Shadowkill sq-3, page 15
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
SAVANT 4: Do you, Voallts Security, your Toerfeles, or Digby have sources within Omphalos?
SUBJECT: No. Digby, I can’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. I’d like to say yes and see you sweat, but it wouldn’t be the truth.
TECH 1: Not lying, not hedging.
SAVANT 4: Good. Name and locate settlements of Dyslaera other than the Voallts Compound on Spotchals.
SUBJECT: No.
SAVANT 4: We will peel the boy inch by inch in front of you.
SUBJECT: (SILENCE)
TECH 1: Reading steady. Truth. He will not speak to save subject 3Tj.
SAVANT 4: It’s futile, Ciocan… Such things are public knowledge. It may cost us say a year to find them, but we will.
SUBJECT: (SILENCE)
SAVANT 4: Very well, that’s enough for today. Take him out. Put him on a three-day water fast. After that, we’ll see.
##
Rohant stretched out on his plank bed, closed his eyes. He’d tiptoed round the truth and got away with it. Shadow was out there somewhere. Her and Kikun. It had to be them.
Somehow. Miralys was well. The fear was gone, that sick emptiness that’d been rotting at his guts since he’d seen young Kalaksi in that cage. Miralys was well and tending to business.
And I’d better be, he thought. Shadow. I don’t have her gift, but maybe something like it…
He remembered what happened between her and him when she mindrode Sassa. Two-way flow there. Maybe… we never thought it was possible, the Tie, yes, the blood-bond with the tiebeast, but mindriding… I don’t know. Well, it’s time to start thinking the impossible. I certainly haven’t anything better to do these next few days.
Fishing In A Smaller Sea: Kikun And Autumn Rose Troll For The One Who Knows
1
Kikun came yawning onto the bridge and stood a moment blinking at the woman in the pilot’s chair. Autumn Rose was wearing dull brownish-purple trousers and an acid green tunic. And she’d dyed her hair an ashy brown, her skin olive-tan.
Clicking his tongue and shaking his head, he sauntered over to her. “Rose, you’re a sight for sore eyes and if they weren’t sore before they’d be now.”
She chuckled. “Camouflage, Kuna. You have yours, this’s mine.”
“Tlee!” Scratching at the skin folds under his chin, he frowned at the green and blue and brown and streaky white of the world taking up most of the screen. “So tell me about that.”
Rose grimaced, a twist of her wide mouth, a quick wrinkling of her long nose. “Well, I have an idea or two. Look.” She played a moment with the sensor pad, talking while she worked. “Barakaly came here about once a year.” She clicked her tongue. “The man was a cretin, you know. He had the best blocks available installed in his kephalos, then he goes and keeps his list of keys in this idiot antique desk in his quarters. Took me all of fifteen seconds to find the secret drawer he put his faith in, once I had time to look around the place. I mean, there it was…” she paused,, frowned at the screen where a map was developing in one cell, with images clustered about it of buildings and individuals and a sidebar slowly filling with data; she made some changes, then went on, “this old… um… THING just sitting there begging me to go poking about in it. I found porno flakes and a bunch of crecards in different names and… ah well, never mind… anyway, there was this notebook with all you need to know to uncrunch his codes, so I’ve been going through his personal records. Not a nice man, Barakaly Lak Dar. Chatty though, I mean looks to me like he got kicks from telling about the things he pulled, business and personal junk. Not a nice man. Oh, no.”
Kikun lay back in the chair and let his eyes droop nearly closed, absorbing what she was saying through skin as well as ears, tone of voice and behind-emotion, everything she was saying through intonation as well as words. Thinking was for him a physical process, sensual more than rational.
