A Prison Unsought (56 page)

His ears popped as the transtube approached its destination
4.5 kilometers above the interior surface of Ares. The pod slowed. The interior
flooded with yellow light warning of null-gee conditions, and his stomach
lurched as weight diminished. Brandon grabbed the hold-ons as the pod stopped,
and he swung himself out, pausing long enough to apply the affinity dyplast to
his feet at one of the dispensers outside the portal.

Then he looked up.

Shock hit with more impact than his first sight of the
interior of Granny Chang’s. He was looking along the spin axis, between the
massive trefoil of girders and cables supporting the diffusers, a complex
tracery of alloy and dyplast with the nuller’s palace—a confusion of vitrine
bubbles glinting polychrome in the light of the night-dimmed diffusers—perched
dead center like a spider in its web. A small, swiftly moving blot resolved
into the form of a brightly decorated gee-flat, like one of the legendary
flying carpets of Lost Earth.

He stepped onto it and it accelerated toward Tate Kaga’s
palace with the characteristic motionless feel of all geeplane devices. Far
below the Enclave lake glimmered, a dark blot reflecting the lights above it.

He sent a silent apology to Vannis. He regretted leaving her
to cope with the mess of her crashed barge and ruined plot.
And Vahn will probably try to hold her
against my return,
he thought,
but
that will protect her from the Harkatsus cabal’s wrath.

The gee-flat slowed to a stop. He grabbed a cable and
propelled himself into Tate Kaga’s domicile.

The interior matched the exterior: a confusion of bubbles
and cables and platforms at all angles, more disorienting even than the Ascha
Gardens. Plants and
objets d’art
bound
the whole into pleasing patterns. A sudden peeping announced a cloud of
brightly colored, bullet-shaped creatures swirling around the edge of a bubble
to dance around his head.

They were tiny birds, a rainbow of colors, their wings
flicking out only to change direction, then folding back against their bodies
until the next maneuver. Their motions were angular, almost insect-like,
completely unlike the flight of the birds he knew from home.

The nuller appeared, descending at a dizzying angle from
somewhere overhead, his colorful robes fluttering. He braked to a stop by
slapping at the cables along his path as he approached, his oversized hands and
feet evoking a series of plangent tones from them that echoed weirdly off the
complex surfaces all around. He brought with him a scent of wood-smoke and
tangy herbs.

Tate Kaga was no longer in his bubble. In its absence, his
movements displayed a natural grace that underscored his centuries of life in
free-fall, and made him seem both alien and human at once. The birds eddied in
a complexity of patterns, surrounding Tate Kaga in a halo of chirping life and
color as he stopped right before Brandon, upside down, his wrinkled face
evocative of soundless amusement.

“Ho! It is the Young Arkad,” the
ancient wheezed. “You know that someone among your Wicked Douloi is about to
tweak your tail.” He pointed up at his crotch.

“I know,” Brandon said, suppressing
a laugh. “You said in your privacy that Vi’ya asked for me?”

“She did not ask for you. She
mentioned your name. Or was it the name of your grandfathers?”

Tate Kaga spun himself around, orienting in the same
direction Brandon stood. Brandon knew it was not belated politeness, but an
oblique challenge: he was being assessed.

He was used to being assessed, usually as a possible pawn in
everyone else’s game, occasionally as a guess at when he might initiate his own
game.
And that will be very soon indeed:
if not within the law, then without it.

“So why did you send for me?” he asked.

“Why did you come?”

“Curiosity.”

Tate Kaga laughed, calling forth another series of tones
from the cables nearby as he slapped himself into a sideways spin. “Hau! And
curiosity is why I called you!” The nuller suddenly launched himself away. “She
lies ahead. Come.”

Brandon pushed off, diving after the old man.

At the opening indicated, Brandon grabbed a cable to stop,
looking in at the woman floating so still in the center of a spherical room,
amid a wrack of small bubbles hanging motionless at random intervals throughout
the space. Below, near the bottom of the room, floated a long, wide platform,
carpeted in living moss spangled with small yellow flowers. Set in the walls, polygonal
viewscreens of various sizes and shapes showed a variety of ever-changing
scenes: deep space, noon-colored skies with swiftly moving clouds, forests,
barren dunes, and twisted rock formations.

