A Prison Unsought (52 page)

The door to the hyperwave room slid shut behind him, cutting
off the stares of the officers and technicians in the Situation Room, but not
before Ysabet, his head technician, slipped through behind him, her black eyes narrowed
above a sympathetic grimace.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “What in the Nine
Shiidran Hells is that circus all about? I thought this was to test the
Dol’jharian and the sophonts. Isn’t that Tate Kaga?”

Omilov sighed heavily. “It’s very . . . complicated.
But Ivard, the youth bonded to the Kelly, is evidently part of the poly-mental
complex that is sensitive to Urian artifacts, and he will not cooperate without
the Prophetae.”

She snorted derisively as she glowered at the small room
with the red-glowing lump of the hyperwave wired into the wall opposite the
door, and the various instruments now ranked along the other walls for the
experiment. “Gonna be crowded. Hope those little brain-boilers aren’t
claustrophobic.”

Omilov nodded, and Ysabet began reviewing and confirming their
preparations. Save for Omilov himself, all the technicians would monitor
remotely, to avoid biasing the noetic and mental potentials of the
participants, and for their own safety, should the Eya’a react negatively.

He glanced at the ceiling, where neatly installed nozzles
now protruded, ready to flood the room with a complex of gases that, based on
the best guesses from the scanty biological data they had on the Eeya’a, might
immobilize them. Might; it might also kill them or, perhaps worse, have no
effect at all. He had a brief, chilling vision of a Situation Room filled with
corpses, blood and neural tissue leaking from eyes and noses.

“Gnostor? Are you all right?”

He tried to shake off the mood. “I’m sorry, Ysabet. Too much
work, too little sleep. You’ve done a fine job here. Why don’t you send in the
first group of participants?”

She departed with a final, indecipherable look backward. He
sensed the tianqi shifting into a new mode, one he recognized as intended to
subdue anxiety, but it had little effect on him.

Omilov tried to steady himself with the sight of the
gleaming instruments blinking their messages of logic and mathematics, the
polished floor reflecting the banks of lights and the mysterious artifact of
the Ur. Here he’d felt in control, in contrast to life outside. It had compensated,
in a way, for his inability to help Brandon, who he feared was slowly drowning
in the maelstrom of Douloi intrigue. Omilov had sworn ten years ago to stay out
of the mephitic gutter of politics. All it did was besmirch one; science, at
least, was clean and neutral.

But now that control was slipping away, the clean symmetry
of science pushed out by the amorphous pressure of mysticism, and there was
nothing he could do about it. Old memories pushed up from the silence of the
past, triggering the dull ache of regret that was never far away. Then the door
slid open, admitting Ivard, the Kelly, Eloatri, and finally Tate Kaga.

“We’d better hurry,” said the High
Phanist. “Manderian says the Eya’a may not wait much longer.”

But then, to his utter astonishment, Tate Kaga floated over
to the hyperwave and commenced a guttural chant in an archaic language that
resembled nothing Omilov had ever heard before, and Ivard echoed it. The Kelly
swarmed around the youth, moaning in counterpoint, their head-stalks patting and
stroking both him and the Urian artifact. On the walls, the lenses of the
imagers reflected the scene in miniature as they recorded it all.

The nuller handed something through the gee-bubble’s field
to Ivard—some sort of burning herb, which Ivard flourished at the hyperwave and
then at himself, breathing deeply. A sharp fragrance filled the air.

Omilov took a furious step toward the High Phanist. “What
are they doing? What is this nonsense?”

“Tate Kaga is a shaman of the
Shanungpa tradition. He is helping Ivard to prepare. . . .”

Really angry now, Omilov cut her off. “I suppose they’ll
sacrifice some small animal next.” He raised his voice. “That’s enough of that.
This is a scientific experiment.”

But the High Phanist grabbed his aim and swung him back to
face her with surprising strength.

“Be silent, Sebastian Omilov! Your
ignorance is willful and unforgivable.” She raised her hand, revealing the
image of the Digrammaton burned into it in its unexplainable leap across the
light-years from Arthelion, where her predecessor had died in the atrocity
aimed at Brandon. “Have you so soon forgotten Desrien?”

