There were techs and Drudges in the lubbot who wouldn’t have two thoughts about reporting Dihbat’s rant. Or Ragnal’s presence. He wanted to be able to claim he hadn’t noticed what was going on because he was drunk and grieving. With that and his reputation for keeping his mouth shut, he should slide away from trouble. Ykkuval Hunnar wasn’t vindictive, but he was a ruthless kreash and knew what letting such talk get loose could do to him. Dihbat was a fool.
As he pressed from the open fields into the wooded strip between the village and the Kushayt, his foot slammed into a root and he fell on his face. He lay without moving, gray dust settling on him, slow dust, so slow he could see it drift down. Chichin taffy world. Fall and it’s like a mattress. Ayee, Taner, not a mattress for Girs. Fire. Burning… Body contorting with grief, he cried for the first time since he heard the news about his brother, pounded his fists on the road, beating and beating the insensate dirt. Girs was dead and this karolsha world didn’t care, nobody cared, shovel the dead under and forget what made them dead.
A whistled tune. Footsteps.
Ragnal leaped to his feet, nearly fell over again, scrubbed at his face, slapped dust from his coveralls. As he straightened, he saw the local they called Ykk’s Pet coming round the curve in the road. Ugly chich. A map of wrinkles wrapped around twiggy bones that looked like they’d snap if you breathed hard on them. Watery blue eyes with all the expression of polished pebbles.
When the Pet saw Ragnal, his tune stopped, his shoulders came up round his ears, and he shambled to the far side of the road and stood there, eyes on the dirt.
Ragnal snorted, then walked away. The less he had to do with that one, the better he liked it. Even if they weren’t human, you could respect a local who gave you a good fight. Something like this, though…
When Ragnal emerged from the trees and into sight of the gate guards, once again he exaggerated his unsteadiness and the care-with which he was moving, pulling his perimeters in as if he were trying to walk through a glass shop on a floor that was tilting under him.
As he passed between the massive gate towers and into the Kushayt, his body loosened and his breathing got easier. Warped and distorted though it was, this was a piece of home. The buildings in here had the look of mass even if the weight wasn’t really there; they were built low to the ground with comfortably thick walls and no stupid windows to weaken the load-hold. The streets were straight and paved with grav plates so they had an honest pull to them; the corners square, the houses kept their hearts to themselves, no vulgar display to tempt the weakminded toward theft. It was everything the yerechs outside wouldn’t understand.
In the tiny private suite that was one of the perqs his status brought him, he stripped and stepped into the shower cubicle, stood there with pulsing needles of hot water beating at him, his forehead pressed against the wall, his eyes closed, the heat and massage of the water washing away more than the dust of the world.
When the hot water was gone, he stumbled out, dried himself, and fell into bed, his weight switching on the grav plate that made sleeping more comfortable. He started to think about what he’d heard, about Genree and Hunnar, about Girs’ almost daily complaints about the equipment, but before he got beyond memory into planning, he plunged deep deep into sleep.
2
As Ilaцrn watched the chav stump off, he smiled as he thought of the ravaged, tear-streaked face, the angry scowl. One for us, he thought. I hope you burn like I am, I hope you’re in pain that never stops. He took a deep breath, adjusted the shoulderstrap of his carry sack, and moved on.
The mesuch killed Bйluchar life down to the mites in the soil so they could grow their stinking tubers, but the Ykkuval wanted Bйluchar plants in his Dushanne Garden. Wanted green and bloom under his eye. Matha matha, gets me away from that place. Gives me a little time I’m not smelling them all round me, hearing those grunts they call speech, looking at those clumsy ugly buildings.
His mouth tightened as he moved from under the trees and saw again the remnant of Dumel Dordan. The mesuchs killed and burned the Dumel with as little thought to what they were destroying as those bloody-handed barbarians who burned ‘mud. A thousand and a thousand years of living and dying, birth and budding, gone. Dordan’s song was finished. Trampled under the tracks of their monstrous machines.
He left the road and moved along the outside of the light fence that enclosed the mesuch fields. He’d learned not to go near the mesuch Drudges. They had crude and painful ideas of what was funny. His knees would pay for the extra walking, but he’d been through one mobbing and shuddered at the thought of another.
The trees closed round him again, straining out the sounds of the mesuch machines and the shouts of the Drudges, the occasional yelps from the Fior women on the slave chains. They didn’t bother slaving the Keteng, just killed them. The Denchok were at once too alien and too much like them, an abomination in Chav eyes. The Shape War songs told the same sad story, a thousand and a thousand years ago the Fior came here and killed with as little understanding and as much evil in their hearts as the Chave showed. And were killed until a harper made the first sioll bond with an Eolt. Ard Bracoпn and Eolt Lekall sang the grand Chorale of Peace, passed the song from Ard to Eolt to Ard again, spreading peace around the world.
The angles flitted through the upper levels of the trees, quadripart wings flickers of diamond, hard bodies ruby and emerald, topaz, sapphire and amethyst-flying jewels whose songs were clear pure notes as bright as their colors. There were more angies in the woods than he remembered, perhaps because they’d been pushed from the open fields.
The air dampened as he got closer to the sea and the Meklo Fen. Large patches of sky showed through the shorter, more scattered trees. Ahead he could see the light green of the rushes, the brown cones at the tips of their tall stems, the dance of light from a stretch of water, a cheled so shallow he could wade to the middle without getting his knees wet.
Eyes sweeping the ground, looking for budding plants he could take back with him, Ilaцrn moved along the edge of the cheled, walking carefully to avoid stepping into one of the soft spots that could swallow before he had a chance to pull free. Hunnar wanted color and vigor, especially along his fake stream, which meant that the plants there had to be continually replaced.
He stopped by a clump of kolkrais, frowned down at it. The seven-lobed leaves were a healthy dark green, the buds had only a hint of gold at their tips. If he could get the greater part of the root system without breaking too many of the hair-fine feeders, that clump could be teased into blooming for the next two months.
He knelt on the damp, squishy soil, took a plastic container from the carry sack and set it beside the kolkrais, removed the hand spade from its loop on his belt, and began the delicate job of digging the plants loose. The slow, careful work brought a peace he hadn’t felt in months.
And there were other satisfactions that drifted through his mind as he worked. The probe had missed his sneaking after Hunnar and watching him meet his spy. Ilaцrn smiled as he dug, but his flush of triumph was quickly over. Once Ykkuval heard what the Eolt were, he wasn’t interested in anything else and didn’t let the probe dig around as he’d done before. Hard to read these Chav mesuchs, but he seemed angry about something. Angry, afraid, frustrated. If I only knew what it was…
As long as there was no suspicion and no direct questions to force his mind to focus, he could keep his secrets. No suspicion-that was the key. I’ll find out what you’re afraid of, he thought. Somehow. And I’ll sweep you all off this world.