Scattered Suns (23 page)

The guards in the command nucleus looked disappointed, but Thor’h ordered them to escort Udru’h back to the shuttle. “I will hold you to your promise, Uncle. If you betray us, we will return with our warliners—and we will not negotiate.”

“I will come to Hyrillka exactly as I said I would.” Udru’h kept his face placid, while his mind raced ahead, trying to see a way out of the trap he had just set for himself.

Chapter 43—OSIRA’H

For several days, the Mage-Imperator’s eldest daughter took the troubled but excited Osira’h under her wing at the Prism Palace. Yazra’h’s three Isix cats prowled alongside as the two half sisters walked through the city.

Everything amazed the young girl, who had previously seen nothing beyond the dry hills and arroyos of Dobro, except in secondhand memories from her mother. The sensory whirlpool of Mijistra’s sounds and colors and tastes and smells swirled around Osira’h. Soaring and majestic buildings gave her a new appreciation for the grandeur of the Ildiran Empire and showed her what she was supposed to be fighting for, why she must fulfill her destiny, even though she knew there were many dark and sinister corners under the seven suns.

Four days earlier, the Hansa’s King Peter and Queen Estarra had departed without learning of the hydrogue-faeros battle inside Durris-B. Yazra’h seemed quite proud that the Mage-Imperator had prevented the humans from discovering any of the brewing troubles in the Ildiran Empire.

Osira’h was immediately reminded of her long-captive mother and all the breeding slaves on Dobro. “Yes, we are very good at keeping secrets from the humans, aren’t we?”

Her muscular half sister smiled, accepting the comment as a compliment. “We have a few days until everything is ready for your mission, and then we must locate a group of hydrogues for you to communicate with.”

“I saw thousands of them fighting at the Durris star.”

Yazra’h tossed her mane of long coppery hair. “Your protective vessel cannot withstand an environment such as that. Follow me, and I will show you the sphere that will take you deep into a gas giant’s clouds.”

She guided Osira’h to a hangar where engineer kithmen and laborers were finishing construction on a strange new vessel. Its hull was fabricated from heavy transparent armorplate. The interior wasn’t large, but neither was she.

“This vessel will protect you from the pressure, but not necessarily from the hydrogues themselves. The rest will be up to you.” Yazra’h gave her an encouraging slap on the back. “But you will make all the difference, little sister. You can do things that no one else can.”

Osira’h did not argue. She moved forward to study the crystalline chamber, touching it with her fingertips. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

Drinking in details with her eyes, storing information in her carefully organized mind, Osira’h learned everything she could about the Prism Palace and the Ildirans, whom she was destined to protect. Some of the courtiers, and even Yazra’h, remarked on her unusual and intense silence. Osira’h just watched them, always calculating and storing information.

Unlike other Ildirans, she had been born with a great weight on her shoulders. Designate Udru’h had never let the girl’s thoughts stray from the expectations placed upon her, had never let her forget that he believed she had the innate skill to accomplish what was necessary. And yet, immediately after delivering Osira’h to the Prism Palace, Udru’h had turned his back on her and returned to Dobro in case she failed.

Osira’h walled off her disappointment, shoring up the barrier with bricks made of memories from her mother: how Nira had been locked in a dark cell so her green skin could drink in no sunlight; how, after the birth of her daughter, Udru’h had kept her in the breeding barracks until she conceived his son, Rod’h; how afterward, he’d subjected Nira to a series of coldly clinical impregnations by other Ildiran kiths.

Her mother had recalled each one of those rapes like burning coals on her skin. Through the too-clear window of shared memories and experiences, the little girl also remembered every ripping pain, every thrust, every bruise.

Osira’h could easily hate Designate Udru’h if she allowed her mother’s memories to overwhelm her. But the girl also remembered her mission, recognized Udru’h’s urgent need to save his race from the hydrogues, even at the cost of a few human breeders. She remembered how Udru’h had cared for her, shown as much love as he was capable of demonstrating.

Osira’h felt as if she might be ripped in two...

When her father summoned the girl to his private contemplation chamber, Osira’h stood uncertainly at the doorway. Jora’h came forward, smiling with a welcome that bore the distinct undertones of shyness—an odd reaction from the leader of the great Ildiran Empire.

“Come in, please.” Tentatively, Jora’h reached out to touch her narrow shoulders. “Let me just look at you.” Without answering, Osira’h watched shifting currents of emotion cross the Mage-Imperator’s face. “So much like your mother. I can see Nira in your eyes.”

