The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 53

As Dacce's next blow descended, she countered it, but at the last possible instant allowed her wrist to turn. To Dacce it seemed as though, tiring, she was on the brink of being overpowered. His blades scored down hers all the way to the guard, where he brought even more leverage to bear.

He expected Leyytey to resist him, but she did the opposite. Her elbow caved, her defense appearing to crumple, and Dacce leaned in even more, pressing his advantage. At that moment, Leyytey reversed her blade, slamming the heavy b.u.t.t end into his chin. Dacce's head snapped back, his shock-sword traveled unimpeded to the floor, where such was its momentum that the dual points stuck in the stone flagging.

She slashed at him and, cursing, he backed quickly away without his weapon. She came after him, murder in her eyes. But Mennus interceded again. He held out his hand and one of Pnin's guards filled it with an ion flail, which he threw to the Pack-Commander. Dacce, the predatory grin back on his face, deftly caught it, whirled the studded globe around his head. Leyytey kept coming.

He said, "That's right," and loosed the mace directly at her head.

Leyytey raised her shock-sword so that the blades trapped the whistling chain between them. When it struck the base, a feedback formed, a bolt of hyperexcited ions racing down the chain into the ion mace's handle.

Dacce grimaced with the pain, but somehow he managed to hang on, drawing back on the mace, bringing Leyytey to him. He smashed her in the nose with the flat of his hand, reached for her weapon.

But this time she was ready, and she swiveled away from him, allowing the momentum of his lunge to take the upper part of his torso past her.

Afterward, her mind would see it in a strange kind of slow motion: he disengaging the shock-sword blades from the ion-flail chain, she drawing back her arm, her muscles bunched, the thrust coming all the way from her pelvis up through her torso into her shoulder and arm, the twin blades humming, fairly quivering with antic.i.p.ation as they cleaved the air.

The hot stink of hyperexcited ions was in her nostrils as she sank the shock-sword through muscle, fascia, and organs. She might have lacked a Khagggun's strength, but with a surgeon's precision she severed Dacce's spinal cord. He was dead even before he hit the floor.No one moved, not a word was uttered. The atmosphere was stultifying.

"Render unto me my coins!" Fleet-Admiral Pnin bellowed in triumph.

"Take her into custody!" Mennus ordered. "She is formally charged with and summarily convicted of the willful murder of Pack-Commander Teww Dacce."

"You can't-"

"This is my domain, Little Admiral." He whirled on Pnin, aiming his ion pistol at the Fleet-Admiral's hearts. "I can do as I please."

The two guards flanked Leyytey, each grabbing an arm.

"I will now have the exquisite pleasure of executing your daughter while you watch."

A slow smile spread across his face. "Unless, of course ..." He allowed his voice to drift off, bait in the water.

"Unless what?" Pnin asked. He was fighting the pain in his head, he was fighting to enunciate clearly, fighting to keep his tongue from feeling like cotton batting.

"Father, don't," Leyytey cried. "This is what he wants."

"Star-Admiral," Pnin said slowly but nevertheless firmly, "spare my daughter's life, and I will do what you want."

"No!" Leyytey struggled against her guards, but they had disarmed her, wisely pinioned her arms, and now held her fast. She was acutely aware that she had twice called him "Father" and he had not admonished her. Better to think of that than to admit that her coming there had made matters worse.

"I want your submission, Little Admiral, complete, absolute. I want you to appear before your followers and endorse me, endorse the new high command for that matter. And then you will announce your retirement from active duty. You will say that you will be advising me in all matters of policy. When that is over, we will retire to the privacy of the caverns beneath the regent's palace, where you will divulge all your secrets, every last one."

Mennus signed to his guards, who put their shock-swords against Leyytey's throat and her abdomen.

"Make your decision now, Little Admiral. Does she live or does she die?"

