Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

“I permitted that as an exercise in futility.”

“I know that voice,” Shadith said. “Ginny?”

“Singer.”

“What do you want?”

“Not your death.”

“That’s obvious. You don’t waste words on targets.”

“Yes. I will be joining you in one moment. I prefer not to have to wait for you to recover from a stunning, so stay where you are.”

“All right.”

A small flit dropped to the ground ahead of them, opened up its side. Ginbiryol Seyirshi stepped onto the ramp, beckoned to them.

Shadith kicked her heels into her pony’s sides, dropped the lead rope, and rode forward.

Tsipor pa Prool stayed back, watching, rifle held loosely under her arm.

Ginny held up a hand. “Truce,” he called out. “Do you agree?”

Shadith stopped the pony five meters off, sat frowning at him. “Last time you didn’t bother asking, just grabbed. Why all this?”

“I need your active cooperation.”

“Why should I have anything to do with you?”

“Omphalos.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend? I never much believed that.”

“Does it matter? No matter what you think of me, you do have friends and Omphalos has them. Not for long. Experimental material has a short life line in their hands.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“ Read me.”

“Tell me.”

“Destruction breeds round you, Singer. I need you.”

“I don’t trust you. I can’t.”

“Your own words, Singer. Last time I didn’t bother asking, just grabbed. We both remember how wrong that went.”

“True. How did you get away? You were a prisoner, weren’t you?”

“They meant to use me to take a world for them, so they sent me out on a ship with a workshop built to my specifications.”

“Fools.”

“Yes. As big a fool as I was, trying to contain you.”

“Truce till when?”

“One year, during which time neither attempts to kill the other.”

“Good enough. One last thing. My companion. She has reason to loathe Omphalos. She comes.”

“Necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Agreed, provided she swears truce also.”

Shadith twisted around, waved Tsipor to them.

The Raska came slowly, her dark red eyes fixed on Seyirshi.

“He offers truce,” Shadith said. “While we go after Omphalos.”

“Is true ssaying?”

“At the moment.”

Tsipor flipped the rifle around, handed it to Shadith. She slid from the saddle with a boneless ease and walked up the ramp. She stopped in front of Seyirshi, reached toward him.

“Let her touch you, Ginny. There’s no harm in it. Tsipor, the right arm, not the left.”

Tsipor pa Prool dropped her hand lightly on Seyirshi’s true arm, jerked it away, hissing as she did so. She stepped back, turned to face Shadith. “Bad,” she said. “To trust, now iss yess.”

“All right,” Shadith said. “We’re in.”

Dyslaera 11: Rohant Edges Toward Escape

Rohant lay on his back, his hands resting one below the other under his ribs. It was dark in the cell, as dark as it ever got, the lights in the corridor outside dimmed to a grayish twilight.

As he had night after night for weeks now, Miji the sakali trotted along an unlit corridor, frill erect, senses alert for insomniac wanderers. It was about an hour before dawn on a night as uneventful as last night and the night before and the night before that, and so on, but he was never at ease inside the prison wing.

For weeks now Rohant had been using the sakali like a blind man’s cane, probing the corridors around his cell and throughout the prison wing.

It was a frustrating process. He could not see through Miji’s eyes, or hear what he heard, he could only read the sakali’s reactions, feel the play of his muscles. Despite this he was acquiring considerable information about his surroundings. Dyslaera had unusually accurate perceptions of distance, direction, and duration. Each pitpat of Miji’s tiny feet told him more about the maze around him.

The Omphalites took him out of his cell nearly every day, sometimes twice. Every five days they took him to the exercise court so he could wash, get some sun and work the kinks out of his body, running round and round inside those slippery walls. The other times he went to the saferoom where the techs made lifeflakes of him. In the first one they made him shave off half his mustache, then read out a message to Miralys. The degree to which his half-mustache grew back was a timing device for subsequent flakes, evidence that an extended period was being recorded.

And they took him to dine with the Grand Chom, who discarded his mask and robes for these encounters.

The serviteurs were androids, not flesh to be shocked by the Chom’s departure from the rules of behavior before outsiders. There were no guards inside the room, but he wasn’t being foolish; there was a stunfence down the center of the table, ceiling to floor, between Omphalite and Dyslaeror.

“Come here,” he said, the first night they dined. Warily Rohant came toward him. He touched the screen and went down.

He was out for twenty minutes.

When he woke, he found that the serviteurs had lifted him away from the screen, settled him in his chair, crossed his arms on the table, laid his head on them.

“A lesson,” the Grand Chom said. “It’s a stunfield. It won’t kill you, you’re much too valuable to waste.”

The third night they dined, the Chom showed Rohant the flake they’d made for Miralys. Rohant shaving half his moustache, then reading the statement. Then six successive views with related physical data, then the final message detailing how the payment was to be made. “We have you,” he said. “If your Toerfeles wants you back she has to sell us a piece of Voallts Korlach, she won’t be able to raise the ransom elsewhere, we’ve seen to that. And once we have the piece, we have the whole.” He held his hands up, closed them into fists. “Before the year’s out, your Toerfeles will be working for us,”

Rohant said nothing. Let the Chom think he was chagrined by this development. He wasn’t. It wasn’t going to happen. He’d learn his mistake when Miralys was standing in front of him tearing his throat out.

They kept flaking Rohant every two or three days after the first demand was sent out. They’ve done this before, he thought, they’re almost as slick as they think they are.

He hadn’t been called to dinner for over two months. The Chom was away somewhere, or so the gossip went. He didn’t know if he missed it or not. The food was better than he got in his cell, but the company took his appetite away.

Miji pattered through the corridors, growing more restless as the minutes passed; dawn was approaching and he needed to be out of this place and in his burrow before the sun was up.

Rohant brought him back through the maze of corridors, took him out to the exercise court; he gave the sakali a mindrub, felt him wriggle with pleasure, then let him go.

Miji dived into the murky water of the sump, swam vigorously through the outflow pipe and went scurrying off, hurrying to get home before the sun brought the tjejunga birds out hunting for stray sakalis and other small-lives.

He was ready to go.

He had his escape route planned. Into the Novice living quarters, out into the Novice garden, through the Pleasure House to the Postern Gate that stood open night and day (far as he could tell), propped open by something cold and heavy that Miji didn’t like touching. Once he was outside the Compound, he’d head for the nearest cover and keep running, hoping he could stay clear long enough to get outside the range of their seekers. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than sitting around on his tailbone waiting to be skinned for the amusement of these stupid sheep.