The Swan Riders (5 page)

“You want us to stay here,” said Francis Xavier, obedient, soft-voiced, walking the knife edge between statement and question.

“What I want,” said Talis, “is for you to take first watch.” He was framed against the false sunset. Structures were developing in the charged sky as it equalized: muscly, twisted ropes of shining and stretched membranes of dimming air. Radiating out from the ruin of Calgary, filling a quarter of the sky, they spread out behind Talis like huge wings. “Relax, FX. What's safer than the middle of nowhere?”

The middle of nowhere. The middle of Saskatchewan. The middle of my country.

This was my country.

I had been the heir to the crown of the Pan Polar Confederacy. Calgary was—had been—a PanPol city, an edge-of-the-empire garrison, and an important inland port with a small spaceport and a large zeppelin depot. There were even royal apartments near there, in the ancient, wild luxury of Banff. I had been to those apartments, slept there. Walked those streets. The people in Calgary were my people.

There were fifty thousand of them.

And they were gone.

My face was numb and strange where Talis had touched it. At the edges of my electronic mind I could feel the brush of the weapons platforms, the surveillance satellites, speaking to me in a language I could not yet understand. In my fingertips I could feel the charged particles raining down from the ruined sky. It was—I was—

I was crying.

Talis frowned at me and made a little flourish with his hand, like a magician conjuring flowers. Very like that, because when he opened his hand there was something cupped in his palm: three little pills. A small enough thing to practice sleight of hand with, but it was impeccably done—certainly I hadn't seen him do anything so mundane as reach into a pocket.

“How did you do that?”

“I'm a trickster god.” He nudged the pills toward me across his palm, naming them one by one. “Muscle relaxant. Neurosheath repair agent. And a sleep aid. Take them. Tomorrow we need to ride.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But I think my mind is altered enough.”

Sri made a noise that was not quite a snort—not with a dead city glowing on the horizon.

“It's not a request.” Talis flashed his teeth. “And it's not in your interest to slow us down.”

There was too much in me, too much whirl in my mind, and yet there was a numb spot, somewhere in the middle of it. But Talis was right. If cities were being destroyed, we needed—Francis Xavier had said “refuge.”

I needed refuge. So I flashed my teeth in my turn, and I took the drugs.

The Swan Riders were both murderers. But that was nothing to what Talis was.

I
slept.

Drugged sleep, chemical sleep, full of acidic dreams.

So many. I dreamt of Calgary. Stepping off the lift at the zeppelin spire, my mother's hand on my shoulder, the ground crew bowing . . .

I dreamt the Precepture, my books and my narrow bed, the ropes that held my mattress creaking under me, and Xie—

I dreamt my books and my narrow bed, and Xie, and the knock at the door that was the torturer coming to fetch me.

I dreamt the queen my mother, who had let me be tortured, for her country, for my country, for Calgary. We were stepping off the lift with the zeppelin spire above us, her hand on my shoulder, the ground crew gathering, the light of the orbital weapon striking in slow motion, pouring down over us. With my new eyes I could see everything. I saw us skeleton.

I dreamt I saw Xie.

She was wrapped in red and yellow silk and crowned in a hundred draped strands of turquoise and red cinnabar and white bone beads. Xie, Li Da-Xia, arrayed for her throne. There was a rattle of rain on a glass ceiling, the scent of apples. The scent of a girl. Xie reached up and undid one of the looped beads of her headdress. The strand of turquoise swung loose like a braid and the beads spilled from it and dropped one by one to the floor. She undid another strand and it too fell free, and red and silver splashed around her, bead after bead falling free. Her headdress was undoing itself now, silver and cinnabar and coin, her dark hair appearing, a shy and lopsided smile on her face. Her undone robe swung open and she stepped toward me through the air.

I dreamt Xie, and my narrow bed, and the ropes that held the mattress strained and creaking. And I dreamt her touch.

I moaned, and Xie said: “Greta?”

Her touch, my face. My face was numb where Talis had stripped my memories, and he would take her, he would take Xie. He would destroy her from orbit, he would strip her out of my heart. Xie touched me and I made a sound—rough and hoarse, fear and sex.

There was a slap against my cheek.

“Greta!”

I blinked and light hit my eyes. Real light. My eyelashes were gummed together, sandy with drugged sleep. Someone was leaning over me. Hands on my face. Someone.

It was the Swan Rider woman, Sri.

Her face was so close. I felt my body tighten back into my bedroll as I struggled to wake up, to pull the real world together around me. My teeth were chattering. They clicked together like beads falling. There was a blush all over my body, adrenaline and more surging through me, feedback currents sucking on my fingers.

I shivered.

“You were moaning,” said Sri. “I thought you were having a nightmare.”

“It . . .”

“. . . wasn't?” she supplied. Delicately. Teasingly.

I had been a student of classical rhetoric for more than a decade. I said: “Ummm . . .”

Sri grinned. She was holding a little knife in one hand, and she made it sashay in the yellow light. I swallowed. My mouth was hot and sticky. Sri dropped back to where she'd clearly been sitting, on a rock by my side.

“Do you dream much?” She picked up a heart-sized lump of wood and began—resumed—whittling it. It already had a recognizable shape, a horse and rider. As I watched, she set to work on the rider's breastbone. She seemed impossibly to have muscles in her fingers, and the blade flashed and turned like a retractable claw. She looked . . . competent, I decided, though I really wanted to think
dangerous
. “Sleepwalking? Nightmares? If I'm going to save your life, that's the sort of thing I ought to know.”

“I don't sleepwalk. And I can save my own life, thank you.” It came out crisp, but I was less than sure. It was full morning, October light slanting through the grass, the sky high and blue, no longer full of crawling radiation. Real, I reminded myself. I dreamt Xie but Calgary was real. Talis had blown it up.

