Author: Alexis Glynn Latner
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Avendis Press
Rights: Copyright 2022 Alexis Glynn Latner. All rights reserved.

ABOUT WITHERSPIN

In a spinning city full of intrigue, romance, and dangerous games, the word for everything going wrong is witherspin.

Nia Courant is an interstellar lawyer. Years ago, on the other side of the stars, she made a disastrous decision.  It wrecked her life and ruined her career. She found work at a university in the space-station city called Wendis. But the university is a sheltered bubble in a strange culture built around an interstellar amusement park. She knows she’s at a disadvantage in Wendis unless she learns how to play its games of chance and danger. What she doesn’t know is that love can be a dangerous game too.

Gyle Martan is an exile in Wendis. For him, the spinning city was an uncomfortable port in a deadly political storm. His façade as a University official conceals a mystery. The core of the mystery is something dark and dangerous. He knows his past will catch him if it can and destroy him if it does. But then he falls in love with Nia and begins to imagine something better than lonely exile.

When everything starts going wrong around them in Wendis, Nia and Martan must cooperate with each other in a danger game they never expected. Now Nia is Martan’s best ally. Martan is Nia’s best hope. Unfortunately, he may also be her worst nightmare.

WITHERSPIN

ALEXIS GLYNN LATNER

Copyright © 2019 by Alexis Glynn Latner

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For Eileen K. Stansbery

CONTENTS

1. Greening Day

2. Fair Play

3. The Plain Of Pain

4. Rocket Park

5. The Queen Of Europa

6. Return

7. Truce Token

8. The Spies’ Guild

9. Shove and Shove Back

10. Turning Points

11. Gauntlet

12. Skylark

13. The Glassberry Thorn

14. Wildway

15. Inferno

16. Fair Country

17. The High Road

18. Inquest

19. Storm Warning

20. The Most Dangerous Game

21. The Kestrel

Next Adventures

Chapter 1—The Bane King

Also by Alexis Glynn Latner

About the Author

Acknowledgments

1

GREENING DAY

The Great Wall of Wendis loomed over Nia like a glass cliff. Her footfalls echoed on the Wall’s wide fauxstone stairway. On the other side of the clear Wall was the space shield, with complicated metallic corrugations the size of ravines. She climbed upward in the space shield’s shadow, in cold and stillness. Except for her, the Great Wall seemed deserted tonight.

The absence of other people puzzled but also pleased her. There was no one else around to witness her missteps. As she climbed higher, the spingravity lessened, but the tendency to misplace her feet increased. Wendis was an enormous, solitary, spinning cylinder in deep space. Spingravity held everything in Wendis in place, but it was a tricky facsimile of gravity. For someone like Nia, who had grown up on a terraformed planet, spingravity and stairs were a bad combination, and the vast whorl of stairways inside the Great Wall of Wendis posed a severe test. Every year she lived here, though, it got easier.

The proximity of space chilled the air. Nia’s breath condensed into white wisps. Now, faint starlight glazed the fauxstone steps. Higher up, the concave rim of the space shield glittered with reflected starlight, and starlight flooded the steps. Encouraged, Nia dared to run up the rest of the way. She reached the High Landing breathing hard, but victorious.

Then she realized that someone was already there, turning around in an irritated flicker of motion at the sound of her footsteps. He was shirtless and pale as white marble. He had the slim-hipped build of a boy. But behind his shoulders, transparent membranes with red veins angled over his head and slanted down beside his torso—he had diaphanous wings, tented like the wings of a bug. Nia froze. She knew Wendis harbored two or three of his kind, but she’d never seen one before. She didn’t like meeting one here.

They were called Angels, a flattery intended to placate them, because everyone was afraid of them. The rumor of an Angel on the Great Wall would clear everyone else away in a hurry. That explained why the Wall was deserted tonight. And it meant she might be in danger. She suppressed an urge to bolt back down the stairs. For her, that could be more dangerous than the Angel. Instead she sidled away along the High Landing. Apprehension made her skin prickle.

The Angel stared at her with large dark eyes. Then the Angel said, “Azuri.”

Nia stiffened with anger on top of her apprehension. A person from the planet Azure was an Azurean. Azuri meant a thing from Azure. “Shandy,” she retorted. A thing from Shandy.

The Angel responded with a cold flicker of a smile.

Nia circled around the High Landing, taking slight, low-energy steps lest she accidentally launch herself over the guard rail in the scant spingravity. Above her, starlight shone on a latticework of metallic beams and gratings. When Nia reached another stairway, a third of the way around the Landing, the Angel was distant and lost in silvery light. She breathed easier.

The Angels had been human before they were changed to live in low-gravity, artificial environments in deep space. According to Wendisan lore, they were the creatures of a merciless interstellar god named Shandy.

Nia scanned the landing. No sign of the Angel. Fact: all he had done was toss an insult at her. Another fact, one she knew too well: rumors can mutilate the truth. The Angel had been looking out at the stars before he heard her coming. Maybe all he wanted was the view. Nia stretched to ease her leg muscles and let the view claim her own attention.

The Great Wall of Wendis was the transparent western end of the spinning space cylinder. Above the glittering rim of the space shield, around the spin axis, the Great Wall was a window on the universe. All around Wendis, starships and star bubbles flickered like fireflies in an eternal night. Arriving starships re-entered realspace with flares of light. Lesser flashes heralded bubbles containing messages and small goods from other worlds. Fading, the ship lights and bubble lights sorted themselves out. The ships maneuvered toward the Port on the other end of Wendis. The bubbles streamed into the Mailyard net below the Great Wall. And the backdrop of it all was starry space, rotating with the incessant spin of Wendis.

Wendisans had their own constellations. Nia didn’t know most of those. But she recognized the Raptor, the seven stars of the Faxen Union. Above the Raptor’s back—in the safest position that close to the Raptor—wheeled the sun of Azure. Her home. So far away that the blue seas and white continents were only a trace of photons in the spark of light of that distant star.

Homesickness rolled over her like a cold, heavy wave. At this moment, the dawn of Greening Day was sweeping over Azure. Once every year for three years, Nia had climbed the Great Wall of Wendis when it was Greening Day on Azure, observing the holiday in her own lonely way from here. With a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, she remembered her last Greening Day at home. It came just after her career crashed down in ruins along with her father’s ambitions for her. They had an argument wracked with pain and anger on both sides. He had finally shouted at her. “You made an interstellar fool of yourself! Admit it!” She fired furious words back at him. Unspoken, yet ringing in the air at a psychologically deafening volume, was their family history. The Courants were descendants of the starship astronauts from Earth, the star voyagers who first brought green hope to a barren ice world. From her childhood on, much had been expected of Nia Courant. Before the end of her last Green Holidays on Azure, she had argued with everyone in her family. Was it still homesickness, if you’d been sick of home and they of you when you left?

Behind her, a voice said, “Hello, Inanna.”

She whirled. The landing was empty. But the Angel knelt on a metal beam overhead, intently regarding her. Nia felt the chill of fear. She hadn’t realized that with wings, in low gravity, he could glide this far. “How do you know my name?”

“Don’t be surprised,” the Angel answered. “You’re famous.”

Nia retreated to the stairway. She found the first step by feel. Her heart pounded. Acutely aware of how steeply the stairs curved down, she hesitated. The Angel flexed his wings. Stars shone through translucent membranes with ruby-red veins. Unnerved, Nia said, “Enjoy the view,” and turned away from the Angel to the stairs.

Down was safety. But safety was a long way down.

One step. One more. One after another. Fear of falling and fear of the Angel crowded out her breathing. Her overtaxed leg muscles quivered, but she pushed herself until she reached the Low Landing.

A tube train flashed by; pedestrians and delivery bots shared the sidewalk, and never had the populous nocturnal hum of Wendis sounded so reassuring to Nia. She halted and leaned on a railing for support. If the Great Wall was an annual, self-imposed test, she passed with flying colors this time.

But the Angel came as a very unwelcome complication. How did he know her name? Very few people in Wendis knew that “Nia” was a lifelong nickname, and her real name was Inanna. And what did the Angel mean by famous? She was an interstellar lawyer, recently promoted to Assistant Counsel at Avend University in Wendis. That didn’t qualify as fame. Wendis had plenty of interstellar lawyers, most of them more accomplished than she was.

The Angel’s voice had been soft and yet cold, so cold it burned in her memory.

Suddenly the signal pod on her bracelet trilled. The contour of the trill told her that she had a bubble in the Mailyard. For a moment Nia just stared at the trilling pod. A bubble for her just when it was Greening Day on Azure? That was almost as unexpected as the Angel.

In more peaceful times, the space shield stayed irised all the way down to the Low Landing, where people could watch star bubbles come and go in the Mailyard. The mail station was located just off the Low Landing on a street called the Milky Way. A uniformed mail official queried the identity pod on Nia’s bracelet. Satisfied by her identity, the official produced her bubble. Automated scanners had already screened and approved it, and it rested on the scanner tray, like a giant pearl. The bubble split open and folded down to reveal its cargo—a glass bottle full of liquid, the pale pink of dawn on Azure.

The gift tag flashed on the scanner screen. Nia dear, have a happy Greening Day, and all our love. Eirene and Vim. Nia was so surprised that she felt light-headed. She knew better than to expect Greening Day gifts from her parents, but she’d never dreamed that Grandmother Eirene and Grandda Vim would send her a bottle of Aquarel.

The mail official said genially, “It’s good to get a bubble when you’re far from home.”

Nia nodded.

“Do you know about the Ascendance Fair? It’s the most wonderful event in Wendis. Visitors come from all the terraformed planets for the Fair. It starts tomorrow, and this year it will be better than ever.”

“So I understand. I work with Hiro Hiroshi Low,” Nia answered.

The mail official beamed. “Hiro Hiroshi is a Wendisan of faultless patience and politeness, a true son of the Service Guild! That’s my own Guild. He’s bringing honor to us all.”

Hiro was Nia’s invaluable legal assistant. Serving on the Fair Committee was an important civic responsibility for him, and he had been carrying it well. Unfortunately for Nia, though, Hiro was patiently, politely, and honorably determined to cast her in a ridiculous role in the upcoming Ascendance Fair. She could imagine news about that getting back to Azure during the Green Holidays. Just thinking about it made her tense up. With a mental jolt, Nia wondered if the Fair had been what the Angel meant by “famous.” Wendis was a small world, its connective social tissue was gossip, and the most exciting annual event in the world was the Fair.

The mail official deftly knotted the ends of Nia’s carry-cloth over the bottle. Cradling the cloth-wrapped Aquarel in her arms, Nia left the mail station with her thoughts churning. She could well imagine whatever Hiro had told the Fair Committee about her, percolating into the social aquifer of Wendis. Complete with her real name—Inanna—and the fact that she had been named after a Wendisan great-grandmother. Oh no. The last thing in the universe Nia wanted was fame as an actress in a tourist-attracting carnival in Wendis.

For most of her three years here, her mind had been elsewhere: mastering interstellar law, grappling with the legalities of the university’s relationships with the Faxen Union as well as the Alliance of Starmark. That might not be good enough. She’d surrendered her Azurean citizenship when she came here. Her family bridges, if not burned down, were badly charred. She didn’t want to remain an outsider in Wendis indefinitely. Especially not an outsider who was fair game for casting in the Ascendance Fair. She had to find a way to be at home here. But how? With Azurean looks and planet-born awkwardness in spingravity, her chances of seamlessly fitting in weren’t much better than the Angel’s.

Nia crossed a civic plaza to its far end.

Slender arches framed a view of the interior of the cylindrical world. Tonight Wendis was full of fog and erratic winds that tattered and twisted the fog or let it pool in sheltered places. She could barely make out Avend University’s glassbrick spires and the hilly park uphill from the campus. The park was dotted with lanterns and pavilions set up for the Ascendance Fair. Bobbing in a breeze, the lanterns looked pretty, like cottony fireflies. Nia had never attended the Fair. She’d stayed too busy with work. Unremitting work had gained her the job of Assistant Counsel at the university.

Wendis was a hard place to get to know. It showed foreigners a polite and entertaining face, which turned out to be practically inscrutable. After three years Nia knew less about Wendis than the average Wendisan child. The Fair, on the other hand, was designed expressly for visitors. It might be fun, if you could just be an entertained visitor.

As though the signal pod on her bracelet had read her mind, it chirped a call from Hiro. Nia stepped into a nearby commcube to hear what he had to say. When she put the pod into the signal slot, one wall of the commcube melted away to show the foggy, lantern-lit park close up. Hiro appeared in front of her, holding a butter-yellow daffodil.

“No,” Nia told him.

He was a slender Wendisan with golden skin, curly black hair, and a pleasant, expressive face. Now his forehead wrinkled slightly. “No?”

“No, I will not play the part of the Queen of Europa in your Fair.”

“The Fair Committee just had a long meeting. Almost the only item on the agenda everyone agreed on was that you would be the best choice for the role in all of Wendis! We have so few people with authentic Europan skin tones, and like most lawyers, you’re good at acting.” Behind Hiro, people struggled to inflate a large pavilion, with a breeze making the transparent material twist and flap. “And this year our Fair happens to coincide with your home world’s Green Holidays, commemorating your astronaut ancestors. Surely that would be propitious.”

More like conspicuous. Torn between admiration and irritation at Hiro’s persistence, Nia used the Wendisan triple negative. “No, no-no. Is this why you called?”

Hiro opened his hands; the daffodil disappeared. It was a virtual flower. “Not really. We have a legal emergency.”

He explained. On the other end of Wendis tonight, in the Port, a xenecology professor returning with a newly discovered alien species had run afoul of Customs in the Port. Customs balked after the professor checked both plant and animal in the declarations form.

A window in the commwall flashed on, showing six small tangles of leaves and tendrils. They looked like thinnings from Grandda Vim’s garden greenhouse. All six specimens had been impounded at the Port.

Nia told Hiro, “I’m sure the Port officials don’t want anything dangerous getting past them into the Fair. But Professor Zeng is a reputable xenecologist. He wouldn’t bring in something dangerous. Our best tactic is a provisional waiver of identity, like for people, when their gender is ambivalent but irrelevant. An identity waiver will put the matter into a different department in the Port—away from anyone heated up by arguing with Zeng.”

“I’ll transmit the waiver within the hour. Should the creatures be provisionally animal or vegetable?” Hiro had a twinkle in his eye. “Or mineral?”

“Vegetable. The Wendisan fondness for plants may predispose the Port authorities favorably.” A vine-and-flower design bordered the walls of Nia’s commcube. “I wonder if the plant-animals bloom? That would be an interesting twist in your flower code.”

A luminous daffodil winked into the flowery border of the commwall. That much of the flower code she knew. A daffodil symbolized the offer of an unexpected yet delightful opportunity. On the verge of saying for the last time, NO, Nia found her attention caught by the inflated pavilion behind Hiro. Someone had turned on a string of colored lights along its spine. The pavilion reminded Nia of Greening Eve, of phosphor lights blazing in niches carved in ice outdoors, bright chandeliers in a lofty cathedral, singing and giving gifts. Being a gifted member of a happy family. The pavilion blurred with Nia’s tears.

“Counselor?”

If he’d directly asked her what the problem was, she might have told him. It tied into things she hated to think about, but tonight had brought everything closer to the surface than usual. With a direct question, she would have explained. But it was Wendisan custom not to ask direct, personal questions.

Silence stretched out uncomfortably.

“I’m not rejecting your Fair.” The thought of staying at work while all of Wendis was having a festival made the pit of her stomach feel hollow. “I’m sure it’s wonderful.”

Maybe Hiro picked up on the emotional freight in her words. “I would be honored to show you the Fair on Opening Day. Let me give you an insider’s view of the Fair.”

It was an attractive offer, but Hiro had ulterior motives.

Then Nia realized what was going on. Space games. In all spaceships and stations everywhere, people invented innumerable little games—weightless food games, clever new uses for tools, subtle exercises in marking territory—ways to stay sane and cooperative in close quarters in a patently hostile universe. As huge and old as it was, Wendis was a space habitat too. For her to ever be at home here, she would have to learn to play intricate Wendisan space games. Her choices were to be a player or to be a pawn. Being an unknowing pawn was how she had once made an interstellar fool of herself. She did not like being a pawn.

She’d rather be a player. Starting with the Fair. The bottle of Aquarel felt cool and heavy inside the carry-cloth. In a way that had nothing to do with the brain chemistry involving ethanol, it gave her courage. Here goes. “Mattis and Vijay-Kol each asked me to go to the Fair. To be evenhanded, I’ll go with both of them, and you can show us the Fair, but you’ll be free to leave if Committee duty calls you away.”

It was a reasonable counteroffer, and Hiro knew it. “I will be honored,” he said politely.

Nia felt pleased with herself. She suspected that Mattis and Vijay-Kol, given the interest each of them had been showing in her lately, and given an opportunity to attend the Fair with her, would outdo each other trying to monopolize her. At best, everyone would have a reasonably good time. At worst, Hiro would have very little leeway to maneuver her into the unwanted role of Queen of Europa.

The rational side of her mind asked, would playing that role really be so bad?

A different part of her mind countered with the slashing swiftness of a reflex burned in by pain. Looking like a fool is always bad. It wrecks your life. Never again.

2

FAIR PLAY

Words glittered on a soaring gate the color of gold. Welcome to Parhelon Fair, it said.

This was the oldest and grandest of all the Ascendance Fairs in Starmark. The Fairs all celebrated that singular age of invention and violence that formed the modern human universe—the age of the Ascendance—when rockets first launched from the face of Earth, spacecraft streamed away from the home planet, and finally, starships left, never to return.

A chattering crowd streamed through admission portals in the golden gate, but Hiro directed Nia to an inconspicuous side door. He waved his Fair pass and let them both into the Fairgrounds. “What would you most like to see?” Hiro asked.

Nia answered, “My Wendisan great-grandmother was very old, and I was very small when she died. But I remember her having soft wrinkles and white hair like a cloud and telling me about the Fair in Wendis, that it meant playing make-believe games, having good things to eat, and putting on costumes. It sounded wonderful.”

“Then we’ll look for your great-grandmother’s Fair today,” Hiro said warmly.

A few minutes later, two familiar, youthful professors strode through the Golden Gate. “It should be ‘Perihelion Fair,’” said Mattis, the disheveled but brilliant physicist. “Right now Wendis is at perihelion in orbit around its sun.”

Vijay-Kol, contrastingly sleek and polished but equally brilliant, parried with a criticism from his own field. “As I tell my Elementary History class, this Fair distorts history to a ludicrous extent. The real Golden Gate is thought by most scholars to have been a bridge.”

“Those are functionally different things.”

Nia smiled at them. Evidently, they were going to be every bit as possessive of her attention as she had expected. Let’s see Hiro get around that!

Hiro said, “Most visitors go to the Mall first of all.”

“To get to there we follow the yellow brick road,” Vijay-Kol said, reading a signpost.

“It’s interesting that people in the twentieth century favored yellow bricks for roadway paving material,” said Mattis.

The Replica Factory sold precious plastic toys, letter openers shaped like prehistoric swords, and model rockets. Mattis and Vijay-Kol found those things more fascinating than Nia did. Hiro suggested, “Just a few doors down is the shop with the best garb in the whole Fair. Let me show you.” Intrigued, Nia followed Hiro out of the Replica Factory, into the center of the Mall, which surrounded an ice-skating rink under a skylight.

It gave Nia an odd twinge to think of ice skating on the fevered world that Earth had been at the Ascendance. Here, though, the ice rink was a playground. Neophytes in bright clothes lined up at the rail on one side of the ice, released the rail then coasted toward the opposite one, pushed by the spingravity. Advanced skaters glided through loops reshaped by spingravity, carving rococo lines on the ice. In a separate area, fenced off by an elastic barricade, people from terraformed worlds scooted across the ice on their backs and bottoms, laughing and gasping at how spingravity made them swerve or slow or accelerate, depending on which way they launched themselves from the rail.

The Timely Emporium occupied a prime location facing the ice rink. Nia felt a flash of alarm when Hiro revealed that the shop belonged to Bess Elzebet Seller, the Chairwoman of the Fair Committee. She was away, though. Busy running the whole Fair, she had left a niece in charge. So instead of encountering the Fair’s Chair, Nia met her goods.

Folded bandannas and neckties filled small bins. Brightly colored Twentycent garb dangled from high racks. Exquisitely crafted pieces of jewelry were displayed in transparent cases. On top of the cases, glass and stone beads were heaped like lustrous moraines. Oh my, Nia thought, I could have a wonderful time playing dress-up in here. She discovered thick, soft sweaters. “This is real wool. It’s first quality,” she told Hiro.

Vijay-Kol materialized at her elbow. “I’ll buy one for you.”

“None of these are my color,” Nia said sweetly. Ten points off for lack of originality.

Vijay-Kol was from Faxe, the prime world of the Faxen Union, the single most powerful polity at this end of human history. He was a product of the Faxen ruling class—physically nearly perfect, certain that anything could be bought, and certainly able to afford it. Azureans, however, knew not to be unduly influenced by Faxen wealth. That was good political strategy, and good personal strategy too. Nia had to admit, though, that Vijay-Kol was attractive. He wore his physical perfection well, like an expensive but familiar, tailored suit of clothes. Mattis had a much different charm—he was as engaging as an unabashed young dog.

It was customary for visitors to the Fair to buy bits and pieces of antique costumes. Vijay-Kol donned a green beret which complimented his sharply tailored coverall. Mattis selected a paisley tie that clashed with his tunic. Nia shared a dubious look with Hiro, and they both suppressed laughter.

Exiting the Mall, the small group boarded an aerial tram. As the tram purred upward through the foggy air, Hiro explained the layout of the Fair. “During the Fair, much of the inside surface of Wendis is turned into Fairgrounds. The plain around the central part of the Celadon Sea depicts the twentieth century, but the Fairgrounds reach up onto Mount Zaber. There, and east of the Sea as well, are recreations of eras even further back in ancient history.”

“That’s historically lax,” said Vijay-Kol. “It’s supposed to be the Ascendance, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

“It’s a game, and the rules are what they are,” Nia said.

Hiro nodded approvingly.

I’m catching on, Nia thought.

The fog thinned. Now they could see the misty foothills of Mount Zaber. A wide valley opened up out of the bulk of the mountain. Tall, slim towers stood in the center of the valley. That, Hiro said, was Rocket Park. Finally the tram slanted down into a box canyon where stood a cluster of flimsy-looking buildings. Mattis called out, “Wild West, here we come!”

The buildings were made of distressed fauxwood. Papier-mâché horses in various poses stood next to fauxwood rails beside the street. Food vendors offered fry bread, curry, and doughnuts. “Curry is good on the fry bread,” said Mattis, waving a piece with his mouth full. Hiro bought Nia a cup of strong, tasty kavva and a piece of a gingery cake. “I know which foodstuffs are authentic, such as this gingerbread,” he confided.

The Edge of Town overlooked a brushy gulch where Cowboys and Indians were scheduled to fight over possession of an oil well. It began with a staged scuffle between a Cowboy and an Indian. The actors rolled around in a flurry of feathers and faux-leather fringes. They were university people who had spent many hours rehearsing. Hiro glowed with approval. Later, there would be a Train Robbery. The huge, black machine waited on a hill. Its track ran down to cross a narrow plain, and momentum would make it roll that way to be attacked by Robbers and defended by Lawmen. Tonight there would be a Pow-Wow, with all the actors who’d spent the day fighting each other recreating ancient, sacred dances around real, open-air fires.

Unfortunately, Mattis and Vijay-Kol pulled each other into an argument about the historicity and fluid mechanics of oil wells. Vijay-Kol’s voice slid into the tones of a lecturer. Mattis responded as though in a scientific dispute, waving his hands. Nia, for whose benefit the two were putting on their sideshow, did not feel benefited.

Hiro asked, “Would you like to come behind the scenes with me?”

In fact, Nia would have preferred to simply enjoy the Fair. But avoiding the Fair game was no way to learn to play it. She interrupted Mattis and Vijay-Kol to say, “Enjoy the show. We need to see to university business.” True enough, since Hiro’s role on the Fair Committee was University Liaison. She followed him to an inconspicuous door in the low cliff that bounded the canyon. A brief translating elevator ride brought them to the six-sided control room for the Fair. “Welcome to the Hexagon,” said Hiro.

Nia looked around curiously. Everyone in here wore Fair garb as they sat under holovision screens or conferred around tables.

A bulky man in a long, brown coat intercepted them. Hiro said, “This is Security Chief Echt, and that’s an FBI trench coat he’s wearing, Fair Bailiffs and Investigators—”

The Chief growled, “Drat these high-handed foreigners! Hiro, some Faxi bodyguards roughed up a couple of Albian university students. The Albis were calling the Faxi party names, but the Faxis overreacted. We squared the situation away, but it left a bad taste in some mouths, including ours.”

“Faxens and Albians would think that Wendis is neutral territory,” Nia observed.

“It is, ma’am, but the Fair has its own rules.”

A man wearing a white coat and spectacles with heavy plastic rims joined them. Hiro said, “This is Jake Isoroku Genner, the Fair’s Liaison from the Engineer’s Guild. He’s garbed like a Rocket Scientist.”

“Honored,” Nia said correctly.

“This is your university lawyer?” Genner asked.

Hiro said, “She is Nia Inanna Az-Courant.”

“Honored!” the Fair-garbed men chorused.

Nia was floored. Her complete Azurean surname was Az-Courant, “Az” signifying astronaut ancestry. She didn’t go by that name form here. And on top of that, Hiro had used “Nia” like a Wendisan social nickname. That was a huge compliment to her.

“Are we getting rid of the chaff with purple hair?” Genner asked.

Hiro explained, “The woman cast as Europan Queen insists on purple hair. Bess Elzebet Seller was the Queen of Ethiopia in her younger days and is a stickler for authenticity. She deems purple hair authentic Twentycent, but not role appropriate. They’ve argued about it.”

Nia gestured toward her own hair. “Silver may be even less authentic than purple.”

“Bess Elzebet wondered about that,” said Genner. “But since the quicksilver hair on Azure is early genetic engineering from Earth, everyone agreed it’s essentially authentic.”

Nia stared at him. That was an Az family secret. Or so the Az families thought. Wendis, though, had been finding out and filing away stray secrets for two thousand years. She knew that by now, and kept learning it all over again.

Swelling with the importance of what he intended to say, Chief Echt intoned, “Permit me, ma’am, to suggest that it would bring honor to your astronaut ancestors if you were to step into the luminary role. . . .” Nia was about to be put in the awkward position of flatly turning down admirers. But then the Chief’s wristpod chimed. The Chief held that wrist to his ear, listening to a report coming through on his official ID cuff. His face darkened. “Hiro! There’s a missing student.”

“Just one?” Hiro sounded annoyed.

“This one is a high-lordling from Goya. Has a head stuffed full of fairy tales and daring plans, no doubt, and your Proctor can’t account for him.”

Hiro replied, “Don’t rely on our Proctor. He’s a useless political appointee. Find the boy’s friends, roommates, rivals, and ask them if they know where he might be.”

Nia said, “Point out that anyone who withholds information about a fellow student engaging in prohibited activities is violating the Honor Code themselves.”

The Chief asked Hiro, “Should the spooks search for him?”

Nia said, “It looks like you have an emergency. I better get out of your way.”

“Not yet,” said Hiro, answering both Nia and the Chief. “The Goyan boy may be in the amusement park. I’ll direct our group there and look for him.”

In the transvator back to the Wild West, Nia said, “You knew introducing me with the Wendisan nickname form would charm them. Too bad your Fair duties derailed your intentions.”

He scowled at the floor of the transvator. “I wish the wargamers would use Proctor Kugel for target practice. It will be a public relations nightmare for the Fair and the university if a student from a prominent Goyan family gets into trouble on the dark side of the Fair.”

“What dark side? I thought the Fair was safe and visitor friendly.”

“Nia Inanna, the Fair has never been as safe as we make it seem. And this year it’s more dangerous than ever.”

Riding the roller coaster with Mattis left Nia windblown and laughing. Mattis was ecstatic. “In the straightaway it was velocity perfectly counteracting the spin of Wendis! No spingravity. We were weightless. We are in space. We really are.”

Still breathless, Nia gasped, “Those swooping curves made the whole world seem to rock back and forth! And the corkscrew—!”

“Made us oscillate between microgravity and double g. Wow!”

“I’m dizzy.” Nia clung to Mattis to steady herself. Extra credit for making her enjoy spingravity for once.

Jealousy flashed across Vijay-Kol’s chiseled features.

Hiro had not seen the missing Goyan boy in the amusement park. Nia wondered what in the Fair would most attract a Goyan boy—specifically, an aristocrat’s son from the feudal kingdoms in the interior of Goya’s single large continent.

Hiro directed his little group through a shortcut in a fence to Everyville. He glanced around searchingly while pointing out Elm Street, with boxlike little houses, and Main Street, with City Hall and other edifices. Nia doubted that the Goyan boy would be here. Mattis, on the other hand, excitedly called out, “Look! A car!” Ancient vehicles lined one block of Main Street. The ambulance, fire truck, and taxicab were superficial facsimiles. The garbage truck, complete with working collection mechanisms and being demonstrated by uniformed actors, was surrounded by curious Wendisans. Denizens of a tightly closed environmental loop, Wendisans were highly interested in ancient dealings with waste matter.

The cherry-red road car had its hood invitingly open to reveal real Ascendance automotive technology. After many minutes, Mattis had to be pulled away from his contemplation of the internal combustion engine.

“The vehicles will be in the March of History,” said Hiro. “The March starts in the Rift Valley beyond the other end of the Sea. Participants come down the Silk Road and up the Roman Road, and some descend the East and West Highways from the mountains. When it reaches full strength, the March ends at Rocket Park at midnight.”

Hiro led them to Town Square, where a large lawn surrounded a Courthouse. Food vendors ringed the Square. Besides kebobs and curry buns and twists of salted, baked dough, there were tubes of meat in long, white buns with bright red, green, and yellow condiments. “Hot dogs!” Hiro said. “From the ancient literature it’s clear that Twentycent people enjoyed eating dog. This is synthmeat, though.”

Nia chose a surimi shrimp kebob instead.

Beyond the buildings of Town Square rose a slender spire. Pointing with the kebob, Nia asked, “Is that a make-believe church?”

“At Fair time, it pretends to be a stage set pretending to be an antique church,” said Hiro. “But it’s really a church, the only one in Wendis, St. Delaney-by-the-Sea.”

Nia frowned. She knew that there were a few Catholic Orthodox believers in Wendis. Fine. They had to worship somewhere. Wendis also had at least one sect of Hades worshippers. There was no reason for her to cross paths with either group.

Hiro led their little group to the Town Square lawn, where they picnicked on springy grass dotted with yellow flowers. “This is the best lawn in Everyville,” Nia said.

“It’s been tended for years by one of our faculty,” Hiro said. “Lee, the drama professor. For this year’s Fair, he’s directing an ancient play called A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“He’s done a good job directing this lawn.” Nia noted healthy crabgrass, dandelions, and clumps of lush chickweed—all standard terraforming species. None of them grew outdoors on Azure except in rare sheltered spots. She became aware of feeling comfortably warm. Wendis always seemed cold to her, colder than Azure. On Azure, you lived in warm greenhouses and stonebuilt habitats with good heating systems. Wendis tended toward energy conservation and cool, clammy fogs. But this was summer in Wendis, perihelion, when Wendis orbited closest to its sun and the engineers tuned the weather to make it balmy.

Mattis and Vijay-Kol were arguing about something again, but in a fair and spirited way like the professors they were. Hiro quietly conferred with the Hexagon about the still-missing Goyan student. Meanwhile, a Marching Band worked its way past the food vendors on Main Street, putting forth brisk horn and drum music. Nia liked sitting here with friends, pretending to be at home in the first home of all, on Earth in the summer.

A hollow boom, and then another, echoed in the air. “The war games.” Vijay-Kol scrambled up. “We don’t want to miss this.” He took Nia’s arm.

“What about the physics of bullets?” Mattis crowded close to Nia’s other side. “A bullet launched anti-spinwise would break loose from the spingravity and fly free.”

“They use beams of light and mesh vests that register hits,” said Hiro.

It was late morning. The sun ball in the heart of Wendis had almost reached the midpoint of its crystalline spar. Fair visitors congregated at the City Limit where Everyville ended on the brink of one of the Celadon Sea’s great slosh cliffs. Below, a plain stretched between the cliff and the pale green water. Usually it served as sport fields, but today the Darkling Plain framed the main war game of the Fair. The program was detailed in an information kiosk. “The cliffs on Aven Island are painted white,” Nia said. “That’s supposed to be a place called Britain that had white chalk cliffs. Where we’re standing is called Normandy.”

“I know what war it is,” said Vijay-Kol. “Mid-Twentycent. They had rifles, bayonets, artillery cannons—no lightguns, no atomics until the very end.” The Plain and the sea swarmed with re-enactors, foot soldiers on the Plain and seagoing soldiers in boats on the water. The game plan was clear enough: an invasion of the land from the sea. Artillery boomed again. “Half a million prehistoric humans died or were wounded at Normandy,” Vijay-Kol lectured. “Pitiful, really, because there was no human speciation in those days. Any of them could have interbred with each other’s wives. Yet they had differences worth a world war. Such was old Earth in the last days before it went to seed and sowed the stars with starships.”

He’s hard hearted, Nia thought. Many Faxens were nice people, though naïve—Mattis being a good example on both counts—but Vijay-Kol knew what kind of toll history had exacted. It didn’t move him. He felt all the pain and toil and waste of history justified because Faxe now rested at its pinnacle.

“There aren’t half a million re-enactors down there,” Mattis said. He swept the Plain with his hand held at arm’s length then announced, “Maybe fifty-five hundred.”

Hiro said, “That’s a very good estimate. Counting supporting players, there are almost six thousand participants. The makeup artists under the bushes will use many liters of red paint making the wounded look wounded.”

Eager, interested, Mattis was a shiny slate where pain and disappointment had never written anything. He and Nia were about the same age, but Nia felt older.

She became aware of warm radiance on her arms. “The fog burned off.”

“The engineers promised the Fair Director clear weather at noon,” said Hiro.

For once, the interior of Wendis was clear. In the center of the cylindrical world loomed the Wend Range, three mountains that rose up like frozen waves, curved spinwise. The middle mountain, Specter, rose so high that it curled around the sunspar at the center of the world. The radiant sun ball in its crystal spar had already glided past the jagged crest of Mount Chance. The sun ball was approaching tall Specter, after which it would pass over broad Mount Zaber.

Re-enactors flowed onto the Darkling Plain. They formed up into opposing forces, armed with glinting guns and bayonets, shielded by sharp wire, sturdy boat hulls and the long metal snouts of the artillery weapons. The two sides of the war confronted each other across the glistening edge of the sea. When they came to blows, it would ring to the eaves of the world, even though it was all a show. Nia found herself holding her breath. She expelled it in irritation as she realized that Vijay-Kol meant to deliver a lecture on ancient military history here and now, stifling Mattis’ attempts to lecture on the physics of antique weaponry.

The armies moved. Ranks of combatants crashed into each other, falling into chaotic patterns, regrouping. Artillery throbbed. Land mines blossomed like thunderous flowers. Spectators cheered. Vijay-Kol and Mattis fell silent. With horrified fascination, Nia noticed scores of wargamers playing dead, splashed with blood-red paint.

Then the sun ball reached the summit of Specter. The tallest mountain’s shadow fell on the Darkling Plain. It happened every day, but the world was usually so full of bright fog as to make the noontime eclipse hardly noticeable. Not today. Obscuring the sun, Specter loomed tall and dark, and the summit that curled around the sunspar evoked the hooded face of a menacing, supernatural figure. The shadow sweeping the Darkling Plain from west to east was its terrible cloak, and fear swept with it. Nearby, a child sobbed.

Nia backed away. She couldn’t stand watching the war under the eclipse. It was only shadow and show, but it felt too real. She slipped away through the crowd.

In the quiet, dim interior of St. Delaney-by-the-Sea, Nia had her head in her hands when she sensed someone sitting down next to her. She murmured, “Hiro, I thought your Fair was all farce and games, but that was about real history.” And it had made her instinctively seek a place that felt safe, and she’d come here. Old habits die hard. But St. Delaney did feel safe. It was silently empty—no priests, no congregation, and Hiro was here with her.

“The Director of the Fair is a profound man,” Hiro said. “His Fairs point toward truth while being entertaining. No one’s ever seen anything quite like today, though. I think the Director means to suggest a shadow falling on our own time in history. Just as it must have seemed to people in the twentieth century, a happy outcome is not yet certain.”

Nia shook her head. “Earth going to seed and throwing off starships that germinated on new worlds—that’s easy to say, and happy for us, but the twenty-first century was blood and terror and death for millions. History almost ended before it began.”

“Some people believe Faxe is throwing a dark shadow on our day.”

“My father, for one.” She looked up at windows radiant with scenes of Earth and serene human figures. The window near the altar depicted St. Delaney in his spacesuit among the asteroids. “See the saints, Hiro? They glow because they lived in dark times.”

Hiro diplomatically answered, “I’m Buddhim, but all faiths in Wendis have holy people.”

“Are there any holy people in the March of History?”

“The role of Gautama Buddha is played by a Buddhim priest. An equally irreproachable priest plays Attila the Hun. Three friends of mine play Popes. They adore the gorgeous garb.”

Nia had an incipient headache. “So the Fair is a farce except when it isn’t.”

“The garb isn’t at all farcical for those who have key roles. It’s as authentic as possible, and very nice. For example, the Queen of Europa wears an authentic, lovely dress—”

Nia could hardly believe her ears. “And you want me to play that role? Nobody in space places wears dresses—except the hookers in the port! What do you take me for?”

“I can explain, Counselor—”

“Look, if you’re going to tell people Nia is my social nickname, just call me Nia!” If she’d known how emotionally ragged she’d be today, she would have skipped the Fair.

Hiro said, “The Fair includes those Popes in robes, and a phalanx of Old Roman warriors in skirts, all of them dignified, none of them going near the zero-gravity realms until they change into sensible shorts or coveralls.”

His wristpod whistled frantically. With obvious irritation, he punched a stud on the pod. Nia heard the consternated voice of Chief Echt. “We know where that Goyan lord’s son is. He’s in the Siege of Jerusalem and so is a hereditary enemy of his family—a university upperclassman also from Goya. They intend private combat.”

Tension etched into Hiro’s face. “Please tell me the other Goyan is a Saracen re-enactor.”

“No. He’s a Crusader.” The Chief signed off.

Hiro ran his hand through his hair. “If a student from a prominent Goyan family gets hurt, the consequences will be awful. Scandal. Hospital expenses. Other Goyan families pulling their children out of the university!”

“People are re-enacting the Siege of Jerusalem?”

“The Fair Committee was opposed, since it’s a thousand years too early. But those putting the idea forward made a case for the Crusades being key background for twenty-first century history, and the Committee was overruled. I must go. I’m sorry.”

So that was what a Goyan lord’s son most wanted to do in the Fair. “I’m coming with you. You may need a lawyer.”

3

THE PLAIN OF PAIN

The nearest commcube was camouflaged as an archaic telephone booth. Nia messaged Mattis and Vijay-Kol to say that she and Hiro had been called away to urgent university business but hoped to rejoin them later. Then Nia and Hiro caught a train at the transit tube station. They had a compartment to themselves, with a low table on which Hiro spread out an insider’s map of the Fair. It was more detailed than the maps in the hands of Fair guests, and updated in real time. East of the Celadon sea and west of its terminal slosh cliff, Hiro’s map showed an area called the Plain of Pain. Moving dots surrounded an icon labeled “Jerusalem.”

Several of the dots were red. “Casualties,” Hiro admitted.

“Make-believe?”

Hiro shook his head unhappily. “They’ll be taken to the hospital and put back together. I didn’t want you to see this part of the Fair.” His shoulders sagged.

The tube train coasted into a station where the signage flashed ZONED PARK: HEADQUARTERS AND VISITOR CENTER. A dozen visitors filed off the tube train. Nia said, “Never mind what I think about the Fair. Who’s who around Jerusalem?”

“The Saracens are honorable fighters, with notable exceptions. There are also Byzantine mercenaries looking for trouble, and some Zulu warriors siding with the Saracens. The Crusaders, I’m sorry to say, draw from the worst element in Wendis. They usually find their recreation in the high Zones in the Park.”

The tube train slowed and stopped again. PARK ZONE 5: INFERNO.

Additional signage flashed under the station announcement. RESTRICTED ACCESS: MUST HAVE REQUIRED PERMITS AND WAIVERS FILED WITH PARK RANGERS.

The aching tension in Nia’s head seeped into her shoulders. From perplexity to dread. “I like the Zoned Park up to Zone Four. I know any zone higher than that has real danger. But I’m one of few foreigners who’ve ever read the whole Wendisan Legal Code. Wendis has legal immunity from an explicit variety of bad outcomes to visitors in the Park, as long as the waivers are in order. I thought some of the waiver wording was fanciful, and the signage about danger was only meant to titillate. But now I suspect that terrible things happen in the Park. Am I right?”

Hiro sighed. “People from all the terraformed worlds in Starmark pay well to take part in dangerous, and sometimes terrible, games in the Zoned Park. Danger pleases some people. It makes them feel focused, or alive, or superior to those who avoid danger. Or superior to those don’t survive.”

Nia shivered.

The next brief stop flashed in red letters. PARK ZONE NINE: THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME: HIGHLY RESTRICTED: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. Nia had seen that signage before. Today it made her skin crawl.

Hiro’s voice was quiet and bitter. “The Fair Council has to negotiate with the vested interests of the Zoned Park. This year they drove a hard bargain. As a result, we reserved the Plain of Pain for the Park’s most dangerous elements, so they can come out to play with history too, in return for not killing, robbing, exploiting, or scaring tourists in the Fair.”

Nia felt numb. Parts of Wendis aren’t as bad as I thought. They’re worse.

“Still, the players on the Plain of Pain must follow the Fair rules.”

“Fair rules?”

“Everyone has a role, and every role has rules. There are rulers—Popes, Queens, Presidents—but their authority is limited by continent and ethnic or religious group.” Hiro seemed happier to slant the conversation back to the Fair as a whole. “The inhumans have secret rules, and everyone who plays a magical being has the magic rule set. It’s all old school.”

