Shadow of the Warmaster

4

Pels and Kumari sat at a table in an open structure of stressed wood molded into a round of arches with a circular roof of roughcut shakes. Its floor was raised shoulder high off the grass and looked out over scattered beds of brilliantly colored flowers and convoluted, variously textured banks of fern. The deflector field shunted aside the rain as the clouds boiled black and wild overhead and lightning walked along the valley floor some distance below the house. Adelaar smiled with pleasure as she heard the hoom of the wind, the steady hiss of the rain, the crack of thunder and lightning, Quale said the storms were spectacular; that was rather an understatement. She climbed the steps, gave Pels and Kumari a nod, a stiff impersonal smile, and settled into the chair Kumari pulled out for her. “Quale said something about closing down the house.”

Up close Kumari looked less human; her skin was white and translucent as milkglass (milkglass maiden) and delicately scaled, no eyebrows, her nose was a low knife blade slightly turned up at the tip with narrow nostrils, small mouth a pale pale bluish pink, narrow jaw, pointed chin; she was narrow and angular as a primitive sculpture, her hands were extravagantly long and thin; there was a faint drag on her flesh that suggested she’d been born and reared on a lighter world than this. “He means we’ll probably get away clean, but Bolodo is apt to slag the place out of sheer snittishness. He’s setting the automatics. May work, may not, depends on what they send.”

“Planetaries won’t keep them out?”

“What planetaries?”

“Oh.” Adelaar looked round. “Then why…”

“Don’t worry about it.” Kumari made an odd little sound, a rattling hiss that Adelaar eventually interpreted as laughter. “He spent half a dozen years building the place, he was worse than a wounded auglauk when he had to admit it was finished. He’s been walking around muttering to himself about redoing this or that, but he can’t convince himself he could do better; if Bolodo levels it, he’ll have the fun of rebuilding. Right, Pels?”

The furry person produced a rumbling chuckle. “Improve his temper no end.”

Adelaar watched the storm a while; she was intensely curious about these two, but couldn’t in courtesy ask for their life histories; courtesy aside, they were not likely to bare their souls for her, a stranger and a mere client. “You’re Quale’s Crew?”

Pels answered her. “Two thirds…”

Kumari broke in, “One half. You’re forgetting Kahat.”

“Shoosh, Kri, Kahat? That’s the third Kahat ves had since ve came.” He dug into his face fur with short black claws that looked as formidable as his tearing teeth, explained to Adelaar what he meant. “Kinok eats the current Kahat every two years when the bud’s about to complete separation. Sacrifice to the drives, ve says. You know Sikkul Paems?”

“I know.”

“Me, I’m com off and Kumari, she’s Ship’s Mom; she knows everything about everything.”

“Fool!” Kumari patted him on the cheek. “Cuteness has warped your pea brain.”

He growled at her, fell silent as a pair of serviteurs came humming up with large trays. Spice tea, crisp wafers, small glass bowls with sections of local fruit, glass skewers to eat them with. The tea service was native clay, rough glazed, a warm dark brown with hints of rust and a deep blue shadow where the glaze was smooth, the drinking bowls generous with a restrained elegance of form.

Adelaar lifted one of the bowls, cupped it in her hand, enjoying its weight and texture. “Local?”

“One of my neighbors downstream, she’s got a patch of kaolin she’s been working for the past thirty years.” Quale came through an arch and dropped into the fourth chair. “Do anything for thirty years and you tend to get good at it. Pour for us, Kumari.”

He sat sipping at the tea and watching the storm. Adelaar skewered a slice of ruby fruit, ate it. It was good, a mix of bloodheart plum and citrus, firm, fleshy, full of juice; she closed her eyes, swallowed the fruit, savoring the blend of flavors in her mouth and the drama of the storm against her ears. She thrust the skewer through a rose-pink wedge, sniffed at it, crunched her teeth into it, smiled at the spurt of sweet tart flavor. Alternating bites of wafer and fruit, washing them down with sips of tea, she took the edge off a hunger she hadn’t noticed before.

