplored.

It was a round chamber, turretlike, with walls of pale-veined marble into which, at intervals, were sunk a series of voluptuous black-onyx columns. Still and all, it had about it an air not only of desolation but of desiccation and death, which made the high, domed ceiling even more astonishing. On it had been painted a large and elaborate nightlily. It was an exquisitely wrought single-stemmed flower with eight sword-like petals. In its center was a clutch of five slender stamens, ruddy as the Kundalan sun, the anthers at their tips the purest cadmium yellow. How something so alive could exist in this musty wilderness was a mystery that would not let him go. There was something intensely erotic about the nightlily, which as depicted was both phallic and softly, dewily open. Though Kurgan would hardly admit it, even to himself, there was something intensely attractive as well as repulsive about the duality.

It was there that he took Eleana, laying her on a vast bed whose purpose could only be guessed at.

He climbed upon the bed to the fluttering of a century of dust, the senescent wings of extinct birds. For an eternity he did nothing but sit on his haunches and watch her face.

He was in an agony of longing. He had dreamed of this moment for more than a year, could hardly believe it had arrived.

Simply by her existence there the entire bedchamber had come alive, the marble and onyx gleaming where before they had been dull with dust. The room pulsed with the triple beat of his hearts, with the rhythmic drumbeat of blood through his arteries, its ebb and flow through his veins. Each piece of furniture-tiered tables, deep chairs, sensual lounges, all in threes-were florid, filigreed, frescoed, feverish even for the Kundalan. Light filtered down from cleverly hidden niches to provide a softly diffuse illumination that overlaid the bedchamber like a diaphanous gown. Now with her there it seemed clear that the s.p.a.ce had been designed for amorous trysts, not religious asceticism. Doubtless, that was why he had first been drawn to it, why he continued to come back. And yet, he had felt enjoined from revealing it to anyone else, including the parade of Looorm, who almost nightly shared his bed. At last he knew why.

He wanted Eleana, and only Eleana, there.His hands dug into his thigh muscles so hard the pain finally penetrated his half stupor. He felt drugged, slow-witted, and dull. All the things he needed to do were swept away by the indelible fact of her presence. He was stunned. He wept at his inability to think clearly, and was shaken by a sudden murderous rage.

With an inchoate cry, he closed his hands around her neck. His fingers seemed seared by the first contact with her flesh, and his face turned lupine, feral, his nostrils flaring as they filled with her ravishing rosaceous ruinous odor. He was possessed by a throbbing, as of thunder overflowing distant dells. He felt as if he must explode. Instead, his fingers tightened on her windpipe.

Her chest heaved, and she began to choke. He forced himself to pretend that the rippled cartilage beneath the gently veined silken skin of her throat was the stock of an ion cannon.

Her face had turned very white, and she was thrashing. He bent over and pressed his feverish lips to hers, hard enough that he could feel her bared teeth, the life soughing out of her with each beat of her heart. He wanted to possess her and to kill her. He desired her, and he despised her, both beyond measure. His brain was clotted with bloodl.u.s.t and desire. He wept and called her name. Had he been another kind of V'ornn he might have prayed for deliverance.

In any event, deliverance arrived. His ok.u.mmmon activated, the telltale tingling running up his right arm, increasing in intensity until, centimeter by centimeter, it led him back from the precipice on which he had been precariously balanced.

He was being Summoned.

Out loud, he cursed the interruption, but as he withdrew his hands, as he crawled off the huge bed and before exiting the bedchamber, he remembered to place the small milky alabaster box on a heavily filigreed table next to where she lay.

He made his way back through the labyrinth into a smallish atrium whose faraway ceiling was pierced by an oculus. He stood for a moment in a shaft of dun-colored sunlight. The thick, dusty illumination that could have belonged to any time of day seemed with its unnatural weight to penetrate clear through him.

He stepped nimbly out of the light and turned the searchlight of his brain onto other matters. He thought of the banestone hidden like a seed in the alabaster box he had placed beside the bed. The banestone had proved its worth. The Nieobean paralysis gel would not wear off for another eighteen hours. By then surely he would have decided whether to take her or kill her. Either way, she was his.

By the time he had returned to his suite, he was in full command of all his faculties. Just as well, since Nith Na.s.sam was already there. His taloned arms were crossed over his chest. His biocircuit horns were fulminating orange and red as he stood, spread-legged, turning the wall of weapons impotent.

"What have you learned about Courion?" he growled without preamble.

"Nothing as yet. These things are delicate. They take time."

"I am not interested in excuses."

Kurgan had but an instant to decide which tack to take. "Since you have not climbed into the Kalllistotos ring with the Sarakkon as I have, let me explain something to you. They are a deeply suspicious race. It took me a long time just to get them to acknowledge me, let alone allow me into their company. I cannot simply ask them the questions you seek answers to. I gain their trust ever so gently.

One false move will sever my connection with them forever. I know you cannot want that."

"You have no idea what I want." Nith Na.s.sam slowly, ominously, unwound his arms. Ion arcs sparked from the tips of his clawed, alloyed gloves. "Know that I have no tolerance for slackers or dissemblers. Nevertheless, in this matter and this matter alone I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt." He pointed. "Do not try my patience, however. Answers must be forthcoming soon."

Kurgan, who now had his own reasons for ensuring the process met with quick success, said, "I understand completely, Nith Na.s.sam. Rest a.s.sured that I will have information for you before the week is out."

