His Conquering Sword Read online

  In this miraculous den, many strange and wondrous machines cluttered the long narrow table and crowded into each other on the carpets. An image shimmered in the air. Aleksi recognized it immediately: the shrine of Morava, with its great shining dome and its twin towers framing the curved expanse of roof.

  “That’s where the prince is,” he said in surprise.

  Cara glanced at the shrine. The image was so lifelike that Aleksi could not believe that he himself was not standing some distance from the actual shrine, seeing it with his own eyes. Had she witched it and brought it here, making it small enough to fit in her tent? But no, Tess said that the machines called modelers made images of things, not the things themselves.

  “Lie down there.” The doctor patted a low couch with one hand. On this couch, Bakhtiian had slept through his coma. “I’m going to scan you. You saw when I did the same thing to Tess. Take off your saber first, and any gold or metal—yes, your belt buckle.”

  Aleksi did as he was told and gingerly lay down on the pallet. Tess had lain here without the slightest sign of nervousness. Now, the doctor spoke a few Anglais words he did not recognize and he felt the air hum around him. Then she took a little box, lit with jewels of light, into her right hand and, starting at his head, passed it down over his body. The humming air moved as well, like an invisible ring of pressure, down along his torso and his hips, down his legs, dissipating at last by his feet. It took a long time. Torn between awe and fear and curiosity, he watched his spirit drawn into the air at the foot of the couch. His spirit shone as brightly as Bakhtiian’s and Tess’s did, which surprised him a little, and yet, hadn’t the gods gifted him with many blessings?

  “Lady in Heaven. This is astonishing. You’re a perfect specimen, Aleksi. No wonder you survived your hell of a childhood. I think you may well be one of the keys I need to crack the code. I think whatever tinkering those damned chameleons did to the humans they transplanted here bred true in you. Have you ever been sick, a day in your life?

  Aleksi thought about this, since it was the only thing in her entire speech that he understood. “No, not that I remember.”

  “And your reflexes—I must find a way to test them. I’ll just bet that they’re part of the package. Aleksi, have you ever thought about having children?”

  There were definitely times when Aleksi thought the doctor was a little mad. “Every man thinks of it at some time. But if I marry, I’ll have to leave Tess, and I don’t want to do that.”

  “Of course. The jaran are matrifocal. Still, I’d love to try a little selective breeding—” She broke off and coughed into one hand. “In any case, this is a needle. I’m going to take blood. You saw me do that to Tess as well.”

  “Yes.” He watched with interest as she pricked his skin with the tiny blade. The viscous scarlet of his blood filled a tiny chamber of glass, a red as rich as the red of his silk shirt. She removed the needle and gave him a piece of fluff to press onto his skin, though the point of entry scarcely qualified as an injury. At the long table, she busied herself with some of the machines, but he could not see what she was doing because her back covered his view of the table. Instead, he regarded his spirit, turning in the air before him.

  “Oh, you can sit up now,” she said over her shoulder.

  He sat up. His spirit still turned. He rose and walked closer to examine it. It seemed to emanate from the very base of the couch, like a rainbow emerging from the ground and arching up into the heavens to scatter its color across the rain-drenched sky. But it was him, clearly so. He reached to touch it, but just as his fingers met its surface, it sparked and vanished into a thousand flickering lights and then to nothing. He jumped back. The image appeared again: there, his narrow chin and thin face, in gold and white and blue; the curve of his throat a glittering, soft green; the relaxed slope of his shoulders in green and blue, with a hint of violet; his chest and hips, his legs, his feet fading into a cloud of deepest violet at their base, the exact curve of his kneecap, the knob in his left little finger, gold with a tracery of red, where it had never healed straight when it was broken many many years ago. He was crowned by a bright silver formless light, just as Bakhtiian’s spirit had been, just as Tess’s had been.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked the doctor from her table. He felt her move, without seeing her. He caught a movement in his peripheral vision; an instant later he shot his left hand up and caught a little ball she’d thrown at him. “Good reflexes,” she said. “Squeeze that as hard as you can.” He complied, then transferred it to his other hand and squeezed it again. The ball was made of some strange substance he did not recognize: not wood or metal, not ceramic or cloth. Little bumps nobbled its surface, and when he squeezed hard enough it gave slightly beneath his hand, and he felt warmth from inside of it.

