Lee, Sharon: Liaden 11 - Mouse and Dragon

The door cycled as he approached, admitting a familiar, pudgy form.

“Daav.” His hand was caught, and he was drawn into an embrace as gentle as it was speaking. A heartbeat only before Clonak released him.

Daav stepped back, raising his hands with fingers spread wide.

“I am just on my way away,” he managed.

Clonak nodded and turned with him, back to the door.

“I'll walk with you, if you'll have me,” he said.

“It's only a step to my car,” Daav murmured, “but if you crave the exercise . . . ”

Outside, it was a sunny, cloudless day, chilly but virtually windless. Aelliana had been dead for thirty-three days.

“Old friend,” Clonak murmured, as if he had heard Daav's thought, “there are no words to express—”

Daav's hand shot out on its own, and gripped the other man's arm, tightly—and released him. “Don't, Clonak.”

There was a small silence, before Clonak nodded. “I will of course respect your wishes,” he said stiffly.

Daav bit his lip, ashamed of his churlishness.

“Forgive me, old friend,” he said, with what gentleness he could muster. “You loved her, too—”

Clonak took his arm. “I loved her—and love her yet. However, my concern of the moment is my friend, who seems to be fading as I look at him. Are you well, Daav? Do you need—note, I do not say 'want'—a Healer?”

He shuddered and tried to pull away, but Clonak did not relinquish his arm.

Trapped and goaded, he sighed. “The Healers will cause me to forget those things that—that perhaps cause me not to thrive. I—we had so little time! How can I forfeit even one moment?”

“Get down!” Clonak shouted, augmenting the command with a firm push.

Daav hit the ground, rolling, into the shelter of a delivery van, pulled his weapon, and peered out.

A pellet struck 'crete six inches from his nose, cutting a tiny gouge in a spurt of dust.

“Stay down,” Clonak snapped from beside him, “and do try not to be a target.”

“Too late,” Daav murmured, though he did withdraw to a position of more prudence behind the van.

Clonak slid something back into his belt. “My crew will be here soon,” he said. “Just keep your head down, Daav.”

“Crew?”

“Security crew,” Clonak said briefly. “I'm team leader.”

“So—a practice run.”

“Practice makes perfect,” Clonak said in Terran. “Who's marked you out as a target, Daav?”

“The Terran Party.”

Clonak frowned and shot him a glance. “The Terran Party . . . ” he began.

“ . . . are wingnuts,” Daav finished. “Yes, I've been told. They do, however, carry a grudge, and apparently believe that killing me will kill the proof of a common ancestor for Terran, Liaden and Yxtrang.”

Clonak stared at him. “They're a little late getting the message, aren't they?”

“Most of the organizations the information was sent to ignored it, so far as I am aware. The Terran Party went to the trouble of finding who I was and setting snipers on me.” A pellet struck the side of the van they sheltered behind. “Also, they were kind enough to murder Aelliana.”

Clonak said nothing. No one came to claim the van they sheltered behind; no pedestrians or other traffic disturbed them.

No one shot at them.

The device on Clonak's belt vibrated; Daav heard the faint hum.

“Got them,” Clonak said. “Want to come along and hear what they have to say?”

He thought about that, weighing the anger that was twisted, twined and inseparable from his grief.

“Yes,” he said.

It was, as he had suspected, the information packet he had sent out to various Terran and Liaden supremacist organizations, detailing the common root. The Terran Party had taken umbrage and word had come down that “Daav yos'Phelium” needed to be taken out.

Hidden, he had listened while Clonak questioned both of the . . . people . . . that Clonak's team had harvested—questioned them closely. Their target was “Daav yos'Phelium,” dangerous madman. Clans meant nothing to them, nor did the Scouts or Solcintra University. It was as if they truly believed that the annihilation of Daav yos'Phelium would destroy the information they found so alarming.

Idiots, he thought, stalking along the river path in Trealla Fantrol's wild garden. He had made his excuses to Clonak when it seemed that he must rise and kill them with his own hands.

Balance—but of course it would not have been Balance. The two women taken by Clonak's team were ignorant; they followed orders and collected their pay. Killing them would have as much to do with answering Aelliana's death as drowning two kittens.

When his mother had been murdered, and Sae Zar, he had removed Ganjir from Korval's trade routes, forever. It had caused some difficulty, he had heard, which had failed to gratify him. Had the planet died, its population starved to answer Korval's deaths, yet it would not have nullified those deaths, nor returned Chi and Sae Zar to the arms of their kin.

So it would be with Aelliana. Balance with the Terran Party could accomplish nothing.

Might not Terra take exception to the wholesale slaughter of her folk? Aelliana asked.

“Assuredly she would,” he answered, “and to set Korval against Terra is something that we are surely mad to contem—”

He ground his teeth together, looked around him at the empty pathway and crossed to an agreeably placed bench. Sinking into it, he closed his eyes.

This happened, too often. He had thought, with time, his halved soul would grow weary of attempting to simulate what was lost. Dreading the day it happened, yet he had supposed that the instances of his “hearing” her would grow further apart, and eventually, over . . . time . . . fade entirely.

Instead, he seemed to hear her voice more often, and more clearly, as he gained in strength. He tried to suppress it, to hear through it, but the effort left him exhausted in heart and soul. He told no one, not even Er Thom—especially not Er Thom—and that subterfuge further exhausted him.

Perhaps—perhaps, he thought, he should have the Healers. They would . . . Aelliana would be wrapped in mists, as if an old memory that no longer had the power to move him. He would forget the sound of her voice, her phrasing, her laughter; forget the color that mounted her cheeks when she was angry. He would be—reft and alone, the joy they had shared something that need no longer trouble him.

He took a breath and brought his attention forcefully back to the problem at hand. Daav yos'Phelium had a price on his head—he was in fact a hunted man who endangered those remaining of his loved ones by his very existence. Did Daav yos'Phelium vanish, then the hunt would cease.

It would, naturally, need to be a widely publicized disappearance, but he thought he might manage that. There was also the matter of Aelliana's Balance. Certainly, the woman he loved would never have agreed to the slaughter of innocents, even if he found himself willing to pursue such a course.

No, he thought, recalling the interview with the two women. The enemy here was not Terra—it was ignorance.

He might, after all, be able to deal with ignorance.

Sighing, he settled himself more comfortably on the bench, his head resting against the trunk of a silver ash.

Perhaps he fell asleep. Perhaps it was another sort of seizure, which ceded comfortable oblivion, rather than pain and terror.

The stab of a headache brought him to himself again, but he was not drowsing on the bench by the river path.

He was sitting on the family patio at Trealla Fantrol, Val Con tucked onto his lap, the two of them bent over a book. By the count of pages, they had been reading together for some time.

Of the time between his stopping on the bench and this moment, he had no memory . . . at all.