Ties of Power (Trade Pact Universe)

Table of Contents

 

MORGAN BREATHED A NAME IN STARTLED RECOGNITION.

“Rael . . . ?”

Faster than reflex, Morgan drew and aimed the weapon he’d tardily begun to carry, moving to put himself between the Clanswoman and the hut containing Sira. Suddenly, everything made a kind of terrible sense: Barac’s arrival to drive Sira from safety and time the attack, and now Rael’s to check on its result. The two members of the Clan Morgan halfway trusted, the trust a key to unlock their defenses. His mouth tightened as Rael became solid, her beautiful face turning ashen as she saw his welcome.

“What is the meaning of this, Human?” she demanded, her voice imperious. “Where is Sira?” Under the question, Morgan felt the lash of Rael’s power as she sought her own answers, that power glancing from his shielding with a lack of success she acknowledged with a measuring stare and a raised brow. Rael took a step toward him, choosing to disregard the weapon aimed at her, her attention now on the hut. “What keeps me out?” she asked, head tilted as though she’d finally found the real puzzle.

Before Morgan could answer, the air was shattered by a scream. Forgetting Rael, he turned and ran toward the hut, landing right in the arms of the villagers placed there as guards. He struggled frantically. Then, a second scream, unheard, burst through his mind. Morgan!

The Finest in DAW Science Fiction
from JULIE E. CZERNEDA:
BEHOLDER’S EYE
The Trade Pact Universe:
A THOUSAND WORDS FOR STRANGER (#1)
TIES OF POWER (#2)

Copyright © 1999 by Julie E. Czerneda.

eISBN : 978-1-101-17757-0

 

 

 

 

 

First Printing, October, 1999

S.A.

For Everett Norman Starink

Hi, Dad. I’m going to blame you for a lot of things, starting with my sense of honor, my self-worth, and my insatiable curiosity about the world. Then there’s that tendency, surely hereditary, to save everything interesting.

I suspect it’s also your fault that I never doubted myself or my dreams, since I knew you would be proud no matter what. Thank you for all your support, love, and encouragement, as well as the way you still wiggle your ears like a true elf.

Love, your Julibeth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Book three! I’ve noticed one difference already—I need to thank more people each time, which is a truly wonderful problem. For those who aren’t listed here, please understand the lack is space and not my most sincere gratitude.

If my first effort at a sequel reads well, I give full credit to these hardy souls. Any mistakes or omissions are mine. Thank you, Sheila Gilbert, for unerringly spotting the flaws. Thank you, Merilyn Vyse, for volunteering to read the manuscript even after you learned this meant hundreds of scribbled sheets of paper. And a very special thanks to my alpha reader, Roxanne BB Hubbard, who somehow caught just about everything possible, including all those interesting words spell check leaves behind!

I’d also like to thank my fans and readers for all those “made my day” moments this past year. It means a great deal to me to find out my stories and characters have given you pleasure.

My thanks to the great folks at DAW Books, including Sean, Debra, and Amy. I’d like to thank Luis Royo for making each cover even better than the last. And thank you, Ellen Asher, for your kind words and the beautiful hardcovers from the SFBC.

I’d also like to express my warm appreciation to these individuals for their tremendous support and interest: Roberte Fournier, Mark Lefebvre, Stephen Christian, Patti Vickers, Ann (Pat) Methe, Mark Askwith, Don Wright, John Rose, Raymond Alexan der, Nicky Blum, Dave Switzer, James Schellenberg, John Kahane, Peter Halasz, and Mici Gold.

Thanks, Jennifer and Scott, for allowing me to bend the family schedule around writing and signings. You are the best.

And thanks to my fly guy. Roger, this is far too much fun for one person—which is why I’m so happy to share it all with you!

PRELUDE

MEMORIES and socks.

Barac sud Sarc, Third Level Adept and former First Scout of the Clan, shook his head as he added the holocube image of his murdered brother Kurr to the clothes already in the travel case. Memories, indeed.

I wondered when you would go, the words formed in his mind, the touch soft and familiar.

