ElyriasEcstasy (16 page)

Rune looked at the lone Guard who’d been left behind. He
wondered what the man had done to attract the Toplux’s attention. Plainly he
was nervous. Perhaps he too was being punished. The anticipation of what Aphael
Chav might do next, then, must be weighing heavily on the Guard’s heart, making
it beat faster than normal. The man was a Junior Interrogator. Why had he drawn
this duty?

Rune asked him, on impulse, “What did you do?”

The Guard seemed surprised by the question, but also
appeared to understand its full meaning. He looked at the floor, muttered, “I
gave liquor to a prisoner.”

Rune nodded. With some semblance of gentleness, he said, “Go
stand in the hall. Your pheromones are distracting me.” He had stopped himself
from saying the words “fear sweat”. Though his senses were only at their peak
in connection with Urna, they functioned at a heightened level even now.

He waited until he heard the door close at his back,
distinctly lacking the normal click and beep that would let him know he had
been locked inside. He glanced over his shoulder, making sure no eyes were
peering through the hole in the wall at him. The Guard’s slightly labored
breathing told him the man was leaning against the opposite wall.

Rune stepped up to the wall nearest to him and pressed his
palm flat against it. Urna had never told him why he did this to his walls and
Rune had never pressed him. Perhaps he hadn’t cared. Urna was eccentric. Let
him doodle if he liked.

Now, however, Rune examined with purpose.

He ran the thin, smooth skin of his fingertips, free of the
calluses one developed when regularly handling weaponry, over the surface of
the wall and felt the raised medium Urna had used to scrawl six words there.
They read:
This is the way to…
The last word was obscured, as if it had
been frantically rubbed out with the heel of a palm. Rune’s keen eyes made out
something of the original writing, but it was unclear. It could have been
fight
,
or maybe
light
.

He moved along the wall, breathing deeply. It wasn’t hard to
imagine his Weapon writing these nonsensical things, in fact, it was quite
easy. But could this writing be indicative of something more than harmless
eccentricity? Of all the things he’d fancied Urna to be—partner, rival,
lover—he’d never once suspected that he might actually be unstable. Such mental
deterioration wouldn’t be allowed, surely. It would have been wiped out by
drugs, or by other Lux programming tactics.

They had means, Rune had heard, but thankfully he himself
had never been subjected to them.

Rune continued to move slowly along the wall. His nostrils
flared and filled with a bitter, acrid smell, almost indiscernible. His tongue
salivated with sense memory. The taste of blood in his mouth. He dropped to his
knees.

There was a sequence of drawings directly in front of him.
Symbols he didn’t recognize, which meant that Urna should not know them either.
They had received the same military education. Only Urna was always reading
those old pointless texts, those scraps he’d gotten hold of somehow. Probably
he’d memorized the characters without knowing their meaning, if they had
meaning, and copied them here because he thought them pretty.

“Urna!”

The Passengers were closing in on the roadway. Not near
enough that the two of them were in immediate danger—yet—but close enough that
Urna could surely hear them too, with his ears that were far inferior to
Rune’s.

Worse, though, than this closing threat, was the sickness.
This was the first time Rune had truly had his boots on the ground out here.
Normally he stayed up high, out of range, and directed Urna. That was why they
raided old cities, because they provided an abundance of tall structures.

Bile rose in Rune’s throat and he knew then that they were
too far out. Not just flirting with going beyond the range of the wings’
ability to fly them back without running out of fuel, but they were too far
under the Ship. He was seized with the grim certainty that they shouldn’t have
come such a distance. “Urna!” There was little point in keeping quiet now.

“Wait.” He heard Urna, nearly breathless now. He was on his
knees, digging through some pile of rubbish on the crumbled roadbed. What the
hell was he doing? “Wait…” But Rune could wait no longer. He pushed himself
forward again, toward that voice. That single point of familiarity in this
wasteland. Rune closed his fingers around his sidearm as he went, blind and
avoiding obstacles by instinct, but it wasn’t as easy as it should have been.
“I’ve got it!” Urna called out in triumph, but Rune didn’t think he was talking
to him.

