"Yes," Hiche gasped. "All right. Yes, there was a conspiracy. Be ... between Star-Admiral Rydddlin and Fleet-Admiral Werrrent."

"I care nothing for them." Mennus grimly continued his work with the implement. "Giving me their names will not save you."

"What...?"

"Who else was involved?"

Hiche's eyes were squeezed shut, tears ran down his cheeks.

"Who else?" Mennus said, bearing down.

Hiche's chest was heaving, and beneath his closed lids his eyes were rolling. Mennus knew he was cutting it close.

"Rydddlin was too young, too inexperienced to come up with such an audacious plan. Fleet-Admiral Pnin. He was the real instigator, wasn't he?"

"Ardus Pnin?" Hiche cried stupidly.

"Yes." Mennus slowly, agonizingly stirred Hiche's innards as if brewing a stew. "Pnin."

Hiche shook his head from side to side. "No. You are insane."Mennus bore down, grinding slowly, inexorably with his implement of pain. Hiche's mouth opened in a rictus of agony, his chest ballooned outward. It was the end. Mennus had gone too far. His last breath escaped his trembling lips. This air had form and substance.

"Ardus Pnin distrusted Rydddlin," Hiche sighed with his final breath, "as much as he distrusts you."

With a roar, Mennus swept the crystal recorder off its perch and stomped it to fragments beneath the heel of his bloodstained boot.

A thread, shining, dark, impossible to ignore, had stretched itself from the regent's palace all the way across Axis Tyr to Receiving Spirit. There it intercepted Kurgan.

The banestone called to him.

He returned at once to his quarters at the regent's palace without precisely knowing why. As he crossed the chamber in which he had hidden the banestone, his thoughts were drawn toward Eleana in much the same way that an animal's attention is directed toward the direction of an oncoming storm. He saw her again as he had down in Black Farm, and he felt a painful swelling of his tender parts. He had, by this time, reached the set of scrollwork drawers within which he had secreted his purloined prize, and now he pulled open a drawer and unfurled a piece of b.l.o.o.d.y robe he had ripped from a particularly resistant Ramahan at the end of a long and grueling interrogation. It seemed appropriate that he wrap the banestone in this grisly artifact.

Naked, dark as a pit, the banestone wove its spell. It had reached into his mind, found the person he desired most, and attuned itself to her. Now it spoke in Eleana's voice. Her laughter echoed in the chamber, causing a shiver of antic.i.p.ation to slither up his spine and explode at the base of his brain. All at once, he was overcome by a fever for her that was so intense his knees felt momentarily weak. When his eyes refocused, he noticed that he was gripping the banestone with white-knuckled tension and that the veins in his hands coursed as dark as the artifact itself.

It struck him that Eleana was close. He was absolutely certain that this feeling was neither wishful thinking nor a premonition.

Eleana was here, in the palace.

Where are you?

His hands had begun to shake.

I want you. I will have you.

He mouthed these words as he stared into the convex surface of the banestone. No reflection returned his gaze. Rather, it was Eleana herself. The banestone had opened up a window through time and s.p.a.ce to show him that the object of his desire was somewhere in the caverns below the palace.

They are close," the Khagggun said to his companion, as they made their silent way through the kuello-fir forest. "In fact"-he looked up quickly-"they have ceased to flee."

"Good." The other went down in a semicrouch. "We will take them out along with this section of the forest."

The first Khagggun held up his mailed hand. "Hold. For what they have done a quick death is too merciful. Besides, one of them is down on the ground." He glanced at his companion. "And the other is female."

The second Khagggun grinned. "s.e.x and death. Double our fun."

"Still," the first one said, "let us proceed with caution."

So saying, they separated, converging on the position of the fugitives from different vectors. The rain continued in rather desultory fashion, plinking down through the webwork of branches and needles, creating a melancholy sound much like the dreamy breathing of a restless sleeper. They ignored the tiny animal sounds, the rustling and scurrying across the beds of fallen needles, or the occasional twitterings ofwarning emitted by huddled birds awakened by scent or sound to the advancing intruders.

