Shadow of the Warmaster

5

Aslan began working.

Reluctantly.

These weren’t her people, she had no responsibility for what happened to them, but…

What Tra Yarta wanted was a profound distortion of her work and she was ill at ease whenever she thought of what Parnalee was going to do with the data she provided, but…

She had to do the analysis, she needed the information, she didn’t trust either Parnalee or Churri, but there was no one else; she drove herself at her preparations with disgust, distrust and a bellyload of fury.

She made abortive gestures at first, feeling about like a blind worm, starting lines of investigation, letting them trickle from her fingers; she wasn’t accustomed to working without a staff to help interview the subjects, collect data samples, do a preliminary sort on them and much of the slog work thereafter. Not having those eager, ambitious students, she had to reshape her habits and find a way to do that work herself.

After a week or so of aimless dipping into the Palace Library, she called herself to order and spent several days working with (and cursing copiously) the computers Tra Yarta had provided, setting up procedures, protocols and questionnaires. Then she began interviewing the Hordar who worked as gardeners, servants, cook, cat-handlers, musicians, poets, entertainers of all kinds, and last of all the few Hordar who made it into the Guard. Every Hordar working inside the Wall. They talked with her because they were ordered to and were very cautious in their answers to her questions, but she expected that and had long experience in setting up a series of questions that would give her much more information than they knew they were providing.

All that took time, more time than usual, because she had no staff, because she had to do all the analysis herself without any of the software she needed on computers not designed for that sort of work, because she was deliberately doing about three times as much interviewing as she needed, because above all she wanted to be very careful about what she actually passed out of her hands. Tra Yarta grew restless, but could not fault her for not working; besides, as she’d guessed from the first, he was a thorough man himself and they were only a minor part of his plans for suppressing dissent and disturbance. She sank her apprehensions and anxieties in a half-willed amnesia and let the work absorb her; she enjoyed everything about her profession, even the dullest part where she was going over and over material, arranging and re-arranging bits of information to discover patterns and unexpressed meanings.

Aslan yawned, recrossed her ankles. “Where’s Churri?”

“Getting drunk somewhere, spinning stories, picking up more recordings. What’ve you got?” Parnalee took the lid off the carafe he’d brought with him, chugged down half the ice water inside. It was an unusually hot day and the house wasn’t equipped with any kind of air conditioning, not even a fan, so Aslan was spending the hottest part of the afternoon outside under shade trees near one of the dozen fountains, stretched out on a lounge chair she brought from a slatted toolshed tucked away behind some flowering shrubs.

“I’ve started getting the history sorted out. See what you can pick up on a couple of prophets; they seem to be important to the Hordar, so you might be able to use them. Pradix and Eftakes. Better be careful, though. I suppose you know how tricky that kind of thing can get for outsiders. Pradix. Hmm. Center to the local religion. He was born some two millennia ago, standard years not local, on a world called Hordaradda which was on the edge of the Huvveddan Empire. By the time he died or was translated or whatever you want to call it, one half of Hordaradda was swearing by him, the other half at him and the Huvved were agin the whole thing. Ended up with the Pradite faction buying a colony transport and lighting out for parts unknown. Shaking the dust off, usual reaction. Like a lot of fanatics, they didn’t know what they were doing, but they were sure they were sharper than any mundane, so they got cheated on the ship, paid hard cash for junk. The transport went blind in the insplit. If you believe in that kind of thing, it was their holy Prophet’s intercession, or maybe it was Luck, anyway, when they tinkered their way back to realspace, there it was, a nice yellow dwarf of a sun with a coolish but comfortable planet waiting for them. No intelligent life as far as I can tell from the look I got at contemporary records, but otherwise a flourishing biota land and sea. They named the sun Horgul and settled on the fourth planet out to breed and argue over the teachings of Pradix. I’ve printed up a few of those, you might be able to do something with them. Eftakes was born here about five hundred years later, I’m not all that sure just what his differences are with Pradix, but the Hordar had a sharpish little war over them and the Eftakites moved down to the south continent. Guneywhiyk. Silly name, isn’t it. North continent’s no better. Kuzeywhiyk. Sounds like a sneeze. Got some of Eftakes’ sayings listed too. Be careful how you use those up here. On Kuzeywhiyk.” She giggled. “I don’t know if Tra Yarta wants you doing anything down south; if so, you’d better have a look at Eftakes and his faction.”