After several minutes of silence, Quale turned his head. “You send your driver off?”

“T’k, I forgot him, I left him sleeping in his flickit.” She grimaced at the rain. “I hope the thing doesn’t leak.”

“Who?”

“Sour type called Oormy, Sounds unlikely, but that’s what I made of his mutter.”

“Ha! the Worm. No one else would bring you?”

“No.” She smoothed her fingers over the textured glaze of her bowl. “What do you want me to do? Go back to Daruze and wait? I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“No. Of course not. Ship’s lander is coming down here, we’re not going anywhere near the city. Unless you have something there you need to retrieve?”

“My case in the flickit, that’s all I have.”

“Hmm. Let Worm sleep till the storm’s over. He can’t fly in that stuff anyway.” He reached under the table, pulled up a servitrage, ordered the housekeep to fetch Adelaar’s case the moment the rain stopped and tell the driver Oormy to go home. After he clipped the trage away, he set his elbows on the table, clasped his hands. “About time you did some talking, mmm?”

“Time… how much longer will this storm last?”

“An hour, maybe a little more.”

“Ah.” She closed her eyes, weariness sweeping through her, three plus years working alone, never knowing if the next day, next hour, next minute would see her banging her head against a barrier even she couldn’t get through or around, or in a trap that got her ashed, three plus years until Quale said Done and the deal was closed. Three plus years stretched taut, then the elastic broke. It hadn’t hit her up there in the office, but now… Now, soothed by the sounds of the storm, the tea and fruit a warm comfortably heavy lump in her middle, a need to talk washed over her, frightening her, at the same time luring her to say things she’d never said even to herself, to say more than she’d said to anyone since Churri the Bard. She understood what was happening to her, the euphoria that came from a sudden release of tension, but understanding was no help at all. “Mind if I ramble a bit?”

“Why not. I need to get the feel of things.” His voice was distant, almost lost in the storm noises, as seductive as her exhaustion. “Just talk, whatever you feel like saying.”

“Mmm.” Eyes still closed, she slid down in the chair until her head rested on the back; she never sat like this in public, never, but she was too tired to care, just moving a finger made her body ache. “You know anything about the Saber worlds? I can understand that. Still, people did go there, especially to Sonchйren, sunsets and opal mines, chasm falls and tantserbok, hunters came from all over to hunt the tantserbok. I never understood those types, going after beasts no one could eat or use; their flesh was poison, their skin wouldn’t tan, it rotted in three days no matter what you tried. And more hunters died than tantserboks, five hunters out, one back. The ratio changed now and then, never in favor of the hunters, but all those dead seemed to make the next ones more eager. Can you explain that to me, Quale? Can you make it make sense? I think stupidity can’t be genetic, it has to be a birth defect or something like that. Why else with the kill rate like it is are there so many idiots around? Ah, that was a long time ago. Churri came to see the sunsets. Churri the Bard he called himself, a poet of sorts, I’m no judge; he moved me, but my brothers laughed at him. He was a little man, I’m not tall and he’d tuck under my chin, he got me so messed up, I didn’t know which end was where, god I hate that phrase, I don’t know why I use it, one of my brothers caught us, nearly killed Churri, he took off and didn’t stop till he was on a ship going somewhere else. A month later I was being sick in the morning and bloating up like a milaqq in a cloudburst…”

Her voice trailed off, she opened her eyes a slit and examined Quale. There was something about him that reminded her of Churri, she couldn’t decide what it was, but then she wasn’t all that good at reading people. Not his looks, Churri’d been bald as an egg and dark amber all over, with bronze cat eyes that laughed a lot though never at himself. A streak of cruelty with little malice in it, like the cruelty of a cat, a spinoff of the curiosity, passion, detachment that fueled his poetry. Aslan had inherited the curiosity and the passion, but hadn’t yet acquired that detachment, probably never would. Quale, what was it about him, something of that same detachment? that playful painful digging into the other’s, well, call it soul? Quale had an easy way of moving, but Churri was made of springsteel and sunfire, to look at him made her shiver. Quale was amiable, competent enough but low in energy. Tepid, that was the word. Churri was restless and unpredictable, he seemed easily seduced into tangents but was not, no, that was his cunning; he was a stubborn little git, when he wanted something, he got it, her for one. That was something else their daughter had inherited; she was about as biddable as a black hole before she could walk or talk. Ahh, it didn’t matter, probably just a question of hormones. I was upset and tired, let my guard down. She shut her eyes.

