forty-one #2
“You’re right. I’d end up running off with her cousin there.” He soon waved in Kema’s direction, bidding the shy girl to come over toward them once she had her meal and drink. “Put in a good word for me, would you? I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
Sulim rolled her eyes before making herself comfortable on her bench. “If you turn up that charm any more, she’ll become the first hybrid woman to ever get pregnant from a human.”
“You think?”
She had reached for the deck of cards to shuffle them, but instead tossed half of them at his face with a flick of her wrist.
When Kema arrived a minute later, she sat next to Sulim, and both mercenaries offered to teach the off-planet girl the most beloved strategy card game on Cerilyn.
She wouldn’t even have to cough up some money to play—this time, at least.
“You’re really sure about this?”
Mira stood before the altar, taking in her last few moments as a humble priestess who pretended she wasn’t who she said she was.
I can’t hide it anymore. Soon, word would spread, anyway—that Mira Lerenan was actually Mira Dunsman, the daughter of intergalactic criminal Nerilis and his High Priestess wife, Joiya.
Word would also spread that Sulim was not only her lover, but her soulmate.
Never mind what the contingent of other julah in Shield Town were up to, and how they were now related to everyone in Second Tribe.
And by “word,” Mira meant it was part of an official PR statement about to disseminate throughout the Federation. Whenever there was a major transference of power on Cerilyn, it was known by governments and gossipmongers alike.
It’s bad enough that all of Yahzen knows these things.
Well, about her heritage, anyway. The only thing that had saved Mira’s image among humans was the fact that the Yahzenian government had graciously hidden most of her identifying information from public view—in Basic, anyway.
Sulim had been one of the first to figure it out, because of course the Queen of Private Investigations had done it.
When she confronted me a couple of years ago, I thought that was it for us.
Sulim hated liars—almost as much as she hated smokers, another sin of Mira’s.
The man before her smoked as well. Ramaron hooked one hand over his elbow while languidly smoking from the pipe his mother had given him over a millennium ago, one of his most precious possessions.
“It’s been willed,” was all Mira said to him for a moment.
Then, “We have a long fight ahead of us, against a man we both love in our own ways.”
Because, despite the strained relationship between father and daughter, Mira still acknowledged him as the man who had loved her mother.
“If my mother is visiting people in their sleep and telling them what to do to help me in the fight, then I can’t turn away.”
“And who is visiting you in your sleep, Mira?”
He asked that earnestly. Yet Mira took a moment to glance at her mother’s statue, which gazed back down at her with such motherly affection that it was hard to believe she was stone.
“Someone my mother used to know.” Mira turned back toward him. “Someone from a very long time ago.”
“Yes. The Dreamwalker.” Ramaron blew out a long trail of smoke that curled around his head and filtered toward the flat ceiling.
“Strange, isn’t it? Your mother’s former incarnation set it up so the foundress of my House came to you late in the Second Epoch. A feat of its own. When this is all over, you have much to share with the Academy.”
Mira offered him a smile. “Yes. When all of this is over. I just wish…”
She brushed her hair behind her ear, letting her touch linger on the cartilage that separated her lobe from her head.
“I wish she would tell me half of what she has told all of you. If she is the chazah master setting up all of the pieces into place, then what do I, a humble priest, have to do with it?”
“If this really is a chazah match for the epoch,” Ramaron mused while chewing on the end of his pipe, “then you are a higher rank than a measly priest.”
“The only higher-ranking pieces are the High Priest and High Priestess.”
“Then you must forge your own identity between those two positions. Perhaps that is what my great-ancestress is imparting upon you.”
“I think it is, too.”
“Just… acknowledge this.” Ramaron’s free hand gestured toward the space between them. “If you go through with this, you are giving up everything. Your birthright is forfeit. You will become a pariah on Yahzen. Your grandmother Great Dame Dunsman will excommunicate you like she did her own son.”
“I’m aware. If you think I had a life in House Dunsman or among the gentry of Yahzen, then you never paid any attention. I was already a pariah. That’s why I was sent to this Void-forsaken place. They wanted to be rid of me, because of what I reminded them of.”
“Your father.”
Mira grimaced. “My mother. The woman who sacrificed a whole reality to have me.”
