Crown Of Fire (7 page)

Tel arched one eyebrow. "You've missed Conura Day for two years."

The serving woman slid a plate, still flaming, onto the tapestry tablecloth. "The trick to eating this," the woman told Brennen, "is to keep it alight. Blow out each bite just before you take it into your mouth."

"I see," he said dubiously, trying to spoon into it. He lifted the bite, and it extinguished.

A faint bell chimed behind Shel's back. She stepped aside as Tel's servitor hurried up the hall.

"Do this." Firebird slid a spoon into the center of her portion, let granules spill in, then carefully raised the bite, still flaming.

The blue-aproned woman reappeared beside Shel. "Your Highness? Crosstown link."

Tel pursed his lips. "Right in the middle of dessert. Wouldn't you know?"

"I'll make you another, sir," the servitor said as Tel brushed past her. She remained in the room, eyes averted from Tel's guests, so Firebird didn't speak. The sweet, rich dessert had a perfumy taste.

Less than a minute later, Tel returned, frowning. "Evidently," he said, "they really want to speak with you, Firebird."

"Who?" she asked, glancing at Shel.

Tel folded his hands. "He didn't give a name."

Frowning, Firebird followed him to his crosstown station. A featherweight headset dangled from a wall panel that could display a caller's lace, amplify a voice, or show informational displays.

Shel's footsteps came close behind.

Tel lifted the CT headpiece. Firebird hooked it over one ear as he hurried back to the dining area, and then she made sure his link wasn't set to transmit visuals. "Hello," she said toward the blank wall panel.

"Lady Firebird." It was, as Tel said, a male voice . . . and no face appeared. The caller hadn't set to transmit either.

"Speaking," she answered.

"Greetings from Three Zed. We've missed you."

Firebird's blood turned icy. She whirled to lean against the wall and stare into Shelevah Mattason's blue-gray eyes. As Shel pulled a sub-tronic tracing device out of her tunic pocket, an epsilon probe slid into the back of Firebird's awareness. The sensation made Firebird wish she'd eaten less—and made her sympathize with Clareen Chesterson. "Go on," Firebird said, not bothering to turn her head. The pickup was omnidirectional.

"So you dislike idle talk, too. Good. Are you familiar with a phenomenon called the
shebiyl?"

Firebird thought back to something Brennen had once mentioned, a practice forbidden in the older holy book,
Dabar.
"Alternate paths of the future," she said crisply.
Keep talking,
she urged him as Shel held her device close to the CT unit. Danton's plainclothes agents had been assigned to cruise this neighborhood in a second car. Shel would alert them.

"Very good. We have seen on the shebiyl that your presence could lead to Netaia's destruction. We've seen this world as a cold cinder spinning in orbit. If you really care for your people, you should leave quickly."

She silently cried,
Liar!
but the mental image made her tremble, especially after watching that Codex simulation and hearing Tel make plans on her behalf. Could she live with herself if she caused—

Could
she
spark the uprising?

"Nothing to say, Lady Firebird?"

"Who are you?" Was this Micahel? Whoever had emerged from the shadows, Brenn needed his location. They also needed to know how the Shuhr tracked them here.

"You wouldn't know my name, Lady Firebird."

Disappointed, she said, "Go back to your own world. This is mine."

The voice laughed. "Yours? I believe it belongs to your countryman, Muirnen Rogonin."

Firebird rolled her eyes. Shel adjusted her device.

"Do enjoy your visit home. And your bond mate, while you have him." The connection clicked off.

Chilled, Firebird dropped the headpiece onto its hook.
While you have him?
"What did you get?"

Shel cradled her tracer on one palm. "Frequency, range, heading, and a voice profile. He's close, maybe half a kilometer." She reached for the CT link. "I'll relay this to base and our auxiliaries. Maybe we can take this one."

Firebird marched back toward the dining area. Brennen stood in the hallway, Uri at his shoulder. Firebird wondered how much they'd heard. "Shuhr," she murmured, "and Shel says he's close. Half a klick. She has the base trying to trace the call." She slipped back into the dining room and sat back down. With one puff, she blew out her dessert. "Tel," she said, "we just had a call from one of the Shuhr."

Brennen followed her in. "Governor Danton will get you a guard in minutes," he told Tel. "Meanwhile—"

Tel's expression darkened, and he lowered his eyebrows. "Not necessary, Cald—"

Shel emerged last from the hallway. "I've got a trace on the call. The auxiliaries are on their way."

