Attanasio, AA - In Other Worlds

"My lady, you are distressed," the other said to her. "We should go."

She touched Carl's arm, and a blur of energy warmed him. "Why are you here?" she asked.

Carl held up his strapped wrist. "I've been sold." He cast a nod to Allin. "By him."

She looked hard at Allin. "Why are you selling him? He looks Foke-worthy."

Allin met her stare with a stern countenance. "He has been wizan-appraised, my lady." The Foke warrior observed the wizan guards' edginess, and he asked: "What has distressed you?"

Evoe said nothing, for she was watching Carl for what was familiar.

"The last of her kin, a distaff aunt, was a prisoner in Rhene," a guard related. "We had come with the ransom to free her. But she has already been taken to Galgul."

That last word cracked the guard's voice. Allin nodded in sympathy to their anxiety. "You are indeed distressed, my lady," he said loudly to her; then, to the guards: "You must take her to where she can rest."

"Will you came with me?" Evoe asked Carl.

His heart was squashed with feeling. The eld skyle had been right about this woman-she was all the colors of waking to him, the flesh of dreams. She wasn't shimmeringly beautiful or vein-poundingly erotic. But her slender face enthralled him with its waif eyes and a puckish smile that showed small white teeth. What could he say?

He loved the melody of her features.

The guards took her arms and she shrugged them off. "Will you come with me?" she asked again, more urgently.

"Yes," Carl's whole body said.

"Lady!" Allin barked.' "We have witnesses to your distress. I am hereby overriding your authority by Foke right for the Foke good."

The guards seized her. She slumped and twisted, throwing herself against one guard for purchase and heaving the other to the ground. With her free arm, she jabbed viperlike at the remaining guard's face, and she was free. Her hand reached into the guard's robe, and she came away with a pistol.

Allin had settled into an attack crouch, and he crabbed toward her, ignoring the gun.

With. both hands, Carl grabbed Picwah by his shirtfront, hoisted him into the air, and flung him at Allin.

A knifeblade grinned in Evoe's hand. She cut the leash, and she and Carl bolted for the chamber's exit. They ran through gold-lighted corridors and into a transparent elevator. The lift tugged at their tensed insides, and as the gallery level pulled off; they both laughed with relief.

"My name's Carl." He took her hand, and the warm electricity was still there.

"In my whole span, nothing like this has ever happened to me before." Her face glowed apricot from the exertion. "How do you know my name?"

"The same way I know your language. They were the gifts of an eld skyle."

"How long have you been in the Werld?"

"About twenty or so meals."

The elevator stopped, and she guided Carl out by

his hand. They were on a rooftop. Clouds the color of gunsmoke wisped overhead. Below, a laser-lit city blazed like magma.

"Rhene," Evoe announced. "The City of Sacrifice. We can't stay here."

The wind was steep on the top ramp of the clearing pavilion, and Carl was sure she was going to jump to the fallpath. His 'heart was galloping in' anticipation. She led him instead along the curve of the ramp in the circle of a landing pad. Dozens of glossy, enameled flyers were parked along the perimeter.

Evoe selected a blue-toned one and raised its blackglass canopy. "Get in."

The sling Carl crawled into held his weight and swiveled wildly until he realized he, had the control grip in his left hand.

Evoe slid into the second sling, and the faceted blackglass hood closed with a sigh from its airtight bolts. The interior was black.

Green points tapped on in the dark as Evoe activated its drive.

"Are we stealing this thing?" Carl asked into the blackness.

"It's a flyer," the answer arrived with a chorus of moving control lights and audial cues, "and any citizen of Rhene may fly it."

The canopy's blackglass phased to transparency, and Carl watched with glittering fascination as the landing pad dropped away and they were suddenly high over Rhene. The clearing pavilion, he saw at once, was the city of glass towers that he had seen from afar during his thornwing flight. In the direction toward where he had been then, clouds folded in on themselves like the interior of a brain.

"That's the Cloudgate," Evoe's alto voice informed him. "It's the only safe route through the destroyer winds to the Welkyn where the zotl live. That's why

Rhene is here-to guard their upper Werld from the human animals they breed in Midwerld for their food."

"I came through there in a thornwing."

"That's about the only way through," Evoe agreed. "The fallpath flows down. Thornwings can get down the Cloudpath, but not up it. The only way up is a flyer. And the zotl destroy all unauthorized craft."

Rhene glowered below them like embers. "Where are we going?"

"Where no one will find us." She made some small adjustments and leaned back in her sling.

Skyles whirled past as their flyer swiftly found its way through the maze of the Werld. The continuous abrupt,changes in direction never touched them, and they hung gracefully in their slings.

Evoe was looking at Carl with an earnestness in her dolphin-tinted eyes that gave him the same slick feeling as luck.

"Tell me about yourself," she requested, "so that maybe I can figure out why I feel this way about you."

"What way?"

A burr of anxiety snagged her voice: "Don't you feel it?"

He did. The eld skyle had prepared him for it, and it still amazed him. The sublime tranquillity of a summer afternoon prismed all his thoughts and feelings. He had been saturated with strangeness since he had been snatched out of his former life-and now the luster of caring emotion -welling in him, the most natural and primal emotion of any child, seemed strangest of all. "I'm in love."

They laughed a lot during that flight. The tight space of that pod seemed as big and full of promise to Carl as the entire room of May. He told her about himself. Not everything, of -course. He left out his balding head and flat feet. But he told her the high

lights: St. Tim's, college, the brokerage house in Manhattan, and the Blue Apple. He was surprised by how little there was.

And how interested she was in it.

Evoe never finished her story. She was one and a half cycles old and had completed many initiations. She had been born into an ancient Foke clan with a legacy of fealties to other clans. That meant she had spent half of her first cycle serving and learning from various and scattered Foke tribes. She had attained a great deal. Her most valuable lesson was learning to surrender the leadership role she had been born to. Over the years of her ancestral servitude, when she cleaned the lodges and reared the children of other noble clans, she was immersed in and fell in love with the simpleness of living. After her thrall was over, she stayed close to that love, and she lived longer than any other in her family. She was the first wizan in their known history. And that had been a great humiliation to her clan.

Among the Foke, wizan were honored. They were allowed to write books. But warrior leaders, chiefs, were glorified. They alone could carry the guns smithied in the Foke's secret armories. The two were never found together in one person, though Chief Wizan was a popular character in Foke myth and lore. Foke chiefs were bound by law to take the Foke's greatest risks, and they always led in battle. None ever lived more than half a cycle.

Evoe suspended the telling of her story when the flyer landed on a skyle cliff among spires of fir. The pod went black.

"We'll send the flyer back," her soft voice said in the darkness. "They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do, we'll be long gone. Here, take this." She handed him the gun she had taken from her guard. "I have one, too.