Selat issued a moist hiss. “Is that so? But my intelligence tells me she has already slipped out of your grasp, Moolag. This is very bad news for you if it is true.”
Water burbled with laughter. The Moolag’s hologram churned and blurred. “I’m pleased to tell you that your information is quite outdated. It was such a bad job of an escape that we just recaptured her. We got her accomplice as well.”
Selat couldn’t tell by looking at him, but the Moolag definitely sounded smug. In fact, it was quite impossible to read the expression of a creature that was nothing more than shell and eyes. Down in the corner of his line of sight, Selat watched streaks of light depict the band of pitiful refugees celebrating their reunion on a docking causeway in the skies of a bustling garrison town on Mora Bentia.
“You had better recheck your reports then, Moolag. My intelligence is more current than you could imagine. Our traitorous Nairom and his rebel friends have just sprung her again and they appear to be getting away with it too. If I were you, I’d stop them and kill them before it turns into your own execution!” Before severing the connection, Selat saw the pair of bulbous eyes webbing in anger with broken blood vessels.
Selat sat back and smiled. “Either way, it will all work out for me in the end, won’t it? If the Moolag and his lackey capture and kill Nairom, I frame them for treason. Our forces love the general for his ambition, you know. If Lady Feillion escapes, I blame the Moolag for incompetence because we couldn’t capture our cybermancer. No one wants an incompetent Moolag around. I just can’t stand by and let underlings plot secret plans to overthrow us, can I?”
Next to Selat, the Agar Hegirith’s voice echoed through the holo-transmission chamber like the low growl of a predator, “You are a master of your art.”
Selat looked out of the corner of his eye at Magron Orcris. He thought he had heard a touch of impudence. He needed to get rid of this one soon. “You, most of all, should know my abilities well,” Selat snarled.
CHAPTER 34
Without the benefit of space-warping machinery, Aiben’s thoughts slid through the realm of hyperspace and searched for the other minds of his kind. Within seconds, he found the two he was looking for. His consciousness snapped together instant communion with the hyperspatial echoes of Corag-mar and Jerekiel in true Haman fashion.
Corag-mar reported first. I was able to slip im shalal out of the military complex undetected. I expected to meet you at the rendezvous point, Hegirith. What I found instead were enough Zenzani troops that I was lucky to get out of there without them questioning me. What happened?
Aiben recounted what had transpired at the Spacer’s Grotto, the ill-fated separation from his companions, and their incredulous reunion.
I’m glad you weren’t caught, but I fear Gormy Bonebender will stop at nothing short of his own life to capture you now.
I’m afraid you might be right, Aiben agreed, but we have more important things to worry about right now.
We have been able to gather the other three Keazil’hi and the Shelezar in preparation for alachti ai alamat, Jerekiel thought. She was a resonance in hyperspace that he was fast becoming accustomed to. We should meet at shelezati baral and not waste any more time.
Shelezati baral? Aiben asked. He knew what it meant, but not what it was. The place of history.
It is the ancient grounds where the ilud’hi performed alachti ai alamat. That was before the Golani’aak took sole custodianship of im shalal and stopped the ritual fifty years ago.
Corag-mar didn’t refute her. Her tone had been more factual than accusatory.
Aiben wondered if the other Keazil’hi and their ilud’hi would be able to put aside their feud with the Golani’aak as Jerekiel and the Neilemi’aak had. Jerekiel was in the unique position of being able to see the larger picture, however. She had been undergoing the training to become the next Shelezar. It had taught her how to overlook and stand apart from the ilud’hi. She was to be the one to perpetuate the fabrication in the future, which claimed Aiben was the prophesied Iniri’ki Hegirith returning for im shalal. A fabrication that had been so complete, not only in the minds of the ilud’hi, but also in Oand-ib’s actions, that it was in fact becoming the very truth.
Jerekiel injected the coordinates for shelezati baral into Aiben’s head. It was just one more tidbit, along with all of the other particulate thoughts he had discovered over the past several weeks, to feed his ever-expanding memory. Jerekiel assured him they would meet him there and then she and Corag-mar departed shalal hiliz. They left Aiben alone with his own thoughts.