“My father was a man of great honor, hmm! He shut me in a cell and brought in whores to tend me because no decent woman should have to look at me.

It’s a miracle or good genes, take your pick, that I lived through that time and Aslan was born healthy. My father left her with me till she was weaned, then he gave her to a baby market. If she’d been a boy he might have kept her though I don’t think so, she looked too different, skin was too dark, eyes were gold-like Churri’s, not washy blue like his. Me, he sold into contract labor. Not to Bolodo, to a smaller Contractor, one you could get loose from if you had the brains and drive. I don’t like thinking about that time, but it taught me what it took to survive when you didn’t have a family back of you. After three years I managed to buy out and I went looking for Aslan. Seems to be a habit, that. Found her too. Things were fine for a while, I was doing this and that, pulling in enough credit to keep us comfortable. Apprenticed myself to a minor genius and learned everything he wanted to teach me and a lot he didn’t want out of his hands. Until Aslan hit puberty. And I turned into my father. T’k. We had some royal fights. Aslan was smarter than I’d been, no roving poets for her, but she didn’t like my friends, she found them boring, nauseating, unethical, she had an obsession about ethics, don’t know where she picked it up, it was bad as a deformity for scaring people off, she didn’t like what I was doing, ethics again, she wanted no part of my friends or my business. The rows got worse, nothing physical, we weren’t that sort, but we were clawing at each other with words and she was very good with words, better than I was, I sputtered and yelled and got frustrated, but she never lost her tongue. We loved each other, but we couldn’t live together. So Aslan went to University.” Adelaar sighed.

“She couldn’t stand my friends, but she took up with some of the worst nannys there, flatulent bores, maybe intelligent but ignorant of anything to do with real life. I’d visit her, she’d visit me, we’d be polite a while about each other’s friends and oh everything until the facade broke and we had another row. We’d give it a rest till next time, but we kept in fairly close touch by submail. Funny, we had our best conversations on faxsheets, though maybe not the most private. We set up a code of sorts, words that meant trouble but I can handle it, trouble help fast, that kind of thing. She has this fixation about recording cultures for the poor destroyed native species who’d probably skin her and roast her if they got the chance, she was always poking into places no sane trader would go near; we had rows about that, paranoid mama she called me, you get what you expect, she said, expect people to be nice, you get nice. I told her she was an idiot. She just laughed. Then this Unntoualar thing came up, a chance to be the first researcher into Kavelda Styernna. She stopped by Droom on the way there, she was full of it, the first time she’d gone in alone; she’d got five student assistants and a manager, Duncan Shears, she said he was the best there was at handling logistics, University was going all out for her.

I was scared out of my mind for her, I’d heard nasty rumors about the Styernnese and the Unntoualar, I warned her she wouldn’t like what she was going to find out and she should be damn careful what she looked at, University was no good to her if the Oligarchy decided to off her, what could they do about an accident however fatal? I told her to yell if things looked murky, I’d come and get her, hell with Styernna and everything. This time she didn’t argue, she knew it was going to be touchy, the Oligarchy was only letting her in because of long hard pressure from their homeworld Bradjeen Kiell and from University and they were going to watch every move she made. It’s a filthy universe and we’re about the filthiest things in it. If it was up to me, I’d say sweep the debris into the nearest sun and get on with today’s business. Knowing how sick and perverse we can be is useless, doesn’t change anything except maybe it encourages the freaks. I told her that, I don’t know how many times, but she’s a passionate creature, Aslan, and she believes time can repair the damage we do if given material to work with and it’s her mission to collect that material. I said that, didn’t I, ah well, my mind’s not tracking, I’m too tired. So she went. I got a submail letter from her a month later, bright and chatty, saying how helpful the Styernnese were, no doubt for benefit of the censor she expected to read it, but she worked the code in and that told me it was a bigger mess than even I thought and she was scared but hanging on and if I didn’t hear from her by the last third of each month I should come get her. Come quiet and careful. I started tying knots in things so I could go as soon as the mail didn’t come.

