Dusk (49 page)

Six should have known he was vulnerable to
attack, and yet he was still charging. Six must have been gambling
on his own ability and speed to counter any attack Cyrus would have
thrown in the nanoseconds it took to cross the two meters between
them.

So Cyrus didn’t attack.

Cyrus cowered, threw his hands up, and
planted his foot as if to scurry. And then, just as Six was almost
on top of him launching his own attack, Cyrus sat up, grabbed the
middle of Six’s spear with both hands and twisted it, scooping the
blade from the dry earth, sending a shower of dirt and dust
directly at Six’s face as the blade came up in the wake of the
silt. The blade moved up through the skin next to the scar on Six’s
chest, just over his heart. Six reeled from the attack and Cyrus
spun the other end of the spear around while planting his heel into
the outside of Six’s knee—not hard enough to dislocate it, but hard
enough to send him to the ground. Six bounced when he hit the
ground. He tried to get his hands up, but by the time his body
settled, the spear tip was already at his neck.

Six sat there, wordless and huffing, as the
dust around them cleared. There was something in his eyes Cyrus
could not really place. It was not hatred, not disdain, but it
wasn’t reverence or congratulation either. But it didn’t matter.
The din of the crowd told Cyrus he had won, whether Six’s eyes
admitted it or not. Cyrus set the spear down and climbed wearily to
his own feet, while Six sat there with his blank stare of refusal.
Cyrus walked over and extended his hand, but Six huffed again with
blood trickling from the fresh, but superficial, wound on his
chest. When Cyrus did not withdraw his hand, Six slapped it away
and stood abruptly. Cyrus dropped back, throwing his hands up into
a defensive stance. From the corner of his eye he saw Tanner and
Uzziah surge forward slightly from the crowd, but Six was already
pushing his way through the mob on the opposite side. As Six
disappeared, the crowd moved toward Cyrus with looks and cheers of
wonder, all recounting their favorite parts of the contest. Someone
mentioned that if the scar did not heal, they would now have to
call him Seven, and there were several snickers from the crowd, but
they all seemed more focused on Cyrus than Six. Which was more than
Cyrus could stand. He had not come to this compound to flex his
muscle, to usurp a position in Paeryl’s van, or to abdicate the
Apostate’s champion. But their champion had called him to the
round, he had thrown down the gauntlet, and if Cyrus was going to
ask these men and women to risk their lives for him, he could not
have picked up that gauntlet and handed it back.

But Six had crossed the line and Cyrus had to
put him back on the side where he belonged. In a real fight, Cyrus
was certain he had little chance to win, but if Six’s childish
pursuit reared itself again, now Six too would wonder about the
outcome. And
that
was all Cyrus needed.

Cyrus excused himself from a flurry of back pats and
moved outside the crowd himself to find Loli, because even though
he had shown the Apostates what they needed to see, and he had
given Six more than he had asked for, he wanted to make mag-lock
certain that regardless of what Six’s problem with him and his
presence here was, that at the conclusion of any rematch Six might
educe, one of them would no longer have a problem.

Cyrus found Loli in one of the darker corners
of the crater dipping her wineskin for water. “I don’t mean to
bring it to you like this, but your people are a straightforward
people.” Cyrus was still catching his breath, but as he spoke his
words were firm. “Let your betrothed know that I only extend my
hand to a man once to have it slapped away. If you have any love
for him in your heart, tell him that if he comes at me sideways
again, I will set his six down to zero.”

Loli laughed at Cyrus’s comment and it took
him aback. “Why would he challenge you again? He saw what he wanted
to see.”

“Why would he challenge me openly in the
first place? He tried to kill me.”

“If you are not in the crematorium right now,
either he wasn’t trying to, or he couldn’t. My betrothed has many
idiosyncrasies, but imprecision in battle is not one of them.”

“Fair enough. Just seems like he’s had breach
in his keel about me since I came here. I just want to make sure
it’s over.”