“You say it’s Omphalos responsible for this. Maybe yea, maybe nay, but one thing’s sure, Barakaly doesn’t know from Omphalos, not a word even in his twistiest files and if you’d ’ve seen what he’s got there, you’d know he must ’ve put EVERYthing in. He’s been to Arumda’m lots of times, though. Seems there’s a Black House there that provides victims to order,” she coughed, grimaced again. “All I can say is, it’s no wonder he was one of Ginny’s clients. Anyway, it’s a mess of a world. Every island its own nation and there are a furtzen lot of islands, haeds they’re called.” She grinned. “You’d think with that many heads around, they’d have a little wisdom thrust on them, but not so, my friend, not so. The place is full of tiny wars, whenever some local vaarlord gets an itch for someone else’s land, he whips up a war and tries to take it. It’s worst in the south, there’s more land there, more big islands, sub-continents I suppose you’d call them. Haemundas to the Rummers. Don’t look at me like that, Kuna. That’s what they say when they’re talking about each other-according to Barakaly, though I admit he’s not a source I’d trust about anything sensitive. We’ll just have to wait and see. Anyway, where was I? Ah, good thing that’s in the north.” She pointed to the city map. “The biggest city they have. Tos Tous. The Landing Field’s there and it’s a Freecity, lots of strangers coming in and out. Offworlders too, freetraders and types like Barakaly in for the… um… amenities. I’ve dug out the names of some contacts he had who might be useful. They set up his stays at the Black House and other little pleasures. Seems to me, those are the types who’d have the information we need to get at… well, call it Omphalos. What I think is, we go in, look over the ground, go after these contacts, take them, question them and…” She shrugged. “That’s as far as I can go now. What happens after that depends on what we find out. Probably we scat for home and Digby and Miralys. We’ll need a small army if Shadow and the others are here. If they aren’t, well, we better go add our ignorance to the rest and see what we can do about it.”
He blinked at her. “Question?”
“Nothing bloody, luv. Even for Digby, I don’t do torture. But I picked better than I knew when I took this ’un. Barakaly has himself a nice little selection of head softeners. Drugs, luv. Our targets, they’ll sing like baby birds when some of that stuff hits the blood.”
As she started fiddling some more with the sensor pad, there was a familiar rustle of feathers, a scratch of feet. Kikun turned his head and stared into the corner beyond Autumn Rose. Gaagi was there, his armwings folded tight against his sides, his golden eyes wide and staring. Grandmother Ghost was half behind him, bent over, peering around the wings, snorting repeatedly because she was allergic to feathers. She winked at him, but didn’t say anything-for which he was profoundly grateful; every time she opened her mouth, she dropped him in trouble so deep he thought he’d never see day. Gaagi spread his arms wide, caught Grandmother in the face with a feathered membrane and left her sputtering with annoyance. He began signing, his supple fingers moving so fast that Kikun had difficulty following him.
Journey of many days, many sorrows, hurt and hunger, tedium and terror. It finishes here, yes, it finishes here, but not this journey nor the next. Come home, Nayol Hanee, come home, O Ta’anilcay, or die here and know the Dinhastoi do die with you.
Rubbing at her nose, Grandmother Ghost pushed past Gaagi, who faded into a black film, then was gone. She shoved her little bulldog face at Kikun, waggled her crooked forefinger at him. Her voice was a mosquito whine in his mind’s ear.
Aya aya, get you home or I be a fly on your backside biting. Get you that girl and leave off this interfering in foreign hashendilis, you got your own to worry over. Hah! I give you till you finish this’n, then you won’t know what sleep is you hang off any longer. Hah! Ya!
And she was gone.
Kikun sighed. None of that was any help. If that was all his gods and ghosts could do for him… Tlee! when Grandmother got mad, she had a bite like a borer fly, he rubbed his shoulder, grimacing at the memory. That wasn’t the only place she’d got him, either.
“Messages?” Autumn Rose sounded irritated.
“What? Oh, No, nothing to do with this.” That wasn’t quite true, but he didn’t intend to spend his time explaining Grandmother. Or Gaagi either. “Rose, something’s occurred to me. What are you going to do with the ship?”
“If you’d been listening to me…”
“Sorry.”