The southeast wind brought a clinging mist that rolled dankly through the forest, erasing the farthest visible trees and partially obscuring the rest. The Khagggun made their way through the mottled, lichen-colored landscape until they saw the fugitives. Much to their surprise, they saw a Tuskugggun holding an ion pistol on a male Resistance fighter, who lay on the misty bed of kuello-fir needles.

She turned suddenly as she became aware of them.

"Who are you, Tuskugggun," the first Khagggun growled, "and what are you doing so far from civilization?"

That was when Ka.s.stna, aiming between Marethyn's legs, shot the first Khagggun dead. The second Khagggun leapt back toward the bole of a tree, returning Ka.s.stna's fire.

Ka.s.stna dived into a thick swath of underbrush as Marethyn ran in a zigzag diagonal path in order to get a clear line of sight. He tracked her with his eyes. When she nodded, he knew she was in position, and he commenced a scattershot firing at the remaining Khagggun. The Khagggun returned his fire, and he just missed losing an arm, as a third of the thicket whooshed up in violent green flame. He scuttled through the mist to the bole of a kuello-fir, firing as he went. Ka.s.stna saw Marethyn roll on one shoulder, get up on one knee, and fire. The second Khagggun flew backward.

Marethyn rose and went over to the downed Khagggun to check that he was dead. Then she turned her attention to Ka.s.stna. For a long moment, they watched each other with a kind of wary distrust.

"I have to admit that I may have misjudged you," he said as he walked easily toward her.

Marethyn tensed, and as she raised her weapon, he fired at her in reflex without aiming. She turned and fled, through the forest, keeping the trees between her and Ka.s.stna.

Ka.s.stna made no attempt immediately to follow her. He would find her, he had no doubt of that. He felt the urge to relieve himself, which always came over him after a kill, and did so all over the Khagggun corpse. It was a shame in a way to have to kill these Khagggun. If not for the Tuskugggun's stupid actions, the Khagggun would have discovered the camp, contacted their pack, wiped out Gerwa and his cell. He could have stolen back, liberated the hidden cache of weapons.

He sighed in satisfaction as he finished emptying his bladder. The key to gaining and maintaining power in the Resistance was having access to Khagggun weapons. The more you had of them, the more success you would have against the V'ornn. And that, in turn, would translate into more power. What remained now was to devise another plan to discredit Gerwa and take control of the weapons cache.

One step at a time, he thought. He needed to take the Tuskugggun back to the tribunal. Delivering her would gain him some power in the eyes of the other leaders, and he knew just the way to do it.

Twisting off the Khagggun's helmet, he placed it on his own head. Of course, owing to the V'ornn's oddly conical heads, it did not really fit, but with some fiddling he was able to settle it sufficiently in place. He activated the echo-tracer circuitry. A holoimage appeared, nothing more than a blip, really, heading away from him, almost due north.

The Tuskugggun.

Methodically and coldly, he began to slip through the dripping forest after her.

Like a sea creature rising from fathoms deep, the ringing blackness inside Riane's head was gradually replaced by the grey, amorphous light not of a watery sun but of words forming like air bubbles rising to sunlight. These words took on a life of their own, the world melted and metamorphosed, and Riane heard Eleana whispering to her . . . "I listened to the language of my heart. I knew that I loved you, that I would love you for all time. That I would a.s.sault the very gates of N'Luuura if that is where I would find you."

This manifestation of Eleana's heartfelt emotion had long been swallowed up in the hollowed-out intestinal tract of Kundala. And yet it continued to circulate, like a widening gyre of bright-rippled eddies, in the bubbling preconscious of the heroine who lay, healing, in her arms.

Riane, who was yet to wake, had entered that vast whirlpool suspended between time and s.p.a.ce. Shewas Annon again, with his life before him, unsullied by danger, deprivation, or death. There was only the promise of possibilities that, for a scion of the Ashera, were virtually limitless. Into this shadowless Cosmos, Eleana's words stole like sunlight through a glade, causing Riane to conjure in her preconscious a scene she cherished. She had just saved Eleana from drowning in the cistern in the courtyard of the Museum of False Memory, and now in her mind resounded her own words: 1 won't let you give up, Eleana. I love you too much to let you die. I will follow you all the way to the gates of N'Luuura.