“Old what?”

“In Wendisan secret rhyming talk, school means rule.”

“Why do I sometimes hear the phrase ‘rotten onion’ in a very unlikely context?”

Hiro smiled conspiratorially. “Secret talk for Faxen Union.”

His wristpod whistled. The latest news from Chief Echt yanked Hiro back to his immediate problem. Apparently, the Goyan boy had arranged to meet a Crusader in private combat in front of Jerusalem’s Gate today, in the early afternoon. Hiro shook his head glumly. “There are five gates. We don’t have enough free safety officers to check all those gates in the next hour. We dare not send less than three together.”

The signage in the tube car flashed again. PARHELON FAIR: SIEGE OF JERUSALEM: NO CHILDREN OR PETS ALLOWED.

This wasn’t going to be her great-grandmother’s Fair. Or Nia’s idea of a fun game. But it sounded like a perfect place for a foolhardy young man to get into trouble. “Since they’re university students, would they recognize me?”

“Yes. You have very distinctive looks.”

“Then we take a likely Gate. Get a safety officer to meet us. That makes three and frees up someone else to check the other gates.”

Hiro shook his head. “Your citizenship has never been my business, and I assume it’s ex-officio. That’s not good enough to approach Jerusalem.”

“I’m a full legal citizen of Wendis,” Nia told him. “Out of all of her descendants, my great-grandmother bequeathed her citizenship to me.”

Hiro’s eyebrows went up. Then he said, “Just don’t forget that citizenship makes no difference to a flying spear.”

The view of Jerusalem from the bleachers was safe. Unfortunately, it was also distant. The stage-set city, called Jerusalem, brooded behind thick, high walls. In front of the west wall, attackers clustered in two groups. Fighters wearing tabards over suits of mail congregated under a vermillion banner. A separate, grubbier group surrounded an ungainly catapult.

A rider mounted on a horse cantered from one group to the other, attracting a hail of arrows from the city. A horse? Nia shook her head in amazement. The horse must have been bred in Wendis, or it would be even clumsier here than she was, since it had more feet. She tiredly rested her chin on her hand. “We aren’t getting anywhere. And the fighting isn’t either.”

“It isn’t scripted,” Hiro pointed out.

Mounted Saracens thundered around the northwest corner of the city. They tore through the Crusaders around the vermillion banner, cutting off and circling around a third of them. The rest of the Crusaders shouted and surged that way. The banner rocked and rippled. Then the details disappeared in a cloud of dust. Nia said, “We’ve got to get closer.”

“Even for a citizen, it’s dangerous to be a spectator on the ground here.”

“Where does that leave our student?” Nia retorted.

They climbed out of the bleachers. Spectators on the ground stood closer to the action. Hiro was of average height for a Wendisan, and he could barely see the action going on near Jerusalem, but he slipped through a crowd as easily as an eel through seagrass. Nia stuck to him, and they forced their way toward the battleground.

Nia was taller than most Wendisans, and for once it was an advantage to her. Over the spectators’ heads, she watched a detachment of mounted Crusaders racing toward the fracas in progress. Their swords and maces glinted in the sunlight. They rode into the dust cloud and stirred everything up. Flailing weapons and running feet could be glimpsed in the dust.

Nia didn’t see any blue-robed Saracens around the West Gate, or anywhere else.

The skirmish subsided. The two sides separated, dragging away their bleeding casualties. It looked like real blood, not paint. Of all things in all of history for Wendis to make a game of, the Siege of Jerusalem had to be one of the worst, and with horses, most logistically difficult. It was absurd. Unless the psychological logic was to hammer away at a crooked place in history, trying to make it right. What it said about Wendis, harboring a game this elaborately brutal and historically compulsive, Nia did not want to wonder.

Nia and Hiro reached a huge, flat rock, a good vantage point, just in time for there to be no action to see. Hiro called the Hexagon. He learned that the Security Officer who was supposed to meet them—Chief Echt—had been delayed by a fracas nearby. Spectators were breaking through the sidelines south of Jerusalem for a better look at the fighting between Zulus and Byzantine mercenaries.

They sat down on the big flat rock to wait for the Chief. Nia drew her hand across her brow. “Why is it so awfully hot here?”

Hiro wiped his own face with a fauxsilk handkerchief. “This is a heat dump for the environmental systems. It’s historically apt, as ancient Jerusalem was in a desert.”

“The Darkling Plain is smooth. Why do the stones here have sharp edges?”

“Many years ago, in the Great Tumble, a coal-black asteroid glanced off the hull of Wendis. In the catastrophe that followed, a section of Mount Chance fell down. The Plain of Pain is the debris field.”

Staging the Siege of Jerusalem on a sharp-edged field of ruin seemed weirdly apt. It also made Nia more uneasy than ever. She didn’t like this place or this war.

Enemy groups glared at each other. Nia felt dangerous anticipation in the air like the electric tension before a thunderstorm. She and Hiro had to find that Goyan boy, and soon, before the storm broke. Hiro, though, was too fundamentally decent and gentle to decipher the black heart of a game like this. When in doubt get good advice. But who in Wendis could advise her about a vicious war game? Not university professors or officials! Then who?

Ah. Maybe Nia knew the right person. She told Hiro. “We’ve got to do something. I think Robard Benedet is probably involved in this. Do you think we could contact him?”

To Nia’s surprise, Hiro bristled. “You only know him from tedious university functions where he’s a more sophisticated and witty companion than anyone else, and you’re the most attractive and exotic woman there. He has his reasons to be attentive and charming to you at such times. It would be stupid to seek his help here.”

He was still bristling. Suddenly she knew why. “You’re afraid of Robard.”

Hiro’s fist clenched on his map. “There are nasty rumors about his sexual dealings with men. You’ve never seen that, since you are only social friends, in public. I’m sure you haven’t been alone with him—”

“Don’t be so sure,” Nia snapped.

“Great Heaven! How could you?” Hiro’s voice rose.

“What you just said!” Her voice rose too. “And how intriguingly Wendisan he is!”

Hiro gasped. “His sort isn’t a true Wendisan!”

“Like the Zoned Park isn’t Wendis and the Siege of Jerusalem isn’t the Fair?” she shot back. She’d never argued with Hiro before. The atmosphere here was laced with hostility. “There may be Wendisan things and people that you’re too nice to understand.”

Hiro glanced around, taking in the spectators closing in around them. He muttered, “Behind his back people call him Bent Robard.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. I only thought we might be able to get information from him. I didn’t say I trust him to help us, because I don’t. He keeps a monster caged in the basement of his soul. I know because I’ve seen it.”

Hiro looked startled. “Seen it?”

“Not under intimate circumstances,” she said before Hiro’s imagination could run wild. “It was when he showed me his collection of replicas of ancient weapons.”

Robard Benedet displayed his weapons in the hall of his house—by Wendisan standards, a large and expensively furnished house. What he had lifted out of its display case to show her was a spiked ball attached by a chain to a short stick. Unlike the swords, daggers, and lances, which were things of severe beauty, this thing, called morning star, had looked ugly and cruel. Yet he’d held it gently—almost caressingly. At that moment she’d seen behind his eyes a shadowy, monstrous, barbaric mood very much at odds with his urbane exterior.

Even in the heat here, the memory made Nia shiver. The monster at the bottom of Robard’s soul would like the Siege of Jerusalem. It might even be let out of its cage to play.

Hiro’s wristpod whistled. “Hiro?” It was Security Chief Echt. “The locator puts you at the Rock by the Hard Place. Stay put—I’m on my way. We have new information. The spooks think he’s on the west side of the city!”

“We see no sign of the boy near the western gate,” Hiro answered.

Nia jumped up onto the rock and looked toward Jerusalem. “The battle lines are forming up again. Are you sure the city has only five gates?”

Hiro smoothed out the map and laid it on his knees. “This shows a great gate on the northwest corner, and one in each direction of the compass.”

“The original city had a tiny gate called the Needle’s Eye.”

Hiro traced the wall of Jerusalem with his finger. “Yes! Near the northwest corner!”

Nia squinted, trying to see across the field. “I think I see it under that minaret.”

“There are so many moving dots on this map that they look like trails of ants! A column of Crusaders is marching from the north, and Saracens are streaming out of the major gates to meet them. The west side of Jerusalem is no place for private combat—it looks as though a battle will break out there!”

Nia shook Hiro’s shoulder. “What if a foreigner, who shouldn’t be here at all, gets killed? There’d be no way to pin the blame on anyone.”

“Killed?” Hiro clutched his hair. “That would be a disaster for the Committee and the university!”

And for the boy. Nia turned back toward Jerusalem. A flutter of bright blue cloth caught her eye. “I see him!” She leaped off the rock and ran toward the Needle’s Eye.

“Nia! Wait!”

Nia wove through spectators crowding toward Jerusalem. Beyond the spectators she glimpsed a blue-robed Saracen and a Crusader brandishing swords at one another, close to the wall. The Crusader wore a coat of mail—not the heavy authentic sort, but lightweight, bright synthetic mail that gleamed under the ragged sleeves of his tabard. If the Crusader was an upperclassman, he’d been in Wendis several years longer than the younger Goyan. That gave him a deadly advantage in the spingravity of Wendis. Fighting moves would make the boy in blue robes lose his balance, more likely sooner than later. If Nia’s own experience was any guide, he’d been here just long enough to think he could handle himself in spingravity.

The noise in the background escalated, and it had ominous sharp edges. Over her shoulder, Nia registered Crusaders and Saracens converging on the great Northwest gate, with splinters of battle spilling this way. The struggling blue Saracen seemed fixated on his adversary, heedless of the war looming toward him. Behind the two combatants, the Needle’s Eye stood open, only a little taller than a man, a port in the breaking storm of combat. Nia gestured toward it, hoping Hiro got the idea.

The Saracen staggered backward. He clutched his bleeding sword arm with his free hand. The Crusader pressed toward him. Nia caught the Crusader’s trailing cloak and gave it a hard yank. When he turned toward her, she ignored his sword and shook her finger in his face. “Are you trying to throw the Honor Code out into space ? I’ll see you in university Court!”

He took a step back. Good. He did recognize her. From the corner of her eye, she saw Hiro dragging their Saracen away toward the Eye of the Needle. Even better!

In front of the wall, Crusaders and Saracens collided like clashing tides and surged this way, yelling and bashing weapons against weapons. Panicky spectators, running, blocked Nia’s retreat toward the Needle’s Eye. The university Crusader ran away with the spectators.

A big brown warhorse angled out of the fighting. The horse carried a menacing mailed rider. Scattering spectators left and right, the rider made for the blue Saracen robe. In a split second, Nia guessed that the Crusader had never meant to kill his family’s enemy personally. Instead he’d arranged with another Crusader to make sure it happened—now.

Sidestepping on polished hooves, the horse covered the ground at a terrifying rate. Nia sprang aside. But the spingravity snared her feet. She fell. It seemed to happen in slow motion clogged with dread. She hit the rocky ground hard, flat on her face, and froze. The horse lunged over her. Its rear hooves thudded on each side of her head.

Hiro’s voice screamed, “Citizen down! Citizen down!”

The swirling action eddied, space opening around Nia. She sat up, feeling the sting of cuts from sharp rocks, but nothing that hurt enough to indicate a blow from the horse’s hoof. She seemed to be the center of interrupted action that rippled outward like a stone in a pond. Wargamers called out, “Citizen down!”

Stray spectators yelled, “Where?” “What citizen?” “That one!”

A mailed knight on a tall sorrel mare cantered up and stopped short. He leaped off, flinging the reins to a follower on foot. He tossed his helmet to another follower. Nia recognized Robard and saw that he was furious. He seized Nia’s wrist and roughly hauled her to her feet. “Citizen interfering, you mean.”

The morning star hung from his belt, caked with blood. Nia instinctively knew that this was a very bad way to encounter Robard. She drew in a breath, intending to tell him that it was a university matter. Before she could speak, he backhanded her. The mail on the back of his hand scraped her cheek. The pain brought tears to her eyes.

He’d never seen her in pain before. It changed something. She saw the monster in his soul uncoil behind his eyes. And stare at her. Terror shot through Nia’s nerves.

Behind Robard, Saracens had rushed out of the Eye of the Needle to carry the blue-robed boy back into the City. Instead of melting away with them, Hiro stepped forward. His voice shaking, Hiro told Robard, “Let her go. She’s a citizen!”

Keeping his grip in Nia’s wrist, Robard shook his head. “If your Committee comes for her under a parley flag—we’ll parley. Until then, she’s mine.” Crusaders ringed around them. The expressions obscured behind helmets and masks looked gleeful.

Dread crushed Nia’s breath. Robard liked men more than women, but he could like a woman well enough. What she had already known about him and what Hiro had said today about Robard’s reputation fused in an awful realization. Who Robard liked, he loved to hurt. If she couldn’t get away from him, he would hurt her and savor her pain.

Desperation spurred Nia to think fast. Rules worked in the Fair. Rules were how Robard usually kept his monster locked down. She stood straight and said, “No. I am your queen.”

“What?”

“I am the Queen of Europa.”

Robard shot Hiro a daggery glance. Hiro’s head bobbed up and down. “The Fair Committee’s unanimous choice!”

Robard let go of Nia’s wrist. He snatched a painted piece of wood out of a pocket and hurled it onto the ground. “Tell your servant to pick that up. It’s a token to get out of hell free. Show it if anyone tries to stop you. Now get out of my war.” Robard gestured, and his Crusaders handed him his helmet and the reins of his sorrel mare. He swung up onto the horse and led the Crusaders away like a magnet pulling iron filings.

The token got them past straggling Crusaders on foot and through a band of smirking mercenaries. Nia was trembling, but she kept her head up. Better act regal until out of sight of the Crusaders. As she and Hiro reached the bleachers, a ragged roar went up on the battlefield behind them. The combatants were at it again. When they ducked behind the bleachers, Nia and Hiro clung to each other. Hiro gasped, “I had no idea he would try to take a woman hostage!”

“I guessed the right rule to use on him!”

“Thank Heaven,” Hiro said faintly.

Chief Echt barreled behind the bleachers. “I said stay put at the Rock!” he bawled. “If I hadn’t seen her silver hair over the crowd, I’d never have found the two of you!”

“The boy is with the Saracens in the city,” Hiro said, “and hurt badly enough to stay wherever they put him.”

“Then both of you clear out of here!”

The roar of battle seemed louder, closer, studded with distinct crashes and thuds and whinnies from horses. Spectators started jumping off the back of the bleachers to flee. “To the tube station!” Hiro took Nia’s hand and led her at a full-out run past indecisive spectators and curious ones who stopped to look back. They dodged a squad of Fair Bailiffs pouring out of the train with stun guns in hand.

Hiro and Nia jumped into a train car just before it pulled out of the station. The tube train was packed with Fair visitors on their way to points West. Every seat was taken. Everyone stared at Nia and Hiro as they thumped down to sit on the floor. Hiro put his arm around her. “There was no time to find out if that beast stepped on you, should we go to the hospital?”

“It didn’t step on me and I’m not really hurt. What about you?” His shirt bore streaks of reddish-brown color that wasn’t paint.

“That boy was bleeding profusely and pale as a scallop when I got to him. Are you sure you aren’t hurt?”

“I’ve been in worse shape the times I fell off a horse at home. This was just falling under one.” Then the bigger picture sank in. Nia shuddered. “It’s bad enough to be conspicuous and trip on stairs all the time. How many people are going to hear how I fell under a horse?”

“Everyone in Wendis,” said Hiro.

4

ROCKET PARK

In the Hexagon, Fair Committee members and workers clustered around Nia and Hiro. The excited attention made Nia shrug awkwardly while the medic on duty assessed the bruises and cuts on her face, hands, and knees. Was she certain the horse hadn’t stepped on her? “It didn’t,” she insisted. “Horses know where their feet are, and I knew to stay still.” Cold dismay coiled in the pit of Nia’s stomach. Hiro was right. The foreigner falling under the horse would be the talk of the Fair.

A heavyset, dark-skinned woman hurried into the Hexagon. Garbed in bright geometric-patterned cloth, she parted the Fair workers like an angelfish scattering the lesser species of a coral reef. She announced, “Everything is witherspin on the Plain of Pain! The Jerusalem war went out of control, and I just heard that Hiro’s Az was run over by a horse!”

This was Bess Elzebet Seller, the Chair of the Fair.

Nia and Hiro gave her a more accurate account of events, including Nia’s narrow escape from Robard. Elzebet had a wide, kind face, and Nia told her about Robard’s motives. Elzebet threw her hands up in horror. “Durzy, go get some peppermint tea for this woman!” she ordered one of the Fair workers, and snapped at the medic, “Put that bottle of brown bandage away. This is Wendis, and you can find a shade that matches her skin. Do you think she’ll want this unpleasantness to jump out of every mirror at her?”

The cool air in the Hexagon chilled Nia. Everything has gone witherspin on the Plain of Pain. Nia had abstractly known that “witherspin” meant things going wrong or falling apart. Now she knew how it felt: everything spinning the wrong way and the all-pervasive force of spin unpredictably, perilously skewed. She shivered.

Elzebet wrapped a fluffy blanket around Nia’s shoulders. “We’d have had terrible trouble if that university student had been murdered, and I have you and Hiro to thank! But what in the name of Tumble was Bent Robard thinking? The nerve of him presuming to take an uninvolved citizen hostage, while he’s lording in the bloodiest war game anyone has ever seen! I’ve already had three calls from the hospital, and the last one was Dr. Tsuda herself complaining about how things are going. The Normandy Invasion swamped them with sprains and broken limbs, and then the half-dead from the Plain of Pain started pouring in. I’m filing charges against that Proctor of yours, Hiro. It’s his job to make your students stay inside the rules. He let that boy sneak away into the worst corner of the whole Fair, and the Bailiffs found three more of your students in the Den of Iniquity! Drink this, dear. Peppermint tea is just the thing after an upset.”

The tea was sweet and comforting, but Nia felt the skewed spin of circumstances forcing her in a direction she didn’t want to go. “The March of History must have started by now. Is it too late?”

Hiro answered, “No, the Twentycent actors haven’t joined it yet—”

“Then I have to do what I told Robard I would.”

Elzebet drew herself up to her full height and width, as dignified as the Ethiopian Queen she had once played. “That was said under duress, and that’s not how we do business.”

“I won’t be a liar,” Nia insisted. She gingerly touched her left cheekbone, which felt sore. “I may look worse for wear, but I don’t dare go back on my word.”

“She’s right,” said a man’s calm voice. “If she is the Queen, Bent Robard can’t take refuge in fury that he was publicly deceived. He may have no choice but to face the truth.”

“What truth, Ban Hayao?” Elzebet asked.

“If he’d taken a citizen hostage and tortured her, he would have crossed the line into criminality in the eyes of everyone in Wendis.” Detaching himself from the background, the calm-voiced man gently tilted Nia’s face. “My makeup artists can conceal your injuries.”

Hiro told Nia, “This is Ban Hayao Pannister, the Fair Director.”

Hayao Pannister had the clearest eyes Nia had ever seen, reminding her of still water in a deep pool. On impulse, Nia asked him a question that had been blazing in the back of her mind all afternoon. “I don’t understand your Fair. It’s illogical, it’s entertaining, it’s beautiful in places, and it can be serious as death and murderous as hell. Why?”

He smiled; a network of crow's-feet framed his eyes. “You have just described human history. But watch what happens at midnight tonight.”

To make sure she wouldn’t lose her nerve, Nia sent Hiro back to her apartment for the bottle of Aquarel, while Elzebet Seller fitted Nia with a Twentycent dress and jacket. The knee-length skirt had an elegant cut and soft drape. The jacket felt like friendly armor, and the mauve fabric complemented Nia’s complexion. “I expected something more ostentatious,” Nia said.

Elzebet answered from behind Nia, where she was adjusting the hemline. “The Queen of Europa, or to be more accurate, England—the continent was Europa, but the Queen was England’s—was a head of state, and she wore first-quality clothing in the best of taste.”

Hiro reappeared with the Aquarel. He now wore a Twentycent business suit and fauxsilk tie. Unlike Fair visitors, who adopted pieces of antique clothing at random, he looked comfortable and tasteful. He said approvingly. “Bess, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“Honored for the opportunity!” Elzebet gave Nia’s jacket a final tweak.

Nia and Hiro boarded a serpentine float with other Twentycent dignitaries—a President, a Pope, and the Ethiopian Emperor. To Nia’s relief, they all had places to sit. Elzebet had given her high-heeled shoes, and standing in those on a moving float in spingravity seemed like a recipe for disaster. Their float pulled into the March of History behind a float carrying feather-fringed Indians and white-scarfed, goggled Aviators, just ahead of blue-coveralled Astronauts on a Moon Rover. Nia quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be unpleasant in any of the ways she’d feared it would. The crowd along the route applauded. Nia copied the gesture used by the Aviatrix, tilting her hand toward the spectators, who waved back. The friendly attention reminded Nia of when she had been much younger, performing artistic dance and enjoying being on stage. She poked Hiro in the ribs. “Smile!”

“Ah, I wanted this very much. But what you saw today wasn’t your great-grandmother’s Fair. You must be disillusioned with Wendis.”

“My great-grandmother’s Fair didn’t bring me to Wendis.” Nia spotted Mattis and Vijay-Kol and gave them a more animated wave. Mattis waved back. Vijay-Kol scowled.

Hiro said, “Wendis lives at the heart of interstellar law, and it’s only natural that an ambitious interstellar lawyer would situate herself here.”

“It was more like a port in a storm for me.”

Hiro was a Wendisan’s Wendisan. He had always been proper when interacting with Nia. No personal questions. But they were friends now. The rules had changed. “What storm?”

He deserved her honesty, and the March was climbing onto Zaber’s knees and leaving the noise of the crowd behind. Nia took a deep breath. “My family on Azure expected me to become a political leader and work to preserve Azure’s independence from Faxe. But I got into trouble at the end of law school—in fieldwork. The fallout eventually ended any hope of a political career on Azure. I was blacklisted there. I invoked my great-grandmother’s Wendisan citizenship and came here. I didn’t want to play the part of the Queen because it sounded too much like a farce of something that I really did dream about—being a head of state someday.”

“Great Heaven, I had no idea,” said Hiro.

The March wound its way up Mount Zaber toward the wide, bowl-shaped valley that held Rocket Park. The number of participants surprised Nia. There were actors playing dignitaries, but all kinds of other costume too—peasants and nurses, farmers and bureaucrats, courtesans and scribes, converging from all directions. “Is everybody in Wendis taking part in this?”

Hiro smiled. “Every Wendisan. Those who have essential work to do are watching through their friends’ and relatives’ personal cams.”

As the March went up Zaber, its route switchbacked. Participants ran up and down the mountain to have a word with friends in another era. Caught up in the spectacle, Nia didn’t notice Robard on his sorrel mare until he pulled up beside the float. Nia felt her heart thud with alarm and anger. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Robard. Instead she watched his mare. The way the mare held her head was relaxed, and Robard’s hands on the reins light. Robard’s mare had never been abused, Nia thought, because she wasn’t human, and his sadistic drive was.

“I didn’t think you’d do something like this,” Robard said. “I underestimated you. Fortunately for me.”

Surprised, Nia looked into his face and saw Robard—not his monster—in his eyes, a grim Robard without the usual glint of sardonic wit. Nia guessed that he already realized what Pannister had said—how close he’d come to crossing the line into criminality.

He said, “May I have my get-out-of-hell-free token back? I might need it tomorrow.”

Hiro produced the token. Nia held it out for Robard to take. Then he flicked the reins and his nimble mare climbed the slope, taking him back across a thousand years of make-believe history. Hiro crossed his arms, radiating disapproval at Robard’s back.

Their float crested the rim of the Rocket Park valley, and Nia gasped. Everyone who’d been ahead of them in the March of History now surrounded the tall rockets. The marchers were all afoot. Horses, empty floats, the cherry-red road car from Everyville, and the Moon Rover ringed the valley. Later marchers were still arriving. They included a large number of people dressed from head to foot in black.

“This way,” Hiro said. Peasants and children seemed to be doing fine without footwear, so Nia left the high-heeled shoes in the float and went in stocking feet. The grass felt soft and springy. It was almost midnight. The valley filled with the buzz of anticipatory conversation. Angling toward the rockets, Hiro said, “You are the most able interstellar lawyer I’ve ever worked with. How in High Heaven’s name did you get into trouble in law school fieldwork?”

She’d never told anybody in Wendis. Now she was walking shoeless on grass on a Wendis summer night given over to history. And history had its wicked rulers, its wretched wars, its inglorious Crusades. Her personal past did not seem unduly disgraceful. She took a deep breath. “I defended someone accused of sedition against the planetary authority on Moira.”

“But Moira is the Faxen Union’s prison world—what a terrible venue for fieldwork!”

“There are people on Moira besides prison colonists—the world has cities and free citizens. It’s a rough place for legal fieldwork, but the people need legal help, and a young lawyer can learn a lot. I chose to go there. The accused was innocent, but the planetary authority wanted him found guilty. I won by going outside of Accepted Interplanetary Law. Moira has a strange legal subcode that’s recognized in a treaty with Faxe. Officially, I failed the fieldwork, and it looked like my father had raised an anti-Faxen activist. His enemies were happy to seize on that, so it damaged him professionally.” She gritted her teeth. She hated having been an unwitting pawn in that political game. “I graduated with honors anyway and succeeded in everything I did after that for years. Then my name came up for appointment to the Interplanetary Department of Azure’s government. Somebody brought up the fieldwork. I was disqualified for any sensitive government post,” she ground out, “because of what I had done on Moira. They called it evidence of deeply flawed professional judgment.”

Hiro wore an amazed expression. “The innocent man on Moira went free?”

“Yes, and as far as I know, he’s still alive and well. It cost me my home, my relationship with my family, and the life I intended to lead.”

People were sorting themselves into a single spiraling line from the rockets to the rim of the valley. Hiro hooked his arm around hers. “Nia, tumble happens. It even happened to Wendis when the asteroid hit. How you cope is what counts. Like today. You saved that foolish boy, fell under a horse unhurt, and made a brilliant escape from Bent Robard. No wonder you’re good at recovering from tumble. You’ve had practice.”

Wendisans crowded together, holding hands with family and friends. Nia found Jake Isoroku Genner on her other side. Garbed in his white lab coat, he winked as he hooked his arm around hers. “We descendants of astronauts and engineers should stick together.”

At midnight, a hush fell. One by one the rockets lit up from inside. Then Nia saw that the rockets were made of paper, and they were shivering and shaking.

With a swishing sound, the rockets rose into the air on exhaust fire made of glittering streamers. Nia wondered where they would go in this world where the sky was a curved sea.

Above the heads of the Wendisan crowd, the rockets burst into showers of light. Fireworks! The sparks curled, lights shaping themselves into birds, butterflies, flowers, and animals. Nia smelled a trace of acrid combustion in the air. On the ground, the Marchers of History stood around the rocket-liftoff Ascendance with faces illuminated by the fireworks.

Above the colorfully garbed Marchers on the valley’s slopes stood all the people wearing black. Nia whispered, “I bet they represent the Dead Zone.” The vast bubble of depopulated galactic space centered on lost Earth.

Hiro said, “Some are our Children of Bane and other Shades of Human. They have their origins in the Dead Zone. They deserve a place in the Spiral of History too, so they play the role of Dead Zoners.”

Nia saw, or imagined, a black-clad, slim-hipped figure with diaphanous wings unfurled. Angels were adapted to low or no gravity but could wear gravity braces here, just as people born on low-gravity moons did when visiting higher gravity. “Even Angels?”

“All sentient beings in Wendis are threads weaving one fabric,” Hiro said firmly.

Genner said, “Our adolescents delight in filling out the ranks of the Dead Zoners by wearing black clothes and black masks and pretending to be unimpressed by the fireworks.”

She laughed. “They’ll outgrow being unimpressed.” Wendis was a grand stage for fireworks tonight. The opposite side of Wendis was decked with smooth fog, a featureless dark backdrop. She pointed up at a whirl of colored fire that sketched a distinctive rodent. It even had whiskers. “Is that a marmot?”

“A marmot in honor of Azure,” Genner told her.

Nia felt her life at turning point—revolving around this moment in time. Let news about me being a Queen in Parhelon Fair get back to Azure, she thought. It didn’t matter anymore. Her future was in Wendis. What mattered was for her to belong here. She had to understand how its elaborate and even dangerous games were the vaulting iceberg tip above a deep mass of culture still invisible to her, below the waterline of appearances. Invisible but, to her amazement, not unwelcoming.

Animals and plants made of light proliferated toward the West end of Wendis. There, just inside the Great Wall, crystal towers—offices, government buildings, and trade centers—radiated from the axis. Now the civic towers lit up. The West end of Wendis shone like a star with coruscating rays. Nia felt a shiver of recognition, from seeing something she already knew, in an unforgettable new light.

Along with a mountain range, a sea, a university, dangerous games, and knowledge as old as history, Wendis had a city, one with a very old name. It recalled the ancient days when the earliest rockets vaulted up from the face of the Earth. To cameras looking up, the rockets finally looked like bright stars. The rockets carried brave spacefarers whose missions began at the place with the same high-reaching name as the city in the West end of Wendis: Star City.

The following evening, Nia attended an emergency meeting of the Fair Committee and the Fair Director in the Hexagon. The Fair had legal problems—ones that did not result from the injured university student. Nia had talked to the boy in the hospital. He dreaded his relatives learning about his misadventure. Nia explained that under the applicable Goyan laws, he had reached the age of accountability, so the university was not obligated to inform his family about what had happened. The hospital would repair him at the university’s expense, and the matter would be well concealed, as only Wendisan law could conceal a thing. Nia drew the boy into a discussion about the distinction between upholding family honor and being a pawn for an enemy. She came away with the hope that he would mature into a capable, as well as educated, lord of his feudal people. And a promise that his younger sister would follow him to Avend University.

The flammable legal tender on the Fair Committee’s doorstep derived not from the Goyan boy’s misadventure but from the fact that this was the most tumultuous Fair in living memory. In only two days, four near disasters had been narrowly averted. Each would have given the Committee and the Fair an indelible black mark on their record. Nia advised Elzebet to adapt the risk waivers used in the Zoned Park for the Fair.

Elzebet resisted the prospect of scaring Fair visitors and tying up Fair workers getting signatures. Turning toward the Fair Director, Elzebet put her hands on her hips. “Ban Hayao. With all respect, I think your eclipse on Opening Day threw a dark mood on my Fair.”

Pannister said, “With all respect, the eclipse was meant to show Wendis something it doesn’t want to see, but had better. That the Faxen Union is on the cusp of becoming another of history’s overweening Empires. No good will come to Wendis when it does.”

Elzebet shook her head. “Wendis is neutral, and the Fair stays out of politics, it always has, and I respectfully say we should leave it there!”

“Does Faxe concur?” Pannister asked.

“Put the political commentary in the Zoned Park. Take it out of my Fair!”

The silence that followed sounded loud. From the stricken expressions around the table, Nia guessed that a Fair Committee Chair had never overtly criticized a Fair Director before. She said, “With all respect, I think the both of you are both right and wrong.”

Heads turned her way. She had some credibility, to spend wisely and only if necessary. Which this was. “Only with hindsight can we see a shadow falling on history. In the present it looks different.” She steeled herself for what she meant to say next, a paraphrase of her father’s ideas. “The immense power and wealth of Faxe distort what they touch. Governments, societies, and religions turn into halls of crazy mirrors, like that house in the Amusement Park where people see comical, confusing distortions of themselves, and the mirrors reflect each other to false infinity. Inside the distortion created by the wealth and power of Faxe, a sense of inevitability attaches itself to warped ideas. False infinities tempt human ambition. Ill will seems natural. If this is happening in the Fair, it’s not because of the eclipse, it’s because of the times, Bess Elzebet.” Then she turned toward Pannister. “If you mean to make a wordless warning, a dramatic special effect like that eclipse shadow misses the mark.”

Silence. Nia hoped it was the Wendisan thinking silence and not sheer disapproval.

Pannister said, “Please excuse me. I need to work on something.” He and Elzebet bowed to each other before he left the Hexagon by a back stair.

Pannister’s departure freed the Fair Committee to roll up its collective sleeves and tackle how to implement the risk waivers. Finally, Elzebet put her hands down on the table and said, “We’ve worked hard and done well, and I thank you, Nia Inanna, for lending us your legal expertise. Now let’s have a drink.”

The Committee member named Durzy said, “We polished off the last of our wine in the late meeting before the Fair, remember?”

“No, I didn’t remember, probably because we polished off that wine.”

Nia said, “Hiro, where did you put the Aquarel just before the March of History?” He produced the bottle from a cabinet. Nia poured a dollop of Aquarel into every glass. “In honor of the Green Holidays on Azure and the Fair here.”

Chief Echt looked through the glass with a knowledgeable eye. “This is a famous Azurean liquor. They put it down in one swallow.” He demonstrated.

Elzebet followed suit, then fanned herself with a hand. “Hu! It may be pink, but the drink poured in the Den of Iniquity is weaker than this!”

Genner said, “The value of Aquarel is closer to rose diamonds than rosewater. We’re honored to celebrate your holiday, Nia Inanna.” Protruding from the pocket of his white coat was a transparent semicircle marked with fine lines. “Pocket protractor,” he said as Nia stared at it. “All the Rocket Scientists had them.” The Aquarel made the fine lines on the pocket protractor quiver in Nia’s sight.

Hiro said, “I’m surprised you on Azure drink this.”

“We need it sometimes. It lets us bend our rules.”

Hiro refilled Nia’s glass with the last Aquarel in the bottle. That second glass made the six corners of the room wave like kelp under the sea. There were rules, and there were rules, Nia thought. Some of Azure’s rules were sexual. Quite a few Azureans traced their ancestry to Aquarel bringing unlikely couples together to break rules. Nia would have liked something like that tonight. But Vijay-Kol and Mattis were, respectively, sulking and too blithely innocent to attract her. Hiro was as deeply gay as he was deeply decent. There wasn’t enough Aquarel on Azure to make Nia want to be alone with Robard Benedet.

Aquarel also let you see whole new rule sets. In other words—think like a Wendisan. Nia had resolved to learn to play the Fair Game. She’d done pretty well at it, ended up making some good moves. Why not try another calculated move, for a greater cause than her own feelings? She pulled Hiro away from the rest of the Fair Committee. “I think Hayao Pannister is the most influential man in Wendis. He’s on City Council. So is the chancellor of the university, but only ex-officio, and he has less power—he isn’t in on half the stuff Council does. Listen, Ban Hayao is right. Dark times on the Outside are not going to stay outside, however much Wendisans prize their political neutrality. And an incident that might just give the university a black eye in better times could be devastating now. We need a competent Proctor. Elzebet is bringing charges, and our office is going to document Proctor Kugel’s incompetence today and in every incident we can dig up from the past. But he’s a cozy political appointee. It’s possible that not even malfeasance will get him fired. So I want you to ask Ban Hayao for help.”

Hiro nodded. “After the Fair, I can ask someone, carefully chosen, to relay—”

“No. Tonight. You. Elzebet says Ban Hayao’s workshop is up those stairs.” Nia pointed. “I’ve had too much Aquarel to make sense much longer, and I’m not Wendisan and you are. You go talk to him.”

5

THE QUEEN OF EUROPA

Hiro Hiroshi Low ducked under a hanging mobile of paper birds and dragons that circled and swooped at him, guarding the door to Ban Hayao’s workshop.

His misgivings at interrupting the Director of the Fair were softened by that pink Azurean liquor. Hiro mostly felt wide-eyed wonder. The workshop was full of mannequins posed in exotic costumes. Robotic dragonflies chased each other among origami sculptures hanging from the ceiling. The wall beside Ban Hayao’s armchair was a vizscreen. It showed an image of mirrors reflecting mirrors, and a marmalade cat sitting between the mirrors, its image multiplied infinite times. Hiro bowed with deep respect and explained his mission to Ban Hayao.

As the Fair Director listened, interest twinkled in his eyes. “Did you tell her that the Queen of Europa is one of the totipotent roles?”

“No, she logically deduced that she would have geographic authority over the Crusaders.”

“Apparently she understood Bent Robard better than any of his enemies do.”

“She has Seventh Sight,” Hiro said. The other six Sights corresponded to the rest of the ladder of invisibles, but Seventh was the discernment of hidden good and evil.

Ban Hayao’s eyebrows arched up. “Do say! I would never have expected that. I grew up watching the classic holovizzies that starred Inanna Riga. She was the most celebrated actress in Wendis in her day. Your Az has her great-grandmother’s beauty, but she seems to be a more substantive woman. Inanna Riga was famously flighty. It didn’t surprise people that she married out to Azure, just that she liked it well enough to stay.” Ban Hayao lightly drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Don’t you work down the hall from the university Proctor?”

“It’s a good vantage point from which to be unimpressed with him.” Hiro braced his confidence to make the concluding part of the case for Ban Hayao’s consideration. He wished that he'd had a week to prepare his remarks on something this important, but no matter, he had to make the best of it now. “In the ancient universities on Earth, the Proctor was the officer who ensured discipline, good order and common safety. Proctors kept bad influences out of the academy; they limited where students and junior academicians were allowed to go, keeping them out of the clutches of highwaymen, taverners, and whores; they saw to the fair and honest conduct of examinations so that the degrees and honors conferred by the university would continue to be held in high esteem. Avend University revived the office of Proctor for good reason. Wendis has temptations, hazards, and disruptive influences that the ancients could hardly have imagined. A competent Proctor is vital to the well-being and reputation of the university.” And by extension, vital to the reputation of Wendis, but Hiro was not about to lecture Ban Hayao Pannister about Wendis’ best interest.

Ban Hayao nodded. Hiro tensed, anticipating a polite dismissal. To his astonishment, Ban Hayao said, “I think I have the man for you.”

“You do?” Hiro squeaked.

“A year ago, Wendis gave asylum to a military man from Goya who’d gotten crosswise with his political enemies. He nearly died in an explosion, but our doctors have done a great deal of repair work on him since then. He has extraordinary intelligence and education. Just today I was pondering where in the world to find him a job. Look.” Ban Hayao touched the arm of his chair, and the vizscreen on the wall beside him changed. Instead of the marmalade cat in the false infinity of the mirrors, the vizscreen showed an airy hallway in the university hospital. A dark-haired man in a hospital kimono slowly walked down the hallway, exploring, Hiro guessed. Under the drape of the kimono, the man had a trim but athletic build. His hands were bandaged, and he wore a brace on one knee.

A damaged ex-military man wasn’t the sort of Proctor Hiro might have hoped for. On the other hand, what with war games going out of control in the Fair and dangerous elements festering in the Zoned Park, the idea had merit. “Is he a man of good character?”

“Good question. Many people—not all of them military—believe in violence as a positive thing, a good solution to problems, even a way for good to overcome evil. Violence can be a religious faith, a bad one, in my opinion. I think this man has lost his faith in violence and now is faithless and forlorn. He’s well enough to leave the hospital, and he needs a job. Still, I’d hate to turn a potentially violent foreigner loose on your university, like putting a wolf in the sheepfold. Sheep are midsized domesticated herbivores with fluffy coats and innocent faces.”

A memory floated up out of Hiro’s eventful days of the Fair so far. “Those creatures are depicted in the colored glass windows of the St. Delaney Church.”

“Yes. There’s no such thing as an academic shepherd, because you might as well try to herd cats and oysters—at the same time. But a sheepdog is what your university needs.”

“A genetically engineered cross between a sheep and a dog?”

“No, no-no. A dog that looks like the sheep it guards. A sheep-furred dog with bright eyes and sharp fangs.” Ban Hayao laughed. “We can give our exile the opportunity to do useful work in Wendis, but put him down the hall from a valiant woman with Seventh Sight.”

“If that man is evil, Nia Inanna will see it,” Hiro assured Ban Hayao.

“On the other hand, you may gain a good Proctor. Watch this.”

The man in the vid suddenly saw Dr. Mektil Banter coming his way. Dr. Banter was grossly deformed: she belonged to the Wendisan population of the gene-deranged Children of Bane. In the Hospital, she did not bother to conceal the asymmetry of her torso, her mismatched eyes, and her six-fingered hands. But she wore a blue Doctor’s uniform with the silver caduceus that denoted chief rank among surgeons. Ban Hayao said, “I’ve seen Wendisan children and grown foreigners run away when Maddy surprised them in the Hospital hall.”

The man in the vid showed no fear or hostility, just alertness, and if Hiro read him right, curiosity. With one bandaged hand, he lightly braced himself against the nearest wall, ready to spring away if the monster threatened him, but not assuming she would. Dr. Banter addressed him. He made a courteous reply. Soon they were cheerfully chatting. All in all, the man’s reaction to Dr. Banter was becoming.

“The Queen of Europa wants the current Proctor out, and a better one in,” Ban Hayao mused aloud, “just when I’m pondering this apparently unrelated problem. An interesting coincidence or perhaps the fingertip of High Heaven. Since you’re here, please take this to her.” Ban Hayao held a small golden thing in his palm—a link for an identity bracelet; it was engraved with a fleur-de-lis. “I gathered she wouldn’t care to wear a crown. This may be better.”

Hiro nodded. Every eye native to Wendis would know what it meant. Tourists, and foreigners visiting the university on business, would take it for tasteful jewelry, so Nia would not be embarrassed. Hiro sighed with satisfaction. Nia was the Queen, the outcome he had hoped and worked hard for. True, he had not mentioned to her that it was a totipotent role or explained what would be expected of her for the next two weeks. But he would give her the fleur, and he felt certain that she would be pleased.

“The man’s name is Gyle Night Martan.”

Hiro nodded happily, knowing it to be sheer coincidence that the common Goyan male name, Gyle, sounded like guile.

Ten days later, Nia hurried across the campus thinking that for the Queen of Europa to lose her temper might be poor form, but it was very tempting. Today she had hoped to accomplish real work. As Assistant University Counsel, she had more than plenty to do. But her plans for the start of the day had just been derailed.

Hiro Hiroshi Low had a lot to answer for.

Nia ducked through the hedgerow behind the Rose Garden. Unfortunately, a storm last night had dropped rain here. The leaves of the hedgerow shed cold water on her. The lavender fabric of her tunic showed every wet spot. Not very dignified.