14

Deceptions

Leyytey, Fleet-Admiral Ardus Pnin's daughter, looked nothing like him. She was small and dark-eyed, but as determined as he ever was. As a little girl, she worshiped him, absorbed every word he uttered to her. Tried her best to please him. He made her laugh, he terrified her, it felt to her that when he walked all Kundala trembled. And then one day when she was sixteen she discovered the truth about him. On the day he lost both his sons at h.e.l.lespennn, he mercilessly cursed the twist of fate that had left him with only a daughter. Leyytey's face went white, and she could scarcely breathe. Panicked, she looked to her mother, whose eyes, cast down, refused to meet hers. Her father, made temporarily mad by the death of his sons, continued to rail against her because he could not bring himself to utter one bad word about his dead sons.

She revealed nothing of that in her public life, of course. With the fatalistic conviction of a Khagggun, she could not help believing that his periodic visits to the workshops where she learned her art and later to her own atelier, was for him a kind of perverse self-punishment. And yet, for all that, she could not turn her back on him, could not cut him out of her life. Each time she saw him, however, she was racked with anguish.

And so, toward evening, at the end of her long day, when she saw him stride into her atelier, she was buffeted by these familiar vicious crosscurrents. If she had been born a male like her brothers, she would be standing by his side, proud and armor-clad, seeking his sage advice before going to war. She almost never thought of her brothers, but they sometimes appeared in her dreams as floating faces with disembodied voices. Often, she was trying to say something to them, but they could not hear her and, when she awoke she retained no memory of what she might have been trying to say to them. They were dead. What was there to say, anyway? What had she ever said to them-or they to her- before they had flown off to be ground up in the jaws of the Cento-phennni?

She fixed her father in the corner of her eye, watching him the way a Khagggun would look at a timed fusion bomb. The irony was that because of her avocation she knew more ways to take life violently than most Khagggun. The knowledge was a necessity in order for her to design and forge the finest weapons and armor.

As was his wont, Fleet-Admiral Ardus Pnin stood un.o.btrusively against a wall, hands clasped behind his back. His curious golden eyes, almost all pupil, watched everything at once. The sight of his merciless scrutiny reduced her to nothing.

His gaze pierced the gloom of the atelier, alighting only for an instant on Pack-Commander Teww Dacce, standing spread-legged in one of the trial booths, testing the new ion mace Leyytey had made for him. Pnin took a deep breath and, for the time being, put Dacce out of his mind.

He was fascinated by the cleverly articulated suits of armor. Lit by pools of bronze light, they revolved slowly as if dancing to an unheard beat. He deeply appreciated the feel of Leyytey's blades in his hand, the balance perfect to use sword tip for thrusting or razor edge for slashing, the heft ideal for cleaving skulls. He liked to watch her agile fingers, lit by the bright purple sparks from her ion anvil, stained copper by the metallurgical seeds of her art.

All this remained locked inside his head, theoretical as a Gyrgon experiment. Child of his she might be, but she was Tuskugggun. What Leyytey could not know was that deep down in the shadows of his soul, he possessed no tools for understanding her. Ever since she had produced her first schematic for a shock-sword at a preternaturally early age, he had not known what to make of her. If she had the mind of a Khagggun, then why in Enlil's accursed name could she not have been born one?

The air cracked and sparked, brittle as mica. It was acrid with ozone and other trace chemicals. Litby the crimson flames of her ion forge, they began in short sentences, awkward and stilted, that proved them strangers to themselves as well as to one another.

"Daughter, business is good, I see." He hefted a magnificent shock-sword, newly forged, not yet shipped to the Temple of Mnemonics, where it would be ion-charged by Gyrgon. With an expert eye, he a.s.sessed the perfect alignment of the twin blades.

"Getting better all the time, Fleet-Admiral." His ion-bound law dictated that she address him formally.

Pnin nodded.

"Miirlin misses you. He does not understand why you turned him out of your villa."

"It will take time for my grandson to learn everything he needs to know."

"Less time than either of us think. He is extremely precocious, surprising his mentors at every turn."

Leyytey had mated and bred because she had heard her father say many times that the good warrior lays down his b.l.o.o.d.y sword long enough to ensure the future of his line. She had cared little for her mate, but his genomic profile was excellent and, in any event, he was her father's choice for her. Involuntarily, her gaze pa.s.sed over Pack-Commander Dacce, remembering the fleeting furnace of their frenzied mating.

After that, nothing. The fire that had flared so brightly had been banked by a surfeit of indifference, though not from her.

"That is good. When Miirlin is of age I will make him into a great Khagggun leader." The weapon resounded with a proper pure, clean note as he tested it. "Have an heir to continue my line, my work."

Leyytey reacted to this backhand rebuke with a furious blush that was thankfully lost in the rubicund glow. All she had ever wanted was his approval. She felt defeated by circ.u.mstance, by the inescapable prison of her gender, the reflection that leered back at her each morning when she stood naked and helpless before the mirror in her bedroom. She wanted to turn away, to look at anything but his intimidating face, so she willed herself to gaze into his cold golden eyes.

"I want Miirlin to be safe."

"I will keep him safe."

"And who will keep you safe, Fleet-Admiral?" To his surprised look, she said; "Isn't that why you placed him back in the hingatta?"

"Willfulness ill becomes a Tuskugggun!" His raised voice was enough to turn the heads of her a.s.sistants, who crept, silent and cowed, into the shadows.

Still she would not look away. "I have heard disturbing rumors of late."

He stared stonily at her.

"Rumors that the new Star-Admiral is disbanding the high command."

Pnin's gaze did not flicker. "Pack-Commander Dacce's tongue has been wagging."

"Well? Is it true?"

"He is simply trying to frighten you."

"In that case, he's done a fairly good job of it."

Grasping the shock-sword in a two-handed grip, Fleet-Admiral Pnin held it up so that the blades threw darts of reflected light into the air between them. "I want this weapon."