her instruments 03 - laisrathera (33 page)

The first day was bad. Somehow the second was worse, because they knew how little there would be to find. It was sometime into that afternoon that Reese straightened, trying to work the kinks out of her back, and heard a familiar voice say, “I pray you’re not afraid of the consequences.”

She turned to the figure wrapped once again in a gray coat, if cleaner than it had been when she’d seen it last. “I thought you’d be up on the ship still.”

Val smiled, but there was no humor in it at all. “The four-legged doctor yonder judged I am well enough and sent me away. Particularly once I started hovering over Belinor.”

“And Belinor.…”

“Will be fine,” Val said, softly. “But he has paid bitter coin for his defiance.”

Reese glanced at him. “Like some other priest I know.”

“Like some other, yes.”

Reese nodded, surveying the mess. “So. Consequences of what?”

“Of this.”

“I’d be more afraid if there weren’t consequences for this,” Reese said, but Val shook his head.

“You have seen your man kill yet?”

Thinking of the fight in Surapinet’s compound, Reese said, “Yes.”

“In cold blood.”

That gave her pause. “No.”

Val nodded. “He won’t be the same man afterwards, in every way but one.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one that counts.”

Reese scowled at him. “I thought you were more of a straight-talker than most Eldritch.”

Val chuckled softly, walking past her. “I am more of a straight-talker than most Eldritch. Most priests, now….”

She sighed and trudged after him.

By the end of that day all that could be excavated of the remains of Jisiensire’s country seat had been. They had found no survivors, and almost no corpses either: the fire at the estate had been fueled with too much eagerness to leave much of anything behind. What few bodies they did find were in pieces. Reese guessed the new esophagus Hirianthial had sewn into her had given her some unexpected resilience because she didn’t vomit the way a lot of the unfortunates working alongside her did. She was guessing they were able to think of the pieces as parts of actual people. Reese was having trouble with that: it was so horrible that some part of her was convinced what she was seeing were props, bits of molded plastic made to look like someone’s arm or hip.

Even knowing they were real, she didn’t do a whole lot to convince herself otherwise. Better to keep moving than to cripple herself when there was so much still to be done.

Afterwards, the team split into smaller groups and went by Pad to the two separate sites Soly had pinpointed in her orbital scans. These were the villages Athanesin had razed, and here they found bodies, and the looks on the faces of the dead….

That night, Reese took a break in a field far enough from the edge of the village to smell something besides the memory of ash in the air. She didn’t say anything when the twins joined her, or when she ended up with one head on each of her shoulders. It kept her warm, having them close. They didn’t talk, which for them was strange, and their bodies were slack with more than exhaustion. Depression, she thought, and couldn’t blame them.

Bryer joined them not long after, bringing a sticklight that left a trail of golden luminance in the purple twilight. That the Phoenix didn’t say anything as he crouched across from them didn’t surprise her either, except he broke his silence without being prodded.

“There will be a killing for this.”

“Angels, I hope so,” Sascha muttered.

“I know,” Reese said to the Phoenix. “And yes, I know he’s going to be the one to do it. I won’t take that away from him. That was his family, his life, the people he took care of, the way you people have insisted I take care of you.”

A quiet. Irine spoke into it. “But?”

“But it’s a bleeding army of four hundred people, and they’ve all got modern weapons,” Reese said. “I don’t want him to die.”

“I’m guessing they have some sort of dueling tradition here, from what I’ve heard,” Sascha said. “That would probably be the way he does it. One on one.”

“As if this guy hasn’t cheated already, by their standards?” Reese waved a hand back toward the village, almost knocking into Irine’s nose. “They’re not supposed to kill what they think of as peasants, either.”

“Bigger weapons,” Bryer said. When they all looked at him, the Phoenix flared his crest and articulated. “We have them.”

“I guess,” Reese said. “But at some point there won’t be any people left to use the weapons, if we keep just upping the power level.” She sighed and rubbed her face slowly, dragging her fingers up and down her cheeks. “I just want this to be over, so we can figure out how to live through the days that are coming after.”

“That part should be easy,” Sascha murmured. “One day at a time, and all that.”

That made her smile, and then her telegem chimed. She touched it. “Reese.”

Solysyrril: “Captain? Your Queen’s made it in-system. She should be in orbit within the hour.”

