Revolution's Shore (36 page)

The man's stark fear permeated the bridge like a rank smell as La Belle's chair swiveled slowly around, revealing her: face set as in stone, black hair braided tight and lapping in its fall her knees. She regarded the man at her feet in awful silence.

“What did he do?” whispered Lily.

Adam shrugged, answering her in a low voice. “It's the typical story: asteroid miner comes in to some station on leave, runs across a sweet adolescent je'jiri girl in full raging heat who'd slipped her clan for a night on the prowl. And of course all intelligent people are avoiding her like the plague, and trying to get calls through to whatever ship has hired out her clan. But people like him usually figure that as long as the je'jiri isn't already mated, they're safe. Brainless idiot. And then of course once he realized he was marked, he ran—and tried to cover his trail by pretending it had never happened.”

At last La Belle spoke. “You lied to me.” Her anger was bone deep and implacable.

“Oh god, oh god,” the man wept. “What else could I do? I had to leave. They were on my trail already.”

“You knew the law.” Her voice hardened with each word she spoke. “‘No human will mate or have intercourse in any sexual or sensual fashion with je'jiri.' Code ex-eleven-oh-four of the Codified Law of League space. Which even a privateer acknowledges.”

He stammered something incoherent, lifted a hand to his hair. His forehead bore a brilliant red scar, like a brand, puckered across his dark skin.

“‘In dreams you hunt your prey,'” murmured Kyosti in an expressionless voice, “‘baying like hounds whose thought will never rest.'”

But Lily, glancing at him, saw that he was strung so tight that the merest touch might shatter him. The usual bronze of his skin had washed out to a ghostly pallor, accentuated by the unearthly color of his hair.

“But she was still an adolescent—and she consented—” the man gasped. His gaze darted to the elevator doors, halted for a frozen heartbeat on Kyosti's still, taut form, and skipped back to La Belle.

“Then you are either uncontrollably libidinous or simply stupid. The je'jiri
are not human
, man. Their ways are not our ways.”

“They're savages,” muttered Adam under his breath. “Little better than animals.”

“You have violated every tenet, the very foundation, of their culture, as admittedly alien and atavistic as it may seem to us. Yi took the hunt on, and now they have caught up with you.
I
cannot stop it.”

He lay in crumpled anguish at her feet, weeping with noisy and awful terror. The bridge crew stood utterly silent, watching him without compassion. “But you are La Belle Dame,” he sobbed. “
You
could stop them.”

She stood up. “I am La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” she said with the bite of diamond, “and I do not suffer fools gladly.”

To Lily's left, the third set of elevator doors opened.

I
N THAT FIRST INSTANT
, she could have believed that Kyosti had somehow moved from her side to the elevator without her knowing, and emerged again onto the bridge; a kind of vivid double entrance made possible by some quirk in his character.

He took two sprung steps out of the elevator and stopped. He had the same tall, slender form, crowned by startlingly blue hair. Then he turned, and she saw his face.

The shock of the absolute inhumanity of the man's—the alien's—features shook her: first, the strange, unearthly pallor of his skin matched against brilliant green eyes pierced by an acute and vital intelligence. The features of his face had a delicacy that lent it an almost angelic cast, a beauty that might be said to surpass human beauty, but for—

But for its contrast with the alien's behavior. He froze, like any hunting thing, and cast his head about, eyes half-shuttered, as if he were smelling out the room, scenting and placing each individual. The movement repelled her: it seemed grossly primitive, as violent as Unruli's unpredictable storms, tied by tide and wind and gravity, and the unbreakable bond of the gross senses to the cycles of earth, to the unforgiving grip of the deepest, oldest part of the brain.

The man on the steps of the dais had ceased weeping and now groped up to a crouch, gathering himself in like an animal driven to its last, desperate fight.

More of them emerged from the elevator—two, four, seven in all. Each scented the room. The male who had first come in had locked his gaze on his prey, and he trembled, as if the wait was unbearable. He lifted his hands. Lily saw that each finger was tipped with a pale, sharp claw.

A strong, bitter smell permeated the bridge:
their
scent.

