C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  Marak's heart beat fast. He had seen men and beasts run, even shot through the heart. He could perhaps reach her before the guards even organized an objection.

  But until they offered to prevent him from a peaceful, even requested, advance, he made himself as obedient as the rest of the madmen.

  Marak, the voices said suddenly, and the mad twitched and turned and spun for the Ila's amusement. He restrained himself desperately from moving to that urge: it was his one breach from the rest, the one indignity he had refused all his life.

  There were drawn blades all around them, guards stationed among the pillars. The Ila's men were justifiably anxious in this viewing of the mad. They waited for the afflicted to do something more extravagant to prove their madness, and now a guard prodded him in the side, curious about his difference.

  Pride would not allow him. He had run into the desert as a boy. He had hidden his fits in storerooms, in privacy, in long rides into the waste. He had learned that the fits had had a rhythm: they came at certain hours of the day, at certain times in the night, regular as the calendar, regular as the moons in waxing and waning. He had learned to live with them, to pretend, to conceal the twitches and the urges.

  But lately the fits had gone out of rhythm, out of the ordinary.

  This manifestation now was out of rhythm, as if the Ila's very presence had provoked it.

  {Marak, the voices said. Turn. Walk. Come.} And quietly, biting his lip until the blood came, he would not.

  The mad, within the room, became agitated. The Ila sat observing them. An au'it sat nearby, writing, writing. One by one the records went down, as the guards separated each madman from the herd in turn for the au'it to record his name, his origin, his behavior, turning each back when they were done. The Ila seemed bored, impatient.

  Then a signal passed, a motion of the Ila's hand, and the guards held back the latest madman they had cut out of the herd.

  "Tain's son," the Ila said, and the guards, letting go the one, prodded at Marak instead and moved him forward.

  Now, Marak thought, anticipating the next few moments, and became steady as any hunter. Hate fueled his patience. Desire kept his head down and held his gait to an ordinary shamble, all to come as close as he could.

  They stopped him just short of the distance inside which he might move and not be stopped. The guards brought chains and put them on his hands. He bore that meekly, too: the chains were a weapon, brass chains, solid and capable of shielding a fist, of looping a throat, of cracking a skull. Then they put a spear backwards through the ring attached, and two men held it, but that was not enough. The spear, too, was a weapon within his reach.

  With those precautions they moved him to the very foot of the Ila's seat.

  A great calm came on him, even a sense of leisure in which he could satisfy his curiosity before he used his last chance. He looked up at the Ila, the tyrant, the ruler of all the world, as if he owned her.

  "Marak Trin," the captain said, and the au'it wrote.

  Then the traitor voices started in his skull, dinning: Marak Trin. Marak Trin. Marak Trin, a foolish, mindless echo, hindering him from clear thought.

  In the desert, on the wide plains of the Lakht, in constant company with the mad, aware of the rest, the voices had grown louder and more insistent. He fought them down. He looked up at the red robes, the blood red robes, up to the Ila's face, and found it very aptly time to die, before the voices were all he heard. But he had never seen the like of her.

  White, white skin, and gloved hands, and booted feet. On the Lakht, they valued white skin, skin the sun had not touched. They whitened the skins of brides and grooms with creams. They valued slender bodies that clearly had never lifted burdens or carried water, or scratched a living from the desert.

  All these marks of beauty the Ila had. She wore a close cap of red silk, and inner robes of silk shaded like flame. She exuded wealth, and power, and, some said, holiness.

  Yet she seemed frail, in size and strength so like his young sister, he was dismayed.

  "Are you truly mad?" she asked him directly, as his sister might have asked, a question, an entangling snare of question that caught his mind and his heart. He had killed enemies. He had never killed a girl.

  But he had never failed an intended target, either. He would; he would not; and in desperation he leapt at the steps. He dragged his guards with him. He hauled at the chains and had three men stumbling at his feet. He seized the spear and lifted his hands, aiming it at that slight figure.

  A thunderbolt struck him, sizzled through bone and nerve and flung him back in a sliding course down the steps. The guards smothered him with their bodies, wrenched at the chains, and hit him, but that impact of bone on flesh was nothing, nothing to the thunderbolt.

  "No, no, no," the Ila said, a light voice, like chimes. "Don't harm him. You knew Tain's son would have tried it."

  Marak could not get his breath past his tongue or move his chest beneath the living weight of the guards pressing down on him. He lay half-buried, on the hard edge of the steps, the object of every eye, and had time to realize the failure of his ambition, the shame of his father, and to know he had once and for all lost his mother's life.

  The gods struck down the hand that touched the Ila. Had he not heard that warning all his life? He had no gods, and the Tain had none. but he had incontrovertibly met a wall of force, and it had stolen all his breath, shaken his heart in his chest, made his limbs twitch. To make it even worse, the voices roared wildly in his ears, a deafening rush like the sound of waters.