“It happened so fast. Got a letter one day where the undertext said she was picking up stories that nauseated her, that she was nervous but coping, three weeks later University subbed over a transcript of her trial and an apology because they couldn’t do anything directly for her, but she was still alive; there’d been a death sentence, but it had been commuted to thirty years contract labor. Alive! Under involuntary contract, you aren’t alive, you’re walking dead. The time I was under contract I was tougher than Aslan’d ever be, but those three years came close to killing me. Be damned if I left her in that mess. She’d been trashed, University said as much, but I didn’t need them telling me. They were going to try buying her clear if they could find out who had her, and they were going after Styernna; oh, they were hot against Styernna, gnashing their bitty teeth, shuh! I didn’t care what they did, I wanted my daughter. Besides, that lot of nannys couldn’t find their assholes without a map.

“Getting into Styernna wasn’t easy. They’d closed down the ports, not even homeworld types could land, and they had the satellites on alert for snoopers, but given the coin, anything’s available. I knew this smuggler, he put me down and arranged to lift me off a month later. I nosed around Kay Strenn, that’s the capital, trying to sniff out what they’d done with Aslan. It wasn’t easy, Aslan calls me paranoid mama, but I’m a lamb beside those shits. I have this medkit which is probably unlegal on just about every world I know of, but it’s useful at times like this, I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that, what the hell. I went after the trial judge, he was the only one I could get at without more preparation than I had time for and local muscle which I had no access to. He didn’t know much, except that Aslan must have found out something really ugly because the Oligarchy wanted her dead and ordered him to take care of it. Like always, he did what he was told and drowned what qualms he had in the local version of hi-po brandy. He was involved in the commutation, he had to sign the papers; I got Bolodo’s name from him and something peculiar. If the Oligarchy wanted Aslan dead, why sell her to a Contractor who might take what he learned from her and blackmail them? Didn’t make sense. Officially my babbling judge knew nothing about why it happened, but he’d picked up rumors. Bolodo had paid certain members of the Oligarchy bribes and promised them Aslan would disappear so thoroughly she’d be better than dead. Why Aslan? Not for her body, shuh! she’s my daughter and I love her, but even I wouldn’t call her a beauty. She’s attractive enough, but there are thousands of women more so. Not all that sexy either, she’s more interested in scrungy natives and putting together culture flakes than she is in men, they’re for recreation when she’s not busy with something else and that shows. To be honest, Quale, she’s a very boring person. Secrets? Everything she’s done has been published one way or another. She’s a xenoethnologist, for god’s sake, who’d pay a pile of coin for a xenoethnologist? There it is. What it says to me is this, Bolodo had an order from some crawly who has the hots for a scholar and Aslan dropped into their fingers. Scholars do tend to have a lot of backing, colleagues and so on who yelp when something happens to one of them, I give the nannys that.

“I dumped the judge and got off Styernna with lice hot after me ready to do me worse than they did Aslan. That must have been when Bolodo discovered someone was snooping into their business; there was enough left of the judge for that. I suppose I should have offed him, but the easy life I’ve had the last few decades has made me soft. Couldn’t do it. He was such a miserable little worm, I just couldn’t squash him.

