A Prison Unsought

A PRISON UNSOUGHT

Exordium: Book Three

Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-509-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

Imagine an ocean,
the life-layered aqueous skin of a planet. In its surface waters, where life
burgeons in the sunlight striking through shallows, racked by wind and wave,
every creature is either predator or prey. It is a world of eternal struggle:
the sudden slash of tooth, the lazy diaphanous drift of blood that triggers the
predators’ frenzy. But deep beneath the surface, undisturbed by any storm, is
unchanging calm; there vast schools swim in peace. Death still strikes, but few
are the victims compared to the whole.

Now turn your eyes to
the world in which we live, the vast ocean of night with its widely scattered
islands of life: the planets and Highdwellings of the Thousand Suns. It, too,
has its shallows, their sun the power flowing from the Mandala, in whose light,
and for whose favor, the Douloi struggle endlessly among themselves. As well
its depths, wherein the Polloi work and play and live and love, billions passing
their entire lives in freedom.

True, suffering and
strife still linger in the Thousand Suns and can never be eliminated, for
strife is coeval with humanity. We have long sought ways to limit its extent,
with varying degrees of success. It was the genius of Jaspar Arkad, and those
who followed him, to strike the bargain which has since then upheld the
Panarchy: that in exchange for power and privilege the Douloi should forever
surrender peace.

Magister Lemel sho’Harris
Gnostor of Gnomic Universals
Akademia Elaion, Hellas Prime, 879
a.a.

Court is a
place where joys are visible but false, and sorrow hidden but
real.

Madame de Maintenon ca. 500 b.e.

Apprehension gripped the vitals of both men moving down
the empty corridor, but being enemies, they could not share it.

Morrighon still could not believe his orders. But to hear
them was to obey.

He stopped at the only door on this corridor, deep within
the battlecruiser, and peered both ways. No one in sight. No sound except the
breathing of the deposed Panarch of the Thousand Suns standing behind him.
Long, deep breaths they were, like a runner; not noisy, nor was the old man
trying to hide his exertion.

Morrighon tabbed the door open, then guided the Panarchist
into the darkness beyond with a hissed admonition, “Be silent!”

Gelasaar stumbled as the hatch engaged behind him. He’d
smelled the sour fear on the thin, misshapen secretary, which caused him to
brace for anything as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The thick, coarse-woven cloth of the
dzirkash’juluth
—the Dol’jharian penance robe that Morrighon had
disguised him in—did little to ward the room’s chill. Perceiving a dim shape at
the other end of the chamber, he shuffled carefully toward it. Although the
plates sewn into the robe were merely aluminum foam, instead of the heavy
iridium ordained for Dol’jharians who incurred their superiors’ displeasure,
the 1.2 standard gees maintained on board the
Fist of Dol’jhar
constrained his movements just as effectively. It
was a realistic disguise for one accustomed to standard acceleration, perhaps
the only one that would have worked among a people accustomed to the brutal
gravitation of Dol’jhar.

Though Gelasaar recognized the merciless speed with which
higher acceleration could wear down an aging body, he was finding it difficult
to attend to all the protocols for long exposure to high gravity. At least he’d
mastered the shuffling and the breathing against a hard-set core that partially
decompressed his spine, but if he was already feeling the effects, after less
than a week, what damage would he sustain by the time they finally reached
Gehenna?

Gelasaar smiled grimly at the pale form emerging from the
darkness.
Doesn’t matter.
The
Isolates his justice had exiled there would see to that.

He stopped. A skull smiled back at him with the humorless
grimace of the fleshless dead. It hung above a long, high carven table, flanked
by two massive candles that emanated a faint sweet carrion odor. The shock of
recognition was immediate: he was in the Chamber of the Mysteries.

As he puzzled at the significance of this, he recalled the
Dol’jharian name of the chamber:
Hurreachu
i’Dol
. It meant something like “the Unknowable-Presence-Indwelling of Dol,”
although the first word was essentially untranslatable. Merely being there was
a death sentence for any non-Dol’jharian, for this was the cultic center of the
Avatar’s power. No wonder Morrighon had been afraid, though he was secretary to
the son of most powerful man on board this ship, Gelasaar’s conqueror, Eusabian
of Dol’jhar.

But the balance of power yawned chasm-deep between Eusabian
and his only living son. Eusabian had killed all his other offspring, and
Gelasaar knew that Eusabian would kill Anaris rahal’Jerrodi, too, if he
suspected either weakness or disobedience.

The door hissed open, and Anaris entered. The tall,
broad-shouldered young man and the short, frail older man gazed at one another
with interest freighted by the twenty years Anaris had spent as Gelasaar’s
hostage.

Gelasaar pushed the cowl of the robe back. He sensed an odd
amalgam of emotions in the young man; Anaris’s stance was easy, but the angle
of his head and the tightness of his shoulders revealed the wariness that he
did not bother to hide.

Anaris said, “I see you’ve met Grandfather.”

The Panarch inclined his head.
Is that how it’s to be?
Irony had become one of Anaris’s strongest
defenses during his fosterage in the Mandala. Gelasaar wondered if the young
man’s choice of this room for their meeting revealed the final victory of his
Dol’jharian nature, or a fear of the resurgence of his Panarchist nurture.

“We didn’t have much to say to each
other,” he replied.