Parnalee rubbed the carafe back and forth across his brow, then gulped down a good part of the water left in it. “Never mind the sayings, any hero tales?”

“Yeh, but most of them are set on Hordaradda. I’ll print you up some summaries, let me know which you want to look at closer. Um. Some narrative verse cycles from the War of the Prophets. Haven’t had time to do more than look at the titles.” She sipped at the fruitade, wiped her mouth. “I’ve come across mention of popular verse tales about the Conquest, the kind of thing that conquered peoples pass around, more or less mouth to mouth. Naturally the Huvved didn’t record any of them, though I suppose they knew about them, the mention was in a trial transcript of a Hordar accused of theft and murder. Huvved definitions of both. I think it likely he was some sort of rebel. You might ask Churri to see if he can dig up some of them, they should be still floating around in manuscript and memory, that kind of underground snoot-cocking can hang on for centuries.”

He smiled, a tight, sour twist of his lips. “I’ll enjoy that.” The smile, such as it was, vanished. “Insolent stupid arrogant shitheads, I could break them over my little finger. Gods, one more mincing cretin treating me like a dog…”

She filled a second glass with iced fruitade, got lazily to her feet and carried it to him. “It was your idea, Par.” He reminded her of Sarmaylen when one of his pieces was rejected; the thought made her smile and feel more tender toward him than she was wont to do. “You thought up the party catering bit, you went to Tra Yana and got him to rent you out. Here, take this.” While he drank from the tall glass, she smoothed her cold hand along his face and neck, then moved around behind him and began kneading at tight shoulder muscles. “You’re just not used to being a slave; that kind of stagnant society couldn’t afford you, lucky you. Uh! I’ve been on one or two feudal backwaters. Uh! No slaves, but some of the peasants might as well have been, bonded to the soil, sold with it. Uh! you’re all knotted up. I’ve seen the way their so-called betters treat them. Uh! To these highborn Huvved, you’re not as valuable as a dog, you can’t be dropped into a pit and live out their fantasies of manhood for them with your blood and pain.” She stopped talking, clicked her tongue. “Hmm, I wonder… Any smell of pit-fights with men instead of dogs?” She stepped back from him. “That’s a bit better. My hands are getting hot, might as well stop for now.” She strolled back to the lounge chair, stretched out on it and took up her own glass, resting it on the firm flesh over her stomach; her shirt was open except for a single button holding it together across her breasts. “Well, have you?”

He lifted his head, looked at her with dislike that melted into a smile more professional than warm, though that might be her own attitudes getting in the way. “I’ve arranged several such entertainments.”

She slid the sweating glass back and forth across her bare midriff. “Ah.” She was silent for a breath or two, then she said, “Be careful, Par.”

“Don’t angle for a promotion up to dog?”

“You got it.”

She heard the tinkle of ice cubes, then he grunted. When he spoke, he changed the subject (the change landed on her ear with a loud clunk that said he didn’t want to talk about this any more). “How’d the Huvved get here? Is there anything in that for me?”

