Glory Season (87 page)

“I can’t say much about the venture,” the examiner had said, referring to the enterprise her clan was funding. “Except that it involves transport and communications, using improved traditional techniques.” Brill’s smile was thin, wry. “Our clan likes anything that lets us spread ourselves out thinner.”

“So it doesn’t have to do with the Former, or the space launcher?”

Brill’s green eyes had flashed. “What gave you that idea? Oh. Because I was with Iolanthe and the Pinniped, that night. No, I only came along to be introduced. As for the Jellicoe finds, those are sealed by Council orders.” Brill
lifted her satchel. “You must have known there was no other prospect. A dragon’s inertia is not shifted by yanking its tail.”

Aware of the Persim clone trailing nearby, Maia had asked one final question at the door. “I still can’t figure how you knew about our visit to the Lamatia bone room. The Lamai never found out, did they?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then you must’ve spoken to Le—”

“Don’t make assumptions,” the older woman had cut in. Then, after a beat, she held out her hand. “Good luck, Maia. I hope we meet again.”

It wasn’t hard to interpret Brill’s meaning.
I hope we meet again … if you survive.

Those words came to mind as the carriage bore Maia and Odo by the marble portico of Council House. Fewer demonstrators held banners, which hung limper than ever. There was no sign of Naroin or her father.

The strike is failing
, Maia sensed. Even if it were still active on the coast, how could loosely organized men overcome great clans and win back things lost ages before living memory? What did ancient Guardians, or the Great Former, mean to the average seaman, anyway? How long can passion be maintained over an abstract grievance, nearly a thousand years old?

Something unsettling occurred to Maia. Brill’s examination had covered many of the skills needed by the pilot or navigator of a ship. Might it be part of a scheme to recruit
strike breakers
? There were enough women sailors to staff some freighters, after all. Without officers, those ships would soon founder, but what if women were found as replacements on the quarterdeck, as well?

I’d refuse
, Maia vowed.
Even if it turned out to be the one thing I was born to do, I could never help deprive men of their one niche, their one place of pride in the world. The Perkinite solution would be more merciful.

She knew she was leaping to conclusions. The situation was making her paranoid and depressed.

Watching the faltering demonstration, she saw Odo smile.

The next day, the heavens opened and there was no ride in the park. Maia tried to read, but the rain turned her thoughts to Renna. Strangely, she found it hard to picture his face.
Eventually, he would have gone away, anyway
, she told herself.
You never would have had anything lasting together.

Was her heart hardening? No, she still mourned her friend, and would always. But she owed duty to the living. To Leie. And she missed Brod terribly.

That night, Maia woke to words in the hallway. She heard passing footsteps, and shadows briefly occulted the line of light under her door.

“… I
knew
it couldn’t last!”

“It’s not over, yet,” commented a more-cautious voice.

“You saw the reports! The vrilly lugs’ll accept the token offer and be happy about it. We’ll be moving cargo well before spring!”

The words and footsteps receded. Maia threw off the covers and hurried to the door in her nightgown, in time to see three figures round a far corner—all Persims, ranging from early to late middle age. After a moment’s temptation to follow, Maia turned and headed the way they had come, her bare feet silent on the hand-woven carpet. No guards were stationed to keep her prisoner anymore. Either they felt sure of their hold over her, or cared less what she did.

Her way lay past the main foyer of this wing and into the next, where a staircase led up to an ancient tower. Voices drew near, descending. Maia ducked into shadows as another pair of Persim entered view.

“… not sure I like sacrificing so many to the courts, dammit.”

“Ten is the least the Reeces say’ll pass. Sometimes you must trust your lawyer clan.”

“I suppose. What a farce, though. Especially when we’ve won!”

“Mm. Hard on those going down. Glad it won’t be me.”

The pair turned past Maia, the second voice continuing with a sigh. “Clan and cause, that’s what matters. Let the law have its …”

When the way was clear, Maia hurried up the stairs the two had just vacated. The first landing was dim, and she felt sure her goal lay higher. From her room, she had watched a light burn many times, accompanied by reverberations of tense argument. Tonight there had been jubilation.

Three levels up, an open set of doors faced the landing. An electric bulb burned under a parchment lampshade, casting shadows across towering bookshelves. An ornate wooden table lay strewn with papers, surrounded by brass-studded leather chairs in unseemly disorder. Presumably, the mess would be cleaned up in the morning.

Maia entered hesitantly. It was a more impressive room, by her prejudices, than the ornate opera house. She yearned for the volumes lining the walls, but headed first for the detritus of the adjourned meeting, uncrumpling bits of scrap paper, poking through sheets apparently torn out of ledgers and covered with scribbled accounts … until she found something more easily interpreted. Another newspaper, complete this time.

Maia skimmed ahead.

This explained some of what she had overheard. The good news was that even the winners in the political struggle, Odo’s side, could not completely co-opt the courts. Public servants were enforcing the law, by narrow Stratoin standards.

Yet ironies abounded. The law emphasized deeds by
individuals.
That might have made sense back in the Phylum,
but here, actions were often dictated by groups of clans. As in elections, the law pretended universal rights, while securing the interests of powerful houses.

There was another article.

So Brill was right. The men and their allies couldn’t fight inertia, the tendency of all things Stratoin to swing back toward equilibrium. The guilds had won a token concession or two—Maia felt especially glad that Renna would be honored—and Odo’s side in the struggle might have to sacrifice a few members. Nevertheless, Jellicoe was restored to its old wardens, who would now quietly resume their deadly exercises, practicing to blow up great, unarmed ships of snow.