She snorted. “Really. What I was saying is, I don’t want to leave her parked in orbit. This is a free trader’s market which means basically that anything left lying around unguarded is fair game. Bunch of pirates, even the best of ’em. Not putting them down, you understand, I’d probably do the same, given the chance. What I’m saying, a sweet ship like this without a watch on board is gone. Even without you to clue ’em, Kuna, the average trader round here would get past security not even breathing hard. And I don’t want to put her down at the Landing Field. Too many noses around wondering what your business is. And too expensive. Anything’s too expensive. Except for my crecard, I’m about broke and Barakaly doesn’t carry cash, at least, I didn’t find any. They’re used to traders slipping in, doing their business and scooting; no one’s going to pay much attention to us. I’ve picked a place to stash the ship. See that isthmus? No settlers and close enough to where we have to go.”
2
The air was fresh and sweet. They’d come down through a rainstorm into a mountain dawn and when Kikun emerged and looked around, crystal drops clung everywhere, picking up the sunrise, glittering red and gold and brilliant white. The local life was already recovering from the intrusion; there were grunts and whistles and a sudden soar of melody. Then the pattern repeated with changes.
He rode the lift down and walked into the middle of the meadow, absorbing shape and color, sound and smell, relaxing into this new world. The reprocessed air on the ship was clean and properly humidified, even faintly perfumed with touches of leaf and flower-choice air, one might say, pampered air. Despite this, it smelled of metal to him, as artificial as Ginny’s arm. He breathed deeply and his soul expanded.
They’d landed on the narrow isthmus that was the spine connecting the north and south nodes of Haemunda Chajiari, a sparsely populated area because the land was mostly vertical and stony, interrupted with steep narrow fjords where cliffs dropped a hundred meters straight down into the ocean water; the isthmus could support trees, grasses and small mammals, but a man would starve to death.
Kikun chanted under his breath, apologizing to the local life for the shock of the landing. Eyes watched from the treetops and the brush, looked up at him from the grass. Not much fear here, because no one came, just an ordinary wariness.
He settled his backpack more comfortably, leaned against a tree stump, and waited.
The lift hummed again. He turned. Autumn Rose was coming down with her pack leaning against her leg and two miniskips like hobbyhorses resting by her feet.
“Help me, Kuna,” she said when the lift reached the ground. “I want to run west with the edge of dark and we’ll miss it if we don’t start soon.”
He hauled his emskip onto the grass, shaking the icy dew over his feet and over its metal surfaces, then stood back, watched the lift rise, fold itself in until the skin of the skip was sealed tight once more.
“West by north,” Rose said. She touched on the effect, swung into the saddle. “Set the tonc at two seven four corrected. Got it? Good. Let’s go.”
3
They reached the Tola Hills above Tos Tous with dawn pinking the sky ahead of them, landed the emskips on a brushy ledge with a good ten meters of weathered stone rising above them and a drop over the lip of fifty meters straight down. Once the emskips were wrapped in a camouflaged groundcloth, it would take some hard looking to spot them; besides, as Rose said, who in their right mind would look there.
Despite the awkward weight of the pack, Kikun climbed the crumbly stone face like his looksake garden lizard going up a wall; Rose followed more slowly, grumbling all the way. She didn’t like heights, she wasn’t going to have any skin left on her front or her hands, besides she was freezing and starved. There had to be a better way, Z’ Toyff, there had to be. She reached up, Kikun caught her hand and helped her onto the flat above the cliff.
Tos Tous rambled around the curve of a wide lovely bay; the city was a quilt of many colors all of them gray or brown, thousands of small buildings gathered in haphazard clusters. No street-if they were streets, not merely gaps between adjacent buildings-went straight for more than a few meters.
“Lovely place. Anthill someone stepped on, squashed all to hell and gone.” Autumn Rose unfolded the map she’d had the kephalos print up for them, looked from it to the city below. “That’s the part we want.” She pointed. “There, near the middle of the curve where most of the wharves and warehouses are. Um. We’ll be going through the main market-if we’re lucky enough, and this is market day, you should be able to collect quite a lot of coin. Do the best you can, Kuna, we need the cash.” She chuckled, nudged him with her elbow. “You should be about the best pickpocket alive with that Talent of yours.” She sobered. “I can use my crecard in emergencies, but I’d rather not. I don’t know who or what’s watching readouts round here.”