Except for the trembling male, the rest, having finished their scenting, stood stock-still. One stepped forward—Lily thought it was a female, although it was hard to tell.

When she spoke, she spoke directly to La Belle in a voice deeply accented with alien sounds. Her teeth were a carnivore's teeth: pointed and deadly.

“Do you contest the kill?”

La Belle did not move. “No,” she replied.

A sigh rippled through the je'jiri. The male lunged forward.

Beside Lily, Kyosti gasped, a strangled sound, and collapsed to his knees.

The man fought, at first—some instinct for survival that humans had never lost—but ranged against this inhuman lust for the kill it did not avail him long.

The je'jiri male set claws into his face and chest and ripped open the man's throat with his teeth.

Blood pooled out and dripped in streams down the steps of the dais. The last rattling sigh of the dying man echoed across the bridge.

Adam swore under his breath.

Lily felt her knees sag as bile rose in her own, intact, throat. She put a hand out to grip Kyosti's shoulder, to steady herself, but he was shaking, trembling, and he had thrown a hand up over his eyes as if it could protect him from what they had just seen.

Someone in the far reaches of the bridge was vomiting. The noise cut off abruptly as, escorted by two other figures, they fled out another door.

The je'jiri male waited a count of ten, and then sniffed, scenting for a smell now eradicated from the universe. He set his hand, palm down, in a sticky puddle of blood, and brought it up to his face, marking each cheek and his forehead, and last his lips, with red.

Then he rose, and retreated, clothes stained with brilliant, wet scarlet. And the others came forward, one by one, and repeated the gesture: hand, palm down, in blood, and the precise, ritualistic marking of their faces.

The female went last. As she rose, all of them turned and looked at Kyosti until because of their scrutiny the attention of all the people left on the bridge was on him.

The female spoke directly to him; alien words, but her meaning was clear: It is also your obligation to mark the kill.

Kyosti shuddered, a tremor that passed through his entire body. He shook away Lily's hand on his shoulder and stood up.

Took one step back.

“
Abai'is-ssa
,” hissed the female. As if he was being pulled forward by a force as powerful as gravity, he walked to her. Each step seemed agonizing, torn out of his will to stay where he was.

Lily began to move after him, but Adam grabbed her by both arms and held her back. “Don't be a fool,” he muttered. “You can't stop this.”

Stiffly, Kyosti crouched by the mutilated corpse. His hand shook violently as he lowered it—stopped it a finger's breadth above the pooling blood, and then shut his eyes and pressed it down. And marked his face: both cheeks, his forehead, and last, his lips.

The female je'jiri turned her feral gaze on La Belle, expectant.

La Belle had not moved during the entire time. Her gaze rested dispassionately on the corpse. “I and my crew witness this kill, fulfilled under the specifications of the Gabriel Treaty, and we now declare that this course is finished.”

Like ghosts, the je'jiri vanished into the elevator without a word or gesture of acknowledgment. The door sighed closed behind them.

There was silence on the bridge.

Kyosti still knelt by the corpse.

“Adam,” said La Belle curtly, and she looked pointedly at the corpse.

He let go of Lily's arms and, signaling to two other crew members, walked over to the corpse. He had clearly come prepared: they bundled the body into white sheeting, sopped up the worst of the excess blood—although a few deep stains and the acrid scent lingered—and carried the dead man off the bridge, vanishing like the je'jiri into an elevator.

Lily watched it all with an intensity brought by the realization that once this act ended, she would have to react to what she had just seen. Kyosti still knelt on the steps, his face streaked with drying blood.

La Belle stood, her feet incongruously bare, on the top step. As Lily raised her eyes to look at her, she met La Belle's gaze. It was not unmixed with pity. Perhaps she saw the storm rising in Lily's expression, or perhaps she just knew enough of human nature, but she moved her hand slightly, not more than a twist of the wrist, and the rest of the personnel cleared off, leaving the three of them alone in the hushed cavern of the bridge.

“You had something you wished to tell me,” said La Belle.