Tel glanced up. "I have a bodyguard of my own, uplevel. I gave him some time off while your shadows take care of me." He touched a control on the table's edge.

Brennen blew out his own dessert, a smoldering cinder. An image sprang into Firebird's mind—Netaia, blackened like that burned-out dish of flamed snow.

Liars!
They couldn't be trusted, but the image wouldn't leave her mind.

A liveried man appeared in the hall doorway, imposingly square-shouldered, impressively quiet. Tel turned to him. "Paudan, the threat is outside. Watch the front door."

The big man half bowed and slipped out.

With a sweep of double doors, Tel's servitor pushed through again, three more dessert portions gleaming on her tray. "Let's try this again," Tel said cheerfully.

Shel moved to the window and stared out, resting one hand on her holster. Before the servitor finished setting down the desserts, Shel murmured, "There he is. That's no pedestrian."

Firebird sprang up and followed Brennen to the window.

He'd already pulled an interlink off his belt. "Tel," he said, holding the link aside, "how many entries do you have?"

"Three." Tel pointed toward the kitchen. "He seems to be headed for the service entry. Side door's in the firebay room, and there's the front way, where you came in."

As Brennen relayed Tel's information to his other forces, Firebird pulled Tel's small blazer from her deepest pocket. Brennen drew an oddly shaped weapon, designed to be concealed in his palm. It contained ten tiny injector darts, each loaded with two drugs. One was a rapid sedative. The other, a chemical called DME-6, temporarily blocked all epsilon abilities. Brennen had refused to touch the darts but let Danton's nongifted aides load his pistol. Firebird, who'd struggled with a needle phobia all her life, literally could not carry the weapon. "Don't get separated from Shel." Brennen touched Firebird's elbow. "You two, firebay room. Tel, can you and your man handle the front door?"

"Yes."

"All we need to do is keep them busy until Danton's reinforcements arrive." Brennen turned to Uri. "We'll take the service entry." He loosened his crystace in its wrist sheath, then glanced toward the back door.

"What makes you sure there'll be more than one of them?" Tel asked.

True,
she thought at Brennen.
He came alone that night at Trinn Hill.

Brennen shook his head slightly.

All right, then.
Brennen, at ES 83, was still better equipped than Tel and all his servitors to deal with Shuhr until reinforcements arrived.
And what about windows?
Firebird wondered.

Following her bodyguard, Firebird hurried back up Tel's hall, past the link station and into the room where they interviewed Clareen. Now she saw it with an eye for defense. Its windows faced downhill. Across from the windows loomed the massive stone hearth, and then one more heavy wooden door beyond the hearth, at the room's end.

"Watch the window," Shel said. After propping the inside door and examining the outside door's palm-lock, Shel took up a position against the firewall.

Firebird eased toward the outer wall between window and door and peered through the edge of the glass pane. Or was it glasteel? Would it hold until a Sentinel force arrived? There were more ways into this apartment than through doors. Her stomach tightened on Tel's "modest" food.

She saw movement outside. A bony, dark-haired man—she didn't think it was the assassin she'd glimpsed at Trinn Hill—mounted Tel's steps.

He hadn't gone to the service entry after all, but straight to the door that no Sentinel guarded.

"Shel," she whispered, drawing back. If she could see him, he could sense her by her individual tang of alpha-matrix energy. More than ever, she wished she could shield her mind against the gifted. She'd only learned to turn inward and touch her epsilon carrier, and unless she coupled it with Brennen's, she'd only managed to kill two assailants who attacked her psyche. She prayed she would never again get that close to a Shuhr.

The door chime rang.

The ancient mantel clock's pendulum swung in slow arcs. On one side of the firebay, a covered canvas lay on an easel, probably one of Tel's projects. Traffic hummed in the distance.

The caller knocked lightly at first, then harder. Just inside, beyond the propped parlor door, Tel squared his shoulders beside his broad-shouldered shadow. Firebird wiped moisture off her palms, cringing. Brenn hadn't wanted to involve other non-Sentinels in their trap.

An eerie wail started overhead. Shel's head jerked up, her blazer wavering between door and ceiling. As the wail grew in volume, Firebird jammed a finger in her left ear. Sonic weaponry? Or—

Down the chimney came a rattling shriek.
More ways in than the doors!
Simultaneously, something slammed against Shel's side door.
A second assailant, attacking while we're distracted.
Shel crouched, shutting her eyes and flattening her palm against shuddering dark wood.

