As they exited the mouth of the tunnel from the stronghold and entered the city transit hub, the pale blue robes of Suralian guards flashed by on ledges to either side. These guards didn’t bother to camouflage. If they’d been human soldiers, Laura would guess the Sural put them there as a show of strength, a visual display to would-be invaders.
I don’t need to hide my assets
, it seemed to say.
The pod slowed and floated across the smooth floor of the huge, circular space, weaving between smaller and larger pods carrying all manner of goods, or people, or both. Workers in dark green robes gathered in clusters around pods and cargo, sparing Laura and her companions barely a glance. A long distance pod carrying a servant, a scientist, and an artisan, even an artisan with exotically fair skin and chestnut hair, excited no particular interest in the midst of a busy day’s work.
The pod reached a large shaft on the far side of the hub and dropped headlong into it.
“How many stops are we making?” Laura asked. They were passing directly under the city now. She could sense it, a scorching bonfire outside her shields, waiting to burn her senseless should she be so foolish, or so exhausted, as to let go the thread of protection.
“Three,” Azana answered. “Will that suffice for you?”
“It will have to.” Laura wiped her forehead with a cloth. She’d begun to sweat from the effort of keeping the empathic blaze at bay, but she’d get through this trip somehow. It helped that they’d planned those three rest stops along the way—Azana needed to consult with mathematicians at strongholds close to their intended route. Something about a project the respective rulers of Suralia and Parania, the Sural and the Paran, had dreamed up together, though Laura would lay good odds it could be better described as a plot they’d hatched. Tolari rulers did love to scheme, and those two were on better terms with each other than most. After all, they were brothers.
Half-brothers, anyway. They shared a common father, though they didn’t put it that way. Kazryn, the Sural’s father, had
fathered
the Paran but wasn’t his
father
. That made no sense to Laura, but one ruled Suralia and the other Parania, so she guessed the details didn’t matter very much. The Sural didn’t even know the woman who had
mothered
him. It made her fingernails itch to think about it.
The glow above faded as they sped away from the city. Laura rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension in them and, carefully, lowered her shields. Exquisite awareness of the other two women in the pod came crashing in, but at least they’d cleared the city and its searing radiance. She needed only her normal empathic barriers now. She wiped the sweat from her face once more, imagining herself deep within a stone pyramid.
“I think I should rest,” she said. Without waiting for a reply, she quit the bench and made her way to the rear of the pod, where mats, pillows, and cushions covered the transparent floor. It wouldn’t take much more than an hour to reach the next city, and less than that before they crossed the border into the province to which it belonged.
Laura stretched out on her back, pulling a coldpack from one pocket and a communications tablet from another. She gave the coldpack a pinch, and it frosted over. With a sigh, she draped it across her forehead, enjoying the delicious cold, and contemplated her tablet.
Though the Tolari normally used very little technology, they made an exception when it came to the lovely little device. It measured the size of her hand from heel to fingertip, a slim, elegant rectangle with rounded corners which might pass for a polished stone tile, until someone tapped it
just so
. Laura tapped it, and it came alive with symbols and sigils and things she couldn’t understand despite her language lessons.
Two sigils sported tiny labels in English, just for her:
Language Exercises
and
Casey Public Library
. She pursed her lips. She should have worked on the language exercises while she visited Marianne and her new baby, but it just wasn’t any use. Over the years, she’d spent more hours studying and stammering than she cared to admit, but she never got past the most basic phrases in any language she tried to learn. She hadn’t done any better with the Paranian she studied now. It was all she could do to remember the simplest greetings. She had left the exercises undone. She could already hear Kellandin, her tutor, clicking his tongue.
The second sigil was a gift from Marianne. It contained the entire fiction collection from Marianne’s hometown library, tens of thousands of books, more than Laura could read in a lifetime, even a lifetime extended another 300 years by the Jorann’s blessing. She touched the sigil, and the novel she’d been reading opened, a cracking good adventure about a girl stranded by herself among aliens. It was so engrossing, in fact, that she almost missed it when something… changed.