That I would a.s.sault the very gates of N'Luuura if that is where I would find you.

In this state of semiwakefulness, of timelessness, Riane said nothing, for words circled in the pool of her mind like bright silver fish. Instead, she envisioned Eleana, all the living details of her, the iconic minutiae that crowded, unseen, at the corners of one's vision because there was never time enough to take them in: the sensual angle of her upper leg, the power and promise of her thighs, the languorous arch of her hip, the perfect arc of sun-burnished shoulder that merged so sweetly into the gently muscled arm, the moist hollow on the inside of her elbow, the silken threads of veins on the pale inside of her wrist, the fine down of her, erotic in the flickering light.

I will follow you . . . I would a.s.sault... A prayer from which she arose, as from a dream of her own fashioning which, in a sense it was, into the reality of the conscious moment when place was fixed and time began again to tick forward.

"Eleana." Her voice was a dry cracked reedy whisper.

"Ah, thank Mima!" Eleana kissed Riane's forehead.

"The Hagoshrin?"

She shuddered. "Look for yourself."

Riane saw the Hagoshrin squatting atop the altar. Held by its tentacles was a body. It was stripping it of flesh. As each bone was exposed, it almost daintily drew the bone out, popped it between its ma.s.sive jaws, and chewed. When it got to the skull, it wrenched it off what was left of the spine and, holding it for a moment between its teeth as if savoring what was to come, crunched down slowly and methodically, the sound of bone splintering reverberating through the cavern.

"Is that what it plans for us?" Riane looked around. "We cannot go forward, and we cannot go back.

We are trapped here."

"Hush now." Eleana rocking her. "All is well. I am here, love."

Riane's heart thudded in her breast. "What?" She was overcome by a sudden display of nerves.

"What did you say?"

A slow smile spread over Eleana's face, a shy smile, but one also of great pleasure.

Time seemed to have slowed again to a honey drip. Riane felt the ghost of Annon rising within her, not dead, no, far, far from that-felt his V'ornness, his maleness as one feels the pressure drop at the advent of a storm, a soft stirring in the inner ear.

Eleana touched her, a hand on her arm, a warmth, a current like an eddy in the water made by something surfacing. She kissed Riane tenderly on both cheeks. "Annon."

How long had Riane been waiting to hear those words. It might only have been a year, but it seemed like all her life. All the anxiety that had held her rigid drained out of her, the nerves that had delivered unconvincing denials to her lips had vanished.

"Giyan said you knew."

"She was right."

Riane, Annon, both at once, reached up, brought Eleana's head closer. Inhaled deeply her tangy scent. Her lips opened, and she tasted the tip of Eleana's tongue. Riane gave a little moan of longing, and for a delicious moment the kiss consumed them both in a perfumed cloud of citrus and musk.

Time stopped for them, as it does for all lovers. The one existed for the other in a kind of luminous suspension large as the Cosmos itself. They breathed each other in, felt the other's long-pent-up longing, felt it as their own. Tasted each other, the sweeter because each for their own reasons had a.s.sumed it would never be.

For Eleana, Annon had returned from the dead, although it seemed to her that the flame of her hope, her desire, had resurrected him from darkness invisible, had brought him back to her as unerringly as acompa.s.s needle finds true north. It seemed magical, impossible, inevitable and right. It did not seem strange to her to touch Riane and feel Annon. He lay just beneath the surface, like a great sinuous fish in a pond revealed by sudden shadow erasing the sunglare. She felt Riane as well, the mysterious one, not only to her but to Annon as well, felt a power and a purpose beyond her understanding. Or maybe it was her own unleashed pa.s.sion that made breathing a labor. Losing herself, she did not care.

