In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (28 page)

“I was not acquainted with my mother,” she said slowly. “But you, I think, show evidence of close genetic relationship.”

The man made a gesture of acknowledgment. “Vowin was my brother’s offspring, and her mother was my first cousin,” he said, and smiled. “This mission is both a professional and a personal-lineage one.”

Wondering, her eyes searched his face, and then she nodded.
“This is a most satisfying meeting,” she said. “I have been isolated from my lineage for a very large proportion of my lifespan.”

They advanced and touched hands, knuckle to knuckle, the intimate greeting of close kin.

“I am sent by the Supremacy to bring you home,” he went on. “Your father thinks this urgent.”

“I am acknowledged?” she said, raising a brow.

“Yes,” Notaj said.

He made a beckoning gesture. One of his Coercives came forward with a ventilated carrying-box; its color was dark blood red, with the Imperial helix sigil on its side. Despite herself, Teyud felt a prickle of awe. When Notaj opened the case, a bird-form used for recording secure messages hopped out onto his hand; it was of the same color, its sightless eyes yellow. It bent and touched its tongue to his hand, then to Teyud’s as she advanced it. It blinked once, twice, and again as the organ recognized the Tollamune genome and activated the recorded message.

Then it spoke. There was a raucous undernote to it, but the voice was one she recognized from her earliest youth. It was an old voice, tired, but firm . . . and with an overtone of command that made skin tingle along spine and scalp:

“I, Tollamune Emperor Sajir sa-Tomond, the Two Hundredth and Twenty-Fifth of the Kings Beneath the Mountain, acknowledge the recipient to be my offspring: Deyak sa-Vowin sa-Sajir-dassa-Tomond. She is the closest genomic heir to the Ruby Throne, and my Designated Successor. Let
Sh’u Maz
be restored through her.”

A pause, and the voice took on a slight gentleness. “And I acknowledge that Vowin sa-Soj was my chosen consort, who with my knowledge and consent and through voluntary intromissive reproductive union became gravid with the individual now known as Deyak sa-Vowin sa-Sajir-dassa-Tomond. Permission for offspring was previous and general rather than specific.”

A slight gasp went up from the listeners at the last sentence; Teyud felt her eyes widen slightly. That was an unprecedented honor, even for an Imperial consort!

“Return to me, Deyak sa-Vowin. I will set you beside me and share all the heritage that is yours as well as mine. Let us together restore Sh’u Maz.”

The Thoughtful Grace commander and his subordinates took knee for a moment and bent their heads; Teyud gently returned the message-bird to its carrier.

Notaj looked at her, a smile in his yellow eyes. He touched a tube fastened to the belt of his harness.

“And acknowledged also in a Vermillion Rescript—”

“Swaying the Real World,” Teyud said quietly. “But I have acknowledgment from another source, Commander of the Sword of the Dynasty. Another, and more authoritative.”

His brows rose slightly. She went on, “You know where I have been?”

“Working for the
vaz-Terranan
. . . the other faction of them . . . searching ruins,” he said, clearly puzzled. “This was why we were delayed, besides the storm. We knew only the general direction of your search. Odd that the Terrans wish to root about among desolation.”

“Not so odd as one might think,” Teyud said grimly. “We found some things of great value in the lost cities. Some are in the hold.”

She gestured behind her to the roaring flames whose warmth she could feel on the back of her head.

“But one, the most numinously significant, remains with
me
.

” Teyud locked eyes with the other Thoughtful Grace. His went wider and wider, first as the implications of the archaic phrase sank in, then as communication occurred on a level neither of them had felt before. His olive-tan skin blanched, and he took a half step backward.

Then he took knee with his right fist pressed to the sand as well.

“Tollamune!”
he cried, and his troops echoed it. Another cry:
“Sh’u Maz!”

When he rose, joy and fear struggled for mastery behind the impassive mask of his face; she could
feel
it, as if a communications ganglion were engaged with both their brain stems.

“It becomes even more imperative that you be brought before the Supremacy immediately, given that
that
piece is on the board of the Game of Life once more,” he said. His eyes flicked to the remains of the landship’s crew. “What of these?”

