She might never have to worry about the Sevtar problem again.
Sand stung Kelric's face as his guards led him through the sandstorm. They stopped at an isolated storehouse far from the compounds. When he saw Zecha waiting at the building's metal door, his unease grew. She heaved open the heavy portal, revealing both it and the storehouse walls to be over six handspans thick.
His guards prodded him forward with their swords, honed points nicking his skin as they pierced the cloth of his uniform. Inside the storehouse, he found a single large room with a pallet and a blanket. A row of barred windows stretched the length of one wall, set so high he doubted he could see out of them even if he jumped. Puzzled, he turned to Zecha.
"You're being separated from the other prisoners," she said.
"For how long?" he asked.
Her eyes glinted. "Forever."
Kelric lunged for the door. but the guards were already heaving it into place. As the portal slammed shut, he smashed into the metal. "No!" He pounded his fists on the door. "NO!"
No sound came from beyond the storehouse.
14
Rock's Chute
In the beginning Kelric raged smashing his bulk against the walls that confined him Each time his fury spent itself, he collapsed to the floor, his shoulders heaving as he gasped In air.
His jailors had convened one of the storeroom closets into a bathroom. The other closet held a blanket, a jug of liquid soap, and cleaning rags. Each morning his food appeared in a narrow tunnel cut through the bottom of the storehouse door. After he finished his meals, he shoved the empty bowls and plates back into the tunnel. When he heard someone removing them, he tried to grab their arm, but he couldn't reach far enough into the tunnel.
He refused to eat, hoping a hunger strike would force them .to release him. After several days, when his jailers showed no reaction to his untouched meals in the tunnel, he wondered if Zecha wanted him to die by self-induced starvation.
He quit the strike that night.
Eventually he developed a routine. In the morning he exercised, and for the rest of the day he played Quis solitaire. When the light faded into night he escaped into sleep and when dawn trickled In the windows he awoke, every morning of every day, until the days became seasons.
Autumn cooled into winter with rains that trickled in the windows saturating his world with dampness. Once he caught a fever, becoming so sick he could barely move. In his lucid moments he wondered how anyone would know if he died. After he recovered, he made a cloak out of his blanket, using a shard of rock to cut armholes and fashion a hood. He pushed the remaining scraps of cloth into the tunnel, and the next morning a new blanket came with his food.
Winter warmed into spring. His hair grew into a shaggy mane and his beard curled in a red-gold mat on his chest. In summer, he lay sweltering in the heat. Sand blew in on the hot wind and settled over his body.
At night, dreams from his home world of Lyshriol haunted his sleep. He saw its plains of silvery grass and the ancient dappled forests where he had played as a child. In other dreams he held a lover, often Deha, sometimes his first wife, more rarely other women he had known. It felt so real that when he awoke he wanted to beat the walls in protest of the empty spaces that greeted him.
He had always been an introvert, recharged by time alone, but this was beyond all reason. When he became depressed, Bolt released chemicals in his brain, powering up an endorphin high. It helped his mood but didn't counteract the loneliness, and it strained the already damaged computer, until finally, after several seasons, he lost contact with it Bolt's silence saddened him, he no longer had even the voice in his head to converse with.
So he talked to the sand, the floor, the food. He named the insects that hummed in the windows. When he found himself giving a funeral to a dead airbug, he knew he had to find a distraction from the loneliness.
Quis became his existence. He covered the floor with structures and made extra dice with cement he chipped off the walls. When the rules grew constraining he added new ones. The Quis he played was his and his alone, with no influence, no history, no cultural memories, no input from any other player. The simple patterns he had learned at Dahl seemed laughable now. He wove his perceptions of Haka, of Coba, of the lmperialate, of the universe, into his Quis. The patterns evolved, illuminating the past, predicting the future, revealing hidden mazes in the subconscious corridors of his mind.
His dice took on personalities. Ched was the silver cube.
Every pattern he built of the boy's life in Compound Four evolved into death. He tried to find patterns of hope, but the dice refused to lie. He often found somber dice of mourning around the silver cube.