She frowned and sat up. The coldpack plopped into her lap.
Azana’s fingers, which had been dancing over her own tablet in a frenzy, came to an abrupt halt, and she turned her large whiskey-brown eyes on Laura. “Artist?”
“I—” She frowned again. “What’s different?”
“We have left Suralia and entered Camenar,” murmured the servant guiding the pod, scarcely stirring from her trance.
Laura closed her eyes and pushed her senses out as far as they could go, which, a stray part of her awareness noted, was a good deal farther than even a week ago. What she sensed resembled a musical note, pure and distant. Laura was no musician—she had no idea what people meant when they said one note was higher or lower than another, and she couldn’t sing so much as a nursery rhyme to save her life. This, though—this was music made of emotion, and that she did understand.
Azana’s voice interrupted her reverie. “Are you listening to the Song of the province?”
Laura opened her eyes. “Is that what that is?”
“I lack the sensitivity to hear it, but it is said that every province has a unique Song, sung by the hearts of its people and ruler together. I have read mentions of it, in travel accounts written by sensitives.”
“I didn’t realize I heard anything at all until it changed. It’s like… background music.”
Azana lifted one corner of her mouth. “An interesting way to express it.”
“We—humans, I mean—play music everywhere. Shops, restaurants, city streets. You can’t escape the background music. It’s—”
Something I will never hear again.
Her throat closed. She took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Never mind that. What about you? Do you have a family?”
Azana froze, and Laura recognized the sudden grief whirling through her heart like ash. After a few long seconds, the Tolari woman blinked and looked away.
“I’m so sorry,” Laura said, doing her best to hide a wince, but her face twitched. How these people managed to remain so impassive so much of the time, she couldn’t fathom, though Paranians like Azana were far more expressive than the notoriously glacial Suralians.
Azana recovered her composure and returned Laura’s gaze with an expression of polite interest. “I have a daughter, Denara. She has six years and two seasons—about thirteen of human years.”
“That’s a difficult age.”
A wan smile touched the Tolari mathematician’s lips. “In some ways, they are all difficult ages, but joyful ones, as well.”
“True enough. My daughters were more difficult than my sons, but watching them all grow up, smart like their father, was one of the best parts of my life. And now—” She paused and took another breath to steady her voice as their faces filled her mind’s eye. Patrick. John Junior. Sarah. Elizabeth. Anthony. “I can never see them again.”
“You gave up your children to spend time with our Paran?”
“No!” Laura exclaimed. She raised an apologetic hand when the other woman startled at the vehemence. “I couldn’t ever see them again anyway, not as long as Central Command wants me dead. They’ll only be safe if I lose myself and stay lost. The Paran… what I have with him was an unexpected gift and a second chance at happiness. I did take the blessing for him, but not—I didn’t give up my family for him. I’d already lost that.”
Azana’s voice tightened. “I… understand.” She turned her eyes away. The grief still welled and spiked through her, bright flashes to Laura’s empathic sense.
“Who did you lose?” Laura asked, very softly.
Azana uttered a word in Paranian. “Your language has no term for it. The man who would have been my bond-partner. He was a physicist. Only a season before we planned to bond, an explosion in the laboratory where he worked sent him and the son I mothered for him into the dark.”
“I’m so sorry.” A dull ache throbbed in Laura’s chest.
“You know this grief.”
It wasn’t a question. Laura tightened her barriers and nodded. “The Sural executed my husband for violating the interdict and committing espionage.”
Azana stared at her in astonishment. “And you do not declare enmity against him?”
“How would that help? It wouldn’t bring John back, and if I refused to have anything to do with the Sural, I’d be cut off from Marianne as well. I don’t have to
like
him, but he took me in and protected me when I had literally nowhere else to turn.”
“And when you and our Paran met, it was truly a second chance,” Azana murmured. “Even in your absence, his feelings for you are hard to deny.”
Laura took yet another deep breath, and said, on impulse, “Tolari live a long time. Maybe you’ll find your own second chance.”
“Perhaps.”
