Ruler of Naught (82 page)

“Blue,” Markham said.

“Blue!” Kelar repeated, his teeth showing in challenge.

Markham lost, and lost again. And when his fifth time came and
went, Lokri tried to look away, but he couldn't. He saw Markham's features
crimson and run together and his smoking skull gleam, bony and white, while
around him the crowd yelled and laughed.

And then he, too, was gone.

Lokri drew in a shaking breath, and then the last blow
knocked his lungs airless. Through the crowd glided a small figure, no older
than Ivard and already beautiful: Fierin ban-Kendrian, Lokri's sister.

She looked this way and that, and her face changed when she saw
him. Uncertainty gave way to delight. He stared at her, unable to move or
speak. How could she be dead? Four times he'd checked on her, always from a
distance. The latest one was mere weeks before Eusabian's attack: she'd been
alive.

More unsettling, she looked just like she had when he last
saw her, which had been years ago. He
knew
she was an adult now. She’d
inherited Lokri's place. She would not be this child.

But she came right up to him, and threw herself in his arms.
He hesitated, then closed his hands about her thin shoulders, and hugged her
warmth against him.

“Jess,” she whispered, tears of joy gleaming in her eyes. “How
happy I am to find you! Where have you been?”

“Hiding,” he said, trying to force a distance, to regain
control.
They said she was part of the plot
, he reminded himself.
To
gain my inheritance
. But there were times—when he was very, very drunk—when
he'd not believed it. “What are you doing here?”

“I've come to play.” She lifted her hands and spun around,
her glinting silvery dress the same shade as her eyes. Silver eyes, the same
shade as his—the same shade as the dead eyes of their father—

“Get out of here,” Lokri said.

Fierin looked hurt. “But I found you at last!”

Lokri met Kelar's gaze
. I know what it is, I'm already
dead
, Lokri thought. The thought brought a mixture of self-mockery—and
relief.
I must have already gone through the farce on Ares and they've
executed me
. But he didn't really believe it.

What he did believe was that Fierin, the only one of the
family worth anything, was in danger.

With one hand he thrust his sister behind him. “You go home,”
he said. “I'll run their damned play for them.”

“You know the risk,” Kelar said.

“Yeah, you told me. Souls.” Lokri didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm
out of his voice.

“You have to understand,” Kelar said. “This is not for a
night's fun, and it's not for a decade of bond-slavery like Piriag's favorite
forfeit. This is
forever
.”

The platitude
There is no forever
came to Lokri's
lips, but in his mind was a terrifying image of falling, falling, through the
void of space.

“Call it blue,” he said.

Fierin's thin fingers gripped his tightly.

The circles whirled, faster than ever, but Lokri watched,
feeling the patterns... losing them. Catching them—losing—catching—
Hit
.

He slammed his hand down, then looked up the line. Blue... blue...
blue... blue... blue... green—

The crowd yelled.

“White,” Lokri said.

Murmurs around him splintered his attention. He shut them
out, concentrating, and again thought he had the pattern, and missed. Kelar
laughed, his face cruel. “Give up, Kendrian? Give up?”

Lokri tried again, this time letting the house declare the
pattern. When he lost for the third time, fatalism seized him. He clung tight
to his sister's fingers, feeling her pulse racing under his hand.

Kelar's words echoed in his mind. Give up?
That means
there’s a choice, and that means there is an exit somewhere... a way out.
“If
I lose, does she go?”

Kelar gestured back toward an open door. At either side
stood two shadowy figures with ready weapons. It was either Lokri or Fierin. He
studied her face, her steady, trusting gaze. He could leave her and try his own
escape, or he could—

“Call it,” he said.

The lights whirled, this time so bright it hurt the eyes. The
roars of the gamblers rose to a scream and then died in a weird echo. Lokri
felt a cold wind blow against his face, and he staggered, righting himself
against a wall.

Opening his eyes, he stared straight into one of the flaring
torches. He shifted his gaze to his own hand, fingers spread against a stone
wall. His hand slipped, leaving a sweat-mark.