“I can't believe it.” Lily's voice emerged hoarse and ragged. “You let them murder him. You let them just mutilate him as if he was no better than”—she shook her head roughly—“No one, no
thing
, deserves that. I thought the League was supposed to be civilized.”

La Belle stepped carefully around Kyosti's motionless form and descended the steps to come stand a body's length from Lily. Their eyes were on a level. “Do you tell the cat not to kill the mouse? The owl not to hunt at night? The eagle lives by killing rodents. The wolf drives down and butchers caribou. But unlike humankind, they only kill what they need. Je'jiri are not indiscriminate killers, as we humans are. They are driven, they are fueled, by instincts that we have long striven to transcend or deny, but I, for one, respect the absolute predictability of their honor.”

“Honor!” Lily cried. “You call
that
honor?”

La Belle smiled, but it was the smile of grim truth, not of sympathy. “How many men and women have you killed, Taliesin's daughter? And for what cause, and whose honor? Can you say it was for as compelling a reason as the iron law of je'jiri mating: one mate, for life, no exceptions. It is in their bones—in the very fabric of their being.”

She paused, but Lily stared, silent, at Kyosti's frozen pose: kneeling on the steps as if he were praying to a god who had long since forgotten him.

“A linguist once told me,” La Belle continued, softer, now, “that there is no word for ‘love,' or ‘adultery,' in the je'jiri language. Love is a human construct for fleeting ties.
Their
bonds are burned into every cell of their bodies. And adultery does not exist, except among the aberrant. If you sleep with a je'jiri, their mate
must
kill you. It is as simple as that.”

“It's horrible,” she breathed, still seeing the clean ripping of the man's throat.

“We live in a great, vast universe,” said La Belle calmly. “We must accommodate those to whom our ways seem equally alien, and unspeakable.”

“Kyosti,” Lily murmured, lifting her anguished gaze to the clear sanity of La Belle's pale face. “Hoy. He's one of
them
. I thought he was human. No wonder he's so—” But she could not bring herself to identify what it was in words whose spoken permanence might mark him forever.

“No, Lily,” said La Belle with abrupt, but real, compassion. “He is indeed half je'jiri, on his mother's side. But that is not the root of his particular crisis. Je'jiri are too prosaic to harbor insanity in their minds. It is his human half that curses him.”

“What do you mean? That murder—it was so savage—and that awful ritual of marking themselves with the blood.
That
was the horrible part.”

“Oh, and I agree, even though I may understand why it is so. But I can look at it from a distance. I can intellectualize it, as we humans do so well. I cannot be forced by birth and instinct to partake in a deed that the rest of me finds cruelly and bitterly repugnant.”

Lily shut her eyes. The searing pain that shuttered Kyosti's face as he knelt unmoving was too terrible for her to look on. And she wondered what kind of death his father had died.

“There
was
a message, I think,” said La Belle, coolly changing the subject.

Lily's throat was choked with anguish, but she managed to force out the words anyway. “I'm sorry. I don't know how else to say this.” She opened her eyes, because it would be cowardly to tell in any other way but face-to-face, seeing her. “Heredes is dead.”

“Yes,” La Belle agreed, with no change in her expression. “Joshua Li Heredes is dead. I came to Reft space to discover what had happened to him. We have just been to Arcadia, where I found out.” She paused. Still, her expression did not change.

Because Lily did not know if La Belle would welcome sympathy, she found refuge in an awkward question. “But how did you end up here, at Blessings?”

“Curiosity impelled me to follow the sudden flurry of military activity, but—” She dismissed the Reft's political turmoil with a wave of her hand. “I see nothing here to interest me. The
Sans Merci
will return to League space. Now. I think you will need a few moments alone with Hawk before you return to your ship. Farewell, Lily Ransome.” She lifted a white hand to touch Lily's forehead, a benediction, and turned and walked, soundless across the expanse of floor, to an elevator.

“But”—Lily stammered, confused by her abrupt dismissal, and by her complete lack of reaction to the news of Heredes's death—“but you can't just leave the bridge deserted.”

La Belle smiled. “Like Mephistopheles, the bridge is where I am.” Without explaining the comment, she disappeared into the elevator.