Cursing all the more loudly, he tried to go after them, but his leg gave out, and he banged his head on the way down. He fired into the utility corridor, and kept on firing until the weapon's power pak was drained.

15

Along Came a Gul

It was that time of the day when the light was a pellucid blue, the treetops burnished a deep gold, and the shadows grown long. Across a lapidary sky was thrown a paragraph of high, thin clouds in the curlicue shapes of a numinous language. The dense forest of West Country Marre pine cut the wind into innocuous puffs that soughed through the needle-laden branches, causing them to dip and sway like the wavelets of a becalmed sea. Birds sang happily and insects buzzed industriously and every now and again there came the sound of a small mammal foraging through the underbrush.

It was a thoroughly pastoral setting in which one would find the sight of spilled blood particularly shocking.

So it was with Giyan and Minnum as they hiked down a shadowed northern embankment of Receive Tears Ridge on their way to the deep forest where the sauromicians had long ago harvested the mushroom known as Peganis harmelea from which Madila was derived. They had arrived via the network of ancient cenotes built throughout the northern continent. Giyan had learned to use them when she had returned to the Abbey of Floating White the previous year. With the sauromicians abroad and very active, she rightly felt this a safer means of travel than Thripping, which-she suspected-the Dark League now had the means to monitor.

They broke through a gap in the tree line and began to traverse an upsloping highland meadow, lush with waving wrygra.s.s, diaphanous milk-nettle and tall stands of whistleflower, their clear blue buds just beginning to open.

Giyan dropped to one knee, her fingers tapping, tracing patterns on the ground here and there.

"What do you sense, Lady?" Minnum asked.

"This ridge is far from deserted."

"Khagggun?" Minnum spun around.

"Khagggun and Resistance both." She rose. "We are crossing a nexus point of some kind. A battleground, past, future, present."

They continued on with a heightened sense of awareness and were relieved to leave the openness of the meadow behind. Once again, the forest closed about them, but now the Marre pines were interspersed with hard-needled, bluish green kuello-fir, and the rocks held more moss and lichen. The needle bed across which they walked was thick and springy and pleasantly fragrant.

They rose to a narrow ridge. The far side descended more steeply, and they bent their knees as they went to take the strain off their lower backs.

"Look familiar?" Giyan asked.

"It has been many years, Lady." Minnum looked around. "Put me down anywhere in the Korrush, and I can tell you within half a kilometer where I am. But I was never so at home in forests that I could distinguish one part from another."

No more than a quarter of the way down, Giyan stopped. Her nostrils flared, and she swept up a handful of dead needles. They were dark, matted together.

"Kundalan blood," Minnum said, and she nodded.

A little farther on, they came to a pock whose pale lichen was similarly stained. She reached out. "Still sticky," she said.

They continued their descent. She had them pause often, c.o.c.king her head as if listening to periodic reports brought to her by the wind. Minnum was very glad to be in her company, but observing her command of sorcery he could not help but feel a twinge of sorrow for all that had been taken from him. It was harder to be sightless if at one time you had had your vision, because it was impossible to forgetwhat was no longer yours, what had once been.

The slope was accelerating its descent. At the same time, the forest became more dense, darker. The tree trunks were thicker, taller. What light filtered down was turned a mottled blue-green as if they were traveling underwater.

"There are fewer animals here," Giyan whispered. "And no birds at all."

This sounded ominous, but at that moment Minnum paused, sniffing the cool, crisp air. "Smell that?"

"The odor of burnt spun sugar?"

He nodded. "The mushrooms give off that distinct odor. We're close now to the harvest field."

They proceeded at a quickened pace. He led the way, winding through damp underbrush and large, moss-encrusted rocks that grew denser the farther they advanced into the forest. All at once, Giyan reached out, pulling him clean off his feet.

His head swiveled. "What-?"

But she hushed him and he felt the ripple in the air around them, a slight darkening against his second sight that signaled a spell being cast.

Hidden within Flowering Wand, an Osoru cloaking spell, the two of them peered back up the ridge.

From behind them, Minnum heard what Lady Giyan must have sensed a moment ago: the telltale click-clack of Khagggun armor. And then the first column appeared, moving steadily, inexorably along the snaking ridgeline, more than a pack, and then a second column, a third, fourth, and fifth.