The windy storm had scattered rose petals and bits of rosebush across the grass of the Rose Garden. A different kind of storm seemed to have blown through the people gathered there, waiting for her. A knot of wargamers in starchy uniforms traded glares with another group in grubby uniforms. Two of the wargamers carried primitive-looking rifles. Between the groups stood a war games referee in her official white cap.

Off to one side stood a man in a nondescript dark coat, looking at his wristpod with one eyebrow raised. He was undoubtedly querying his itinerary, wondering why it brought him here. He certainly could move fast. Barely five minutes ago, he had been on the plaza by Gembolt Hall. Nia told him, “You must be Gyle Night Martan, the new Proctor. Don’t worry, you’re in the right place.” The wargamers surged toward Nia talking all at once. “Hold on! I’m not ready to hear your case. I’m waiting for one more advisor.” She turned back toward the new Proctor. “In the Ascendance Fair, I’m the Queen of Europa, and one of my responsibilities is sorting out fair-related jealousies and feuds. I’ve interrupted your orientation tour because I need some of your professional expertise.”

He gave her a long level look. “You must be Counselor Inanna Az-Courant. You have the authority to override my itinerary and command in an unplanned stop.”

“Ah—yes.” He’d done his homework, he was a fast thinker, and he’d gotten her name right, all of it on one try. Nia, however, had just come off as unprofessional and high handed, not to mention water spotted. This was not the way to start a working relationship with the new Proctor. She had to get these squabbling Fair people out of the way, then salvage her professional first impression. Where was Hiro? “Faculty and administrators are generally on an informal basis with each other, and I go by Nia.”

“Call me Martan,” he said with a slight shrug. “What do you need a Proctor for?”

“I need someone with military background.” His eyebrow went up again. Nia added, “Real military experience, not make-believe and not theoretical.” She had polled the university directory for anyone with military expertise who was available this morning. Only a couple of names came up. She could have summoned Vijay-Kol and all it would have won her was a lecture about military history. But she’d seen a new name—Gyle Night Martan, the new Proctor, on his first day on the job. The Directory proffered the part of his work history concerning Goyan military service, and located him crossing campus from one meeting to another. So she’d modified his itinerary. “The Fair is an elaborate Wendisan game. It’s crucial to the way things work here, but for foreigners, it can take some getting used to.”

The referee was shushing her charges, but one of them waved a book. Nia took the book and handed it to Martan, because Hiro had just appeared in the Rose Garden, looking out of breath. “Glance at this, please. I gather it’s relevant,” Nia told Martan. Then she positioned herself under a trellis of scarlet climbing roses, and faced the wargamers with her arms crossed. “Everybody, this is Mr. Low of the Fair Committee. You’ve already seen Mr. Martan, the university’s new Proctor.”

A soft “Ah,” came from Hiro.

“I’ll hear what these complainants have to say. The Fair Committee member, the Proctor and the Referee will advise me on how to decide between them.”

That popped the cork. Explanations and complaints poured out.

The complainants had been re-enacting an early Twentycent battle. They had remodeled a small loop of the Vell River to match the topography described in the book that Martan was thumbing through. It was an odd, ancient, pre-Ascendance book, titled The Defense of Duffer’s Drift.

One side—the British, in stiff uniforms with pith helmets—had burrowed into pits, trenches, and cracks in the riverbank, from which they peered out and fired their rifles at the other side—the Boers, in wide-brimmed hats, a larger force, but more exposed. Fighting for control of a shallow ford in the river, the gamers had already rehashed the storied battle five times. Today was to be the ultimate episode. But the Boers were accusing the British side of cheating with unfairly advanced weaponry. The British accused the Boers of deviating from the real battle by preparing a submersible warcraft to float into the fray. A British spy had spotted the submersible under a camouflage-colored tarpaulin on the bank, upriver.

Nia frowned. “What does the referee say?”

The referee did not look enthused. “It’s a replica of a small iron-clad submersible that actually predated the war in question, but on a different continent. Since it predates the era, I can’t reprimand it.”

“All’s fair in war!” the Boer Captain said smugly.

The referee scowled. “The Boer side has replicas of early Twentycent rifles called Mausers. The British side has mid-Twentycent rifles called Military16s. Since both types are early repeating rifles, using M16s isn’t breaking the rules, but it’s bending them.”

“The British Empire had the best weapons in the world!” said the British Lieutenant.

“Hiro?”

He sighed. “These are the Peach Orchard Wargaming Society and the Glory Road Warriors Club. They have a running feud. Every year of the Fair they re-enact a different little war, and every year they bend the rules to get the better of each other.”

“Let me see those guns,” said Martan.

His hands moved expertly over the stock and the barrel of each weapon. “They shoot beams instead of real bullets, and your vests register hits?” The wargamers nodded righteously. “Well, you’re right about all being fair in war. But these rifles are more than a technological generation apart. Not likely to be on the same battlefield. Not with no mention in the book of one side having that much advantage.”

The British sputtered. Nia cut them off. “Mr. Martan has a military background. Do any of you? Anybody ever been in a real war? I didn’t think so.”

“I don’t buy the Boers’ submersible either,” said the new Proctor. “The book says the battle took place in a veld wilderness. No military would manufacture a boat like that, drag it across wilderness, and put it in a river that probably wasn’t navigable or even mapped.”

“The River Vell runs through the veld of Wendis!” objected the Boer Captain.

“A veld in a teacup. This book describes something more like the Steppe on Goya—a thousand kilometers of grass and thorn.”

Now it was the Boers’ turn to sputter, but Nia interrupted them. “I say there’s willful fault on both sides, with an edge to the Boers for cleverness, and points to the British for having better espionage. So I say you’re even. And I’m the Queen of Europa. What I say goes. Everybody clear on that? Now, for the rest of the Fair, you, you, you, are reassigned to the other side.” She pointed at the Boers she meant. Then she gestured toward a small group of the British. “And you three will be on the Boer side. The six of you switch sides, starting now, or you’re out of the Fair!”

Looking shocked, three Boers and three British reluctantly swapped shirts and headgear. “You can betray your new side,” Nia said. “I’m sure there are turncoats in every war.”

“Friendly fire casualties too.” Martan looked entertained.

“Play it however you want to,” said Nia. “Go have a good Fair!”

The subdued wargamers departed. The referee went her way too, chuckling.

“Thank you,” Nia told Martan.

“I see you like that kind of game.”

“Actually I’m not fond of war games.” Especially not after the Siege of Jerusalem. Two weeks of reflection had only deepened her distaste for that one.

“I mean wielding absolute power.”

That was a brash remark. At least he wasn’t taking her for a fool. “In the Fair, power is knowing the rules. I see you like weaponry.”

“In war, power is knowing your weapons.” His wristpod chirped, a reminder from his itinerary that he was soon expected elsewhere. He left at a swift supple walk.

Nia turned toward Hiro. “What took you so long?”

“A calamity in Tranquility Park. The storm last night blew a pavilion down onto the model railway—scattering miniature trains and flattening a wonderfully detailed model mountain. The train modelers were distraught and blaming the engineers for the storm.”

“At least they won’t come to me about it. They’ll go to Jake.” Of the Fair’s five totipotent roles—Autocrat, President, Pope, Chief Designer, and Queen of Europa—the Chief Designer got the technical stuff. Jake Genner had been kept busy sorting out technical difficulties. The Queen of Europa had unbounded authority over relationships. “Ever since the Fair started, I’ve been besieged by people who want me to sort out their differences. No wonder you have trouble casting the role of Queen of Europa! Did you have to find a foreigner because everybody who knows the Fair knows what a burden this role is?”

“It’s never been this bad before.” Hiro looked frazzled himself. His own Fair duties had kept him running almost from dusk to dawn, while he’d been coming to work at the Counsel’s Office every day too. “This is the most tumultuous Fair in living memory. We had to have a highly ethical yet objective, resourceful woman in the role of Queen of Europa. Someone who could do what you did here today. That was perfect. It will keep the Peach Orchard and Glory Road players busy finding their footing. Maybe they will even find friends among the enemy.”

“I hope so.” Nia felt better than she had a short while ago. Dealing with the wargamers had invigorated her. At the Great Wall, she’d decided to learn to play the arcane space games of Wendis, and ever since that night at Rocket Park, she knew why it was so important for her. Wendis was a place where she could belong, if she learned to play its games and understand the hidden depths of its culture. She’d made a good start. Instead of a pawn in the Fair she was a queen. The golden fleur on her identity bracelet glistened. Maybe she’d keep it as a promise to play the role of Queen again next year. Martan was right; she did enjoy this game. Putting an arm on Hiro’s shoulder, she said, “Let’s go to work. We’ve got a lot to do. Including adjusting to the new Proctor. Mr. Martan is going to be quite a change.”

Startlingly soon it became apparent that the office of the Proctor was under new management. Students scrambling over the university’s perimeter wall after curfew were apprehended and deposited back in the dormitory. Students patronizing forbidden establishments in the Port, the Park, and Karnivale found themselves ID’d and put on scholastic probation. The Proctor evicted a black-market virtuality vendor from the beery recesses of the tavern in the sub-basement under the Research Hall. Then he tackled more clever academic scofflaws. After two months on the job, Martan exposed an examination cheating scheme. This was announced to approving murmurs in Faculty Senate.

In his official seat in the Senate chamber, Martan wore the same nondescript coat as when Nia first saw him in the Rose Garden. He appeared to be a rumpled academic like most of the rest of them; he fit in seamlessly. From her own seat, almost adjacent to the Proctor’s, Nia watched and listened intently. Nia’s mother would have said that Martan was a brown nonentity. But Nia’s mother was shallow. There was more to Martan than met the eye.

Later in the Senate proceedings, it was proposed that Proctor Martan attend an upcoming conference of academic disciplinary officials on Tellas. He matter-of-factly agreed, whereupon another amazed murmur swept around the chamber. The previous Proctor, Kugel, had been notoriously reluctant to travel, or for that matter, even to leave his cozy office.

After the meeting, the chamber cleared, and academicians walked out together with their conversations. Nia stepped in Martan’s way. “Congratulations on uncovering that cheating scheme. You used entrapment.”

One of his eyebrows went up. “You could call it a trap. A neat one that did the job.”

“That kind of thing violates the university Honor Code, and if I find you doing it again, I’ll call you on it, on the Senate floor.”

“I’m still learning the ground rules here, and I appreciate your input. Rest assured, you won’t find me using entrapment techniques again.”

He seemed so much like an ordinary, bookish, cooperative academic that Nia almost said very well, thank you. Then the nuanced texture of his words snagged her attention. “I won’t find you doing it again.”

“Righto.”

With a flash of anger, Nia crossed her arms. “Don’t do it. Then I won’t catch you.”

His eyes met hers. They’d never stood this close before, and anger made Nia alertly attentive to him. He had very dark eyes, well-shaped black eyebrows, and a shadow of bitterness on a face with very good bone structure. “I see.” His gaze went to the Queen’s Fleur on Nia’s identity bracelet. When Nia looked up again, Martan had quickly and quietly moved around her. He was almost out of the Senate hall.

She glared at his back. Think you can play games with me and win? We’ll see about that. Martan was as much of a foreigner in the university as she was.

And she understood the rules a lot better.

“He’s extraordinarily effective, but he’s underhanded,” Nia told Hiro in the privacy of her small office. “Rude, too!”

“Willful students are no match for him,” Hiro said, pouring tea for both of them. Nia detected admiration in Hiro’s tone.

“I’m not sure the administration is a match for him either.” She found Martan’s eyebrows extraordinarily attractive—shapely in a masculine way, with slight peaks and well-defined edges—which added zest to her exasperation with his temperament. “I do think he’ll serve the university’s interests far better than Proctor Kugel did. Maybe I should send you to negotiate difficult favors more often. You must know a magic secret for persuasion.”

“I do.” Hiro smiled. “Wendis loves to honor the wishes of a good Queen of the Fair,”

Nia laughed. “That’s better than Wendis gossiping about the prospect of a reluctant one!”

Hiro sat up straighter. “What gossip do you mean?”

“When I took my annual hike up the Great Wall just before the Fair, I met an Angel. He told me I’m famous—that everyone knows who I am. He knew my name is Inanna, and that was before my real name was public knowledge. I concluded that everybody in Wendis, from rim to axis and including the Angels, had heard rumors about the Committee’s casting woes.”

Hiro lowered his teacup. “Nia Inanna, the Fair Committee keeps sensitive matters in utmost confidence. Before the Fair, no one in Wendis outside of the Committee heard about you in connection with the role of Queen of Europa.”

Nia frowned. “If the Angel didn’t mean famous in Wendis, what did he mean? The dark and lonely ends of the universe where the Angels live? I don’t think so.”

“Wendis has a saying. . . .” Hiro hesitated. “‘Don’t ask Angels for news. If it’s trivial, they won’t say anything, and if it matters, their price will be too high.’ Wendis has traded with the Angels for centuries. They sell expensive but highly reliable news. Shandy sits like a spider at the middle of a web of Angel comings and goings, and anything of significance happening in Starmark or the Faxen Union makes the web tremble long before word of it crosses the stars by conventional channels. If the Angel said you’re famous, it wasn’t idle gossip, and he may not have meant famous in Wendis.”

“I don’t have any claim to fame outside Wendis,” Nia retorted.

“Could the turn of events on Moira have become widely known?”

Nia set her cup down with a bang. “I don’t want to know!” Damn that Angel. With a practiced effort, Nia thrust the shadow of Moira aside and seized on something she did want to think about. “I wonder why Former Proctor Kugel never traveled, yet as soon as he was sacked, he departed for Goya to visit relatives there. His inertia looked like an aversion to travel, but people running a dishonest scheme out of a place of employment usually avoid leaving for long. While the former Proctor is gone and the new Proctor is away, I’m going to ask Chan and Yakov to resume the Proctor Project.”

Chan and Yakov were the Junior Assistant Counsels, and the Proctor Project was their successful effort to document Kugel’s malfeasance. Maybe they’d find more improprieties among the Proctor’s staff or in the proctorial records. That would spare Martan the awkwardness of something coming to light at a later date. At the same time, anything Chan and Yakov discovered would give Nia additional leverage if—make that when—Martan overstepped his authority again.

6

RETURN

Painted by the starliner’s navigation computer onto the passengers’ windows, the Starcross Nebula parted like a shimmering blue- and red-tinted curtain. Minutes later, the starliner dropped into realspace. The virtual image shimmered into physical reality, Martan’s destination, an immense, rotating cylinder in orbit around a golden sun.

He hadn’t seen that the last time he arrived. He’d been in an artificial coma then. Now he marveled. There was nothing else like Wendis anywhere in known space. He suspected that he could return to Wendis a hundred times more and the sight of it wouldn’t go stale so long as he came back to it this way, alive and well and having just made a successful journey.

Of course, he still had to get back in.

Scanners in the Customs gate hummed. The scanners approved of him. Evidently, they had not been programmed to look for what no one suspected. Cleared through Customs, he casually rolled his shoulders to loosen the knotted tension, just another traveler getting the kinks out after a long starflight. Then he stepped into the nearest commcube to call his office.

“Avend University, Proctor’s Office.” Mikal, Martan’s assistant, brightened as he saw who the vizcaller was. “Welcome back!”

“It’ll be an hour or so before I’m back to the office,” Martan told Mikal. “I need to justify my existence.”

Mikal was an earnest young Faxen expatriate, recently graduated from Avend University himself. “Oh, no, sir, you don’t have to justify your existence. You’re an excellent Proctor. And everybody knows your predecessor was an incompetent knob.”

And Mikal didn’t know the whole truth. “Any appointments this afternoon?”

“Oh yes. The owner of the Trieste Casino.”

“Fine.” Casinos and several other kinds of business in Wendis were forbidden territory, and therefore irresistible to university students. Part of Martan’s job was to deal with and occasionally placate the owners of those businesses. “Anything else going on?”

“We’re in hot water, or more like cold water, with the Engineers’ Guild. While you were away, the University Counsel’s Office convinced the engineers that the Proctor’s Office inflated its energy needs for years. The Engineer’s Guild instituted a penalty against us and awarded it to the lawyers. So it’s cold in here, and down the hall where they are, it’s toasty warm!”

Martan felt mental gears stripping. In returning back to Wendis from that academic conference in the Faxen Union, he had to change his thinking: from staying alert to every nuance of his physical surroundings—anticipating danger—surviving another hour—to . . . university politics. Not that he would complain. All things considered, the university in Wendis was a fine place to learn how to be human again.

As Martan walked away from the commcube with his suitcase obediently rolling after him, he imagined continuing the conversation. Mikal, you’re not only young, you’re Faxen. You don’t understand life, the universe, or Wendis. In particular, you don’t know what it’s like to be a secret project of Wendis City Council. Martan did have to justify his existence. Fortunately for him, a new academic year was about to begin, and students were returning from their home worlds to the university. There had been students on the starliner he’d just disembarked from. A few of them might not be able to resist the temptations of the part of the Port called Tradeway.

Martan found a secure parking spot for his suitcase. Then he set out toward Tradeway. After ten or twelve steps, feeling out the spingravity, he moved like a native Wendisan. Spin-gee coordination was something tourists always failed to master and Wendisans never failed to notice. Moving like a Wendisan made him unremarkable here. He liked it that way.

Far down the cluttered expanse of the Port of Wendis, Martan glimpsed the bulwark of a Telal cargo ship with containers being off-loaded. He bristled, caught himself, and made himself bleed his animosity off in an indifferent shrug. The containers would stay sealed in Port as they were transferred to other starships to continue on their way. No doubt many of the sealed containers contained destructive or unhappy things. But that wasn’t his concern any more.

Martan entered a souvenir shop on the cheap end of the Tradeway. He found no young people inside, just a shop clerk. Playing the part of a bored traveler, he examined the shop’s wares: mysterious bits of machinery, six-tined forks supposedly from alien ruins on Tellas, blue blobs purported to be the melted remnants of the alien civilization on the incinerated planet that orbited inside the atmosphere of Moira’s giant red star. All fake. This shop might offer genuine alien artifacts, but if so, they weren’t openly displayed.

Two young men of university-student age slipped into the shop. They looked like brothers. The way they grinned at nothing obvious and shared shuttered, knowing glances telegraphed their intention to break rules.

Tradeway was off limits to university students. Martan only had to ID-scan them inside any Tradeway shop and they would be on scholastic probation for weeks. But he decided to see what these two were up to. The boys’ air of well-polished health, wealth, and self-esteem marked them as scions of the Faxen upper class. Their parents were Faxen politicians or syndexecs. As their elders considered the worlds of the Faxen Union to be their property, so these two probably thought Wendis was their playground. They might only intend to buy lurid souvenirs. On the other hand, the carrying case tucked under one boy’s arm might contain something much more interesting than school supplies. The boys were admitted into a back room. Martan gradually circled toward the door to the back room. Then he let himself in, quickly and quietly, behind the clerk’s back.

The Faxen boys and the shop owner, expectantly leaning over a table with the carrying case lying open on top of it, all froze at the interruption. Martan whipped out his palm-sized ID scanner. It queried the boy’s wristpods and got instant answers, signaled by pleasant chirps from the wristpods. The brothers stared at their chirping wristpods for a stunned second. The taller one burst out, “Why’d you let him in?! He’s the Proctor!”

“Righto,” Martan said. “And you’re Jerad and Athan.”

The shop owner puffed up angrily. Martan made the Wendisan peace gesture, tracing a circle in the air with his fingertips. “Don’t worry, Citizen. I’m not Port Patrol snooping into your business. These brats don’t understand the rules of engagement in Tradeway.”

Both boys started to protest. Martan cut them off, shifting his stance to one of subtle intimidation, injecting into his voice a note of ruthless authority that startled them into silence. “Amateurs can get killed by career smugglers protecting their turf. Or with a Telal ship in port right now, healthy young smugglers who come to the attention of the Traders’ Guild might be kidnapped and sold to the Telal Company to end up as slaves in data mines on Moira.”

The shop owner nodded righteously.

“Fortunately for your college careers, I’ll just write this up as ‘identified in forbidden premises,’” Martan said. “Keep that case,” he told the shop owner.

The shop owner snapped the case shut with a cheery, “Good Wendday to you all, then!”

Jerad and Athan gave Martan a glare of pure venom as they left the souvenir shop empty-handed. Whatever the case contained was valuable. So Martan had not only saved the boys from themselves, and Avend University from negative repercussions, but he’d also made a good impression in Tradeway. Not bad for an hour’s work. Pleased, Martan walked uphill from Tradeway to the transit ring. There he waited for his suitcase. He’d summoned it with his wristpod. The suitcase was now making its way through the Port in the busy bot lanes.

The transit ring ran all the way around the world, a wide plaza with transit tubes radiating away from it, and stairs spiraling down into the residential levels of the cylindrical world. It was a cool damp day in Wendis. Fog shrouded the peaks of the Wend Range. Wind created streamers of mist, like foggy pennants, over the glassbrick towers of Avend University, a quarter of the way around Wendis on the hills between the mountains and the Celadon Sea.

Wendis was a sea wrapped around a mountain range inside an interstellar way station. Wendis was a web of deceits and desires, wrapped around an interstellar amusement park, inside an ancient, neutral, and crafty city-state. Wendis was a place of exile for Martan.

A year ago, he’d arrived in the Port of Wendis as cargo himself. Damaged cargo, in an artificial coma. He’d spent most of the year being pieced back together again in the hospital. Then City Council deemed that he should have a job, and arranged one for him.

His identity as Gyle Night Martan, legal resident of Wendis and Avend University Proctor, had proved airtight enough for him to attend an academic conference in the Faxen Union. If the slightest crack in his supposed identity had been discovered in the Union, he would have been detained, and his fate would have gone downhill from there. Instead he’d made it back to Wendis. He felt as though he had come to Wendis for the first time today. He was alive and well. His existence here needed justifying on a regular basis, but that was doable and sometimes enjoyable. All in all, exile in Wendis was much better than being dead.

It was infinitely better than the many fates worse than death that the Faxen Secret Intelligence Agency could inflict on a traitor to the state.

Martan’s predecessor in the role of Proctor had been as inept as only a coddled political appointee could be. The records Martan had to work with barely mentioned the owner of the Trieste Casino: University benefactor. Handle with care.

When the Wendisan casino owner arrived at the Proctor’s office, he high-handedly tossed his business card on the reception desk, rather than hand it to Mikal with a Wendisan bow. Taller than most Wendisans, he didn’t wait to be invited to seat himself—something about his manner gave Martan the impression that he coiled—in the corner chair. Martan picked up the business card. Ornate words materialized on the card. TRIESTE CASINO—Robard Benedet. “What may I do for you?”

Benedet touched one forefinger to the other. “First, I want you to keep your boys and girls out of my casino. They sneak into the Trieste, distract my staff, and clog up the games, and I hear from outraged representatives of their families when they lose money.”

“Of course. It’s the job of the Proctor to keep students out of the more sophisticated entertainment venues in Wendis.”

“The former Proctor didn’t,” Benedet said with contempt. He touched his forefinger to his other hand’s middle finger. “Second. There’s a scheme going on, and some university students are behind it. They’ve mathematically modeled one of my best games, and ever since we figured out who they are and barred them, they’re sending shills in to game the house. I’m losing money. And it’s not like this has been a great year.”

“It sounds like they deserve a high grade in probability mathematics.”

“They’re smart, but not smart enough to figure out that it’s bad luck to game the Trieste.” Something in Benedet’s tone suggested coils drawing tighter.

“I’ll look into it.”

“You do that. I know Goya breeds capable military people, and I’ve heard you were one of them, before you came to Wendis.”

Yes, Martan thought, you heard that. It was the cover identity constructed for him by City Council: Gyle Night Martan was supposedly a native of the terraformed planet Goya, a Goyan with honest though undistinguished military and academic experience. Goya was Martan’s favorite planet, one he knew well enough to pass himself off as a native. It was a lie that had the same fit and feel as the truth, a good lie.

Benedet stood up abruptly—uncoiled. He gave Martan a disdainful look, taking in his deliberately nondescript attire. “I have to say that I’m unimpressed.”

“You’ll have to take your chances with me.” Martan smiled without humor.

Benedet turned back at the door. “It feels like an icebox in here. Don’t you even rate building heat?”

A short walk along the fauxstone-floored corridor on the second floor of Gembolt Hall brought Martan to the Counsel’s Office. The air warmed between the Proctor’s Office and the lawyers’ lair. Martan had noted before how cold that end of the hall was, but he’d never guessed that his predecessor had been cheating in the energy requisition process, at the expense of the Counsel’s Office. The star of the Counsel’s Office was Nia Courant, originally from the ice world Azure. Martan had just assumed that she preferred her environs cold.

She seemed to be away right now. Just as well. Catching the Proctor’s Office breaking university regulations must have pleased her. Martan would have preferred to avoid the Counsel’s Office today, but he had to meet with University Counsel Minami Toll. The appointment wasn’t negotiable. The ostensible reason for his meeting with Toll at regular intervals was consultation on matters of university governance. It made so much overt sense that no one had ever questioned the arrangement. Toll was the university’s highest-ranking lawyer, in charge of the whole Counsel’s Office including Nia Courant and several lesser legal personnel. And though only City Council knew it, Toll was Martan’s master.

“You should be happy to know that while you were gone, your identity held up under the highest scrutiny,” Toll informed Martan. “The gossips of Wendis.” They sat in Toll’s austere office in her low, cushioned chairs, with a pot of tea between them. The open window let in a light wind that toyed with a small wind chime in the corner of the room. “How did it go?”

Traveling by starliner to Tellas had felt like being let out of a box to run free. Then came the three-day conference of academic officials, at the colonnaded University of Tellas under the swirling clouds of that world’s sky. “More informative than I expected,” Martan answered. “At the University of Tellas, at universities on Goya, and in Alliant schools, administrators see a pattern. Faxen agents are infiltrating institutions of higher learning. Even the dean of a theological school on Albion thinks he has a Faxen spy on his hands. Faxe is metastasizing.” He added bitterly, “I was a fool never to see that.”

“You were not a fool,” Toll said. “And most of the Faxen agents at those institutions, and possibly here, are no more thoughtless fools than you were. They still believe in the Faxen Union. Indeed it has much noble history to its credit. The metastasis is unfortunate.”

“It’s ugly. The government of Faxe is tightening its hegemony over the Union and wants to extend its dominion to even more planets. The dominated are motivated to resist. Which inflames the compulsion of Faxe to dominate. It’s a hideous mess.” Martan wondered why he had been so blind to the destructive ends of Faxen politics, for so long, until just a year ago.

“Given the hideous mess that the Faxe is making of its Union, could happenings on Moira resonate in the interstellar diplomatic playing field?”

Unexpected question. Martan tilted his head, mentally exploring variables in the equations of interstellar power and politics. “Moira is Faxe’s prison colony and slave labor factory. Yes. Turns of event on Moira could resonate elsewhere.”

“Do take more tea,” Toll said. Wendisans had a highly annoying cultural habit of going offline to reflect in the middle of conversations.

Martan’s mind veered to the probable presence of Counselor Courant in the adjacent office. Nia Courant believed in winning by following rules better than anyone else. Martan believed in solving problems. Viewed in a certain light, the issue of energy distribution—and the fact that Courant’s people had scored a point over the Proctor’s Office, and Mikal was glum about it—was a straightforward problem. By simply sidestepping the rules, it could be solved. . . .

“I deeply appreciate the information you’ve brought back. I am encouraged by the ease with which you traveled into the Faxen Union and back again undiscovered. And now I say this to you. No more squabbling with Nia Courant!”

“What do you mean?” Martan asked innocently.

“Both of you and your staffs have been distracted by petty politics while serious matters brew. Avend University is a weak link in the armor of Wendis. Interstellar people flow back and forth in academic freedom here, which is a good thing, but no one is screening out hidden agendas. Now you have confirmed my suspicion that Faxen agents might seek to place themselves in our midst. So I want you to work with Nia Courant and with Academic Provost Gellatly, and put together a detailed and credible report on this situation, to present to the City Council. Find out if Faxen strings are pulling any university people. Work in absolute secrecy, and do not under any circumstances let the Faculty Senate know what you’re about.”

“A secret committee?”

“Precisely. Academic Provost Gellatly is a good man who knows his fellow faculty very well. You have extremely effective methods at your disposal, and good reason to ask many questions. Nia is Azurean and understands Faxen law and culture quite well.”

“She and I have been at odds,” Martan said.

“Call a truce.”

“But her office just won an issue.”

“Therefore she may take a truce kindly.”

“I don’t like the idea.”

Toll was an old woman with white hair in a bun secured by polished sticks. Sometimes she was as authoritarian as only the accomplished old can be. Martan expected to hear a direct order with a knife-sharp point. To his surprise, Toll sighed. “I hope I don’t live to regret saying this, but you might find it pleasant to work with her. For Heaven’s sake, man, use your eyes!”

Martan exited Toll’s office to find Nia Courant waiting to enter it. They exchanged a stiff nod. Martan let his gaze linger on her as she went by. For once, she wasn’t wearing a heavy outer tunic. He’d never seen her without one. Tall and slender, in a conservative but close-fitting white overshirt with crisp slacks—Wendisan professional attire—she was made of long, attractive curves. Martan blinked. Toll might be right.

Toll snapped her office door shut.

Nia Courant’s assistant, Hiro Low, sat at a curved desk in an alcove of the Counsel’s Common Office. He cordially smiled at Martan, deepening the smile lines in his face. Beside Low, the window stood open, just as the window in Toll’s office was open, because Wendisans liked fresh air. Outside, the day balanced on the cusp of sunset, with golden sunsparlight slanting onto the grassy swards of Avend University. Through the window, Martan heard a faint tinkle from the wind chime in Toll’s office, where Toll and Courant were closeted. Then Martan heard a word that riveted his attention: Moira.

Martan asked Low, “May I honor the sunset?”

“Of course. I didn’t know you are a religious man,” Low said, in an approving tone.

“I’m respectful.” That was true enough. Martan had a wary respect for religious matters. He also had keener hearing than unmodified people could imagine. Standing in front of the window, Martan turned one palm up and the other down, like a pious Goyan about to start his Hinge-of-Day prayers. He heard Toll’s aged, sandpapery voice. “What was Eisen School of Law on Azure thinking? What possessed someone to assign you fieldwork on Moira?”

Nia Courant’s voice was unmistakable—mezzosoprano, Azure-accented. “My family is privileged. I couldn’t accept an easy assignment.”

“What happened?”

“I wrote a report at the time.”

“This report is a thicket of minutiae in which the truth lies concealed.” A crisp flutter told Martan that Toll was dismissively thumbing through a stack of paper. “I have been asked by the Ambassador to the Alliance to get the true story from you.”

Courant’s tone rose. “No! You can’t invade my privacy like that!”

“Heaven knows why the foolishness of a law student on Moira should attract diplomatic attention fifteen years later. A prompt response from us may make the matter simply evaporate. If you refuse to cooperate, it will escalate. What did you leave out of that report?” Courant’s response was inaudible to Martan. Some people raise their voices under stress. Some lower them. Some swerve both ways as it gets worse and worse. Martan reversed the position of his hands when a man saying Goyan prayers would come to the part that went, Blessed be day, blessed be night, may nothing break the cycles of this world. Toll exclaimed, “When you smelled a murderous political scheme, why didn’t you run to the Alliance Embassy?”

“The way the Authority wanted the trial to go, the penalty would have destroyed an innocent man! I found a way to foil the Authority.”

She did what? The notorious Moira Planetary Authority was also known as the Puppet Show: puppets of Faxe. As a young lawyer, Courant twisted the strings of Faxe’s puppets? She might be made of sterner stuff than Martan had given her credit for.

“I’ve put the whole thing behind me,” Courant insisted.

“Never came to terms with it seems more likely.”

“It was the Faraway!”

“Nia, you are not the first to utter that incantation, expecting whatever happens in the Faraway to stay in the star-blasted sands where it occurred. It doesn’t always work that way.”

“I know, Minnie, I know!” Courant’s words were edged with pain so raw that Martan winced. “But after everything I’ve succeeded in Wendis!”

“Yes. But your success here may be at risk now.”

After a beat of shocked silence, Courant gave an inarticulate cry. To Martan’s intense disappointment, her next words were inaudible to him—a ragged confession made in a voice so choked and broken that Martan couldn’t make out what she said. The sun ball of Wendis splashed its last light on the university’s towers. Enough time had passed for a pious Goyan to wrap up his prayers, so Martan reluctantly turned away, just as he heard Toll exclaim, “Dear child!”

Martan had believed that Nia Courant was cold as the glacier-crusted Azurean seas. He’d been wrong about her. When she was young, she did something impassioned, bold, and disastrously self-defeating. You aren’t the only one who’s ever done something like that. It startled him to imagine saying this to Nia Courant, but he finished the thought. Thrown yourself onto the wrong track, followed through, went on, buried your mistake in the past. And learned years later that a damning mistake can have nine lives.

7

TRUCE TOKEN

Claustrophobia, dizziness, being trapped in a spinning cylinder, with no escape except to airless space and death—Nia jerked awake. That didn’t help. This was the narrow bedroom in her Wendisan apartment, and the apartment was as compact and efficient as all quarters in Wendis—and would have fitted intact into the breakfast nook in her family’s home on Azure. Castle Courant was a rambling edifice, made of heat-beam-carved stone because the early Azurean terraformers hadn’t had much else to work with, but it was big enough to breathe freely in, and this apartment wasn’t. Nia slammed the light switch with her fist. Soft yellow light glowed in the strip above her bed. It made the room feel bigger but not big enough. All of Wendis sealed against the vacuum of space and won’t stop spinning—!

Stay still. Breathe slow. Dear God, she thought, she hadn’t had an attack of claustrophobia since her first year in Wendis. Why now? Then, with a sickening shock, she remembered what had happened in Minnie Toll’s office. That what she had done so long ago on Moira mattered yet again. She curled up, with arms wrapped around herself, too hurt to cry.

Morning came too late and yet too soon. Stunned from the bad night, Nia made her way to the university. It was a foggy morning in Wendis, and she couldn’t see farther sun-east than the nearest evergreen treetops. But she knew it was only four miles to the end of the world, not enough room to run far. Despair rocked her like a breaking wave. She’d battled claustrophobia and spingravity clumsiness. She’d succeeded here professionally. Your success may be at risk now—Toll’s words terrified her.

But surely what she had done here was too substantial to be blown away like a soap bubble. She was Assistant University Counsel; she had an office of her own. It even had a window—a very narrow window. Nia gulped. The walls seemed to lean over her.

Desperate to get away from claustrophobia, she closed her eyes and chose to recall Moira, painful but planetary, spingravityless Moira. Sun red as blood, dust bitter as bone. Struggling for weeks to win an unwinnable legal fight that she didn’t have the knowledge and experience for. Victory and vindication and pain all woven together by the thorny stems of roses flaming in the sunlight beyond an open window, the crooked window of Adan-Eran’s sickroom.

“Counselor?” Nia opened her eyes. Hiro stood there looking gravely concerned. “About the staff meeting—should I tell everyone it’s postponed?”

“No. Don’t worry. I’m together enough to run the meeting.” She hoped so.

Morning light streamed in through the beveled-glass bay window in the Counselors’ common office, shining on the potted plants on the window’s wide sill, including one empty purple pot. The shared work space was the setting for the weekly meeting of Nia’s small staff: Hiro, the two Junior Assistant University Counsels, and Friday the AI. Friday’s icon, a glowing palm frond, showed that he was awake and attentive. Nia herself felt like hell. “First, has anybody seen my hugwort today?”

“Pardon?” asked Toll, seated in the visitors’ chair, her face smooth but watchful. Toll would pick up the pieces if Nia broke down.

I will not break down, Nia thought. “It looks like a nondescript little plant, but it moves on its own like an animal. Professor Zeng discovered the species near his field station on Jumala. He got six specimens through Customs after I devised a provisional identity waiver for them. He gave me one to understand them better. I have to design legal protections before the illegal pet trade exploits them. Hiro?”

Hiro had already begun a methodical sweep through the common office.

“Chan, we all know about the improved energy budget, because we haven’t had to wear coats at work for the last three days. Want to summarize it for the record?”

Chan was the younger of the Junior Assistants. Nia thought of him as Cheery Chan. “Spring came early for us,” he grinned. The Counsels shared this floor of Gembolt Hall with the Academic Provost and the Proctor. It had long been noted that Proctor’s Office was warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the others. Chan and Friday the AI had pored over the last five years’ energy budgets and discovered discrepancies which had gained the Proctor’s Office a disproportionate share of energy for heating and cooling. Their investigative work had moved the Engineer’s Guild to assess an immediate energy penalty against the offending office.

“How did this escape notice in the annual reviews?” Toll asked.

“The annual reviewers didn’t have access to the Proctor’s AI’s confidential files. I did, since our AI is a friend of his AI,” Chan said, “and the new Proctor was away on travel.”

“Well, well, this further discredits the previous Proctor,” Toll said.

In Nia’s opinion, the present Proctor had poor taste in clothing and a cavalier attitude toward rules. But he was competent, at a time when there was real need for the job to be done right, for a change. He hadn’t objected to the energy penalty. Maybe he understood it was fair.

Hiro moved a trash can to expose a busy bundle of leaves. He handed the hugwort to Nia. “Thank you!” The ends of its leaves spilled over her cupped hands. “Yakov?”

She privately thought of the other Junior Assistant Counsel as Yakov the Gloomy. He came from Albion, one of the terraformed worlds in the Faxen Union. Albion’s sun was the bright eye of the Raptor. Yakov’s acerbic acumen was well suited for his area of responsibility—Faculty Affairs. “We’ve got a problem on Estrella.”

Nia stiffened. “The university doesn’t have any field stations on Estrella. Just one team of linguists, and the ecologists analyzing the environment around Delagua—all of them good scholars who mind their manners in the Faxen Union—and Svetlana Tai’s xenarchaeology site.”

“Tai had a dustup with some looters. She and her people pulled out, but pulled some artifacts out with them. Several looters, who just happened to be the sons of local bigwigs, were seriously injured. And one university employee is in custody of the Faxen military police.”

“Tai, I hope!”

“No, it’s our Rules Compliance Monitor or, as she referred to him, the Snitch.”

“Sake Svetlana is running true to form,” Toll said dourly.

Nia frowned. “Yakov, develop scenarios for how to get our Monitor home in one piece. Chan, you help Yakov in this. Top priority. I’ll work the diplomatic angle.”

The Junior Assistants disappeared into their office. Nia put the hugwort in its empty purple pot on the windowsill. It tried to crawl out. Sitting in the windowsill, Nia held her hand over it to keep it in the pot. “If it stays in the sunlight for a few minutes, it gets sleepy and settles down,” she told Toll. The morning sunlight through the window felt calming to Nia too, a bright gentle warmth on her back. “Minnie, I’ve actually been waiting for Tai to pull another one. I think I have a way to get a shorter leash on her.”

“Please do,” Toll said. “Before she opens trouble that we can’t close.”

“Tai is Wendisan, and that gives her a lot of impunity here. But I think I’m Wendisan enough now to take her on.” Toll gave a measured nod. Coming from Toll, that affirmative meant a lot. Nia went on, “Taking her on will be a major challenge. We can’t afford a distracting hall battle at the same time, so we’ll need to get on better terms with the Proctor’s Office.”

“Good, good-good!” Toll used the Wendisan triple-qualifier.

Suddenly Nia’s optimism, splintered during the night, formed back into one piece. Toll believed in her. Taking on Svetlana Tai meant initiating a war game. But this was a little war that Nia wanted. She smiled at Toll.

An expression of amazed attraction crossed Toll’s face.

It wasn’t the first time anyone had ever reacted to Nia that way, but Toll was happily married to The Gracious Astrid. Why did she find Nia so attractive today after she’d fallen apart last night? “Earlier you said you needed a word with me in private,” Nia ventured.

“No.” Visibly collecting herself, Toll shook her head. “Not today.”

Feeling unsettled, Nia changed her mind about leaving the hugwort in its purple pot. She took it into her office as she scoped out the situation Svetlana Tai had created.

Something had to be done—at a minimum, an apology from Avend University should go to the Estrella Planetary Authority. Ideally, it should be signed by Svetlana Tai. There were two impediments to that plan. First, Tai was unlikely to be willing to sign an apology. Second, she and her team had absconded to the outer-Meridian system where they were now investigating the mysterious artifacts of another extinct alien culture.

Claustrophobia crept back into Nia’s mind. Agitated again, she stroked the hugwort’s leaves. It responded by curling a tendril around her fingertip. The tendril had a soft tip with silky hairs. Its touch soothed her. Nia decided that the hugwort was good therapy for stress.

Researching her options on dealing with Tai’s diplomatic debacle, Nia discovered that Tai had been born on Goya of one of the Outfamilies, the trading, banking and prospecting clans who lived away from Wendis. Technically, Tai was an outcitizen. And there were legal mechanisms by which outcitizens’ signatures could be affixed to documents in their absence. It wasn’t easy, but it was legally doable. The letter of apology could be sent to Faxe that afternoon, skipping across the stars in a diplomatic bubble.

The hugwort was still resting in Nia’s lap. She ran her fingers through its tendrils, taking out the tangles. In one green tangle, she found something cool and metallic. “Hiro!”

He was leaning into the office in an instant.

“I just found the earring I lost last week! Professor Zeng told me they’re as bad as crows about collecting shiny things, and he was right.” The hugwort looked leafily innocent. Nia laughed, then noticed Hiro’s relieved expression. “Um, have I been grim as death today?”

“Last night was hard for you.” Toll had called Hiro to bring peppermint tea. When he ran in with it, Nia had been crying uncontrollably. He’d never seen her like that, not even on the Plain of Pain. “I feared you’d never smile again.”

Hiro was a Wendisan’s Wendisan, a member of the influential Service Guild, a good man, and her invaluable assistant. And her friend. Tumble happens, as they say in Wendis, but it’s not always the end of the world. “Hiro, I know Wendis has a truce-token tradition, sending something symbolic like a flower or a button to propose a truce with someone. I don’t know the code. The Proctor doesn’t either, as he’s not from Wendis—but I need something for him.”