Distracted, Rune overcompensated for a drop in the level of
the ground and tripped, falling to his knees. Instead of coming down hard, what
he made contact with was startlingly soft and wet. And it reeked. Panicking, he
released the blindfold from his face with a series of sharp tugs, not as
practiced in its quick removal as he would one day be.

He’d stumbled into what appeared to be a small patch of
dense moss, copious and rank. Under the Shiplight it appeared red. Before he
could stop himself he reached down to touch the stuff with his fingertips. He
withdrew his hand immediately. His fingers stung. Something told him that this
wasn’t part of the normal pervasive decay. He and Urna had never been this far
out. No team had. Was there
more
of this red moss the deeper one went
into the Unsafe?

That was when he remembered the pistol in his other hand. In
that same mad instant he swung the firearm, meaning to get Urna’s total
attention. Rune had landed too far behind him and the Weapon was still several
yards ahead. He hadn’t listened to Rune’s warning and now the Shadowflash had
to make his point clear. He was, after all, charged with his Weapon’s safety.

He pulled the trigger. It was only the second time he’d
fired the sidearm in the Unsafe. The first had been on a rooftop, when he had
jumped at a shadow.

The discharge of the pistol was loud. He hadn’t aimed well.
The sickness—the result of fear, obviously—had him off his balance. He heard
the
spang
of metal against metal, heard also Urna’s yelp of surprise.
But he smelled no blood. He detected no impact of bullet against flesh. His
warning shot hadn’t resulted in tragedy.

He was retching when Urna made it back to him. The Weapon
was running and he almost passed Rune up, skidding to a stop. “Trying to get my
attention?” Urna demanded. But there was a mad glee in his voice. Then, closing
his hands around Rune’s shoulders, he heaved him up. “Come on.” The Weapon
paused, unholstered his own gun and fired it. An unnervingly short distance
away, a Passenger let out a strangled cry. “Got my one more,” Urna said.

Rune’s engine had cut out on landing. He had to fire up his
wings again. Urna did the same. They lifted off before the Passengers could
reach them. The whole way back Rune felt as if something was pulling at his
stomach. He’d thought it simply fear before, but he wondered now if it wasn’t
something to do with that red moss. His fingers still hurt, as though they had
been scrubbed with some strong chemical, but the hurt was fading.

When they were back inside the Safe, then within the Lux
city’s limits, bathed in the fast approaching light of the Citadel, Rune
chanced a look at Urna.

Urna at his left was flying with one hand held close to his
chest, clutching something there that he didn’t want to lose. It was a
rectangle of metal. Bronze. It bore an inscription that Rune couldn’t make out.
More prominently, it was marked by the scorched pucker of a bullet hole. Urna
had picked this ancient, tarnished artifact off the ground, held it
triumphantly aloft—and Rune had inadvertently shot it out of his hand. He could
have killed his partner. Easily. This would
not
figure into the report
he would later make.

It was his blood. Rune saw it now.

The dried brown that formed this particular series of
symbols was Urna’s blood. The lingering smell was suddenly familiar, almost
personal. It flaked away beneath his fingers and he jerked his hand back,
preserving the symbol he had gingerly touched.

A kind of corkscrew shape.

He stepped back, sat on the bed, on the overturned mattress.
After a moment he noticed the small slit in the material. Perhaps those who had
searched this room so violently had missed it.

Working his fingers inside, he pulled out, one by one, a
shell, a stone, a coin. All from the Unsafe, he was quite sure. And finally,
digging deeper, he came upon the bronze item. It looked like a plaque, an
ancient testimonial of some sort, though to whom he couldn’t say. It was too
corroded. Perhaps it had decorated the base of a statue once. Now it was junk.

But Urna had risked their lives to retrieve it on that long
ago night. He had acted impulsively, indulging a whim. Undisciplined. A
daredevil. They had never again gone so deep into the Unsafe. Rune had never
seen further evidence of the red moss, but he had never forgotten it.

Rune’s fingers inevitably touched the hole that marred the
plaque. He might have killed Urna that night. He might well have.