"It looks like an entire Wing is on the move," Minnum whispered. "That cannot be good news for the Resistance."

All at once, the column halted. A short, helmed Khagggun at its head swiveled this way and that. His alloy armor bore the insignia of a Wing-Commander.

Minnum felt a shiver run down his spine. "Surely they cannot see us, Lady?"

The Wing-Commander gestured, and a phalanx of Khagggun broke out of the column. They fanned out along the ridge and headed slowly down it toward the thick forested area where Giyan and Minnum crouched.

Giyan cursed her memory lapse. It had been so long since she had had to deal with Khagggun that she had forgotten that their helms were equipped with photonic sensors that could detect body heat.

Flowering Wand was of no use against that technology.

As the Khagggun advanced, they swung their ion cannons off their shoulders and toggled the arming mechanisms.

"What are they seeing inside those helms?" Minnum whispered.

Giyan, feeling his shiver, put her arm around him and squeezed him tight.

No talking, she said in his mind. In a moment, they mil be close enough to pick up our molecular vibrations.

What are we going to do, First Mother?

The Khagggun had moved into a wedge formation with the center Khagggun in the lead. They were in constant communication, a hive mind, as the hardware inside their helms performed multiple scans across increasingly wider arcs of the forest.

Giyan knew that their body heat would soon betray them. She could not let that happen. She looked around. They were crouched between two boulders. She could smell the musty aroma of the moss that lay in thick swaths across the north rock faces. Putting out her hand, she touched the soft wet spongy surface. Cool as stone, cool as metal. She ripped off a piece.

Quickly now, she said. Tear off as much of the moss as you can find and cover yourself with it.

But, Lady, why- Do as I tell you1. Now!

They tore great handfuls of the moss, ripping it wholesale off the rock face, and when they had denuded those rocks, they scrabbled behind them for others. Crouched in a fetal position, huddled together, they covered themselves in the cool must of the moss. Small insects wriggling through the moss bottom crawled across their cheeks and arms, bands of tiny cilia rippling, antennae questing. All else was still.Giyan heard their hearts beating, the blood rushing through their veins. She stilled her breathing to almost nothing, slipping into a meditative state. It took Minnum a moment longer to get his racing heartbeat, his fright, under control. Giyan extended her pool of calm to encompa.s.s him, and at length he, too, drifted into the sorcerous twilight.

Above them, the lead Khagggun stopped, and the others stopped with him. He looked to the left, and they all looked with him. They all looked to the right together.

"What do you see?" Hannn Mennus spoke in their ears. "Did you find the anomalies I picked up?"

"There is nothing, Wing-Commander," the lead Khagggun said.

"Two bodies," Hannn Mennus said. "It seemed like two bodies."

"We have registered a brood of six qwawd, two adults, three juveniles, and a pair of snow-lynx."

"No Kundalan."

"No, Wing-Commander."

"The snow-lynx?" Hannn Mennus said. "Coming toward us or away from us?"

"They must have sensed us," the lead Khagggun said. "They have changed direction and are moving away to the north."

"Catch them now, kill them cleanly," Hannn Mennus said. "I want to wear their hides."

When Sahor, reading dense and difficult texts in one of the myriad lamplit galleries of the Museum of False Memory, heard the sound, he looked up. What he had heard had been small-tiny even- the whispered click of a rodent's claws on the stone flooring, or perhaps the soft metallic clash given off by a nocturnal insect. Transparent wings beating against the windowpane.

It was this last possibility that caused him to approach the crystal window. Beyond the eternal V'ornn-made night glow of the city, the sky was clear and full of stars. He could sense them, rather than see them, burning brightly, enigmatically, semaphoring their Cosmic messages. And where were the Centophennni? Were they seeing the same constellations that were strewn across the Kundalan sky? His new Kun-dalan body gave a brief, involuntary shudder, his gaze trended downward, and he saw the face.

It was on the other side of the windowpane, pale as ice, translucent as an old holophoto. What did he feel inside? How was he to say? He had been quite certain that he would never see it again, and now that he had been transformed he had in fact put it out of his mind altogether. Now up it popped, there of all places.