Hiro’s reply surprised Nia. “Yes, yes-yes!”

A triple affirmative? Then it was an idea Hiro himself had first, Nia guessed, and he’d been tactfully waiting for her to catch on. “What should it be?”

“For a man like him, metal, or first-quality wood.”

“I couldn’t afford even a toothpick made of first-quality wood. So it better be metal. My most convincing Wendisan connection is the Fair,” Nia thought out loud. “I’m proposing truce, not surrender to Martan’s ideas about university regulation—” Nia leaned over Hiro’s desk and pulled a drawer open. She pointed to his letter opener. “What about one of these?”

Forehead furrowing, Hiro seemed on the brink of objecting.

“Something with an edge.” Nia liked the idea.

“Two edges, to be exact,” Hiro murmured.

Martan had begun to believe in reincarnation, at least for fog. The bright fogs of Wendis were the reincarnated next life of the continual steams in the industrial district beside the Port.

In late evening, the industrial complexes slowed into easy-going rhythms of massive machines in motion and surges of chemicals in feeder pipes. The industrial district and the port abutted at a street full of dingy storefronts with garish lights. The damp air carried the same brassy music and brash voices as the backside of any port anywhere.

The seedy bar called the Blue Cockatoo had everything that undergraduates were too young and too callow for. Martan expected to ID-scan at least one of them in here tonight. Wearing the shapeless gray coverall of an off-duty dockworker, he sauntered by the doors that led to the game room and the brothel. He leaned on the bar to order cheap whiskey.

Nobody in here yet looked like a university kid. They were probably still finishing dessert in the serveries. Martan tried to imagine being sent to a university for a first-rate education, and then risking his education and his family’s reputation by flouting the rules to visit the Blue Cockatoo. He had never had such an opportunity. At university age, he had joined the military. Maybe that was another way of doing the same thing. Getting away from home to break as many rules of society as possible.

It was overly conspicuous to scan the crowd for very long, so he took a thick envelope out of his pocket. Nothing was less remarkable than a Port worker nursing a whiskey and pondering some souvenir. The envelope bore the hallmark of the Counsel’s office, and had been waiting for him on his desk at the end of the day. He’d recognized a good prop for his evening plans and pocketed it without opening it. The thick envelope turned out to hold a fold of purple fauxsilk. Wrapped in the cloth was a miniature sword with an ornate handle. The detailing was exquisite, the silver metal polished to a luster. It would have made a fair weapon in a pinch—a pointed surprise hidden in a hand—but he suspected that wasn’t its intended function. After a few minutes thought, he decided it must be a letter opener. Physical letters in paper or plastic envelopes were used for ceremonial occasions on Wendis.

A scrap of paper in the envelope revealed the purpose of the thing. Hand lettered on the paper were the words, Can we have a truce? N. C. So this was a truce token. A Wendisan would have accompanied it with an elliptical haiku. Martan liked Nia Courant’s direct words better.

His ears picked up young voices, two male and two female, with Goyan planetary accents. He pocketed the letter opener and held his ID scanner in the palm of his hand. Casually approaching the newcomers in the bar’s dim entryway like a patron on his way out, he had scanned the ID’s of three of the four before they realized what was happening.

“Run! It’s the Proctor!”

They had sense enough to scatter. Martan started after the one whose ID he hadn’t picked up with the scanner, but the boy dashed into the industrial complex, darting around heavy machines on condensation-slick catwalks. Martan called off the chase. Too dangerous for the student. Besides, Martan had seen the boy’s face well enough to memorize. He could identify him tomorrow, the old-fashioned way, by picking him out of the university crowd.

Having an eidetic memory was useful. Even better when there was something you wanted to see again in your mind’s eye. As he walked homeward through the Port, Martan visualized Nia Courant. Without a coat, she was all long, slight curves—symmetrical, agreeable curves—like the letter opener. Martan felt for it in his pocket.

He remembered coming back to Wendis yesterday and feeling glad to be alive and well. But he was even better off than that. He had a place in society here. He had abilities beyond the human norm, and permission to use them in his line of work here. He had a subordinate, Mikal, who liked working for him. And now a gift from Nia Courant. He wrapped his fingers around the cool length of the letter opener, lightly touching the sharp edges.

He felt more whole than he had for many years.

Each weekday morning, Hiro Hiroshi Low walked to work. Today was a fine early winter day. A cool wind sighed through the university’s Old Grove. Scimitar-shaped yellow leaves spiraled down to the ground, and the air carried a eucalyptus tang. Hiro welcomed this new morning in his beautiful world, a new beginning like a million mornings before it. Life would go on, even though the last couple of days had seen tumult in the Counsel’s Office. Nia had been hurt and shaken—far more so than on the Plain of Pain. But the episode had opened her eyes to the value of making peace with the Proctor. Hiro hoped the truce token would be well received, and that even better things would soon follow.

In the early days of the Fair, Hiro had come to a realization so obvious that he was amazed he hadn’t seen it before. Ever since he’d known Nia, he’d watched unsuitable suitors be attracted to her. Some of them were chaff. Others, like those two professors on Fair Opening Day, were men of less courage and character, attracted to those qualities in Nia. And then there was Bent Robard, venturing far enough away from his sadistic fascination with men to be attracted too. Enough was enough! The Service Guild prided itself on matchmaking acumen, and it was high time Hiro turned that skill to the situation in his own place of employment.

In Ban Hayao’s workshop, watching the vid of Gyle Night Martan in the hospital corridor, Hiro had thought him an attractive man. A few days later in the Rose Garden, Martan struck Hiro as intelligent and decisive. After Nia successfully dealt with the wargamers, with Martan’s help, Hiro had noticed that the two of them were within a hair of the same height. At that point, Hiro’s matchmaking instinct had pricked its ears. Two eligible people being of exactly the same height was highly propitious for romance. Then in their first words of conversation, they homed in on the topic of power. Usually, two people with romantic potential would resonate on music or sports, poetry or divination; but shared interest was shared interest. That Nia and Martan held their first conversation in a garden of storm-torn, thorny but fragrant, wine-, cream-, and scarlet-blooming roses. . . . That didn’t portend a tranquil relationship, but in his heart of hearts, Hiro suspected that a tranquil man would hold no erotic interest for Nia.

With Martan as the most suitable romantic candidate to appear in the several years Hiro had known Nia, Hiro had subtly helped things along. His efforts had gone undetected by Martan and Nia—which was for the best, at this early and delicate stage. Toll had somehow picked up on it and indicated that she did not approve, but would not interfere. So Hiro had continued his matchmaking efforts. Now that Nia had sent Martan a truce token, Hiro’s matchmaking instincts hummed happily.

Suddenly Hiro saw none other than Minnie Minami Toll coming up Hillside Way with a determined air about her. She intercepted Hiro at Cherry Creek. “Before this week, did you know about Nia’s old trouble on Moira?” Toll asked abruptly.

Aiee, Hiro thought. That trouble might not be at an end after all. “She mentioned it to me on the first day of the Fair.”

“I hadn’t heard about it at all, and I’m her mentor!” Toll was eighty Wendyears old, but Hiro had to hasten to keep up with her as she strode uphill. “I tell you, Hiro, this is a damnable turn of events. She took a big gamble, giving up Azurean citizenship to be a citizen of Wendis. She’s worked hard here. Now her career is shining like a new blue star. She’s a credit to me, and someday, I hope, my successor as Counsel to Avend University. But now this! So! I hope you succeed in your efforts to match her with our new Proctor.”

Having worked for Toll for years, Hiro understood Toll as he would only understand another Wendisan, but she could still surprise him. “I thought you disapproved.”

“I did, but a lot of revolutions have gone around since the day before yesterday.”

“Gyle Night Martan is a good match for Nia. Not a predictable match, but the most predictable matches aren’t the finest,” Hiro assured Toll.

“But she’s a beauty.”

Hiro nodded. “She’s taller and paler than most of us, but her features have graceful lines, not as angular as the faces of most Azureans.”

“To me, Nia and Martan look like a mismatch, a silk sash next to a knotted rope, but you have a better eye for men than I do. Tell me what I’m missing.”

Hiro was happy to discuss Martan’s merits. “Oh, he’s more handsome than he seems at first glance. He was a military man—an officer in the Goyan Guard—it always takes them time to adapt to civilian clothes, and they look badly put together in the meantime.”

“He has a bitter tongue.”

“Who in his position would not? He got crosswise of a better connected enemy on Goya, and left the Guard, just ahead of a humiliating demotion or worse.” Toll made no comment except to clear her throat. Hiro continued, “All the Goyans I’ve ever met have an unbreakable cord binding their souls to that wild planet of theirs. And here he is in Wendis, which must seem like an uncomfortable port in an ugly storm. No wonder he’s not quite happy.”

“Calling that man not quite happy is like calling the Celadon Sea not quite flat.”

“He’s in pain. We get them sometimes, people taking refuge in Wendis between a bitter past and a blank future. He and Nia have much in common.”

“So they do, Hiro Hiroshi. So they do.”

The water below the Cherry Creek bridge dashed along in a clean stony bed. A jay flitted through the trees, a flash of blue feathers. It was a pleasure for Hiro to converse with his old boss. He could use native expressions and gestures and rich silences. Nia would never be this easy for him to communicate with. Nonetheless, he was very fond of his Az. He wanted to see her happy. “Best of all, however he got in trouble on Goya, it must be something an interstellar lawyer could sort out. And defending someone in trouble motivates her—as with the accused man on Moira. It would do her good to help a handsome man here who needs her.”

“Need her he will, but not as soon as she needs him. I want him to be her bodyguard.”

“Great Heaven, why do you say that?”

They reached the edge of the grove. Across the courtyard stood the glassbrick flank of Gembolt Hall, full of human and AI administrative ears. Toll spoke quickly. “The first I knew of all this was when I was contacted out of the blue by Hal Elan Hazy, the Ambassador to the Alliance. It seems that someone Nia defended as a field law intern on Moira years ago has gone up in the world, his history was at issue, and Hal needed the facts. Yesterday I gave Hal what I’d found out from Nia, along with a piece of my mind about being forced to dredge up unpleasant past issues in the life of my protégé. Hal then gave me an explanation that kept me up half the night worrying.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“I thought Nia’s man on Moira might have been a minor political reformer. It turns out he was a religious leader in the Old Catholic Orthodox Church. Now he’s a notorious critic of Faxe. His enemies know that Nia saved his life, but they didn’t know where she was, not until the Fair, when you succeeded in putting her in a spectacular light! Now all across Starmark and the Faxen Union, everyone who’s heard how the Fair in Wendis went, knows that Nia is here. Her tie to the most famous critic of Faxe may put her in danger.”

Hiro had never dreamed that Nia being the Queen of Europa might endanger her. Shocked, he managed to say, “She must stay home in Wendis until it blows over.”

“I wish it were that simple. The balance of power between the Faxen Union, on one side of Wendis, and the Alliance of Starmark on the other side of us, is uneasy, and according to Hal, unstable. Any shift in the balance of power could mean bad luck for Wendis. Agents of Wendis have brought back information, the AI’s of the City have crunched it, and now the AI’s identify Nia as a catalyst of change in the whole unsettled weather of politics across the worlds.”

“Oh, no!”

“Worse yet, she might be pressured go Outside, even to—no, I won’t repeat what Hal said. It’s bad luck to call out an unhappy fate’s name.”

At a loss for words, Hiro took in a breath of pure dismay.

Toll continued, “I meant to tell her about this yesterday after the staff meeting. But as she sat in the window, sunlight streaming in behind her, that silver hair framing her face, she smiled at the prospect of taking on Sake Svetlana Tai, and she was so beautiful that it broke my heart.”

On the steps of Gembolt Hall, Toll turned to look out into the world. The early morning fog was thinning. Misty university towers stood on the falling hillside, and a patch of sunsparlight gleamed on the distant Celadon Sea, which curved like a wide green bowl. Hiro had seen Toll in a mood like this before, taking a long view of a difficult situation. Toll looked like a comfortable great-aunt and thought like a field marshal. “Nia and Martan aren’t my idea of a match, but I want those two on amicable terms. He can be her bodyguard, under the very plausible pretext that academics pair off all the time.”

Guarding a woman whom he loved, Gyle Night’s eyes would flash, his back would straighten; he would fling off that untidy coat of his and take action. It thrilled Hiro to imagine it. “He would be a very good bodyguard.”

“Better than you know. Better than you know.”

8

THE SPIES’ GUILD

Winter would come to Wendis, with cold weather, snow on the Wend Range, and the Celadon Sea looking like dull steel under leaden clouds. And Nia would be homesick. Winter in Wendis always made her homesick for Azure, for seagulls and surf, glaciers like cathedrals of ice, and warm wide greenhouses, but this year it would be worse than usual. Moira haunted her again. If years of hard work and leaving Azure, becoming a Wendisan citizen, coping with spingravity every day and night, wouldn’t erase that blight on her life, what would?

I’m wound up and verging on histrionics, she thought. So she ran beside the Celadon Sea to near exhaustion, then walked, and came to the place where a huge broken slab of Mount Chance angled into the sea. It loomed jaggedly, like a glistening black glacier.

The broken mountain was an artificial material much like obsidian. Where it met the sea, debris shattered off the main fragment had been washed by small insistent waves for years, becoming smooth with subtle colors. Nia wished she knew how to make that happen psychologically. Fifteen years later, the broken edges of what happened to her on Moira felt sharp as ever. When she had returned home to Azure, her father had been angry, her mother scandalized, her brother and sisters embarrassed. Family disapproval didn’t soften broken emotional edges, Nia thought unhappily. It turned the sharp edges into tempered glass.

Her grandparents’ reaction had been different. Grandda Vim cooked shrimp, her favorite food. Grandmother Eirene asked Nia penetrating questions and listened to the answers. “You’ve ruined your career on Azure,” Eirene had said. If Hiro Low thought Nia’s Azurean manner was too blunt, he should meet Eirene! “But some things are worth doing that for,” Eirene had added.

Tumble happens, as they say in Wendis. Walking beside the Celadon Sea with sandpipers dodging around her feet, Nia fantasized about talking to Gyle Martan about how she’d had to leave Azure to save her career. According to Hiro, Martan had made political enemies on Goya; he was in Wendis not because he wanted to be, but because he found safe harbor here. He seemed to have some splintered edges of his own, inside. He might even understand hers.

The idea of telling him about Moira and Azure alarmed Nia. She wouldn’t do it any time soon. But it was a strangely attractive fantasy.

When Nia entered Toll’s office, it came as a pleasant jolt to her to find Martan there. The Academic Proctor, Isao Gellatly, had not yet arrived. Undoubtably Gellatly was running on university time: preoccupation with one’s own studies, plus interruptions from other academics, usually resulted in a few minutes of lateness.

Martan raised an eyebrow at Nia. “I’ve never seen a letter opener like that, with such a fine edge and perfect balance.” He had an attractive accent, a softening of his consonants compared to the twang of the more common Goyan accents.

“It’s Fair ware.”

“You have good Fair connections.”

“Ahem,” Toll said. Academic Provost Gellatly had entered the office, unnoticed by either of them.

Gellatly was a fragile-looking old academic. His absent-minded air belied the fact that he was the highly effective overseer of Avend University’s research, scholarship, and teaching.

“Here is a chart of university organization.” Toll handed out printcopies. “Academics, support staff, and all others.” Bright-eyed academic that he was, Martan immediately studied the chart. Nia slipped it into her notecase. “Why?”

“I’m appointing you three to a confidential committee.”

Nia bit her tongue on a protest—I have far more than enough to do!

However, working with Martan had definite appeal. So did the work Toll asked of them: look for Faxen strings pulling people, organizations, and agendas in Avend University. Nia was shocked that the university had not been more vigilant long before now.

“We’re trying to catch spies?” Academic Provost Gellatly asked.

“Only looking for them,” said Toll. “We’ll leave the catching to others.”

“Good! I’m not as fleet of foot as I was in my younger days.” Gellatly laughed.

Nia had discovered early in Wendis that if you need to find out anything important, you start in your own Guild. So that evening she went to the Lawyers’ Guild weekly Assembly.

The Lawyer’s Guild House was located on Benevolence Way. The smell of the Way reminded her of cinnamon. Like every other space habitat, every part of Wendis had a smell. Nia liked the smell of cinnamon, but she missed the air of Azure—clear, cool and scentless as crystal.

The assembly’s topic for the evening was Shades of Human. There was a thorough-going discussion of questionably human and especially genetically changed people in Wendis, how human rights for them had been negotiated, and the legal defense of ones who ran afoul of Wendisan law. Nia learned that one of the Angels in Wendis was a convicted spy, locked up in prison. Another Angel lived here as a marriage partner of the first one. He had a job in the Park’s high zones. That must be the Angel Nia had encountered at the Celestial Window. Had he been looking out at the stars because he was homesick? And did he know Nia’s real name because his mate was a spy?

Nia’s mind shied away from the Angel and veered toward Gyle Martan. “Call me Martan,” he’d shrugged the day they met. A unique man. Under the tiredly utilitarian coat he always wore, his build was more that of a limber athlete than a bookish professor. He had medium-brown skin, a slightly aquiline nose, and dark brown hair with a suggestion of ringlets that Nia found charming. And those shapely eyebrows.

The legal discussion meandered into Children of Bane, Pretenders, and even more obscure Shades of Human. Nia slipped away into the Guild library. First she researched the geography of Goyan names. It turned out that the Martan, Marshan, and Mariner families were numerous on Goya, all derived from ancestors who had originally colonized Old Mars, ultimately giving up on Mars and leaving for the stars. People from Old Mars had not been daunted by the prospect of terraforming great wild Goya. Gyles were numerous too—the Goyan equivalent of the ubiquitous Azurean Jons. And Night was the most common middle name on Goya. Disappointed, Nia got down to business. She asked the Guild Librarian if spies from Faxe had ever meddled in the affairs of Wendis.

The Librarian, Mr. Korister, a thin, intense man with Afrasian features, immediately ushered Nia into the reading room, where junior lawyers were not allowed without permission. The reading room turned out to be furnished with well-padded old furniture and all kinds of books—programmable ones and even real paper codexes. Nia was pleasantly reminded of her grandparents’ study in Castle Courant. Korister selected a lacquered table at which he seated them both. Then he told her, “We in Wendis follow events on Azure with admiration. Your world has excelled in crafting political independence with good legal and diplomatic work. We expected Azure to be annexed into the Faxen Union years ago.”

Two elderly lawyers gravitated into earshot. They leaned forward to hear Nia reply, “We don’t have much in the way of resources that Faxe wants. Faxe has living seas. It doesn’t covet our plankton farms. I don’t understand why Faxe would try to subvert Wendis either.”

Korister templed his hands. “Wendis has scientific and historical treasures not completely camouflaged by our notorious frivolity. And every so often we take in a political enemy of their state. The Faxen secret intelligence agency sent a hellhound to Wendis five years ago, on the trail of a Disunion political leader.”

“Do say!” said one of the listening elderly lawyers.

“What’s a hellhound?” asked the other gray eminence.

“An agent of Faxe’s Secret Intelligence Agency, Judge Wang. A genetic monster,” Korister answered.

“Not genetic,” Nia said. “They’re cyborgs, modified humans with weaponry built into their bodies.” She had the interested attention of five distinguished lawyers now, two more having appended themselves to the group. “Faxe’s hellhounds look almost normal, bulkier than most people, but they can pass for laborers or thugs. They’re designed to hunt down enemies of the Faxen state who flee into the Faraway. Hellhounds can withstand heat, cold, high gravity, even assault weapons. Their own worst weapon is a kind of artificial telepathy. When they find their target, they rip damning information out of the victim’s mind, and then execute them. When a hellhound murdered somebody in the back streets of our capital city a few years ago, it shocked even some supporters of Faxe.”

Korister said, “The one in Wendis didn’t last long.” That jarred Nia. She knew that Wendis harbored its own proficient predators. She just hadn’t known they were that proficient.

Around the lacquered table were voiced suspicions that Faxe had engineered some recent troubles in Wendis, most notably, the assassination of the late Chief of Police. The Guild Lawyers suspected that Faxe meant to destabilize Wendis if it couldn’t buy it or take it by force, that Faxe was prying at every corner of Wendis it found unguarded. “At least your university finally hired a competent Proctor,” said one lawyer. “Not before an exchange student from Tellas was kidnapped and sent back to his family in increasingly vital pieces,” another pointed out.

Nia felt that her initial question had been fully answered. She started to thank the Guild lawyers and leave. Korister, however, had a question to put to her. “These are darkening days, a bad time for the academics to be preoccupied with their intellectual turf wars. The survival of Wendis is once again at stake. How much Wendisan history do you know?”

It sounded like a test. No foreigner could truly know the history of Wendis. Too much of it was below the waterline of what history books had to say. But a foreign lawyer who lived here had better know the historical high points or look like a dolt. “Earth’s First Colony, Terra Nova, when it was in the prime of its great civilization, built a huge exploration starship and named it Adventus. In its interior were nine sealed ecological zones for the study of exotic life. Over centuries of starcrossing, generations of scientists and engineers kept Adventus alive. Meanwhile, though, starflight was improved, and faster starships radiated from Terra Nova. Newly colonized worlds bloomed ahead of Adventus. Finally it reached the star-rich region on the edge of the next arm of the Galaxy. Here it stopped to stay at a small golden sun. The massive old engines were taken out and a port took their place. Now known as Avendis, it became a great center of commerce and learning. Generations of engineers, scientists, and diplomats kept Avendis alive. Avend university was founded in those days.”

Her listeners nodded approval that she knew the origin of her own institution.

“When Terra Nova went bad, became the Terror that depopulated whole colony worlds in the Dead Zone, and then invaded Starmark, Avendis defeated the Terror. Then for the first time and not the last, Avendis was seen to be the turning hinge of interstellar history.” Those words were right out of the Ascension Fair’s Welcome to Wendis. Nia hesitated. The Welcome didn’t mention the Tumble, but thanks to Hiro, she knew how Wendisans felt about it. “Only six or seven generations ago, a coal-black asteroid collided with Avendis. Avendis tumbled. It was a terrible catastrophe. Many people died, much of the interior was damaged, and the ecological zones were ruptured beyond recovery. The engineers stabilized the spin and repaired the infrastructure. Ecologists repaired the park as best they could. Unfortunately, the port was out of commission for decades, meaning that physical disaster was followed by economic ruin. As the only possible way back to economic health, Wendis remade the zoned mountain range in its heart as an interstellar amusement park. Then and since then, scientists and engineers, ordinary people and diplomats, keep Wendis alive.”

The listening lawyers all nodded approval. “Throughout our history most of our diplomats have been members of the Lawyer’s Guild,” said Judge Wang.

“These days much credit goes to Spies’ Guild,” Korister said dryly. Nia had thought the Spies’ Guild was a Wendisan joke: the only Guild in which even the members don’t know who each other are. Korister told her, “You do know our history. I commend you. You may not know how many agents of Wendis work Outside. They are essential to our security. And the favor is reciprocated. There are outside agents in Wendis. Some of them have the interests of the Alliance in mind. Some are Other Shades of Human. And some answer to Faxe.”

Knowing nods all around. Somber faces. Korister sounded grim now. “We value Avend University for how it cultivates our heritage of knowledge, but the university has all kinds of people doing research that the rest of us, not being specialists, cannot fully comprehend. If the university won’t control the misguided adventures and the secret ambitions of its academicians, the City Council and the Leading Guilds will.”

Nia swallowed with a suddenly dry throat. Senior lawyers stating these things probably meant that the most powerful people in Wendis thought the same way. Worse, Nia felt certain that this matter was nowhere near the threshold of attention of the Faculty Senate. She pretended calm. “Of course.”

“Excellent,” said Korister. “I’d hoped a first-rate interstellar lawyer from Azure would grasp the seriousness of the situation.”

Nia managed a graceful exit by giving the group a courtesy bow before she left. Outside the reading room, she rubbed tension’s sweat off her forehead. She hadn’t expected to be grilled by the top level of the Lawyers’ Guild. But it had been enlightening. Minnie Toll was no fool. Smelling trouble in the wind, Toll had put Nia, Martan and Academic Provost Gellatly onto the problem in secret. But Faxe might have a head start on them.

And that encounter in the reading room felt like the Guild’s way of sending fair warning back to the university—that it had better clean house, without delay. Nia walked down Benevolent Way with her arms crossed, only half aware of the air smelling like cinnamon. It sounded as though many tangled webs of espionage stretched across interstellar space. Wendis was a target of espionage, but with its Spies Guild, Wendis gave as good as it got. Wendis might be full of dangerous webs spun by the Alliance, Shandy and his psychotic Angels, Faxe, the enemies of Faxe, and Wendis itself.

Meaning that Avend University could find itself caught like a fly in a webbed nest of spiders.

9

SHOVE AND SHOVE BACK

Hard to tell what triggered bad memories—it could be something minor, or even nothing—the mind freewheeling when it has nothing better to do. Martan often remembered his first sight of Faxe. An immense, cloud-glazed orb, studded with transit towers that soared to geosynchronous orbit. A ring connected the towers. Starships streamed off the ring like droplets of water. The flights of starships connected Faxe to the rest of its Union—seven other planets at six other stars, all but one in the near neighborhood in galactic space. Unfortunately, not everybody on all seven planets wanted to be part of the Union. After generations of tension, revolutionaries suppressed, plots foiled, and diplomacy that milled and started and never solved enough problems, the Disunionists made a gesture as dramatic as it was unforgivable.

The blue sphere with its gossamer ring rotated in space. Finally the section over the great equatorial city Strata came around. Over Strata, the ring was broken. Disunion terrorists had brought down the Strata transit tower, pieces scattering over a sea and a continent, the base of the tower now a smoldering wound in the heart of Strata. Tens of thousands of lives had been lost. Thousands more were in peril. Martan was with other troops, sent immediately after the disaster. Troopers didn’t usually merit a view from a starship window. An exception had been made this time. So they saw what they were up against.

He’d spent the next month in scenes out of Hell. Troops doing rescue had dug victims out of rubble, looked for the dead and the dazed around the jagged limits of the city, and fought off native flora and fauna eager to take their planet back where the city’s environmental screens had been broken. One night the air was mild and the light of the bright moon Veritas illuminated a still-smoking debris field. That was the night Martan found a child in the debris—a child alive, but thirsty, starved, terrified, whimpering.

The attack on the Strata transit tower was a mind-numbingly destructive gesture, but apt. Starship traffic formed the tendons of the Faxen Union. Breaking the transit ring signaled a savage threat to the Union. After the Strata tower fell, it made perfect sense for Faxe to retaliate ruthlessly. New military installations sprouted up all across the Union. Disunionists mounted strikes against the installations. And so it went, shove and shove back, a devastating contest. The war had clear logic to anybody who saw images of the broken transit ring. Compelling logic, if you’d smelled and tasted the tower ruins in Strata. It seemed irrelevant that Faxe’s original name, bestowed when a starship from Terra Nova found this world, had been Fiat Pax. Let there be peace.

The founding starship had named Faxe’s pale moon Veritas. Truth. Martan later learned, in a very hard way, that Varry, as it was known now, contained more lies than truth.

Mikal appeared in Martan’s office door. “Academic Provost Gellatly is here.” Shaking off his grim reverie, Martan pulled the plushest of his chairs forward for the elderly scholar.

Old Gellatly had found no signs that Faxe was behind the research gifts and grants that had lately rained down on several distinguished faculty. Faxe wasn’t even behind the Faxen Scholars’ Association. Those were advanced students and junior academicians making alliances with each other against the day they would all be struggling for a place in the sun in academia in the Faxen Union. There was one strident Faxen apologist in Political Studies, but his agenda was so transparent as to be nonproblematic. He simply believed in all that Faxe stood for. “There are no marionettes being pulled by Faxen strings among the university faculty,” Gellatly concluded.

Gellatly was a harmless, precise man. How would he know a nefarious scheme?

“And what have you uncovered so far, Gyle?”

The name Gyle had no meaning for Martan, but he had trained himself to answer to it without fail. “No Faxen agents among the students, but there are disruptive influences that point toward Faxe. Several students have parents from among the Faxen elite—syndexecs, plutocrats or bureaucrats. The kids feel like they have a license to play hell with the rules.” Not that they were getting away with it. Martan had made young enemies, most notably Jerad and Athan, the would-be smugglers. He would lose no sleep over them. He toyed with the letter opener.

Gellatly said, “That’s a nice little piece of Fair ware.”

“It came to me as a gift. Truce token from Nia Courant.”

“Fine move. I commend you both. Were you aware of the ancient image of Justice as a woman wearing a blindfold and holding a set of scales and a sword?”

Martan recalibrated his opinion of the Academic Provost. Gellatly was harmless only in that with a well-honed mind, and command of a wide array of knowledge, he was driven by wanting to know rather than by wanting to control, own, or harm. Those qualities made Gellatly an informant of value. Martan asked, “Do you know much about Moira? The other day I was talking to someone—” Toll to be precise, but in the university everyone might talk to anyone about anything; that was the water in which all these fish swam “—who thought there’s something significant unfolding there.”

“Yes. Moira may have found its savior. A Bishop of the Old Catholic Orthodox Church. In the slums and shantytowns of Moira, hospitals and schools bloom like roses in the good bishop’s footsteps. He’s even made inroads in the prison camps—where Faxe keeps its criminals and captured terrorists, you know.”

Oh yes. Martan knew about that.

“The prison camps are a tough nut to crack, but they’re feeling pressure to treat the inhabitants more humanely. Meanwhile the Bishop of Moira and the members of his religious order pray daily for the dead of Moira. For all that world’s dead, not just the terrestrial ones.”

“You mean the Old Moirans? That’s bizarre.”

“For Moira, it seems to be working.”

The intelligent alien race that once existed on Moira had never developed starflight. When their big white sun spent its hydrogen fuel and ballooned into a red giant star, their home world was incinerated. By then they had colonized their system’s Mars—Moira. But over the following millennia, the senile red sun’s radiation fluctuated. The Old Moirans, and the higher forms of life they’d brought with them from their doomed home world, went extinct. To top it all off, the helium flash—the final death rattle in the life of the Moiran sun—could happen any millennium now, if not tomorrow, and sterilize the face of Moira.

If the Bishop of Moira was pacifying a world full of inconsolable alien ghosts—or the anxiety-ridden human imagination of such ghosts—more power to him, Martan thought.

That didn’t tell Martan what Nia Courant might have to do with current events on Moira, much less how she’d pulled the strings of the Puppet Show years ago. Martan was still feeling curious about that when he walked to the university servery at noon. The servery bustled with activity, clattered with silverware, and smelled like gingery noodle soup and fresh melons. When he saw Nia Courant, at a small table by herself, Martan veered to take the other seat at her table.

She looked alarmed. Martan wondered why. Then he belatedly realized that his arrival had caused a stir in the servery. The place was full of excited rumors. About him. Students and junior academics were whispering back and forth that Night was the significant middle name of fatherless Goyans whose mothers were prostitutes, especially on the Goyan Steppe, where the Faxen military occupation was in its fifth decade. The Servery rumors included salacious details about sexual relations between the natives and the Faxen soldiers on the Steppe. And by joining Nia Courant in the rumor-soaked servery, Martan had embarrassed her. She turned pink. On her complexion, it was an attractive, delicate shade of shell pink. But not a good sign. “Sorry to breeze in here and join you uninvited. I gather it’s a bad day for that.” he told her.

She tilted her chin up.. “Consider yourself invited. Some people are being incredibly rude. It’s not your fault.”

“Overprivileged whelps,” he muttered.

She pointed at him. In Wendis, pointing at someone was impolite. Martan personally didn’t mind being pointed at by anyone not holding a weapon that emitted projectiles. She said, “Maybe, but you don’t mind as much as you’re pretending to.”

“You’re right,” Martan admitted. “It’s a game. Shove and shove back. I shoved first by catching two Faxen boys selling contraband in the Port. It’s no surprise that they want to shove back. Let them.”

“Tell me more about that. Not here, though. Unless you need lunch?”

“I don’t.”

They walked away from the servery. “Why let them?” she asked.

“Scoring points against me will make them gleeful and careless. When they escalate the little games, they’ll make a mistake that gives me an advantage. Are you going to tell me it’s entrapment?”

She wasn’t quite coordinated in spingravity, but the trace of awkwardness in her gait fascinated Martan. There was no awkwardness in her expressions and her gestures. On any terraformed planet, she would be an extraordinarily graceful woman. Which also fascinated Martan. Most fascinating of all, she liked games of shove and shove back. She did it with words and rules. With a subtle flick of her head—signaling mind made up?—she said, “Entrapment breaks written rules including the Honor Code, which you should probably read and memorize. But for you to be here in Wendis, doing what you need to do for the university, you need to be able to beat some people at their little games. Not just students. Universities are hotbeds of petty games on the part of administrators and faculty. And then there is our not-so-petty game of finding the spy. I’m glad you’re here.”

Martan felt an urge to smile.

The signal pod on Nia’s bracelet trilled. She glanced at the bracelet. “I’ve got a Messenger.” Annoyance flashed across her face.

Was she annoyed to be interrupted when talking to Martan? He hoped so. “Do you often get Messengers?”

“I occasionally take interstellar depositions, but I wasn’t expecting one today.” She sounded annoyed. That was good. “I’ll see you at our meeting this afternoon.”

As she walked away, Martan finally noticed that they’d walked to Vizafter Plaza and he was left standing near the reflecting pool. She’d fascinated him so much that he’d been aware only of her and not of his surroundings.

His situational awareness had not lapsed like that in the last seven years.

The breeze carried a trace of the smell of machine oil. He could hear the blowers that kept the winds of Wendis stirring. With a glance, he counted three bluebirds in the cherry trees near the pool. He registered everything around him and knew to near certainty where he was in Wendis, in relationship to everything else here. But for a while he’d noticed none of it but her. And now he was distracted by the insistent idea of playing shove and shove back, push and push back, touch and touch back, with Nia Courant.

The pool reflected Martan’s own image back to him.

Wendis really was a good place to learn how to be human again.

The Messenger Portal was a small, dark room near the Chancellor’s Office. Whatever this is about, it better be good, Nia thought. It had interrupted a very enjoyable conversation. With the door closed, she pushed a stud on her bracelet’s data pod to record what the Messenger had to say. “Begin.”

The Messenger materialized, a three-dimensional image of a woman of medium height with an hourglass figure and long dark hair. With a jolt, Nia recognized Svetlana Tai. That Tai had the means—or connections—to send a Messenger was not good news.

With a scowl, Tai’s Messenger looked Nia in the eye. “Butt out of my business. Your majesty.” It sounded insulting. Perhaps Tai had sent the Messenger to convey sheer spleen. A waste of resources, but one that told Nia a lot about Tai’s character.

The Messenger would go back to Tai with Nia’s reactions recorded. Nia controlled her expression and chose her words with care. “You may have an incorrect understanding of my university duty. Shall I explain it?”

The Messenger said, “Don’t meddle in games you don’t understand, or you may end up at least as bad off as the last time you tried that that kind of thing.” There was a preprogrammed pause, not long enough for Nia to respond, before the messenger added, “On Moira.”

Alarm and anger sleeted through Nia. She felt her face paling.

The simulacrum of Svetlana Tai smugly nodded, said, “End message,” and vanished.

Later that afternoon, the secret spy committee met in Nia’s office. Martan, when he arrived, took one look at Nia and quietly asked, “Something wrong?”

Nia had her arms tightly crossed, an instinctive protective stance. “Just busy.” Busy wondering how to defend herself from an irresponsible, vicious colleague. Shove and shove back, Nia could understand, but not being motivated to send a Messenger for no better reason than intimidation, and dredging up obscure old interstellar news for that purpose. Wait, Nia thought, there was a university research station on Moira. There was alien debris in the area. As a xenarcheologist, Tai had to have been on Moira at least once. If Zakeri’s trial was remembered on Moira, Tai might have heard about it. If Nia had thought all this through, she might not have been so eager to antagonize Svetlana Tai. Damn, damn, damn.

Martan reported that he had finally found Faxen fingerprints on university trouble. He had identified two students—brothers—whose parents were bureaucrats in the Faxen Secret Intelligence Agency. He doubted, though, that the brothers were SECINTAG agents. They just knew a few things about dirty tricks.

Nia stared at him. “Did you learn that between lunch and now?”

Martan nodded. “All of you, Hiro and Isao too, know about my military background. I have to confess I did some work in military intelligence.”

Academic Provost Gellatly said, “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.”

“Not in my case,” Martan said.

“I’ve never heard of the Goyan Guard having a military intelligence arm,” Nia said.

“It’s new and it’s very secretive. Desirable duty—it means star travel, spingravity training, even assignments to other worlds—but politicized, and a person can get in the crosshairs of powerful vested interests. As I learned.”

After that, they all pored over the university’s organization chart. Nia had trouble paying attention. Tai had the gall to have her Messenger say games you don’t understand. Since when were warped legal proceedings, and a state-sponsored attempt to destroy a man with an unjust charge of sedition, games?

The daylight in the office window faded. Academic Provost Gellatly leaned back wearily. But their report was taking shape, and Hiro suggested they reward themselves with an excursion to a fine little club near the university.

“Is it a student hangout?” Martan asked Hiro.

“The atmosphere is too refined and the prices too high for most students,” Hiro said. “The clientele is a nice mix of town and gown, men with women, women with women, men with men. And there is dancing. Early in the evening, the music is pleasant neowaltz, and everyone who likes neowaltz goes there to dance.”

Nia put her head in her hands.

Sounding concerned, Hiro asked her, “Is dancing against your religion?”

“No. I love it.” And the tension gnawing inside of her ever since she saw Tai’s messenger badly wanted out. “I can’t do it right, not here, I’ll stumble.”

Hiro made some noises about no one minding a misstep or two, but Martin put his hands on Nia’s shoulders. He had never touched her before. “I can help you.”

Waltzing couples swirled around the room. Martan was a good dancer but Nia moved stiffly, hyperaware of her feet. Without warning, she felt her feet going the wrong way—exactly what she dreaded. Martan shifted his stance and readjusted hers, and the danger passed. It happened again a few minutes later. Nia felt dazed with relief. “You can help!”

Martan’s dark eyes sparkled with pleasure.

The music flowed through Nia, and she let it move her, and every time her move was wrong for spingravity, Martan unobtrusively countered it. He was so adept at it that those watching might not even notice. She began to relax, holding him less tightly, and more closely. Martan said into her ear, “This afternoon I also memorized the Honor Code.”

Nia’s delight bubbled up in a laugh. In a long lull in the music, they returned to the table shared with Hiro and Academic Proctor Gellatly. Nia kept a hand on Martan’s arm. For some reason, Hiro looked extraordinarily pleased.

Without warning, different music started up. Instead of a lush, leisurely neowaltz it was melody with strong beat and a fiery undertone of stringed instruments. Hiro sat up straighter. “Hey, hey, it’s too early for that!”

“What?” asked Gellatly.

“That’s Goyan Steppe music. Usually it’s not played before midnight in this place, when a younger crowd shows up. I wonder why—” Hiro’s eyes narrowed. Nia followed his gaze. Three tables away she saw the leering faces of two Faxen students. “I think those boys tipped the musicians to start up the Steppe music early,” Hiro hissed.

“Spirited, isn’t it?” Gellatly said, tapping his foot.

The Faxens laughed rudely. Hiro said indignantly, “This music is a deliberate insult to our Proctor’s parentage.” So Hiro had heard the rumors that had been going around today. Unlike earlier in the servery, Martan glowered with instant, genuine anger.

Nia’s own anger flared. Right now, she hated people crass or childish enough to dredge up someone else’s lived-down past. “Martan, can you dance to that music?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said in a flat tone.

“Look, when I was younger I studied dance and performed for audiences. I had too much energy and dance gave it an outlet. But I really liked Goyan Steppe dance. It was art dance, not folk dance. I’m rusty. I can’t dance anything fast in spingravity. But if we keep it slow—want to throw this back in their faces by dancing Ziara?”

Martan’s eyes widened. “You?”

Inhibition rattled in Nia’s mind. Looking like a fool is always bad. It wrecks your life. But she was sick of letting that old reflex hamper her life. And there was a big difference between being a fool and being attention-getting. Getting attention could give you social power in Wendis. Being Queen of Europa had taught her that. “I don’t plan to look foolish. Just keep doing what you were doing earlier.”

Martan peeled off his nondescript coat. Nia took the clips out of her hair. Together, they found their way into the compelling beat together. Nia let the music shape her movements. Martan countered her spingravity missteps as effortlessly as before. She gasped in wonder.

This felt like coming out of a narrow closet and breathing fresh air again.

Hiro Hiroshi Low settled back in his chair, reflective. He’d intuited that those two could enjoy waltz and each other. But this was a complete surprise. Nia and Martan were the best Ziara dancers in the place at this early hour. They might even be better than the later crowd, who tended to drink too much and do Ziara in a lascivious way that was untraditional. The young Faxen troublemakers sourly departed, poorer by however much they had tipped the musicians to play Steppe music four hours early. The atmosphere in the club improved with the Faxen youths’ absence. Now everyone still seated watched the dance floor with bright eyes.

Though traditional Ziara wasn’t lascivious, it was sensuous, and Nia did it that way. Across the room sat Mattis, the young professor from the Fair. He gaped. Hiro sympathized. This turn of events would be quite a shock to a would-be suitor’s system.

A lithe, golden-skinned man of late middle age approached Hiro and Gellatly at their table. “I am Jay Jae Ibuse, Master of the Tauzin Dance Academy. May I join you?”

Hiro rose and bowed. “By all means.”

“Honored,” Gellatly said affably.

“I know that you are the well-honored Mr. Low of the university and the Fair Committee,” said the Dance Master.

Hiro folded his hands in modest acknowledgment.

“She is the university lawyer and Queen of Europa in the Fair. Who is he, though?”

“Our new Proctor, who is a Steppe native, on one side.”

The Dance Master followed Nia and Martan with his eyes, not missing a single movement. “He didn’t learn that dance around a tribal firepit. He dances like Faxen army men.”

“He does have army background,” Gellatly said, nodding.

But that’s the wrong army, thought Hiro. Mild alarm chimed in the back of his mind.