Out of the hearth burst a shrieking flock of black saucer shapes. Spinning and sputtering, they scattered. Firebird dropped to a crouch, steadied her little blazer two-handed, and tracked one saucer. She fired. The saucer exploded, scattering metal fragments over a narrow radius, showering Tel's longweave carpet and some of the furniture, and piercing the covered canvas with a
pop.
She tracked another saucer and fired. They had to be close-quarter drones, the kind that adhered to a victim and then exploded. If caught midair, they wouldn't throw much shrapnel—

Three of them whirled toward Shel. Two more whizzed at Firebird. Her blazer quivered in her hand. She got one, missed one .. . ducked . . . caught it as it spun back toward her, then picked off the others.

Tel shouted a challenge from the entry. Had she missed another saucer? A hasty glance back showed Shel still crouched at the side door, left hand raised in voice-command. Someone had to be outside that door, pitting his epsilon strength against hers.
Mighty Singer, where are those reinforcements?
So much for their assumption that the Shuhr would wait to attack publicly!

There
was
another saucer in the entry, diving at Tel. Tel's servitor fired, missing Tel by centimeters, too close to hit the swooping drone. Firebird tracked the drone and fired again. Metal exploded with a flash that seared afterimages on her retinas. Tel fell back, one arm flung up to cover his eyes. His other servitor huddled in a corner, holding her sweeper aloft like a weapon.

Outside, an engine roared up and stopped. Shel shouted through the parlor, "They're here!"

The clock's ticking seemed to grow loud again. Firebird listened hard. Running feet and shouting voices passed by... outdoors. She blinked, trying to clear smokelike puffs from her vision. A weird chemical smell filled the hallway. Shel pulled an instrument off her belt. "Nothing toxic," she assured Firebird. "Just explosives."

More light footsteps ran through the dining room. Brennen and Uri appeared in the hall. Firebird felt Brenn relax when he saw her unharmed.

Tel lowered his arm. Two short scrapes oozed blood on his forehead.

"Are you hurt?" Brennen asked.

"Scratched." Tel frowned as the door chime rang. "Do we let these men in?"

"Yes." Uri reached for the interior lock panel. The front door swung open. "Did you—?"

A uniformed Sentinel shook his head. "We were too late. Couldn't pick up a trail. How many—?"

"Two of them," Shel broke in.

Leaving Shel with Firebird and Tel, Brennen and his cousin walked four new arrivals around the apartment's perimeter. Tel's manservant biotaped his scrapes.

"I'd heard you were a good shot," Shel murmured, smiling. "Well done."

Firebird shrugged, wishing Brenn's reinforcements would have arrived three minutes earlier. He and Uri would be restraining an epsilon-blocked Shuhr for interrogation in Tel's parlor and sending Shel back to the palace for those sealed orders.

Tel inhaled deeply. "Ventry," he said, relieving the serving woman of her sweeper, "could we possibly try, one more time, to eat a quiet dessert?"

Firebird thought she heard the woman groan.

A carload of Sentinels escorted them back to the palace, then remained on watch, parked in the public square.

Firebird's afternoon commitment to the elected Assembly wasn't for two more hours, and she knew she'd better consider every trip outside these walls as a perilous opportunity. Brennen put Shel to work on the voiceprint, tracing calls through the crosstown network's memory banks.

Brennen was also making plans to fly a search grid, hoping to spot those Shuhr agents by their stray flickers of epsilon energy. Firebird doubted he would try such an overflight more than once, if at all. Flying surveillance would be risky and difficult.

She decided to make one pilgrimage inside these walls before her Assembly appointment. Shadowed by Shel, she padded up the private hall and around a corner. She palmed the locking panel on her old rooms. The door didn't budge.

Unsurprised, she stepped back to look around. Down the stair, a servitor hurried across the wide hall—and she recognized him. She'd heard Brennen assign this blond-bearded Sentinel to kitchen staff, back at Danton's office. He was one of their undercover agents. "Hello," Firebird called down. "Good afternoon."

The young man paused. "Good afternoon, Lady Firebird," he answered stiffly, mimicking palace-staff decorum.

Not bad,
she observed. Following protocol was his best chance of going unnoticed. Higher-ups on the staff, having served together for years, couldn't be impersonated—but lower-echelon servitors came and went regularly. If this Sentinel diffused his epsilon shields, he would sense her approval. "I'm sorry to bother you," she called, "but I would like to look in on my old suite."

He turned away. "I'll find someone to deactivate the lock."

