Of Fire and Night (9 page)

19

RLINDA KETT

B
eneath the icy ceiling of Plumas, Rlinda and BeBob attended the Roamer funeral of Andrew Tamblyn. The three surviving brothers, somber and confused, worked with their comrades to prepare the ceremony. Though the reanimated ice woman had disappeared into the sea, Rlinda did not assume for a moment that everything was returning to normal.

Maybe Karla Tamblyn was happily playing with whatever creatures she’d found down at the bottom. Rlinda had heard the water miners talk of exotic sea creatures like singing nematodes and glowing jellyfish. A pall had hung over the grotto facility during the past three days, while workers watched, holding their collective breath and waiting for something else to happen.

Because of the Roamers’ damned edgy vigilance, Rlinda saw no chance for her and BeBob to escape, and skipping away during a funeral certainly seemed like bad form. Even so, Rlinda was getting awfully tired of sitting on her hands, and she was always cold down here. What did she expect, living on a flat shelf of ice under a kilometer-thick frozen ceiling at the edge of a frigid sea? She had plenty of blankets and heaters in the
Voracious Curiosity,
but her beloved ship was docked on the surface, and they were stuck down here. . . .

Caleb, Wynn, and Torin Tamblyn had placed Andrew’s body in a floating coffin of pressed cellulose, then packed dried icekelp around their brother. Caleb bent over the coffin boat and poured a thick translucent liquid onto the body and the surrounding flammable material. The biting chemical odor of fuelgel struck Rlinda’s nostrils.

Wynn and Torin stood together, barely able to contain their tears. The twins exchanged nudges, each encouraging the other to speak first. Finally Caleb said in a raspy voice, “This is the second Roamer funeral for one of my own brothers. Andrew, and before him Bram.”

“And before that we all came here to mourn Ross,” Wynn added.

“Damned hydrogues,” Torin muttered.

Now, there’s something we can all agree on,
Rlinda thought. The Roamers had good reasons to hold a grudge against the Hansa—she couldn’t argue with that—but no amount of rationalization gave them any cause to take it out on her and BeBob.

The three brothers each said a brief reminiscence before they tossed igniters into the fuelgel-soaked boat and pushed the floating coffin into the sea, where convection currents pulled it from the broken shore. The fuelgel burned efficiently, setting the icekelp and cellulose on fire, as well as Andrew’s shrouded body. Flames reflected on the frozen ceiling.

Standing on the ice shelf in the cold, Rlinda and BeBob held hands; they could see the steam of their breath. BeBob was actually crying. Her heartstrings might have been tugged a little more if she and BeBob hadn’t been held hostage here. Both of them felt like outsiders, witnessing a very private moment.

As the boat drifted farther away, the funereal flames grew hotter until the cellulose coffin broke apart. Caleb turned aside, looking more angry than sad. Torin barely contained his sobs. Rlinda wanted to wrap her arms around him in a big hug, but restrained herself. Sympathy was one thing, reality quite another.

The Roamers kept their gazes down, waiting for the flames to finish burning out. A long, somber silence fell.

But the sheltered seas did not accept the new offering. The water around the remnants of the pyre began to bubble and froth like a cauldron. Hot steam curled around it like the shadow of a tornado. The boiling increased, churning and swallowing up the fragments of the burning coffin.

In the midst of the fury, something white and sharp like an elephant’s tusk thrust out of the ocean. A pedestal of ice formed from the water and rose above the surface. Trickles flowed down and hardened like candlewax.

Her milky-white skin sparkling with frost, Karla Tamblyn stood atop the curved monolith, looking more animated than before, like an angry goddess emerging from the frigid ocean. In the sea around her a medusa swarm of writhing creatures appeared—hundreds of fleshy scarlet tubes that pulsed and expanded like blobby leeches filled with fresh arterial blood.

Karla raised her hands. Her dark hair thrashed in tentacles energized with static electricity. Ablaze with cold fire, she opened her mouth and spoke in a hollow voice. “Water flows where it wishes.” Karla bent her fingers and clenched her fists. Power crackled through her skin, but her eyes were oddly blank. “Liquid has no form.”

Dozens of the deep-sea nematodes swam forward as if they were the reanimated woman’s foot soldiers. Their round mouths were studded with tiny diamondlike teeth for chewing through thick ice. Or people.