“I went home for tools, visited some old friends; by the time I reached Spotchals, I wasn’t me, had distorters on my bone structure and twisters on my body stinks. Just as well, Bolodo had spotters out, bloodoons looping over every port, sniffoons trundling through the streets, don’t know if they were looking for me or what they thought they were doing, but it was a nuisance. Local lice were irritated by all this, that was points for me, they tended to knock down the ’oons whenever they came across them. After I got dug in, I didn’t have too much trouble keeping hid. You know Spotchals, the police there are nothing special, they do what they have to and not much more and the government’s less corrupt than most, and there are thousands of ships going in and out, busy place, and a huge population.

“Getting through security around the Bolodo compound was something else. It took me three years of digging, slow tedious dangerous digging, dancing tiptoe around the sleeping tiger to get close enough to work the mainbrain. You don’t know how many dead ends I banged into, but I finally wormed a way through perimeter security and set up a protected corridor that would let me nest in the walls each night and gnaw away at the records hunting for Aslan’s file. In and out, living on my nerves, feeling for traps, moving a hair at a time, day by day, week by week, month by month. Twice I joggled something; it wasn’t exactly a trap, but it alerted Security and there was a general alarm, I stopped breathing, didn’t move and they missed me; they ran all around me, but they didn’t find me. And I started again hair by hair, looking for Aslan. They were tense for weeks after each of those brushes, jumping at shadows, it made things easier and harder for me; all that activity covered a lot I was doing, on the other hand someone could stumble on me any time if my Luck went bad, it was enough to give me permanent shakes. After two more months of this, I found her. She was listed as part of a special shipment to a world so secret it wasn’t identified except by a code name. This was in a limited access file, you needed five keys entered simultaneously to release it if you didn’t have a shortcut like my crazyquilt. And still that worldname was coded. I duped a part of the file, the part about Aslan. All the shipments were there, fifty years of kidnapping and slaving; I thought about duping the whole thing, but I was afraid of staying in there too long, besides, I didn’t care about those others, what I wanted was Aslan. Oh. Yes. I got something else, note this, Quale, this is important. Those shipments are assembled at a substation off Weersyll, they go out roughly twice a year. There’s one scheduled for three months from now, I hope you can follow it. Lyggad says you can, he’s the one researched you for me, you know you’ve got a very odd history, dumb, I don’t have to tell you about your life, where that ship is going is where we’ll find Aslan. I’ve got the flakes with me, I thought you might need to see them. That night I didn’t try for the code, I took the flakes out of the compound and stowed them in my case. I gave myself three more nights to break the code and identify the destination. I set up passage off Spotchals, didn’t care where to, on half a dozen ships each night, different hours, I wanted to be out and off fast, you know Spotchals, there are what, fifty? a hundred? ships leaving every night, if I was quick enough, slippery enough, I’d get ahead of the guards, the ’oons, even if I tripped alarms all over the place. As long as I got clear of the compound. That was the trick. Getting clear. Security hadn’t come close to my corridor, not once in all those months. It was worth taking the chance. I went in, set things up to collapse behind me if I had to run, slipped into the limited files and started hunting for the key to the code that concealed the world and its location. I thought I was being very very careful, but that particular line was loaded with traps, almost the first move I made set off alarms, turned the compound into a bomb waiting to blow. This time they knew they had a rat in the walls and they weren’t going to quit till they got it.

“I jerked my taps and went away fast, the corridor shutting down behind me, erasing my backtrail. I thought I got away clean. I collected my case and was offworld before Bolodo Security finished flushing the compound and turned their search on the ports. I dodged about for several months, shifting IDs until I was me again. There was no sign of interest in me before Aggerdorn, that was where I got passage here with Treviglio. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, should I. It isn’t that big a step to tie the agitator on Kavelda Styernna to Aslan and Aslan to me and given what happened on Spotchals, adding in Adelaris, well, there I was. Kinok and Kumari were right, Bolodo’s little sideline is nasty, dangerous and profitable; the net on Aslan’s shipment was close to a billion gelders and remember there’ve been two shipments a year for more than five decades.”