Vi’ya’s long hands lay
loose, and her night-black hair, usually smoothed back and controlled, pooled
in shadow about her. As Brandon watched, her eyelids lifted. She gazed without
comprehension into the space above her.

Markham’s mate. Why?

Tate Kaga was gone. Grabbing the door frame, Brandon pushed
himself through—and though he touched no controls, the door slid shut behind
him.

Vi’ya had only a moment’s warning.

Like the first brilliant rays glowing past the viewports as
the ship turns toward a sun, she felt Brandon’s emotional signature.

She had enough warning to tighten the shields against the
full force of radiation before he appeared in front of her, his tunic molded
carelessly to his body, his hair floating about his head. It looked like silk.

“We have a few minutes,” he said,
“without an audience loud in its partisanship, or outrage, so—” He pushed off
slowly from the wall and withdrew one of his hands from his tunic pocket. “I
wanted to return this to you.”

He held out the large tear-shaped gem—the Stone of
Prometheus—from the Ivory Hall in Arthelion’s Palace Major.

“It was a gift,” he said, when she
did not take it.

And when she still did not move, he grabbed one of the
little bubbles and used it to change his own direction, coming nearer to her.
Now she could hear his breathing, the rustle of cloth as he reached to lay the
stone in her hand.

She kept her palm flat. His sleeve brushed lightly against
the inside of her wrist as his fingers laid the stone in her hand. She closed
her fist around the stone as its armor of light crept up her arm, and turned
away, her wrist falling to scour away his touch against the rough weave of her
clothing, the movement strong enough to set her to spinning.

Pain lanced through her head; an afterimage of the damned
hyperwave spun through her mind, echoed from far away by Ivard and the Kelly.
Of the Eya’a there was no trace. She forced the image away—and grabbed hold of
a bubble to steady herself so she could find an exit.

“Wait.”

Her head turned, not to hear what he said so much as to
avoid a second physical trespass.

“Did you enjoy the concert?” he
asked.

One had to look somewhere. She opened her hand, and watched
the remarkable transformations taking place as the colors bloomed out of the
stone, fluorescing the polychrome armor steadily toward her shoulder.

“It seemed to accomplish its
purpose,” she said.

It was impossible to close him out completely. The warmth in
the light voice had said:
Did you enjoy
my gift?

Now the warmth withdrew, his face closing behind the mask of
polite blandness that one so easily misconstrued. The emotions, unfortunately,
did not barrier themselves, shifting instead into a mesmerizing blend with
question overriding, and ordinary human hurt underneath.

“What purpose?” he asked.

She lifted the stone, its chain writhing like a snake
through the air. She held it up against a hexagonal view of the cold stars of
space. The colors in the stone swiftly altered through blue, then indigo, and
then faded, leaving diamond clarity. “You used Markham to slap the faces of
your nick lords,” she said. “And it seems to have worked.”

He made a gesture of denial, his emotions altering with a
complexity dizzying in its intensity. “No,” he said. “They designed that
message themselves, because they arrived looking for it. I gave them Markham’s
music, which evoked in each what was most important to him. Or her,” he added
softly. “Am I right?”

The urge to strike out in defense was very nearly
overwhelming. “If you wish to be thanked, then I thank you.” If surliness would
not end this interview, perhaps pettiness would.

He did not move, or speak, but she felt his recoil—and it
still left questions. He would not go away. He would not go away, and this time
there would be no interruptions to save her.

“Why—” He spread his hands. “—won’t
you talk to me?”

She altered her
position, all her Dol’jharian instincts awakening. It was time to flee—

Or to fight.

“You’re afraid,” he said in wonder.

She looked up once, briefly, a flicker from night-black
eyes.

Her anger impacted him, a blow to the spirit, but he went
on. “Not the clean fear of battle. You have no fear of battle. I’ve seen you
deliberately shoot people down, and just as coldly risk being shot at. But
that’s an admirable trait in a Dol’jharian, isn’t it? To deal death without
emotion?”