“Your craft has ample cargo capacity?”

“Yes. She was designed as a transport, not a warcraft proper, though highly modified.”

“They come with us. They have rendered me good service, and
they shall have reward—even if it is only enough
tokmar
to kill themselves agreeably.”

He nodded, and she could feel his approval. “Your father would respond so.” Grimly, he added, “Not all of the Crimson Dynasty have understood that loyalty must be reciprocal if Sustained Harmony is to truly reign.”

“But I am not merely of the Crimson Dynasty’s genome,” she said. “I am also Thoughtful Grace. And that is something
we
have always understood well.”

He assumed a stance of respectful urgency. “Then we must return you to Dvor Il-Adazar and your father. This is the maximum priority, and may be difficult to accomplish with the necessary degree of security.”

“No,” she said softly; her gaze turned to the east. “There is another priority. Fortunately, it takes us in the same direction.”

I am coming for you, Jeremy
, she thought.
If you live. And if not
. . .

Notaj was not a man who was easily alarmed. He still took a step backward when he saw her face.

Jesus, I’m cold!

That was Jeremy’s first conscious thought as he awoke from dreams of smothering with a plastic bag around his head. Then he realized something
was
covering his face, and tried to tear it away. That brought another realization; his hands were tied together in front of him . . . and he was moving, a rushing motion that combined with an up-and-down surge. It was a bit like riding a horse, but the way it would feel in a dream where you floated along with the hooves just touching the wildflowers.

He blinked gummy eyes open; they were covered by his goggles. They didn’t prevent him from looking downward, and the sight of what was on his lower face sent him into a jerking frenzy for a moment. It was a translucent bag the size of a football, swelling and shrinking, and it had tentacles wrapped around his head and jaw and neck.

A sharp pressure brought him steady again.
I know what that is. It’s a Martian oxygen-mask, one that has halitosis. And I’m riding on a goddamned bird!

He was strapped into a high saddle that cradled him fore and aft, with his hands chained by something like organic handcuffs or a leathery worm, run through a ring on the saddle’s horn. The great wings rose and fell on either side with a long, slow booming sound, feathers longer than his legs splaying out at either tip; then they stopped, and the
Paiteng
went into a long glide. He could see its eye shifting back to look him over, then shifting forward again. He took a quick look to his left and right and saw a dozen others, stretching out to the edge of sight on either side, black-suited riders wearing masks like his own. He looked down . . .

Eeeek!
he thought.
Good thing I’m not afraid of heights . . . much
.

They were at least six thousand feet up. That didn’t sound like much, when you’d flown between planets, but you flew between planets in a metal shell, seeing nothing but a starry blackness through video screens and pushed along by hydrogen heated by a gaseous-fission reactor. Even an Earth-to-Orbit or the shuttle down to Kennedy Base was little more than sitting in a crash-couch and being squashed by high G’s.

Here he was really
flying
in a way his gut had no trouble understanding, and on a bird, at that. The ochre landscape of the Deep Beyond crawled by below, and there was nothing between him and it but air. He could feel the great muscles of the
Paiteng
swelling and flexing between his knees, and even with his face covered it was numb in the rush of the frigid air.

With that he shook off his shock enough to be conscious of just how much he hurt; he must have been knocked out by the net striking him. That meant at least a very mild concussion, which was no joke at the best of times, and despite the best efforts of the animate air-compressor plastered to his mouth and nose, he was probably breathing less oxygen than was healthy. And the air was dry; the whole of his mouth and sinuses and throat felt like tissue paper that had been left outside in the sun, and there were the beginnings of a savage headache between his eyes, along with a tinge of nausea.

He coughed, and the facemask swelled resentfully and increased the pressure of the air flowing into his face.

Okay, Okay, I’ll let you do your job
, he thought at it.

Another of the riders coasted closer, twenty feet up, a move that
required agility by both the
Paiteng
to keep their wings from colliding. Jeremy stared back at the dark-goggled eyes; it was impossible to see features past those and the grotesque organic lump that kept him and the other rider alive at these heights, but he could sense a cold hostility.