Loli laughed again, “How can something that
never existed come to an end? Six issued an open challenge because
he
believed
you were what he wanted you to be, not the other
way around.”

“Maybe that’s the way youth expresses
admiration.”

“Youth? He’s always been like that—for the
180 gyres we’ve been betrothed, and the 109 before. Since he first
set foot in Avalon, he has let his emotions carry him beyond the
Miasma in that way, and kept them to himself in the other. It’s as
if diplomacy had been erased from his mind the day he watched his
parents die.”

Cyrus looked both dumfounded and
apologetic.

“You didn’t know? My father went on an
acquisition to Druvidia. He had sent Aerik and the rest of the van
back to get the grav-lev. What my father didn’t know was the reason
why the silent alarm had been so easy to circumvent was it had
already been triggered by mistake by a man who had worked in the
building during the day. The maintenance man had brought his family
to the building for evensong and to watch the dome darkening. When
the Echelon saw the van leaving, they assumed everyone on their
scan was an Apostate and they leveled the building. My father
managed to get to the basement and under some cover before the top
floors collapsed. After the dust cleared, he found Six pinned under
a support beam. He was bleeding heavily from his chest. The
Druvidian scouring crew came to search for and identify the bodies,
but Aerik and Tessla were able to rescue Six and my dad. They were,
however, too late to stop Six from finding the remains of his
parents in the rubble. They brought him back here because they felt
guilty, but mostly because the Eos could save him better than
Druvidian medicine. His wound healed, but it left the scar on his
chest. Afterward, he refused to tell anyone his name. I think it
was because it reminded him of his life before. We don’t bring
children here without their parents; the ones that have come here
due to misfortune or duress never really get over it. I think he
couldn’t deal with what he lost and he never told us his Ashan
name, so we just called him Six because of his scar. It was still a
reminder of his past, but he seemed to glom onto the name.”

“Why not his drawn name?” Cyrus sensed
another awkward moment even as the words left his mouth, but he had
to know.

“Oh,” Loli smiled again, but this time she
seemed taken somewhat aback herself, “we would never evoke
that
card.”

Cyrus felt the swelling in his chest subside.
He had not realized the fight had uplifted him to such a high
degree until he felt the pride receding as the pall of his own
ignorance overshadowed him. He could see Loli, normally unaffected,
was visibly uncomfortable, but he had to know.

“Which card?”

Loli hung her head a bit. It was less shame
than it was the weight of something much greater than Cyrus could
see. “My betrothed is the only Apostate since the exile that has
drawn the Death card.

And then, without thinking about it, it hit
him; what was 180 gyres here was close to fifty years on Earth.
When Darius had told him the Eos extended life, he had not told him
how much it had extended it. Humility washed over him, forcing out
the shame of his own ignorance. “I sincerely want to apologize for
bringing this to you like this,” they weren’t the best words, but
they were all he was left with.

“Not necessary. How could you know?” Loli
smiled again, this time naturally.

Cyrus wanted to say something else, but he
simply nodded and took his leave.

When Cyrus returned to the Forum, he found a
thin, silver, double-handled vase sitting in the center of the
floor. At first he had not noticed it, but it did not take long for
him to realize what it was. It was the Amphiphoreus—the spoils of
the Hundred Hands champion. Cyrus did not know how to feel about
this quiet concession, but it was a quiet concession indeed; and
most importantly, it meant that despite all his harrumphing, Six
had gotten the message.

• • • • •

Tanner sat working a small piece of limestone
with a knife. There were other pieces of limestone, in two
different colors, laid about him as he worked. He looked up briefly
as Cyrus approached and then went back to his work.

“What are you building?” Cyrus asked.

Tanner worked diligently at the piece of rock
in his hand, “I promised Fenrir I would teach him to play chess, so
I’m making a chess set.”

“I know you’re a purist and all, but Jang and
Darius could probably throw a hologram together in the time it took
you to ask them.” As the words leaving his mouth resonated in the
air, Cyrus saw the folly in them.