The obsidian decahedron was Zecha. Sometimes he trapped it in torturously convoluted structures, destroying its rank. Other times he built pattern after pattern, trying to understand why she loathed him. She remained an enigma. For some reason, even thinking about her here, alone in his cell, drove him to barrier his mind. She crept into his brain, negating him like an anti-empath.
Gradually his dice took on more complex aspects. Equations evolved in his patterns: complex variables, differential equations, topology, catastrophe theory, Selenian mystimatics. He created new theorems, becoming so absorbed in his lifelong passion for abstract math that at times he even forgot the weight of his solitude. In his sleep he dreamt Quis equations.
Then the dice turned introspective, forcing him to relive the scorn of his half brother, Kurj, the Imperator: Mathematics, Kelric? Why frustrate yourself in a pursuit beyond your ability? The Quis showed what he had never understood: his brother's contempt masked fear.
It would have made no difference what dreams Kelric pursued, his brother would have crushed his confidence, tearing Kelric down to protect against what he, the Imperator, perceived as a threat to his power. Kurj saw only himself when he looked at Kelric, and having gained his title through violence and death he would never trust his own heir.
That was when Kelric smashed his hand through the dice, throwing them across his cell.
After that he sought fonder memories. He wove patterns of his father, a farmer bemused by the glittering technology of his wife's universe, a loving man who doted on his family, never dreaming he would someday become an interstellar potentate. The patterns of his mother were warmth and a shimmering gold beauty so great a galaxy bowed before it. She was the sun of home, the warmth of the hearth—and a political pundit who walked the halls of Imperial power.
Through his dice Kelric grieved for the loss of his home, his family, his hopes, his future. He lived among the structures, balanced on the edge of madness, unable to remember how it felt to touch another human being, until he wondered if his memories were no more than the dreams of an insane man.
15
Desert Tower
The Topazwalk spanned the top level of Haka Estate like a tawny corridor of light. Made from tinted glass, it looked out over a sea of sand. Two figures walked together along the corridor, bathed in its ruddy light.
"I'm sorry to be blunt," Zecha said. "But bring Sevtar onto the Estate and you will regret it."
"Your reports make his progress sound excellent," Rashiva said.
Zecha knew she had trouble. It had taken time and work to win Rashiva's confidence, and part of that success came from her encouraging reports about Sevtar. In truth, she had paid little attention to what he was doing this past year. Who could have known the Manager meant to take him into her Calanya?
It was insane.
"It's true, he's made progress in a controlled environment," Zecha said. He had, after all, done nothing but play Quis. If he hadn't learned anything by now, he never would. "But I have grave doubts about his mental stability. There's no telling what might make him snap."
Rashiva nodded. "He will be kept separate from the others until we know if he's stable."
So. The Manager had her doubts. Zecha took stock of the situation, If he told tales of solitary, would anyone believe him?
That Rashiva paid much closer attention to the prison than her predecessor would help here. The Manager knew about the delusions suffered by the prisoners in Four, and whatever marginal sanity Sevtar had possessed prior to his solitude was certainly gone now. Given his weak mind, he was probably raving mad. She could have her prison doctors certify him as insane, a madness that subsided only under their expert care.
Sevtar would soon be back in prison.
The grate of metal scraping on stone woke Kelric. He raised his head and peered into the predawn darkness.
The door of his cell moved. .
The portal slowly swung open, revealing an octet of guards. They entered the cell like wraiths, shadowy and gray in the dim light. Kelric rose to his feet, unable to speak, surrounded by the Quis structures he had built. Seven of the guards took up a shadowed formation around him and the eighth gathered up his dice.
Stop, he thought. They were destroying patterns he had worked on for days. But he stood frozen, afraid if he moved the dream figures would vanish.
They gave him his pouch, the small sack bulging with dice. Then the captain raised her arm toward the door in a ghostly invitation. He looked from her to the other guards, still unable to absorb their presence.
Then he walked out of the storehouse.