The Dance Master said, “He looks Steppe enough to have Ziara in his blood. And she, with that silver hair and blue eyes, looks like a Steppeman’s Angel. Are they lovers?”

“No, but university rumor will have them there tomorrow,” said Gellatly.

“Ziara tells a story, and the woman’s hands convey important nuances, but that is a refinement that most amateurs don’t understand. She does.” Like water seeking a steeper way to the sea, the music coursed faster. The musicians had started with slow Ziara melodies. The tempo increased as those on the dance floor got into the spirit of the music. The Dance Master leaned forward. “She’s planetborn, she has that unfortunate clumsiness—but he’s compensating for it. He anticipates her awkwardness and catches her. He’s no planetborn flatfoot.”

Hiro and Gellatly looked at each other. He’s not?

“Oho, here comes the flutist. The musicians don’t often find tradition-minded Ziara dancers in this establishment. That trill is an invitation to dance a form—the ‘Phoenix.’ That’s a hard one and she knows it. She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. ‘Thank you and no, thank you, I haven’t flown in years!’ I thought as much. Some dance master on Azure must have been disappointed when she chose a different career.”

“Stuffy family,” Hiro said.

“Pity. Ah, the flutist again. He’s offering her the ‘Ibex.’ That’s a much easier one.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Gellatly asked.

“The flute signals to our couple that if they wish it, in the next dance this evening, the musicians will play a melody for a special set of moves. Look. They’re discussing it.” The Dance Master watched Martan and Nia.

Hiro watched the Dance Master. He had features as refined as a Keiling vase. Sensing Hiro’s gaze, Jay Jae returned it with wise, kind eyes in which Hiro saw a kindling warmth. Very much to Hiro’s surprise—for the evening was surprising enough already—he felt the stirring of attraction between them. The Dance Master was well known to have lost his beloved husband, a younger man than he, to untimely death several years ago, and to have been alone ever since. Perhaps he was not resolved to live the rest of his life in celibacy.

The music ended in a flourish of drum and tambourine. Nia came Hiro’s way with Martan in tow. “Hiro, may we borrow your tie?”

Hiro automatically put his hand onto his Twentycent fauxsilk foulard tie, which tastefully matched his shirt and the double-breasted jacket that evoked the same antique sartorial era.

“She means can we have your tie,” Martan said. “It’ll never be the same again.”

Hiro slowly unknotted his tie. Ban Hayao had told him about Martan’s background. Hiro trusted Ban Hayao. Surely there was an innocuous reason for everything that caught the Dance Master’s sharp eye. Hiro put the folds of his tie into Martan’s hand.

“Just don’t let go,” Nia told Martan fiercely.

“Just don’t slip off,” he answered with a half-smile, but his dark eyes were intense.

For the first time in years, Nia felt the thrill of performing. She’d thought Moira had killed that. But now that wonderful feeling was alive again. Later she’d probably curl up, shivering and afraid of what she’d done. That would be then, this was now.

The music started again, the intensity of it ratcheted up from the previous songs. The drum and the lute evoked the wide wildness of the Steppe. The flute sang like light, quick flying hooves. To the fluted notes, she had to whirl away from Martan as they held the opposite ends of a sash or a silken rope—the tie taking the place of that. Then she had to whirl back to him. The first time they tried it, Nia lost her balance. But Martan had positioned her on the side of the dance floor near their table, and Hiro and a nimble stranger caught her before she skidded far.

Martan held out his arms and she returned to him and the dance.

The second time through, Nia negotiated the Ibex as far as whirling back toward Martan, and then misplaced her feet. He dove to save her from falling flat. The musicians provided a lull while she found her way back into the beat. They danced toward the whirl-away again. They couldn’t keep making failed attempts.

It would only work if she trusted Martan.

She whirled away. Only the fauxsilk tie, stretched taut, connected them. She whirled back. Martan held his arm out. They jostled back together face-to-face. Not perfect—but not foolish either! On a final flourish of flute, drum and lute, Nia positioned Martan so that he had his back to her with her fingers laced through his. Ecstatic, she raised their clasped hands, a salute to the audience. The onlookers applauded wildly.

Too profoundly happy to smile, Nia pressed her back against Martan’s solid back and briefly closed her eyes. This felt like years ago when she’d been coordinated, graceful, fearless, and brilliant—a girl everyone admired and who could fly in more ways than one. Moira had wrecked that. But now she had danced again. It hadn’t been effortless, she wasn’t fearless, and she needed help—but she could dance again, even Ziara. Her fingers tightened on Martan’s warm hand. He turned toward her with a smile as radiant as the end of an eclipse.

The well-rested neowaltz musicians took up their duty once more. Nia and Martan waltzed. Hiro Hiroshi Low could tell that she was tired, but Martan seemed tireless, and his arms gave her support. The Dance Master went away to have a word with the Ziara musicians, and Academic Provost Gellatly genially departed, leaving the evening for younger people to enjoy while he returned to his own home to go to bed. Suddenly feeling too solitary, Hiro regarded his rumpled tie. “You’ve had a hard evening,” he told it. “You may not be wearable as a tie again, but I’ll find you an honorable role next Fair.”

The tie’s stretched condition was well worth it. Nia and Martan were a fine match. Everyone in the place could tell that. Hiro took a sip from his glass of good Goyan wine—he’d splurged, once he saw how well things were going—and congratulated himself on his skill as a matchmaker. He was a true son of the Service Guild.

The Dance Master returned. “Hiro Hiroshi, that was a remarkable performance. Most of us can’t dance a dance like that with a planetborn—we can’t anticipate her errors. Even I can’t, and dance is my calling. The musicians are as amazed as I. I’ve heard rumors of mysterious special training in the depths of that moon of Faxe, Veritas—a training regimen to make a planet-born soldier excel in spingravity combat. Has he had such training?”

“Er. . .” Hiro had successfully kindled a romance between Nia and the handsome new Proctor. Who in the Dance Master’s estimation danced like a Faxen officer and handled himself like someone with arcane Faxen military training. This at a time when cleverly disguised Faxen spies were suspected to be prying at Wendis. The Dance Master remained at the table, showing subtle and courteous signs of personal interest in Hiro. Hiro was seized by a sense of something totally unexpected and wonderful dawning. In the back of Hiro’s mind, though, notes of alarm sounded distantly, like the way the bell of the only church in Wendis, St. Delaney-by-the-Sea, could sometimes be heard pealing on the other of the world at dawn. Who is Gyle Night Martan, really? Why is he here? What have I done?

10

TURNING POINTS

Nia parted from Martan at the gates of the university. He had to make Proctor’s rounds. He didn’t hint at the prospect of going home with her. His conduct was flawless—completely up to Azurean standards of decorum. For some reason she couldn’t identify, that unnerved Nia. She went home to her small apartment. As she’d more than half expected, the backwash of the dance caught her there. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. It was worse.

Looking like a fool is bad. It wrecks your life. And now I’ve done it again!

Trembling, she argued with her own panicked feelings. Dancing with Martan had been a pleasure and personal triumph. It had made her look expert in a particularly exotic and attractive dance. As a child, she had liked being noticed. Moira was what had changed things. But there was no good reason to let Moira win that way. She was almost calm, almost victorious in her argument against her irrationality. Until remembering Moira made her remember Svetlana Tai’s Messenger, and Nia’s calm collapsed under a wave of claustrophobia.

In the darkness before dawn she made her way to the university Promenade. Dry leaves skittered across the Promenade in the cold wind. The overlook railing felt cold as she leaned on it to look across the dim campus toward Star City. It was one of the longest views in Wendis and usually mitigated her claustrophobia.

In the east end of Wendis, Star City gleamed like a geode in the dark.

Nia remembered Orendi, the northern Tetrapolis-city of Faxe. Orendi was a compact city of tall towers, between snow forest and the vast natural park called Tetra. As a teenager, Nia had spent two half-years in Orendi with Gale-Eris Mitrova, who was the daughter of friends of Nia’s family. Gale became Nia’s own friend, confidant, and tutor in Trapoli social life. They went to parties and cultural events and dated young men. It had been more fun than anything Nia did in all the years since then. Until dancing with Martan last night.

Five years ago, Nia had visited Gale-Eris again. This time everything about Faxe seemed different, beginning in Faxe’s transit ring, where Nia was subjected to scanning and questioning more intense than she’d ever experienced before. It was after Disunion terrorists had brought down the transit tower in Orendi’s southern twin city, Strata. But Nia, a citizen of Azure—an independent planet with no Disunion terrorist movement whatsoever—had difficulty getting down to the surface of Faxe. She arrived in Orendi with humiliation sticking to her ego like tar.

Social status corresponded to altitude in Orendi. Gale-Eris had moved up in her world: she now owned an apartment with sweeping views. To the east, a snow forest climbed up into a tall mountain range. To the south, the parkland of Tetra stretched out across the heart of the continent, vast and uninhabited. Orendi’s environmental screen hardly affected the views at all. The screen was just a faint shimmer mostly visible at dawn or dusk.

Gale was an interstellar mediator and a brilliant one. She spent a great deal of her time away from home, elsewhere in the Faxen Union, working for the Union Government by doing political and corporate mediation. They discussed Nia’s own, decidedly less successful, career. Nia had felt that she’d long since lived down her old debacle on Moira and expected to be considered for government office on Azure in one or two years.

Gale had asked, “What if it doesn’t work out? Do you have any other options?”

As a matter of fact, Nia did, and it was her reason for being on Faxe this time. “Here. An interstellar lawyer can make a good career on Faxe.”

Gale had frowned. “Twenty years ago, that would have been a good idea. Now I’m not so sure. Have you considered working in Wendis?”

Nia had never imagined going to Wendis for more than a pleasure trip, if she could ever afford that. “No. I don’t know if I could stand spingravity, and not having open spaces and a horizon and a sun, like Azure. Or here.” Between Tetra’s northernmost point, Orendi, and its southernmost point, Strata, there were no cities, roads, or farms. Tetra was a wilderness preserve. That memorable conversation with Gale had taken place at dusk, and beyond Gale’s window Nia could see the faint, flickering wildlights of Tetra—the electrical activities of the native animals and plants. Preservation of the natural ecosystems of Faxe was a linchpin of the government policy, individual values, and everything in between. “I like how the native wilderness is preserved.”

“The hell it is.” To Nia’s shocked look, Gale explained. “Tetra is hollow. Under a shell of apparently undisturbed landscape, resource extraction goes on day and night. The most unusual specimens of wildlife are taken by collectors. The rest of the creatures are disturbed. Even this high up, you find them fluttering in front of a window or clinging to the glass, staring in at you. That didn’t used to happen, but it does now.”

Nia was dismayed though not astonished. This fit with what her father believed. Her father just hadn’t been that blunt, or known about the creatures staring into windows. “Is this why you’re happy spending so much time away?”

“I’m good at what I do. But I find the government cares less for mediation than for winning.” Gale sounded bitter. “It cares less for talks than forced confessions, less for justice than power. The Union Government invented hellhounds, which are judge, jury, and executioner conveniently rolled into one damnable tool of the state. If I were you, I wouldn’t be an interstellar lawyer here.”

At a loss for words about Faxen politics, Nia asked, “Are you happy with your personal life?” Gale’s lover was a syndexec. Nia had never met the man and only knew that Gale loved him.

Silhouetted against Tetra, Gale said, “He’s like his class. That which they love, they love to own.” With a sinking heart, Nia had just nodded. She hadn’t seen Gale since that conversation. They’d not kept in contact. Nia hoped that Gale had found better love, either in her syndexec or with someone else.

In comparison, Martan looked like a good romantic prospect. All things considered, and especially considering the way he danced, Martan was as attractive as any man Nia had ever met. That didn’t mean he’d accept her past, with the scars and the fears that her decisions had imprinted on her. She wondered what would happen between them. Wendis brightened from its eastern end. Dry leaves skittered across the Promenade in the dawn wind. The overlook railing felt cold as she leaned on it, watching the greens and grays of the university campus take shape in the light of day.

Suddenly Martan joined her, standing at the rail beside her with his coat whipping in the wind. Happiness percolated up inside Nia. Her claustrophobia and fear of being a public spectacle were here for her to reckon with, but miraculously, so was he.

At that moment, three purposeful students appeared on the Promenade. Lightly dressed and shivering, they made straight for Martan and Nia. She crossed her arms with a frown calculated to drive the unwelcome distraction away. Undeterred, the trio—winsome and eager—explained through chattering teeth that they represented the upcoming Wintergala. It was a worthy cause, a wonderful showcase for amateur talents. . . . Would the Proctor and the Assistant University Counsel consider doing a performance dance in the Wintergala?

Since she had made enough of a spectacle of herself last night, Nia started to curtly explain it would not be possible. Leaning against the railing, Martan said, “Want to fly?”

The suggestion electrified her. The short answer was—yes! Nia gave him a longer and more cautious answer instead. “I don’t know if I could pull that off here in Wendis. Even if I can, it would take a lot of practice. And advice from a real teacher. I have no desire to do it for laughs.”

“Hiro’s new friend the Dance Master would be happy to help us. Dare you.”

“Only if you wear your Goyan Guard uniform!”

He half-smiled. “Done.”

The young representatives from the Wintergala left overjoyed.

“If it doesn’t work, we just do Ibex or another easy one.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall down,” Martan said as they entered Gembolt Hall.

Nia remembered how easily he’d amended her missteps last night. She imagined dancing Ziara with practice, and unexpected happiness welled up in a laugh.

Just before Martan turned away toward his office at the other end of the hall, he brushed the side of her face with his fingertips, with the slightest trace of possessiveness.

Nia stood in the hallway feeling her heart beat fast. She’d half expected him to kiss the back of her hand, military courtliness, or go his way with a smile and a self-effacing shrug—academic courtliness. Instead, that touch. It changed her inner world. With Moira haunting her again, Wendis a place of spingravity and claustrophobia, and Azure an estranged home, her life had felt like endless blundering in a dark attic, tripping on furniture with hard edges. Now a small light flicked on, not brilliant, but illumination enough for her to see a way out.

Martan had learned a wary respect for Toll. When she wanted to, Toll could come to a point like a lancet. Today the clouds in the heart of Wendis were freighted with ice water. Rivulets of rain streamed across the glass of Toll’s window. Toll said, “So. You two danced up a storm last night.”

Martan answered, “I learned Ziara when I was stationed on the Steppe, and she studied artistic dance when she was younger. She can’t quite handle the spin-gee, but I can help her. In fact we just promised three students that we would do it in public again for the Wintergala.”

“Great Heaven, why did you agree to that?”

“We’ll have to practice a lot. You did tell me not long ago that I should find a hobby.”

“I didn’t mean Nia. Are you falling in love?”

“Not with her!” Martan immediately realized that he’d telegraphed more to Toll than he intended. His idea of inscrutability was Toll’s idea of his being an open book. Thus the weekly meetings. He’d learned to explain whatever she asked about, saving her the time, and him the discomfort of her cutting her way to it. “She’s very attractive. That wasn’t lost on anyone in the place last night. But I’m a very ordinary-looking man.”

Toll shook her head. “You were that, but the doctors, being Wendisans, could not resist making you prettier, remember?”

“I remember but I don’t connect with it.” Martan shrugged. “When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a stranger.”

“You might smile at the girl students and the gayboys once in a while. They are a far better mirror for you than a glass on the wall of a lonely Proctor’s residence.”

Martan suddenly remembered the wild, free girls on the Goyan Steppe. While he was stationed there, three different ones had invited him into their tents.

“There,” said Toll. “You have a charming smile, and I reiterate, quite good looks. Let me give you a word of warning.”

“What, Madame Toll?”

“I have no idea what sort of women you associated with in your previous life, but they probably weren’t like Nia. She comes from the elite of Azure, a class of people who are resource-poor but lineage-rich, and they have very conservative standards of behavior. If it occurs to you to rush her along, think better of it.”

“Fine.” She was an Az and Martan was pretending to be Goyan chaff. Martan did not believe that Nia Courant would find him a destination to rush toward. Except in Ziara. That was reason enough for him to work with her on a Wintergala dance.

“And by the way, it should go without saying, but I’ll say it. Her family is on Azure. I, however, am here.” The grandmotherly-looking Counsel drew herself erect in her chair. “If I ever learn you’ve done anything unworthy of an officer and gentleman, I’ll have you thrown out of Wendis through a refuse disposal airlock.”

Nia had a course in Interstellar Law to teach. Her students were smart, verbal, and well informed. She was reminded that her own university on Azure, though good, did not attract the finest young minds on twelve terraformed planets. She barely stayed ahead of her students.

During one lecture, it startled her to see Martan casually sitting in the corner of the classroom. As Proctor, he had a right to sit in on a class. But Nia prided herself on being an observant teacher. How had he materialized like that? He showed up the next day too.

Meanwhile she cleaned up the trouble caused by Svetlana Tai. Released from detention by Faxen authorities on Estrella, the rules compliance monitor returned looking haggard. He’d expected to be charged with vandalism and sentenced to prison on Moira. Nia took a deposition from him, sent him home to his family, and seethed at Svetlana Tai’s recent actions.

Tai deserved punishment, but it wouldn’t happen. With a knack for operating on the inside edge of the law, Tai usually got what she wanted, and got away with an appalling amount of misbehavior. On the other hand, Tai’s Messenger said games. In games, scoring points matters. Shove me back by dredging up Moira, will you? Two can play that game, Nia thought. She arranged a meeting with the Chancellor of the university. He was half-Faxen and lacked the Wendisan ardor for conducting business in person. But for this, a virtual meeting wouldn’t do.

By Wendisan standards, his office was large, as was his window. After initial small talk, Nia said, “The Counsel’s Office would like your help with a problem involving Svetlana Tai.”

The edges of the Chancellor’s mouth twitched with displeasure at Tai’s name. Good. What Nia had heard was true, that the Chancellor intensely disliked Tai. Nia explained the situation and then proposed a course of action.

The Chancellor said irritably, “Her conduct merits more than a slap on the wrist.”

Here in private with Nia—reacting to her Azurean looks?—the Chancellor seemed different from his Wendisan public face, wearing his power with less subtlety. Fine. Nia had been around powerful people all of her early life. To gain their cooperation, you state your case and specify where power comes into play. “Leaving the rules compliance monitor behind in that situation was a clear breach of the Honor Code, and making it known will embarrass her. In Wendis, embarrassment weighs more than many other penalties. I need your personal approval to attach a citation for breach of the Honor Code to Tai’s record.”

“Approved.” The Chancellor tapped the spherical Secretary on his desk and its lights flashed. “You yourself have been here, what, four years? You’ve gained an excellent understanding of Wendisan culture.”

That wasn’t accurate, Nia thought instantly. In four years she only understood the part of the cultural iceberg in plain view above the waterline.

But the Chancellor added, “A note of commendation goes into your own record.”

“Noted,” said the Secretary.

Leaving the Chancellor’s office, Nia felt triumph tempered by wariness. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. But the Chancellor had given Nia what she wanted: an official black mark on Tai’s name. In addition, an Honor Code breach would cause Tai to be scheduled for fifty hours of community service. Ideally, that would take the form of scraping mold out of air ducts in the university’s buildings and grounds.

Tai was expected back before the end of the academic term. Her ill will toward Nia would predictably escalate as soon as she arrived. Nia had to have ammunition ready. With that, on top of teaching, it was a terrible time for Nia to acquire a time-consuming new pastime.

But she was learning to fly again.

Jay Jae Ibuse was a masterful dance teacher; Martan was better than any partner Nia had ever dreamed of. Nia soon quickly came to love the Tauzin Dance Academy, with the long narrow banners brightening the corners of the large main room. Even Hiro was often there, a frequent guest of Jay Jae. Hiro now possessed a real silk necktie to replace the one stretched past any further utility as a tie. There wasn’t a silkworm closer than Goya, silk was shockingly expensive, and Nia and Martan, with modest academic salaries, had eaten noodle soup for a week to afford the tie, but it was worth the expense. The material was purple with an exquisite medallion design. Hiro had been thrilled speechless to find himself the owner of such a tie.

Joy at dancing buffered the discouragement that Nia felt in learning to fly again. The flying moves of Ziara were harder for her to relearn in spingravity than learning the dance on Azure had ever been. Even Martan, because he had to correct Nia’s mistakes in coordination, was operating at the edge of the envelope of his ability. One night Nia launched herself toward Martan for the breath-taking Zia move where the man catches the woman and holds her over his head, but Martan wasn’t quite balanced even before he lifted her up in his arms. “Line up knee and shoulder!” Jay Jae called out—too late: Martan lost his balance. Nia crashed to the floor. The spingravity made her skid far enough across the floor to inflict a friction burn on her knee.

Martan gently gathered her up. That reaction from him was worth a skinned knee.

University Counsel Toll placed a teapot on a low table. “What happened to your jaw?”

“It’s a casualty of a good cause, the Wintergala,” Martan answered. “She accidentally hit me with her elbow when I dropped her.” He rubbed the bruise. “It’s incredibly hard for her to handle the spin-gee, but she keeps trying.”

“I heard you’re sitting in on her class. Contemplating a law degree?”

“I like watching her. No better way to watch a pretty teacher than from a large class.”

“As countless generations of smitten students have discovered. Are you in love?”

Martan shook his head.

“In lust?” Toll asked suspiciously.

“I’m on my best behavior, Madame Toll. But love—no. That is not allowed.”

“Still?”

Good question. “I don’t know how much the doctors changed me,” Martan admitted.

Toll sighed. “You perplex me, my boy. You can seem as innocently adrift as many a young academic, and that makes me want to give you matronly advice.”

“What would that advice be?”

“Keep her real name in mind.”

Martan lifted one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Inanna Az-Courant. She’s an Az.”

“That isn’t what I mean. Inanna was the name of an ancient goddess. We in Wendis do love names like that, heroes and kings and goddesses of ancient times. The goddess Inanna is a legend older than old, from the first cradle of civilization. She was the Sumerian goddess of love and war who descended to Hell at terrible cost to herself. Nia had an episode somewhat reminiscent of that when she was young. Perhaps someday she’ll tell you about it. It’s a painful topic for her.” Toll leaned back with a sigh that Martan found impossible to interpret. “Dance on, my boy. If ever you see her truly vulnerable, I think you’ll lose your heart to her.”

The hugwort had abandoned any pretense of being sessile. At night it prowled the office, opened drawers and cabinets, and pilfered writing instruments, paper-fasteners and Wendisan coins, which it especially liked because the coins had a hole in the middle and were easy to apprehend with an insistent green tendril. Nia couldn’t bear the thought of confining the hugwort in a box every night. So she asked Hiro to make the office hugwort-proof, which he did with his usual good humor. The outcome was imperfect. Hiro finally wondered out loud if he had hugwort-proofed the office or simply provided the hugwort a specialized intelligence test.

One Wendsday morning Nia entered the building early out of sheer desperation to get everything done. The engineers permitted only emergency lighting before regular hours, so the hallway was gloomy. At the Counsel’s Office door, Nia saw Martan approaching from the other end of the hall. He moved like a stalking cat. On the floor, in front of him, an untidy pile of leaves and tendrils scurried along, on its way home. When it encountered Nia’s foot, the hugwort quivered delightedly. Scooping it up, Nia scolded it, “You are not supposed to leave the office!”

“Hah,” said Martan. “We’ve had items going missing all week. I just watched that thing open a drawer and help itself to three new paper-fasteners. What is it, anyway?”

“A species recently discovered on Jumala. Professor Zeng gave me one to help me understand how to design legal protections, so the species won’t be exploited in the pet trade. I didn’t know it was getting out. I’ll replace whatever’s missing.”

“A handful of paper fasteners, two pens, Mikal’s class ring—and that letter opener you gave me.” Martan glared at the plant-animal. “I thought it was a human thief, and I was waiting to give somebody hell. And then that thing came in. Under the door.”

“It’s surprisingly compressible.” In the Counselors’ common office, where the dim emergency lighting was fainter than the predawn light coming in through the bay window, Nia felt through the hugwort’s tendrils. Something cool and rounded met her fingers. She disentangled it from the greenery to hand to Martan.

“Mikal’s class ring. Missing for two days,” he said.

“Sometimes it clings to a treasure for days on end.”

“Well, it’s not dragging the little sword around everywhere. Does it lose things?”

“No, but it hides them.” She led Martan to the bay window. Outside, in the cool gray light before day, the verdant terrain of Wendis rippled like a thick green rug toward the Sea.

Nia probed the mulch in the hugwort’s purple pot. She found several coins and paper fasteners, then the letter-opening sword. Outlined in early morning light, she saw Martan’s shoulders relax, relieved. “I apologize for my little green friend. It doesn’t know that it’s doing anything wrong.” Nia put the miniature sword in Martan’s hand.

His fingers closed over it and over her hand as well. “You have strange taste in friends.”

“You, for example?”

Instead of the verbal comeback she expected, he leaned closer and kissed her. Before she realized what she was doing, she responded to him, kissing back. After a few minutes, he drew away. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he slipped the sword into a shirt pocket.

Nia felt dizzy. Oh. Her sexual feelings had been waiting to find the door cracked, and when they did, they rushed it. “Can we dance tonight?”

“Not tonight. I have an early evening appointment.”

But she wanted to see him, off duty, sooner than tomorrow. “Come to my place after that.” She handed Martan her address card. He seemed to handle it with extraordinary care. This will change things, the rational part of her mind warned.

Then let things change, she thought.

Late in the day, in the quiet of the Proctor’s Office, Martan studied Nia’s address card and the holographic map that appeared when he turned it over. He saw which neighborhood she lived in—University Village, no surprise—and which street and apartment, and how to get there. The signage in Wendis was eccentric but reliable, and all he needed was her address, but for some reason he memorized the way to her door, including the distances and elevations, so thoroughly that he could have found his way there in a city-wide blackout at a dead run. Odd compulsion. Not something an ordinary man would—or could—do. Was he in love? He didn’t know. At any rate, he wanted to see her in the privacy of her own home more than anything in a long time, but had an unwelcome errand first.

He had sent out a letter under Proctor’s letterhead to a number of businesses that were off-limits to students. In the letter, he asked for their cooperation in keeping their premises student-free. Most had responded in the affirmative. His reputation was beginning to get around. But from the owner of the Trieste Casino, the reply was a noncommittal invitation to come talk about it. University benefactor. Handle with care, said the notes handed down from Martan’s predecessor.

Maybe I’ll do that, thought Martan. But probably not.

He walked to the Trieste Casino, finding his way through the Wendisan maze of sidewalks, catwalks, pathways, bridges, grottoes, and far-flung stairs. The casino stood under Mount Chance like a glassbrick castle. Soft green, blue, yellow, and pink lights shimmered in the glassbricks. From outside, different sections of the Trieste looked like glacier ice, sunrise sky, or sugar candy. Inside, the lobby had a ceiling like a glass garden—glass made into flowers, illuminated in sparkling, vivid colors. A uniformed concierge directed Martan toward a doorway in the far corner of an opulent gaming hall. In the subdued lighting, Martan noted lavishly dressed customers around gaming tables. Evidently, the Trieste existed to skim the richest cream of interstellar casino-goers. An interactive menu listed the casino’s attractions. Some of the games listed implied stakes higher than money. This was definitely a place to keep university students away from.

Through a doorway was a room with Benedet seated behind a desk. Odd place for an office, Martan thought, and then realized that it wasn’t Benedet in person. It was a recorded holoviz. It animated when Martan was halfway there. “Welcome to Trieste, Mr. Martan,” said the casino owner. “Unfortunately, I’m detained elsewhere. You’ll have to wait for me.”

Maybe not, Martan thought with sharp irritation. Of all evenings, he did not plan to waste this one.

“I’ve arranged a tour of some of my facilities.” The image of Benedet smiled coldly. Something about that smile put Martan’s nerves on high alert.

Benedet said, “Your hospital bill will be on the house.”

11

GAUNTLET

In front of the Benedet holoviz with its predatory smile, the floor tilted to the right under Martan’s feet. Martan slipped. The spingravity of Wendis pulled him down and sideways. But something under the tilted floor gave off hot vapor. Martan rolled against the sideways pull of the spin-gee. He skidded off the tilted floor to land on his feet on a subfloor. With adrenaline firing his nerves, he stared at a vat of clear liquid with a red heating element in the bottom of it. He would have fallen into that if he’d let the spin-gee pull him where it wanted to. Anybody without spin-gee sense would have been in hot water. It was a nasty trap.

The tilted floor righted itself, springing up before Martan could catch it, leaving him standing beside the vat, which looked like the only feature in an otherwise featureless, dimly lit hallway. Ceiling, walls, and floor were made of frosted glassbrick. Martan tensed. What next?

Bright lights flashed in the air. The lights formed words.

THE GAUNTLET OF TRIESTE

SUCCESS! 100 POINTS!

Martan knew that the Gauntlet was one of the Casino’s games with stakes higher than money. If you made it through, you won big. If you failed, you hurt bad. There would be more unpleasantness to come. The skin on the back of Martan’s neck crawled. Sweating in the heat from the vat of hot water, Martan edged around it, silently damning Benedet and his warped game.

Something rasped. Martan didn’t like the sound, like a small trapdoor, overhead, sliding open. An instant later, a brilliantly glowing orb dropped toward Martan’s head. Martan dodged it. When it hit the floor it crashed into shards. Then more just like it plummeted out of the ceiling, all raining down at a spin-gee angle. Martan wove and ducked through the barrage of spheres. One caught him on the shoulder with a painful blow. He got clear of them, with the crash of breaking glass ringing in the hallway. Then they stopped. The hallway was littered with shards, and some kind of oily liquid pooled around them. No going back through that.

Anybody without spin-gee-sense, and superb reflexes, would now be lying unconscious in the shards and iridescent oil. Under his breath, Martan cursed Benedet. The air lit up again.

SUCCESS! 200 POINTS!

Backing away from the field of glass and oil, Martan let out a long breath between his clenched teeth. Anger seethed inside him. Then he remembered the voice of his onetime fight instructor. “Know your anger. Dip out a spoonful.” Martan walked lightly, alert.

Something gleamed in the dark. He leaped clear of an axe wielded by a giant metal mannequin. The axe crashed down on the floor where Martan would have walked by it. Metal idiot, Martan thought, staring at the thing. It couldn’t locomote—couldn’t give chase—just raised the axe back up, fascinating to watch, but ineffectual.

Then he felt a tremor in the frosted glassbrick floor.

The floor cracked open. Martan jumped for better footing then jumped again, and again, nearly getting a foot trapped between two pieces of the floor when they split apart and crashed back together again. The floor swayed, broke, and tipped like ice floes in thaw. Cracks darted up the walls to the ceiling. Sections of wall and ceiling started collapsing in. Hell!

Martan sprinted. The breakup propagated only as fast as a normal man could run. And Martan was faster. He still had his speed, just like he still had his spin-gee sense. Past the crazing part of the hallway, he slowed to a jog.

SUCCESS! 300 POINTS! appeared in the air.

Obstacle course. This was an obstacle course, one with a vicious attitude. But in his previous life, Martan had liked obstacle courses—and excelled at them.

The hallway ahead, now less like a rectilinear hall and more like a caveway, branched in three directions. On the left, the passageway ran down steeply, looked slick, and smelled faintly of spoiled food. It hinted at a one-way trip to the casino kitchen’s garbage dump. The passageway on the right opened into a vertical well with a rope ladder slanting down the center of it. Martan sniffed that air too. There was cold water down there, he thought, and algae. He experimentally gripped the rope ladder, discovering that it oozed slippery slime when squeezed. Martan disgustedly wiped his hand on his coat. Use the ladder and you slip off to land in the water below. Probably stocked with poisonous aquatic snakes.

The center passageway looked clear and straight, but it was unlighted. It smelled of hot metal. Martan walked ahead slowly, straining his sight and his other senses. There seemed to be an obstruction in the passage, something bulky and stationary.

Two large glowing eyes abruptly opened, eyes with no intelligence behind them, just fire. Martan backpedaled just ahead of a torrent of flame from a metal dragon’s head. The fire stopped. The dragon caught its breath with a mechanical wheeze. Its fiery eyes stayed open.

One way went down to garbage, one way down to rank water, and one way into a flamethrower! Martan stripped off his coat. It was his old assignment coat from earlier years, and it had a fireproof, projectile-proof inner layer that had saved his life more than once. Martan walked forward. He held the coat up against a fresh burst of flame from the dragon. Fire spilled off the coat material. The dragon paused, sucking in fresh air. Martan leaped around it with the smoldering coat in his hand.

SUCCESS! 500 POINTS! YOU MAY BE A WINNER!

Martan heard the dragon’s base turning and put on a spurt of speed. Past the dragon, but not clear of the range of the flames, were two doors, a narrow black one and a wide white one. Martan picked the black door and raced through it.

Into an ambush.

Three fighters launched themselves at him, muscular men in black clothing and black masks. Martan reacted instinctively. He launched himself into the air at the first one, knocking that man down hard. He rolled back up onto his feet and snapped his smoldering coat into the face of the second fighter. He caught the third man’s knee with a vicious kick, and the goon went down. Lightning-fast reaction time had its pluses. But now there were two more goons running up. And the first three were mad. Martan remembered his fight instructor’s voice saying, “Choose fight or flight.”

Martan outran the goons. The hall forked, this time in just two directions. One way curved left and had a high fence across it, but with a gap between the top of the fence and the ceiling. The other way curved right and had a wide crevasse in it. The crevasse was at right angles to the Wendis spin, and a jump across it would be anti-spinwise. In effect, it was wider than it looked. You could climb the fence and wiggle through the gap at the top. If it didn’t snap shut on you. You could jump the crevasse. But better not misjudge the jump.

Martan launched himself across the crevasse at an angle as spinwise as he could manage. He landed on the first inch of the other side and rolled forward, back on his feet in a second.

Behind him, his pursuers vanished. Ahead of him, a wide blank wall suddenly rolled aside. It revealed a crazy skein of catwalks and stairs that extended as high and low as he could see. Between the catwalks and slanting stairs, empty space stretched a long way down to what looked like a hard landing on jagged debris.

SUCCESS! 1000 POINTS!

WATCH OUT FOR THE MAIDEN

THE DOCTOR IS STANDING BY—STANDING—BY—STANDING—BYSTANDING—

Lights flashed brighter and brighter. They were damned strobes, engineered to distract and confuse the brain. By this point in the Gauntlet, only somebody with acute spin-gee sense would be left standing. This setup was meant to addle that. But Martan had taken one good look at the twisted maze. He closed his eyes and felt his way through, remembering what it had looked like and listening to faint air currents around him.

Going up a skewed set of stairs, he stopped on a landing. It felt different from what he expected. He opened his eyes. The next stair was a hologram. The landing went nowhere.

Then he heard something creak like a hinge, inches from his ears. Martan turned his head to see a human-shaped door studded with needle-sharp metal spikes swinging toward him. Trusting his memory of one look into this place, he leaped up, caught the rim of the catwalk overhead, and swung his feet up to hook the rim with his ankles so his whole body was clear of the spiked door. The harsh crash of metal on fauxstone echoed across the mazed space. Martan swung down through the opening behind the spiked door, then stood there breathing hard. The spiked door was the Maiden. One of its spikes was much longer than the rest. If he hadn’t jumped, he would have been pinned like a butterfly but alive enough for the doctor to salvage. That trick had been designed by an ingenious sadist—like the rest of the Gauntlet.

The Maiden crashed shut behind him.

The Gauntlet had presented a corridor first, then a cave passage, then a mazed space. Now it was a wide, dark area with crystalline columns. The columns branched high up, like faceted black trees, and melted into a roof shaped like a complicated canopy. This was a night forest, bounded by a high, translucent glass wall with pale-blue light shining from the base of it. That must be an outer wall of the Trieste.

The crystal forest was silent. No birds, not even a mechanical owl, but. . . . Martan heard soft, crisp clicks. An instant later he registered what it was. A skeleton, a skeletal stag with gleaming white antlers, charged toward him.

Martan dodged behind a column. The skeleton stag had to be a robot, but it moved rapidly and easily, stretching its bony neck around the column. Its tines looked wicked.

Martan remembered putting the letter opener in his shirt pocket this morning. Clenching his fist around it, he threw himself around the column, dived under the stag’s rib cage and plunged the sharp, strong sliver of metal up into its bony neck. The joint sparkled. The stag backed away with its head hanging down, jerking.

“Vandal!” said an icy voice behind him. Martan whirled. “That machine is valuable.” A tall man stood between two columns halfway across the night forest, and Martan recognized Benedet. Fury flared in the back of his brain. Benedet was armed with a long sword. Martan launched himself at Benedet.

Only Martan’s reflexes saved him from Benedet’s sword slicing the air inches from Martan’s shoulder. Martan backtracked out of range of the blade while he sized up the situation. Behind Benedet, weapons were arrayed on the floor. Sword, spear, spiky ball on a chain on a stick. You choose. You also risk your neck by stooping to pick anything up.

Benedet was as dangerous as his toys. He advanced and retreated, moving lightly and unpredictably. His sword was sharp and expertly wielded.

His fight instructor’s remembered voice said, If you don’t have what you need, use what you have. At least the remains of Martan’s coat were cool enough to wrap around his arm. Martan pretended to stray into range of the sword. Wrapped in the coat, his arm took a powerful blow, edge on. That he withstood the blow distracted Benedet enough for Martan to dive past the man and scoop up a long, pointed spear. He’d worked with pointed sticks many times. And Benedet quickly realized it. Benedet circled, wary of the point. With a long arm and a long blade, though, Benedet’s reach was equal to that of the spear.

Sometimes Benedet had empty space behind him, and sometimes he had one of the crystal trees, a beveled column. Martan maneuvered around, testing the balance of his spear. He pressed an attack, and landed a glancing blow with the point of the spear on Benedet’s rib cage—and the spear tip slid off. So Benedet had some kind of body armor under his black clothes. Benedet pressed back. Martan had to retreat behind a crystal column. He retreated farther, until he was out in the open with Benedet in front of the column.

Martan hurled the spear. Benedet saw it coming and sidestepped. Behind him, the spear ricocheted with a ringing clang off the column. Martan had put so much power into the throw and calculated the angle of rebound so well that the spear flew back and broadsided Benedet. Startled, Benedet dropped his guard for an instant—long enough for Martan to land a flying kick to his sword hand. Martan felt bone snap. The sword fell.

Five black-clad goons rushed into the night forest. Martan froze, weighing his next move.

“Enough!” said Benedet.

Martan and the goons eyed each other, but no one made a hostile move first.

Benedet said, “I said we’d meet, and so we have.”

Martan let himself crack the lid on his anger. It put a white-hot edge on his words. “Why the game?”

Benedet jerked his head. His goons withdrew, leaving Martan and Benedet alone. Then Benedet said, “Welcome to Wendis. Among other purposes, our danger games let us test our mettle—and that of others. You pass the test. You’re a far more qualified Proctor than the indolent fool who preceded you.” Benedet grimaced. He had his broken wrist clamped against his chest with his good arm.

Of all the damned conceit! Martan stowed his anger where he could find it again in an instant. “No more tests, not if you value your—wellbeing.” Not if you value your life.

Benedet heard the unspoken magnitude of the threat. He raised his good hand and traced a circle in the air with his fingertips, the Wendisan peace gesture. “Agreed. No more tests. You keep university students out of the Trieste. I cooperate. Fair enough, Gyle Night?”

“Fair enough. . . .” Martan let his voice trail off in an admission of minor ignorance.

Benedet smiled humorlessly. The corners of his mouth were white with pain. “Unlike most Wendisans, I do not have a cozy nickname. My enemies call me Bent.”

Martan left the Trieste empty-handed. No prize for getting through the Gauntlet. Benedet hadn’t said anything about that and Martan hadn’t asked. Martan felt cheated. Other than that—he had enjoyed the Gauntlet. He had always liked obstacle courses. This one had told him how much of his old self was left after all that happened in the past year. It was more than he had dared hope for. He just didn’t like the Gauntlet’s attitude, or its owner.

As he approached Nia Courant’s home on a quiet, convoluted Wendisan street, nervous sweat trickled under his arms. At least it was clean sweat. He had gone home, showered off the smell of burnt coat, and painted bandages on several scratches.

Tonight she looked very much the Wendisan lady in a soft tunic and slacks and a necklace of sparkling pale stones. She had a Wendisan-style company room with cushions and a low table, and she seated them both on the cushions, close to each other. Martan felt light-headed. This was more baffling than the Gauntlet, because he didn’t know which of several different rule sets to follow. Azurean courting rules? Wendisan? The only set of courting rules he knew well was the one applicable to a soldier on the Goyan Steppe.

“You look invigorated,” she said.

He nodded. “I walked to Chance and back.”

“It’s a small world, when you can walk halfway around it between afternoon and midnight.” As she spoke, the stones around her neck shifted and caught the light.

“Those are diamonds,” Martan said.

“This is just the only strand of gems I own.”

“It goes with your clothes.” It would have gone spectacularly well with her body without clothes. What could he say to an Azurean woman who was part Wendisan, when Azureans were strait-laced and Wendis was famous across a hundred stars as a place to lose your heart to the natives? “May I touch it?” Acutely conscious of her breathing, he traced the necklace from the side of her neck to a point below her throat. The diamonds near each end of the strand were tiny and pink, and the size of the crystals increased as the color shaded deeper to the red rose diamond at the point of the necklace. The coloration and proportions of Wendisan women were different from an Azurean woman. “Was this designed for you?”

“Yes. It was a gift. He could afford custom making.”

Gift? He? Martan felt wrenched between indignation and dread. “A lover?”

“No, no-no. For a while we were each other’s best company at excruciatingly boring civic dinners. It’s a Wendisan dating pattern. We were social allies, not lovers. And that’s over.”

Clever move, Martan thought. Wearing the necklace let her explain her romantic situation to him. She considered herself free. She had a rich admirer, though. And Martan had no possessions except those thinly spread through the Proctor’s Residence; no money except a Proctor’s slender salary. Use what you do have. “I once saw the rose diamond mines on Goya.”

She nodded. “That’s what these are.”

“The mine is in a mountain range crowned with snow and ice. The mines have diamonds in all the colors of the stars in Goya’s night sky, but the rose diamonds are the rarest of them all.”