Osira’h met his gaze and suddenly felt awkward and confused. Seeing Jora’h in the round chamber with its colored-crystal windows, her mother’s memories flooded her with other recollections. Though this man in front of her was her own father, her mind was full of other encounters in this room: warm and passionate lovemaking in the cushions, conversations and caresses that made the girl’s heart melt. So different from the breeding barracks on Dobro: love instead of mere impregnation, ecstasy rather than pain and horror.

But if Jora’h loved her, why hadn’t he saved Nira from Dobro? Why had he believed the lies without questioning, without wondering if Nira had been snatched away? If he truly cared for her, why had he let her go so easily?

“You’re very quiet,” Jora’h said, leading her into the chamber.

Osira’h shuddered instinctively, even though she knew he meant nothing sexual by his invitation. Here, he was her father, the castrated Mage-Imperator, not the friend and lover Nira had known. Even so, Osira’h could not help but see him from both perspectives. She would have to balance the two without revealing the depth of her knowledge. Jora’h and Udru’h, among others, would likely be horrified at all she had “witnessed” and could remember. How ironic that the very breeding and abilities that made her the hope of the Ildiran Empire had made her a freakish anomaly, an unpredictable singularity. No, she could not let her father, or anyone else, learn her secret.

Before she could answer him, Osira’h saw the potted treeling in a wall alcove. Her eyes wide and sparkling, she stepped forward. “May I touch it?” Her thoughts whirled, remembering what it had been like for Nira to drop into the telink network, connected with other green priests and all of the worldtrees. It had been a solace long denied to Nira. “My mother was a green priest.”

Jora’h smiled. “Of course.”

Osira’h held her small hand close to the delicate fronds. The golden lapped scales of bark on the thin trunk were like soft jewels. The fernlike fronds fanned out, and she stroked the leaves like a musician playing the strings of a delicate instrument.

She wasn’t sure what to expect. Her fingertips felt a tingle, then a jolt, and her heart swelled. An image flashed through her mind of Nira in desperation, grasping thorny shrubs on Dobro until her palms were bloody, screaming her thoughts into deaf plants that had no way of contacting the worldforest network.

Then, as if in response, a kinder recollection came to Osira’h. She relived the day that the worldtrees had accepted Nira as a new green priest, enfolding her in their verdant embrace, connecting with her cells, changing her body’s chemistry so that she could be a part of the vast and serene forest mind. Oh, the joy she had felt when that huge universe suddenly opened to her...

The girl released her touch. The potted treeling seemed to tremble, but she had not achieved a complete connection, not like a real green priest’s. Even so, she smiled in quiet wonder.

“I see that makes you happy,” Jora’h said. “I wish to do everything I can to keep you happy before you must...go away.” He paced the floor of his chamber, turning back to her. “It will be soon. I am still waiting to hear a report from my scout cutters, to let me know what is happening at Hyrillka.” He shook his head. “But I grow too distracted. That does not concern you. Just another trouble in the Empire.”

She waited in silence, letting him continue.

“I want to spend time with you, get to know you. You are my own daughter, and I have placed such a heavy burden on you. I thought we might tour Mijistra, visit museums, or go to the streams.” His words petered out.

“Yazra’h has already shown me those things.”

The Mage-Imperator sat on his bed cushions. “Then the most important thing I can do for you—for both of us—is to tell you about your mother. Nira was...very special to me.”

“And now she’s dead.”

He looked stung. “Yes.”

Though Osira’h already knew everything about her mother, unfiltered and uncensored from Nira’s own mind, she decided to test her father. Curious to see how closely he would adhere to the truth, she let Jora’h explain himself, in his own way.

Chapter 44—NIRA

After escaping from the isolated island where Designate Udru’h had stranded her, Nira was still alone. Unlike Ildirans, however, she did not view such solitude with mortal terror. The company she had been forced to endure in recent years had been nightmarish.

On her endless walk across the uninhabited landscape, Nira’s emerald skin provided her through photosynthesis with all the sustenance she needed. She could survive; she was a green priest. But the pounding silence all around her and inside her throbbing head weighed upon her. Though she had healed long ago, her head still ached from where the guards had clubbed her after they’d dragged her away from Osira’h...her daughter, her princess.

She walked on and on, seeing no one as she crossed the vast landscape of the empty continent. Dobro was a very sparsely settled Ildiran world. Perhaps to keep others from seeing the horrific breeding work? Grasses and weeds whispered into the silence around her, speaking with leaves and stalks and blossoms, but she could not comprehend the language. Unlike the worldtrees back on her beloved Theroc...

