"They profess to know nothing," Kurgan said.

Chron grunted. "Even though you are regent, you kowtow to Gyrgon."

Kurgan knew he meant no offense. In fact, it was a simple statement of truth. And yet, Kurgan found himself offended, as if he had been belittled in the crew's eyes.

"This is our caste system, the way it has always been," he said. "Your council, the Orieniad, do they not also sometimes give you orders which you are bound to follow?"

"Enough," the first mate said, stepping forward. "We are here to perform the Last Honors for our captain and our friend." He held out his hand. "The winding-sh.e.l.l."

Kelyx shook his head. "We believe Captain would want Kurgan Sto-gggul to have that responsibility."

A leaden silence reigned aboard the Omaline. Water slapped against the curved hull, sluiced through its scuppers. The onsh.o.r.e wind rocked the ship. Grey clouds studded the noonday sky like alloy bolts.

The crew shuffled while Chron's face went pale. His fists clenched and unclenched.

Kurgan knew he must quickly break the impa.s.se. "Courion has bade me help say good-bye, Kelyx, from across the Great Sea of Death. I am honored to comply."

There was a palpable sigh from the a.s.sembly as Kurgan responded the way a Sarakkon would. No one would oppose him now or even think ill of him, even Chron, whose face had returned to its normal rich pomegranate color.

Kelyx nodded. "Spoken well and true, as is a friend's duty." He opened his hand to reveal a heavily banded sienna-and-cream-colored sh.e.l.l, long and spiraled. The whorl inside a delicate pink. "Hold out your hand."

Kurgan did as he was asked. From inside the winding-sh.e.l.l emerged a pink tongue. But when touched it felt cool and smooth and hard, just as a sh.e.l.l would.

"The winding-sh.e.l.l is used to shroud the body before it is consigned to the deep," Kelyx explained for Kurgan's benefit. "In the absence of Captain's body, we will use this." He produced a beautifully made dirk with a curved forged blade and a handle of pebbled s.h.a.green. A cab-ochon star sapphire capped the b.u.t.t end. "Captain's favorite sea dirk."

He placed the weapon on the band of pink sh.e.l.l, and it immediately turned sienna and cream. In an instant, it began to spiral around the dirk, winding it in its peculiar shroud.

"From the sea we came, from the sea we return," Kelyx intoned. "In the bosom of the ocean, where all life begins, there is no ending, there is no regret, there are only new beginnings."

He nodded to Kurgan, who threw the shrouded dirk into the waves. It sank out of sight without even the vestige of a splash, vanishing as its master had vanished, without a trace.

Kurgan, watching the rolling sea, tried to think of Courion, as he had done for the entire time he was on the ship, but his thoughts were tangled up in the lies he was bound to tell the Sarakkon. If he had known himself better, he would have understood that he was caught up in the lies he had been telling himself ever since he returned from Za Hara-at. But he was a Stogggul; he could not know himself better.

And so, instead of thinking about Za Hara-at and what had transpired there, instead of thinking of her, he had come down to Harborside, to Courion's funeral, to get away from feelings that were, in the end, impossible to deny. That did not stop him from trying. But, of course, even among the Sarakkon, he could not elude them. They darted, silver and gold, like fish beneath the waves, and made it difficult for him to feel anything for the Sarakkon captain he had called friend.

"It is over," Kelyx said. "Now our captain is part of history."The crew dispersed, taking up, in twos and threes, their appointed ch.o.r.es.

"We sail within the half hour," Chron said.

Kurgan nodded. "I understand." And turned toward the gangplank.

"You are welcome to sail with us, Kurgan Stogggul," Kelyx said.

Kurgan paused. "My regrets, Ship's Surgeon." He gave a fastidious smile. "Another time it will be my pleasure." There was nothing he wanted less.

What are they doing in there?" Eleana stalking back and forth in the enormous cavern that led to Rappa territory. They looked out on semidarkness, overflowing with the murmurous conversations of the Rappa, so curious about everything, not the least of which this gathering of folk of neither their kind nor kin.

The Nawatir, thick blond hair and close-cropped beard, high cheekbones and wide mouth set in a globular Kundalan skull, glanced at her. "We will find out soon enough."

Her grey-green eyes clouded over. "If they tell us anything."

"Did you have such impatience when you were in the Resistance?"

"In truth, it is the Resistance I cannot get out of my mind," she said simply. "Each day that goes by the Khagggun kill more of them. What are we doing here?"

"I do not know."

"Neither do I, and that is my point." A swirl of luxuriant nut-brown hair, this is what defined her, and a full, generous mouth, leading to a face, overall, of defiance, of crafty stratagems, of moving forward in the advent of adversity. It was so bold you could not help but ask yourself what lay beneath. "Doesn't it ever concern you that the two of them- Riane and Giyan-keep so many secrets?"