  The guards raised him up to his knees. He could not even manage to hold that position, once released, and slumped down onto his face on the floor, under the curious stares of the mad, in the spite of the Ila's men.

  "Marak Trin," the Ila said.

  He could lift his head, that much, enough to stare up at her. He moved an arm and, discovering that unthought movement under his command, attempted to draw it beneath him. It moved. He drew one and then the other knee across the cold, polished stone and heaved himself up, laughably like the beasts, rump first, then the forearms. The hands still would not move. He felt nothing but a tingling in his feet.

  "Marak Trin Tain."

  The roaring in his ears went on, a torment in itself, making her voice distant. He had succeeded only in kneeling at this tyrant's feet. There were deaths and deaths in the holy city. Men were impaled on hooks and flung from the walls or hung alive for the vermin of the air. He wondered which death was his, or if the lightning of her fingers would suffice, and burn him to a crisp.

  "Are you mad?" the Ila asked. The room spun like the direction of the voices. The pain gathered in his bones and seemed to have found a home there, and in his silence an angry guard brought a length of chain down across his back. "Are you mad?" the Ila asked again, in that soft voice. "Or is this one of your father's tricks?"

  "As mad as they are," he said. He was dismayed to discover sudden cowardice in himself, that he feared another of those blows, and he despised himself that his mouth found it better to answer. He no longer knew for what he hoped. He told himself that his hope was to get to his feet again, and to try again, but his limbs would not, could not, and his heart had discovered a fear to equal fear of his father. "Mad as all the rest," he mumbled.

  "And your father gave you up."

  He failed to answer. The chain came down across his back.

  "Yes," he said.

  "And when did you know you had the madness?"

  "Years," he said. "For years."

  "As a boy?"

  It admitted a time of helplessness. It opened the door to his father's house, his mother's shame, his father's disowning him after all these years. He said nothing, and knew the blow of the chain would come. Damn them, he thought, and then discovered the limit of his fear, right at the boundary of stubborn, foolish pride.

  The chain crashed across his back.

  But the lift of a gloved hand had prevented its full force and
forestalled another blow.

  "Tain knew?" the Ila asked. "Or is Tain Trin Tain mad, too?"

  "No," he said, and caught a breath. "No to both."

  "How many others are mad in your household?"

  "None that I know." It was the question she had asked the others. They were into the safe litany of the others' questions, and he could let go his breath and cease to expect the blows. He could gather his strength.

  "How did it come?"

  "As lights. As voices." The red-robed au'it wrote each answer, sitting on the steps by the Ila's feet, her book on her lap and her pen moving busily between ink-cake and page.

  "And Tain did not at any time know."

  "No," he said. "Not until the last. I kept it secret."

  "And what betrayed you?" The Ila moved, a whisper of silk like the creeping of a serpent as she leaned her pale chin on a red-gloved, jeweled fist. "Did you fall in a fit?"

  "I did," he said. Shame heated his face. He had fallen at his father's feet, in front of all the chiefs. He spared himself confessing that part, that moment, all the shocked faces.

  "What did your father do?"

  "He asked me the truth, and I stopped lying." The silence hung there, filled with only that. He wanted to move on. "He had heard your men were gathering up the mad. He sent for them."

  "He was glad to let you go."

  "If glad is true," he said. His father's life was blunted, now, turned sharply back on itself: no heir, no wife, and now a diminished reputation, either in laughter or in pity. Was that gladness in Tain Trin Tain? Was Tain in any wise relieved to have signed that armistice with the Ila?

  He thought not. But he thought little else. The pain in his body diminished, but the roaring in his ears reached a numbing pitch, and persisted, as if all the voices were bottled up in him, trying to find expression. Death began again to seem friendly. He asked himself how much more before his brain scrambled, before he had to scream. He bit his lip, bit it bloody.

  "Do you see lights and hear voices?" the Ila asked.

  "Yes."

  "And what do these voices say?"

  "Nothing of sense." Could it be worse? He doubted he could keep his feet if he could gain them.

  "And the pictures? The images? The visions?"

  He fixed his sight on the Ila's face, one stable point in a swinging world. It spun, and tilted, and stopped, over and over again. "Buildings," he said. "Buildings. A tower."

  "This tower? The Beykaskh?"

  He shook his head to clear it. She might take that headshake for no, and it was the truth. He focused on her, only on her. Past the whiteness, she had a classic Lakhtanin face, thin and bow-nosed. Her lids were black-rimmed. The iris was dark. The eyes became pits into which sense could fall, and, no, she was not a child: the eyes alone said she was not a child.

  A gloved finger raised, forbidding, then curled itself across the lips, convenient resting place. "The son of my enemy. The one who burns my towns, steals from my treasury, robs my caravans, despoils my priests. What shall I make of you?"