“Cannot propagate. Trapped . . . contained.” Karla turned her ivory face toward the ceiling where the artificial suns shone down. Her voice boomed.
“Water flows where it wishes.”

She launched a shockwave. Invisible balls of lightning rippled through the air and hammered into the low ceiling. The inner surface of the jagged dome cracked, and ice-melt water began to flow down. “Chaos and randomness is the natural state. Order is offensive.”

The force in her voice was enough to send them all reeling. A torrent of rain poured down around Karla. Large chunks of ice cracked from the ceiling and tumbled into the ocean. Waves surged around her, as if she were a typhoon incarnate. “Water flows where it wishes.”

Karla’s ice pedestal began to move toward the shore where the terrified humans stood. She brought destruction with her.

20

MAGE-IMPERATOR JORA’H

A
Mage-Imperator was supposed to protect his people, but each deception made Jora’h damn his obligations more. How could even the leader of an Empire stand against beings powerful enough to smother whole
stars
? Jora’h felt as if he had stepped on a trapdoor and was now falling into an endless pit. How could he resist without bringing the destruction of his entire civilization? What choice did he have? Many times he had cursed his father and all the Mage-Imperators before him.

Three days ago, the warglobes had departed, yet their threat hung in the air like the long-fading note from the end of a musical composition. He would never forget the look of hurt, disappointment, and disdain Osira’h had given him when he’d capitulated to the alien emissary. But now that he knew the hydrogues could ransack her thoughts and cull whatever information they wanted, he had to make her
believe
that he was a failure. In truth, he might yet fail, but he did not want the enemy to know all the things he might plan against them.

Secretly, the Mage-Imperator knew there was one last chance, if he had the freedom to make the attempt. If his people did not let him down. The hydrogue emissary had warned that they would return soon to issue their abhorrent demands and force him to betray humanity. He must have another option by then.

But first, he would need to send Osira’h away, so she—and the hydrogues linked to her—could not see what he was doing.

He called his daughter to his private contemplation chambers. The girl stood straightbacked before him, exuding the same inexplicable power that had been strong enough to force the hydrogues to obey her. “You summoned me. If you require my service, then I am ready to help.” The troubled girl seemed to hope that she’d underestimated her father.

Her eyes flicked to the prized Theron treeling that sat on a shelf, a gift from Queen Estarra of Earth. Every time Osira’h looked at it, Jora’h wondered if she felt the sort of calling that her mother did.

“And how would you help me?”

“By following your plan, Liege.” It was not a question. She herself had done the impossible, and now she expected him to do the impossible as well. “You asked me to bring the hydrogues to Mijistra. Therefore, you must have a plan. You are the Mage-Imperator.”

“I did what I had to do, Osira’h. Without some kind of appeasement, the hydrogues would have leveled our planet and then destroyed all other Ildiran worlds.”

By pretending to agree to their demands, he had bought time to set a desperate plan in motion. But he could not tell Osira’h that, lest the hydrogues wrest the knowledge from her.
I bought time . . . but after thousands of years of breeding and experimentation and planning, have we not had enough time?

The girl’s odd expression and strangely alien eyes told him she was not satisfied with his answer.

“I am sending you away, Osira’h. You will go back to Dobro.” He took her hands in his own, and the yearning on his face was not feigned. “Your mother is alive. Designate Udru’h kept her on Dobro, hiding her even from me. I am sending you to her. I want you with Nira.”

The little girl’s face lit up, and he wished he could tell her more, tell her everything. Questions seemed to geyser from her mind, but she drove them down, simply reveling in the surprise and joy. For the moment, she seemed to have forgotten her scorn for his cowardly response. Her happiness startled him, since he knew she had never even met her mother.

Jora’h averted his gaze to the treeling in its alcove, thinking of his beloved green priest. He missed Nira so much, wondered why it was taking Udru’h so long to bring her. Now she would have to stay on Dobro until it was safe again. What would she think when their daughter told her of his willingness to doom the human race? He stroked the pale frond of the worldtree.

Osira’h bowed, but he could see she was smiling. “If that is your wish, Liege, I will happily go to Dobro.” At that moment, he wished the girl would call him Father, but he knew that was too much to expect.