Tanner pored over his carving as he spoke,
and it was hard to hear his voice over the scraping, “Have you
noticed how melancholy the inside of the compound feels now? And
how no matter what burden has nested in your head, the sun always
brings some sense of levity. At first I thought I imagined it, but
look at these people. They live in conditions we would have called
squalid. Conditions we might have experienced our first year, but
we would have long since overcome by now. And yet, they don’t just
accept it, they relish it. I sit here, carving this bishop out of
the earth they live on, and I can’t help but see exactly how far
east of Eden we have gone.”

Everything about Tanner had always been
corporeal. He was a man that had been born three thousand years too
late and the fervor that guided his hands in the carving of the
stylus-tip head of the chess piece was his defiance of the sterile,
automated world that imposed itself upon him.

Cyrus sat next to Tanner and picked up the
spare knife sitting next to the pile of rocks. “Well, I may as well
help out.”

Tanner set his own knife down and picked up
one of the larger, browner stones. “I could use another king,” he
said as he handed over the rock.

Cyrus took it from him wordlessly and began
carving himself.

• • • • •

Jang and Toutopolus worked with Doree of
Sevens and Thendyr of Wands to configure a stand-alone gravity
drive to the Xerxes unit so that Darius could control all the
parameters needed for training in the practice room. If everything
went as he expected, they would be able to set the room to mimic
anything from three Gs to the gravity of Earth, or even to practice
in zero G. That was specifically why Tanner had requested it. He
had facilitated some zero-G training on Eros, and he wanted to
institute some here just as a precaution. He and Cyrus had also set
a regimen for increasing the gravity to closer to Earth specs for
endurance and agility drills because training in Earth’s gravity on
the Paracelsus had made a difference in the escape. It had been too
dangerous to attempt to have a separate gravity parameter for any
part of the Paracelsus during travel, but the specs that Cyrus and
Milliken had specified for the volume and the material strength of
the room itself were the only criteria Jang had to worry about
here.

And it wasn’t much of a worry at all. For
such simple people, Doree and Thendyr internalized Jang’s requests
very quickly, and rarely had to have anything, even the more
complicated ideas, explained to them more than twice. When Jang did
have to explain something again, it was usually because of the
language barrier. Many of the ideas from Earth didn’t translate
well in the Apostate’s dialect and vice-versa, but the barrier
never held up for long. And now, as Jang worked to calibrate the
Xerxes unit to the specs Cyrus had set, it seemed to really not
matter at all. Everything was foreign to everyone, and it was
exhilarating having to figure out some way around some new problem
every day—especially with Doree’s help. Fenrir and Aerik spent most
of the time in the forge building materials Tanner had requested.
And Thendyr spent a lot of time learning planetary physics from
Cyrus, so that gave Jang and Doree a great deal of time alone. Jang
had initially thought it impossible to want to spend this much time
around one individual woman, but until now, he had rarely noticed.
It was when Doree was not there, or when there was no tedious task
like trying to phreak the Echelon comm-sat, that Jang would feel
the drain of being away from sunlight that Cyrus had warned him
about, and it was hard to convince himself that it was not largely
due to the absence of Doree rather than his new biological
augmentation.

Jang moved to connect the cable leading to
the control unit that would remotely control the gravity drive, and
he noticed a strange discoloration at the back of the Xerxes unit
precisely where the neural processor was housed. He froze in place,
horrified, thinking backward through his movements for the last
hour, trying to figure out what he could have done to burn out the
unit. Then, when the Darius avatar appeared behind him to peer over
his shoulder, he realized that the unit was still functioning, and
that it was not a burn mark at all. The back of the unit housing
had been caved in slightly, and what he was seeing now was a large
cluster of cracks in the paint.

“What is that?” the Darius avatar asked.

“I’m not sure,” Jang said, plugging in the
cable and looking closer at the aberration, “It looks like someone
kicked it, but the dent is too subtle and the cracks are much too
uniform.”

“Well, unless you or my father kicked it, I
don’t know who would have. No human being has set foot in this room
for hundreds of Earth years other than you guys.”