The je’jiri male waited a count of ten, and then sniffed, scenting for a smell now eradicated from the universe. He set his hand, palm down, in a sticky puddle of blood, and brought it up to his face, marking each cheek and his forehead, and last his lips, with red.
Then he rose, and retreated, clothes stained with brilliant, wet scarlet. And the others came forward, one by one, and repeated the gesture: hand, palm down, in blood, and the precise, ritualistic marking of their faces.
The female went last. As she rose, all of them turned and looked at Kyosti until because of their scrutiny the attention of all the people left on the bridge was on him.
The female spoke directly to him; alien words, but her meaning was clear: It is also your obligation to mark the kill.
Kyosti shuddered, a tremor that passed through his entire body. He shook away Lily’s hand on his shoulder and stood up.
Took one step back.
“Abai’is-ssa,” hissed the female. As if he was being pulled forward by a force as powerful as gravity, he walked to her. Each step seemed agonizing, torn out of his will to stay where he was.
Lily began to move after him, but Adam grabbed her by both arms and held her back. “Don’t be a fool,” he muttered. “You can’t stop this.”
Stiffly, Kyosti crouched by the mutilated corpse. His hand shook violently as he lowered it—stopped it a finger’s breadth above the pooling blood, and then shut his eyes and pressed it down. And marked his face: both cheeks, his forehead, and last, his lips.
The female je’jiri turned her feral gaze on La Belle, expectant.
La Belle had not moved during the entire time. Her gaze rested dispassionately on the corpse. “I and my crew witness this kill, fulfilled under the specifications of the Gabriel Treaty, and we now declare that this course is finished.”
Like ghosts, the je’jiri vanished into the elevator without a word or gesture of acknowledgment. The door sighed closed behind them.
There was silence on the bridge.
Kyosti still knelt by the corpse.
“Adam,” said La Belle curtly, and she looked pointedly at the corpse.
He let go of Lily’s arms and, signaling to two other crew members, walked over to the corpse. He had clearly come prepared: they bundled the body into white sheeting, sopped up the worst of the excess blood—although a few deep stains and the acrid scent lingered—and carried the dead man off the bridge, vanishing like the je’jiri into an elevator.
Lily watched it all with an intensity brought by the realization that once this act ended, she would have to react to what she had just seen. Kyosti still knelt on the steps, his face streaked with drying blood.
La Belle stood, her feet incongruously bare, on the top step. As Lily raised her eyes to look at her, she met La Belle’s gaze. It was not unmixed with pity. Perhaps she saw the storm rising in Lily’s expression, or perhaps she just knew enough of human nature, but she moved her hand slightly, not more than a twist of the wrist, and the rest of the personnel cleared off, leaving the three of them alone in the hushed cavern of the bridge.
“You had something you wished to tell me,” said La Belle.
“I can’t believe it.” Lily’s voice emerged hoarse and ragged. “You let them murder him. You let them just mutilate him as if he was no better than”—she shook her head roughly—“No one, no thing, deserves that. I thought the League was supposed to be civilized.”
La Belle stepped carefully around Kyosti’s motionless form and descended the steps to come stand a body’s length from Lily. Their eyes were on a level. “Do you tell the cat not to kill the mouse? The owl not to hunt at night? The eagle lives by killing rodents. The wolf drives down and butchers caribou. But unlike humankind, they only kill what they need. Je’jiri are not indiscriminate killers, as we humans are. They are driven, they are fueled, by instincts that we have long striven to transcend or deny, but I, for one, respect the absolute predictability of their honor.”
“Honor!” Lily cried. “You call that honor?”
La Belle smiled, but it was the smile of grim truth, not of sympathy. “How many men and women have you killed, Taliesin’s daughter? And for what cause, and whose honor? Can you say it was for as compelling a reason as the iron law of je’jiri mating: one mate, for life, no exceptions. It is in their bones—in the very fabric of their being.”
She paused, but Lily stared, silent, at Kyosti’s frozen pose: kneeling on the steps as if he were praying to a god who had long since forgotten him.