“Kelar?” He swallowed. “Fierin?”

His voice echoed. He was alone.

Rage burned through him. He began to run, faltering when he
rounded a corner and nearly ran down a short figure in a long robe standing
just before a stairway.

It was the High Phanist. Without slowing, he raised his fists
to strike her out of his way. She remained still, even when he was three
strides from her. He was angry enough to slam her against the wall, but he made
the mistake of looking at her face first.

Not that she had any arcane powers. She just stood there,
her eyes steady with the same sort of stillness that rested in Jaim’s gaze just
before a fight. But Lokri sensed no threat. She was just... there.

As was he.

The realization shocked him into dual awareness. He was lost
under New Glastonbury, and he was in a cell on
Grozniy.
He seemed to see
himself standing before the door of his cell; for a moment the thin, bruised
figure leaning against the door with upraised fists, his head hanging down, was
the teenager who’d discovered that justice was just another word. Lokri didn’t
know if anything he remembered after this moment under New Glastonbury was
real. Or even since that day his teenaged self had found his family—

He faltered to a stop, and lowered his arms, but his fingers
were rigid with anger. “Damn you,” he said hoarsely, “and
damn
this
chatzing hellhole.”

“It is not an easy one, I take it?” she said.

He glared down at her. “No, it
wasn’t
,” he said,
trying to force the experience into the past, where it belonged. “How do you
arrange these things?” he asked. “And where,” he felt his voice rise and forced
it to flatten, “do you get the ghosts?”

“You bring the ghosts with you,” was the reply.

He shook his head, expelling his breath in a strangled sound
midway between a laugh and a shout of anger. “Are they all dead, then?” A chill
shook him. “Am I?”

She gestured invitingly, and sat on the next-to-lowest step.
“Tell me what you saw.”

“Ghosts. In your gambling den.”

Her brows lifted.

“You're going to tell me there is no gambling den here.”

“If you wish... ” She left it at that.

“What I wish is to be out of here, and free,” he said. “And
I want to know why my sister was forced into your farce.” Her jerked his thumb
back over his shoulder.

“I don't know anything about your sister,” the woman said. “But
I would hazard a guess that there is business left undone, perhaps something on
her behalf, which you might attend to. Does that strike a chord?”

“It strikes a death knell,” he said sardonically. “Any
business I try to take care of will end with me in the execution dock, for a
crime I did not commit.”

“Ah,” she said. “Then there's a question of justice.”

“There is no justice,” he rejoined. “There's power, which
buys all the 'justice' it needs. I don't have any power.”

She pursed her lips, then looked up at him. Her eyes in the
flaring torchlight were tired, but very kind. “You are from Torigan, are you
not?”

He said nothing, disgusted with himself for letting his
speech fall back into the unmistakable Torigan cadence after so many years of
successful disguise.

She shook her head slightly. “Never mind. You need tell me
nothing.”

“Then why are you here?”

“It seemed the right place to be just now,” she replied. “My
clerk reported an angry young man ranging about the corridors down here,
probably lost. I wouldn't want you to miss your flight... should you choose to
leave Desrien.”

“'Choose.'” He scorned the word.

“Well you could stay and become a pilgrim,” she said,
smiling teasingly.

Pilgrim
. It was the word Kelar had used. The echo
made the hairs on the back of Lokri's neck prickle, and he knew that he could
spend his lifetime denying whatever it was that had happened in that
lower-level gambling den, but it would never leave him. There was power here,
something he could not even remotely understand, much less subvert.

“Maybe it'll be easier to take my chances with Panarchist
notions of justice,” Lokri said, leaning against the wall to disguise his
trembling.

The woman put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to
her feet. “I am not one given to predictions, but from what little you told me,
it seems there is a family member important to you who might need your aid. And,”
she added, frowning a little, “it may transpire she will aid you.”

He shook his head.

“Will you run forever, then?”

“The universe is big,” he said.

“And often leads back to the same path, and the same nexus,
to be confronted yet again.”