They made their way through a daze of swirling, whirling sand, until they reached one of the lesser peaks with a door embedded in it. They entered the crag and followed a maze of tunnels that sloped down under the desert. Kelric's sense of direction soon failed him in the sameness of the passages and their turns. He didn't bother asking Bolt where they were; the node had long ago stopped responding.
At the junction of two corridors, his guards took him into an office. The captain removed some clothes from the desk: suede pants with sewn seams, a laced white shirt with Quis designs embroidered on its cuffs, knee boots the color of sand, and a robe made from lightweight russet cloth. She gave him a woven scarf as long as he was tall, made from white yarn with black tassels all around its borders. Quis designs adorned it, sewn in metallic yarns that glittered even in the room's cold light.
After the guards withdrew, locking the door behind them, Kelric stood holding the clothes. He couldn't comprehend them. For a year he had worn the same gray uniform, washed and rewashed by himself until it drooped with holes.
Eventually he changed into the new clothes. The robe covered him from neck to foot, with loose sleeves that came to his wrists. He had no idea what to do with the scarf, so he draped it around his neck and let it hang down his chest. Then he waited.
A knock sounded on the door, followed by a-pause. The captain came inside and walked over to him, then bowed from the waist. She lifted the scarf and wound it loosely around his head, covering his neck and face, except for his eyes. She finished by raising the hood of his robe, hiding all of him but his eyes.
The octet took him back into the tunnels and escorted him deeper into the maze. At a rotunda that looked down onto a lower floor, they rendezvoused with another octet, one whose bearing and manner he recognized.
Calanya guards.
Finally Kelric understood. Hallucination. Loneliness had driven him to create these bizarre scenes.
The Calanya escort led him farther into the maze, climbing upward now, until he was sure they were above the desert again. The stone under his feet changed into glazed tiles and the tunnels expanded into halls with arabesques sculpted on the walls. Mosaics graced the corridors in geometric designs, with intricate borders around arches, niches, and column capitals.
He devised Quis rules to describe the patterns.
They came out into a painfully bright corridor where sunshine poured through floor-to-ceiling windows. It nearly blinded him. By squinting, he could make out the desert far below, sweeping to the horizon.
The doorway at the end of the hall looked like the keyhole for a giant skeleton key, with a stained-glass window in the upper circular portion. It had Quis designs carved around its edges and the Haka symbol of a rising sun at its apex.
Beyond the door was a suite. Spice rooms. Colors. Kelric could barely absorb it; his last year had been spent in shades of gray. These walls blended from cinnamon near the floor into gold and then cream at the top. Plants with saffron blossoms stood in vases and spheres of glass painted with flowers hung from the ceiling on gold chains.
They showed him through room after room of luxury, until finally it became too much Kelric balked at an arbitrary archway when the captain pulled aside its curtain of reeds.
She smiled at him. "Go on in. It's yours after all."
His? He walked into the room beyond the reeds Larger than the entire Compound Four men's wing, it was only a bath chamber. A pool fed by fountains filled over half of it.
"Manager Haka had purifiers installed in the wells that serve the pool," the captain said "So you won't get sick if you swallow any water."
A fountain in the shape of a flower stood at one edge of the pool. Kelric sat on the ledge of its basin and looked into the water-filled bowl inlaid by green and blue tiles. He traced his hand through the water and it swirled in Quis patterns.
The captain spoke again. "I am Khaaj. My octet will be Outside your suite. If you need anything, open the Outside door and we will summon the Calanya Speaker."
Speaker? He only knew how to speak to himself.
"A barber is waiting to give you a shave and a haircut," Khaaj added. "The metalworker will be here later this afternoon to change your Calanya guards."
Kelric stared into the pool, devising Quis equations to describe its ripples. He didn't turn around as his escort left, he just continued to watch his hallucination of a fountain.
It had finally happened. He had gone insane.