  The doctor came over to him and squinted at his eyes. She held up a black stick with a light nestled in its tip. “Look at me. Straight at me. Don’t mind this. They say the actor Gwyn Jones is a martial artist.”

  “What is that? Martial artist?”

  “Someone who has studied the art of fighting, not just the craft of it. I’d like to see the two of you spar together. He won a number of tournaments, of—well—contests, say when you race a horse. Surely you fence together and see who comes out the winner?”

  “I always did,” Aleksi admitted humbly. “Come out the winner. That’s what Vyacheslav often said to me, that most men are blind to the saber, that they only use it to cut with and kill with, but that the saber is like a Singer’s lute, that it could itself sing. He said I was a Singer, that I had made a long journey, but that my instrument wasn’t tales and song but the saber itself, just as the saber had been his instrument in his time. So he taught me.”

  “You are a Singer? A shaman?”

  He shrugged. “I never went to the gods’ lands, if that is what you mean. But I learned from him as much as there was time to learn, about the—art—of saber.” He grinned. “I like this word, martial artist. You khaja are always surprising me. I thought you weren’t civilized.”

  Dr. Hierakis laughed and withdrew her light from his face. “That’s all. What news from the council?”

  Aleksi also liked her brusqueness and the way she came straight to the point and never hemmed and hawed about the least detail. “The main army, with Bakhtiian, rides to Karkand. Sakhalin rides south. Grekov and Vershinin ride west past Karkand. Nadine will ride north to escort the prince back here.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor.

  “Will he know this before she arrives?” Aleksi asked.

  Dr. Hierakis laughed. “Yes. We have a way of talking that can send a message faster than the fastest horseman can ride. You see the image of Morava, there?” He nodded. “That isn’t an image modeled out of the memory, but a real image, sent to us by Marco Burckhardt from half a kilometer away from the palace. He sent it this morning.”

  Aleksi regarded the image of Morava. The view looked down the long avenue that led to the front of the shrine. He could just make out the sweep of white stairs framed by thin black pillars that led to the huge doors embroidered with tracery and fine patterns. “But, Doctor,” he said, “if you can send messages so quickly, why not show Bakhtiian how to do this thing as well? If his generals could speak together like this, then imagine what they could do.”

  “Oh, I can imagine it,” said the doctor. “But we’ve done too much already. Casualties are high, of course, but deaths are low. We’re saving and healing a much higher percentage of the wounded than would have survived without my training. And yet, and yet, I can’t just stand by and watch them die, knowing that with a little knowledge they could be saved. What of the khaja living in the army’s path? But I can’t reach them. I can’t reach everyone. Not yet.”

  The doctor often talked to herself like this, to him and yet to herself and to some unnamed audience which Aleksi supposed was both her conscience and the absent prince, with whom she shared more than simple friendship and loyalty. H
e knew some vital issue troubled her, but he had not yet puzzled out what it was. And if she and the prince did not want to share this swift messenger they hoarded between them, after all, why should they? They owed Bakhtiian nothing. Aleksi did not think they were Bakhtiian’s enemies, but neither did he think they were Bakhtiian’s friends. Allies, perhaps, because of Tess, but it was an uneasy truce. They were only here because Tess was here. Even Bakhtiian knew that. They needed no alliance with Bakhtiian, and certainly with such machines, they had nothing to fear from him, however powerful and vast his army might be. Jeds was a long ride away, according to both Tess and Nadine, according to Bakhtiian himself.

  But if Tess left, if the prince and Dr. Hierakis convinced her to go, Aleksi had long since promised himself that by one means or another, whatever he must do, he would go with her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT FIRST THE COLOR gray, like a fog, sank in around them. Fog lifted to become mist, and through the mist towers appeared, rising up toward the sky in such profusion that they might have been the uplifted lances of the jaran army, one hundred thousand strong.