“Thanks, Soly, we’re on our way.” She tapped the telegem off and didn’t move, for long enough that Irine nudged her.

“Um, Reese?”

Reese shook her head. “Nothing. Let’s get back.” She pushed herself upright and ambled after the twins, listening to their subdued attempts at banter and thinking about Soly’s casual comment. ‘Your Queen.’

She had a Queen. And a castle. And a people deeply in mourning after the violence of this short-lived revolution, a planet now forced into permanent vigil against the incursion of pirates and slavers… and a man who’d beheaded his own brother and then lost almost all his family. Almost all of them: there was Liolesa. Thank freedom for small blessings. Reese caught up with the others and led the way back to the camp.

CHAPTER 23

The first thing Liolesa did on stepping through the Pad tunnel was scan for him, meet his eyes, and step toward him, extending her hands… and he took them, and with them her fury and horror and seething satisfaction at all they’d accomplished in her absence. He searched her gaze and let her study his, and then he let himself accept that she was home and that the greater part of the responsibility had at last passed from his shoulders. He sighed, judged that they were close enough to alone, with the people around them standing so apart, to use the more intimate name. “Lia.”

“Hiran. Walk with me and tell me how it stands. I want to hear it from your mouth.”

He inclined his head and let her pick the route. Inevitably, she moved toward the remains of the village. Two of the Swords detached from their posts near the Alliance shuttle and trailed them, and that was their duty and their diligence pleased him, in some distant place where he could be pleased past the numbness of the past three days. So they walked, and he told her of the pirate’s stolen warship and the battle to retake it; of the war in the palace, and the deaths of the Chatcaavan and his brother; of the attempt to salvage anything from the atrocity Athanesin had perpetrated on Jisiensire’s holdings and their estimation of how few of Jisiensire’s populace had survived. He spoke exclusively in black mode, and shadowed, until the dark of it clogged his throat and painted everything in hopelessness and exhaustion.

When he had finished she said nothing, staring into the distance. He let her have the quiet, standing behind and to one side of her, his hands folded behind his back. The wind was stiff and wet, sticking his hair to his cheek and numbing his nose. Three days of laboring in it, and he found he forgot that he was cold, though it made him clumsy. Too much to distract him. Too much shock.

At last, she said, “Lesandurel’s on his way with his fixed fortifications and enough engineers to go to work on them. That’s settled. And the scout will be staying after the battlecruiser you liberated departs. They had not planned to leave it, but they need the cruiser more. We will have some protection thus, until we can push through any longer-term plans.”

“Of which you have many,” he guessed.

“Oh, one might say so.” She did not sound satisfied, however. “They are bearing fruit somewhat too late to have saved us this grief.”

He stepped up alongside her, feeling her awareness of him, her wariness, and her need not to accept any palliative words. So he did not give her them, and felt the prickliness of her irritation growing alongside the reluctant fascination that streaked her aura with tarnished silver. “Well?”

All he said was, “The chances of us living our lives without grief are nil. Our lives in particular.”

“Because they are so long? Or because of who we are?” She turned her face away, clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Never mind. It hardly matters, does it. This is the situation we have, and it must be faced.” She glanced at him, then. “You will kill Athanesin.”

A command, a question, a statement of fact? All of these things, perhaps. “Is that to be his sentence?”

She turned her face back to the ruins, and her voice was low and hard. “Need you ask?”

What other reply? “No.” Something else seemed important, and he remembered after a moment. “He has an army.”

“An army that Corel’s heir could not contain?”

Could he? Probably. While fighting a duel at the same time? Best not to push his limits, not when heartsore. “I have a better idea.”

“Good.” She considered the bleak vista for long enough that he became far too aware of the cold and the ache in his joints, in the fine bones of his fingers. “Tomorrow, you will finish this. And then we can begin the long process of remaking the world in its new image.”

“How does it find you?” he asked, quiet, allowing his words to glide into neutral grays. “To at last be free to do so, without political impediment?” When she glanced at him, he finished, “You have been waiting so long.”