As a cybermancer, he had always longed for the periods of silence where his thoughts were his alone. Now he found himself feeling lost and yearned for the glory days of the Haman when the Consciousness was the constant repository for shared sentient thought. In time, he would have to teach the people of Ilud’hi ai Rahan how to remain connected mind to mind if they ever wanted to resurrect the Consciousness again.
Aiben brought himself back to his companions crammed into House Feillion’s launch and ticked off the coordinates for shelezati baral to Jiab. The smaller Oobellian diverted his attention from their retreat just long enough to key-hop the numbers into his console, two stubby fingers at a time. Neikkia continued to thread their ship in and out of the corridors between the docking structures the Zenzani had planted in the dense fog of Abri Mor.
Several robotic enforcers dove into the murk behind them, intent on pursuit, but the thick soup that swirled at the base of the docking tower gave Neikkia sufficient cover to evade them. As they submersed and sped down along the trunk of the tower, Aiben saw that the buildings were only several hundreds of stories tall, nothing compared to the ancient mile-high edifices that honeycombed Besti. He hoped that there would be enough vertical space beneath the fog ceiling for Neikkia to keep up the game of cat and mouse with the handful of tenacious patrolmechs until they could make good their escape.
Nairom was also working on leveling out their odds. He had drilled his sharp mind into the hypernet and pierced the Moolag’s security net, aided by the back door he had left ajar on his first visit. While Aiben had been taking care of their destination, Nairom had been making sure they would get there. His nanomechs, accessing the hyperportal via the lockout code, started directing the robotic enforcers from one bogus task to the next. One by one, the mechs broke off the hunt and sped back to their regular patrol corridors in the shipping docks above where their new instructions sent them to chase down false alarms.
Neikkia was free to break the perimeter of the city. She skimmed the launch as close to the ground as she could to keep beneath the garrison’s sensors and weapon batteries. As they sped outward from the main stem of the docking complex and hit the outskirts of the city, Aiben could see out the launch’s viewport that they were climbing the ridge of a valley, which sloped up from the military settlement.
Between the edge of the rise and the border of the garrison town, a ribbon of water, overcast with darkness from the fog, ringed around the complex like some medieval moat from ancient history. The geographic bowl and its circle of black water explained the ever-present fog condensing in the temperate climate of the lower altitudes of the city. Once up and over the ridge, House Feillion’s launch screamed through the sonic register above the dry pampas and away from the oily hues of the city, spearing high up into the blue watercolors of a noonday sky.
Within a standard half-an-hour of their escape, House Feillion’s launch set down unmolested at the foot of a mountain range, which rose like a scar on the back of Mora Bentia’s main landmass a hundred miles south of Abri Mor. Even at top speed, it would take another hour before Jerekiel and the other Keazil’hi arrived, so they decided that their band of fugitives would disembark and look around the ancient grounds of alachti ai alamat.
Ballis and Nairom both argued for making sure the area was safe, all the while eyeing one another suspiciously. They had each secured one of the four weapons aboard th
e launch and were determined to use them if needed. Aiben half-listened to their opinions on the matter of security and nodded his head in apparent agreement, but his mind was elsewhere, pondering the unknown ritual that would be ahead of him. Almost mechanically, as his thoughts raced towards fate, he followed his companions while they disembarked. Only Neikkia Noonak and Jiab remained in the launch, having agreed to be ready to lift off at a moment’s notice.
Aiben had no idea what was going to happen when Jerekiel and Corag-mar arrived with im shalal. Even though he was the intended fulfillment of the Shelezar’hi’s prophecy, he didn’t know what his role was supposed to be during alachti ai alamat. He traced his index finger along the red tinged darkness of the halifi on his arm, as if expecting it to do something, to give him a clue on how he should act, but it didn’t.
