Jo Clayton - Shadowplay

As they plunged deeper and deeper into the Pilgrim throng, the people took hold of the song and began singing with them, the sound spreading and spreading until it filled the space under the bowl of the sky.

Sometime around mid-afternoon there was a disturbance by the right front corner of the wagon. A man as elaborately dressed as Rohant was screaming something that was partly drowned by the shouts of the guards and partly carried off by the wind. He tried to climb onto the bed of the wagon, laying about him in a frenzy of desire and determination with a seasoned quarterstaff, his strength multiplied by his insanity. In a lull when the wind dropped, Shadith heard what he was screaming: I am Nataminaho, I AM, not HIM, not that IMPOSTER. I AM NATAMINAHO, I AM ANOINTED BY OPPALATIN, I AM…

He was driven back, knocked down. A moment later she heard him scream as the broad wheels began to roll over him.

Ginbiryol scowled at 18 as he recognized the shouter, one of Puk's protйgйs, the country Plicik with the taste for torturing children; he had some effective scenes from that one, this would finish the tale, but there was a problem with the style of the end. He considered a moment, then isolated the sequence; a good many of his clients shared the tastes of that local and would be insulted by his ignoble death, seeing it as a judgment on them; however, there were two or three who had a sentimental gloss on their attitudes toward children, they'd enjoy the pain, the writhing, the blood, and feel a special glow of virtue as they also enjoyed the wretched end of the torturer. He dumped the sequence into a special file for a Limited Version of this Limited Edition. Though finishing the story off satisfied his aesthetic sense, it was a dangerous ploy. If he misjudged his audience, it wasn't merely a matter of refunding the purchase price; he would have some very unpleasant people angry with him, people who had a propensity for direct and bloody retaliation for anything they considered an insult.

He continued monitoring the Cells, brooding over timing as he watched. The emotional content of the scenes was intensifying to the point of exaltation and the autumnal odor of endphase was strong as burning leaves. Time is now, he thought, I had better set the Banger in place. He tapped his forefinger on the armrest. Ajeri wasn't here. She'd taken to avoiding the Bridge.

The kephalos tracked her and found her in the gym where she was exercising with grim determination, sweat rolling off her body, her face a grotesquerie of strain.

Ginbiryol watched a moment, decided to leave her where she was. He called up the record of what she'd already done with the Planet-Killer, nodded with satisfaction when he read its current status; he finished activating it and used servos to ease it into the drone' which Ajeri had already programmed. All he had to do was pop it out and send it down.

The drone dropped in a slow lazy spiral, taking most of the day to reach the surface. It slid into the ocean and drifted down and down for another half a day until it nosed into the muck at the bottom of a vast chasm in the seabed, near hotvents that went even deeper into the worldheart. When the slavecircuit beeped to notify

Ginbiryol the Banger was in place, he set his sandwich and kaff aside to contemplate the dark bulk in the darker rift and savor in anticipation Shadith's consternation as the world blew up around her.

Almost as an afterthought, he started a quartet of quiverworts droning out to Teegah's Limit. These quasi-plants, which had been developed by the Sikkul Paems from their own root stock were ordinarily not available outside the Paem system though there was a good deal of interest in them because they were sensitive to disturbances created by surfacing starships, were the most reliable alarms around. Ginbiryol had acquired his worts by means devious and expensive and was careful to keep their presence on his ship from the Paems who cared for his drives.

He wasn't worried about help arriving for the Avatars. Kiskai was so far off the usual ship runs there was very little chance either Hunters Inc or Voallts Korlatch had ships closer to it than Spotchals; by his calculations no ship was likely to make it here for at least another three weeks. However, he was a cautious man and even a minute chance was worth guarding against, especially when it was something he planned to do anyway.

He finished his meal to the sound of the com bell; emergency calls from downside agents were coming in faster and thicker as the hours passed. He ignored them. Events had their own momentum now. He didn't need to prod them any longer. The on-planet agents were expendable and it was as good a time as any to cut them loose.

After the serviteur went off with his lunch tray, he sat back and contemplated the busy Cells, satisfied finally with the way things were going. Let the girl plot and twist and subvert all she wanted; in the end she was just another tool. In the end she was ash.

Knowing that Ginny was watching and savoring her growing terror, recording it for his loathesome clients, Shadith fought it and with it, a sickening sense of helplessness and a rage that nearly strangled her. She could put on a face to fool Miowee and Kikun and Rohant and their captors, but HE could read behind that face and gloat over what he saw. And sell her fear, her frustration, her fury. In all her long hard life she had not hated anyone so much, not even the slavers that took her and murdered her family.

Late on the third night in the Kisa Misthakan, Shadith lay on the cot with her eyes closed. The bare lightbulb that hung from the center of the ceiling was swinging slightly at the end of its wire; it was never turned off and she was not allowed to cover her face. A priest with a shaved head and a brown leather half-mask sat on a chair by the door, arms folded, eyes following her every move. At regular intervals he got to his feet and came over to her, stood looking down at her. She ignored him; he was just one more irritation.

There were no rats or mice, not even any spiders in this prison wing, so no ears and eyes were available to her; it was like living with a sack over her head and boxing gloves on her hands. Her cell, every cell in this section had all been scrubbed until they stank of disinfectant; even the microbes were annihilated. Either Ginny had warned the Gospah about her talent, or he was by nature obsessively neat. Perhaps both, the one reinforcing the other.

Outside the walls of the Misthakan the city teemed with small lives, this was a time of feasting for them, the streets were full of dead meat, much of it fried. The kanaweh were deeper than ever into their killing frenzy, preparing their own doom though they semed incapable of realizing that as they went from looting shrines to raiding the Plicik Ispisacos. She shuddered away from the bloody chaos and brought the small black furwing she was riding into the Misthakan Courts and sent it sniffing around for the others.

Kikun, Miowee, Kayataki and Rohant were one, two, three, four down from her, in cells that stank of disinfectant with watchpriests sitting by the door. She hadn't seen them since they were dumped here. In her training sessions young Aspirants took their parts in the choreography the Gospah was drilling into her. No doubt the same was happening with them.

They all had small barred windows high in one wall. Unglazed. Coneshaped. Cut through several feet of stone. She tried flying the furwing through the bars into Rohant's cell, but the watchpriest saw it and killed it. She wrenched her mind loose, but not before the creature died and its small agony seared into her. She moaned and curled into a fetal knot, crying with a grief that, reached to her toes, that filled every milliliter of her body.