Part of the Proctor’s job was midnight rounds outside the university’s walls, making sure that the youngest students were safe within and not getting into the perilous attractions of Wendis outside the walls. In his weeks on the job so far, he’d caught half a dozen students dropping over the walls at late hours, and the number of attempts had tapered off sharply. This was a clear, cool night, undisturbed by wayward students, and Martan made his rounds in good spirits. He exchanged a wave with the stocky policewoman on the corner.

It had been an eventful night. He’d won the Gauntlet with its bizarre dangers. Benedet had cheated him out of the prize for winning. And yet the Gauntlet had given him something worth more than money. It had showed him that he still had the physical enhancements and training that made danger his natural habitat. Knowing that he was still who he’d been, not a stranger to himself, had emboldened him to court Nia Courant.

Mindful that he might have to explain his conduct to Toll, he’d been an officer and gentleman in Nia’s home. But he’d taken her to another world by telling of places he’d seen. Then they’d kissed. She didn’t want his hands on her back (Azurean taboo?) but she chose to defend it by reclining against a cushion. Having her between him and the cushion, with the edge of his hand on her warm throat, brushing cool diamonds, made him feel more completely alive than he had in months, or years before that.

Martan whistled a tune. He didn’t remember where the song came from. Maybe he’d learned it years ago, when he was young and happy.

Nia had more than a full day of work ahead of her. The prospect it didn’t faze her in the least. She floated on the delight from the previous evening. Martan had seen strange and beautiful places on Goya, and he could describe them with as much poetry and passion as any traveler she’d ever heard. To his further credit, he kissed well, while respecting the fact that on her side there might be boundaries that took a while to dismantle.

Today she felt no fear of Moira. It was just one of a hundred planets in this corner of the Galaxy. They all held wonders and terrors. Plenty of people had experienced adventures—good adventures, bad ones, or mixed outcomes—in the light of the hundred thousand stars of the Faraway. Even Moira had some things she was glad to have seen with her own eyes. Martan apparently had never been there. She had some wonders to tell him about, when she felt ready.

At mid-morning came the Wendisan Second Tea Hour. The whole world stopped as everyone drank fragrant tea and caught up with social business, business socialization, and fresh gossip. But the chiming of a vizcall made Nia leave Hiro, Chan, and Yakov in the Common Office and go back into her own office.

The vizscreen stayed enigmatically blank until Nia enabled the visual mode on her end. She was startled to see the sparely handsome face and sardonic eyes of Robard Benedet. He dispensed with pleasantries. “I hear you’re dancing with the new Proctor.”

“How do you know that?” she demanded.

“It’s a small world.”

A small, gossipy world. Hearing from Robard that she was the object of Wendisan gossip nettled her. “Why do you care?”

“I was incensed to hear that you’d taken up with him. He seems like a somewhat good-looking nobody.”

Nia felt her adrenaline level ratcheting up. “I have my opinion about him and you’re free to form yours.”

“I did. He’s not what he seems. In fact, I don’t know what he is, and there aren’t many kinds of human being that I can’t classify, if I try.”

Nia frowned. What was Robard getting at—besides the highly unwelcome revelation that he might be jealous of Martan? “Look, if you’re trying to get me to change my opinion about you, forget it. I know too much about you now.”

“I know. I’m only calling you to warn you. You’ve found a very dangerous dance partner, Nia. Watch your step.”

12

SKYLARK

The hugwort nestled in Nia’s lap as she ran her fingers through its foliage. Little green tendrils stroked her wrist. Could it detect her anxious state of mind? What could it sense?

Robard’s call had upset her too much to ignore.

Hiro leaned in. “I don’t mean to intrude, but if something has gone wrong, let me help.”

Nia gestured him to enter and close the door behind him. “It’s Martan.”

“What about him?” Hiro asked with, for a Wendisan, almost rude directness.

“He came along at a good time. When I had to face up to old mistakes and move on. But there are things about him I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” said Hiro. “Jay Jae believes he’s not planetborn, and that he dances like a Faxen military man, and that he has had some kind of secret Faxen spingravity training. Yet he is a Goyan Guardsman—Mikal assures me that a uniform has been sent to be cleaned and pressed.”

“Good. That eliminates the worst-case scenario. No, just makes it less likely.”

“What is the worst case?”

Nia took a deep breath. “That he is exactly what we’re after. An undercover agent of Faxe. His name is more or less the three most common names on Goya. So it might be false.”

She wanted Hiro to say No, no, no, and explain why her unease was groundless. But he looked grave. “Chan told me about breezing into the Proctor’s Office one day and calling out Mikal’s name, and both Mikal and Martan automatically looked up.”

“As if Mikal is his real name?” Nia felt a cold flicker of fear. If you don’t even know someone’s name, do you know who they are at all?

“Nia Inanna, I’ve been so concerned that I queried my own intelligence network. We in the Service and Hospitality Guilds can find out things like whether someone kicks cats when no one important is looking. I asked questions to find out how he has treated cats and cleaning people, or what he might have let slip to reveal something unsavory in his character. The answer is—nothing. But that cannot be. Everybody has something objectionable about them—a betrayed friend, a secret vice, a bad habit. But as far as the Service and Hospitality Guilds can discover, he has no stain whatsoever on him. But he’s not new enough to be stain-free.”

They looked at each other.

“I asked Toll. Minnie Minami knows more about Martan than she lets on. She told me nothing in plain words, but I believe that this is City Council business. My own guess is that he really is what he said he was. Goyan Military Intelligence. Ties between Goya and Wendis run deep, and if Wendis should ever step out of its neutrality to form an alliance with any outside state at all, it will be the Archipelagoes of Goya. And it would be all skylark, you know.”

Skylark was Wendisan slang for a scary dark secret. “Goyan Military Intelligence on assignment?” A few of Nia’s knotted muscles relaxed. “I think I could live with that.”

Dance practice went badly that night. Nia had to reach a higher level of coordination in spingravity to make the dance work, and she failed. Finally Jay Jae Ibuse sent them both away. “You are getting nowhere,” he said. “You must get there without trying.”

Martan walked her home. It was a cold, clear night. The sunspar glittered, full of stars. In the coldest weather of the year so far, Martan had paradoxically stopped wearing his nondescript old coat and resorted to a thin jacket instead. At least he had gloves. Inside her own coat, Nia felt chilled and miserable. “I can’t conquer the spin-gee, I just can’t!”

“Then stop trying to conquer it. Jay is right.”

“How did you get so good in spin-gee?” she shot back.

“Training, and I can tell you what your problem is. Sensitive ears. You have more fine-grained coordination than most people. So spin-gee bothers you more.”

At her door, she hesitated. Goyan military intelligence on assignment? What was wrong with that, really? “Don’t leave.” In her front room, she sank down on a cushion. She was sick of being clumsy here in Wendis, for the first time in her entire life. But in lovemaking, spin-gee didn’t matter, and she would move better than any other woman in Wendis as far as Martan was concerned, because she was the one he wanted. Unfortunately, going further would mean Martan finding what she always tried to hide. She wrapped her arms around her knees.

“You’re tense.” He gently put his fist against her back, between her shoulder blades, sending shivers through her. “Want a backrub?”

“Why not?” she answered, voice muffled, since her head was buried in her arms.

“Because you don’t like your back being touched. You remind me of a cat that wants to be stroked and doesn’t, and edges out from under the hand that tries.”

Amazing how he could be low-key when she was wound tight, companionable when it was hard for her to be with herself. Nia swallowed hard. She had an explanation that had papered over awkwardness before, one that worked in Wendis. “Please.”

He first massaged her shoulders, where his strong hands smoothed her tight muscles like someone fingering kinks out of a skein of rope. He started to work his way down to her shoulder blades, then stopped. She wrapped her arms tighter around her knees. He lightly drummed his fingers on her back, as if he had conflicting thoughts. Then he found the magic seam on the back of her shirt, parted the seam, and ran his fingertips across the thin parallel scars that ran across her back from her shoulders to her waist.

“It was an early experiment in love,” she said with what she hoped sounded like conviction. “Not a successful experiment, and I never want to repeat it.”

“Don’t lie,” he said curtly.

“That’s all I’ll say about it!” She started to shrug away from him.

Without warning, he shoved her against the wall and took her by the throat. “Those scars are no accident and mean treason.”

Nia gripped his wrist. She tried to push him away. But he was too strong for her to fight, and to her utter shock, she heard herself say, “Yes and yes.”

“Where and when?”

“Moira, fifteen years ago.” Fear rose inside her like a cold black tide. Somehow he was making her say the truth she didn’t want to tell. She tried to struggle, but she felt paralyzed. His hand felt hot against her throat, pinning her against the wall with no way out.

“Why?” His face lacked even a flicker of expression.

Nia clenched her teeth against a compulsion to spell out the answer. Pain blossomed in the back of her skull. Words she did not want to say seemed to bubble up in her vocal chords. She resisted. The pain spread. The words she didn’t want to say trembled on her tongue. She bit her lip and tasted blood.

Martan stunned her by saying it all. “The trial took place in Moiran courts. It was under Moiran law to make it more palatable to the Moiran public. On Moira, a man convicted of high crime against fellow Moirans is whipped and wears thirteen scars for the rest of his life. Everyone knows it because they see it in bathhouses and common houses. There is isn’t much privacy. They despise the crimes that merit the thirteen scars. But you discovered an obscure law that lets a legal defender take a penalty if the defender is convinced of the accused’s innocence.”

The pain in her head unfolded new petals. It demanded an acknowledgment. “Yes!”

“Why did you invoke it?”

“I won’t tell y—” Pain instantly crushed her rebellion. But it hurt too much to talk.

He spoke the words for her. “The thirteen scars are such a mark of shame that a man who wears it on Moira doesn’t last long. Only if he’s young and healthy, and this man wasn’t. You knew it wouldn’t kill you, and you’d leave Moira. And he’d have life instead of death.”

More than the pain, having her secret flung in her face sapped her will to resist. “Yes!”

“Why are you ashamed about it?”

She tried not to answer. A different color of pain started opening in the back of her skull. It hurt even worse. Like hammering a sore thumb. “I failed fieldwork and I was criticized by everyone on Azure. My father and mother wanted me to have the scars erased. On Moira I’d promised to keep them forever. On Azure I looked like a masochist and a fool.”

“Social guilt doesn’t count.”

The threat of pain vanished. It left her quaking in terror. Now she understood. He was an agent of Faxe after all. The worst kind—a new kind of hellhound. She understood, and it was too late. No one the hellhounds go after ever lives to tell of it.

“Why are you afraid?”

This time she felt no pain pressure and no reason not to tell the truth. “You’re a hellhound and you’re going to kill me for knowing that.”

“Yes and no.”

“Damn you!” Beyond hope, she put her hand on his throat, mirroring his grip on hers. “What do you mean?”

“I was a hellhound until a year ago when I defected under cover of an explosion.” He seemed to blurt it, as though now he was compelled to tell the truth. “Faxe thinks I’m dead. Wendis gave me asylum. Doctors here put me back together. I don’t know what I am now.”

“I can answer that.” She was past either hope or fear. “You are a hellhound, because you just did what hellhounds do best, you invaded my mind to tear out my secret.”

“I—I—what?” He jerked away.

“Why? Even if you’re going to kill me, why?” she demanded.

Now expression flowed across his face. He looked horrified. “I didn’t mean to do it! What happened to you on Moira tripped my instincts. I didn’t know that could happen!”

She tried to get up. But she was too weak. Her legs folded. He reached toward her. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed, and he jumped back as though burned.

His face paled. “Do you want me to go away?”

Memories writhed in her mind. There were recent memories and old ones freshly excavated, all with raw edges. Dazed and full of dread, she said, “I know you can come back and kill me if you want to. I’ll be less afraid if you stay here.”

He stared at her. “I do not understand that.” Suddenly he leaned over to grab his discarded jacket. He got his gloves out of a pocket, and pulled them on. “I can’t do telepathy through gloves. See? Let me help you. It always happens. After—that. You feel weak, but it goes away.” Slipping his arms under her shoulders and knees, he lifted her effortlessly.

She was too weak to resist. “How do you know? With your kind there isn’t an after.”

“In training, we practiced on each other.”

You are a monster, his conscience accused him. He was so furious with himself that he felt sick. He sat cross-legged on Nia’s bed watching her sleep. That was normal enough. Sleep always came to the victim after Interrogation practice. Waking up was what could be rough.

He could not believe the magnitude of the crime he had just committed. It had been like a switch flipped, an instinctive reaction to those scars on her back, eerily like what he had been trained to seek out in enemies of the State. She wore a mark of high crime, and she felt an enormous amount of anger and shame over it. That had tripped the instincts and skills forged years ago when Faxe made him into a hellhound. Inadvertently or not, he had done an Interrogation on her. He balled his fists. But you can’t fight what you already did. He watched her sleeping where he had put her, under a light blanket up to her shoulders. If she woke up in a wild panic, the blanket would help him keep her from hurting herself.

The light in her bedroom was night-time dim, but he could see every detail of her face and hands, and the way the blanket followed the curves of her body. He memorized her, knowing with sick certainty that he would never be this close to her again.

In the early hours of the morning, she flinched into wakefulness, shaking and suppressing sobs. He hovered over her. “It’s OK, this isn’t Moira—”

“It’s all spinning, spinning—” she sounded panicky.

Spindizzy claustrophobia.

He remembered how he and the other hellhound cubs helped each other, during the merciless training in a high-spin-gee capsule inside Veritas. “You better lie flat on your back, at an angle to the bed.” He rearranged her. “This way you line up with the spin. Put your head on a pillow. Now breathe slowly. Better?”

“Better,” she said faintly.

Not screaming. Not thrashing. She might be tougher than he had dared hope. “It helps to keep your eyes open,” he suggested.

“But then I’ll see you.” She sounded grim. But sane.

“Look, I found a book on the floor. You must be reading it. Listen to me read. That’ll help take your mind off spin.” Martan was clutching at straws. It was a high-end book, with its pages displaying The Philosophical History of Starflight by Viljalm Courant Azzavre and a place marked about halfway through. “‘With the discovery of starflight, the human universe expanded a millionfold. In hindsight, though, the human universe diminished by the same order of magnitude. The places where starflight works seem to be a tiny fraction of all the places in the Galaxy. Earth, for one notable example, was not such a place. Yet over the ensuing millennia, it has been collectively decided that where starflight does not go, does not matter. . . .’ What?”

She was staring at him wide-eyed. “That print is not illuminated and you’re reading it in the dark.”

He had seen less well-stocked kitchens, but not often. Not outside of districts in the grip of famine. He located enough ingredients for two thin synthegg omelets with crackers and a sliced apple. There was no tea in her cupboard, but he found kavva that didn’t smell neglected and stale, so he prepared that too.

Behind him, he heard her footsteps that stopped short.

She pressed against the corner between the kitchen and the hallway, staring at him. “When I woke up, I thought you were a nightmare!”

“Maybe I am.” He turned the omelets.

“You know how to cook?!”

“I lived alone in many places. It was learn to cook or subsist on what fate threw my way. Here. Strong kavva for the headache.” He put the cup down in front of the chair on her side of the table. She slid into her chair and rested there as lightly as the omelets in the pan. If he startled her, she would run away. “Are you all right?”

“How in God’s name would I know?”

“Not screaming is a good sign. It’s normal to feel dazed and numb.” His being domestic might help things along. It was the best idea he had. He slid her omelet onto a plate and placed it in front of her, reaching across the table so the table stayed between them. “Since you keep your chopsticks in the bottom drawer, and your forks in the top drawer—fork?”

“Fork. What happens if. . . .” She trailed off. They ate the omelets in fragile silence. He expected a question about the most unpleasant possible outcomes of Interrogation and steeled himself for it. She said, “What happens if Faxe finds out you’re still alive?”

“Nothing good.”

“Be more specific.”

“Legally, I don’t have human rights and the Faxen state owns me. I don’t think there’s any place except Wendis that wouldn’t extradite me in a heartbeat. And what happens after Faxe gets me back would be much worse than death.”

She suddenly stood up and backed away.

Nia yanked open the door of Toll’s private office. Toll with Hiro and the Junior Assistants were sitting around a pot of tea on Toll’s side table. It was Second Tea Hour. Nia pointed at Toll. “We need to talk. The rest of you get out!”

Chan darted away. Yakov dashed after him. Hiro started to get up. “Not you!” Nia caught him by the shoulder and shoved him back into his chair.

Toll’s face hardened. “What did Martan do?”

“They call it Interrogation.”

Toll bolted up out of her chair. “What!”

“He says the psychological tracks in my mind tripped his reflexes, and you know what? I believe him. At least I’m still alive. But he wanted the truth about Moira and he got it.”

“What? What?” Hiro gasped.

Nia eased her grip on Hiro’s shoulder. “All right, you didn’t know what he is. But you—YOU did!” Nia accused Toll.

“No, Nia,” Toll said. “I only know what he was.”

“City Council gave you control over him! I want to know if he’s man or monster!”

Hiro stammered, “Man or m-monster?”

“What do you think, Nia?” Toll asked.

“You’re asking me?” Her voice rose. That was OK, Nia realized dimly, as long as it made no sense to the Assistants who were probably listening at the door. She flung her next question at Toll like a stone. “Did you set me up to find out?”

Toll kept her own voice down. “Nobody planned something like this, least of all with you as an unwitting probe. But we truly don’t know what he is now. He is a desperate experiment on the part of City Council. If it’s gone wrong he can be destroyed.”

“NO!” Screaming was a bad sign. Nia backed into a corner. The solidity of walls helped her regain self-control. “He used telepathic force and pain to make me tell him about Moira, and it was easy for him, expert’s work. When he realized what he’d done, he looked like a small boy who’d been roughhousing with his puppy and accidentally broke its neck.”

Hiro Hiroshi Low was simultaneously relieved and alarmed when Martan promptly answered the doorbell of the Proctor’s residence. Martan stepped aside, letting Hiro and Jay enter. “When do armed guards come for me?” Martan asked raggedly.

“They won’t,” said Hiro. “Toll believes it was an accident.”

Martan withdrew to the other side of the room, giving Hiro and Jay the opportunity to flee if their nerve failed. “Is she OK?”

“She’s hurt and shaken, and in the care of a knowing doctor. Yours, to be exact.” Hiro was hotly furious at Martan.

Martan sat down on his couch and put his head in his hands.

“The doctor thinks she will be all right,” said Jay. “She may be more resilient than those you’ve encountered this way before.”

“Good God, I hope so!”

“Toll told some trustworthy people that you had a combat flashback. She has them scouring the Port and the Industrial District for you. But Nia asked the two of us to check for you in your own home.” Hiro looked around. The apartment was immaculate, and characterless, just as Hiro’s contacts in the Hospitality Guild had said.

“What next?” Martan asked.

Hiro said, “Toll wants you to stay on the job. If the few people who know about the ‘combat flashback’ ask about it, don’t be drawn into discussing it, just remember that Toll told them you were in awful combat during the Mistral Insurgency. But be careful of touching anyone with your bare hands, until it is determined how likely the accident is to happen again.”

Martan said hollowly, “Wasn’t there an ancient legend about a king who turned everything he touched into gold? Am I going to turn everything I touch into terror?”

“No,” said Jay. “Nothing in real life is that simple. It’s because of you that Hiro and I found each other, and we love each other, and we are glad. And when you found out you could revert to that interrogating instinct, it was with a strong person who had no real guilt on her conscience, so you didn’t kill. We all have much to be thankful for, you included.”

A tremor ran across Martan’s shoulders.

The office of Dr. Lila Lorelei Tsuda was decorated with green and gold cushions and a sideboard which held carved, red stone figurines. It seemed like a soothing place. Was it possible that Nia’s raw fear and sense of betrayal would start to heal here? Please. Please.

Minnie sat beside Nia with Dr. Tsuda across a low table from them. Martan’s medpsych file lay on the table. In printform it was huge. The doctors in the university hospital had done months of rehabilitation. Dr. Tsuda was the chief of the doctors who had taken a ruined human being—ruined hellhound, to be more exact—and rebuilt him. He wasn’t what Nia had thought. He wasn’t anything she understood. Her hand shaking, Nia leafed past pages about his hellhound physical parameters. “I only want to understand what he did to me.”

“I must ask you a very direct question,” said Minnie. “Was it rape?”

Nia cringed, but made herself think about the question. “I don’t know.”

“He can invade minds, but human beings don’t have the nerves to register that kind of invasion as intrusion,” said Dr. Tsuda.

“I had a horrible headache until you gave me that painkiller.” Which may have included a tranquilizer, since she hadn’t been this calm all day. “How many people did he kill?”

“Three,” Minnie said. “We have every reason to think that all three were terroristic criminals.” Minnie looked haggard, and had not left Nia’s side all day. “He spared his last victim. That one was a Disunionist but not a terrorist.”

“And he spared me.”

“I’m not sure that was how the last moments of your interrogation went,” Dr. Tsuda said thoughtfully. “You demanded answers from him and got them.”

“I did ask. He did answer. Involuntarily, but immediately and with truth. You think I made him do that?” Nia answered her own question. “Yes, I did.”

“Do you know how?”

Nia shook her head. She leafed through the file almost randomly and found a holophoto of a man who looked like Martan, but younger and happier. “Younger brother?”

“He has no living family,” said Minnie. “That is what he looked like eight years ago, on leave as a Faxi military officer, not long before—”

“Don’t mention death and destruction right now,” Tsuda said softly. “An agent of Wendis managed to find that image. I used it as a guideline when I rebuilt his features.”

Nia had to blink to focus on the photo. “You made him better looking.”

“He had enough misfortune stacked against him.”

“It doesn’t excuse hurting you,” said Minnie.

Nia blinked again. The medicine was blurring her vision, she thought. Then she felt tears on her face. “He was happy that day. He took a hike into the desert with his father and brother, and they saw a tarantula farther away from the terraformed tracts than anyone had ever seen a predatory spider. A very good sign. And he bought a sack full of milk candy from the old sweet-seller, and for the first time in his life, he ate all the milk candy he wanted.”

Lila Tsuda and Minnie both stared at her. “How do you know?” Minnie asked.

Nia struggled to sit up straight. “It’s his memory. What’s it doing in my mind?”

“I do not know, but that’s definitely not how a hellhound interrogation is supposed to go,” said Dr. Tsuda. “Minnie, follow through. She’s close to something important.”

Minnie put an arm around Nia’s shoulder. “Tell us more if you can.”

“He reminds me of someone,” Nia heard herself say. Odd, not to plan to say something, but just hear yourself say it, and agree as though someone else had just uttered a worthwhile insight. “Not hair and skin color, but he reminds me of someone on Azure.”

“A family member, a friend, an assailant—?” Tsuda asked with the precision of a doctor palpating a patient for pain.

“I knew Tavvy—Daved—since we were both small.” Nia’s head swam. Unless this was all delirium—and given the way the green and gold cushions were dancing with each other, that did seem possible—Martan was a lot like Daved, her childhood playmate, and later, her loyal lieutenant in adolescent adventures. Daved confessed, an hour before she exiled herself to Wendis, that he’d been in love with her for years. Daved was plain-looking and from a family only a rung or so above the bottom of Azure’s social ladder.

“Your medicine works very well but the dose might have been a little high.” Nia felt herself drifting toward an unconcerned oblivion, like the effect of Aquarel, but gentler. She rested her head on Minnie’s shoulder. “My parents are concerned with good genes, good looks, and Az status.” Her words floated away like dry leaves in the wind. Tomorrow she probably wouldn’t remember that she had remembered Martan’s memories. “They knew I’d eventually grow into the Courant looks, and Daved would be a good plain man the rest of his life. It might serve them right if I brought a hellhound home to Castle Courant.”

Martan made his midnight rounds in a dripping cold fog. With his old coat’s outer layer having burnt to a crisp in the Gauntlet, he just had a thin jacket. Not a problem. Tonight he felt like being cold and miserable. He couldn’t stop thinking about Inanna. Somehow during the Interrogation, a few of his own neurons had repatterned themselves in a way he couldn’t explain. Now he could only think of Nia Courant as Inanna.

He wondered with sick obsession what name she had for him now. He’d seen how she would face her own executioner, unflinching, with a direct blue gaze. Then, when he realized what he had done and broke off the Interrogation, he’d seen her crumple, looking crushed as a broken bird. Incredibly, she woke up in the middle of the night, scared but sane.

Between one footstep and the next, Martan realized that he’d seen more in Inanna’s mind than the truth about those scars on her back. He flushed with fresh shame, yet he could not resist exploring the stolen glimpse of a potent memory. He knew how she’d gotten the rose diamond necklace. How the giver of that gift had spread her collar to create a more dramatic setting for the necklace, then fastened it behind her neck.

The giver was Robard Benedet. Martan felt like raging.

For the first time in her life, she’d seen herself as a brilliant and beautiful woman, in the mirror of Benedet’s face, when he regarded her with the sparkling string of rose diamonds resting lightly around her neck. Martan could never give her anything like that moment. It was unforgettable to her. It was Benedet. Now she wouldn’t even let Martan touch her. Martan clamped his teeth shut on a howl of despair.

Quiet scuffing sounds came from a tree next to the university wall. Martan discovered a young male student climbing down the tree. The boy took one look at Martan’s face, dropped to the ground and ran away as if from the devil.

13

THE GLASSBERRY THORN

The Celadon Sea often looked like stone or metal or glass. Today, shining in late-afternoon sunspar light, it curved like a bowl made of pale, beaten gold. Appearances can be deceiving, Nia thought. The sea’s slosh cliff was five hundred feet high here. That was how high the Celadon Sea could slosh before the cliff failed to contain it. Near the edge of the cliff ran a walking trail with scattered benches. The bench Nia occupied was made of soft slick material that felt warmer than the cool wind.

“Get up,” said Lila Lorelei Tsuda. “I didn’t bring you here for the view.”

Nia reluctantly turned toward St. Delaney-by-the-Sea with its tall steeple and white fauxstone walls. “I don’t want to do this. Not when I’m this shaken up.”

“Well, do you go to church when you’re not shaken up?”

“No,” Nia admitted.

“It’s a nice little Both-Cathor church. There are so few Old or New Catholic Orthodox faithful in Wendis that it makes no sense to split doctrinal hairs.”

I know, Nia thought. The house of faith is divided and I don’t trust either side. She unwillingly followed a flagstone path around the building. Between mulched flower beds stood a bushy, bare, thorny tree within its own ornate fence. The fence bore a placard.

The placard read, “THE GLASSBERRY THORN. Hawthorn trees originated in Old Eurasia on Earth, where a hallowed one grew beside Glastonbury Abbey in England. A cutting from the Holy Thorn was reverently carried to what was then called the New World. It was planted beside a church in Sitka, Alaska, America, Old Earth. Early in the Star Age a clone of that tree came in the terraforming starship that reached Goya. Holy Thorns have grown beside the Catholic Orthodox Cathedral of Stella Maris on Goya for more than two thousand years. After the Great Tumble of Wendis, when the Vicar and Sub-Vicar of St. Delaney both perished, the Catholic Orthodox Patriarch sent a Goyan Vicar to St. Delaney. With the new Vicar went a cutting of the Holy Thorn as a sign of hope. It readily took root here. Unlike all other Thorns, which blossom white, the flowers of this one are pink.”

Lila said, “Avensong is lovely. People of all faiths come to appreciate the choir.” With that, Lila steered Nia through a side door of the church. The smell of incense in the air jolted Nia like missing a step going down stairs. She sank into the seat Lila had chosen.

Rows of seats faced each other, with a Wendisan palette of faces, mostly golden to brown. Nia glanced sideways at Lila. Slightly older than Nia, the Wendisan doctor was renowned for her expertise in medical regeneration. She had wavy black hair, golden skin, and regular, softly rounded features. I envy her, Nia thought. I wish I had the looks to fit in Wendis like a gemstone in a setting. And I wish I were as much at ease here as she is.

Late sunlight welled up in the west-facing windows, making the glass saints blaze with color. Nia said, “I met a saint once. Something shone through him, a kind of light.”

“How wonderful.”

“Like hell! I did what I knew was right for his sake, and it ruined my life! And Martan’s damned Interrogation brought it all back. Why did you insist that I come here?”

“Because the Interrogation brought it all back.”

“What did I do to deserve that? I was in love with Martan. How can doing the right thing have such a cascade of wrong outcomes?” Nia whispered fiercely.

“You saw the Glassberry Thorn. Why do you think they took something thorny across the sea once, and across the stars twice, and planted it here after the Tumble?”

Nia crossed her arms and pressed her back into the hard seat. The first melodic notes of song sent ice water down Nia’s spine. Suddenly Azure didn’t seem far away. A few lightyears didn’t matter in a religious service so old that it predated clocks. Nia’s painful memories of leaving Azure to an exile to Wendis were as vivid as the bits of glass in the windows, but with nothing to hold them together in a pattern that had beauty or meaning. Shards in a chaotic sea of regret. Old reflexes made Nia want to look up at Christa Terra. But this was an Old Cathor building. It didn’t have a brilliant Christa Terra window.

She located a small Terra Sancta window high in the highest wall of the building, illuminated by the last rays of daylight. Old Cathors agreed with New Cathors that Terra was sacred, at any rate. The blue, white, and green image of humanity’s lost home world shone through Nia’s tears. World created good in the beginning, world destroyed by human greed and violence, world resurrected on scores of new worlds by laborious terraforming, world alive forever in human hearts and minds.

The canticles and prayers strafed Nia’s nerves. She stared down at the fauxstone floor until the last song reverberated to silence.

The doctor put a hand on Nia’s shoulder. “I can see how much that hurt. You’re the type to take religion seriously. Can’t you become Buddhim? It’s a profound and peaceful old faith, much less about violence and thorns.”

Nia shook her head. “I respect the Buddhim. But what’s here is real for me.” Trying to forget her religious upbringing might be futile. You can’t take the weft out of the warp was a favorite Wendisan saying. “I came here once before.”

“Do say.”

“It was on the first day of the Fair. Ban Hayao’s eclipse scared me and I came in here, without thinking, old reflex, seeking sanctuary . . . and I remembered Zakeri, the Bishop of Moira. I’d tried to forget everything that had to do with him.”

“Do you hate him for how everything turned out?” Lila asked. Nia shook her head. Lila looked unconvinced. “You were crawling out of your skin the whole Avensong. Don’t you have a few unresolved feelings about him?”

Nia clenched her fists to hold in her temper. “I felt sure he was a saint. I’m still sure.”

“Saints are people who stand forth in terrible times.” Lila waved her hand, taking in all the colored windows of St. Delaney. “These were eventful, star-crossed lives. You can be sure the people around them had plenty of heartache. Don’t New Cathors believe in saints?”

Nia’s fists relaxed. “In the abstract, yes. Disrupting the life of their daughter, no.”

“Ah. What did your parents think, then?”

“That I fell in love with a vagabond bishop and did something monumentally stupid.”

“They were wrong.” Wendisans were a polite, elliptical, indirect culture. But Lila Tsuda was as direct as anyone Nia had ever met, in a peculiarly sharp way. Lila wasn’t blunt; she was precise as a scalpel. “I might add that ‘vagabond bishop’ is an insult to the episcopacy.”

“The Old Cathor church is thinly spread in Starmark,” said Nia. “A bishop may have a whole sparsely populated world to cover, and stay on the move, without enough funding to travel in style. It can look vagabondish. In my father’s professional opinion.”

“Professional?”

It felt strange for the trump card in a conversation to also be painful personal revelation, but it was still a conversational trump card. “My father is the Archbishop of Azure-Tierre.”

Lila was actually speechless for a minute. Then she managed to say, “No wonder you can’t stand church anymore.”

It made an amazing difference to step out of St. Delaney and suppress thoughts of her father, saying a liturgy, or shouting, “You made an interstellar fool of yourself!” Nia had agreed to come here with Lila and she had, and now she was free to get on with her life. She reclaimed her place on the scenic bench. Lila joined her. The bench was definitely warmer than the air. Trust Wendisans to have a pre-warmed scenic overlook bench.

It was twilight in Wendis, with the Western Wall a pool of purple light that left the whole world half illuminated. The Sea looked like amethyst, shading to dark wine on the sun-east shore beside the Plain of Pain. Nia remembered the first day of the Fair. She had learned a lot about Wendis that day. Enough to play the games of Wendis, she had thought, and two days later she sent Hiro to Ban Hayao to ask for a new Proctor. It worked. Nia had taken it as a personal triumph. Except it ended up worse than she would have dreamed possible.

“What a pleasant evening,” said Lila. “I’m sure it’ll be a busy night in the Zoned Park, and there will be six or eight new cases waiting for me when I get to the hospital tomorrow.”

There was nothing in earshot more sentient than a holy hawthorn tree, one with a sense of humor, having put forth flowers of a very non-liturgical color. There was no better place and time to speak of the secrets of Wendis. Nia said, “I know Wendis takes its games seriously, and I’ve learned to respect that. I like some of the games, and steer clear of the ones I don’t like. But a hellhound isn’t just a game. What was City Council thinking?” Nia demanded. “I hope you know, since you did the work for them.”

Lila looked at her for a long moment. “The games of Wendis aren’t just games. Wendis is a fragile soap bubble in a perilous universe. The Zoned Park is a proving ground where Wendisans play dangerous games to rehearse for the day Wendis is ever attacked from outside. Not everyone has the aptitude for danger games, but we all do what we can to protect Wendis. I know what Council was thinking, because they told me. Agents of Wendis report that Faxe is making newer, subtler hellhounds, and widening the scope of their heinous missions. It’s only a matter of time before Faxe sends a hellhound into Wendis to harm Wendis itself. But all of a sudden, by serendipity or providence, a certain Faxen hellhound had a fit of conscience and defected to Wendis, arriving in damaged but salvageable condition. Council wanted a hellhound for Wendis—fire to fight fire. I am the only doctor in Wendis who could give them that.”

“How did they know he’d stay tame?” Nia asked.

“They didn’t want a tame one, just a real one.”

Nia felt jarred. How—Wendisan. Half of what happened here had coils inside of coils of ulterior motives, wrapped in layers of misdirection and ritual courtesy. At the moment, Nia intensely disliked that about Wendis. But she appreciated Lila’s scalpel-sharp honesty. “Thank you for telling me. And for bringing me here. I may not come back, but I respect how you approach your work as a healer, not just a flesh-and-bone-repairer.”

Lila answered, “So, so-so.” The Wendisan yes with major reservations. “I’m tired of patching up casualties from the Zoned Park every day, from spaceport accidents every week, from the Fair every year. I saw in Martan an opportunity to crown my career with success.”

Nia suddenly remembered the morning after the Interrogation. She’d been dazed to the core. He made breakfast for her. Finally he said something that drove a wedge into her daze. She’d fled, leaving him in her apartment, and gone to confront Toll. She hadn’t realized why the daze broke when it did. Until now. A career’s crown, Nia thought, with a shivering rush of realization, a challenge an ambitious professional woman could not pass by.

She and Lila were more alike than she’d realized.

Hiro Hiroshi Low had moved onto Jay’s ancestral home only a week ago. He had not settled his personal effects yet; he had to see where his things felt right. It was an old house, in the traditional pre-Tumble Wendisan style, built on a hillside in an angular spiral, with sparsely furnished rooms that circled inward toward a meditation chamber in the heart of the house.

All week, well-wishers had brought them flowers and melons. Toll and Astrid came calling first, and others from Gembolt Hall, and many from the Fair Committee and Tauzin Dance Academy, plus twenty or so enthused members of Hiro’s extended family. On Sunsday evening, Hiro was both pleased and touched when Nia Inanna appeared on the doorstep with a fine pair of Bird of Paradise blooms to formally wish the new relationship well.

Hiro bowed her into the First Chamber, the outer room of the house. Here, away from the office, he could speak freely, so he apologized profusely for putting her in harm’s way. “I thought you could help Martan in his political troubles and find much in common with him. I used every opportunity to get you together. I’m terribly sorry.”

Behind Hiro, Jay said, “His enhancements pointed toward war or espionage, but I was caught up with having such a marvelous dance student, and I didn’t think it through.”

“We’re all intent on our own calling,” said Nia. It was a good Wendisan answer. She had courteous instincts; that was more important than anything else. Gratified, Hiro took the flowers. Then Nia asked, “May I ask your advice?”

Jay parted the brocaded curtain in the doorway to the Second Chamber and gestured, welcome in. Burnished Keiling sculptures occupied niches in the wall. The furniture was made of lacquered true wood. Nia hesitated at the low divan, turned toward a cushion on the floor, then looked at the floor itself. “I’m sorry, I don’t know where I belong.”

The dear Az—she knew that in a traditional Wendisan home, a divan might be for sleeping but never for sitting. And a cushion might be for sitting but maybe just decoration—much depended on where you were in the Wendisan social system. She’d probably heard that guests of no Wendisan social standing should sit on bare floor, but Jae’s floors were covered by tami mat! Touching her shoulder, Jay directed her to the divan. He had Hiro sit beside her. Jay kneeled on the floor in all the dignity of the master of the house, near Hiro’s knees, saying without words that Hiro was a beloved companion. What a beautiful man he is, Hiro thought. I meant to match Nia Inanna with Martan, and it backfired, but I found the love of my own life.

“I don’t know the right way to conversationally wind around to it,” said Nia. “I spent so much time in the office today doing research, I may not be thinking straight.”

The Counsel’s Office was a relatively interstellar place. Here, though, Nia seemed like an insecure young woman. Indeed she seemed younger than her chronological age. Hiro had heard that someone who suffers trauma in their childhood or youth can be stuck at that age in important, emotional respects. But such a situation was not hopeless. Good healers and life itself could help them unstick themselves. The concern of friends might help too. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m not sure Martan still attracts me, but saving him from his political problems does.”

“They’re made up. The business about the Goyan Guard is false,” Hiro pointed out.

“The reality is even worse. He’s a turncoat hellhound of Faxe. Legally, Faxe could have him extradited back, and they’d punish him with no regard for limits on cruel and unusual punishment. He doesn’t have human status in the Faxen Union. So he’ll have to hide from Faxe for the rest of his life. Unless I can legally establish his humanity and human rights.”

“Why would you want to?” Jay asked.

“Only a Wendisan lawyer could do it, because only Wendis has a nuanced legal approach to different degrees of humanity. There’s a long, ongoing legal consideration of Shades of Human and how to ensure fair treatment under the law for individuals who aren’t completely human. Wendis and Faxe are both signatories to Accepted Interplanetary Law. There’s a lot of potential leverage to win legal assent from Faxe for new legal precedents. If I could do it—successfully argue for Martan’s humanity and establish his innocence under Accepted Interplanetary Law, because he was conditioned to kill, on the authority of a Faxen agency—it would be a crowning career move for me.”

Hiro felt a chilly draft of apprehension. True, a move like that could vault her into the elite circle of those who shaped interstellar law. She had the talent and ambition to pull it off. The problem was that it might put her in the crosshairs of Faxe. As if her old entanglement with that Moiran religious leader wasn’t bad enough! “It sounds like what you did on Moira, and that got you into a lot of trouble. How can you think of doing something like that again?”

“To get it right. To oppose the injustice of Faxe and its agencies—and have a better outcome than I did on Moira.”

Comprehension dawned on Hiro. Aiee. This sounded very much in character for Nia. It also sounded like a moth describing the attractive qualities of flame. He managed to say, “That would be a dangerous legal game, with life-and-death stakes. You’d have to be most cautious.”

“I know. I’m being ridiculous. I can’t even face Martan, but I’m contemplating this.” Nia put her head in her hands. “Maybe if I ignore it the idea will go away.”

Hiro had a sinking feeling that it would not go away. The only thing he could do was invoke hard truth. “Nia Inanna, you have the best instincts of anyone I know for recognizing good and evil and how they wind around each other. You see the universe not in black and white, good and bad, but shades of gray. We Buddhim have a name for that. Seventh Sight.”

“I don’t see many white sheep or black ones. Most of us are gray sheep. Some more dappled or darker gray than others,” she said with a wry twist of a smile.

“How does Martan look to you now? If he’s evil or corrupt—leave him to his fate. One doesn’t polish one’s reputation with a dirty rag,” Hiro said firmly.

After a thinking silence, she said, “There’s evil sticking to him. Not sticking like skin or glue, though. More like dirt. Under it, he’s a man. Not a monster. A man.”

“A dangerous one,” said Jay.

“I know. And the last time I trusted my life to making a call on what kind of man someone was, it wrecked my life. But I wasn’t wrong then.” She resolutely tilted up her chin. “I’m not wrong about Martan, either. He’s a human being. He deserves human rights.”

After Nia departed, Jay closed the door of their home. “Is she always so impetuous?”

Upset, Hiro ran his fingers through his hair. “Only when the stakes are high.”

Jay put a reassuring arm around Hiro’s shoulders. “Counseling caution was wise. Say that in different words, until she hears you. Are you sure she has Seventh Sight?”

“I’m sure.” Hiro worriedly rubbed his face. “So now I have to believe what she says about Martan, and I have to be concerned about his welfare too.”

Sometimes, Martan thought, being superhumanly observant was not a good thing. Like now. Inanna’s body telegraphed that it made her stomach lurch to be in the same room with him for the first time since the Interrogation, even if the room was Lila Tsuda’s office, with Tsuda and Hiro Low both here to referee the encounter. Martan slouched in his chair, hoping to look like less of a threat.

“Nia, what upsets you the most?” Tsuda asked.

“I can’t forget that he could destroy me,” she said in a low voice.

“That’s true. But don’t underestimate the destructive potential of words, at which you are supremely skilled, probably as skilled as he is with physical and psychological violence.”

That was Martan’s feeling exactly. Added to his discomfort at that was the disconcerting fact that the interrogation had done something to his mind too; ever since then, she was indelibly Inanna to him, not Nia. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before.

Inanna retorted, “I’ve never attacked anybody like he has! Though I was never conditioned to do it, either.”

Must you be so fair? Martan thought. Then he realized it was approximately his sentiment, but not his words, because he was remembering what another man had told her. He stifled a curse. Of all times to retrieve another of Inanna’s memories of Robard Benedet.

“Martan? What upsets you the most right now?” Tsuda asked.

“I got some of her memories. Not just the ones I—took by force. Some other memories leaked in, random ones,” Martan evaded. Inanna shot him an alarmed glance.

“Would it surprise you if she got some of yours?” asked Tsuda. “That it went both ways? Does that usually happen in your Interrogations?”