“A linguist once told me,” La Belle continued, softer, now, “that there is no word for ‘love,’ or ‘adultery,’ in the je’jiri language. Love is a human construct for fleeting ties. Their bonds are burned into every cell of their bodies. And adultery does not exist, except among the aberrant. If you sleep with a je’jiri, their mate must kill you. It is as simple as that.”
“It’s horrible,” she breathed, still seeing the clean ripping of the man’s throat.
“We live in a great, vast universe,” said La Belle calmly. “We must accommodate those to whom our ways seem equally alien, and unspeakable.”
“Kyosti,” Lily murmured, lifting her anguished gaze to the clear sanity of La Belle’s pale face. “Hoy. He’s one of them. I thought he was human. No wonder he’s so—” But she could not bring herself to identify what it was in words whose spoken permanence might mark him forever.
“No, Lily,” said La Belle with abrupt, but real, compassion. “He is indeed half je’jiri, on his mother’s side. But that is not the root of his particular crisis. Je’jiri are too prosaic to harbor insanity in their minds. It is his human half that curses him.”
“What do you mean? That murder—it was so savage—and that awful ritual of marking themselves with the blood. That was the horrible part.”
“Oh, and I agree, even though I may understand why it is so. But I can look at it from a distance. I can intellectualize it, as we humans do so well. I cannot be forced by birth and instinct to partake in a deed that the rest of me finds cruelly and bitterly repugnant.”
Lily shut her eyes. The searing pain that shuttered Kyosti’s face as he knelt unmoving was too terrible for her to look on. And she wondered what kind of death his father had died.
“There was a message, I think,” said La Belle, coolly changing the subject.
Lily’s throat was choked with anguish, but she managed to force out the words anyway. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to say this.” She opened her eyes, because it would be cowardly to tell in any other way but face-to-face, seeing her. “Heredes is dead.”
“Yes,” La Belle agreed, with no change in her expression. “Joshua Li Heredes is dead. I came to Reft space to discover what had happened to him. We have just been to Arcadia, where I found out.” She paused. Still, her expression did not change.
Because Lily did not know if La Belle would welcome sympathy, she found refuge in an awkward question. “But how did you end up here, at Blessings?”
“Curiosity impelled me to follow the sudden flurry of military activity, but—” She dismissed the Reft’s political turmoil with a wave of her hand. “I see nothing here to interest me. The Sans Merci will return to League space. Now. I think you will need a few moments alone with Hawk before you return to your ship. Farewell, Lily Ransome.” She lifted a white hand to touch Lily’s forehead, a benediction, and turned and walked, soundless across the expanse of floor, to an elevator.
“But”—Lily stammered, confused by her abrupt dismissal, and by her complete lack of reaction to the news of Heredes’s death—“but you can’t just leave the bridge deserted.”
La Belle smiled. “Like Mephistopheles, the bridge is where I am.” Without explaining the comment, she disappeared into the elevator.
Lily stood, feeling dwarfed and alone in the vast silence of this strange, almost alien, bridge.
Kyosti’s voice, soft, brushed against the quiet that hung so heavily over him. “‘Hell hath no limits nor is circumsc
ribed In one self place, but where we are is Hell, And where Hell is there must we ever be.’”
She took fifteen deliberate steps forward and halted three steps from him. Where the blood had streaked his face most thinly, it was already dried and beginning to flake off.
“I don’t know what to say to you.” She extended a hand toward him, tentative, and withdrew it without touching him.
He did not look up at her, but his voice was low, compelled by an inner pain she could not even imagine. “Say you forgive me for murdering the man on Unruli Station.”
She felt dizzy, having forgotten to breathe, and she knelt beside him. “I forgive you.” She put her hands on his shoulders.
The urgency and force with which he embraced her caught her by surprise, and the strength of his grip scared her—until she realized that he was holding on to her as if she were his anchor. Not even so much for his life, but for his sanity.
