her instruments 02 - rose point Read online

  Turning to face him had put her in the light of the lamps, and the glint he saw at her breast... “Is that a medallion?” he asked.

  Reese glanced down, then brought it out for him to see. “She gave it to me as proof of her intent.”

  “Can you turn it over?” he asked.

  Her puzzlement streaked her aura bronze and purple. He ignored it, waiting for the inevitability... and when Reese showed him the back of the pendant he sighed out. He should have known she would work quickly; Liolesa was nothing if not a master of thinking on her feet. Hirianthial had presented her with an opportunity to catalyze the war she knew she could no longer avoid and so did not want to put off. If she could start it on her terms, she would do that rather than allow her enemies to choose the time and the ground. And they both knew time was running thin.

  “Yes,” he said. “She will protect you. That is her personal emblem, and she would not give it to anyone she planned to discard.”

  “All right,” Reese said. “That’s what I thought from meeting with her, but you can’t be sure with politicians.” She grinned at him, then faltered. “What?”

  “Just like that,” he said. “You have thrown in your lot with us.”

  Reese sighed. “Blood and freedom, Hirianthial. Haven’t you figured it out yet?” She met his eyes, fierce. “We threw our lot in with you the moment we went after you in a slaver’s prison. That it took me most of a year to stop denying it doesn’t make it less true. You’re here. This is your fight. That makes it our fight.”

  “You’re so sure you speak for the others?” he asked. “They may have signed up for adventure, but not for... this.”

  She snorted. “Oh, hell, Hirianthial. They knew it before I did. They spent months trying to beat it through my head. And you know what? They were right. Maybe I’m too stubborn for my own good, or maybe I’m just stubborn enough to get us through things and they’re the ones who remind me to act like a normal human being, but however that works, it did, and I got it.” She shook her head. “You come back to the townhouse with me, Hirianthial, and tell them the story. I’ll bet you a horse they’re going to agree with me.”

  “A horse,” he said, amused despite his dismay.

  “I’ve just found out how important the things are to you people,” Reese said. “So, yes. A horse.”

  “Does that mean if you win I must buy you one?” Hirianthial asked.

  She huffed. “Of course it does. You’re the one with the money anyway. I’ll have to take out a loan to pay for yours if I lose.”

  Was he really so surprised by her reaction to the Queen’s plan? Maybe he’d forgotten she’d grown up with stories of revolution. The descendants of Mars still reared their children on the bloody history of their emancipation from Earth, and as one of the more traditionalist families the Eddings had been particularly proud of their world’s struggle for independence. Reese didn’t need the whole picture to sense the tensions that were poised to rip this world apart. All she needed to know was that Liolesa had no gem grid and went through the trouble of maintaining out-world connections anyhow. That meant the people here wanted no part of the technology the Alliance offered, and that suggested technology might make it harder for them to keep whatever power they were used to wielding.

  And that story she was familiar with, from bones to skin, cell-deep where stories are born. It might be dressed in silk and jewels, but she recognized it all the same.

  As Hirianthial led her through the palace, she surreptitiously examined the back of her medallion and found a tiny design: a white flower twining around a sword. Obviously that meant something, but he hadn’t told her what and it was unlikely he would if she asked. As usual. She sighed and smiled a little. As irritating as he was, he was part of the Earthrise family. That meant she had to find his foibles at least a little endearing, even when they frustrated her.

  “Here,” Hirianthial said, pushing on a wall which was, in fact, a door—that seemed normal for Eldritch design, these doors painted to look like the rest of the corridor. “We will exit through the servants’ halls, but we should be swift. It’s impolite to importune them.”

  “Right,” Reese said, and followed him. The decor here was somewhat plainer, but the walls still had moldings and paint, and the floors were nicer, she thought: wood rather than stone. They detoured past what looked like storerooms without seeing a soul and ended up outside the palace near a gate sized for a person, rather than an army. There were guards there too, though they recognized Hirianthial on sight and let them pass.