Because First-Captain Kwenn was in charge of the regent's Haaar-kyut, he encountered no problem with the guards ringing the periphery of Fleet-Admiral Pnin's villa. It was astonishing, really, the power he could wield simply by invoking Kurgan Stogggul's name. He also discovered, through one of the more voluble guards, one of those still loyal to Pnin, that Leyytey was already inside the villa with Pack-Commander Dacce and the Star-Admiral himself.

"I suppose it has occurred to you that we may be too late," he said to Sornnn, as they hurried through the lushly planted grounds.

"Ever since my beloved's death, the possibility occurs to me every day in every way," Sornnn replied.

Kwenn grunted. "I just a.s.sumed that you and the Fleet-Admiral's daughter-"

Sornnn laughed grimly. "Had we been idiotic enough to get together, I daresay inside a week we would have murdered each other." Then, realizing that Leyytey might already be dead, he shut his mouth and signed to Kwenn.

They skirted the front door, swinging around through slender sysal trees to the rear of the villa. Kwenn could not know it, of course, but Sornnn was intimately familiar with the layout of Pnin's villa, having for years clandestinely slithered in and out under cover of darkness. He knew, for instance, that Pnin had a habit of keeping one sliding crystal door unlocked, and he prayed now that the Star-Admiral, lulled by his complete and bloodless takeover of the compound, had not bothered to have the guards check such details.

"On the other hand," he whispered, just before his fingers touched the slider, "if the Star-Admiral has harmed either Leyytey or Pnin, I will kill him myself."

Kwenn was used to being with the regent, a Bashkir who spoke his own mind, who possessed both nerve and determination. His original a.s.sumption about them-correct inasmuch as it was a cliche, andcliches are given life from a slow accretion of behavioral patterns that creep into the collective caste consciousness-was that they were wily but soft as cor cheese, obsessed as much with their sybaritic lifestyle as they were with coins. Kurgan Stogggul had exploded that a.s.sumption, supplanting it with another, even worse: that Bashkir were bombastic, egotistic, needlessly cruel. To have found one who was as brave as a Khagggun, but also loyal and kind was a revelation he was not likely to forget. In that instant, an unshakable bond took shape between them.

The crystal gave way to Sornnn's touch, and the two of them silently entered the villa, crept through Pnin's bedroom with its narrow, precisely made bed, the chronosteel stand with his armor glowing, down a corridor bereft of light or artwork, in time to hear Star-Admiral Iin Mennus say, as only he could; "Make your decision now, Little Admiral. Does she live or does she die?"

An instant later, as they burst into the entryway and saw Dacce lying in a pool of his own blood, everything seemed to happen at once. Seeing them, the guard closest to them drew Leyytey's own shock-sword away from her abdomen and came at them. Mennus turned toward the commotion. Kwenn drew a small shock-dagger from a sheath hidden under his arm and flung it expertly into the guard's cheek.

As Sornnn began to shoot past him, bending low, aiming for the second guard, Iin Mennus swung his ion pistol, tracking him, about to squeeze off a shot. Leyytey screamed a warning to Sornnn even while she lunged for the shock-sword the stricken guard had taken from her. Pnin grabbed at Mennus' arm and uttered a guttural groan. His eyes rolled up in his head, his legs turned to jelly, and he collapsed, thrashing and frothing at the mouth so vigorously that Mennus glanced at him.

While Kwenn efficiently finished off the wounded guard, Sornnn had slammed into the other one with his shoulder. The Khagggun spun away, off-balance, pulling Leyytey with him so that her fingers grasped for and missed the shock-sword. Sornnn pummeled the guard with both fists, striking blow after blow on the Khagggun's face until he had no choice but to let go. Leyytey leapt for the shock-sword just as Mennus recovered from the startlement of seeing Pnin's seizure. He aimed at her, and she saw that she was too far away from him, they all were. In a moment, he would pull the trigger. There was no strategy possible. There was just action or no-action. Shock-swords were for hand-to-hand combat, but Leyytey had never been satisfied with forging so limited a weapon. Her shock-swords were different from any others. She had already drawn back her arm and now, in a powerful sideways motion, she flung he shock-sword directly at Mennus. The dual points, vibrating no more than a few centimeters from each other, struck their mark. Impaled through the throat, Star-Admiral Iin Mennus was flung violently back until he struck the wall, pinioned there as the hyperex-cited ions boiled his blood to paste.