“Hmm. Depends on what you want. You might be able to touch in undertones of Hordar pride and anger and take the curse off them. As long as you don’t get so explicit you rub up against Huvved paranoia.” She glanced at Parnalee, saw his annoyance, trying to teach him elementary tricks of his own trade, hah! she swallowed a grin, but… enough was enough, she’d gotten a small jab in for that look he gave her, time to be serious. “Let’s see. About three hundred years ago, again that’s standard not local years, when the good folk in the Huvved Empire got tired of their bloody rulers, or maybe desperate enough not to care all that much what happened to them, they rose up on their hind legs and kicked out the current Imperator. Came within a hair of putting their hands on him too, close enough they scared the shit out of the creep. He ran for his life in his last Warmaster, wrapped in her cloud of stingers, made the insplit just ahead of a swarm of Harriers. When they didn’t give up and dived after him, he ordered a random course punched in, ran along it full out until he lost them, then popped back to realspace so he could find out where he was. Poor old Pradites. Either Pradix’s holiness had worn off or Luck was out to lunch because where do you think he was when he stuck his nose up? A spit and a half from Horgul. They come all this distance to get away from home fights and bloody Huvved, spend seven centuries getting comfortable with their new world, and here comes the Huvved Imperator and his hopeful court to sit on their necks again. Hmm. One of those coincidences nobody believes, but they happen. Um. Shall I go on?”

“This is printed out?”

“Minus a few editorial comments that might annoy the spy who reads my hard copy.”

He squinted up at brilliant white sunlight glittering through interstices between the undulant leaves of the low broad tree spreading out above them, leaves like overlapping slices of translucent green jade. “I’ve got nothing better to do until it cools down. Go on.”

“Thanks a lot.” She sipped at the fruitade; it was still cool enough to be drinkable, though the ice had melted. She wiped away the sticky trickle spilling from the corner of her mouth and wished futilely for a little wind to stir the hot still air; with the outer curtain wall and the inner walls that shut in this much smaller space, any breeze around would give up and go home. “Right. Picture our Imperator and his bunch sitting up there in that monstrous Warmaster, drooling over what looks like a sweet setup for plunder. Picture their surprise when they tune in on the local comsets and hear a version of Hordar speech. It apparently hadn’t changed all that much in the centuries since the Pradites left Hordaradda, the Hordar are a pretty conservative bunch. Far as I can gather, there was an odd mix of technology. A lot like they’ve got now, in fact. Minus some flourishes laid on by the slave techs the present Imperator has been importing. Functioning comsets, the landers from the colony transport, some stray robotics, some sophisticated filters, touches here and there of tech they’d brought with them and managed to hang onto. They did some mining in the asteroid belt, dumped their worst criminals on the next world out, that kind of thing. Otherwise, they were pretty well early industrial with large feudal patches out on the grasslands, what they call the Duzzulkas. No ground traffic, but a busy sky. Airships. Hydrogen lift. All sizes, all over the place. Cheap and reliable. Don’t have to build roads. By the by, I’ve convinced Tra Yarta that I should visit a Sea Farm soon, tell you about that later. Anyway, where was I?”

“All over the place.”

“If I’m boring you…”

“Academic maundering, which I suppose you can’t help, being an academician. Go on. I have to get this one way or another and it might as well be now.”

“So kind. Remind me to poison your next drink. Hmm. Yes. The Huvved came roaring in over Tairanna and took her fast and bloody. Poor old Pradites and Eftakites hadn’t a chance against a Warmaster, stories from that time have her melting down whole cities in a single hour.” She sat up, wiped at her face. “Like I’m going to melt in a minute.” She poured more fruitade into her glass, tasted it, grimaced. It was warmish, all the ice long gone. She dumped the pitcher out, filled it at the fountain and emptied it over her head, filled it again, emptied it again and dripped back to the lounge chair. “From all I can find out, the Hordar were a peaceful lot then; they did more fighting with words than with fists, they’d rather go somewhere else when things got tense. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t fight, but they weren’t much good at hopeless battles. Even then, though, you didn’t want to push them too hard. Back them into a corner and you had trouble, serious trouble, capital T trouble. You get the Hordar Surge coming at you.”

Parnalee broke open the fastenings on his tunic, wiped at his face and his neck with a damp handkerchief. “I presume this will eventually reach some endpoint.”

