Lance of Earth and Sky (The Chaos Knight Book Two) (16 page)

Oneira nodded, folding her lace-gloved hands in front of her. “The creation of automata is assumed to be a lost art—but not for the Company.”

*
You can craft me such a body?
*

“Not I,” Oneira said. “But I know someone who can.”

T
ry as he might, Vidarian could not bring himself to eat the lavish meal Oneira had laid before them in the forecastle's stateroom. He had never been seasick a day in his life, but even looking at the poached rock crab before him turned his stomach.

Oneira had no such difficulty, daintily downing chilled oysters and wilted pepper greens with sweet plum vinegar.

It didn't help that Isri also went without eating, though she was offered plate after plate. The seridi ate no meat, by choice and not biology, and it had taken subtle pressure on Vidarian's part to have her included at the table at all. Now he wasn't sure that he'd truly done her a service by insisting.

Iridan did not eat, but he did have a plate in front of him, an etched silver platter set with a translucent sphere that glowed a soft blue. It was an attunement sphere, Oneira had said, and it had some sort of meditative effect on automata.

Now that Oneira was openly acknowledging Ruby, she, too, had a place at the table, set in an ornate golden jewelry box. She and Iridan could communicate silently, which meant that the meal, awkward already, was made more so by punctuations of long silence.

“
I would be very grateful,
” Iridan said after one such, “
for any information about my siblings. Any of them.
”

He addressed this to the table, and Vidarian wasn't sure whether it was with honest openness or to pressure Ruby—or Oneira—by voicing his question publicly. It was unfair to hold his origins against him, but the mere fact that he was created for diplomacy—or created at all—made it difficult for Vidarian to feel comfortable with his motives. If an automaton could be said to be motivated for anything other than its purpose.

*
I wish I could tell you more than I already have,
* Ruby said. *
What I…said…in the Arboretum—it came from a part of this prism key that I can't open on my own. It's as though a door is shut, and I can't control what opens it. I'm genuinely sorry.
*

“
My plight is certainly not worse than yours. Perhaps we can help each other.
”

Ruby and Iridan warming to each other was hardly surprising under their circumstances, but Vidarian couldn't help but be disquieted by the thought that Ruby was testing the waters of Iridan's intelligence, imagining herself in such a body. Oneira's offer presented more questions than it answered, but while they were still leagues from the Imperial City, there was no prospect of answering them.

Iridan's lavender eyes were on Oneira. She set aside her silver fork and lifted her linen napkin to her lips, then set it aside, all thoughtfulness. “What I am about to tell you is a Company secret, and you should know already how covetously knowledge is guarded.” She lifted the napkin again and carefully folded it. “I only tell you as I suspect you know already, and what I know isn't much. The existence of the four automata created by Grand Artificer Parvidian nearly a thousand years ago has been continuously known to the Company, which has also paid handsomely to preserve the knowledge of the Animators, whose guild in turn trained Parvidian.”

“
Four,
” Iridan repeated, his inflection flat, his mind somewhere far away.

Oneira nodded, watching him carefully. “Three known to each other and to the public—the fourth known only to the highest echelons of government, and, of course, the Company.”

*
Do they exact some kind of loyalty oath from you, to keep you from disclosing your secrets?
* Ruby asked. Her tone said clearly that she did not trust the Company, even if she remained tempted by Oneira's offer of an automaton body.

“They don't need to,” Oneira said, and rang the serving bell. A black-uniformed maid entered promptly with a steaming pitcher of
kava
and a tray of sugar, cream, and spices. “Knowledge is disclosed only with advancement into genuine wealth—and the Company controls access to that wealth. No one would jeopardize what they had earned.”

“Unless someone else offered more wealth?” Vidarian ventured.

The bemused look Oneira gave him was chilling in its implication: no one in the world had more wealth than the Company. She gestured, and the serving maid set the tray on the table, then poured a silver cup of
kava
and spiced it. Vidarian had known the Company was powerful, but only the opening of the gate had revealed the glacier of strength that lay below the surface. “And Justinian?”

Oneira accepted her cup and gestured the maid to pour Vidarian's. She took a long and deliberate sip. “I should have known that he of all the directors would have had a contingency plan.”

Her tone was neutral, a subtle rebuke on her analytic abilities, but the wound was clear: whatever Justinian's contingency plan had been, it did not include her. Vidarian decided not to suggest to her that it had appeared to include him. It felt oddly oily to withhold information with her when she had shared a piece of her own, but he reminded himself as he accepted the silver cup that he did not trust her at all.

The next morning Altair arced down to hover just off the starboard rail where Vidarian stood.

//
Thalnarra has heard something from below,
// he said, curiosity giving his voice a metallic tang. //
A contact. She is coming in to land.
// Generally, Altair flew at higher altitudes than Thalnarra, but lately they had been reversed.

“Can't you hear them yourself?”

//
Her telepathy is quite a bit stronger than mine.
// He didn't seem embarrassed, though Vidarian was; certainly, as telepathic strength varied in humans and seridi, so must it also in gryphons, but the thought had never occurred to him.