The face smiled at him, and he went to the door, unlatched it, and pulled it open. She was wrapped in an ankle-length greatcoat, dark and dusty and travel-worn, though from what he knew of her she never traveled at all. Her face was not dissimilar to other Tuskugggun faces, long and copper-colored, with high cheekbones and a bow of a mouth and dark eyes. Except she was more beautiful-far more beautiful, even in this guise of her own creation. Possibly, though, he was already seeing beneath the photon sh.e.l.l.

"May I help you?" he said. "We are closed."

"You are always closed," she replied. "These days."

They stood facing one another, he in the doorway, she wrapped in her cloak and the early spring night. Insects, roused from their winter dormancy by the change in light and temperature, whizzed and shrieked, softly, shrilly, their linen wings beating against the darkness. There was a sudden heaviness to the air that spoke of a coming change.

"Aren't you going to ask me in?"

"Do I know you?"

Her laughter, deep and clear, a perfect note, was a reminder of the old days, of the pain she had caused him, but also of the incandescence, bittersweet, that had engulfed them both.

He stepped aside and, without a moment's hesitation, she entered. As he relatched the door, she swept off the greatcoat and, with it, the photon sh.e.l.l. And there she was facing him again in all her terrible glory, wings beating, biocircuits spiraling up her gleaming glabrous skull, white pupils dilated in thedimness, lips formed in the familiar enigmatic half smile.

Gul Aluf.

"How did you find me?" he said.

"Offer me a drink," Gul Aluf said. "Please offer me a drink."

He went to a well-stocked sideboard. Minnum had liked his brews. His hand went automatically to the oldest fire-grade numaaadis, which was her favorite, "Not that," she said. "Something . . . Kundalan."

And when he turned to look at her questioningly, she added, "In honor of the new you, something quintessentially Kundalan."

"This is an exceptional ludd-wine."

She nodded her a.s.sent.

His hand moved to another crystal decanter. "A favorite of the Ra-mahan konara."

"So I am told."

The ludd-wine was the color of dried cor blood and almost as thick. He handed her a crystal goblet, and they both took a sip. She wore a sleeveless black ion-mesh tunic that alternately hid and revealed her body as she moved. He had forgotten the l.u.s.trous sheen of her skin.

"An acquired taste," he said, noting the look on her face.

"As is everything Kundalan." She put the goblet to her lips, swallowed more this time. "I had another null-wave net in the laboratory," she said softly. "That is how I found you."

"Impossible. I checked."

"As I knew you would."

She gazed at him over the rim of the goblet. Was she laughing at him? It would be so like her to do that.

"That would a.s.sume you knew that I was alive."

"I suspected." Her gaze never wavered. "I hoped."

He spent some time digesting that last sentence. He discovered, much to his dismay, that he fervently wanted to explore the implications. Part of him, of course, wanted nothing more than to shy away. He had vowed a long time ago that he would never allow himself to become entangled with her again.

She took more ludd-wine, drank it all down. "I know what you are thinking."

"I doubt it."

Her wings beat arhythmically, a habit he had found at first endearing, then as their relationship deepened, frankly erotic.

"As you wish." But her smile-that maddening, ripe, altogether luscious smile-informed him otherwise.

"Who else suspects," he said abruptly. "Who else hopes?" "None. But Nith Immmon suspects."

"Yes." Sahor nodded. Nith Immmon had been one of his father's admirers. Clever at political maneuvering, quite a bit less so as a scientist. "Of course." And then, sadly, because he could not help himself: "Are you connected with him?"

Gul Aluf moved in her gliding manner. Her feet barely touched the cool stone squares. As she pa.s.sed the sideboard, she placed her goblet on it. She stopped not a pace from where Sahor stood. She placed a hand on his shoulder. In anyone else it would have been a neutral gesture, but with her nothing was neutral, everything was, like an ion, charged.

"I like your new form," she said. "Yes, I do." Her hand slowly skimmed across his skin. "It is unusual.

But so young. So taut. So vital. It was wise of you to manufacture this Kundalan-like photon sh.e.l.l, the better to hide from your enemies. One day you must show me the neural-net schemata." She c.o.c.ked her head. "But how did you manage to go off-line from the Comradeship's matrix?"

"Nith Batox.x.x managed it," he said. "So did I."

"Only the two of you. You can trust me, Sahor."

Of course he could not tell her how he had gone off-line. She still believed him to be Nith. If she got even a hint that he was a V'ornn-Kundalan hybrid . . .