“Almost never.” Excremental hell! What if she’d gotten his memories of hunting down an enemy of Faxe—and something sweet at the core of killing. . . .

“Actually, I think it helped me understand him better,” Inanna said. “I got some of his memories of living on Estrella, how it was there. And girls on the Steppe.”

Oh, no. “What about them?” Martan asked.

“Making love. Making it enjoyable for them,” she said in the general direction of a decorative pillow. Martan felt his face flush hot. He must be turning brick red.

“Nothing amiss in that. Now, Martan,” said Lila, “I want an honest answer. What did you accidentally take from Nia that upsets you the most?”

Toll could compel him to talk. Tsuda had wanted Toll here, but Toll declined, explaining that she was far too angry at Martan to be evenhanded with him. She’d sent Hiro Low in her place. Now Hiro said, “Answer, get it over with, and go on from there.”

Martan ground out, “Her relationship with Robard Benedet.”

Inanna gasped.

“Compelling psychological interest. A rival,” Tsuda nodded.

Inanna objected, “They are not rivals! Robard is very verbal and I liked verbally fencing with him. We enjoyed each other’s company at tedious university events. Ever since the Fair, though, I can’t ever forget that he has—bad compulsions, and he invents ways to act on them.”

A growl bubbled inside Martan’s chest. If he ever got his hands on Benedet’s throat, he’d mine the other man’s mind for crimes. It would be an enjoyable exercise.

“He has no social nickname, but behind his back he’s called Bent Robard,” Hiro said. “His intimacies with men are rumored to be violently sadistic.”

Martan could believe that. It squared with the Gauntlet.

Inanna said, “I blundered into a scary game with him but I won and he didn’t hurt me. Martan did!”

Martan raked himself over hot goals of guilt.

Hiro said, “Bent Robard isn’t in love with you. And you aren’t his chosen prey.”

There was a minute of loaded silence. Then Inanna looked at Martan. “You are.”

Did she mean Martan was Benedet’s chosen prey, or that Martan was in love with her? Damn words, Martan thought. With Inanna, nothing could be the right thing to say, and at the same time, nothing was the wrong thing to say!

Her voice softened, giving Martan a razor-edged pang of longing for the trust they’d felt not so many days ago. “The morning after the Int—You made an omelet for me.”

Martan plunged into what he hoped was something right to say. “I know your favorite food is shrimp. Sorry. I didn’t even imagine I could get unrelated memories and your food preferences by accident. I know how to fix a special Goyan shrimp dish, and I’ve seen the ingredients here in Wendis. I’d like to cook that for you. . . .” He faltered.

Their eyes met, and she smiled.

14

WILDWAY

This was the part of the Zoned Park that Nia liked best. It mimicked wilderness on Earth.

The cold air smelled of pine needles and wet rock. Their breath condensed into white wisps. Nia was glad to be wearing a supple but warm field jacket today. Martan seemed content with a his thinner jacket. Carrying the knapsack that contained their lunch, he was wrapped in grim memory and oblivious to the chilly weather.

The trail twisted around a flat boulder where a gorge dropped below the path. On the far side of the gorge, a waterfall leaped from a rocky rim high above the overlook to a foamy pool far below. The water’s path slanted. It looked like a vast glistening scarf, trailing behind the incessant rotation of Wendis; it was a spectacular artifact of spingravity.

“Canting Fall,” said Nia.

Martan didn’t smile, but the lines of his face relaxed. “You were right. It’s pretty.”

After not seeing Martan for ten days, then that wary encounter in Lila Tsuda’s office; then several strained meetings in Gembolt Hall—the first two chaperoned by Toll herself—who watched Martan like a ruffled owl eyeing a weasel; after a couple of wary walks on the campus, in the Old Grove and the Rose Garden, finding that those surroundings helped them both relax; after agreeing to take a long relaxed hike in Wildway to talk things over, where Nia would be the guide and Martan the tourist to whom the place was new and unfamiliar—they were having a normal, ordinary date. On the surface. But Martan was grim and laconic and Nia felt skittish. There was one absolute ground rule: he had to keep his fingertips off her skin. His artificial telepathy worked through artificial nerves in his fingers. The mere thought of his touch made her indignant and scared.

A grating warble broke the silence. Martan instantly looked up. A dark-winged shape flitted in the fog above them. Nia said, “It’s a condor.”

“No. It has a crested red head. That’s a Faxen bird. It’s a carrion eater, but in the early colony days on Faxe they called it the Deathbird. The species is intelligent enough to create carrion. We better get away from these trail dropoffs.”

The trail zigzagged down from the edge of the gorge. Nia followed Martan, watching him move with the fluid grace of an athlete. Or of a predator.

The Faxen scavenger reappeared. It flew overhead with loose flopping motions. Martan scowled up at it. “Unpleasant species, and in no danger of extinction on Faxe. Why in God’s name would they put it in an amusement park?”

“For one thing, this is not an amusement park.”

“Hah! Everyone on a dozen worlds has heard the hype about finding adventure and romance here. Pick a theme, dare a dream, wend your way, play a game, lose or win the prize of your life, in the Magic Mountains!”

“Saying Magic Mountains makes you sound like a tourist. It’s the Wend Range.”

He frowned. “I saw many things in my travels. I’ve seen the Rings of Ruin, the Star of Goya’s Sea, and the Lights of Vere. I’m not interested in an amusing park for tourists. Or what to call it.”

“It’s not always amusing. Since portable communications devices are forbidden, visitors have to handle anything that goes wrong on their own, unless they can find a park ranger. All the Zones have some degree of real danger, and more of it the higher you go in the Zone numbers. This is Zone Four, and we could slip and break a leg. Or the Faxen bird could dive at us and try to knock us off a cliff, if that’s what its instincts are.”

“So there’s a bit of risk to pique the interest of jaded interstellar travelers.”

Nia counted six separate misconceptions in what he was saying. “All right, it’s a park if Zaber, Specter, and Chance are mountains.” Invisible in fog, Specter’s unnatural peak loomed above them and sun-eastward. Point taken, Martan clamped his mouth shut.

They came to a log serving as footbridge over a cold, turbulent stream. As soon as she stepped onto the log, Nia felt perilously off-balance. Slipping off! her brain shrieked. Martan took her jacketed elbows, and walking backward across the log, he steadied her. When she was safe on the other side, he gave her a half smile.

He tended to smile and gesture in an odd, one-sided way. It was as though part of his soul smiled and another part stayed secret.

With a cascade of wing beats, a small gray bird fluttered out of the fog, alighting on a rock by the stream. It bobbed its whole body up and down several times. Then it strode into the swift stream until the crown of its head disappeared under the ice water. Nia checked the Magic Mountains Guidebook. “That was an ouzel. A species from Old Earth.”

“Some of the amusing oddities here are authentic?”

“Most of them are.” Nia touched the guidebook’s access button. Its pages reconfigured into a square the size and texture of a folded handkerchief. She pocketed it.

The trail led to a lawnlike meadow that cradled a frosty pool. Canting Fall’s waters slanted into the pool with far less commotion than an equally high waterfall planetside. That was just as well, since cold spray would have been unpleasant in weather this chilly. “Let’s picnic here,” Nia said. “See what kind of lunch Hiro packed for us.”

Martan reached into the knapsack and produced two boxes. Nia recognized them as Fair Ware: Twentycent lunch boxes from the Replica Shop. The embossed lid of the fauxmetal box had a fanciful picture of a rocket ship with tail fins flying over a cratered moon. The other box was plastic, and pink, with a white cartoon kitten on the lid. “I can guess which one is mine.” Martan kept the rocket box, handing the pink one to Nia.

When she opened the pink box, she saw a note, in Hiro’s elegant handwriting, attached to the inside of the kitten lid. It read, “There will be a test in the Park today with Toll’s approval. Don’t be unduly alarmed, but use your wits.”

Nia’s eyes narrowed. Test?

She explored the lunch box and found a synthmeat sandwich, a flask of tea, and a sweet rice ball for dessert. Martan had the similar fare, with a burlier sandwich. It had been a nice gesture for Hiro to make lunch for them. His note came as an unwelcome surprise. Nia suspected that Hiro, in his inimitable way, had gathered that there would be some kind of officially sanctioned test of Martan’s abilities—or of Martan’s self-control, since he’d recently lost his self-control and interrogated an innocent person. Her. Maybe Toll and the Wendisan doctors and psychologists wanted to know how far to trust Martan. So, for that matter, did Nia. But she would much rather have been asked for her permission to be involved in a test. Silently thanking Hiro for his warning, she finished her lunch.

The Canting Fall fell slower than the eye insisted it should, and twisted as it went. From this close, it looked like sculpted crystal. Through rifts in the fog, light from the sunspar flooded the meadow. The traveling sun ball was just west of midspar. A bank of rhododendrons shielded the meadow from the cold spinwinds. For the first time today, Nia felt warm enough to unfasten her jacket. Stretched out on the cool grass, Martan laced fingers laced behind his head, contemplating the far side of Wendis, where the university’s towers and the hospital dome appeared through the thinning fog.

Nia had seen the far side from Wildway on clearer days, but she’d never seen anything like him. He had eyes so dark that the irises looked black even in sunsparlight.

Martan’s gaze met hers. “When I was little, I never imagined a woman with silver hair. I didn’t meet any Azureans until after I left home.”

“Here in Wendis, quicksilver hair is far from rare,” Nia pointed out.

“Huh. Next year the trend-following young people of Wendis will turn their hair a different color. But yours is real.” Reaching up, he touched a long stray curl. “I can tell by the way the strands catch the light.” He twined her hair around his finger.

The slyly possessive gesture shot a thrill through Nia. Damn! Aside from—surely not because of—his scary past and special abilities that included deadly telepathy, he intrigued her.

She let his arm slide under her jacket. He obediently kept his hands on the fabric of her shirt as he pulled her into an embrace.

He abruptly pulled back. “Something in your pocket moved.”

A green tendril dangled out from under the flap of one of the main pockets of her field jacket. Unfastening the pocket, Nia lifted out an untidy little bundle of leaves and tendrils. “And just what are you doing in there?” she asked it.

Under his breath, Martan said something about three being a crowd.

Nia placed the hugwort on her knee. It balanced there like a misplaced little houseplant. Test? Probably not. More likely, sneaking into her pocket was its own idea.

Martan asked, “Where is its brain, if it has one?”

“Here in the middle of the leaves, what looks like a tuber but feels like a mouse.”

The hugwort let Nia briefly show Martan its fuzzy root mass. It wriggled out of Nia’s grasp to scramble down her leg and onto the grass.

Nia said, “Professor Zeng’s latest write-up lapsed into phrases like ‘enchanted morning glory.’ When they’re mature, at least three years old, they can bloom, and the blooms look just like morning glories. Zeng thinks they may be a terratism from a vanished human colony on Jumala. Unfortunately, hugworts may be too adorable for their own good. It’s going to be a challenge for me to design legal protection for them from the illegal pet trade.”

“Can you design legal protection for me?”

They’d talked about this. It surprised and pleased her that he brought it up now. “Yes. I can. Legally, though, you’re a stranger specimen than it is.”

“I am not stranger than an enchanted morning glory!” Martan said with offended dignity.

“But it never killed anyone.”

A shadow flopped in front of the sunspar. Martan cursed it under his breath.

“There are Faxen flora and fauna in the Wend Range. They thrive in the same conditions as Earth creatures. Faxe was the new Earth—the promised land on the other side of the stars—when it was first colonized. Too bad it’s become a police state.”

“I of all people know that. I was the sharpest tool of the state against its enemies. In the end, I did defect, and I almost died doing so. Does that count for something?”

“Yes.” To make it count for his legal freedom would take the best work of her whole career in interstellar law. Right now, it felt incredibly important to her. And part of the reason it felt that way, she admitted to herself, was that she wanted a sense of control in her relationship with Martan. “Was there a formal word for the kind of operative you were?”

He laughed humorlessly. “Not among insiders. A hellhound is a hellhound.” That was the first time he’d voluntarily uttered the word to her.

The hugwort ambled toward the bank of rhododendrons. Smuggling itself in her pocket for an outing was a new trick, but Nia was glad it had. The hugwort had somehow cracked Martan’s reticence to talk about himself. Hellhound. Very few people had knowingly looked one in the eye and lived. A shiver went down Nia’s back. She tried to not let it chill her voice. “Tell me about hellhounds. It doesn’t have to be personal, you. Just tell me about hellhounds in general if it’s easier for you to talk about it that way.

“It’s not. We were brain-trained to give nothing away.”

“Brain-trained?”

“Juvenated, and then retrained in thinking and feeling. The better to—”

A green streak darted out of the bushes. It scurried toward Nia. Climbing up her jacket to its pocket, it stuffed itself in, managing to fasten the button with a tendril, which it then retracted within the pocket.

Martan looked at the rhododendrons which the hugwort had run away from. His spine went stiff. “Get up. Are there real predators here?”

Nia pulled out the guidebook, which unfolded itself back to the natural history pages. She scanned the list under Animals, Biological.

“There’s a big animal. Is it a trick?”

“Wildway really doesn’t have tricks.” Today, however, it might have a test, and if this was it, the timing was execrable. Just when Martan had started talking about himself! On the other hand, this could be a Wildway thing using its own initiative. Visitors were well advised to be careful here, to carry the guidebook and consult it frequently. “The guidebook says Wildway harbors a few mountain lions. If you encounter one, don’t run, just move away slowly.”

He shoved her toward the open end of the meadow, away from the bushes.

Without having been asked for her cooperation in a test, Nia saw no reason to cooperate. She’d much rather cut the test short and ask Toll for an explanation. “Things can go wrong anywhere in the Zoned Park, including Wildway. So there are escape routes.” She flipped to the orange section of the guidebook. When she touched the schematic map for their location, a bright series of arrows appeared on the map. “We’re in Zone Four right now. From any Zone, you can reach Safe Haven. The door to Haven is that way.”

Martan herded her along, looking back over his shoulder.

“Around these little trees—there. It’s in that cave.”

He stopped short. “Not good. No way out.”

“Look at the back of the cave.” A concave part of the cave’s rocky back wall displayed the number 5. A convex part of the wall showed 9. Between the numbers stood a bright orange door. “Those numbers mark Gates to higher Zones, but the orange door leads to Haven, and it’ll open as soon as we touch the doorplate. Come on.” She went to the orange door and demonstrated.

Nothing happened. “The door isn’t working right.” A test that disabled a Haven’s door?!

“The animal is stalking closer. Can we use the Gates?” Martan demanded.

“Yes. I have a university authority key.” Apprehension mixed with indignation tightened in her chest. Here was the useless orange door to Haven. Beside it was the Gate marked 9—a shortcut to the most insanely dangerous part of the Zoned Park. And in the concavity in the wall there was 5. The authority key was on her identity bracelet. Nia dived toward the 5 to touch it with the key.

The concave wall abruptly rotated, taking them with it.

15

INFERNO

Harsh daylight flooded Nia’s eyes.

“This is a wasteland.” Martan sounded incredulous.

Nia crossed her arms. “We’re in the Wendway called Inferno. The fauna and flora are from the most inhospitable alien world ever colonized by humanity. The plants cut you or poison if you touch them.”

Martan took in their surroundings with sweeping glances. To one side, the land fell away. They were on the knees of Mount Zaber, close—too close for comfort—to the precipitous canyon between Zaber and Specter. “Valles Avendis,” said Nia.

On this side of Valles Avendis, deeply scored reddish rocks climbed the steep flank of Zaber. Far above, Specter’s summit was swathed in clouds. The sunspar ran straight through the clouds, but the brilliant sun ball had traveled well west of Specter. It was mid-afternoon in Wendis. Behind the sunspar the sea looked metallic. They couldn’t make out the rest of Wendis. It was as though they had stepped out onto a hostile alien world.

“Incredible,” said Martan.

“Welcome to the Wend Range.”

With a coarse rasping sound, the Zone Gate started rotating again. Martan took Nia’s elbow and pulled her up the precipitous slope.

His strength startled her. “Stop!” she protested. “What are you doing?”

“Finding a vantage point to watch the Gate.”

She had to scramble up with him. She didn’t dare struggle—if she broke away from him and fell, it would be a long way to the bottom of Valles Avendis. At the top of the slope, he hauled her up alongside himself on a narrow shelf of rock. The rock shelf was screened by a cluster of spiny plants with shiny purple leaves. “Don’t touch the leaves!”

“I won’t. Look.” He pointed below them, where a black bird raggedly circled in midair. “That’s the same Deathbird, and now it’s here.”

In spingravity—a counterfeit of planetary gravity—some birds managed a parody of flight. It typically looked comical. But she found the Deathbird’s flight disturbing. Its head turned from side to side as if scanning the harsh landscape. “Some birds can flutter-fly over the barriers between the Gates,” she whispered. “Of all things in here, the birds are the most free—they fend for themselves, although their nests are protected.”

“Deathbirds protect their own nests,” he said under his breath. “Homicidally.”

“You’re being paranoid.” Could somebody in authority possibly be testing his potential for paranoia, for overreaction? Nia suddenly wondered about that. “As far as anyone in Wendis knows, you’re just an academic.”

“I have enemies. All the followers and kin of every enemy of the state I executed. And the Faxen secret intelligence agency, since I defected. And Faxe sends revenge a long way,”

“I doubt Faxe could infiltrate the Wends. The denizens here don’t want anybody else’s games going on.” She rubbed a bruised elbow. The denizens might, however, agree to a test.

“I know more about what the secret intelligence agency could—”

Far below them, the Gate turned. A huge, tawny cat with fangs as long as its head stepped out. Nia clutched Martan’s arm. “That’s Old Scratch! The saber-tooth tiger from The Most Dangerous Game in Zone Nine, a robot programmed to be a savage predator—”

“Give me that guide book.” He frowned. “This makes no sense. It looks like we have to go uphill to find another door to Haven. But higher Zones are more dangerous.”

“Don’t confuse uphill with upzone! Almost every Zone has an incredibly irregular border that runs all the way from sea to one of the summits—”

“I see. Uphill now, hurry.”

Nia’s throat felt tight with apprehension. If Scratch was the test, and the test involved making Haven’s door in Wildway not work, then the test had been approved by the highest level of Wendisan government. What if Martan failed? Wind blew strands of her hair across her face. She wasn’t resisting his hand on her elbow now. Martan caught her when she tripped. “This is so far up the mountain that it’s enough less than the spingravity I’m used to to botch my coordination,” she said bitterly.

“I won’t let you fall.” They came to what looked like a rockslide, a field of rocky debris. Martan started to pick a way through. He froze as a gaunt, doglike creature sprang out of a crevice in the rubble and confronted them, growling.

“Infernal jackal!” Nia whispered.

Stepping forward, Martan flung his arms out threateningly. He grimaced. His teeth flashed in the hard bright sunlight. The animal snarled back, but it retreated. Martan bounded on up, keeping Nia close to him. Uphill from the rockslide, Martan scooped up rocks and stuffed them into the knapsack. “What is an infernal jackal?”

“One of the few terrestrial species that thrived when the colonists introduced them on Inferno. Back there, you—your teeth—” Nia stammered. “I thought I saw . . . .”

He shouldered the knapsack, now lumpy with a cargo of rocks in addition to the lunch boxes. “Not like what the big cat has. But yes, I can morph, in a few small ways.”

So she hadn’t imagined it. Martan had showed the jackal a neat, sharp pair of fangs. She felt lightheaded.

“I retracted them right away,” Martan added.

Snarling erupted behind them, and a scrabbling sound, and then a yelp, abruptly cut off. Had Old Scratch met the jackal?

Was the idea to make Martan square off against Old Scratch?

“Hurry. Uphill.” Martan held a large rock in his free hand. Nia couldn’t imagine what good rocks would do against the giant cat.

Mount Zaber confronted them with cliffs of deeply folded stone with dark recesses. Nia clutched the guidebook. “To go much farther uphill, we’d need climbing gear. But there’s a door to Haven inside the mountain. That way.”

The Deathbird slanted down from the sky to flap in a ragged circle above them, as if announcing their location. Hardly breaking his stride, Martan hurled his rock at the bird. The rock traced a line so straight it might have been drawn in the air with a ruler. The rock connected with the bird’s red head. Trailing purplish blood, the Deathbird flailed its wings and tumbled away over Valles Avendis. “So much for that.” Taking Nia’s arm, Martan shepherded her into a deep fold in the red cliff. In cold shadow, they found the mouth of a tunnel that slanted down into the mountain.

Nia considered telling him that it was a test. She discarded the idea. It might make him mad, which could only increase the final body count, which now stood at one Deathbird.

A single orange arrow illuminated on the smooth, sloping floor of the tunnel. It meant this way to Haven. Other than that it seemed pitch-dark in the tunnel to Nia, but Martan steered her around invisible obstacles, one of which rattled unpleasantly. The passageway took a turn in an alcove where 6, 7, and 10 shone in the dark.

“Ten?” Martan asked.

“Not exactly a zone. It’s the Underworld. Not a place we want to be. The Haven door shouldn’t be much farther down,” Nia said, just before her foot splashed into cold water. She recoiled with a gasp.

“Subterranean lake.”

He sounded more upbeat than he’d been all morning. She, however, felt like the subject of an all-out stress test. Her hands shook as she opened the guidebook, which self-illuminated. “It does show a lake, but it’s not supposed to inundate the Haven door except in spring—”

Martan pressed the edge of his hand against her lips. “Be quiet,” he whispered. “We can look for the Haven door underwater, go back outside, or gate up. The water is icy. And Old Scratch is outside. We may have to gate up.”

Nia nodded.

“You’re shaking. Scared?”

She doubted there was all that much difference between an extreme test in the Zoned Park and the Park’s own dangerousness and unpredictability this far up. She had good reason to be scared. She nodded and held on to him.

“I can deal with danger,” he breathed in her ear, “though I didn’t expect it today.” He slipped the guidebook back into her pocket. “Up it is.”

Use your wits, Hiro had advised. She whispered, “If somebody is forcing us to zone up, there’ll be fiendish surprises waiting for us in Zone Six. Not Six. Seven. I’ve been there before and they control their own gates.”

“Scratch just entered the tunnel—back to the gates!”

They ran in the dark toward the Upgate marked 7.

“Open it!”

Nia pressed the key on her bracelet against the 7. The wall of the alcove whispered open to reveal a softly illuminated transvator. Martan backed into the transvator, pushing Nia in behind him. He slapped the control plate. Nia saw the huge robot cat loping down the tunnel toward them just before the transvator door whispered shut.

Nia shook with relieved tension. They had backed away from Old Scratch into a normal translating elevator. The transvator had slick sides, grab bars, and bright green footprints to indicate the floor. Keeping a protective arm around Nia, Martan held onto a grab bar. Coriolis force pushed them both against one wall as the transvator descended smoothly in the spingravity of Wendis. The transvator then moved side-spinwise, and the pseudo-gravity increased slightly.

“What next?” Martan sounded casual and interested, the tone of what’s for dessert? Evidently, he was having fun today.

She wasn’t having fun. If all this was a test, it had gone far enough. And maybe it wasn’t just a test—or not anymore. No one ran the Zoned Park; the Park was a menagerie of vested interests, some of them not nice at all. Nia doubted that Martan’s Faxen enemies could freely operate in the Zoned Park—but maybe Outside money could buy what Martan’s enemies wanted. “Whether your enemies are trying to get you or it’s just our unlucky day in the Zoned Park or something else, we need to make our own moves and work together. You’ll have to let me use what I’m good at—”

“Words and rules.” Suddenly he smiled. “We’re on the same side, playing shove and shove back?”

On the transvator floor, along with the green outlines of human feet, four green hoofprints and a pair of smaller, cloven hooves glowed into visibility. And then four big, clawed pawprints appeared. Nia gritted her teeth. “Yes, and apparently the shoving match isn’t over.”

The motion of the transvator slowed. Nia hurriedly smoothed her hair, fastened up her jacket, and brushed the red rock dust of Inferno off them both. “I handle the next move.”

The transvator opened onto a high-ceilinged room with painted walls and beveled doors. A high desk loomed at the end of the room. Behind the desk sat a figure with flowing robes over a misshapen body and a flowing beard over a misshapen mouth. Martan’s eyes widened. Whatever he had imagined facing next, he wasn’t expecting this.

Nia stepped up to the desk. Here goes. “Gatekeeper, we wish to enter the Fair Country.”

“Go away, Silver,” the Gatekeeper answered. Behind him, the tallest door in the room, the Door to the Fair Country, embellished with jewels, stood firmly shut.

Nia answered, “My Fair name is Canter.”

“Do say.” The Gatekeeper leafed through the tome on his desk in front of him, an electronic book designed to look like an antique codex. “Who is he?”

“This is—Night.” It was an apt nickname for Martan here, a memorable name that meant nothing. Martan nodded. Following her lead. That was good.

“Bring him back in Fair time. Go away now,” said the Gatekeeper.

“No. Night is not a tourist. He has political asylum.”

The Gatekeeper stared at Martan with piercing, mismatched eyes, brown and pale blue. “Very well. Watch your step.” The jeweled door glided open onto a patio decorated with potted citrus trees with glossy leaves. They entered the patio, and the door snapped shut behind them.

Almost inaudibly, Martan asked, “Why did you tell him that?”

“I did not use the h-word, but I did tell the truth, which is the best course of action where the Gatekeeper is concerned. He’s an important personage here.”

“He looks like the chief surgeon in the university hospital.”

“He is like her.” The edge of the patio overlooked a valley full of tall trees, brown and evergreen. In the heart of the valley nestled a cluster of stone, wood, and glass structures with ridged roofs and weather vanes. Nia rifled through her memory for everything she knew about the Fair Country, its geography and its perils.

“That village is an attraction for tourists,” said Martan. “They don’t get killed.”

“Tourists are off limits for the local predators. We, however, may not be regarded as tourists. But I think we’re a match for the locals. Let’s go.”

A staircase spiraled away from the edge of the patio, coiling down through a hundred feet of thin air to the ground below. Nia gritted her teeth at the sight of it. “You first.” Martan started down the stairs with effortless ease. Nia followed, grimly holding his shoulders to steady herself. Her brain registered subtle discrepancies between how the stairs looked and how they felt, and her planet-born reflexes cried peril. Nia gave up and closed her eyes, trusting Martan more than she trusted her own reflexes.

He said, “You hold up to danger better than I would have expected.”

“Well, you’re better tempered in real danger than in a nice park. How wonderful. Some people who enjoy danger join the Star Rangers, others find work as police officers or emergency doctors. You became a hellhound!”

“Hellhound was not a career choice. I was in the Faxen Union army and stationed on Goya. My family was in Delagua on Estrella.”

Oh. Delagua, Estrella. An ordinary village on a half-terraformed world, it had been near a military base of the Faxen Union where Disunion terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb—an ancient, hideous weapon that left a radioactive scar. Nia had never thought about radioactive wounds being in the hearts of Delaguans who’d been away from home at the time. “You were young and bereft, and insane with grief and anger?”

His shoulder twitched. “Something like that.”

16

FAIR COUNTRY

If she never descended the Spiral Stair again in her life it would be too soon. Finally they reached the bottom. A narrow lane paved with stones led to a cottage set back in trees. It was a well-camouflaged university research station, and her key got them in.

Nia felt like a pawn in somebody else’s game, and she hated the feeling. She wanted some answers, and she wanted them now.

They found a station attendant on duty. The attendant looked at Martan with surprise. “Hey, you’re the Proctor!” The voice sounded like a university-age young man. The body was an animated replica of a prehistoric suit of armor, with a metallic grill for a face under a helmet topped by a fluffy white feather.

“Do I know you?” Martan asked.

“Sure! You come through the High Street pub every night. I wear my City shell then.”

“The blue racing shell.”

The suit of armor nodded, making its feather bob.

Crossing the stars for new worlds had left the human genome rifted with radiation damage. When genetic damage surfaced in a newborn child in Wendis, it was corrected if at all possible. The worst cases were implanted in mobile life-supporting mechanisms. Martan had probably seen some cyborgs scooting around in the hallways during his own long stay in the university hospital. “Why change shells?” Martan asked.

“It’s a Fair costume.” Nia crossed her arms. “An ancient knight.”

The feather bobbed agreement. “I’m doing doctoral research in anthropology here.”

“And you’re the station attendant. We need to contact the university.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“We have a serious problem and we need to contact the university!” she snapped.

“But you must be Nia Courant from the Counsel’s Office. I have orders not to send out any messages that might indicate that you’re here, but give you a message. I wasn’t supposed to open it unless I saw you.” Tiny lights flashed behind the metal grill under the plumed helmet. “Wow! The University Counsel says you’re both in serious danger.”

Nia felt a cold shock of fear. Hiro’s note said with Toll’s approval. Would Toll approve an untruthfully alarming message?

“And I’m supposed to give you the latest highway advisory. Uh-oh. The Highway Robbers are out today. And—wow! Old Scratch just got in the Back Gate!” The tiny lights behind the grill sequenced excitedly. “The University Counsel says get back to Haven as fast as you can, however you can, and whatever you do, don’t get separated. What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Is there going to be an abduction? Can I watch? I could use one for my thesis—”

Taller than the cyborg, Nia stepped toward him. Anger heated her voice. “You will help us, and if you don’t, I will file charges of malfeasance in the conduct of university business and violation of the Honor Code, and you’ll be lucky to merely be kicked out of the school!”

He stepped back with an audible clank. “You mean this isn’t a simulation?”

“I think not!” Nia turned on her heel and said to Martan, “Up to the observation deck.” The way up was a narrow vertical ladder. Martan climbed behind her to steady her, guiding her shoe to the rung when her foot fumbled in thin air. Damn the spin-gee!

Martan asked, “Can’t Toll call in help?”

“Not if the Zoned Park is witherspin. We better assume we’re on our own.” They emerged on the observation deck. The forested hillside rose behind it. Trees flanked the deck and even grew through holes in the surface, making the deck look like a treehouse. A compact weather station perched on one of the guard rails. Its wind gauge whirled in the breeze.

Twilight was settling into the deepest parts of the valley. Soft points of light gleamed in the village. The Highway came up from Zaber’s foothills and went through the village. Farther uphill, the Highway ran through grassy meadows toward the snowy summit of Zaber. The sun ball was on the verge of setting behind the mountain’s bulk. Nia said, “After the Fair, I got a royal tour of the Fair Country. It vaguely resembles Old Europe, and my looks fit in better here than anywhere else. You look like everybody everywhere. Unfortunately, we aren’t dressed like locals. The Highway runs straight down to Haven, but we better not go downhill on the Highway, not with the Highway Robbers on the move. We can follow the Highway up just far enough to go through Davos. That’s the name of the village. Then we’ll take the Fair Lane to the tram station and ride the tram down to Haven. Or there’s the Low Road. It starts in Davos and goes through the Underworld. But the Low Road is unholy dangerous.” Previously she’d not believed much of what she’d heard about the Low Road. She did now.

With his head cocked, Martan seemed to be assessing the sounds around them. Nia only heard a few birds, a rustle of wind in the trees, and just at the edge of her hearing, one of the air handlers in the hillside. Martan heard more. “Where the lane leaves the Highway, there are men’s voices and at least two big animals with metal harnesses, horses, coming this way.”

“The Highway Robbers! Let’s get out of here!”

They scrambled down a tree to the ground. At a half run, they went downhill toward the village, slanting away from the lane and the Highway Robbers. Fallen leaves, damp and limp, muffled their steps. The oak trees, beeches, and laurels were interspersed with weirdly shaped alien trees. Farther downhill, in deeper shadows, some of the alien trees were shrouded in thick insect webbing that sparked and sizzled when flies and flying bugs blundered into it. Nia recognized the sparkspider webbing, as well as the fungi that glowed pink and blue on tree stumps. These were Faxen species that she’d seen in the great park, Tetra.

When they slowed down to pick their way through a low, boggy spot full of puddles, Nia said, “I hope there are plenty of other visitors in Davos today. Anyway, the only way up the Highway is through the village.”

“Will everyone here be against us?” Again a light, interested tone on Martan’s part, as if he were asking, will there be ice cream too?

Nia said curtly, “Not if we play the game well.”

The Wend Range was proving to be the most unpredictable place Martan had ever experienced. Even more so than the dangerous obstacle courses he’d trained on in the nursery of hellhounds inside Faxe’s military-base moon Veritas.

Inanna studied the guidebook’s pages about the village just before they got there, making sure she hadn’t left something important out of her calculations. At the edge of the village, the Highway arched up as a fauxstone bridge over a little river that tumbled down the heart of the valley. In the middle of the bridge was a plastic trapdoor, presumably for maintenance.

Hearing a creaking noise behind him, Martan turned around to see something climbing out of the trapdoor. Huge, humanoid, wet, and covered with matted hair, it lurched toward them.

Inanna took one look and bolted off the bridge faster than Martan would have guessed she could run. Martan raced after her into the shelter of a narrow alleyway. He caught her by the shoulders and told her, “Just stand back and I’ll deal with—”

“Don’t bother.”

The matted monster shuffled back and forth near the end of the bridge, then shrugged and climbed back into the plastic trapdoor.

“That was the troll. It can’t go more than twenty paces from water, those are the rules.”

The only trolls Martan had ever known about were Faxen heavy infantrymen, nicknamed “trolls.” Strange place with strange rules. . . .

Then Martan heard stealthy footsteps deeper in the alley. When he turned his head, two large men rushed toward them. One of them lunged toward Inanna. She dodged. The other man sprang toward Martan with a knife in his hand.

Moving hellhound-fast, Martan kicked the knife away. He slammed the knapsack loaded with rocks into the man’s stomach and followed through with a bonemetal-knuckle punch to the jaw that sent the man reeling against a wall, already unconscious. Martan threw himself between the other attacker and Inanna. He hit the man’s crotch with a kick that folded him like a rag doll. Then Martan seized the attacker by the throat and Interrogated, invading the man’s mind at full force, like a psychic sledgehammer.

Inanna grabbed Martan by the shoulders. “Don’t kill him!” There was raw fright in her voice. “If we kill a native, they’ll all turn on us!”

Martan ceased the interrogation. He took possession of the thug’s wicked knife and shouldered the knapsack again.

“Come on!”

Martan complied. Then it dawned on him that he had just obeyed her twice in two minutes. At the scene of an interrogation.

After an interrogation, it took a few minutes for a hellhound’s attention to return to the outer world. Which was why handlers usually stepped in just after the kill. No one but a hellhound’s handler could pull a hellhound off before a kill. Almost nothing. He’d pulled himself off once, when interrogation revealed the mind of a principled enemy of Faxe who did not deserve to die. Profoundly shaken, his trust in his handler unraveling, Martan defected from Faxe under cover of a fiery explosion soon afterward.

But Inanna had just pulled Martan off a kill. Now he was following her away from an interrogation scene like an obedient puppy. This was scary. It also felt right.

Inanna hustled him through the alley and deeper into the village. “Thanks to our clothes, we are far too obvious. We’ve got to fix that. This way.” She threaded her way through an open-air market with empty stalls. The market seemed as deserted as a stage set. The structures were facades, garish and empty. “Did you wreck his mind?”

That was the question a hellhound handler would ask. It was also the right, authoritative kind of tone. Martan answered. “No. He’ll just wake up with a hole in his memory.”

“What did you find out?”

“They were bounty hunters. A bounty was put out through the usual channels—whatever that means—less than an hour ago. The thug didn’t know why the bounty. He was clear on who they were after, though. You and any male companion of yours.”

“Me?!” Her voice rose in an incredulous squeak that didn’t sound like a handler at all.

Martan briefly lost his mental footing. Suddenly he didn’t feel it imperative to answer her. He wanted to, though. “I can blend into in any crowd, but your looks stand out. I think whoever offered the bounty had the idea of using you as a marker.”

“Not for much longer!” She yanked open an inconspicuous hinged gate and they entered a street behind the facades. This looked like a typical neighborhood in the hilly parts of Wendis. The residences were cozy glassbrick houses, those farthest uphill reached by latticeworks of stairs fringed with potted plants. Each house had a trilingual Wendisan address plate beside the door. The air even smelled like a Wendisan neighborhood at suppertime—stir-fry and curry. The only people on the sidewalks were ordinary Wendisans. They noticed Martan and Inanna—visitors in expedition clothes more suitable for the wild Zones of the park—but the inquisitive glances slid over the two of them without a snag. These Wendisans were unconcerned about a couple of purposeful visitors. Inanna stopped at a house with a distinctive blue door. The address plate read ELZEBET SELLER with a blue bellbar underscoring the name. Inanna pressed the bar hard.

A heavyset, gray-haired, dark-skinned woman immediately opened the door. She wore a colorful casual tunic and slacks. “Canter! Quick—in.” She closed the door and swept them ahead of her into a large room full of colorful clothing arrayed on racks.

Inanna said, “This is Night, and—”

“Oh yes, Canter’s Knight! The Park is witherspin and you two are in trouble, but it seems you can take care of yourselves. Now you want some garb so you’ll fit in better! I told my friend Vendana, the Gatekeeper’s Chief of Staff—she called me right after you left the Foyer, gating over from Inferno with Scratch on your heels!—‘Vendana,’ I said, ‘she’ll have sense enough to come straight to my house.’ These are sorry times, that’s all I’ll say! Imagine an unsanctioned danger game breaking out in broad daylight with two unwitting university people, and one of them a citizen! Mark my words, an investigation of this will go all the way up to City Council, but that won’t help you today, you’ll have to rescue yourselves, dear, and I’ll help.” With that, Elzebet bustled away into her racks of clothing.

Martan asked Inanna, “How well does news travel here?”

“Fast as photons. Tourists can’t have personal communications devices, but the denizens do. I didn’t really think—” her voice broke. “I need the lavatory.” She disappeared into a hallway.

A few minutes later, Elzebet returned with colored cloth piled in her arms. Holding up some wide pieces of cloth against Martan, she squinted disapprovingly at each until she found one that pleased her. “Yes, forest green complements the gold tones in your skin. Try this on. A cloak or cape is what a Wendisan man would wear up here tonight, but you’ve got to act the part, by which I mean body language.”

Green with a subtle geometric pattern, the cloak was smart fabric, allowing for its seams be parted and rejoined. While she altered it, Elzebet told Martan how Inanna came to be Queen in the Fair: it was Hiro’s doing. Elzebet concluded, “Nia made such a good impression on everyone that she earned a Fair name.”

“Canter,” said Martan. A pun on her Azurean family name, Courant?

“I’m sure Azure is a respectable place with decent people, but really, it’s one of those thin new worlds, stretched across a great big planet. She’s too extraordinary for it. This is a better place for her. Wendis is nice and thick, like baklava. There! Now the fit is perfect, and it won’t get in your way whether you fight or fly.”

Inanna reappeared. Martan could tell that she had cried, then pulled herself together and washed her face. A wave of wanting to save her, wanting to show off for her, and wanting her dizzied Martan. When he’d been brain-trained in Faxe’s moon Veritas, they’d disabled this kind of feeling. No wonder. It was distracting. The Wendisan doctors, though, had made sure to re-enable it. Wendisans believed life without love was death.

Elzebet said, “For you, Nia, I have this nice thick shawl. Since your jacket isn’t bulky, the shawl goes right over it. You’ll be glad of the layers tonight with the windchill. Doesn’t midnight blue look good on her? You move like a visitor, you can’t hide that—but this is what a visitor with style might wear.”

Inanna stroked the material. “How much do I owe you?”

“You can’t pay with Wendisan yen,” Elzebet replied. “For denizen garb, it has to be native currency. You must cross my palm with silver.”

“I don’t have any!”

Elzebet chuckled. “Oh, but you do.” At the kitchen table in her private quarters, Elzebet proceeded to cut some of Inanna’s hair and rearrange the rest. “There. You look just like a fashionable interstellar visitor, not a university officer. And you look the part of the Wendisan suitor. Look, Nia, he can imitate the Wendisan male slouch. Excellent.”

“What next?” Martan asked Inanna.

With a steeliness that surprised and delighted him, she said, “We’re in a danger game and we know it. We assume that your enemies are behind it and the stakes are as high as life and death. You’re good at danger and I’m not, but we play as a team, and if anything or anyone else gives us more trouble, you can make them regret it.” Then she asked Elzebet, “Can you give us any advice?”

“Think twice about going down the Highway, or up it. The Highway Robbers are out and about. Old Scratch is prowling near the Back Gate. I won’t be surprised if the Wild Hunt rides tonight. The Huntmaster would give anything to bag Old Scratch. But the Wild Hunt is no time for anyone to be on the Highway through Wyrdwood,” Elzebet said darkly. “Least of all a pretty girl. Some in the Hunt are neither sane nor humane, when they’re wilding.”

Adrenaline sketched a fiery trace through Martan’s nerves. If the Wild Hunt—whatever it was—tried to make Inanna their prey, they’d learn what he could do as a predator.

Looking shaken, Inanna reached into her jacket pocket. “Would you keep something safe for me?” She took the hugwort out. But it clung to her buttons and it refused to let go.

“What in all the worlds is that?” said Elzebet.

“An enchanted morning glory,” Martan said.

“A new species from the planet Jumala,” Inanna said.

“Those leaves look like the glories outside my back door!” Elzebet exclaimed.

“It’s a created organism, a terratism.” Inanna tried to detach the hugwort’s tendrils from her buttons. “University researchers think there was a lost human colony on Jumala, where the ecosystem is bizarrely dominated by plants. The ancient colonists may have mixed Terrestrial genes into a Jumalan life form, before the colony died out.”

“Terratism or not, dear, it’s certainly attached to you.”

“It may be hurt already. I can’t take more chances with it.”

Martan sniffed the hugwort. “It doesn’t have any bruised leaves. It’s not all that fragile. It wants to take its chances with you.”

Inanna reluctantly returned the hugwort to her pocket. She wrapped the shawl around her shoulders. Elzebet then fastened the shawl with a slim golden pin bearing two faceted garnet-red stones. “Here. It’s costume jewelry, a nice finishing touch and a token.”

“Will you be safe after we leave?” Inanna asked her.

“I live in the Fair Country. My door is better defended than it may look to you, and I’m staying behind it until this trouble blows over. You look like any of two dozen couples romancing in the Fair Country on a starry night, and maybe you can just blend in until tomorrow morning. So first of all, use those Wendisan yen of yours to get a good supper!”

