Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

He stopped just inside, his way barred by the dolly and the torp; for a crazy moment he thought he was hallucinating, then that the Bright Sister had somehow developed a mechanical TP facility and flipped his torp back to him, then he knew that the woman had done it, the bitch had found his hiding place, she’d found the Dark Sister, no matter that it was impossible for her to find the Dark Sister, and she’d left this joke to greet him. Furious and afraid he took a step toward it; disarm it, he thought, I’ve got to disarm it.

It blew in his face. He knew an instant of intolerable brightness, of intolerable frustration and rage. Then nothing.

1. Time-span:11 Days (local) after the meeting on Gerbek Island to the evening of the day called Lift-Off.

At the Mines.

When Karrel Goza left Zaraiz Memeli at the Mines, the boy was on fire with excitement, but it didn’t take him long to discover he’d been dumped there to keep him out of trouble while the adults did whatever it was they were going to do. He was furious and hurting, betrayed again by someone who claimed his trust. He poked about, sticking his nose into anything that showed the slightest promise of breaking the tedium. In the middle of his second week there, early one morning before the sun was all the way up, he pulled a rotten board off a window at the back of the convict barracks, wriggled through the narrow space and dropped onto the floor of a holding cell.

The silver sphere came bounding at him, squawling its warning, attacking when that warning was ignored.

He was startled but not frightened. He jumped, swerved, dived, played with it, laughed as he whipped about, elastic as an eel, too fast for the sphere to catch him.

N’Ceegh heard him laughing, took a look.

The sphere stopped chasing Zaraiz and began chatting with him, then it brought him into the workshop.

After a terse welcome, N’Ceegh went back to making the operant parts of one of the stunners he was assembling for the hit on the Warmaster. Zaraiz sat on the stool next to him and watched him work, fascinated by the delicacy and precision of his fingers, by the magnifier he was wearing, the microscopic points on most of his tools. Despite his involvement in the Green Slimes and his ability to dominate the other middlers, he was a solitary boy; he knew the pleasures and value of silence. He asked nothing, volunteered nothing, spoke only to answer the Pa’ao’s questions and kept his mouth shut at other times, not wanting to distract N’Ceegh at a crucial moment. After a while N’Ceegh let him polish and fit together cases for the stunners.

The boy immersed himself in what he was doing, glowing with pride each time the Pa’ao looked a part over and set it down without comment, showing that he thought it was finished, that he saw nothing there that needed fixing. With the resilience of the child he still was, Zaraiz gave his trust again, this time to the Pa’ao, gave it because N’Ceegh was a master craftsman and he wanted very much to be like him, because N’Ceegh was wholly alien, was physically and spiritually Other. He gave his trust and a tentative affection.

N’Ceegh recognized this in his silent way and gave back what he was given.

When they took the Pa’ao, Bolodo’s minions were clumsy and let themselves be seen. To cover themselves they ashed the village where they found him, killing all his kin, blood to the third degree, killing his mates and his children, most of all killing the boychild who was his craft-heir. His species was monogamous for life, patrilocal and powerfully bonded to the family and the family Place. He lived after that only to trade death for death; he escaped from the Palace to find a way of laying his bloodghosts, to feed them blood from the men who did the killing, blood from the men who ordered it. Zaraiz gave him hope of another kind, hope of passing on his craft, of hands to lay his own ghost when it was tired of him and wanted to shed the weary weight of his body.

By the end of the week Zaraiz Memeli divorced his family and swore loyalty to N’Ceegh, taking the name Zaraiz Pa’ao. N’Ceegh adopted him as his son, his craft-heir. And he began teaching Zaraiz Pa’ao the Torveynee, the way of the Pa’ao and the way of honor, the way of vengeance.

Ten days before Lift-Off they watched Ehnas Ofka and her isyas leave for the Chel, carrying with her the stunners they’d built for her. They watched the fighters from the Mines being ferried out to her, one night, two nights, three, until the chosen were all gone.

They spent the day named Lift-Off in the shop, working on the housing of a hunting rifle, one that killed with exploding darts no larger than a mosquito. N’Ceegh set delicate scrolls of inlay into the dark fine wood of the stock, then passed it over to Zaraiz for polishing while he etched shadow patterns into the metal parts. They worked all day, talked about nothing but the work.

Around sundown they went to the Smelter and sat in a corner eating fries and fish and drinking tea, listening to the music, watching the youngsters and the middlers dance.

Thirty minutes later Belirmen Indiz came in, banged his fist on the bar, then scrambled onto it, his age and stoutness forgotten. “The Warmaster is taken,” he bellowed into a sudden silence. “She is taken and gone, sent into the sun. Do you hear me? The Warmaster is gone.”

Noise and confusion, shouted questions, Belirmen’s booming voice as he tried to answer them, shoving elbows, stomping feet, triumphant flourishes, trills and squeals from the musicians, crying men, women, youngers. Rebels crowding closer to the bar to hear more, rebels forcing their way against the tide to get out and spread the news. Everywhere movement and emotion, a heady yeasty mix. A time when dreams no one quite believed in were suddenly made real.

N’Ceegh looked at Zaraiz, nodded at the door. Zaraiz got to his feet and followed him out.

Riding souped-up yizzies protected by miniature cuuxtwoks, N’Ceegh and Zaraiz Pa’ao left the Mines an hour before dawn. They circled wide through the mountains and went clacking and whirring across a stretch of barren Chel, not far from where the raiders had camped. By nightfall they were on the lower boundary of the Eastern Duzzulka, where tendrils of grassland reached into the scrub. They landed, tethered their yizzies, ate, slept a few hours, climbed into the saddle again.

I put Chicklet into a dive, flicked her around so the gunport Pels had improvised in her repair lock faced a melter station; I balanced her on her tail while he got off a missile that a second later blew out the station and a hunk of tower under it. We went swing, balance, boom around the circumference until the wall looked like beavers had been at it.

Swarms of yizzies were converging on the Palace; when we came over from Base, we’d seen hordes of them, flying in from every corner of the Littorals like locusts on the move; they even sounded like locusts when I turned on the external ears and listened to them. The news of the Warmaster’s end was out everywhere, that was obvious. The com net, I suppose; if I were Huvved, I’d have shut down the net till I had some sort of control in the cities. Aslan said it was survival-fear that triggered Surges; looked to me like survival-hope was doing the job just as well. Airships were drifting loose over the city, abandoned by their pilots and passengers, loads of Hordar dropped to melt into the Surge that was forming there. As we flew over, I could see the devastation starting, like the destruction in gul Ukseme multiplied a hundredfold, a million Hordar as a single deathbeast striking down the thousands of Huvved living there, burning, trampling, bursting in doors and windows, destroying everything their hands and feet could smash or torch. The yizzies came clicking and clattering over them, airmarching with the landswarm moving in a blind fury toward the Palace.