Altair cupped his wings and allowed the wind current produced by the ship's wake to carry him up and over the rail with a slight tilting of his right wing. He touched down gently on the deck, just before Thalnarra, as promised, angled in from above and dropped down next to the port rail. Her landing was not so delicate and tilted the ship, but it soon righted itself.

Her dark-backed primaries brushed the deck as she extended her wings for balance. //
Arikaree is here. An'du is with him.
//

“An'du? Here?” Vidarian went to the rail and peered down, but could see only clouds.

//
I asked about that. Now that she can change shape at will, she's no longer confined to the An'durin. She's rejoined her people in the West Sea.
//

“Her people?” An'du had said there were “many” of her kind, but it had been hard to believe. He'd never heard of another whale like her.

The round, red eye that Thalnarra turned on him suggested that the Company wasn't the only group to hoard knowledge. //
There are quite a few of them. She has one with her, some kind of ambassador from one of the other clans. She wants you to meet him.
//

Vidarian found Oneira in the navigation room consulting with her boatswain. He hadn't quite figured out the
Wind Maiden
's arrangement; the crew clearly answered to Oneira alone as the Company representative, but she did not fulfill a captain's duties, and indeed they seemed not to have one. He apologized for interrupting, then explained about their new guests.

“The sea-folk?” The flatness of her eyes said that she was neither surprised nor inclined to elaborate. More secrets. Vidarian fought not to grind his teeth. “I'd love to meet one of them,” Oneira said, and instructed the boatswain to anchor the ship on the water again.

Above, Thalnarra and Altair had returned to the sky, and circled the
Wind Maiden
as she descended toward the water. They called out greetings to unseen—to Vidarian, anyway—targets below. The ship hove along a starboard arc and the ocean loomed up beneath them, all chopping whitecap under a brisk northeasterly wind.

//
Be greeting, good-friend,
// the pelican-gryphon said joyfully, voice fresh like a north sea breeze. //
Nistra's blessing to be seeing you once more.
//

The gryphon might be able to see Vidarian, but not the reverse; it was some long moments before he made out the bobbing shape far below on the water. Arikaree spread his wings in greeting, and flipped an arc of seawater up into the air with his beak.

Beside him, a scaled equine face broke the water's surface, followed by a long, muscled neck. Vidarian only had a second to attempt to make sense of a horse—a green one—in the water, and then An'du's grey-green head surfaced as well, perched atop the creature's back.

The horse reared, another impossible-seeming feat, until the churning foam cleared to show the massive scaled fish torso that continued downward from its waist. Its forelegs, split and webbed where a horse's hooves would be, pawed at the waves, and it squealed, a sound more dolphin than horse.

An'du laughed and cursed the beast in a language Vidarian had never heard, then released the reins. As soon as it had its head, the horse dove back beneath the water's surface to glower at her. How he could tell it was glowering Vidarian had no idea, but it rolled off the creature like water.

“A pleasure to see you again, Vidarian—especially on the open sea.” An'du smiled, and Vidarian knew her words to be genuine; she glowed with health, a fact that must have been attributable to the ocean return. “May we board your handsome vessel?”

The
Wind Maiden
still hovered above the water's surface, and Vidarian turned, looking for the nearest davit, or some way of bringing them aboard. Oneira was already there, supervising the lowering of something better—a rope ladder.

There was a kind of chirp from the water, and a splash. A sea otter had hopped from its camouflaged perch between Arikaree's wings to swim over to An'du's shoulders. She wrapped him around her neck like a fine lady with a foxtail stole, then swam to the ladder. One muscular arm wrapped between two rungs, and she waved with her free hand. Three strong sailors set to pulling the ladder back in, while Arikaree swam with surprising speed and flapped his broad, rectangular wings, laboriously—but impressively—taking off from the water.

When An'du stepped up to the deck, Vidarian realized he'd forgotten how large she was—or perhaps she had always looked smaller in the water. He'd become accustomed to the size of the gryphons, but An'du at least
appeared
human, though her dark eyes without iris or pupil, not to mention her mottled green skin, loudly proclaimed that she was not. Still, as she towered above all of the humans, easily half again as tall as Oneira—no small woman herself—Vidarian appreciated her strangeness anew, trying to imagine the great green whale of the An'durin somehow being the same creature, and not quite succeeding.

An'du knelt and the sea otter leapt from her shoulders, shook water from his pelt in a sinuous head-to-tail twist, then grew, becoming a slim, dark-olive-skinned young man.

He was slender and strong, so wiry that he seemed taller than he was. But where An'du was much larger than a human, her guest was slightly smaller, fine-boned and sharp of feature. And the quiet burn of his eyes as he took in Vidarian, Oneira, the sailors, and the gryphons said that he was not terribly impressed with his new company.

“My friends, I introduce to you Tepeki Underbranch, prince of the Velshi,” An'du said, coming to stand behind the boy and put a hand on his shoulder that easily could have cupped his entire head. She squeezed gently, almost unnoticeably, and he gave the slightest possible nod of his chin.

“I'm pleased to meet you,” the boy said, a soft voice that tried to be low but couldn't.

*
Another shapechanger,
* Ruby said. *
Fantastic.
*