Though his size was attributed to a natural mutation, holovid commentators speculated that Kintiniklintit was a product of eugenics, that human engineers had gifted him beyond other Vanquishers. He’d been sired by the Lords of the Sixth Swarm, who had conquered mankind. That meant that humans could have boosted this young prince.
But there was other evidence of an unholy alliance. The seemed to have embraced human technology more than anyone would have thought possible: They were traveling through the world gates, technology forbidden to all but the Tharrin and their representatives.
Until he learned all this, Thomas hadn’t recognized just how dangerous the dronon were. Until he saw Kintiniklintit in battle, he had no idea why Gallen fled from the dronon.
The Lord Protector who challenged the Kintiniklintit was a huge man, a full head taller than Gallen O’Day. The fellow had enough muscle on him, he could have auctioned it off to blacksmiths.
Even more fascinating to Thomas was that a woman stood beside the Lord Protector. In order to make the ceremony complete, the man had to risk not only his life, but the life of his wife. Thomas wondered at the woman’s nerve. My Maggie has done that, he reminded himself.
The holovision didn’t show the Lord Protector’s battle against Kintiniklintit. Witnesses said it was too gruesome to display. The beginning of the battle was unspectacular-photos showed the Lord Escort clocking record wingspeeds, computer graphics projected his mass to be one-third larger than any other Vanquisher ever encountered. The holos showed the dronon flying toward the human Lord Protector, an enormous man all in black, who leapt and kicked as Kintiniklintit approached. Then the screens blanked, denying Thomas a view of the poor man’s fate.
It was said that in one blow, Kintiniklintit slashed the Lord Protector with a heavy, serrated battle arm, slicing him into ragged halves. Kintiniklintit spared the man’s wife. That was something, Thomas considered.
Despite the images on the holo, as Thomas stayed with Lady Wimisonne, she filled his nights with such diversion he did not worry much about rumors of dronon searches.
Even when the dronon left the planet Fale, Thomas remained with “The Lady” for a few days.
For weeks, she’d told Thomas that if he wanted some fun, he should go to the “recreation center.” Thomas felt his face burn with embarrassment at such words. Though the folks on Fale spoke the same tongue as Thomas, they spoke with an odd accent, and Thomas sometimes found that the way they combined words varied from his custom. Back on Tihrglas, the term recreation center was a euphemism he would not have used in front of a lady. It referred to the secluded homes of single women notorious for letting any man into their beds. For a traveling man, the name of such, a woman was worth gold, for such a woman not only would feed a man for a day or two, but provided some good sport. So Thomas often traded names of such women with minstrels, saying, “I’ll be wandering down Gort Ard way. You would not have the name of a recreation center, would you?” To which the minstrel would reply, “There’s always Mary Mimsey O’Keefe.”
It caused Thomas no little embarrassment that Lady Wimisonne urged him to go to another “recreation center.” Each time she did, Thomas asked if she’d tired of his company. Always she laughed his question away, but finally Thomas feared she really must be weary of him, so while she stepped out for an afternoon, he packed his bags and went to the recreation center, only to discover it was just a pub.
Strange place, Fale. Strange and wonderful, Thomas decided for the hundredth time.
There, he drank his fill, sang to an appreciative audience, and laughed the night away. The dronon were gone, Fale was his once more, and back at home, Lady Wimisonne would welcome him back to her bed energetically.
But when he stepped from the pub, clothes and instrument cases in hand, he was surprised by a shadowy figure who stepped up behind him. “Thomas Flynn?” a man asked.
“Yes?” Thomas turned to confront the fellow. Thomas never made it. A light flashed, and a sharp pain erupted in his shoulder, and he fell.
Three months later, Thomas Flynn sat slumped in a chair, a black blindfold covering his eyes, hands chained behind his back. His stomach cramped painfully.
Thomas felt a fool. It didn’t matter if his captors were dronon or their lackeys. Bagged is bagged.
So he sat chained to a chair in some financial minister’s basement.
Thomas had resolved never to speak. But resolutions didn’t matter. On the very first night of his capture, Thomas’s interrogator simply placed a circlet on Thomas’s head. Thomas had felt a prick at the back of his neck as the machine sent tendrils to infiltrate his brain, then Thomas listened as he told his interrogators everything.
Ignorance, that’s what did Thomas in. Who ever heard of Guides and nanoware and all the interrogator’s nasty tricks?
Of course, Thomas told the interrogator that Gallen and Maggie had gone to Tremonthin. He’d told them where Maggie had lived for seventeen years-even naming the room where she slept at Mahoney’s Inn, in the city Clere, of County Morgan, on Tihrglas.
As he betrayed his niece over the weeks, Thomas became weighed down with guilt. He hoped his answers would do no harm. What did the dronon care where Maggie was born? She’d never return home. As for her destination, Thomas could only hope that the young folks had accomplished their mission on Tremonthin and escaped.
Yet it rankled Thomas. Treachery. Treachery. Thomas’s body betrayed him by speaking. The dronon collaborators wrenched Maggie’s secrets from him.
I am a fool, Thomas had thought bitterly a thousand times in the past weeks. Dying a brave death on Tremonthin would have been infinitely preferable to this.
Three times now I have betrayed Maggie. I betrayed her in her youth when her mother died, by leaving her in the care of strangers. As her only living relative, I only came to claim her when she won an inheritance.
I betrayed her again when I refused to join her quest to Tremonthin. In my naïveté, I imagined I knew more than she.
And I betrayed her at last by answering every question the dronon’s interrogator put to me.
Over and over, Thomas considered his betrayal, until he imagined that if the dronon ever unchained his hands, he would strangle himself.
But for now he only sat, starving, choking on the scent of his own excrement-for the interrogator left him in filth. Until, finally, he heard the door open to his cell. Briefly, Thomas hoped his captors would finally kill him.
His head hung sideways, and though his tongue felt swollen dry, Thomas Flynn began to sing the words to an aria written by an ancient composer named Acuon of Freewater. It was a haunting melody with intricate musical phrases that seemed to meander then would thunder back to their major themes clothed in new majesty, having accrued power in their travels. It was a song of defiance.
A person walked in, stirring the air, padding on soft feet. It did not sound like the heavy boots of his interrogator. Thomas heard a lighter tread. A scent filled the room, a restrained sweetness. The intruder tiptoed around Thomas, never speaking. Thomas took a deep breath.
It was Maggie, his niece-he felt sure. He could smell her wool shawl, the scent of her dark red hair, all mingled with a rich fragrance of perfume she’d got off-world.