And what did Riane feel? Riane and Annon had so often been at war, at odds, the unfamiliar grappling with the unfamiliar like conjoined twins forced by circ.u.mstance to learn too much about each other. As one, now, they rose together to the flame of pa.s.sion, each bringing different emotions. Annon, who had loved Eleana from the moment he had first seen her through dancing trees, through sunlight and shadow, taking her hair down, slow as the fall of moonslight. Riane, who had come to love her, in part through the force of Annon's feelings, in part discovering the love on her own, a shock, a thrill, a whole new world undreamed of. Two became one, an integration as much dreaded as longed for. Here it was, all at once, in a circ.u.mstance neither could have antic.i.p.ated. They gave themselves up to it, heart and soul.

10

Hagoshrin

Pack-Commander Dacce found First-Captain Kwenn eating a desultory meal in a cafe known as Alloy Fist. It was, not surprisingly, merely a stone's throw from the main Khagggun barracks and even nearer the Forum of Adjudication, where Bashkir b.u.t.ted heads over who was making more coins. All Dacce knew was that it wasn't him making coins. The V'ornn owners had gutted the interior, incinerating all the heartwood Kundalan fixtures, replacing them with utilitarian chronosteel tables and chairs. Fusion lamps lent the place the cool bluish cast of an off-world grotto.

Dacce did not immediately approach Kwenn, but rather collected a drink from the bar, at which only a solitary Bashkir sat. Dacce thought he ought to know him, but he could not quite place the face. As he pa.s.sed Kwenn's table, he made sure the First-Captain saw him.

"How goes the interrogation?" Kwenn asked in his typically neutral voice.

"All things considered, I'd rather be in the middle of a war."

"Wouldn't we all."

Kwenn kicked out a chair, and Dacce hesitated just long enough to give Kwenn the idea that he wasn't really interested.

"I see you're wearing the new star."

Kwenn looked down at his uniform. "By the regent's order, all Haaar-kyut must wear it."

"I understand each is coded to your personal DNA."

Kwenn nodded. "It will turn black if someone else-you, for instance, were to try to use it."

Dacce stared at the star. "They say the regent is paranoid."

"Just careful," Kwenn said. "And after the recent betrayals by former Star-Admirals, I'd say he is prudent, as well."

Dacce sipped his drink, not really tasting it, while they chatted about those things of interest to born-and-bred warriors: weapons, training, death. When he had judged that enough time had gone by, Dacce changed the subject. "Tell me something, Pack-Commander, how did you feel about our so-called elevation to Great Caste status?"

"I could have predicted the trouble we would get into," Kwenn said bluntly. "It was inevitable, really.

We are bred to defend and to kill. Personally"-he glanced over at the lone Bashkir nursing a drink at the bar-"I have nothing but contempt for Bashkir."

"Save for their wealth. So tell me, how did you wind up working for one?"

"Trust me. Kurgan Stogggul is as far from your typical Bashkir as you could get."

Dacce was reminded of his superior's respect for Kurgan Stogggul, though he still saw no reason to share it.

"Besides," Kwenn added with a lopsided grin, "Bashkir know how to pay. I get a thousand times the coins I received in Khagggun ranks."

Dacce felt a serious flush of anger, not only at the First-Captain but at himself for not being shrewd enough to invest with Bashkir what little savings he had during the time when it was possible. Now he saw himself doomed to near-poverty level. He mentally shook himself. He did not want to look too closely at why a Khagggun longed for luxury instead of the acetic cortasyne rush of battle.

"Do you play warrnixx?" First-Captain Kwenn was asking him now.

"When I have the time."

Kwenn produced a small multialloy cube.

"Play for coins?" he asked.

"Played for more than that on battlefields.""Shall we say one hundred?"

That lopsided grin appeared again as Kwenn twisted open the cube. A spiral appeared from which a shaft of pure indigo light rose. Out of this fountained twenty-four small decagons, twelve each of red and black, suspended in the beam of the light, while the two contestants put their left hands into the edge of the holographic spiral. Black sparks ensued spiraling around each of the hands before tingling against Dacce. He had the twelve black decagons and would have the first move.