"Yes. When it comes to Giyan it bothers me deeply." He was clad in dark red crosshatched tunic and trousers of a supple and l.u.s.trous fabric unknown on Kundala. From a thick belt hung two swords, their scabbards incised with Miina's runes. The long, gleaming blades, etched down their lengths, thrummed like beaten ba.s.s drums when he drew them.

"What is it, then? Do they not trust us enough?"

The Nawatir, his tongue seized up, said nothing. But Eleana, who knew his silence for brooding, would not let him be, and at length he gave in, not because he was weak, but because he did not want to keep secret the thorn in his heart.

"Perhaps it is a matter of love. I love Giyan so, and she says she loves me." He started out slow and halting, feeling his way, and Eleana stepped closer to him, and his strange, semisentient cloak curled around her protectively. He had told her that it was like a companion or a familiar. "But I ask myself how it can be so. I was a Khagggun Pack-Commander when she met me. I had pursued her charge, Annon Ash-era, into these very hills, to her home at Stone Border. And when Annon died, she brought him out to me so that I would stop the killing of innocent Kundalan. I wonder now how I could have done those things. But having done them, I wonder how she could love me. Were our situation reversed-were I the Kundalan and she the V'ornn-I could not."

He stopped, a little dazed by how much he had revealed.

"And now you wonder whether her love for you is real?"

"How can it be?" he asked, anguished. "How can she forget who I was, what I did to her? No sooner had she delivered her dead charge to me than I took her as concubine. How she fought me. How she. . .

But he could not go on. He turned away from Eleana, and she put her hand out to rea.s.sure him, but thought better of it, and dug a hole in the pocket of her jerkin instead.

Eleana sighed to herself and shook her head. It pained her to see her friend in such an agony of despair. She understood all too well his longings and desperate fears. In Za Hara-at, she had said to Riane, We must not be afraid to say what is in our hearts. When I see you I cannot cool my body down. I have never felt this way about anyone. For she had come to know with the ineluctable suretyof those in love that her beloved Annon was still alive, that somehow, by whatever sorcery, he abided inside Riane.

"I wonder at what you say because of late the question of love has been much in my mind." She spoke softly to the Nawatir's broad back. "Love is an insolvable mystery, where it comes from, why it strikes us, how it grabs hold and never lets go. We will never understand its nature. And here is all that can be fathomed of it. It is love that transforms us, not V'ornn technomancy or Kundalan sorcery, because it does so completely from the heart. But I also know the longing that springs from wanting to go back to the way you once were. As much as I love being a member of the band of outsiders, that very name triggers desires in me, for I miss desperately my life in the Resistance, where every day I could see the difference I was making in the cause of Kundalan freedom against the V'ornn."

He said nothing, his back and shoulders a heavily defended wall.

"We never know what we will become, Rekkk. Look at you, born a V'ornn of Khagggun caste, trained from birth to be a warrior, to kill and maim, to do the bidding of the Gyrgon. And yet you stopped. You questioned everything. Your love for Giyan transformed you. From that moment on, you were in a sense no longer truly V'ornn. Why do you question the similar transformation in her?"

She knew the answer, of course. His guilt at what he had done plagued him. If she had learned anything during her time with the Resistance is was this: the spectre of the past made the present unendurable.

"It is true that I have been transformed again. When I look into a mirror I do not even recognize myself. I am the Nawatir, but I am only slowly beginning to explore the powers I have been given. This cloak is sorcerous, yet I do not yet know the extent of its magic." He shook his head in bewilderment. "It is all so new, all so mysterious, and I am not comfortable with secrets and mysteries." He was huge, and yet now he seemed to have been swallowed by his cloak. His face was a clenched fist, cheekbones like bared white knuckles, ready to put someone, anyone, on their back. "What if she doesn't love me, after all. What if she is just using me, if this is some sort of revenge she has schemed."

"Surely you cannot believe that."

"It is what, above all else, I fear."

He frightened her when he was like this. She worried he was digging a grave for himself but felt helpless, unable to grab the shovel from his gripShe turned with relief at the sound of nails clacking on stone. Thig-pen was trotting toward them across the cavern floor-Thigpen, made voluble by her own anger, her own sense of abiding injustice that ran through the entire species like a rip current. Thigpen, who started telling them about banestones and couldn't stop.