  But to call them towers did them no justice. Not one tower looked like any other tower. Each possessed such striking individuality that even from this distance—from this relative distance, seated on the floor and staring into the three-dimensional field of Hon Echido’s ke’s representation of the palace of the Chapalii Emperor—David could distinguish some characteristic in each tower his eye had time to light on that set it apart from the others. Why had they chosen to do that? So many and yet each unique? David thought of the Chapalii as so bound by the hierarchy of their social order that he would never have guessed that they valued diversity.

  “The Yaochalii reigns forever.”

  Was that Echido talking, or a voice encoded through the image building in front of them? David couldn’t tell. The image itself wore such depth and reality that he could easily imagine himself actually transported there, staring at the city from high above. He recalled the emperor’s visit to Charles and Tai Naroshi—or their visit to the emperor. Maybe he was there. The thought made him giddy.

  “For time uncounted, years beyond years, has the Yaochalii reigned, and so will he reign, for time uncounted, years beyond years.”

  It was hard for David to judge distance because of the scale and the slowly turning field of the image, but in any case, the city was huge. Of course, it wasn’t actually a city; it was the palace of the emperor, a megalopolis by human standards and yet devoted entirely to the emperor and his business. Had it once been a real city? As the Chapalii Empire had expanded out into space, had it been abandoned bit by bit, or had the emperor decreed it so and forced the evacuation? The Chapalii home world of Chapal was the emperor’s world alone now. Or at least, so the Protocol Office said. No other cities existed there, although this one was itself the size of a small continent.

  “The Yaochalii holds his gentle hand over vast territories. The docks of Paladia Minor flow with ships. Merchants spin the heavens with their web of commerce. Lords preside with wisdom over their houses. Dukes administer justly. The princes are at peace. Each lord, each duke, each prince, sends a woman of his house to build a tower for the Yaochalii’s pleasure, so that the emperor may rise in the evening and see a thousand thousand lights set upon his earth to rival the thousand thousand lights that are the markers of his domain in the heavens.”

  Beside him, Maggie covered her mouth with a hand and muffled a cough. Night descended on the field. The towers burned in brilliance, each one a star, reflecting the stars above. Great tiers of darkness blanketed the interstices between the blazing towers, and as the field lightened into day again, David recognized these as concourses and avenues and colonnades and gardens and labyrinths and ornamental terraces and every kind of engineering marvel, laid out in breathtaking extravagance and detail, more than he had modeled or imitated or—perhaps, just perhaps—dreamt of in his extensive studies.

  “In these days comes the Tai-en Mushai to Sorrowing Tower. Thus does he choose to walk on his own feet into Reckless Tower, and so by his actions does he bring himself to Shame Tower. Thus does his name pass through the rite of extinction, and his house is obliterated forever.”

  “Under which emperor did this happen?” asked Charles out of the darkness on the other side of the brightening field.

  “All things happen under the eye of the Yaochalii, Tai-en,” replied Echido.

  “What was the emperor’s name? Was he related to the Yaochalii-en who now graces the throne? What princely house did the emperor of that time come from?”

  “I beg your pardon, Tai-en. Once a prince becomes emperor, then he becomes the Yaochalii-en. He has no other name. What he was before is lost to him. All he had before is lost to him. He brings nothing with him, nor does he leave the throne with anything but his shroud. Thus is each emperor the same, and thus is the line of the Yaochalii unbroken.”

  “What about his family?” Maggie asked.

  “The Yaochalii has no family. He is the Empire. All of us are his house.”

  “But—what if he was married? Had children? Siblings? A favored steward?”

  “All that he had before,” repeated Echido, as if it were catechism, “is lost to him.”

  Marco whistled under his breath. “That’ll teach you to have ambition,” he said softly. “There’s not much advantage in it, is there, if you have to give up everything to become emperor?”