She opened her eyes, yawned. The storm was still yowling outside the deflectors, though the winds were dying down, the rain slackening. “You know the most frustrating thing? I was on Spotchals two months before Aslan’s shipment left Weersyll. Two damn months.” She glanced at the storm with impatience, all pleasure in it gone, sat up and ran her hands over her hair, pulling control like a coat around her. “You can follow that ship?”

“If we can set some ticks. We’ll know more about that shortly. Pels, get on to Kinok, have him start a run on Weersyll, then you get hold of some of your dubious friends, see what they can give you. If they need time, have them message you at our drop on Helvetia. Kumari, see if you can get through to ti Vnok; say we’ll make Helvetia three weeks on. If he wants to meet, have him leave time and place at the drop.” Quale got to his feet, stood back to let the others move past him. He glanced after them, turned to look down at Adelaar. “Helvetia first. We have to settle the escrow and register the services contract.” His mustache lifted in a smile reflected in his pale eyes. “Even Bolodo won’t mess with Helvetia.”

“They could wait beyond the Limit, jump us there.”

“Slancy Orza has a trick or two. Hmm. Give you a few hours’ sleep and the world won’t be so grim.” He bent, reached under the table. “I’ll have a serviteur clear the table. Anything you’d like?”

“The storm to end.”

“Won’t be long now. Relax.”

She made an impatient gesture. “If your lander can’t work through this little disturbance, what good is it?”

“It’s being droned down, no use taking chances for a miserable half hour that we can make up with no trouble once we’re insplitted.” A brow lifted, another smile, then he too was gone.

She sat and watched the rain thrum down, watched it diminish abruptly to a trickle. The clouds raveled, paling, thinning; patches of sky appeared, vividly blue in contrast to the shadowed whites and pale grays of the vanishing clouds. Shafts of sunlight shot down, touching droplets of rain into blinding glitters; the greens outside the garden shimmered like polished jade. Quale read her too well, curse the man, her gloom dissipated with the storm. Her ambivalence remained. Action was on hold for the moment, once it began it’d go with a rush. Out of her control. Before, she’d been in charge, now he’d be. Quale.

Enigmatic man. She smiled, a wry tight thinning of her lips, as she remembered Lyggad stroking his pile of faxsheets, wrinkled atomy, big-eyed elf. The first part of his life Quale was a violent brute with a strong skilled body and enough intelligence, or maybe it was cunning laced with Luck, to acquire a ship and hold together a motley crew of scavs, a sleazy, crude scavenger whose idea of subtle attack was rip and run, then he’d tangled with the Hunter Aleytys and suddenly he was something more. A clever man, quiet, calm, cutting ties to his former… well, you couldn’t call them friends, say associates, pals, buddies, whatever. A man who kept clear of trouble. Lyggad said it was like Aleytys gave him a brain transplant. He giggled when he said it, but obviously more than half-believed it, Aleytys was part Vryhh and who knew what those types could do when they put their minds to it? He said some of Quale’s ex-buddies got nosy and demanded to know what happened, implying in forceful though limited language (that was Lyggad being prissy) that the woman had castrated him. They didn’t ask twice. In that, Quale hadn’t changed, he was fast and nasty when the occasion required. So Lyggad said.

Slancy Orza. Rummul empire trooper, Lyggad said, mostly shell and drives when Quale acquired it, a wreck flying on kicks and curses. The drives used to be huge clunkers that ate fuel like it was free. Quale yanked those and put in new drives; they were nothing standard according to the few folk who got a look at them and were willing to talk. Huge, sleek, powerful Slancy Orza (Lyggad’s voice went wistful, his tongue caressed the words), she can outrace a Sutt Aviso, sit down on a 3g world without bursting a seam and lift cargo nearly equal to her own weight.

She heard a quiet rumble, went down the stairs to stand, on the grass looking up at a small lander as it dropped toward the ground. The pad, she thought, Worm must be gone by now. She drew her hand down over her face, sighed, started for the house.