2

A Host of Questions

When through a lattice of cruel sunlight and knife-edged shadow Kurgan Stogggul had seen Riane and Eleana standing close together in the ruins of Za Hara-at, he had felt his stone hearts shatter. Lying now in a sinister fen of jewel-toned cushions, the aromatic smoke from a laaga stick drifting from between his lips, he closed his eyes and returned in memory to his crouching place behind a gritty wall, incised with unknowable runes, deep in the heart of the excavation of the ancient city. Even the bleary drug-induced fog could not stop his teeth from grinding in fury. In Za Hara-at he, the V'ornn regent of all Kundala, had been reduced to a craven fugitive. In Za Hara-at he, the scion of the ill.u.s.trious trading family of Stogggul, had been reduced to a panting pup, his avid gaze caressing the contours of the Kundalan female whom he had taken by force. On that sun-spangled day two years ago, he had pounded into her all of his rage and contempt for the race that continued to confound his own. But ever since then he had been haunted by her.

After a hundred blind alleys he had still been in the ruins. The center of nowhere, among great groaning slabs of incised stone, a forest that had grown up around him while he slept. Unraveling his sleeve, leaving a thread behind him to guard against double-tracking, his greatest fear, he had finally emerged. With haste, he had descended at the head of a detachment of Khagggun, intending to take Eleana, Riane, and Giyan prisoner. But, try as he might, he could not find his way back to the place where he had seen them. Every time he had been certain he had made the right turn, his mind grew hazy, and he became unsure of himself. Ordering the Khagggun to fan out and search in ever-widening circles had proved fruitless as well, and, at last, he had ordered the search abandoned.

A toxic blue light leaked in through the window of the high tower, playing upon the spiderweb scrim of his closed lids. Outside seethed Axis Tyr, once the capital of all the northern continent, now the nerve center of the V'ornn occupation of Kundala.

Kurgan sprawled, half-insensate, dreaming his drug-induced dreams in the kashiggen he had commandeered for his own use. This was a pleasure palace he had all to himself, a haven from the frustrating tangle of rules and regulations that bound the regent in boredom. Being the regent was not all he had dreamed it would be. Protocol stymied him; and he was, like all V'ornn, still a slave to Gyrgon whim.

He had already smoked half his first laaga stick by the time the dzuoko had brought him the salamuuun, the potent psychotropic drug whose distribution was controlled by his mortal enemies, the Ashera family. Following a sour flight that made forgetting even more imperative, he had lighted another laaga stick, using the smoke to conjure up Eleana.

He had overheard her name when, upon seeing her with Riane, he had sidled closer. His first sight of her in Za Hara-at-sun-browned hand resting with the a.s.surance of an enchantress or a G.o.ddess upon a ruined temple's cornice-had so unnerved him that he had fled into the maze of half-destroyed buildings.

He should have left then, but he could not budge, could not even turn his head away from the sight of her.

The pale down of her strong brown arms had so affected him he had actually become dizzy. Like all V'ornn he was utterly hairless. Up until his encounter with Eleana he had thought himself immune to the common male fascination with Kundalan hair. While Eleana and Riane stood close talking softly, he drank in her dark thicket of hair, her wide-set, grey-green eyes, her strangely flushed cheeks, her long and shapely legs licentiously bared through a slit in her robes. Yearning for a scent of her, he had stifled a moan. His tender parts had swelled painfully, forcing him to kneel. His back bowed, his blood throbbing in his veins, he was helpless before his l.u.s.t.

A delicious eternity, floating in exquisite limbo, given over to a shower of shivers, symptom of alonging previously unknown to him. His hands curled into tight fists. What unthinkable alchemy had she worked on him?

"You must have her for your own."

The unfamiliar voice made his eyes snap open. He sat up, and when he saw the tall, hooded figure, wrapped in a fluid, floor-length greatcoat, he clasped his left forearm.

"My ok.u.mmmon has been quiescent." He tried desperately to clear his head. "I have not been Summoned to the Temple of Mnemonics in more than a fortnight."

"I suppose," the figure said in a deep booming voice, "you thought after Nith Batox.x.x died, the Comradeship would be in such disarray you could do as you pleased." Veradium ta.s.sels at the greatcoat's hem winked and flickered like flames as the figure approached him. "Now you know the folly of that a.s.sumption. All Gyrgon are linked through the Comradeship's central neural net. I know everything Nith Batox.x.x knew about you, regent."

Not everything, surely, Kurgan thought smugly.

The figure drew away the hood. Implanted in the pale amber skull from just above the crimson-irised eyes was a neural net of germanium and tertium wafers floating in a semiorganic material. No one knew whether the Gyrgon were born this way or were operated upon just after birth. Kurgan would give his left arm to know, for he longed to usurp the power the Gyrgon held over all the other V'ornn castes, both Great and Lesser.

"I am Nith Na.s.sam," the Gyrgon said.

"Have you taken Nith Batox.x.x's place?"

Nith Na.s.sam glanced around the sybaritic kashiggen chamber with a look of mingled rect.i.tude and disgust. A glowing network of biocir-cuits were constructed as a pair of stubby horns that sprouted from the top of his forehead.

The Gyrgon studied him with his eerie, glittery eyes. "I see that I was right about you, Stogggul Kurgan."

