Chapter 50
The Infinite Wisdom
“They went right for her.” Dakshi hissed as his fingers probed a bloody slice on his upper arm.
Normally a Son’s flesh expelled anything foreign—gravel, toxins, bullets, fragments—but you could help it along with a squeeze or two, especially if you didn’t want the thick tarry venom from hair-thin ghola darts to eat at skin and muscle until neutralized by the mark. “I hate those bristly little fucks.”
Robert’s eyes were half-closed; his ribs made small creaking sounds as they popped back into place, slivers of bone easing back together.
The Father sucked in a harsh breath, blinked, and the faraway quality of his gaze said how much it hurt.
The pain didn’t come from the bone itself, but its sleeve of richly vascularized tissue; Erik hated having his ribs broken.
It was oddly familiar—a Younger bitching, a Father too pained and wary to let more than a sigh escape, and an Elder caught in the middle, the fulcrum making the whole machine stable.
“The ghola were riding the leng-spiders.” He shook his head, almost shivering as cleansing sorcery crackled down his arms and legs.
“Never seen that before.” At least, not in this world.
“They come from the same place.” Dakshi glanced at the bedroom door.
Liv was sedated; she hadn’t stopped screaming until Sara pushed the plunger of a hypodermic, dispensing a few cc’s of welcome oblivion a lirai’s body wouldn’t burn off as a matter of course.
“But I haven’t seen them do this before either. ”
“It’s as if they can tell she’s unsealed.” Robert finally straightened, and his shredded, blood-stiffened shirt flapped. “I wouldn’t care to do that again.”
That makes you sane. Or at least, close to it.
Erik made a noncommittal noise; the bedroom door opened and Sara stepped out, the edge of her long multicolored broomstick skirt fluttering on a purely personal breeze.
Two Elders from her personal trios flanked their Dreamer, the brunet tall and lean, the blond almost Erik’s size.
“She’s resting,” the lirai said, and every Son in the room snapped to attention. “You’re the Elder she came in with?”
“Yes, ma—my lady.” He corrected himself midway, since this was an older temple and the traditional ways were absolutely clinging to life. Erik was about to add his name and numerator, too, since he didn’t know what the hell else to do when a lirai addressed him directly.
Unless, of course, it was Liv.
“This may be a silly question.” The Dreamer halted, her skirt swirling.
She favored tight leather bodices alive with subtle stampwork laced over linen shirts which could have been made from a Renaissance pattern.
“But was there any indication before you left your previous temple that he has any significant interest in her personally?”
“No, my lady.” Erik forced his shoulders back, settling into parade rest with something close to relief. At least this Dreamer knew how to handle his kind. “We found her by accident during city sweeps—my Younger and I, that is.”
“A frontline temple marked dead but somehow still surviving, speaking to a Control somewhere, receiving directions not to move her. And your Younger called in after the attack, but has not appeared since.” Sara folded her arms and tapped a well-manicured finger thoughtfully against her linen sleeve. “It’s all very odd.”
If that were all, I’d call it good. Not really, since losing Jake was an unpleasant thought, but if a Younger had arrived at another temple with a story to tell, the Sons there—not to mention the lirai—should have been all over the airwaves asking questions and looking for a lost potential.
“It was odd before that, ma—I mean, my lady. We just didn’t know it. ”
“We being…?”
“My younger and I, my lady.” Erik found his hands clasped behind his back, his chin level but his gaze down.
“We ran sweeps while our Father stayed in the temple. It was just easier that way. He hadn’t left the walls for a long while, and the night we brought her home…
” He was starting the story in the middle, mucking up any chance he had to be truly heard.
What could he offer but a mass of inchoate suspicions?
“It was the first time either of us had seen a potential since training at Belmont. And Control didn’t want to move her until after the solstice.
We figured, you know, orders. And Father knew what he was doing. ”
“You didn’t see a single potential all that time?” Sara spoke slowly, but he was willing to bet not a lot escaped her methodical calm. “And you were in Islington for how long?”
“Since ’54, my lady.”
“You’re right. That is strange.” Sara studied him from top to toe, a thorough but benevolent inspection. “Daniel’s told you about unsealed lirai being at risk?”
“Yes, my lady.” Erik debated tacking on the fact that other Sons had, too, and decided that if she wanted to know, she’d ask.
Keeping his mouth from running was always an Elder’s best strategy.
“And you haven’t…” Delicately, she trailed off.
“No, my lady.”
Sara clasped her hands. “Why not?”
“I was trained that consent matters, my lady. Especially in modern times.” Erik’s cheeks were hot. You couldn’t be angry at a lirai. Maybe he was just embarrassed. “Any order to the contrary didn’t reach us in Islington.”
“Commendable, if not very effective.” Sara’s gaze was very much a Dreamer’s, thoughts moving behind a screen, sad and well aware of the price of her gifts.
Soon Liv would look like that, too, though she probably wouldn’t dress like the other woman.
He almost wished she would make another list of things for the Sons to run and fetch.
It would be better than her fierce, fragile determination to fight. “Do you need a direct order?”
Erik’s lungs ached. He inhaled, and the fire in his cheeks was almost nuclear-hot. “Is that an order you’d give?” A heartbeat’s pause. “My lady?” he added, an afterthought.
“God’s wounds,” the Dreamer said, softly. “I hope not.”
The blond Elder was staring daggers at Erik; the dark one’s hand was cupped over his lirai’s shoulder, offering comfort—if there was any to be found.