Fresh from his bath, dressed in his new clothes, with his hair cut and his face shaved, Kelric sat on cushions in his suite and stared at his wrist guards. The only symbol he, recognized was the Haka rising sun. Why Haka guards? If his deranged mind needed to create an illusion, why not Dahl guards? His only good memories of Coba came from Dahl.
"Sevtar?" Captain Khaaj pulled aside the reeds in an archway across the room and bowed to him. "You have a visitor, with Speaker's Privilege." She withdrew and a new hallucination appeared.
Kelric stared at it. When the silence became strained, the hallucination spoke. "I know I'm under your level now, metal man. But couldn't you talk to me just this once? Manager Haka gave permission."
For the first time in a year Kelric spoke to another human being. "Ched Viasa is dead."
Ched grinned at him. "I guess nobody let me know." He walked across the room. "I've never seen a place this nice. Manager Haka takes good care of you, heh?"
Kelric tried to absorb his presence. "Compound Four—?"
"Bonni helped me get transferred, just like you said. I went to Compound Two." Ched laughed. "You know what I've been doing? Laundry. I haven't seen that hole in the cliffs for a year."
"Laundry." Kelric's voice shook.
Ched came over to him. "You all right?"
"No." He fought the tears but they came anyway, running down his face. He wasn't sure why he cried, whether it was Ched, the suite, the sound of a human voice, oi his insane hope it was all real.
As Ched sat next to him on the plush rug, Kelric wiped his cheeks. "Not much of a metal man after all, am I?"
Ched smiled. "Well, you know what they say. 'Never iron cold is the touch of gold.' It's a saying more about people than metal."
Kelric smiled."I'm glad to see you."
"They let me come because of your being sworn tonight." Ched hesitated. "Manager Haka talked to the warden—not Zecha, thank Cuaz, but the one over in Two. The warden knew Bonni knew you, so she talked to Bonni and Bonni talked to me and I said, yhee, if it was all right with you, so Bonni told the warden—"
"Ched, wait." Kelric almost laughed. "I lost track about when the warden talked to Bonni."
"I just don't want you to think I'm pushing where I have no right
to push."
. "Why would I think that?"
"Because you're supposed to ask."
"Ask what?"
Ched averted his eyes. "Me to be your Oath Brother."
Oath? As in Calanya Oath? That made no sense. But he valued Ched's offer of friendship more than he knew how to say. "Will you?"
"Sure." Ched relaxed and grinned at him. "I've sure missed you."
"Do they treat you well in Two?"
"It's all right. I get to take lessons from a Scribe, reading, writing, stuff like that. To make me smart, for when I get out." He glanced at Kelric's robe. "Can I look at your Talha? I've never seen one up close before."
Kelric offered him the robe, but Ched took only the scarf on top of it. "It's rolled right sharp, metal man."
"It's what?"
"You don't recognize it, do you?" When Kelric shook his head, Ched said, "Haka men have to wear Talha scarves in public. It's part of the Propriety Laws."
"Propriety Laws?"
"Scowl Laws." Ched brushed his fingers over the scarf. "Don't you remember? Warden Torv wore a Talha up at the quarry."
Kelric dredged up his memory of the Compound Four men's warden. ".I thought it was to protect him from the sandstorms."
"That too. A lot of women wear them for the same reason." Ched gave him back the Talha. "Theirs are just plain, though. The ones like yours are for high-level men." He nodded. "Manager Haka means you great honor."
Kelric regarded the scarf, with its gleaming designs and ornate tassels. If Manager Haka meant him so much honor, why had he just spent a year in hell?
The Sunset Hall glowed beneath the colors of a true sunset. Stained-glass windows surrounded the hall, their lower edges flush with the floor and the tips of their onion-shaped crowns touching the high ceiling. Dark red curtains hung on the walls between windows and glazed bowls sat on tiled pedestals. Tendrils of smoke curled up from the bowls, scenting the air with incense. No furniture intruded; the highborn of Haka sat on the floor, among embroidered cushions with tassels at each corner, the women in jackets and trousers of brocaded silk, and the men in robes and Talha scarves.