  The walk back to the townhouse took them near the cliffs. Reese looked out over the horizon, over endless waves that glittered pale gray and pewter under the morning sun. She waited for the agoraphobia and felt instead a mute wonder at the sight. What did she know about oceans? Mars had none, and she’d gone straight from there to a ship. She’d seen mountains since, and Harat-Sharii’s plains, but the sea... the sea was new.

  “You find it compelling?” Hirianthial asked, quiet. When had he come so close? And why did she find it steadying?

  “What? Oh.” Reese pulled the hood closer over her head and answered, “I’ve never seen the ocean. It’s... big.”

  “Jisiensire’s lands include the coast in the south,” Hirianthial said. “I had missed it.”

  “It’s a little like space,” Reese said, glancing toward it again. When she could pull her gaze away she found him looking at her with interest. “It has a presence. And it’s bigger than you can wrap your arms around. There are things in it you’ll never know or reach or understand.”

  “That bothers you not at all?” His voice remained quiet.

  “I think it bothers me less than feeling it’s finite and might fall on top of me,” Reese said, though that wasn’t quite it either and she didn’t know what the difference was. But she took a few deep breaths of the brine-scented breeze before going up into the townhouse, and the taste on her tongue felt as old as blood, but cleaner.

  They found the crew at breakfast in a room Reese hadn’t seen yet, a long hall sized for its gleaming wooden table, with high windows casting slanted light across what remained of a very large meal. Even Allacazam was somnolent from the slow yellow flow of colors across his neural fur; they’d set him in a sunbeam. The twins and Kis’eh’t stood when they arrived, and Bryer looked up, the light flowing down his face.

  “So?” Irine asked, bouncing a little. “Are we staying?”

  Reese was deeply gratified to hear the confusion in Hirianthial’s voice when he said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’re staying,” Reese said. “There are rooms in the palace waiting for us. And it looks like the Eldritch Queen wants to use us to upset her enemies into making a stupid move.”

  Sascha pursed his lips. “Wow, sounds dangerous. I’m in.”

  “What?” Hirianthial asked, now sounding ever so slightly bewildered.

  Reese said, grinning, “I think he means ‘are you sure’.”

  Kis’eh’t snorted. “How’s this world going to be worse than being chased by slavers? If their bathrooms are any indication, they certainly can’t manufacture a working firearm.”

  “Can we go see the ocean?” Irine asked.

  Bryer said, “The sea is good.”

  Reese pulled out a chair. “You should move Allacazam, he’s going to get fat if you keep stuffing him.”

  Irine scooped up the Flitzbe as Sascha brought her a cup of cider. “Here you go, Boss. No coffee, I’m afraid. It’s tea or alcohol. We’re going to have to import coffee along with the horses.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Reese murmured, hiding her amusement.

  “You want to stay?” Hirianthial asked Sascha. “You understand the Queen is trying to start a war.”

  “Are you staying?” Sascha asked, and the others grew quiet to listen to the answer.

  Hirianthial looked at them, very still, very contained. “I must.”

  “Then we’re staying,” Sascha said.

&nb
sp; Reese said to Hirianthial, “You owe me a horse.”

  “Your brother is home.”

  The man turned from the bookcase to face his subordinate, who unlike him was dressed in the plain blue and white robes of Ontine Cathedral’s clergy. “Since that would be a very poor jest, I must assume you aren’t making one.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the priest said. “Not about that, anyway. No, we have reports he was seen in the Queen’s wing. The following morning he met with Urise.”

  “Urise!” The man closed the book he’d been considering. “Is that so.”

  “For over an hour,” the priest said. “God knows why he wanted to talk to that old relic. He hasn’t done anything more useful than teach children their catechisms in decades.”

  “Indeed,” the man murmured.

  Watching him, the priest said, “I assume you want him followed? Should we suborn Urise’s novice? We know someone in the dormitory, a boy the same age.”

  “What? No.” The man put the book away. “Urise’s chosen pupils never defect. The boy would report the attempt and they’d know we were prying. No... just keep a watch on him. I want to know how often they’re meeting.”