* * * * *

Gator was a big guy and he tended to loom. His features were
definitely of the rugged variety, though Arvra had never thought him
unattractive. Actually, she hadn’t thought much at all about his physical
characteristics, other than that he was large and strong and thereby a good
candidate to go on a raid into the Unsafe, where sticky situations were bound to
arise and having an ox on your side was just good planning.

But now, all of a sudden, she found herself considering the
older male in a new light. He had led her several streets over, to his own
dwelling. It was no more sturdy than hers, but he had taken evident pains to
brighten up its interior. Cheery paint covered the walls. A number of
sculptures decorated the scene—all done in stone, since nobody would waste
precious wood creating art, and rocks you could just dig out of the ground. The
pieces were fanciful, strange but pleasing shapes.

It had been some months since she’d last been inside here,
she realized, gazing about and nodding.

“Like what I’ve done?” Gator asked, again with that hint of
bashfulness.

“I like it.” Arvra smiled. She felt herself loosening from
the long journey home. She had some idea that Gator was trying to make romantic
overtures to her, and she had been silently considering them on the walk over
here. She eyed him. “You said something about a bath?”

He copied her smile then redoubled it into a grin that
stretched his stubbly face. He clomped past her to open a door at the far end
of the brightly painted room. “In here.”

She went to the door. There she stopped and actually gasped
aloud. “Wow! Where the hell did you get
that
?”

It was apparently the reaction he’d been hoping for. He
laughed heartily, then crowed, “I made it.”

“Made? That? You?”

“What, you think I’m only good for going under-Ship to
plunder and pillage?”

Arvra had to look up to fix him with a wry stare. “No,
Gator. I don’t think that.” She put just enough flirtatious lilt into her voice
to bring a slight blush to his cheeks.

He laughed again.

She entered the smaller chamber, which was quite dominated
by the huge slab of a stone bathtub. Plainly it had been chiseled by hand, but
the loving detail and craftsmanship was obvious. Its sides were like the walls
of a miniature fortress, with amazing crenellations carved into the brim. It
was large enough to easily accommodate Gator himself. The whole thing rested
atop a rectangular base of thick white stone.

“It’s two parts, actually,” he pointed out, while she was
still goggling in wonder at the marvelous monstrosity. “The base is one piece.
I made a deal with this old gal whose house’s foundation is made of the kind of
stone I wanted. She let me go in and chip it out. Took a bit of work. Then the
tub itself.” He slapped the stout side. “That took a long, long while. I worked
from a single solid mass, but since I knew exactly what I wanted out of it, it
was just a matter of time.”

Arvra looked up at him again, still stunned. “A bit of work.
A matter of time. You really know how to understate things, don’t you?”

He shrugged but was plainly quite pleased. “I had a buddy
getting the water ready for it all day.”

The deep, luxurious tub was fairly filled with water—a great
quantity of it, water that was
steaming
. She noticed now that a hunk of
actual soap rested in a niche sculpted onto the rim. There had to be weeks’
worth of rationed water here.

And he was offering this to her. She was touched. Again a
tear appeared and slid down her cheek. It was followed by another, then Gator
came to her and held her against his broad chest and she let several convulsive
sobs escape her. She wasn’t a crier. Not usually. But last night had been arduous,
no matter how satisfactorily she’d passed the time in that cell with that woman
Lavinia. Then coming home, seeing Frank…

After a quick moment she had herself back under control.
Gator smiled down at her.

“I’m going to get in that water now,” she said.

He nodded, letting her go. “Okay. I’ll—” And he was turning
toward the door.

“You don’t have to go.” With that, she started shedding her
clothing. Gator’s dark eyes slowly widened. A few seconds later, standing
naked, she let him take a good long look, even turning about so he could view
all of her. It occurred to her, belatedly, that this might be all he was after,
just this opportunity to take a full look at her unclothed body. She didn’t
begrudge him the favor. Hell, she probably would’ve done that for him if he’d
asked nicely. But all
this
—hot water, soap, the extravagance of a real
bath. She had been expecting something more along the lines of a bucket and
sponge, which was what most people in this town thought a bath was.