Kikun sighed. “That’s the third time you’ve said that, Rose. I heard, I heard.”
“Nerves, Kuna. Always get ’em when I’m about to jump in something I don’t know anything about.” She frowned over her shoulder at the eastern horizon where the tip of the sun was poking up, a brilliant vermilion blob of light. “Twenty kays we have to walk. At least that. Well, better safe than sorry. Come on, Li’l Liz, let’s go.”
4
They reached the Tos Tous Highroad as a line of plodding bullocks walked past two by two, pulling carts piled high with raw leather and leather goods, the smell lingering long after they rounded the bend ahead.
There was a young boy on the back of each left lead bullock, whistling and tapping now and again at the withers of the pair, stirring them back to a brisk walk when they threatened to slow to immobility. These boys wore heavy bullhide trousers, bright wool tunics slit fore and aft, and long knitted scarves wrapped around their necks, the ends fluttering along the bullock’s sides. They turned to stare at Rose (not at Kikun; of course, they didn’t notice him) from large dark eyes in small brown faces, their straight black hair blowing in the wind.
A man and woman sat on a bench inside the last of the carts, he was stocky and bald and wrapped in a heavy overcoat; he gave Rose a single shrewd glance, dismissed her, and went back to watching his carts. The woman wore an identical overcoat but added a shawl over abundant black hair twisted into a high knot. She didn’t bother looking at Autumn Rose; her eyes were fixed on the back of the bullock boy, she was frowning at him, spitting words at the man beside her.
Ten minutes later a line of heavily laden flats hitched together and pulled by a motorized tractor came rumbling along the road, slowed to a sudden crawl as the tractor reached the last of the carts and couldn’t go round because there was a caravan of large hairy beasts plodding north along the highway, heading for the Landing Field.
Autumn Rose ran at the last of the flats, pulled herself onto the bed. It rocked under her and the hitch clanked loudly. The flats rode on a single wheel and tilted at a heavy thought. She waited, erect on her knees, until she was reasonably sure the trader hadn’t noticed he’d acquired a passenger, then she settled between two bales, leaned against a third, and sighed with relief as she stretched her feet out.
She started, made an exasperated spitting sound as Kikun plopped down beside her and stayed present in a way he hadn’t been for the past several miles. “One of these days I’m going to think I’m dreaming you, Li’l Liz, and go not so quietly crazy.”
5
An hour later the flats slowed again, crawling through scrapshacks and garbage dumps on the rim of the city. The dumps had a number of sluggishly burning fires producing a nose-numbing, eye-biting smoke that drifted in a bluish-yellow clots across the road. People crawled like dung-beetles over the discarded paper, rags and other junk, half obscured by the smoke clouds, grimly silent in their searches.
Kikun fidgeted nervously, his fingers moving in complex patterns Rose suspected might be counterspells or something similar. Finally he slapped his hand on the bale beside him. “Let’s go, Rose. Now.”
“Why not.”
They slid down and strolled along behind the flats, coughing as smoke blew over them, keeping apart from the other walkers, most of whom were scavengers going to or coming from their particular mounds of refuse.
The string of flats swerved to the side of the road. A small horde of men came from a blocky building, surrounding the flats, while their leader waved a clipboard in the face of the trader driving the tractor.
“You are being cleared for three flats,” he said. “You are having six. That is going to cost you, Tusuk.”
“You are needing to read that thing again,” the trader roared at him. “Six wheel it is saying. Is not saying nothing about flats. You are needing to count ’em, fool. Six wheel.
“Huh.” The guard brought the clipboard closer to his nose, scowled at the papers on it. “Wheel is meaning flat.”
“Wheel is meaning wheel.” Tusuk pounded his fist in his palm. “You are needing to count ’em,” he insisted. “Six wheel. I am having already paid the padj. Six wheel, sixty peras.” He waved a paper heavy with purple wax in the guard’s face. “Paid paid paid!”
Kikun nudged her. “Come on, come on, Rose. It’s all very interesting, but we’ve got things to do.” He pinched her arm lightly. “I’m ratcheting up the effect. See you later.”