Aslan ignored him. “What it is, it’s a sort of mob action that turns a collection of individuals into a single being with a single mind and a single purpose which is basically to stomp a threat into mush.” She lifted the damp ends of her shirt and flapped them idly, trying to stir a bit of breeze along her sweaty body. “To trigger a Surge…” she broke off, yawned, “… you put a minimum of twelve Hordar in some sort of enclosed space and apply extreme stress involving the survival of a genetic group.” She closed her eyes, after a minute cracked the eye on Parnalee’s side. He was flushed with heat and visibly uncomfortable; she couldn’t tell if he was listening. Oh well, what the hell, might as well finish her recitation. “A Surge grows in lumps of twelve, don’t know why, but there it is.” She yawned again. “Bridges from group to group until most of the population is involved. It doesn’t quit until the danger is gone or every unit in the Surge is dead.” She pushed sweat-soggy hair out of her eyes and thought about going inside for a bath, but it was hotter in there than it was here. Too bad the fountain was in full sunlight, be nice to sit in it a while and cool off, but she didn’t want a case of sunstroke, she didn’t much trust the doctors on this primitive world. Wonder if there are any umbrellas inside, I could tie an umbrella to one of those upper tiers and make my own shade. Hmm. Haven’t got the energy to move. “After I came on the term in the early histories, I tried talking about it in my interviews. Every Hordar had a powerful nonverbal response to the word and put up barriers whenever I tried to move beyond abstractions to the actual mechanics of the thing and the emotional and physical responses.” She sighed. “You getting any of this, Par?”

“I’m listening.”

“Hmm. You think there’s any chance, if it’s this hot tomorrow, for us to go out on the lake, do some swimming?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Freshwater eel-analogs. Very hungry this time of year.”

“Shit.”

“Yeh.”

“Wondered why I didn’t see any boats out there.”

“That’s why.”

“Swimming pools?”

“Huvved. No slaves or Hordar allowed.”

“As my mother would say, sweet sweet.”

“Go on with your lecture. What’s the rest of it?”

“I forget.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“All right. You noticed that Hordar and Huvved are related closely enough to permit interbreeding?”

“I noticed.”

“Probably no pureblood Huvved left; they didn’t bring that many women with them when they skipped out. Let’s see. Surge. Huvved/Hordar mixes don’t seem to have the capacity for that melding, but they exhibit much the same reactions to the word. A lot of fear there. Pride. Rage. A whole witch’s brew boiling away down deep. I suppose anything that intense is useful in your business.”

He grunted, a noncommittal sound she took for assent.

“I came across the phenomenon when I was reading about the early years. Seems that the Imperator then was a bit gaga about Hordar, it was a band of Hordar rebels who came within a hair of removing his head. He and his happy band of sycophants had a fine old time running down and disposing of the locals. Got so bad the Hordar believed he was going to slaughter them all. There you have it, extreme stress involving the survival of a genetic group. The thing that tipped them over the edge was a sort of auto-da-fe he put together outside a Littoral city called Ayla gul Inci. The Incers were driven into a fenced enclosure and forced to watch their relatives burn. About ten minutes into the barbeque they began melding into a Surge. About half of them were killed, but the Imperator barely got away with his skin intact. Not long after that his Security Chief took a look around at what was happening to his men and materiel and convinced the Imperator to abdicate in favor of his most competent nephew. That’s what the histories say, you can draw your own conclusions. The Grand Sech worked out a schema that gave enough to everyone to keep them relatively contented and things settled down. Like I said, the Hordar those days weren’t into mass suicide once the Surge was defused; they adapted and there was a fairly easy peace for the next two centuries. Then a free trader arrived; they don’t have his name, but it seems he had connections with Bolodo Neyuregg. The Imperator before this one, he needed techs because his Warmaster was deteriorating and that threatened his power. He didn’t want to hire anyone who’d give away Tairanna’s location; he was charmed by the thought of, shall we say, hire-purchase of those techs. He didn’t stop with them, slave holding seems to be addictive; hmm, either that or Bolodo reps are very persuasive, anyway, two transports a year for over fifty years, that adds up to a lot of slaves.” She yawned. “That’s about it, except the reason there’s trouble now is simple enough when you consider the impact of cramming maybe a thousand years worth of technological development into fifty years and dumping this onto what was a stable, nearly unchanging society. Basic stupidity always makes trouble.”