  Maggie gestured with her right hand toward the glorious city shifting before them in the field, although the movement was lost to everyone but David and Marco, who sat on either side of her. “Everything but that.”

  “Still,” said David, much struck by this revelation, “I’ll bet it’s a lonely life, Mags.”

  “Very human of you, David, but how do you know they have the same motivations and emotions that we do?”

  “Sorry. My stock in trade is anthropomorphism. What about the names for the towers? Sorrowing. Reckless.”

  “It’s a translation. Who knows what they really mean in Chapalii?”

  “Spoilsport. Though it would be nice to have Tess—” But he broke off.

  The scene changed. The city melted away into spinning fractals which then formed themselves into the heartachingly beautiful blue and white and muddied continental brown of a carbon-oxygen-nitrogen world: Rhui, rotating in the heavens.

  “Though no male may know,” continued Echido, “still, some say that it is here on this planet that the Tai-en Mushai meets his fate, dying before his years unroll into their fullness, holding to himself his secrets, and his shame, and his reckless heart.”

  “So we can’t get a date?” asked Charles.

  “A date. I beg pardon, Tai-en, but this term date is one whose meaning I am unfamiliar with. Perhaps you mean the sweet, oblong, edible fruit of the date palm, a tree named phoenix dactylifera in your scientific lexicon. It grows in tropical regions and bears clusters of dates as its fruit.”

  “Never mind. Ke, perhaps you understand my question.”

  The female had a peculiarly reedy voice with distinct tones whose cadences David found difficult to follow. “Tai-en, this low one does perceive the meaning you grasp for. This low one has assisted the craftsman Rajiv Caer Linn in reconstructing the data banks of the Tai-en Mushai’s network, but as you are both males, this low one can proceed no further in the particular matter you explore now.” On a whistling breath, her voice ceased. After a moment, it started up again. “If one of the females of your party wishes to discuss this particular matter with this low one, then this low one will broach with her subjects fit only for a female’s constitution.”

  “What in hell is she talking about?” murmured Marco.

  “Maggie?” said Charles.

  “Yes.” Maggie jumped to her feet and slipped away into the darkness. A breath of air brushed by David’s face. Evidently Maggie and the ke had gone beyond the long chamber they all sat in now, back between the pillars into the white ro
om that concealed the entrance to the control room. Above and around them hovered the field, projected out above and surrounding the two rectangular countertops that none of the humans had understood until now. They were field generators for the huge imaging three-dimensional field at which humans and Chapalii stared, watching Rhui turn and implode and reemerge as the palace of Morava, the Tai-en Mushai’s secret retreat.

  As if they walked themselves, they came up the avenue bounded on the sides by precise gardens of translucent statues and flowering vines and above by four jeweled arches. The great doors glided open—David ached to know the mechanism by which their massive bulk swung so smoothly outward—to reveal the grand concourse. Along the upper half of the walls, a procession of creatures tangled with plants drew the eye along with it to the distant end. These reliefs seemed grown of some living crystal; they grew and changed as David walked down the concourse. A lion grew wings and a snake’s tail and transmuted into a gryphon. A sinuous, tentacular alien Spai-lin curled in on itself and became a multifaceted snail wreathed in vervain. Through grand corridors and intimate salons they passed. All was alive as it must surely have been during the Mushai’s residence. The dome lit when they entered, drowning them in the depths of a nameless sea populated with grotesque amphibious creatures. In a vast hall, a stellar map spread out along the floor in a mosaic of intricate tiling, and the map rose as light into the empty air. It was as if he walked as a god into the vast depths of space, as into an ocean as black, splintered with light and chasms of shadow, as the other had been sea-green. He strode through the spinning universe, and the music of the spheres hummed like a chorus of drowned bells in his ears.

  With great relief, David came to a room where he could sit down and rest. Except, of course, he already sat cross-legged on the floor, next to Marco. Dizziness swept him as the movement and the stillness collided and merged. He let out all his breath and felt Marco slump at the same time, two sighs in concert. Glorious.