24 Arcadia Falls
KYOSTI DID NOT SPEAK at all on the return trip back to the Boukephalos. He sat next to Lily, eyes shut. The slight rise and fall of his chest, and the barest, shifting presence of his fingers brushing her leg, were the only signs that he was alive.
When Doctor Prachenduriyang met them at the shuttle bay with Jehane’s orders that they were to be returned immediately to quarantine, Hawk acquiesced without protest. Duri had taken careful precautions from the shuttle bay all the way to Medical, and installed them swiftly and efficiently in a two-room suite somewhat larger than Lily’s original quarantine room.
As soon as they were sealed into the suite, Kyosti lay down on a couch in the second room and turned his back to them, effectively leaving Lily alone with Duri.
“He isn’t feeling well,” Lily said, feeling obliged to explain. “I don’t understand, after my quarantine was broken so thoroughly by Kuan-yin, that you’re bothering with this.”
Duri shrugged, watching Hawk’s back with the measuring eye of a healer. “Jehane’s orders. What are his symptoms? Lethargy? He seems pale. I’d better take his readings. I don’t mean to alarm you, but I’ve finally gotten in the medical records from the Forlorn Hope, and he is the only member of the entire crew who has not yet come down with this mysterious plague. And evidently we have a new rash of cases on Zima Station and Savedra, the two ships which accompanied the Forlorn Hope the past month.”
“Maybe he’s immune,” suggested Lily.
Duri shook her head. “Unlikely. So far we have one hundred percent contagion. Why should comrade Hawk be immune?”
“Why, indeed?” asked a new voice.
Lily whirled to see Jehane, sheathed for quarantine, enter from the other room—she had not heard him coming in through the quarantine lock. He waited, examining her, expectant.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said smoothly. “I’m not a doctor.”
“No, you aren’t,” he agreed. His gaze moved to investigate Kyosti’s still form. “Doctor Prachenduriyang, do you think comrade Hawk might be coming down with this illness?”
“I can’t say yet.” She took a step toward the couch, hesitated. “Of course I’ll have to take a blood sample. I haven’t had time to study in depth the analysis of the illness’s course on the Forlorn Hope, although”—she pressed her lips together with a brief tightening of disapproval—“I must say there are a few irregularities in the report.”
“Which was, I believe, compiled by comrade Hawk himself,” interposed Jehane neatly.
“Yes. For instance, he took no blood samples at the onset of the disease, only midway through and during recovery.”
“Which suggests?”
Duri glanced at Lily, then at the unreadable line of Kyosti’s back. “I couldn’t say. Poor procedural methods could account for it. Although all the other medical records from the Forlorn Hope show a meticulous thoroughness in keeping records. Lack of time due to the sudden and virulent outbreak of cases. But again, battle casualties show no such lack of precise record keeping. He might have thought he knew what he was dealing with, and then realized midway through that he did not.”
“In which case,” Jehane said softly, “would he not have changed his procedures with the later cases?”
“Well, yes. …” Duri cast another glance, this one worried, at Lily.
“Perhaps you ought to ask comrade Hawk directly,” Jehane suggested in a tone of utmost reason.
“He’s asleep,” Lily said sharply.
Jehane smiled, making her feel suddenly as if she had given something away. “I meant, of course, when he is feeling better. Meanwhile, Doctor,” and he transferred his attention with effortless smoothness back to Duri. “I wonder if you have dealt with all the inquiries on wounded that have come in from our fleet? Has a complete compilation of casualties been made?”
“No, comrade, but it should be finished within six hours. I have two technicians at work on it now. There were twenty-eight casualties that I did not have sufficient expertise to advise treatment for beyond what the medical teams on board their respective ships had already done, so I’m afraid that they may not recover—”
Kyosti sat up. So smoothly and abruptly that both Lily and Duri started. Only Jehane did not register any obvious change of expression.
“Let me see those files,” Kyosti said harshly. The extreme pallor of his skin gave him a look of desperation, or desperate illness. “My specialty is triage, and specifically combat injuries.”
Duri was too startled to do more than look helplessly at Jehane for guidance.