He thought of the gambling den. “So,” he said finally, “if I
do go to Ares—I assume that’s where we’re headed when you let us go—and face
their justice—do you promise me I'll get out of it alive?”

“In the end we get out of nothing alive,” she said with
irony to match his. “And I promise nothing. But I ask you again: will you run
forever?”

He heard the other, unspoken question clearly.
How many
times do you want to go through this?

“This way,” she said over her shoulder.

Lokri opened his eyes on the familiar blandness of his cell.
But now the restraining walls seemed as substantial as moth-gauze. He wasn’t
sure he’d end up anywhere on
Grozniy
if he walked through one.

He’d stay right here.

Morrighon stared into the darkness from his bed, watching
the glow on the ceiling intensify.

Not again, he thought wearily. Several times since they’d
returned to Arthelion after the battle, the computer phantom wearing the visage
of Jaspar hai-Arkad had materialized in his room, watching silently for a time
and then vanishing. He closed his eyes, waiting for it to go away.

Then he started as he heard his name.

“Morrighon.” It was only a whisper, but the apparition had
never spoken before. The Bori twisted, turning over and looking up over the end
of the bed into his room.

“Listen,” it said, and pointed one glowing finger at the
communicators on the table near his bed. There was a crackle of static, and
Morrighon heard the voice of Barrodagh, issuing a series of orders. As he
listened, his eyes widened.

The
eglarrh demachi-Dirazh’ul
! ‘The Avatar has
decided!’

Now Anaris would no longer be conditional heir, but heir in
fact. After a short, predawn ritual of preparation, Anaris would be taken...

Predawn. Now, Remembering his private worry, he scrambled
out of bed to begin dressing with frantic haste.

He’d seen the signs soon after their return. Anaris had
become more irritable, more distant—signs, Morrighon was sure, invisible to
anyone else. But to the Bori they presaged the conditional heir’s disappearance
into his quarters for a day and a night, not to be disturbed under any
circumstances, and his eventual emergence looked purged and a bit haggard. This
was the third time since his assignment to Anaris.

He had no idea what it meant. He hoped devoutly that it
wasn’t drugs or something similar; that would mean he’d tied himself to a fool,
and the only outcome of that would be a horrible death at the hands of
Barrodagh. But he couldn’t believe that of Anaris.

He hopped around the room, frantically trying to balance as
one foot became tangled in his trouser leg, peripherally aware of the ghost—it
is not a ghost—watching him.

But it didn’t matter what it was that Anaris did during
those periods of withdrawal.
If Eusabian finds him in the state I think he
might be in...

Morrighon fastened his shirt tabs with shaking fingers,
belted on his communicators, and hurried out. As he turned to close his door,
he saw the apparition nod once, approvingly, and fade back through the wall.

His breath came in short rasps as he hurried down the
corridors toward Anaris’s quarters. He tabbed the annunciator frantically,
ignoring the curiosity of the two gray-clad guards posted there. There was no
answer.

Morrighon stared at the door in an agony of indecision.
Maybe
he’ll be ready for them, maybe...
No, he couldn’t take the chance. He
didn’t know what Anaris would do to him for disturbing his retreat, but he did
know what Eusabian would do, if Morrighon’s suspicions about Anaris were
correct.

With shaking hands he entered the override code he’d pried
out of Ferrasin.

Slipping through the door, he slammed it behind him, doing
his best to block the gaze of the guards with his body. Inside, he stared, and
his breath caught in his chest.

Anaris rahal’Jerrodi sat cross-legged in the center of the
floor, his back to Morrighon, surrounded by a snowstorm of white dots. They
were bits of the expanded foam used for packing, but what was impelling them in
their frantic dance around the conditional heir? There were no air currents.

Acid crawled up Morrighon’s gullet as the bits of foam
slowly coalesced into a tenuous representation of the features of Eusabian of
Dol’jhar. For a moment the face held; then it melted into another: the Panarch
of the Thousand Suns.

Morrighon began to tremble. It was worse than he could have
imagined. If Eusabian walked in at this moment and saw Anaris practicing one of
the forbidden arts of the Chorei, he would have him killed instantly.