A chill caused his heart to ache, his diaphragm tighten. He
fought desperately as the Dreamtime stirred within the vaults of memory,
bringing with it an image of a man in archaic dress, facing a snarling leopard
in a dark forest.

Then the hatch hissed open and the Eya’a raced through,
followed more slowly by Vi’ya. She moved as if exhausted, her eyes wide and
unseeing. Manderian watched closely, not touching her but apparently prepared
for anything, his countenance mirroring her agonized concentration.

The keening of the Eya’a mounted above the chanting and the
alien threnody of the Kelly, as they ran their twiggy hands over the hyperwave.
Then they stilled, their white fur fluffed out. Omilov felt a pressure in his
head, and heard Manderian’s breath hiss. Ivard’s voice ceased.

As one, Ivard, Vi’ya and the Eya’a all pivoted to face in
the same direction.

Omilov’s ring finger tingled, rising to an ache up his left
arm. He took a step forward, another, fighting off a buzzing tide of blackness.
He heard Vi’ya gasp a name: “Arkad!”

Then she, Ivard, and the Eya’a crumpled to the floor.

The Kelly bent over the prone youth and the little
white-furred sophonts. They made space for Eloatri, who knelt next to Ivard’s
head. Omilov looked from one to the other, helpless to act or to intervene. The
last thing he saw was the limp body of the Dol’jharian woman borne up into the
air below Tate Kaga’s bubble, her dark hair streaming like a banner in the wind
as the nuller sped through the open hatch and away.

Then the mystery of Desrien claimed him finally and once
again, and he fell into the Dreamtime.

o0o

Sebastian Omilov
knew he was dreaming.

Then the knowledge
fled and he found himself standing in a street in Merryn, on Charvann.

Above, the light
vanished from the sky over the city, taking with it the last traces of his
sense of direction. The buildings around him jutted in as darker night; no
windows glowed, no lumen-panels broke the darkness, only the streetlights casting
no illumination beyond weak puddles of light directly beneath them. A restless
wind scourged the street, and the air bore the tang of dust and ozone.

Omilov heard in the
distance the confusing roar of a crowd in that uneasy state between excitement
and riot. He walked toward the sound, but it receded from him.

Finally he entered the
great square before the Archonic Enclave as the crowd smashed through its
gates, pursuing some sort of banner or guerdon—it was too dark to see the
device emblazoned on it—that twisted in the air in front of them, ever out of
reach. Douloi and Polloi alike, in finery or in rags, they scrambled through
the towering doors and vanished from his sight.

Omilov made to follow
them, seeking some refuge from the strange emptiness of the streets, but the
solid darkness within repelled him. Deep within the Enclave their shouts and
cries sounded like the growl of some vast beast lying in wait.

“There is no safety in
there for you, Sebastian. You must take another path.”

He turned, startled.
At his side stood Nahomi il’Ngari, his superior in the Praerogacy, her gaunt
features clear to his eyes in spite of the darkness. Something was missing. He
had it: the blason de soleil that had been the sole adornment of her sober
garb.

Her hand strayed to
her breast, then dropped to her side. “My aegicy issues from another now.
Come.”

She walked away. The
set of her shoulders forbade speech. Omilov followed, the only sound the grit
of their shoes in the dust underfoot.

They encountered no
other people; the buildings dwindled, giving way to open fields, the restless
breeze carrying a sour tang.

The sky flickered less
frequently. After a time measured only in heartbeats and the solemn tread of
their feet, an angular form took shape against the horizon, glowing with the
light of first moonrise. Then Tira bulged over the distant mountains, and
Omilov gasped as its magenta orb, swollen by the horizon effect, silhouetted
the archaic, terrible form of a gallows. A body hung suspended from it.

As they neared, he saw
that the gallows was guarded by two Marines in battle armor, as unmoving as the
deadly framework above them, their visors closed, reflective.

Nahomi stopped. Omilov
perforce stopped too and looked up at the gruesome burden, swaying slightly in
the wind.