That garnered a slight nod out of Ramaron. “I don’t truly recall this other Joiya, the one who raised you at the expense of our lives, but it sounds like something she would be swayed to do. You and I both know that you were probably not meant to exist, Mira.”
“Not in this form, no. But I do think I was meant to be here, on Cerilyn.”
Someone came down the stairs from Mira’s apartment.
She barely registered Sulim in her mercenary blacks, her holster kitted out with the weapons she wore when on assignment, and her hair combed meticulously along her scalp.
Mira rarely saw her soulmate ready for battle—or, in this case, ready to defend a powerful julah, in case it came to it.
Nobody would attack Mira, though. Especially with Ramaron nearby.
He was vastly more powerful than her, with defensive ward reflexes that rivaled her own father.
According to him, my father got the best of him on the practice fields more than once.
The only nice thing Ramaron could say about Nerilis was that the man always came to visit him in the infirmary.
Well, the infirmary here in Shield Town was much… less… than the state-of-the-art one at the Academy. And Second Tribe had another five hundred years to sort it out.
“We’ve gotta get going.” Sulim shoved her communicator into her utility belt. “They’re waiting for us in the fortress. Sonall will meet us on the way there.”
The last Mira had seen that man, he had been cozying up to Kema by the altar, the young woman giggling up a nitrous storm while the embattled mercenary told her the raunchiest tales he had gathered around the universe.
Go figure. Mira knew they would “get along” well, based on what she remembered of her other life, but she wasn’t expecting them to shack up immediately.
But in the past few days they had planned this next move, Sulim opined that Sonall was insistent on pursuing Mira’s distant cousin, while Kema put up absolutely no resistance.
I don’t get it. He’s just a guy. That was also Mira’s response when Sulim occasionally reminisced about what it was like dating him a few years ago, long before they became mercenary partners who made each other a bucketload of cash and earned them the kind of respect only successful mercenaries
courted in a place like this.
Which was why Sulim was part of Mira’s escort, and why Sonall was meeting them on the way to the fortress, where Chief Olma and her own entourage awaited.
“Shall we go?”
Mira shared a silent sentiment with Ramaron, who stepped out of her way while more smoke curled around their heads.
With a flick of his hand, the smoke surreptitiously bowed out of the way and spiraled toward the altar, where it wrapped around the base of Joiya’s statue and disseminated among the flickering candles left alit.
He soon extinguished his pipe and tucked it into the small sack wrapped around his waist.
Mira led the way, with Ramaron behind her and Sulim off to her side.
Under any other circumstance, she would have erected a ward of indifference around them, or at least asked Ramaron to do it for her.
People must see this. Instead, she readied a ward of defense, if only to save Sulim’s head should someone sense what was happening and have a sudden death wish.
They trekked through the front half of Shield Town, with only a few citizens taking note of their procession.
Hannu hopped out of the inn and joined them on the main road out of town, the one cutting through the thinnest part of the surrounding jungle and leading to the main entrance of the fortress, where both visitors and recruits returning in time for curfew passed.
She must have walked this road a million times.
Mira thought of Sulim, who walked with her usual confident gait, since the Void knew she could rule this town if she wanted.
When they met Sonall at the edge of town, he fell in step on the other side of Mira. She did not discount the firearm on one side of his holster and the half-sized saber on the other. Is this what it’s like to be escorted by them through parts of the universe? Silent, aware, and deadly?
“Damn, it’s hot here,” Ramaron muttered behind her.
Mira almost laughed. She did not say a word when her old friend tossed some dirt into the air, where it soon transfigured into cold water drops that fell upon them like refreshing rain.
They dried off by the time they reached the main gate to the fortress.
The doors opened to them without pomp. Mira continued forward, noting the guards on duty looking down at her with vapid curiosity.
They had their orders to let them through as soon as they arrived, and Sulim and Sonall were here to barter with them if somehow word hadn’t made it.
Yet as Mira stepped into the cool recesses of the fortress, she realized that something had settled over the most hardened people in the known universe.
Mira had been to the sanctuary within the bowels of the Second Tribe fortress before, both to help re-sanctify their statue of the High Priestess and to show some of the locals how to do their own rituals, but she had forgotten the way.