Talis was—nowhere in sight. Both he and Francis Xavier were missing.

I tried to sit up, and failed. Despite the muscle relaxants I had stiffened in the night. My body felt like drying leather. My muscles yelped when I moved. “Where are—”

“They've gone to water the horses. Everything's packed but you.”

“Oh,” I said. Classically. It didn't help that I was flat on my back, with only a sheet to cover me. A crinkle sheet, it was called: a smart material that could both hold and disperse heat. My body was warm enough but my face was cold and exposed. A novel sensation. Princesses of the realm do not do a lot of camping.

“We'll need to get some distance today,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

Frankly, even getting up from the bedroll sounded like it was going to take an act of will. And possibly a small winch. “Stiff,” I admitted. “Are we in danger?”

Sri
hmm
ed, noncommittal. “There are two sure ways to call down the wrath of Talis. To interfere with the Preceptures, or to interfere with Swan Riders. Someone fairly nearby is doing one or the other. And between us, we're both.”

She was a Swan Rider and I was a Precepture child. Well. Ex.

Sri tucked her whittling into a pocket and folded her knife closed with a snick. “What about your thighs?” she said.

“What?”

“If you don't need me to save your life, what about your thighs?” She slid off the rock to crouch, haunched, at my feet.

“My thighs are—my legs are fine, Sri.”

“Now, now,” she said. And leaned forward and closed one hand above each of my knees.

I had once been a duchess and a crown princess. Away from the Precepture, it had been rare for anyone to touch me at all. And then my life had changed—but not so much that I was accustomed to strangers kneeling between my legs.

“Sri,” I said—even as she curled her fingers in. I yelped at the pressure and her fingers shifted and sought.

My datastore diagrammed my own anatomy for me as Sri found the release point of the vastus medialis muscle and dug in. Pain built under the sustained pressure and then ebbed away, and the tension in the muscle with it. Her strong thumbs then swept up the groove where the tendons attached, finding adhesion points and pushing into each, as if popping steamed edamame from their shells.

It hurt and it was
perfect.
The gasp caught in my throat and I heard the sound I was making, of pain and pleasure mixed, the moan I had made in my dreams.

Sri looked up into my eyes and I found my whole body blushing. Her hands were closed as high on my thighs as they could decently go—higher. Her face was close. “Better?” she said.

“Um,” I said. “Very much so.”

“Good.” She got to her feet and arched the tension out of her back. “We have a long way to go. But I can help you. Even if I have to hurt you to do it.”

“I am not sure
thank you
is quite the right response to that?”

“Up?”

She reached down for me. I took her hand and hauled myself to my feet. “For that, thank you.”

In answer she saluted, Swan Rider style. It looked tossed off, almost like a shrug. But even so . . . “I wish you wouldn't,” I said. Then mimed the palm-to-shoulder touch, to clarify what I meant. “I'm not Talis.”

“Oh, my little AI,” she sighed. “I have to remember my place.” Slow, and looking me dead in the eye, she saluted again—and the meaning of it snapped into focus. The cupped hand at the shoulder was gathering up the datastore. The extended, upturned palm was offering it, holding it out like an apple.

Sri, like all the Riders, had a datastore. She had the same augmentations I had: a datastore under her collarbone and webbing threaded through her brain, sensors and generators in her fingertips, full-spectrum retinas implanted at the back of her eyes. But none of it was for her benefit.

It was so Talis could wear her like a coat. With her salute, Sri was offering that. To me.

Just then my datastore began to pummel me with medical jargon, statistics, diagrams, and videos of human dissection. It poured into my mind, instructing me on the basics of possessing people. And mentioning, too, that the act of possession pushed through the inductive webbing and caused microscarring in the host brain.

To host an AI for any length of time was a death sentence. And that death was ugly. I was aware of this somewhat keenly, since (on the off chance I made it that far) it was a death that was going to be mine.

The data was draped over Sri's face like a veil of black lace. She smiled behind that veil—a wicked little smile—and held out a bundle in both hands.

Clothes. Heavy canvas dungarees, a button-down shirt, high boots with square heels, and a Swan Rider's coat: a long dark duster of oiled leather, with the iconic wings appliquéd on the back.

I had never worn anything but royal gowns and hostage work clothes. To dress as a Swan Rider . . . Piece by piece, these people were stripping my old self away.

And speaking of stripping. I took the bundle from Sri. She was wrapped in the data veil of her own death, and she clearly had no intention of turning away. Like an animal watching another animal, her eyes were openly weighing.

I turned my back on her to change, but I could not help wondering how she looked at me when I couldn't see her looking.

And then we rode.

With somewhat more ceremony than he had granted his humans, Talis introduced me to the horses. The other three mounts were mares and were named Heigh Ho Uranium, Roberta the Bruce, and NORAD. NORAD was not only Talis's horse, but clearly Talis's favorite. She was a small, spark-eyed animal, black with white speckles, like a stone made soft with frost, and she looked at me as if considering my weaknesses. As we rode—or as the others rode and I clung helplessly—Talis discoursed on the proper name for a horse of
NORAD
's color (blue roan), the history of the name NORAD (steeped in acronyms and antiquity), and the virtues of mares (the Pony Express had used them exclusively).

Virtuous as mares were, my horse was a gelded male: meant to be “steady.” Right. His name was Gordon Lightfoot. He was a paint horse, egg-white with red-brown splotches, including one in the shape of postflood England around one eye. The eye in the splotch was brown, and the other eye was blue. It gave him an air of comically wise skepticism, like a fool in Shakespeare. When we had to head down a slope and I misjudged my lean and ended up with a faceful of mane, he actually sighed and looked over his shoulder at me. The expression on his face said:
What fresh hell is this?