  “And your brother? We could bribe the servants for information.”

  The man snorted. “Liolesa’s servants? Not likely. Nor will you get much gossip out of them if you ask. They’ll only chatter to each other. A stranger, even a trusted one, will probably not inspire their confidences. Put Surela’s coterie to work. They already have a reason to be interested in him, and he knows it. He won’t find their behavior out of character.”

  “Consider it done, sir.”

  “Good,” the man said, and sat, arranging his dark red robes. “Now, tell me the latest weapon shipment has reached the cache.”

  The recitation took some time: there were weapons moving across several borders, and thanks to the Queen’s meddling there were now random patrols riding the length of settled territory. Their activities had not yet been discovered, but the detours they’d been forced to take to avoid detection had stretched their timeline, particularly since he insisted on their assuming aerial reconnaissance. His co-conspirators had argued that the likelihood of one of the Queen’s foxes being overhead at just the right time to see their movements was astronomical, but he knew Alliance technology better than they did. There might be stealthed satellites in place. It was better not to assume.

  The man dismissed his servant at the conclusion of his report and considered, fingers steepled. Many things he had anticipated, but not that his brother would remain free for so long. Had events not conspired so magnificently against it, Hirianthial would have been some Chatcaavan’s slave long ago, a possibility that had pleased him enough to go through the lengths required to arrange it. But not only was his brother free, he’d come home.

  It was somewhat of a pain, but an opportunity nonetheless.

  Sometime later, he left his office and made the long walk to the catacombs where his order used to serve its mission. The cold stone rooms were empty now, their rotted leather restraints swept away. He’d made cleaning the maze a penance for brothers in need of it, which kept the place free of dust that might betray the passage of any people who might be using it. It took him some time to reach the chamber he sought and no one saw him enter it...which was well, for he wanted no one touching the equipment he’d been at such pains to procure.

  Sitting at his desk, the man tapped the emitter awake and waited for his signal to traverse the labyrinth of obscuring protocols that hid it in the Queen’s own outbound signal. The royal House aggregated the outgoing traffic from all the people on-world who used a Well feed, a group that included not only Galare but Jisiensire and several of their allied minor Houses as well. It was a surprisingly dense flow; while it hadn’t been easy to disguise his own requests, it hadn’t been as hard as he’d feared either.

  His call connected. “I have news,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Your target’s here.”

  A pause. “Here. Where you are.”

  “Yes. Can you get here? Soon.”

  “Yes. But I don’t see how him being there helps me. Unless he’s out in the country somewhere we can pluck him up.”

  “Just get here, and mind the system guards,” Baniel said. “Leave the rest of it to me.”

  “Fine. Two days.”

  The call closed. The man leaned back in his chair, folded his arms on his torso and half-closed his eyes. This thing between them had been a long time coming. The ending of it would be rather more dramatic than he preferred, but there could be a satisfaction in that. He stood, brushed off his robes and settled his stole, and left for his office. Not long now.

  Left to their own devices, her crew scattered to investigate the Jisiensire townhouse while they had the opportunity, leaving Reese some welcome time in front of the fire with Allacazam. She’d been feeling the need to assimilate her day and something about the Eldritch lack of technology made it easy to slow down, stop fretting so much about where she was supposed to go next, or how she was going to make ends meet. The Earthrise was safe in orbit, there was no perishable cargo to worry about, and for now their room and board was being paid by someone else. Absurdly, even with her nebulous grasp of the political situation she was about to be embroiled in, she found the Eldritch world relaxing in the way she’d been hoping Harat-Sharii would be, and hadn’t been. Had anyone asked her if she’d thought herself capable of spending hours curled up in a fur watching a fire slowly wear through a few logs, she would have laughed. And yet, she did just that, and found it deeply soothing... enough so that Sascha’s arrival didn’t bother her. It was novel not to feel that little flinch of irritation when someone wanted her attention.