Parnalee passed his handkerchief over his face again, wiping away the file of sweat and the trickles that were dripping into his eyes. “Surge,” he said, “you can’t make a noble icon out of a mob. I need stories of individuals. Looks like you’re telling me I’m not going to get them.”

“Not from the Conquest,” she said drowsily; she kept flapping her shirt ends, not putting much energy into this. “But you don’t want those, do you? I mean I doubt that Tra Yarta would let you make Huvveds out as what? villains of the piece? no matter how much the Hordar might enjoy such a treat.”

“There are ways…” He brooded a moment. “I’m getting a feel for the Huvved, but I’ll be depending on you and Churri to bring me something I can use for the Hordar. I don’t see anything yet… after I think about it, maybe…”

She dropped her arms over the edge of the narrow lounge chair, began playing with the short stiff grass. “Well, while you’re thinking, what have you picked up about what happens when a transport’s due?” She paused, but he lay like a sunstruck log, saying nothing. “I hope it’s more than I’ve got. Any time I go near anything about the ship, I’m warned off, sometimes hard, sometimes subtle, but the end is, I know the twice-a-year thing and that’s about it.”

“Lock down.”

“What?”

He sucked in a long breath, trickled it slowly out. Finally, he said, “All techs, anyone they suspect might be able to fool around with the ship, they’re locked into the Pens.” He lifted heavy, reddened eyelids. “Means me and Churri. Probably not you.” He spoke slowly, wearily, as if he were too fatigued to push the words out. “Tra Yarta aside, these clotheaded Huvveds have only one use for women.” He pushed himself up, got heavily to his feet, stretched, slumped. “I’m going to get some sleep, Churri wants to talk to you, tomorrow he said… He yawned. “Didn’t say why.”

No spring in his step, with none of the massive force that usually hung like an aura about him, he stumped off, wiping at his face and neck with the sodden handkerchief.

She frowned after him, wondering if he was going to crack up before they got out of here; she couldn’t do much without his backing, might as well follow Xalloor’s advice, find a way to live as well as possible within the limits allowed her. And maybe keep alive a shriveled, forlorn little hope that Mama Adelaar would come and get her out of this mess.

He was a proud man, his size and strength and, well, shrewdness had insulated him from the kicks and pratfalls that life delivered regularly to ordinary folk. One of these days he was going to explode and tell some home truths to whatever Huvved creep it was giving him a bad time. He didn’t understand what it meant to be powerless; he didn’t feel in his bones he was a slave. She had a strong impression that he’d never been in a situation he hadn’t eventually dominated. He played with irrational emotions and used them to manipulate people, but he was essentially a rational man; despite his experience he kept expecting people, maybe she’d better say men, to act out of reasoned self-interest. That wasn’t happening here. It didn’t matter how strong, how skilled, how valuable he was; at any time, for any reason, no matter how absurd, he could be flogged or even killed. His lack of control over his life was beginning to eat into him. She frowned at the brilliant glitter of the water droplets leaping up to fall down and fall again from basin to basin, wondering if Churri was right. Maybe they should go over the wall and try hiding in the mountains.

Churri wanted to see her tomorrow, huh? Well, he was going to have to wait. She was getting out of here, Tra Yarta had set up a visit to a Sea Farm. She sighed, straightened her legs and lay with her eyes closed listening to the music of the falling water; after a while she dropped into a doze.