What Nira longed for most was Jora’h, her lover from the bright and colorful Prism Palace. But he did not know she was alive. She wondered if he had forgotten about her; as Prime Designate, Jora’h had had so many lovers. On his last visit to her isolated island, the Dobro Designate had told her the fat and scheming old leader was dead, and that Jora’h had taken his place. He was now the Mage-Imperator.

Surely he would have come for me by now, if he’d wanted to.

After floating across the broad inland sea, Nira had abandoned her makeshift raft on the shore and continued her trek across the southern continent. In spite of sore feet and tired muscles, she forced herself to keep moving through wind and rain and bright sunlight. Though she had no map and did not know where to go, she tended generally northward.

Her fear and her goal were the same: Up there, somewhere far away, lay the Dobro breeding camps and the other human prisoners. Nira shuddered at the prospect of going there again, but the Ildiran settlement, the one inhabited place on Dobro, had the only ships that could take her away. And Osira’h.

Nira could either hide forever, or she could try to get away...to go home. Back to the worldforest.

The Designate had kept her hostage to use her as a bargaining chip against Jora’h. She did not want to be a pawn; neither did she want to be a danger to Jora’h. She would rather die out here alone than let that happen. Alone and in silence.

Even as a novice, Nira had communed with worldtrees. She had read stories aloud to them, telling the sentient forest of human history. Then, when she’d been chosen to become a priest, the forest had accepted her, changed her, given her access to a new universe of thoughts and experiences.

Once she’d taken the green, she had always been able to feel the great trees speaking to her. Whenever she touched the scaly bark of even the smallest treeling, she could connect through telink and interact with the whole forest. Coming to Ildira, she and old Otema had brought potted treelings to maintain contact with the worldforest—treelings that had been destroyed by the evil Mage-Imperator’s guards. Otema had been slain, without the chance to let her memories be absorbed into the trees, and Nira had been brutalized...taken here, away from the worldtrees.

Her emerald hand clenched around the gnarled stem of a woody weed as thick as her forearm. She squeezed, but heard nothing from the plant, no echo of the immense worldforest mind.

Were these plants truly silent, or had her brain been damaged in the assault that nearly killed her?

She released the thick stem with a jerk, as if it had caught fire. She didn’t want to consider that she might now be deaf to telink. Was it the injury, or had the awful camps beaten it out of her? Surely there must be a single treeling on this entire planet! Somewhere...

Before the Ildiran guards had driven her away, she had managed to impart her knowledge and memories to Osira’h. At least the little girl now understood what Designate Udru’h planned for her and how he had cruelly distorted the truth about Nira and the other breeding slaves. Osira’h knew everything, and her mother could only hope that the knowledge would help her in some way.

In the shade of a tall, reddish rock, Nira squatted to rest, leaning her bare back against the warm stone. In this terrain she saw only scrubby desert weeds and hardy shrubs. No trees. A tall green forest—any forest—would be so soothing right now. Even if she couldn’t communicate with it.

Nira closed her eyes and let her thoughts flow, drifting into the open skies of Dobro. With all her psychic strength, she drew upon her memories of the welcoming presence of the vast worldforest, and sent her silent cry like a shout into the void. She directed the message toward her daughter. Osira’h must be out there, and she had heard her mother before. Her princess should still be near the breeding camps, even if they were half a planet away. Only once, on that single fateful night, had Nira been able to connect with her daughter, yet that briefest of sharings had been enough to express a lifetime of memories and desires.

But the brutal guards had given her a concussion so severe that it had almost killed her. Although she had recovered, Nira still suffered from powerful headaches, pounding pains inside her head...and now she found she was unable to establish even a tenuous connection with the little girl. Either Osira’h was too far away, or Nira no longer had that special ability.

By now her daughter must certainly believe her to be dead, making the task of communication more impossible than before.

The breeze picked up, and the thick, dry weeds whispered again with a sound like laughter.

Years ago, when Nira and other breeding prisoners had been sent out to fight a raging brush fire, she had tried to escape. Chased by her captors, Nira had thrown herself into a thorny thicket, trying to force a telink contact to any tree or bush. Though she’d called out in every way she knew, she had heard no response...and the guards had taken her again.

Now it was the same: no response from the trees, nothing from her daughter. Would the silence ever end?

Nira continued sending her mental beacon until her head split with the pain. Darkness fell, and stars sparkled across an ebony backdrop. And still she heard no answer to her call.

Osira’h simply wasn’t there anymore.