Anaris gave a short bark of laughter. He’d known he would
enjoy this encounter, perhaps the more as it took place in secret, without his
father’s knowledge.

He stepped forward to
place his hands on the altar as he peered up at the skull of his father’s
father. “He has no words for anyone, but most fear his voice nonetheless.”
Anaris’s Uni diction was perfect, right to the sardonic Douloi drawl. “Even my
father avoids this chamber except in execution of his ritual obligations,
especially now that he has formally accepted me as heir.”

Ah. I am not here for summary execution, then, but in
secret.
And now Anaris was heir! No longer rahal’Jerrodi, but achreash’Eusabian,
indicating a sharing of the ancestral spirit. Gelasaar knew what that meant:
danger and opportunity both.

Anaris stepped away from the altar, his boot heels ringing
on the inlaid stone of the floor. Then he wheeled about to face Gelasaar. “But
I needn’t speak to you about the efficacy of ritual, empty though it be. We
share that habit, Panarchists and Dol’jharians alike: using ritual as a tool of
statecraft.”

His voice had slowed to a mockery of the Douloi drawl.
Gelasaar knew that Anaris’s lessons from the College of Archetype and Ritual
had shown him the political necessity of symbolism and ritual, and other
factors in his fosterage on Arthelion had emptied him of Dol’jharian
superstition.
But we somehow failed to
put anything in the place of the void that was left.

Anaris stepped closer.

“This journey itself is the final
ritual of power. Only at its end, after I have dealt with the guardians of
Gehenna and delivered you to your fate, will authority finally pass from
Arthelion to Dol’jhar.” Anaris waited expectantly for reaction from Gelasaar.

It sounded rehearsed to Gelasaar, who hid his pulse of
surprise.
So they don’t know about the
Knot!
As had so many others, Anaris and his father had assumed that Gehenna
was secured by force of arms, rather than the anomaly that had claimed so many
ships before its secret was unraveled, over seven hundred years before. That
was not unanticipated: the Knot was one of the best-kept secrets of his
government.

This meant that Gelasaar had the ability to deliver the
exile ship to sudden death, if he so desired.

But Anaris had said “I,” not “we,” implying that he alone
would escort Gelasaar and his former privy council to Gehenna. If so, Anaris’s
death would do nothing to shake Eusabian’s hold on the Thousand Suns; and the
fact that they were having this interview at all was a reminder of their
conversations when Anaris had been Gelasaar’s prisoner.
He seeks something from me.

The pause had become a silence, more reflective than threatening.
Did Anaris see how this interview mirrored the days when Gelasaar had forcibly
cleared his schedule, just so the two could talk alone?

Anaris did. It was memory of those interviews that had prompted
him to risk this one. He was pleased with the result so far; Gelasaar exhibited
no fear, no intent to bargain or to plead. Excellent. This might while away the
otherwise deadly boredom of life so close to his father.

Gelasaar adjusted his stance minutely as his back reminded
him of another high-gee protocol. By now he was certain that Anaris had not
brought him here to force surrender or abasement from his prisoner, or Gelasaar
would be wearing a shock collar, and likely facing an introduction to one of
the ritual torturers.

Therefore Gelasaar had one last task as Panarch of the
Thousand Suns. He had no doubt that the fusion of Dol’jharian savagery and
Panarchist subtlety that his fosterage of Anaris had created would be more than
Eusabian could deal with in the end. If it was to be that Anaris would rule the
Thousand Suns, this conversation, and the ones that might follow, would be his
final, necessary lessons in statecraft. For Anaris could not rule the Thousand
Suns as a Dol’jharian—that kind of brutality would smash the polity beyond
repair, if it were not already. He had to learn patience, and compromise, and
respect.

And though Anaris had remained Dol’jharian enough to survive
his return to his father, and even to be lifted to heirship, there remained a
hope that Anaris would listen, and hear, and even understand.
He did tell me that Brandon was alive, when
there was no need to do so, and here we stand, without the threat of violence.

Gelasaar arrived at an inward decision. Prisoner though he
was, he would open his mind to Anaris on any subject he wished. Excepting only
one: the secret of Gehenna.

And if, when they reached Gehenna, Gelasaar had seen no
signs of understanding, or if Eusabian were indeed still with them—the decision
for death would still be his.

He smiled, and Anaris smiled back, surprised at the sense of
anticipation Gelasaar’s smile engendered in him. Nothing his father had done or
ever would do could ever rouse any such emotion. But emotion could be costly.

“You know that is not so,” said the
Panarch. He held up his hand, forestalling Anaris’s objection. “Oh, certainly
the transfer of authority will appear valid to your fellow Dol’jharians, but
they are an atom in the void against the trillions you intend to rule.”

Anaris breathed a laugh, disappointed. Surely Gelasaar could
not possibly harbor hope that Eusabian’s
paliach
—ritually
defined vengeance—would fail.

“You cannot hope to succeed without
adopting and adapting the rituals of power, as you term them, that we have
evolved over the past millennium. They are too deeply ingrained in the people
of the Thousand Suns.” Gelasaar tipped his head, his gaze distant for a
heartbeat or two. “But you, at least, can see this, and grasp the necessity, I
think. Your father cannot, as demonstrated by the Throne Room bloodbath.”