“First Chosen,” Barac acknowledged out loud, continuing to pack. “Come in—” He triggered the locking mechanism on the door with a thought.

His mother entered, her movements gracious despite the pain he could sense rippling the unseen M’hir between them. The M’hir. Barac swallowed, suddenly unsure how long it would be before he could touch another of his kind this way. Clan philosophers debated if the M’hir had existed before Clan thought, some believing it to have been an emptiness waiting to be filled with Clan power, others arguing it was a construct of Clan minds and not truly a place at all. Like most, Barac merely accepted that every Clan mind existed in part there, in that nothingness through which Clan thoughts and form could pass at will. It was the medium making them one, regardless of strength or ability. Or dispute.

Barac studied his mother’s face, feeling as though he had to memorize every detail: the delicately pale skin and fine bone structure he saw in every mirror, the dark eyes and generous mouth edged by laughter lines.

Not at this moment, however. “Where will you go?” she asked calmly enough, aloud. It was her right to question his intentions— not as his mother, Clan family structure was almost nonexistent—but as Enora, First Chosen of the House of sud Sarc.

Barac tossed an old coat on the lopsided pile of discards covering his bed and some of the floor. “Must be time to move on,” he commented instead of answering directly. “Look at all this junk!”

“You could stay.”

He hesitated in the midst of closing the final bag, then made his decision. He turned to face her. “If you knew what I do, First Chosen, you’d send me yourself.”

Enora frowned, taking a step closer to her son. Her elegant hand waved in a complex gesture, as if drawing threads from the air. “What are you talking about, Barac? Why would I—?”

Barac shook his head. It’s time you saw the Clan Council as I do, he sent. He opened his thoughts to hers, using his greater strength to forge the gentlest of links with her ordered mind, then drew her into his memories, letting Enora relive with him events of which she’d only been told. And, as the Clan knew well, words were the easiest way to lie.

It didn’t take long. Barac withdrew, soberly watching his mother as she groped one-handed for a chair’s back, oriented herself, then sank down into it slowly. “Sira—” she whispered, shying from the intimacy of mind touch as she sought to control her emotional response. “A lawbreaker. She did all this, herself ?”

Barac waited, knowing what his mother struggled to reconcile. Enora had been a Chooser herself, once, as all Clan females were.

Choosers possessed the Power-of-Choice, an uncontrollable force within themselves that instinctively tested the strength of unChosen males within the M’hir. Win or draw, and the Joining formed, a permanent connection between a pair through that other space, regardless of distance, severed only by death. The Chosen female Commenced, her body altering to its reproductive state.

Losing males were rejected. A Chooser could be patient, since their bodies, untouched by physiological aging, would wait as long as necessary for the moment of Choice.

But with each generation, the Power-of-Choice had become stronger, more dangerous. The Clan Council, hungry to increase the abilities of the Clan, hastened the process by preselecting the strongest male candidates for Choice. After all, to the Clan, power was everything: status, currency, and life.

It took only two generations for Choosers to be born who were powerful enough to kill weaker males during the Test. Fewer and fewer Joinings were successful. The inevitable result? The birth of Sira di Sarc, a Chooser so powerful, so potent, that no male could survive her testing.

Barac’s memory of Sira carried the taste of longing, the overwhelming desire any unChosen felt for such power, and a self-preserving dose of fear. Yet he knew the person as well as the legend: outwardly fragile and ordinary, an easily-overlooked shadow with wide-set gray eyes and solemn expression; inwardly, self-willed and brilliant, brimming with power awaiting release.

Sira had willingly gone into seclusion to protect the unChosen. She had used the years of her isolation to study the population dynamics of her species. She was given access to the old records, from the time when the M’hiray—the 730 individuals possessing the mutation allowing them to use the M’hir—had been forced to leave the Clan Homeworld during the Stratification of their species. It didn’t take her long to discover that not only were the M’hiray in trouble, her own existence, a female who could not find a mate of her kind, meant that extinction was close at hand. She proposed alternatives, the most promising being to test the Power-of-Choice against the mind of another telepathic species, such as a Human. The subject might die, but perhaps the Chooser would Commence and become reproductive without risking more Clan lives.