Maia glanced at a photograph accompanying the article.

Commodores and Investors Discuss New Venture
, the caption read.

Pictured were several sailors dressed in officers’ braid,
looking on as three women showed them a model ship. Maia bent to look closer, and stared. “Well I’ll be …”

One of the women in the photo was a younger version of Brill Upsala, eagerness lighting her eyes like fire. The sleek ship was of no design Maia knew, lacking sails or smokestacks. Then she inhaled sharply.

It was, in fact, a zep’lin.

Is that the “auxiliary vessel” they’re talking about? But that would mean—

A voice came out of nowhere.

“So. Always one to show initiative, I see.”

Maia swiveled catlike, arms spread wide. Behind the door, in a dim corner of the room, a solitary figure lay slumped in a plush chair, clutching a cigar. A long ash drooped from the smoldering end.

“Too bad that initiative won’t take you anywhere but the grave.”

“
You’re
the one that’s going to feed the dragon, Odo,” Maia said with satisfaction. “Your clan’s dumping you to buy off the law.”

The elderly Persim glared, then nodded. “We’re taught to consider ourselves cells in a greater body.…” She paused. “I never considered, till now … what if a cell doesn’t
want
to be sacrificed for the smuggy whole?”

“Big news, Odo. You’re human. Deep down, you’re just like a var. Unique.”

Odo shrugged aside the insult. “Another time, I might have
hired
you, bright summer child. And left a diary warning our great-granddaughters to betray your heirs. Now I’ll settle for warmer revenge—taking you with me to the dragon.”

Maia fell back a step. “You … don’t need me anymore. Or Leie or Brod.”

“True. In fact, they have already been released to the Nitocris. Their vessel docks in less than a week.”

Maia’s heart leaped at the news. But Odo went on before she could react.

“Normally, I’d let you go as well, and watch with pleasure as your fancy friends all fall away, hedging their promises, leaving you with a tiny apartment and job, and vague tales to tell one winter child—about when you rubbed elbows with the mighty.

“But I won’t be around for that bliss, so I’ll have another. The Persim owe me a favor!”

Maia whispered. “You hate me. Why?”

“Truth?” Odo answered in a low, harsh voice. “Jealousy of the hearth, varling. For what you had, but I could not.”

Maia stared silently.

“I knew him,” Odo went on. “Virile, summer-rampant in frost season, yet with the self-control of a priestess. I thought vicarious joy would suffice, by setting him up at Beller House, with both Bellers and my younger siblings. Yet my soul stayed empty! The alien wakened in me a sick envy of my own sisters!” Odo leaned forward, her eyes loathing, “He never touched you, yet he was and remains yours. That, my rutty little virgin, is why I’ll have a price from my Lysos-cursed clan, which I served all my wasted life. Your company in hell.”

The words were meant to be chilling. But in trying to terrify, Odo had instead given Maia a gift more precious than she knew.

 … he was and remains yours …

Maia’s shoulders squared and her head lifted as she gave Odo a final look of pity that clearly seared. Then she simply turned away.

“Don’t try to leave!” Odo called after her. “The guards have been told.…”

Odo’s voice trailed off as Maia left the muted room and its bitter occupant. She descended the drafty stairway, but instead of turning toward her room, she continued
down one more level to the ground floor, and then crossed a wide, dimly lit atrium beneath statues depicting several dozen identical, joyless visages. She pulled the handle of an enormous door, which opened slowly, massively.

Cool garden air washed her face, cleansing foul odors of smoke and wrath. Maia stepped onto a wide gravel drive and looked up at the sky. Winter constellations glittered, save where the luminous dome of the Great Temple cast a bright halo, just over the next rise. City lights sprawled below the acropolis, along both banks of a black ribbon of river crisscrossed by many bridges.

The driveway dropped gently through an open park, then past a grove of ancient, Earth-stock trees, ending at last with a wrought-iron gate set in a high wall. Maia approached without stealth. A liveried sentry stepped out of the guard booth, offering a slight, quizzical bow.

“Can I help you, miss?” the stocky, well-muscled woman asked.

“I’m leaving.”

The guard shook her head. “Dunno, miss. It’s awfully—”

“Do you have orders to stop me?”

“Uh … not since a few days ago. But—”

“Then kindly do not stand between another daughter of Stratos and her rights.”

It was an invocation she recalled from a var-trash novel, which seemed ironically apropos. The keeper shifted uncertainly from foot to foot, and finally shuffled to the gate. As it swung open, Maia thanked the attendant and stepped through, arriving on a strange street, in a strange city, barefoot in the dead of night.

Of course Persim Clan wanted it this way. She was no longer needed, an embarrassment, in fact. But murder was risky. What if it restoked the waning sailors’ strike? What if her disappearance prodded the lazy machinery of the law past some genteel threshold of tolerance? This way,
the Persims might even solve their predicament in Odo, who had outlived her usefulness to the clan. Maia’s escape might provoke that broken piece of the hive to end things neatly, skirting a degrading ritual of sentencing and punishment.

I’m still being used
, Maia knew.
But I’m learning, choosing those uses with open eyes.

And now … what will I choose?

Not to be the founder of some immortal dynasty, that much she knew. A home and children were still fond hopes, as was warmth of the heart and hearth. But not that way. Not by the cool, passionless rhythms of Stratos. If Leie chose that route, good luck to her. Maia’s twin was smart enough to start a clan, with or without her. But Maia’s own goals went beyond all that now.