Uh-oh
, he thought.
I wonder why they kept me alive? They must have stopped to transfer me to a spare bird. Do they think I’ve got hostage value with Teyud?

A disturbing thought struck him:
And do I? Or will she just write me off as an interesting perversion? It was all pretty intense, but quick, and she isn’t really a human being . . . No, Goddammit, she’ll try to get me out of this! I’ve just got to keep my eyes open and think
.

The sun was sinking down the horizon behind them, and the far horizon was turning purple-rose; that meant they’d been flying for hours. It got colder as the sun sank and the stars came out; the vast desert below shone with hoarfrost for a while, as if it were scattered with diamonds, and despite the pain in his head and the general misery in his abused body, his breath caught at the beauty of it. Other
Paiteng
soared to either side, vast falcon shapes against the stars, their wings moving occasionally as they flapped to gain height, then straightening to soar.

He dozed, woke, dozed, woke, tried to ignore the clawing of thirst that grew to a torture like hot pokers down the throat. Then light showed ahead; the night was ending, and the sun was rising in the east. They seemed to be flying over ocean . . . and then his sluggish brain realized it was clouds.

No, fog. It’s ground fog. But you only get that around places like
—

Something stood against the sun. Something so large that his mind refused to register the shape for long minutes. It was the white cone of Olympus Mons, just barely visible rising over the horizon. A mountain nearly 70,000 feet high, 400 miles across, so vast that it could be seen only from high in the air. There were glaciers on its lower slopes, but the upper ice was carbon dioxide, not water.

The line of sunlight rolling out of the east broke over it, and over the silver sea of mist around the base; and then the mountain itself vanished as they grew closer, hidden by its own bulk and the curvature of the planet. The mist shredded into patches, and through it he could see that the Deep Beyond was behind them.
A canal far broader than Zar-tu-Kan’s curled like an artificial Mississippi, vanishing beyond sight to north and south, a vast, shining snake under its glassine roof. Through that clearness, he could see the tiny dots of barges and passenger craft, almost the only place on Mars where they were used.

The Grand Canal
, he thought.
All the way around the base of the Mountain
.

It extended through a landscape covered in swirling, orderly patterns of ochre-olive-green with only occasional patches of atmosphere plant. The rest was orchards of fruits and fields of tubers and the fodder that grazing beasts ate, and the glittering plantations where spars and axles and gears grew on plants that secreted crystal and monofilament metal. Domed mansions stood here and there, and towns, and roadways of tough reddish vegetation down which landships sped.

His first sight of the City That Is A Mountain left him numb, if that wasn’t just the cold. It was too big to take in; mile upon mile of the four-thousand-foot cliff at the Mountain’s edge sculpted into towers and domes, avenues and colonnades, terraces and gardens that were shouts of color and trees impossibly tall and slender, even fountains and artificial waterfalls—an incredible extravagance on this world. In the center, where the cliffs had swerved out into the lowlands like the prow of a ship, was one impossible spire that ran from base to summit, a mile of stone crimson as blood, shaped like a frozen tendril of fire, the Tower of Harmonic Unity. The Tollamune emperors had commanded its shaping when they united and ruled a world, in the days long before earthmen first put words to clay, or built anything grander than a thatched hut.

The air was dense with traffic now; slender-winged gliders, tethered balloons, airships of every size, riders on the backs of
Paiteng
. The score in the party that had taken Jeremy captive grouped themselves into a column of twos and swerved off northward from the Tower of Harmonic Unity in disciplined unison. They passed over the streets of the city, its gardens and its courts, until they came to an amphitheaterlike building a thousand feet across and circled above it. The glassine dome that covered it split in the center and slid back to either side, revealing a shaft in the rose-colored volcanic rock that seemed to descend to infinity.

“Ohhhhhhhh shit!”

Jeremy found he had the breath to scream as the first pair of
Paiteng
riders commanded their mounts to fold their wings and plummet like arrows. The column followed them, two by two—and he couldn’t even cover his eyes with his hands as his mount wheeled and stooped in its turn.