The halifi was nothing more than Tulan’s own exotic design, synthesized as the clue to the presence of the nanomechs who maintained the genetic key to im shalal within Aiben. Those nanomechs knew nothing of the Shelezar’hi and their artificial divinations. There was nothing holy about them. Nothing told him what the Keazil’hi would expect from him.
The foot of the mountain scar was at their backs, before them was a vast deserted expanse dotted with low-lying structures. The brightness seared Aiben’s eyes with the glitter of orange silicates. Heat clutched his throat as he swallowed his first breath outside. Achanei scuttled up next to him, weaved her warm fingers into his, and pressed up against him shoulder to shoulder. The dim specter of her mind hovered just outside of shalal hiliz. She was studying him intently, watching his finger still lingering on the lines of Tulan’s halifi. When she noticed his gaze on her, she forced out a quick, nervous smile and dropped her eyes as if embarrassed to be caught looking.
Together, they walked hand-in-hand towards the structures that broke up the uneven infinity of the gingery desert. A half-buried, cobbled-together hulk sat at the center of what looked like an abandoned shantytown. Squat, ochre mud-brick buildings with smoky glass windows and threadbare thatched roofs were scattered around an old broken spaceship wedged into the desert like a splinter. Unidentifiable bits of broken appliances, tools, and containers littered the spaces in between. It looked like the ilud’hi had neglected their holy ground.
“I’m going to take a look over there and make sure this ghost town doesn’t have any danger lurking in the shadows.” Nairom’s statement was ironic in the intensity of the daylight. He waved in the general direction he meant off to their right, pricked Aiben and Achanei with his steel gaze, and broke off from the group towards a cluster of buildings. “Call for me if I’m not back before they arrive.”
Lev-9 also broke from the group, but stayed within sight of the others as he scouted around on his own.
“What’s wrong with Nairom?” Achanei asked Aiben.
“I don’t know. I hoped our reunion would be happier, even after knowing what he’s been doing for the past year. I guess I didn’t expect him to be so cold and so changed by it.”
“He’s feeling responsible for something he doesn’t want to face.” Achanei started to swing his hand in hers as they walked. “Because of that, he’s afraid of you and you’re afraid of him. That’s what’s causing this distance between you.”
“What makes you think that?” Aiben asked.
They stopped walking and Achanei turned to look at him. A sliver of orange sun escaped from behind the shadow of her head, forcing Aiben to shield his eyes with a hand.
“It’s pretty simple,” Achanei said. Her attentive jade eyes had taken on a bronze tinge in the orange light. “Let’s say he thinks his intentions are still noble, if not just a little misguided. After all, he did accomplish what Oand-ib sent him to do, right? He got you here. However, he has been tainted by the Protectorate, and has probably done things he regrets to accomplish what he had to. He’s afraid you won’t trust him because of it. He’s on the edge. He doesn’t know which side to choose any longer. You’re afraid he’s gone too far and don’t know what his intentions really are anymore. He was like a brother to you, so you don’t know what you’re going to do about it either.”
Consternation spread across Aiben’s face. Achanei’s lit up like a supernova. She was right and he hated having her prove it to him.
“That makes sense. Maybe I should go after him. Keep my eye on him.” A baritone from behind reminded Aiben that Ballis was still following them.
Aiben turned and came face to face with his mentor’s dark mask of suspicion. “What is it Ballis?”
“I don’t know for sure, but there’s something about all of this that doesn’t feel right. I can’t say yet, but I’m sure it’s got something to do with that one.” Ballis indicated in the direction where Nairom had just rounded one of the dilapidated huts.
Aiben nodded numbly. The middle-aged, ex-soldier nodded back and then hurried off after Nairom.
“He can’t remember Nor Joon, but the buried memories are still haunting him,” Aiben said. Ballis could remember just about everything now since their arrival on Mora Bentia but nothing before that with any clarity.
“What do you mean?” Achanei asked.
“Just something Ballis once said about being afraid this mission would get us all killed. That’s what happened to him at Nor Joon.”
They began walking together again. Their feet crunching into the granular, orange sand was the only sound. Waves of heat shimmered around them like iridescent curtains standing between them and the outside world.