  The Harat-Shar sat at her foot, one leg stretched in front of him, the other propped up. His tail was curled over his shin, the tip flicking. The sun had set, and the fire was now the room’s sole source of illumination; they considered it together a while before he spoke.

  “Tell me the truth, Boss,” Sascha said. “How’s he doing?”

  She looked up from petting Allacazam, then glanced out the door. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Except that he’s tense.”

  Sascha nodded. “Irine and I were talking about it. He’s been pretty tightly wired since we got him out of Kerayle, and coming here has made it a thousand times worse. We were hoping maybe they’d be able to help him and that would relieve it. Did he talk about it at all?”

  “All he said was that they’d found someone to help, and that he’d have to stay awhile.” Reese made a face. “Oh, and that it went ‘well enough.’”

  “That sounds like him.” Sascha sighed. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.”

  “How what goes?” Kis’eh’t asked, peeking inside. When Sascha waved her over she joined them and settled sphinx-like with her paws pointing toward the fire.

  “Hirianthial,” Reese said.

  “Whether he’ll be less tense when he gets the help here,” Sascha added.

  “Ah.” Kis’eh’t mantled her wings, then tucked them more securely against her second back. “The real question is ‘what if he doesn’t.’”

  “We leave?” Sascha said.

  Kis’eh’t glanced at him. “That presupposes—interestingly—that we’re not going to.”

  They both looked at her. Reese held up her hands. “You know as much as I do. We’re here at the Queen’s invitation until it looks like it’s time to leave.” She rested her fingers on Allacazam again, who murmured a drowsy sound in her head, like rain falling. She wondered if he could eat firelight as well as sunlight, or if he was just sensitive to warmth. “We are going to have to leave at some point to get the horses the Queen wants to buy.”

  “We’re going back to Kerayle?” Sascha asked, aghast. “Are you kidding?”

  “At the price tag that woman’s willing to pay per horse?” Reese said. “Hell, yes.”

  Sascha’s ears were flat to h
is head. “Even with pirates.”

  “We’ll be careful. And besides, we never saw any pirates.”

  “Probably because they hadn’t arrived yet,” Kis’eh’t said dryly.

  “What she said, Boss.”

  Reese chuckled despite herself. “We’ll take some of the Queen’s foxes. Will that make you feel better?”

  Sascha grimaced. “Only if they’re better armed than we are.”

  “Since someone buttering a slice of bread is better armed than we are,” Kis’eh’t said, “I think we are in good shape. Speaking of which... have you had the bread here, Reese?”

  “A little, at the Queen’s table,” Reese said. “Why?” And let the Glaseah fill her ears with enthusiastic praises about the food quality. She and Sascha were debating the flavor of the sparkling juice they’d been given with breakfast when Hirianthial arrived.

  “Finally! Someone who can end this debate,” Sascha said. “What did they serve us at breakfast, Hirianthial? Kis’eh’t says it was some kind of mild citrus. I think it was a grape varietal.”

  “It was most probably elderflower cordial,” he said.

  Kis’eh’t threw up her hands. “Of course it was something neither of us have heard of.”

  Ignoring them, Hirianthial said to her, “Lady? It is time.”

  As they all stood, Reese said, “Are you coming?”

  “To escort you? Of course—”

  “I mean are you staying at the palace,” Reese said. “Or are you going to stay here?”

  Did he wince? It was startling to see him do anything so obvious. “I probably should stay there, but doing so would be... problematic. I will have to consult with my teacher.”

  “I’m assuming there’s enough space,” Reese said.

  “The space is not the issue,” Hirianthial said. “But rather the placement. Come, Lady. We have an escort.”

  Outside was none other than the page who’d been so forthcoming with Reese, shrouded in a dark blue cloak that smeared him into the dark—and it was very, very dark. The sky overhead, untroubled by the brash lighting of a modern city, looked like a jeweled scarf: she could even see the haze of the galaxy. The shudder that took her then was joy, and joy had a taste and a smell and definitely a countenance, and it was the shimmering wink of those uncountable eyes as seen through a sea-softened atmosphere.