One of them probably had the hypo, and the queasy sensation that went through Erik when he thought of a needle piercing his own lirai’s skin mixed with the heat suffusing his face and the tension in his shoulders.
There wasn’t a scratch on him from the night’s games, because he’d mostly been carrying Liv.
And it was lucky that there had been other trios relatively close to the Pangborn building clearing out a nest of taik flowers in the depths of a parking garage.
They’d dropped their work and streaked back for the lirai as soon as they realized something was amiss, arriving just as Dak and Robert were almost overwhelmed.
It did indeed seem like the Mad God had it in for Liv personally. Maybe he—or one of his subordinates—had figured out something that made potentials and unsealed lirai even more vulnerable? Innovation wasn’t confined solely to mortals.
It was a chilling, completely unwelcome prospect.
Finally, Sara shook her head. “This will not end well,” she said, quietly. “I gave up the hope of being better than what we fight long ago. I’ve settled for being fractionally less malignant, and it’s worked. Sort of. But I’m telling you, Elder, this will not end well.”
Don’t you think I know? Either he disobeyed his conscience or he was responsible for endangering his lirai. It was a no-win situation, as usual. “I’m doing all I can, my lady.”
“I know. We all are.” Her sigh, soft and impatient, brushed every surface in the liraim. “All right, you three. Hold still.”
Sara’s eyes half-lidded. The pulse ran through them all, a touch far lighter than Liv’s, and though you weren’t supposed to, Erik thought he preferred his lirai’s directness to this one’s flowery, ornate curlicues.
Nevertheless, the heat was welcome and his weariness vanished; both Dakshi and Robert regained their color and stood a little straighter, all bruises gone, scrapes sealed, and bones whole again.
“There.” She set off for the door, her elders flanking her, and paused, her profile from some ancient Mediterranean coin. “Erik, is it?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“If you had to guess, which would you suspect?” Her mouth turned down slightly, bitterly; she didn’t like asking this question any more than he would enjoy answering it. “Your Father, or your Younger Brother?”
“I’d suspect myself before either of them, my lady.”
“Charitable of you,” she murmured. “And short-sighted. Considering that you’ve been cleared and your Younger called what was no doubt the last dropline he had a number for.”
“Which I’m told was more than a decade old. My lady.” It couldn’t irk him that she would presume to judge either Ignatius or Jake. He’d done so himself, and arrived at a few unpalatable conclusions. “And our Father was in touch with Control, or something acting like Control, for a long while.”
Still, Erik was a stupid Elder, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, the dim bulb on the marquee sign. Jake would have a few other terms to add, too, and he’d be at Erik’s shoulder, solidly behind his big brother.
Or would he?
“That’s true, I suppose. But not a single potential in Islington, all that while?
” Her head turned slightly; she met his gaze, and he read exactly the thought he’d arrived at his first night here, lying semiconscious in the dormitory and waiting for the echoes of Daniel’s riffling his brain like a card index to stop ricocheting.
“Not one my Younger and I found, my lady.” In other words, there was nothing else for him to say.
The implications were plain as paint; it didn’t help that Ignatius was probably dead under a tide of goatmen, unable to answer questions.
This lirai was checking all local control liaisons in the Truth Chamber, but it was slow work along with examining trainees and candidates.
Daniel was occupied with sweeps, and Liv soon would be too.
Sara nodded before fluttering from the sitting room, no doubt eager for the comfort of her own liraim. How long would it be before Liv felt the same way? Before she understood, more than intellectually, the meaning of refuge?
Dakshi let out a long low sibilant sound, not quite a whistle.
He was looking at Robert, who shrugged slightly as the door closed.
Both would have to visit their cells along the hallway for fresh clothes.
And maybe to rinse themselves; cleansing sorcery got the grime off, sure, but sometimes a man liked scrubbing.
Especially as an antidote to thinking.
“What do you make of that?” Dakshi persisted, since Robert was Father-silent, clearly considering verbal analysis superfluous.
“I think she can guess who the traitor in my temple was. If that’s where the treachery lies and it’s not with a control liaison burrowed in somewhere like a tick, possibly doing a decade’s worth of damage.
” Erik stared at the bedroom door, its semipermanent, invisible baffle folded aside and the lirai behind it deep in the grasp of chemical sleep.
“And she agrees with you and Father, so don’t repeat yourself. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Yessir,” Dakshi mumbled, and a knock on the sitting-room door was a replacement trio, stepping in so the primaries could all change and clean up.
Erik, however, strode for the bedroom. Dakshi, thankfully, said nothing. Robert merely shook his head and shooed the younger man out. Maybe both of them were assuming—or hoping—that he intended to seal her while she was out cold.
It was enough to make a man want to smash a few windows. But Erik had some hard thinking to do, and he’d never have a better time.
Besides, it wouldn’t take very long for the treachery to be revealed in all its fetid glory. Especially now that Daniel, in all the infinite wisdom of a lirai, had waved Liv before the Mad God like a sequined cape in front of a very angry bull.
* * *
She slept through dawn, past noon, and into the short dusk of yet another winter night.
The sky dropped, turned depthless, and flakes began to whirl down as the sun, an eternal busybody, went westward to pursue other business.
Erik stayed at her bedside, counting her breaths and thinking things through.
By the time she stirred, restless and with an edge of metallic burning to her scent as her body metabolized the last of whatever Sara had administered, he was nowhere nearer a viable plan.
But he still knew what was going to happen.