She gritted her teeth.

“No answer?” He slung himself
nearer, slapping at bubbles to circle around her. “Afraid to answer?”

She looked away, toward what might be the exit. Before the
fine black hair floated in a swooping drift to shadow her face he saw a line of
tension across her brow.

“Why?” he asked, and then fired a
shot at a venture. “What could Markham have said about me to provoke such a
response?”

A sharp lift to her chin, one hand flexing: his shot had
struck home.

“Nothing,” she said. Looking away,
“Where is the old—”

“You
are
afraid,” he repeated, and the amusement gathered into a
breathless laugh. “You’re afraid of my title?” He spread his hands, laughter breaking
his voice. “Of all the people on this station, you. The tough nihilist
Dol’jharian escaped slave, cringing away from a crown like any fawning
sycophant begging for a place in the train—”

Her hand cut through the air, straight-edged as a knife,
toward his face.

To block her would probably break his arm; he pulled himself
aside, using a high-level kinesic to deflect the blow. Force spun her around,
and she struck again, still with an open hand, but with all her considerable
strength.

“Why?” he asked again, still
laughing.

But she was beyond talk. He read death in the wide black
eyes, as once more she struck.

This time he moved close and used her own weight against
her, whirling her around. She flung out arms and legs, no stranger to fighting
in free-fall, waiting until she had drifted against a wall, and gathered herself
for a launch.

Over the years, enforced leisure had engendered in him a
habit of self-appraisal. He recognized, with dispassionate amusement, the twist
in his psyche that made seduction a game: allurement, for him, usually came out
of indifference, or scorn, and now out of hatred.

Quick as a moth to the flame, he launched first, and buried
his fingers in Markham’s lover’s hair, and kissed her.

It was the first time they had touched; the effect was terrifying
in its intensity. Lightning shot across his vision as her hand crashed across
his mouth, and then again when his head hit a wall. She bounced against the
opposite wall, and finding a console by her hand, she struck the gravs with a
fist.

They slammed onto the moss-covered platform, Brandon first, the
sharp herbal scent of crushed greenery rising around him. Then she dropped on
him, her strength as paralyzing as the electric bombardment of rage-hot desire.
His vision cleared and he looked up into her teeth-bared feral grin, the
killing focus of her eyes, framed by the black velvet fall of her hair.

Her fingers closed on his neck, but he lay unmoving, making
no effort to defend himself. The palpable danger ignited his own desire; he saw
its effect in the sweat beads across her forehead, and as her fingers found his
pulse and slowly, slowly, deepened their pressure, he smiled right up into her
hell-hot gaze.

“Tell me,” he gasped through
rapidly numbing lips, his voice unsteady with hilarity, “after they bunny, do
Dol’jharians gift their lovers with a new set of teeth?”

Her eyes widened, then she threw her head back and laughed,
the wheezing, abandoned laugh of someone who is beyond calculation or endeavor,
who has only self-mockery left.

The transformation took the last of his breath away:
released at last from the mask of cold control and its repelling overlay of
anger, her beauty was all the more stunning for being totally free of artifice.

He lifted his hands then, his fingers spread, and ran them
through the long black hair, warm next to her skin, cool at the ends. She
shuddered, her strong hands still around his throat, but still and tense, and
when he gripped her shoulders and pulled her to him, the shock of unleashed
passion radiated through him from skull to heels.

Neither spoke: words, her armor, she abandoned in challenge;
language, his camouflage, he deliberately stripped away, leaving them both
exposed to the intensifying scale of sensory harmonics.

They were exactly of a size. Knee, hip, breast, mouth, fit
like bone into socket. Experienced in the arts of passion, he played upon her
senses while the antiphonal descant of her psychic gift—her pleasure amplified
by his, his echoing in hers—beat at them both until the crescendo, prolonged
and prolonged, encompassed them both.

The intensity obliterated suns and stars, then spiraled them
down into existence once again. It was he, the non-psychic, who first regained
the here and now, and all its attendant dynamics.