21

DESIGNATE-IN-WAITING DARO’H

T
o help him locate the missing green priest on the southern continent, Designate-in-waiting Daro’h conscripted forty-nine Ildirans. Udru’h urged him to hurry. They had heard no further word from the Mage-Imperator about his negotiations with the hydrogues, but they were aware that time must be short. Daro’h had never seen his uncle look so guilty or anxious.

“Find her,” Udru’h said again. “Find her, before more damage is done.”

A group of scout ships raced south across the equator to the southern continent, the wide inland sea, and the island where the female green priest had disappeared. Satellite imagery had digested the topography of the southern continent into a detailed map, onto which a fine search grid was projected. Each ship flew low along a separate path, diligently scanning.

Daro’h had never received an entirely satisfactory explanation as to why his uncle had exiled Nira so far away in the first place, or why he had initially told the Mage-Imperator that she was dead. Daro’h himself had seen Nira’s grave marker on the hillside, had watched his father grieve before it. All a deception!

Udru’h held his secrets in tightly clenched fists, and Daro’h feared he would have to do the same when he took over the reins as this planet’s Designate.

All of the Mage-Imperator’s noble sons were born to become Designates, assigned to planets according to their birth order. Thousands of years of history had established a clear pattern for how their lives would play out. The firstborn noble son always became the next Prime Designate as soon as the old Mage-Imperator died; the second became the Designate for Dobro, the third for Hyrillka, and so on. Daro’h had often wondered why the Mage-Imperator’s second son would be assigned to such a seemingly unimportant place as Dobro. That was before he learned of the breeding program and its vital importance to the survival of the Empire. So many secrets!

Now he looked through the scratched side window of the fast flier. Below, the brown dryness abruptly ended in the sinuous shoreline of a blue inland sea. Daro’h intended to have his searchers take separate spirals, circling outward from the island to scour the uninhabited landscape for any sign of Nira. Designate Udru’h had made the odd suggestion that the green priest might want to avoid being found. Daro’h could not understand why. Surely she would prefer to be with her Ildiran caretakers than to remain alone—
alone
!

His fellow team members used comm systems to keep in touch as they circled over the expanse of calm water. If Nira had tried to swim from her island, she would certainly have drowned. No one could cover such a distance. If that were the case, Daro’h’s search was doomed from the beginning.

He recalled that his father had been extremely fond of the female green priest, who had come to Mijistra to read the
Saga of Seven Suns
to her potted treelings. He remembered seeing Jora’h and Nira often in the Prism Palace. But then she had vanished, apparently killed in a fire.

Now Daro’h knew it had been part of a much more complicated plot. Nira had been brought to Dobro already pregnant with the Prime Designate’s child. Had that been Jora’h’s wish, or had it all been done without his knowledge? Could Udru’h have hidden such a momentous thing from the Mage-Imperator?

The Dobro Designate had explained the need for the breeding program, and Daro’h understood that the Terran Hanseatic League must never learn what had happened to their generation ship the
Burton
. But why would the secret have been kept from the
Mage-Imperator himself
? Daro’h could imagine no justification for such an act, and it disturbed him greatly.

The fourteen scout ships followed their grid lines, and the searchers meticulously crisscrossed the dry, empty landscape. Daro’h spoke aloud to the pilot and the guard. “The green priest could have left the island months ago. She might have covered a lot of ground.”

“Then we will cover a lot of ground,” the pilot said.

After several hours, Daro’h received a message from one of his scouts. “Designate-in-waiting, we have found some interesting debris on the shore. It might be significant.”

Their ship reached the edge of the inland sea and settled next to where the other scout had landed. Four Ildiran searchers stood looking at a tumble of logs high up on the beach. In the bright sunlight Daro’h saw the remnants of dried vines that lashed the logs together. Each one of the trunks had been cut to approximately the same length.
A raft!

“She could have floated on this to land.” Daro’h glanced back at the water, saw how far up the remnants of the raft rested on the shore. “She must have dragged it up onto the beach herself.”

“Why would she do such a thing?” asked one of the searchers. “Her island was lush, and this . . . this is desolate.”

Daro’h stared at the rugged panorama that extended as far as he could see. “Who can understand a green priest? But we now know she made it this far. Continue the search.”