  The pain had spread out of the joints and migrated to soft places. The noise in his ears roared and made her voice distant.

  "Tain has given his son away," the Ila mocked him, "so I take him. What shall I make of you, Marak Trin Tain? What shall I name you instead?"

  Mockery he would not endure. "General of your armies," he said, courting their violence. "Captain of your guard."

  She leaned back, lifted a hand, perhaps to forestall her officers. The au'it, who had written it all, ceased writing, poised the pen above the page of her book.

  The Ila's hand described a circle in the air. The au'it shut the book and put down her pen.

  "Now without record," the Ila said, "I ask you. where is this madness?"

  "In the east," he said without thinking, and astonished himself. It was in the east. Everything was in the east. It had no reason to be, but he knew it was, and it disturbed him to the heart.

  "You wish to be a captain of my guard," the Ila said. "I have a one that suffices. But a captain of explorers, perhaps, as there used to be, before there were the tribes. So you are. I name you to ride out for me and find the source of the madness. I name you to go where the mad go when they wander out, and find out why they turn to the east. I name you to return to me and to report whatever you learn. And if you return to me and report the truth, I will give you a gift. You will rule Kais Tain."

  A stir of utter dismay went through the captains.

  He himself did not believe it.

  "I have set my seal on Kais Tain," the Ila said, "and have all persons therein under that seal. Write it!" she said, and the au'it wet her pen and wrote. "They live or they die as you please me, and after you do my will, they live or they die as they please you. What other reward do you wish for your service?"

  Was he not to die? He searched all the crevices of that utterance, looking for the reason in what he heard.

  Was he not to die? And did the Ila make a barbed joke, and had the au'it written it in the book as if it were the truth, and the law?

  The pain made it difficult to think. The roaring made it difficult to hear anything sensible.

  "Is that enough?" the Ila asked him, as if she bargained in a market. "Do you agree to my terms?"

  He could not think on his knees. He struggled to his feet. Fire shot up and down the bones. Defying it, he straightened his back, and fire ran there, too.

  "My mother," he said. "Now. My sister. I want them safe from Tain."

  The Ila moved a vertical finger against her lips and gazed at him.

  "Is there a dispute within Tain's house?"

  "He's threatened them. Keep them safe. Provide for them. And I'll get your answer."

  "I don't bargain."

  "I do." His effrontery stung the guards. They began to move; they laid hands on him; and desisted, perhaps in fear of lightning.

  "I shall provide you all you need," the Ila said mildly, "and appoint you a captain as you ask, and give you all the resources you ask. And I shall set my seal on your mother and your sister and have them safe. Do you agree?"

  It was surely a trap, a trick, a mockery. But the roaring burst like a dam in his ears, and the madmen turned and twitched together, some falling on the floor.

  "Leave," the Ila said, motioning toward the doors. "And take them out!" She pointed at Marak. "You stay!"

  Her guards slowly, with backward glances, gathered the mad, some of them standing, some on the floor, and cleared the room even of themselves. The au'it hesitated, last, but even to her the Ila made a sign, and the au'it gathered her ink and her book and slunk away to a door behind the pillars.

  Then the Ila rose from her chair and descended three steps, silk whispering, falling like old blood about her movements.

  Then she sat down, like some marketwife, midway on those steps. She was that close, as fragile as temple porcelain. But pain ran through Marak's joints like knives and reminded him at every breath what those gloved hands could do.

  Those hands joined, made a bridge against her lips. Highborn women might whiten their faces with cosmetic to show their lack of exposure to the sun, and come outdoors only by night. Her skin left no mark on the gloves. It was translucent white, alive. The eyes were deep as wells.

  "I wish your loyalty in this," she said. "Will I have it?"

  He asked himself what other choice he had, compared to life, and being given power to rescue those two on earth he loved. The opposite was implicit in the Ila's gift: that all he loved were still under her seal.

  "I see no recourse," he said. "No choice."

  "When I heard you were among the mad I gathered, I knew I had a resource above the others. What coin will truly win you, Marak Trin? A province? A great house?"

  She mocked him. And he searched his soul and knew to his distress that in company with her offer, life itself interested him, and her proposition interested him. He had lived with death all the way to the holy city. She gave him tomorrow
instead and offered him the lives of his mother and sister into the bargain. All his principles ebbed away, gone like the strength in his limbs.

  She had sat down like a marketwife. In deliberate mockery of the fear he felt he sank down and sat like a field hand, cross-legged, at the last in a hard collapse against the stone. All she offered might be a lie, but from a posture like hers he answered and he listened, having been caught and corrupted by this idea of hers. Everything in him longed for answers, longed for reason, for purpose, for some logic to his life.

  "What if I do this?" he said. "What do you expect me to find out there?"

  "If I knew," she said, "would I have to send anyone?"