Kurgan tense and on guard. "In what way?"

"Periodically, through the ok.u.mmmon, the regent is Summoned by us. We test him, digest his news, and give him orders, which he carries out unquestioningly. It has always been thus. We Gyrgon find it useful to rule through-"

"Fear."

"-proxy." Nith Na.s.sam's poise appeared undisturbed. "But you are different. You do not fear us as others do. This doubtless was Nith Batox.x.x's doing, since it was he who trained you. No, for you something of a more-improvisational nature-is in order." He grinned unexpectedly. "A traditional Summoning affords you altogether too much warning."

"So you found me here."

Nith Na.s.sam circled him, as if inspecting a craggy bannntor. The inside of his greatcoat was a pustule yellow, the same metallic hue as his ion exomatrix. "My dear regent, as long as the ok.u.mmmon is implanted in your arm I can find you anywhere." He spread his hands, over which, like all Gyrgon, he wore neural-net gloves. "Besides, why would you want to hide from me? Have you secrets you have not disclosed? Have you plans to which I am not privy?"

Kurgan held his ground, said nothing. Gyrgon delighted in lying, obfuscating, deliberately deceiving the other castes if only to see the resultant reactions. They were scientists, behavioral and otherwise. To them, the entire Cosmos was an experiment in progress. And their holy grail, the reason they kept the homeless V'ornn traveling among the stars, absorbing the knowledge of new cultures before ravaging them, destroying them? Nothing less than the secret of eternal life.

Nith Na.s.sam had come close enough now that Kurgan could feel the ion pulses given off by the Gyrgon's gloves like the bites of tiny insects. At Nith Na.s.sam's merest thought, these ion pulses could deliver either pain or death. How he would love to don a pair, to wield that power over others.

"Of course you do, Stogggul Kurgan. You eat and drink secrets; they make up the very air you breathe. You cannot live without them. Like this l.u.s.t you exhibit for a Kundalan female." He grunted.

"Spend yourself in tender flesh, lose yourself in laaga and salamuuun. Indulge yourself as you may, if thatis your wish. What do I care about such low matters?" He shook his head. "Do you think the secrets you harbor matter to me? The mistake my brethren have made with you is in trying to discover them. I have no such designs on you." He stuck his face in Kurgan's. "But you will obey me, in all matters.

Unquestioningly. Unhesitatingly."

Kurgan noted that he said "obey me," not "obey the Comradeship." He was only seventeen, but ever since he could remember he had been under the thumb of adults. In one way or another, he had managed to outwit them all. Now, just when he thought he was free, Nith Na.s.sam wanted to extend his servitude.

"Nith Batox.x.x was possessed," he said in response, "by a Kundalan archdaemon named Pyphoros. I know a great deal about this archdae-mon."

Nith Na.s.sam's eyes glittered evilly. "It would be wise of you not to persist in perpetuating such myths."

There was nothing to be gained by engaging in an argument with a Gyrgon. "My obedience is not without value. What I want in return-"

Nith Na.s.sam flexed his fingers. "Think not of dictating terms to a Gyrgon."

"What I want is the salamuuun trade."

The Gyrgon's laugh was ghastly, as were the alarming teeth he bared. "Like the majority of your caste.

The salamuuun trade is the dominion of the Ashera."

"But why?"

"It is Edict. It is Law."

"You are Gyrgon. You can bend the Law, change it-"

"You do not understand."

"This is my point."

"You are wasting my time. You would have to be Gyrgon to understand." Nith Na.s.sam snapped his fingers. "Now, come. There is work to be done." And he spread his greatcoat, encompa.s.sing them both.

Riane was staring into the mirror when everything disappeared, her reflection included. She saw herself walking through a windswept landscape, knees held high as she crunched through deep snow. The sky was purple, the sun glaring. She squinted, shading her eyes against the glare. Now and again granulated ice swept off the mountain crest in chittering swarms. She continued trekking up the steep slope. Every detail was familiar to her, as if she were following a path unseen except in her mind.

She came at length to high walls and, fitting an enormous key into an iron lock, she opened the front gates of basalt slabs bound in incised bronze. The courtyard that confronted her was laid with pink gravel, carefully raked into a wave pattern. It was bisected by a black-basalt path. There was no snow, no ice. Not even a puff of wind to disturb the perfect pattern of the pink gravel and the thickly leafed sheared trees. A pair of pale carved-stone fountains were set in the gravel on their side of the path. The soft plink-plink of water was soothing. Overhead arced a perfectly cloudless sky of a piercing purple-blue.

As a dreamer would, she walked along the central path without seeming to move her legs. She stopped when she came abreast of the fountains. There were Venca runes carved into their ma.s.sive basins. The ones on the right spelled out the word MEMORY. The ones on the left spelled out the word oblivion.