In the last moments of his life, he goggled at her. And he died disbelieving what his own eyes told him was the truth. Killed by a Tus-kugggun. Impossible. That was no way for a Khagggun to die.

Leyytey, for her part, had no eyes for Iin Mennus. As he was dying in disbelief, she was on her knees, cradling her father's huge square head in her lap.

"Sornnn!" she cried. "Sornnn, what have they done to him?"

Sornnn, leaving First-Captain Kwenn to finish the second guard's unenviable journey to the gates of N'Luuura, ran back down the hall to Pnin's bedroom. There he found the vial of da'ala, returning with it on the run, prying open jaws tightly clenched and dispensing it into the Fleet-Admiral's mouth. The effect of the Korrush spice was nothing short of miraculous. Pnin's spasms lessened both in intensity and in duration, and within moments he was sleeping quietly.

Leyytey looked at Sornnn. Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

Seeing the two of them like that, crouched over the Fleet-Admiral and in desperate need of privacy, Kwenn went silently out the front door, there to deliver the news that the order for "protective custody"

had been rescinded, and to announce to the Fleet-Admiral's patient Khagggun that the time had come to rea.s.sert Pnin's control of his own compound. Fleetingly, he wondered what the regent, who hadn't been heard from in a sidereal day, would make of these events. More tellingly, he had a personal interest in what action the Gyrgon would take.

Meanwhile, inside the villa, with the stink and offal of death all around them, Sornnn and Leyytey carried the Fleet-Admiral's body to his bed. He was very heavy, but neither of them seemed aware of it.When they were certain that he was comfortable, it seemed as if they both wanted to speak at once.

Sornnn led her through the partially open slider out into the back garden. They sat on the same bench Sornnn had occupied with Pnin that night not so long ago when they had schemed a way out of his predicament. It is safe to say that neither could have predicted this outcome.

Above, the trees sprayed the darkling sky with green and gold. Gim-nopedes dipped and twittered.

But the stench of death clung to their clothes and nostrils.

Sornnn finally found his voice. "Was that the first time you have killed?" It was not what he had meant to say. It was simply what had come out.

She nodded.

"It's not easy, is it?"

Her eyes filled with tears. It was clear she was holding them back with a great force of will. She began to tremble, then she could hold out no longer and put her head in her hands.

"Leyytey," he said softly. "Leyytey."

She told him, then, what had happened. When she came to the part about her father wagering on her, Sornnn broke out into laughter.

It made him happy in a way he had not believed he would ever feel again. "Ah, Leyytey, your father must be so proud of you." He took her hand, prying it away from her tear-streaked face. "At last he understands."

"You think so?"

"Yes, I do. But you will find out for yourself when he wakes up."

"I confess I am terrified of the moment. It seems to me that I have been terrified of him all my life."

"And there he was, lavishing such attention on you."

"I was always afraid that I would in some way further disappoint him or that he would find fault with what I did."

"He loves your work. He told me that from the moment you first began turning out weapons, he took them into battle and would use no others."

"Really? He said that?" Her eyes were made wide and candid by the magnifying lens of her tears. She shook her head. "What happened to him back there? How ill is he? Is he going to be all right?"

"He has a kind of brain anomaly, a tumor."

"It's inoperable?"

"I doubt it. But you know what would happen to him if he disclosed his disability to the Genomatekks."

"He was going to sacrifice his life to his career?"

"In so many ways he had already done that. Why not this one?"

"Because it is insane."