“Where are we supposed to be going anyway?” Achanei asked after they had walked around several mud-dried buildings.
Aiben shook his head. “I don’t know, exactly.”
Achanei’s desert-bronzed eyes made Aiben think of Jerekiel. “Let me see if I can find out.”
Aiben’s thoughts sliced into hyperspace once more and immediately bonded with the woman he had come to recognize as necessary in helping him become part of his people again. Jerekiel’s thoughts directed him to one of the shanties hunkering down around the other side of the broken ship half-buried in the desert.
“This way,” Aiben pulled Achanei along with him. He waved to Lev-9 who set his course to intersect with the two cybermancers.
Through the doors of the time-battered building, they found themselves in a single room. It was bare except for a stone platform at its center. It was constructed from three disk-shaped slabs of variegated size, stacked one on top of the other, largest to smallest in a step-like fashion. Each slab might have been six inches thick at the edges. Some age-old artisan had detailed them with the ancient writing of the Haman that Oand-ib had taught Aiben to comprehend. He walked around the platform, his eyes swept along it, reading a tale beginning with Tulan and Nograth’s moral struggle for their people and ending with Jerekiel’s fateful shipwreck on Ilud’hi ai Rahan. It was nothing new to him by now.
Centered on the platform were seven chairs arranged in a circle. They were obsidian-black, carved from stone that couldn’t have been quarried from the orange desert outside. One carried the symbol of the Shelezar, and each of the others, a Haman name symbol on its backrest in blood-red: Neilem, Golan, Drazal, Telemkel, Erin-dal, and Tulan. The ring of chairs looked like a place of ritual. Aiben would wager that the ilud’hi would have kept the seat with Tulan’s name on it empty, awaiting his return.
He swore under his breath once again at the audacity of the Shelezar’hi. His alter ego had been responsible for the circumstances that had forced these people to become pariahs, yet they had immortalized him nonetheless. He suspected, or rather knew, that Tulan’s beloved Jerekiel hadn’t let their people forget him. He wished she had.
Guess I should play my part if I want im shalal, Aiben acquiesced to his own thoughts. Whatever that part may be. He stepped up the platform to Tulan’s chair, to his chair, the largest, most ornate of the seven, and traced the etched symbol with a fingertip. A sudden impulse took hold of him and he dropped down into it.
Achan
ei looked at him, her head tilted slightly, one eyebrow raised, but looking afraid to ask or take a seat herself. Finally, she sat down on the stone step next to Aiben and looked up at him with her crooked smile. Lev-9 appeared to be oblivious to the two cybermancers as he ambled along the wall, scrutinizing more of the Haman logographs that adorned them. The smell of old wood and hot stone permeated the air around them.
“Who are you that our paths cross when I need you the most?” she asked.
There was genuine awe in her voice and that threw Aiben off. He hadn’t expected Achanei, of all people, to read some kind of fateful significance into a situation that had been prefabricated all the way back to Tulan himself. She didn’t quite understand all of that yet, though. In addition, there was something going on with her that he didn’t quite understand either.
Achanei? Her presence was there in shalal hiliz, yet no answer came from her. I should be the one asking who you are. Instead, he read off a string of numbers aloud for her from memory.
“What?” Her lopsided grin melted into perplexity.
“That’s the lock-out code,” he said. “You can use it to cyberlink with me.”
“Tell it to me again, this time a bit slower.”
Aiben repeated each digit, waiting for Achanei to nod confirmation each time before going on to the next one. He could tell she had connected to the hyperportal when her eyes varnished over with the look of someone staring off into infinity. He linked in after her and looked for her mind as it traversed the superluminal ripples of hyperspace. She was there, already trying to contact anyone she could from the Citadel on Besti. Her eyes watered at the failure and she quickly swiped them with the back of her hand.
He wanted to talk to her alone, but Nairom was still cyberlinked through Mora Bentia’s hyperportal as well. If he were paying attention, he would know that Aiben was excluding him. Aiben decided he didn’t care and blocked his boyhood friend from hearing their conversation.