Liolesa looked up at the firmament, her profile limned by starlight, revealing its uncompromising lines, glowing in her eyes. Then she looked at him and said, “I knew that I would come to this moment after bloodshed and horror, if I came to it at all. That my plans were never meant to grow slowly, but to be torn from the body, bleeding and screaming. But for all that, Hiran….” She returned her gaze to the sky. “I am satisfied. The moment has come. I am here to seize it. And our people will survive this.”

“My Lady,” he said.

“You’ll be my Sword?” she said. “Not the White Sword, who guarded my safety. But the Lord of War, who wards my people.”

That made him smile, a little. “This from the woman who took the sword as her personal emblem in defiance of the customs that mandated that a woman should bear the seal and shield alone?”

She pursed her lips. “Sooth.” She considered him, then nodded. “And a nuance deftly exposed. You are right… you are no sword, not anymore.” A grin, fierce and focused. Words gone white for hallowed ground and holy vows. “The Shield, then. Of a world. That is a better metaphor for the Lord of War, who must direct the defense of a nation.”

His heart paused. The world did not; the wind still dragged at the back of his exposed neck, teasing a chime from the prayer bell at the end of the hair chain. It seemed an unreasonably cold night, a quiet one, to hold such an offer in it. The healer who was also a warrior. A task suited to his talents. A responsibility, he thought suddenly, that would give him purpose after the woman he took to wife died. He closed his eyes.

“How well you know me,” he said at last.

She set a gentle hand on his forearm.

Reese returned to the camp and among the silhouettes had no trouble identifying the one she most wanted to see. “Kis’eh’t!”

“Reese?” The Glaseah brightened, then jogged to her and enveloped her in a warm, solid hug, smelling of cinnamon like the pies she liked to bake. “Reese! And… oh, Irine, Sascha… Bryer… I’m so glad to see you all well! Here’s someone who’s missed you, too, Reese—oh, where’s Hirianthial?”

“Over with the Queen,” Reese said and then stopped as the Glaseah deposited a soft, familiar weight in her arms. Her mind exploded with a trumpet fanfare and shimmering confetti, overwrote itself with a confusion of voices and the comforting warmth of blankets after having slept in them long enough for the fabric to go knobby. She laughed and cried, “Allacazam!” and pressed her cheek to the Flitzbe’s body. “Oh, am I glad to see you too. Go easy on the talking, though, you’re going to give me a headache!”

Chagrin fell like nightfall, soothing the excitation of her nerves. Reese sighed and looked up at Kis’eh’t, hugged her again. “It’s so good to see you.”

“We missed you!” Irine added.

Surprised at the extra hug but keeping her arm around Reese’s shoulders, Kis’eh’t said, “I missed you too. Tell me everything?”

“Everything’s going to take a while,” Sascha said. “As usual.”

“Come on,” Irine said, tugging at Kis’eh’t’s free arm. “Over this way. There’s not much left by way of buildings around here anymore, but Soly’s given us some heaters.”

“All the comforts of civilization,” Kis’eh’t said, amused, and allowed herself to be led away. Once they’d settled around one of the thin cylinders, stuck into the soil like a torch but radiating a far more consistent and powerful warmth than any fire, she said, “All right, I’m listening.”

The story took a while to come out. Reese let the twins carry it, adding her bit when it seemed appropriate, and spent the time relaxing into the realization that they were all in one place; that somehow, they’d gotten through this and were together again. She loved her crew. How had it taken her so long to realize?

Allacazam’s jab felt like a stubbed toe. “Hey,” she said to him. “I’m getting there! Go easy on me.” A laugh then, like the tinkle of windchimes. She grinned and petted him, and caught up with the story… almost over now.

When Irine finished—with less of a flourish than usual, given the desolation that they were camped beside—the Glaseah blew out a breath. “Well. That’s an adventure, then.”

“What about you?” Reese asked. “Did you get to spend any time with Liolesa on the way back?”

“A fair amount, yes,” Kis’eh’t said. “I like her. She’s a thinker.” That earned the Glaseah some guffaws, which she accepted with a good-natured grin. “I know. A very Glaseahn compliment. But you wouldn’t believe the amount of work she’s been doing out in the Alliance while everyone on her world was complaining about the evil influence of the alien. Lots of risks and research and investments, almost all of them against her world here falling apart. All the way here she was making calls. If it wasn’t for Fleet having the lock-down on most of the military stuff, she’d have found a way to buy a navy and gone pirate-killing herself.”