"Not to him it wasn't. It made perfect sense. Being Fleet-Admiral is his life." He sighed. "Listen to me, Leyytey. It is not only he who needs to understand you. You have to try to understand him. It's the only way for the two of you, now, you see?"

For some time she remained lost in thought. The moonslight that had fallen upon them in their leafy bower faded as high clouds sailed past. Sornnn found the utter darkness, no matter how fleeting, somehow comforting, as if time had stopped and he could pretend that Marethyn wasn't dead at all, but alive with her new Resistance comrades somewhere in the high ridges of the Djenn Marre. She was right there beside him, so real he could almost reach out and touch her beautiful, proud face.

Presently the moonslight returned, and the beatific image retreated to its proper place.

Leyytey stirred and straightened just as a Khagggun would. "I was so unkind to you-"

"Forget it. Old news."

"Thank you for coming, Sornnn. Thank you for your loyalty to my father."

"We have that, at least, in common, don't we?"

At last she laughed with him, and, reaching out, embraced him as she had never been able to do with her brothers, long dead, and afterward-too late-missing them terribly, had ached to do with all her hearts.

28

Necromancy

Among the Ramahan, little is understood of necromancy," Gi-yan said. "It has never been studied like other forms of sorcery because it was considered too dangerous, too evil." She and Krystren were in the abbey's Temple of Flowing Out, waiting for Varda. The sun had vanished behind a dirty grey pall. A sha-dowless light, filtering like a shroud through the doorway, filled the temple with a certain tension. She had shown Varda where she was, and he was coming to destroy them. They had a plan, but would it work? Krystren knew full well how clever and powerful the archon was.

"The Hagoshrin know all about it," she said softly.

"I suppose I should not be surprised. Hagoshrin eat the bones of their living prey."

"Giyan, everything you thought you knew about Hagoshrin is false." Twelve thick columns held aloft the high, vaulted ceiling. Shadows clung like billows of smoke to the curled, hornlike capitals and, above them, the infrastructure of the ma.s.sive three-tiered architrave. The air was resinous, the residue of centuries of burned incense. "I know because in the forest south of here I came across one."

"A Hagoshrin? Really?"

"His name was Bryn." And so began Krystren's tale of her encounter with the Hagoshrin.

"He looked like what?" Giyan turned to her as she described Bryn's physical appearance. "He told you that the other Hagoshrin's punishment was what turned him into a hideous beast?"

"Yes."

"But that is monstrous."

"And in helping us, Bryn, too, willfully broke Miina's edict."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because he was basically good. And because he was unspeakably lonely."

Giyan shook her head. "Miina, Great G.o.ddess, what is Your will?"

"He crawled inside our head while we were asleep. We were so angry with him. You should have seen his face, Giyan: Like a boy slapped by his mother. We thought he was trying to learn the secret of our mind-feelers, but all he wanted was to feel closer to us."

Giyan thought about this for some time. "Poor Bryn," she said at last. "Poor Hagoshrin."

Krystren liked this mysterious female tremendously, felt a curious form of kinship with her that she was at a loss to explain. "Bryn said that the very presence of the gabir means that the sauromicians have gained possession of the banestones."

"In fact they have eight," Giyan said bleakly. "There remains only one more for them to find." A sound not unlike a roof tile slipping brought them to silence. They stood very still, listened. Nothing. They returned to their conversation, but their tension level had ratcheted up several notches.

Giyan had released most of the safeguards she had activated when she had gained access to the abbey's Library. To have deactivated all of them would doubtless have made Varda suspicious.

"How does a Sarakkon know about banestones? Bryn?"

Krystren nodded. "We are Onnda." So began her careful explanation of the secret Sarakkonian society and its blood nemesis, Sintire.

Giyan was silent throughout, concentrated fully on each word. When Krystren was finished, Giyan said, "Yes, but you have left out the crucial part. Do all Onnda possess your sorcerous skills?"