For an instant Kyosti looked right at Lily. He was so pale that she had a sudden blinding flash of déja vu, seeing, not him, but one of his ghostlike cousins, hand immersed in blood. A tiny smudge of red decorated his cheek: a bit of blood he had missed when he had scrubbed his face with the white towel that Adam had offered him as they had boarded the shuttle for the trip back. She looked away, feeling sick with the memory.
“By all means,” Jehane said. The plastine quarantine sheath muted his expression and his tone. “Doctor Prachenduriyang, if you can set up an interface in here?”
Duri frowned. “I don’t like it. You look and act ill to me, comrade.”
“I won’t leave this couch,” he promised. Even just sitting, he had an edge of fine-honed exhaustion about him, as if the couch lent him a force of will that alone, at this instant, sustained him. “It will give me something to do.”
“Well.” Duri hesitated, then walked forward decisively. “Let me examine you, and take some blood, and then I’ll set you up.”
Under any other circumstance, Lily would have been amazed at the meekness with which Kyosti submitted to Duri’s orders, or even to her plastine-sheathed—and thus scentless—touch. But now she was amazed he had the strength of mind to insist on what little he did demand: a task to immerse himself in, one that would keep him free of having to think.
“Very good, Doctor,” said Jehane. “Now, comrade Heredes, I would like to speak with you in the other room. If I might.”
She allowed herself a brief, exhausted smile as she reflected, following him into the other room, that his habit of asking permission for things he well knew he could demand tended to disarm his followers into believing that they controlled their own actions far more than they actually did.
She seated herself on the other bed, allowed herself a sigh, wishing she could sleep. Jehane did not sit, but turned to face her, standing light and relaxed, his golden hair and brown tunic—given an unearthly sheen by the plastine sheath—set off in rich contrast against the stark white expanse of wall behind him.
“We have routed Central’s fleet,” he began in as matter-of-fact a voice as if he were announcing dinner, “and I have given orders that we advance on Arcadia. I expect to meet very little resistance there, except in the walled precincts of Central itself.”
“Because of Pero,” she said. “Robbie will have Arcadia entirely committed to you. He was halfway to that goal when I left there.”
“Indeed,” agreed Jehane. ??
?Pero has been a tireless worker for our cause.”
For some reason the comment irritated her. “He’s the most honest man I know,” she said abruptly. “I hope you appreciate that.”
“Rest assured,” he murmured, without a smile. “Meanwhile, comrade, both of the unidentified vessels which caused us—some alarm, have left Blessings system.” He paused.
She simply watched him, without speaking.
“You must understand that I need to know what transpired on that ship.” Again he paused.
This time she shut her eyes, not wanting to remember, but the vision bloomed unbidden in her mind’s eye. She opened her eyes quickly to the soothing monotony of white walls and Jehane’s impassive and implacable face.
“And why both ships left so abruptly.”
Because they aren’t interested in you—or us—at all, she thought, but she refrained from saying it aloud. “Because,” she said instead, “they had finished what they came here for. Business”—she had to suppress the image of Kyosti dipping his hand in blood—“that was purely between themselves.”
His lack of reaction was so pronounced as to be a strong reaction in itself—a man like Jehane could not like being dismissed so easily. “The ship you were on, where did she hail from?” he asked, cool now.
“You know where she’s from,” said Lily flatly. “She’s not from the Reft. She’s from the League. As was the other ship.”
“As are you. As is your robot, and comrade Hawk.”
“Where is my robot?” she demanded.
“In time.” He pitched his voice to be soothing, but continued his questions nevertheless. “You were saying, comrade?”
“I’m not from the League. I grew up—” She hesitated. Could she be sure that Ransome House would never be blamed for her actions, in some form or other? And changed what she was going to say. “I grew up in Reft space just as you did, comrade Jehane. I just happen, like you, to have seen stranger things than most people have, and been influenced by them.”
He smiled, a surprisingly sweet expression. “Well spoken, comrade Heredes. Nevertheless. Say it is true, about your birth and upbringing. That still leaves us with—the League. How does one get in touch with them?”