“No!” The word was
impelled from him as if by a fist in the stomach. Despite the corpse’s swollen
face, its blackened, protruding tongue and glaring eyes, he recognized it:
Tared hai-L’Ranja, Archon of Lusor.

Omilov ran to the foot
of the gallows, where a ladder lay on the ground. He bent and grasped its
rungs, trying to heave it against the upright; a foot pinned it to the ground,
bruising his fingers. He stared into Nahomi’s face.

“You cannot help him
now.”

“Why? He was the most
loyal of all!”

No reply. Rage seized
him; he turned on the nearest Marine and pounded his fists against the
unyielding surface of the battle armor, shouting wordlessly. Then he stumbled
back, terrified, as the Marine’s visor popped open. The armor was empty; the
taint of carrion wafted out.

Omilov began to run.
He heard a harsh cry behind him, a creaking, inhuman sound, and the beat of
vast wings.

He left the fields
behind, fleeing into the closeness of a dense forest of twisted trees. His
breath froze white: the air was cold, bitterly cold, and the trees cried out in
the crackling speech of branches split by freezing sap.

Finally he emerged
into double moonlight and the welcome sight of home: The Hollows, its marble
walls and high-peaked roofs gleaming. Omilov slowed to a walk, and his
breathing eased.

He stopped. A coldness
deeper than the frigid air settled in his heart. The windows of The Hollows
gaped empty, lightless; the doors hung askew, and the gardens were brittle, not
with the natural sleep of winter’s rest, but with the blighted death of an
aborted spring.

Omilov stumbled into
the sculpture garden outside his library. Thick rime coated the limbs of the
stone figures, furring their outlines into distortions of their former grace.

And then he saw the
other figures, standing here and there. He approached one and found a man
encased in ice, unmoving. He bent over, peering through the blurry armor frozen
on his face, and hissed in surprise. It was the Archon Srivashti, whose
betrayal of the norms of power had ruined Timberwell. Omilov straightened
abruptly and backed away when Srivashti’s eyes moved, his gaze a mix of mute
appeal and madness.

Something cold touched
his back, stopping his retreat. He spun around, recognizing another frozen
form: Semion vlith-Arkad. The ice around his body was even thicker, but his
eyes, too, tracked Omilov as he moved away.

Omilov fled toward the
library, ever his refuge, and ran headlong into a third figure. The impact
cracked the ice on it, thinner than the layer on the others, and the figure’s
head turned.

“Sebastian, I didn’t
know,” whispered Brandon. As Omilov watched, horrified, the ice grew back over Brandon’s
face and neck, crystallizing in patterns like frost on a window, immobilizing
all but his eyes.

Weeping, Omilov
climbed the steps to the library and pushed open the doors, seeking safety,
security, the familiar.

The roof had fallen
in, leaving the room open to the sky. The two moons peered over the jagged
edges of the walls, brightly lighting the ruin within. Books littered the
floor, their bindings torn, pages scattered; daggers of ice hung from every
shelf, like the teeth of dragons.

In the center of the
room, miraculously spared the destruction all around, he found his carven
reading stand, an opened book upon it. He looked down. It was no book he’d ever
known, the pages brown with age and their edges ragged—hand cut—and printed in
a font he’d never seen before. It was a relic of Lost Earth.

He bent, angling his
head to see past the double shadow from the moons. The words sprang out at him.

“Where are you damned?”
“In hell.”
“How comes it then that thou art out of hell?”
“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Thinkest thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?”

Omilov jerked
backward, trying to retreat, but the only result was a grating, almost musical
crunch as his legs refused to move. He looked down, horrified, to see the ice
creeping up his torso: he was already encased in ice from his hips down.

He looked back at the
book, as if the answer might lie there. A shadow fell across it and he gazed up
into Ilara’s eyes, soft blue-gray and understanding. She closed the book firmly
with one slim hand and smiled at him. He drank in the sight of her hungrily,
forgetting his desperation; but then the cold settled in him even deeper as he
saw the gaping wound blooming like an evil rose in the center of her chest. The
ice mounted to his throat, across his chin, sealed his mouth, and finally
blurred his vision of her face.