Five minutes later, Firebird stepped into a sitting room she could've crossed in the dark without stubbing her toe. Shel followed, silently shutting the door.

The furniture remained, but otherwise the sitting room had been scoured of all evidence that Firebird ever lived here. Her parlor and bedroom were just as tidy and soulless.

Still, her mind saw a row of Academy trophies, a stack of tri-D souvenirs, and her brownbuck flight jacket flung over the ornate desk chair. This suite reappeared regularly in her dreams. She stroked a tiny pit in the stone wall, then traced a mineral vein with one fingertip, letting the sad sweetness of actually standing here roll over her.

She'd lived simply at Hesed and liked it. She wondered if five days in-house would leave her a spoiled aristocrat. It occurred to her that she'd been raised wealthy, never lacking anything she really craved.
Except faith, except security, except love,
she realized. Even her first clairsa was the work of a master instrument maker. The family had paid for her Academy training, knowing Netaia would never recoup that investment.

Maybe it would. Maybe she would serve her people better than her mother ever dreamed, steering Netaia toward Federate covenance and the Ehretans' faith.

She pushed open the last door. Her music room, a narrow chamber with only one window, had been utterly stripped. Not even the high stool and transcriber table remained.

Shutting her eyes, she leaned against the marble wall and wrapped her arms around an imaginary clairsa. She'd written her first songs on this spot, sitting here with her transcriber running. She'd collected other instruments, enjoying the challenge of learning to chord or pick out melodies.

Sighing, she opened her eyes and turned to leave—

And looked into her own image beside the door. For one instant, her brain registered it as a mirror. Then she recognized the portrait. Painted when she was sixteen, seated in a royal wastling's pose, the portrait showed her wearing a smaller diadem than the one she would accept in five days. The artist had somehow created an odd, haunted sadness in the eyes, contrasting with the proud uptilt of her chin.

Who hung it here
? Firebird wondered. Carradee must have done this, consciously leaving a ghost of her presence in the one room where she'd dared to hope she might survive a wastling's fate in the songs she left behind. Even Rogonin's staff must've felt it appropriate to leave the portrait here, or else they simply hadn't bothered to take it down.

"Nothing has changed," Firebird whispered. She still hoped to touch her people's hearts—not the detached, unflinching electors, but the people who truly were Netaia.

Would anyone listen? She was a convicted criminal. She wished she could ask for a fair retrial, besides her gubernatorial pardon. After cov-enance, maybe. Before the Assembly instead of the Electorate.

She stared at the picture, grateful for one more of Carradee's kindnesses. Mentally, she retraced her route through the portrait hall. She couldn't recall seeing Carradee's image. When Carrie abdicated, they must have removed her portrait from the entry, replacing it with Si-wann's.

If anyone ought to have pride-of-place down there, it should be Carradee's daughter, Iarla Second. Surely the four-year-old's portrait had been painted before she vanished.

Firebird hung her head. Almost without question, the Shuhr had found Iarla and her sister. If they were alive, anywhere, surely they would have surfaced by now.

But if the Shuhr had destroyed them . . . then with Carradee abdicated and Phoena dead . . .

Firebird pushed away the thought. The electors would continue their mockery of a regency for decades, if necessary, to keep her from ever coming back.

She pushed away from the wall. Shel, standing against the door, raised an eyebrow.

"Nothing, Shel. I've seen enough. We have work to do." Firebird felt half-complete when Brennen wasn't close, bad enough without adding a burden of memories. She turned away from this place that once vibrated with music. Leading her bodyguard, she hurried back to the crown princess's suite.

When they left the grounds headed for the Assembly, two small, dark cars pulled up alongside their limousine, and she saw midnight blue uniforms inside. A phalanx of Citangelo Enforcers surrounded that unit and delivered her to a hall in the central city. For most of a glorious hour, she sat in a balcony listening to a re-creation of the vote that brought her here. To override the inevitable electoral veto, she'd needed ninety percent of the popularly elected representatives.

She took ninety-four. This time, the Assembly representatives also made short speeches, praising Firebird for entering the single "nay" when the Electorate voted to attack Veroh, and demanding pledges that the Federates would protect their cities from Shuhr suicide attackers. Firebird answered with assurances, then delivered her cultural-exchange proposal. That drew polite applause.

Afterward, an ice-mine director, a metals stamping robot operator, and a woman who operated heavy machinery by virtual remote—all of them elected to represent working constituencies—joined her in a small private room.