The bright glow of another Tolari metropolis began to impinge on the edge of Laura’s awareness. “I’d better prepare myself for the next city.”
* * *
Deep below his stronghold, the Monral lowered himself to the floor of a large bowl carved in the bedrock, a man’s height deep and several times that across. Farric, his son and heir, seated himself cross-legged facing the entrance-way and began to chant. The young man might lack ambition, but he did seem to possess some genius. He had proven himself a gifted chanter, and one well able to keep information close to the robe.
Smoke curled up from tiny fissures in the floor, responding to Farric’s voice, and began to fill the bowl. The Benefactors themselves had left this most ancient of ways to communicate. His people had used it for much of their history, until the alien concept of
tablets
eclipsed it. Now it had become a reliable way for the Monral to avoid scrutiny when communicating with other rulers in his coalition.
The Smoke deepened until it covered his head and invaded his mind. One by one, other presences joined him in the Smoke, becoming palpable in the bowl around him.
“My greetings,” he said aloud. The words shaped the Smoke and propagated outward to those few select rulers scattered across Tolar.
Murmurs filled his mind.
“Negotiations with the Paranian contingent are at an impasse,” he continued. “Parania’s heir is a formidable adversary. She stands fast, and will countenance no return to traditional rule of our world.”
“Leaving us at the mercy of the decisions our grandparents and great-grandparents made when the last Circle was called,” snapped the Taras. Young and impetuous, he had joined Monralar’s coalition within days of taking power in Tarasia, breaking a traditional alliance with Suralia in the process. “While we sit in splendid isolation, the young races of the Trade Alliance mock us—us!—as children. Parania’s skill in the Game is a matter of long legend, and yet the heirs to that lineage support this imposture?”
Draenar, older and wiser, spoke up. “Not Parania. It is the Sural who bids us play the primitives, while he alone speaks for Tolar. I have not your desire for the stars, Tarasia, but rule by one man for two entire generations does irritate me.”
“As long as we remain a minority, we lack the influence to put an end to it,” the Taras shot back. “We should concentrate our efforts on weakening Parania. Suralia is too strong, but if we can take the Paran’s allies from him, we will have the numbers we need to call a Circle.”
The Monral interrupted. “I cannot countenance deliberate harm to Parania. His province is one of Monralar’s oldest allies.” Only the smallest hitch in his son’s chant betrayed a reaction. Farric had been just old enough to share the humiliation when Suralia interrupted Monralar’s contact with the sense-blind
odalli
from Earth and informed the human ambassador that he was negotiating with the wrong ruler. It had taken nearly five years for the Monral to determine that the information the Sural followed had come from the stronghold of his own neighbor and ally, Parania.
In a time of conventional rule, his fellow rulers would have praised his cleverness in obscuring his dealings with the humans, and his bloc would have grown enough to give him leadership of the ruling caste. Instead, the Sural had taken control of the negotiations, damaging the Monral’s standing within his own coalition. A genetic freak too fast and strong to defeat in combat, the Sural led the caste and represented Tolar by the Jorann’s decree, and while he lived, no one else could hope to win the position.
Unless they could outmaneuver him cleverly enough to convince the Jorann to restore conventional rule.
The attempt to negotiate with the humans might have succeeded in doing just that, had the Paran not interfered. Weaken Parania? Destroying it would be more just, and a fitting revenge for ruining his plans five years ago, but no legal target presented itself. Parania’s heir parented a first-bond child, which exempted her from any attempt on her life, and the Paran himself was an adept fighter and a difficult target—but he had taken a human lover, who rumor whispered had become a sensitive when she took the Jorann’s blessing. As an artisan, she was not a legal target of assassination. That dubious honor applied only to the ruling and guard castes—and their bond-partners. If the Paran bonded with Laura Howard and made her a legal target, her death would rid the planet of part of its growing
odalli
infestation, and, at the very least, cripple him. If he followed her into the dark, as so many bereft bond-partners did, all the better.
Images of his own bond-partner’s face came to mind. Need for her filled him.