On the outdoor menu was scribbled, FRESH FISH TONIGHT. The restaurant was located on a terrace with a wide view of the valley and the village, near the edge of the forest, and close to the cemetery where the Low Road entrance was located. The place had good options for fight or flight. Unless and until it became necessary to fight or flee, Martan could relax. The fish was excellent, as were the accompaniments.

“Are you going to finish that rice?” Martan asked.

“How can you eat?”

“I might need the calories later.”

She shoved her plate, with a third of her trout and two thirds of her rice, toward him. “I’m not hungry. I really, really hate being in danger.”

“They may just be using you as a marker,” Martan reminded her.

Her mouth twisted ruefully. “Or they may intend to capture or kill the only lawyer in Wendis who understands interstellar law well enough to defend you against Faxe.”

Few lawyers could accomplish something like that, Martan reflected. Fewer would even try. It took some nerve to contemplate legally divesting Faxe of one of its hellhounds.

The windows and doors of the restaurant, closed against the cold night air, leaked syncopated music. From the patio around him came the murmurs of other diners and the clinks of cutlery in use. He and Inanna were two of thirty people dining on the patio. Wearing Elzebet’s outerwear—naturally enough in the outdoor air’s chill—they attracted no special attention. Martan liked it that way.

Inanna said, “I made the first inquiries for legal background information just six days ago. I was very careful not to let out the secret that you’re alive in Wendis. Maybe I wasn’t discreet enough, and maybe there were already suspicions that the explosion Faxe’s hellhound disappeared in wasn’t quite fatal. I think it’s safe to assume that your enemies want you badly. Then when we came out of the university—which is one of the safest and best-protected places in Wendis—into the Wends, a bounty was offered and the hunt was on.”

“Eat,” Martan told her. “You might need calories later too.”

She nibbled the curry bun from her side dish. “Are your modifications genetic?”

“Does it matter?”

“There are legal protections for cyborgs. The gene-changed are harder to protect, but Wendis has treaties with a few gene-changed communities. If I know precisely what you are, it will help me help you.”

Martan felt flattered. Not many women would tolerate what he been changed into. Very few women could help him now even if they wanted to. Even fewer would be brave enough to try. Helping him could put her in danger and already had. And yet she still meant to do it. He had been a young fool at one time. No more. He would cooperate with her and tell her what she needed to know about himself. If he could! The old brain-training tightened like an invisible collar around his throat, meant to silence him. However, he had already tested that collar today, and found it frayed, not as strong as it used to be. “Martan is an alias. No radiation-mutated ancestors on Old Mars. I have old Earth normal genes,” he said with effort. “The changes were mechanical and psychological. Tsuda and her assistants in the hospital could have undone the mechanical changes. Except I didn’t want to lose all I can do.”

“You wanted to be a hellhound, but a redeemed one?” Her expression veered toward laughter.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“The university hired you as Proctor. You see in the dark, hear fog flow, and have a grip too strong to break. Students sneaking out after curfew don’t stand a chance.”

“Unfair advantage?”

“Doesn’t matter. The entire faculty and administration of Avend University is glad to have a capable Proctor for a change. They just don’t know how capable.”

Pleased, Martan divided the last of the tea between her cup and his, making the amber liquid slant to its destination instead of allowing porcelain to click on porcelain.

“And you’re polished,” said Inanna. “You’re well educated. You fit in with university culture. I thought you said you were born on Estrella.”

“Estrella is backward, all right, but I had a first-rate education after my juvenation and training.” Martan felt elated. Talking about himself was getting easier the more he did it. “Lessons in etiquette too. If we came off like jackals, we’d never accomplish anything.”

They shared a smile. Maybe they really could just blend in with the other visitors in the Fair Country tonight, looking like a romancing couple, and maybe even, Martan hoped against hope, being exactly that.

Aural pattern recognition abruptly commandeered Martan’s attention. A server had hurried to a nearby table. The server and the diners were urgently muttering about witherspin and Scratch. At another table a diner had just received a signal pod call. The diner’s pod whispered, “. . . spies of Shandy stirring trouble. . . .” Martan didn’t know what “Shandy” meant, but the remark was another ominous sibilance stitched across the evening’s bright chatter. Now the other diners started leaving. Martan surreptitiously emptied Inanna’s dipping sauce and his onto the remaining rice, and ate it in large spoonfuls.

“What are you doing?”

“The sauce is mostly oil. Good source of calories.” He spooned up the last of the oily, spicy sauce. “Let’s admire the scenery from the edge of the terrace.”

Davos shimmered with soft warm lights. The village appeared tranquil. But there was a faint, tinny latticework of sound in the distance. “I hear your Metal Man. The anthropologist. He’s running on the Highway into town yelling, “The Crusaders are coming!”

Startled, Inanna jerked back. “That’s worse than Highway Robbers!”

Alarm rippled out from the distant, clanking stormcrow. Parents were calling children home with sharp voices. Doors were slamming shut, bolts sliding in place, security systems being activated with almost imperceptible electromagnetic hums. “Let’s go.”

A tall fence separated the village from the forest on this end of Davos. A stream—a tributary to the small river in the center of the valley and village—ran under the fence, where it flowed through a tall tube as a shallow clear layer of water. They skidded down into the narrow stream and waded uphill, through the tube, into the forest. High banks rose on either side. The water was icy snowmelt. “My feet are cold!” Inanna protested.

At that moment, something separated itself from the dark bank ahead. Looming over them, it growled and bared thick pointed teeth.

Martan glared up at the troll as he pulled out the thug’s knife.

Inanna grabbed his shoulders. “No!”

Martan held off so automatically that he didn’t even think about it.

“Watch.” She took the pin with garnet stones off the shawl and held it out to the troll.

It stooped. A huge blunt thumb and index finger delicately took the pin. Then the troll chuckled and shuffled back into a den in the steep bank. Nothing but a reek like wet dog mixed with curry came out of the troll’s den as they hurried by. The troll did not reemerge.

“That’s the rule,” said Inanna. “Give him jewelry and you can pass.”

Incredible, Martan thought, that she would trust an entity she’d never met before to abide by arbitrary rules in an artificial place!

On the other hand, maybe that was what being a lawyer was all about.

17

THE HIGH ROAD

Nia tripped on a loose stone, going down on one knee with a chilling splash. Martan helped her up. A quarter mile farther upstream, they crawled up the stream’s bank. Nia was shaking with cold, and her knee hurt. Martan sat down with her and wrapped his cloak around both of them. He felt miraculously warm.

They were high on Zaber. Low-lying fog dimmed Star City’s lights to a misty gleam in one far end, but the center of the huge cylinder of Wendis was clear. The whole length of the darkened sunspar was visible along the axis. It was night now, and stars and nebulas streamed through the spar, images that reflected the cosmic environs of Wendis. The cylindrical city-state revolved once every few minutes, but to anyone in the sway of the centrifugal spingravity, the cylinder seemed fixed in space—an immutable frame of reference—with a river of stars flowing through its long crystal heart, framed by mountains like frozen waves. The jagged peak of Mount Chance gleamed in the starlight. Specter loomed higher and nearer. Its summit curled around the spar. Martan gazed at the mountains with observant eyes that had seen other great wonders.

Some interstellar wonders were tiny. Nia checked her jacket pocket under the shawl. “It’s all right. It may not be so eager to smuggle itself along on an outing next time.”

“Where to now, Inanna?” Martan said.

She liked hearing him call her Inanna. For the first time in her life, that Wendisan woman’s name felt like it belonged to her.

Together with Martan, she was caught up in a danger game. Maybe it was a test that had spun out of control in the wild Wends; maybe Martan’s enemies were behind it. No matter. It was a danger game. But Martan was as dangerous as anyone in the Wends, and he was willing to follow her lead when she knew the way better than he did. They were learning to play the game together and this was a game she intended to win. “The last tram to Haven leaves at midnight. We’re in the highlands already. If we cut cross country to the Fair Lane, we’ll have time to catch the tram.” They started across a meadow carpeted with short, springy grass.

“What if something goes wrong with the tram plan, too?” asked Martan.

“At the top of Zaber is Lover’s Leap.”

“That sounds suicidal.”

“It isn’t. If you leap off, you fall down the back side of Zaber into a net in Haven. But I’d never live it down at the university.”

He may have been imagining the net with as much distaste as she was. That or something else was distracting him from listening for warning sounds. Nia and Martan both registered hoofbeats racing up behind them at the same moment, too late.

A shape like an impossibly slender pale horse dove between Martan and Nia, knocking Martan backward. It sidled on mincing hooves, pushing Nia away from Martan. Starlight glanced on a sharp, fluted horn.

Nia tried to duck around the unicorn. Very pretty and very assertive, the unicorn blocked her as it kept dancing sidewise, driving her farther away from Martan.

“Stupid beast!” Martan exploded.

Nia called back, “He’s not stupid. I’ve met him before. He won’t hurt me, but he’s herding me. Prince, stop that!”

“We don’t have time for this!”

“You tell him!”

Martan seized the unicorn’s horn. Prince furiously tried to shake loose, but Martan kept his grip on its horn and bared his fangs while staring Prince in the eye.

Flank muscles tensing, the unicorn jumped straight backward. Martan let go of the horn just in time not to be carried along. The unicorn whirled and bounded away with its tail flowing like a gossamer pennant behind it.

“If he comes back, I’ll see how he likes having a chunk taken out of his pretty hide,” Martan muttered, and kept his fangs out.

They scrambled up the rocky bank to the Fair Lane, which was paved with flat fauxstones. The Lane curved uphill, offering easy going the rest of the way to the tram station. As they paused beside the lane, Nia wondered about the unicorn’s reaction to her, and Martan’s reaction to the unicorn. Had that been two males fighting over her? Prince had radiated male attitude. And now so did Martan. Nia reached out to Martan’s lips, exploring his fangs with her fingertips. “Oooh. Sharp.”

“Do you want me to put them away?”

“I’m beginning to find them strangely attractive.”

He kissed her fingertips and pulled her closer.

Then an ululating sound ripped through the air, like a wail from a raw brass throat. Nia groaned. “It’s the Wild Hunt. We can’t go to the tram now. That’s in their territory. God help us if someone told them what you are. You’d be a bigger prize than Old Scratch!”

“How do we reach Lover’s Leap?” Martan asked

“Up the lane, and turn at the intersection onto the High Road, and up and up and up.”

The Wild Hunt horn sounded several times more, and more wildly, but not any closer. The Hunt was staying on the other side of the Fair Country, in the rough terrain near the Back Gate where Scratch had been seen earlier. Old Scratch might be a prize they could not resist.

“Better Scratch than me—or you,” said Martan. This high on Zaber, the air was thin and bitterly cold, the gravity low, and hard for Nia to manage. She slipped her hand into Martan’s. She’d stopped being afraid of his touch. She was afraid—just not of him. He said, “Your hair has exactly the same color and texture as the unicorn’s mane and tail.”

She shrugged wearily. “Probably the same genes. Unicorns are a terratism that dates pretty far back. Silver hair was early genetic engineering rather than a naturally evolved trait. Everyone else now believes the old families on Azure are pure Earth-original genetic material. But that’s not exactly true. Family secret. Don’t tell.”

Martan stroked her wrist. “You see, it’s not automatic. All my fingers are touching your skin, and nothing bad is happening.”

“I saw what you did in Davos,” she answered, but she didn’t pull away.

“I really had to dig,” said Martan. “There wasn’t much in the thug’s mind for me to work with, because he just wanted a fat bounty. My telepathy drives along the tracks laid down in someone’s brain by pain, shame, and anger. Most of the enemies of Faxe all had a royal mental road for me. The last night when we were together—as soon as I touched those scars on your back, I knew how much shame they meant to you. I reacted instinctively and made you explain everything. But you are the last person in the universe I intended to Interrogate. I’m sorry.”

It made sense. He made sense. Finally she said, “You told me you made a drastic, emotion-driven, foolish decision at a young age. Well, so did I.”

“For me, though, there was gain as well as pain. I enjoy the things I can do. But I’m not Faxe’s hellhound now.”

A hellhound was a subtle tool as well as an effective and terrible one. No wonder Wendis had been interested enough to rescue Martan, repair him, and finally offer him asylum and a useful job. It was very much the tradition of Wendis to collect resources, human or otherwise, that added value. No, Nia thought, he was not a Faxen hellhound anymore. He might just be a Wendisan hellhound. Or even—a half-formed thought fluttered out like a moth from between the folds of this eventful day. He might be MY hellhound. Nia barely registered that idea before they rounded the rocky flank of a hill.

The High Road ended just ahead at a fragile-looking swinging footbridge suspended over a chasm. On each end of the footbridge, tall fauxstone pillars patterned like marble anchored the bridge. The pillar on this side was crowned by a crouching, winged figure, as pale and motionless as the fauxstone but not made of stone at all. Cold recognition crawled up Nia’s spine. She drew close to Martan. “Watch out for the Guardian Angel,” she whispered.

Martin pulled out the knife he’d taken from the thug. As they approached the threshold of the bridge, the Angel watched them with wide dark eyes, turning his head toward them as they went by and stepped onto the slender bridge. Martan murmured, “The bridge being suspended at forty-five degrees to the axis may make it challenging for you. Walk fast but lightly, smoothly.”

With every step, a subtle, invisible spingravity finger nudged Nia’s foot toward the edge of the swinging bridge. It made her fear falling off. Panicky, she said, “It feels—”

“Close your eyes.”

Eyes closed, Nia clung to the arm Martan put around her waist, guiding her while he glided right behind her, his footfalls hardly even registering on the bridge. Music and faint laughter drifted up from the deep valley far below the swinging bridge. That was Karnivale down there. No carnival for anybody who fell off this bridge.

“We’re past the middle,” Martan said. Nia heard soft sounds behind them, like wingbeats. Martan shoved her the rest of the way to the end of the bridge, where she felt solid rock under their feet. He whirled with the knife ready in his hand.

Flying with unfurled translucent wings, the Angel stopped short of where Martan stood ready to meet and attack. Instead the Angel slanted onto the anchoring pillar on the end of the bridge. He unfastened the knotted ropes that held the bridge up. Dangling from the Fair Country end, the bridge slowly fell away. The Angel spoke. “The way is closed.” It was the same voice as that night on the Great Wall, the tone so cold it burned. Nia shuddered. But Martan didn’t seem fazed. Holding her hand, he backed away from the bridge pillar, trading glares with its Angel guardian, until they reached the foot of a stairway carved into the vertical face of rock at the high end of Karnivale.

“Up to the top of Zaber,” Martan told her. “It’s not far.”

Nia shook her head, despairing. This looked worse than the Spiral Stair on the other side of the Fair Country. The frigid wind galed and sighed. The ends of her shawl fluttered. Her muscles trembled as she forced herself to suppress motions too forceful for the low spingravity.

Martan coaxed her up a step at a time while scanning the stairs and the air for danger. “What is that thing?”

“Wendis has at least two kinds of genetically changed humans. One is the Children of Bane, like Dr. Banter and the Gatekeeper. The other is the Angels.” The Angel had flown with an ethereal grace that made the Deathbird look like a feathered buffoon. In motion, in spin-gee, the Angel’s wings had looked almost supernatural—an angelic shimmer of wing. But he wasn’t an angelic, benevolent being. “They’re the most problematic shade of human in Wendis. They’re Shandy’s Angels.”

“And Shandy is who or what?”

“Satan to his worshippers, but to everybody else, a cruel interstellar god who trades in sabotage and espionage and made human beings into Angels.”

“Do say,” Martan replied, with a cold ironic note in his voice that she’d never heard before. But then she’d never heard him contemplating a sentient enemy.

Nia dared to look back. The Angel stared up at them with its wings cocked. One moment of inattention on Martan’s part and the Angel would fly up to knock them off the stairs. Nia was sure of that. But Martan’s alertness never wavered.

Hidden from the bridgepost by a fold of stone and out of the wind, Nia stopped. Her leg muscles trembled with fatigue, and the knee that she had bruised in Inferno and again in the stream near Davos throbbed. Icy tears trickled down her cheeks. “I can’t take much more.”

Still watching the air, still vigilant, Martan touched the back of her face with the back of his other hand, the one not holding the knife. “I’m sorry. If I’d known how to prevent it all, I would never have let everything today happen to you.”

She said, “I knew it might be dangerous to help you. I didn’t think it would be this much, this soon. But I knew it might be.” She leaned against him. Elzebet’s cloak smelled like the Fair Country, spice and smoke. She remembered that she’d likely made the first move of this perilous game herself, by sending out inquiries into areas of interstellar law that would have bearing on the human rights of hellhounds. Her motives were a tight braid of ambition, compassion, and sexual passion. How very Wendisan. Win or lose the prize of your life in the Magic Mountains. . . .

“I will get you home tonight. I promise.” Martan’s voice was calm. He pulled out the guidebook from her jacket’s breast pocket. “Be our lookout for a few minutes.”

Nia anxiously watched the windy air.

Martan leafed through the guidebook’s pages. “Zaber’s peak has extremely unusual properties because of how it’s shaped, and the spin of Wendis,” he said a few minutes later. Faint accordion and zither music from Karnivale drifted up as he studiously read another page and then turned it. Then Martan hissed, “This guidebook is transmitting. I felt it. Only when a page turns—and only sneaky little packets of data.”

“Telling someone where we are?!” Nia’s mind reeled.

“I’d bet my life on that.” Martan hurled the guidebook into the valley. It fluttered away on the winds over Karnivale. She felt his back muscles tense up. He was spring-loading for a fight as he turned them both toward the final steps up.

The stairs ended on the Zaber’s wide crest. Starlight shone blindingly on a thin blanket of snow. There was no sign of the Angel. Nia identified Lover’s Leap, a scalloped lip protruding from the top of Zaber.

Lover’s Leap was roped off and posted with signs.

CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. NO TRESSPASSING. NO SAFETY NET.

“Company,” Martan said flatly.

Four humans stood up from the snow. They wore arctic-white hunting garb and masks. One of them held a big, long harpoon gun pointed at Martan and Nia.

A harpoon flew through the air toward them.

Martan shoved Nia down onto the snow. The heavy harpoon skimmed his shoulder. It made him tumble over Nia’s back, skidding over the vertical edge of Karnivale valley. She grabbed for him, missed, and watched horrified as he fell. But not far. He slid toward a tiny shelf of rock. His feet anchored there. Terror for his safety choked Nia’s throat. But he coiled onto the shelf like a spring, balanced on the balls of his feet, safe. But he had nowhere to go. Nia forced herself to roll toward the hunters, to get to her feet. She must not let them know he was safe, just below the edge. She had to get their attention away from him. She took an uncertain step in the low gravity. The hunters advanced.

Out of the corner of her eye Nia registered rapid motion just before Martan hurtled into her. He collided hard with her and launched them both into the air. He’d jumped up from his narrow perch with all the power he had.

He’d broken both of them free of the low spingravity.

With his arms wrapped tightly around her, they coasted upward from the peak of Zaber. The mountain rotated away. The hunters gestured furiously. But they didn’t shoot another harpoon. Nobody in Wendis would dare fire a weapon toward the spar at the heart of the world.

The spar was a torrent of brilliant stars channeled inside a thick clear crystal tube. It mesmerized Nia. The spar was filled with translucent threads, conduits for a sunlike pulse of golden light by day and a million starlike pulses of silver light by night. It was blindingly bright this close up. The air around it was warm. Nia felt numb awe as she saw the spar up close, and closer yet. They were going to collide with it.

Martan put one hand out. His arm absorbed their momentum. Electrical fields swirled around his hand on the spar’s clear surface.

With a forceful shove, Martan propelled them away from the spar.

Now they fell at the same slow rate at which they’d ascended from Zaber. As dazed as if dreaming, Nia saw they were coasting rimward on the other side of the spar from the peak of Zaber, where the distant hunters had dwindled to angry little toys. Martan and Nia fell rimward, down, and down. But it didn’t feel like falling. It was dreamlike flying, free from spingravity. The whole vast cylinder of Wendis rotated around them.

Martan shrugged off the knapsack, which still contained rocks from Inferno. He slung the whole thing away from him. They changed course to coast rimward at a different angle. “Hah! We’ll land safe!” he exulted.

Now Zaber rotated back around.

Zaber morphed into an immense white wave looming over them, closing in with terrifying speed. Nia screamed. Martan twisted around to cushion the impact with his own body. The steep slope of Zaber slammed into them and buried them in snow.

They rolled back out into the air. Nia choked and spat snow. They slid downhill. Frigid snow slithered through Nia’s clothes.

Martan shouted a curse. “Can’t get my feet on ground—can’t stop!”

They kept sliding downhill toward a flat dark blur on the mountainside. A fragment of Nia’s mind worried what that was. The shape looked familiar—

Nia, Martan and the snow traveling with them spilled into an ice-rimmed lake. Cold water hit Nia’s skin like driven nails.

Martan hauled Nia up, getting her head out of the water. She coughed. The lake came up to her collarbone, and it was shockingly cold. “Aaaah!”

“This way!” Martan gasped.

She staggered toward shore, leaning on him.

“I think we’re safe here,” he said.

Shaking uncontrollably, Nia thought the shoreline looked familiar. It was lined with people staring at them. “You’re right. Robin Lake in Haven,” Nia stammered through chattering teeth. “Audience for stargazing. We are safe here. Oh, cold!—oh no!” She fished the hugwort out of a pocket full of water. It clutched at her fingers with all its tendrils.

They waded out of the water onto a smooth sand beach. Water spilled off Nia’s shawl and flowed off Martan’s cloak as the fabrics rejected the water.

“Here!” Martin flung his cloak and her shawl around them both. He twined his fingers through the hugwort’s tendrils and between Nia’s fingers. He embraced her, and he radiated heat.

Yet another hellhound talent, Nia realized. Raise body temperature. Survive immersion in cold or snow or ice water. She held onto him, sharing his elevated body warmth with wordless gratitude. The hugwort relaxed its grip on Nia’s fingers and twitched its tendrils, flinging water off its leaves like a wet bird shaking its plumage dry.

“A flying ambulance just landed,” said Martan. “Don’t forget I kept my promise to you.”

Nia held his face. “You—are—wonderful!” She kissed him. He responded eagerly.

“What happened?” said an ambulance medic pushing through the crowd. Voices answered, “Those people fell down the mountain—caught in an avalanche—” A child piped up, “They fell from the spar, they did, they did!”

“Anyway, they seem to be all right,” someone remarked.

Nia broke off the kiss but whispered to Martan, “More later!”

Then with ice water dripping from his hair onto his face, he gave her his end-of-an-eclipse smile.

18

INQUEST

Hiro Hiroshi Low had never been so worried about Nia.

Toll’s message had reached Nia in mid-afternoon in the Fair Country. That was the last known of either Nia or Martan, and now it was late in the night. Provost Isao Gellatly joined Toll and Hiro in their anxious vigil. Toll paced in the Counselors’ common office. “I hope to High Heaven no news is good news.”

A chime vibrated the quiet air. “I hope you’re wrong,” said Provost Gellatly, “because there’s news.” The chime announced that the newspaper had arrived. It was the midnight edition. Toll snatched the newspaper out of its receptacle so quickly that the words on the filmy pages were still shimmering into focus. She leafed madly to the Local Section. “Nothing about mishaps in the Park except this nonsense!”

Hiro looked over her shoulder.

“WRONG-WAY LOVERS MAKE SPLASH,” a headline blared. “Late this evening, two unidentified individuals jumped from Lover’s Leap on Zaber in the wrong direction to survive a dramatic fall into Robin Lake. . . .”

“Bah!” Toll hurled the newspaper onto the floor. “We know the Park is witherspin. And whoever orchestrated it has influence enough to keep the newspaper in the dark.”

Hiro heard running footsteps in the hallway. The door to the office banged open and Nia and Martan rushed in. Nia said, “Minnie! Help, they may be right behind us!”

Toll sprang toward Hiro’s desk doubtless intending to call the campus police.

“Who is right behind you?” Hiro asked.

“Reporters! They chased us—we climbed in over the wall—”

“Like two errant students with the Proctor on their trail.” said Martan. A smile danced at the edges of Martan’s mouth. But Nia flung herself into a chair. She kicked off her shoes, and water drained out of them.

Hiro peered into the hall outside. It was empty. Provost Gellatly stooped to pick the newspaper with its sensational headline up off the floor. He neatly folded it.

Nia shook her head and droplets of water flew from the ends of her hair, which was cut shorter than it had been only yesterday. “Reporters!” She folded herself into an unhappy bundle in the chair. Martan put his hands on her shoulders. She pulled his arms tightly around her. Hiro was astonished. Were these two back on romantic terms?!

“I am immeasurably glad to see you both back here,” said Toll. “Yet I dread to ask, what was the casualty count?”

Martan answered, “One Deathbird, and that’s all. We are a good team, Madame Toll.”

“Your teammate is worse for wear,” Provost Gellatly observed.

“I’ll take you home,” Martan told Nia, caressing her hand, “just as I promised.”

“No, you won’t,” said Toll. Everyone stared at her. “Take her to your home, Martan. It’s within the walls and well protected from enemies and reporters.” In a gentler tone, she told Nia, “Rest for what’s left of tonight. Then expect to stand in front of a City Council subcommittee tomorrow at an emergency inquest.”

By the time they reached the Proctor’s residence, Inanna was shaking from exhaustion. Martan urged her into a warm shower. When she emerged, her skin a pretty shade of pink from the warm steam, he gave her one of his shirts and a pair of shorts to wear, and massaged the muscles in her legs. She pulled him into bed and into a sweet, sleepy kiss that made the bedroom spin around him. He listened to her breathing change as she fell asleep.

A week ago he’d despaired of ever even touching her again. Today she had been at his side through the incredible obstacle course that the Wend Range had turned out to be. At the end, they flew across Wendis together. It had been the best adventure of Martan’s whole life. Shared with her. Now she was asleep in his arms. In a way, that was better than lovemaking. People could have sex without trust, but almost no one could sleep without trust.

He set his subconscious scan: any out-of-place noise or smell or vibration would bring him awake, ready to fight, in an instant. But Toll was right about the Proctor’s residence being one of the more secure places here, and he’d spent his spare time making it even more so.

The hugwort, in a clingy mood, nestled in the crook of Inanna’s arm. Two humans and one hugwort might be a crowd, but it was infinitely better than his previous bitter loneliness.

He might be the luckiest man in the universe.

Exhilarated from yesterday and intoxicated from being with Inanna now for twenty-four hours, Martan felt that they could handle anything City Council might throw at them. The City Council subcommittee consisted of Hayao Pannister, the Fair Director; the Police Chief of Wendis, who was a woman named Sagitta Charry; and the tall, lean Head Park Ranger, Yaolun Parker. Across a polished table in a dark-walled small conference room, the subcommittee asked questions. Martan told them everything that had happened in the Zoned Park.

Police Chief Charry looked thoughtful. “What a day in the Park. Old Scratch was set on you and the gate system was compromised. The Wild Hunt rode out, the Highway Robbers turned out, the Crusaders went on a rampage. It’ll take days to restore order in the Fair Country. Most of the denizens are still hiding behind locked doors with weapons in their hands, ready to defend their households. It’s to your great credit that, though you precipitated it all, you made it out without damaging much of anything. Especially considering that you—” she nodded toward Martan “—have immense destructive potential.”

Hayao Pannister said, “He’s as capable as we expected and more self-controlled than we hoped.” Pannister was a slight, soft-spoken man who commanded respect. Martan noticed the convincing effect his words had on other Council members, like a breeze bending grass. Pannister told Inanna, “Make no more interstellar queries—legal or otherwise—pertaining to Martan’s human rights in the Faxen Union. It would be better not to try to turn that stone over. For now.”

“For now,” Inanna agreed.

The Park Ranger said, “What we still don’t know is why things got out of hand in the Park. I fear subversive influences at work, at deep levels.”

“How is the special report on subversion in the university coming?” Charry asked Toll.

“There are no definitive findings yet, but the report will be done on time,” said Toll. “Very fortunately, we’ve not lost two of the committee working on it!”

Soon thereafter, Inanna and Martan were excused from the meeting.

“They know you. You really are a City Council project,” said Inanna. She started to say something more, but fell silent. An instant later, Martan recognized the man seated—coiled—on a bench in the hallway. Inanna walked up to him. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting!” Benedet was in a bad mood. If he had been the kind of snake called a sand rattler on Estrella, he would have been rattling angrily. “I’ve been depositioned by City Council. Something went wrong in the Zoned Park and they want my perspective.”

“So do I. Where were you yesterday?”

“Returning from Goya, on business, which I can’t conclude until the Council lets me go on my way,” Benedet snapped. His glance shot to Martan and back to Inanna. “But you just came from the subchamber. Are you in trouble?”

“No, but there’s been trouble,” she said. “It’s under Council veil, so I can’t talk about it. I’m glad you weren’t involved.” They exchanged a stiff sketch of formal bow.

Martan felt an urge to deploy his fangs. He kept his mouth shut until they were out on the convoluted city street. Then he asked, “Why did you think Benedet was involved?”

“At Fair time, he plays the role of a Crusader. He’s one of their captains.”

“He’s a snake.”

“You’re right. He’s like a poisonous snake, one with beautifully patterned skin and incredibly graceful movements. An asp, or something like that.”

It galled Martan that she liked his analogy. “He’s dangerous. I don’t see how you could have ever let him—” About to say put his hands on you, Martan remembered how he knew that: illicit access to her memories. “Into your good graces,” he finished lamely.

“Ever since the Fair, he’s not in my good graces.”

“Righto,” Martan said blandly.

It had been incredibly careless of him to refer to Inanna’s relationship with Benedet. A hellhound in love is not a calculating hellhound, Martan thought ruefully.

Whenever Nia remembered who he really was, and what he could do, electric fright and fascination shot through her. The balance was tilting toward fascination. It helped that he avoided doing anything to frighten her. She even had to coax him to show his fangs.

He added security devices to her apartment, and several days after their day in the Park, she went back to living there, but he walked her to work every morning and back home each evening, then made supper for her. Tonight he’d cooked Goyan Shrimp Jhinga; it was delicious. After that, since she had to catch up with work, he let her ignore him for most of the evening. Somehow that was particularly reassuring.

Late in the evening, she emerged from her study. Was Martan even still here? Yes. In her Azurean-style armchair, he was reading her grandfather’s book. She studied Martan’s profile. The ringlets of his hair framed and softened a strong-boned face. His attractive eyebrows traced an almost straight line when he was absorbed in something.

He’d once been a pawn of the Faxen Secret Intelligence Agency. He deserved better. And Nia meant to do whatever it took to legally change his status to that of a free human being with human rights under Faxen law. Even if she waited long and proceeded with utmost caution, it wouldn’t be easy. It would be dangerous. But now it meant more to her than career-crowning legal achievement. It even meant more than justice. She wanted him to be happy.

A smile played at the edges of Nia’s mouth. Imagine loving a happy hellhound. Imagine the hellhound doing something as domesticated as reading a history book. Imagine having a home together, with at least one armchair, and partial family approval—not from her parents and sister—but her younger brother Jon and her grandparents Vim and Eirene would like Martan and. . . .

Stunned, Nia leaned against the wall. She seldom let her imagination run away with her, because it could take her places where she had never expected to go. Her smile drained away.

The next morning just before Second Tea Hour, Hiro leaned into Nia’s office. “You’re worried about something today. Would you like to talk it over?”

“No.” In truth, though, Nia was very worried, and lucky to have a friend astute enough to pick up on that. “Yes. Can we talk in the Rose Garden?”

The roses only bore a few old blooms, and petals scattered on the winter wind.

“It’s Martan.” She remembered how she’d first met him, how it had been here, when she summoned him to help her sort out the feuding warmers. How effectively he’d done just that.

“Thanks to my matchmaking, you are in a relationship with a very difficult man.”

“Last night he spent the evening reading a good book.” She sat down on a weathered wooden bench, and put her hands on her temples, because she had a headache. “I’m afraid that deep down he’s a good decent man, and that he won’t ever want another woman but me. I think I won’t want another man but him. He doesn’t particularly like the hugwort, but he’s kind to it, and I think he would be better than just kind to children, and what am I going to do?!”

Hiro gave her a long-listening silence. He likely considered saying something elliptical and equivocal, but finally abandoned the Wendisan approach and said, “Marry him.”

She shook her head. “For an Az in Wendis, that is harder than it sounds.” Hiro gave her a baffled look, so she explained. Azurean society expected young adults to enjoy life, have a lover or two, then settle down in marriage. Certain Azurean rules about romance were fairly rigid. For one thing, one’s mate should not have been a casual fling first. Flings were for before one found an appropriate person for marriage. For another thing, the first intimacies with the mate-to-be should happen in the family home.

Hiro responded, “Great Heaven, that sounds too public, to my taste.”

“An old family home like mine is a rambling warren with twenty or thirty rooms, many of them empty at any given time, and stone walls between the rooms. It’s not like the family has a ringside seat,” she explained. “But the one rule above all other rules is that anybody you bring home to marry better be genetically sound. No negotiations on that point.”

“The name ‘Martan’ would grate on your family’s ear,” said Hiro. “The Goyan Martans are famous for having damaged genes and managing to reproduce anyway.”

“Martan isn’t his real name, he’s not Goyan, and he doesn’t have Martan genes. Lila Tsuda says he’s genetically Old Earth normal. But I wouldn’t care to explain to my family why he has an alias and a secret past, much less what it is!”

“Take one hurdle at a time,” Hiro suggested. “Is there no leeway for doing something irregular, such as bringing home a lover and keeping him?”

“There’s some leeway,” Nia admitted. “Unfortunately, in my family, there’s my uncle Val. When he was really too young to settle down he married a respectable woman and they respectably had two children. Twenty years later, he faked his own death, ran off into the wild side of the Faxen Union, took up with a genetically compromised woman young enough to be his daughter, and had a child with her. He used up all the tolerance my family has. If he ever dares to show up at Castle Courant again, there’ll be a worse scene than you can imagine.”

“Your family has many signs of vitality,” Hiro said encouragingly.

“That’s the first time anybody’s ever called Uncle Val’s escapades familial vitality.” Damn Uncle Val for using up her family’s leeway for irregularity. She needed some too.

Hiro took a different tack. “Counselor, the practitioners in your Guild are famed for using loopholes. Try that. Use a loophole.”

“Such as?”

“How would it be if you and Martan had a provisional relationship blessed by Wendisan society? Wendis honors engagements. We do not do just anything we feel like doing, in defiance of the rest of civilized society, even if it looks that way from Azure.”

Nia said slowly, “Having a relationship sanctioned in Wendis would be using a loophole. It might work. For me, if not for my family. Maybe how it feels to me is the most important thing. I know I want lovemaking with him—but I think I want to hold and have him forever—and Azure is too far away.”

“Wendis is not home?”

“Not quite. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I don’t know.”

“You find it hard to start a lifelong relationship in the wrong place, a place that doesn’t feel like home to you. Is that the bitter kernel of the problem?”

Nia sighed. “Yes.”

“In that case, let the hellhound wait for the right time and go to the right place for you,” Hiro said emphatically. “He is deeply in your debt for that accidental interrogation. It would be fair enough to make him wait until you both can travel to Azure, and then face your family, before he can enjoy full intimacy with you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, with a faint smile. “But if things between us keep going well, I’ll remember your loophole.”

Nia had never seen the whole City Council of Wendis before. She felt equal parts curious and tense about it. Today, on the seventh day of the Council’s Inquest, Martan and Nia had been summoned to appear again, this time in front of the entire body.

In an ornate chamber, the Council was arrayed behind a gleaming black table. There were ten seats and one high dais. Nia identified Ban Hayao Pannister, Police Chief Charry, Ranger Parker, the University Chancellor (virtually present), the Head of the Port Authority, and the City Engineer. One of the Council spaces was occupied by a hologram with the image of an old man. Two more members were not immediately recognizable to Nia. One of the two was a handsome older woman named Sridhoor. The final Council space was taken up with a black veiling hologram. Who—or what—that represented, Nia could not even guess.

To Nia’s relief, the proceedings unfolded in an anticlimactic fashion. The Chancellor seemed more distracted than irritated at having one of the university’s own lawyers as the subject of a City Council Inquest. The City Engineer stood at the dais to speak for the Council as a whole. Nia and Martan were deemed innocent of complicity in the trouble in the Zoned Park, and the Council apologized that they had been caught up in an inexplicable breakdown of safeguards there. They were assured that investigations continued. They were excused, and the members of the Council also went their separate ways.

“That seemed pro forma,” Nia said, “And some key parts were left out. I think not everybody on City Council knows what you are and everything that happened to us.”

Martan nodded. “No h-word. You’d think we were tourists who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Maybe we were,” Nia answered.

The hallway leading toward City Hall’s back door was long and fauxwood-paneled, and had many doors, in one of which Police Chief Charry suddenly appeared. “Step in here, if you would.” With that, Charry directed them into her own office. To Nia’s surprise, Toll was there, looking grim and strained.

“Two more people will come soon. Kindly wait,” said Charry. She had alert eyes, smile lines that framed her mouth, and a compact figure far from any stereotype of burly enforcers of the law. Nia remembered hearing about the contentious aftermath to the assassination of the previous police chief. Various factions had backed different replacements. Charry was a compromise, a dark horse, almost an outsider to Wendis; her family were interstellar traders based on Goya. No faction was thrilled with her appointment as Chief of Police and none were antagonized by it either. Nia instinctively liked Charry and wished her well.

A few minutes later, Ban Hayao Pannister slipped into the office together with Ranger Parker. Charry said, “I’m going to ask you, Nia Inanna and Gyle Night, to tell no one what we say here—and believe me, it’s proofed against eavesdropping devices. You need more truth than the whole Council just gave you. Your lives depend on it.”

Martan’s back stiffened. Charry’s words and other clues fell together in Nia’s mind. The pattern was alarming but not a surprise. Nia said, “Faxe may have been behind the trouble in the Park. Martan’s legal status in Faxe is essentially that he’s damned. I’m prepared to challenge it in the arena of interstellar law, beginning today if need be.” A chill crawled down her spine.

Toll said nothing. Nia felt disappointed. Why was Toll playing the wallflower just when Nia needed her mentor’s vote of confidence?

Charry regarded Nia with those alert brown eyes. “When he asked for asylum in Wendis, it was an extraordinary opportunity for us. How better to protect Wendis from the ever-better hellhounds being created by Faxe than by having a hellhound of our own? It could work, if he proved to be civilized, or civilizable. Not all on the Council liked the idea. Some wanted destructive analysis of you, Gyle Night, but they went along with the majority vote, grudgingly.”

Martan’s spine was now stiff as a board.

Ban Hayao Pannister moved to Martan’s side. “After you accidentally interrogated Nia Inanna, I urgently wanted to know if you really could be trusted to control yourself and not endanger innocents around you. And so, to see what would happen if you felt threatened and free to respond to the threat, I designed a test in the Zoned Park.”

Martan’s eyes widened. “Test?” he said with dawning anger. “Your test could have killed her!” Martan’s fangs were showing.

Nia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Stop that!” Martan retracted his fangs with a scowl.

Ban Hayao turned the palms of his hands up. “Old Scratch was my idea. Yaolun was in on the plan. He rigged the Gates and arranged the absence of Park Rangers in Wildway. We expected you to end up in Zone Six, Warway, where we would spirit Nia to safety and further test you. However, someone discovered my plan and amplified it with deadly schemes of their own. But their schemes failed. You, Gyle Night Martan, exceeded my highest hopes and even discovered the great secret of Zaber’s design—that something or someone launching from the top of Zaber at just the right velocity will fly across Wendis to a safe landing. And you, Nia Inanna, showed an unexpected aptitude for danger games, indeed, indeed.”

Aptitude for danger games—coming from Ban Hayao—startled Nia.

“So the two of you extricated yourselves from the predicament I’d unwittingly put you in. Since then, I have investigated night and day, through official channels and unofficial ones. And what I’ve found is quite unexpected.”

Nia had urgent questions, but in Wendis, asking questions could be impolite, and Martan had already pushed the limits of propriety. Nia bit her lip.

Toll said, “Say on, Ban.”

“First, Faxe doesn’t know its hellhound got away.”

Nia and Martan looked at each other. It doesn’t? Then Martan jerked his head, a fractured nod. “I understand. It wasn’t Faxe. That leaves vengeful Disunionists. One of my kills had family ties to Wendis.”

“I had that possibility investigated after you mentioned it last week,” said Charry. “But the Disunionist branch of the Jeng-Jang Family hasn’t come closer to making trouble in Wendis than one of them arrested at the Fair for drunken disorderliness.”

Ban Hayao took up his story again. “I feared something had leaked from City Council to someone who hated the idea of Wendis harboring a hellhound—someone bent on exposing the hellhound and getting him killed.”

Martan’s mouth hardened like stone.

“And sure enough there are whispers going around the Fair Country about a hellhound in Wendis. More eyes were on you than you may have known that day—that’s the way it is in the Fair Country. Busybodies everywhere. But what the whispers say is, ‘Our hellhound!’ ”

“Our hellhound?” Martan echoed incredulously.

“We have many resident monsters. They are our scary dark secrets, our pets, our enemies, and our relatives. One more is just one more. If he’s an honorable monster, he’s welcome to come out and play.” Ban Hayao had a twinkle in his eye.

“But if not Faxe—” Nia had steeled herself to hear that a war of words had been declared, that she was already involved a fight with the legal apparatus of the Faxen Union to save Martan’s life. She felt confused, and angry at feeling confused. “Then what or who?”

“We don’t know. But we do know this: not you, Gyle Night. Your talents were a complication the makers of trouble didn’t foresee.”

Martan gave Nia a suddenly concerned look. “I don’t like where this seems to be going.” He put his arm around her shoulder.

“It’s going where you think it is, and I don’t like it either,” Toll said.

“I don’t understand,” said Nia.

Ban Hayao said, “You spend the vast majority of your time in the university, which is one of the most secure and well protected areas in Wendis—while the Zoned Park is the least. As far as I can tell, the bounty and the turmoil in the Fair Country were elements of a trap that had been in place some time, sprung when you applied for a guest permit.”

Toll said, “Nia, the Ambassador to the Alliance told me that your old trouble on Moira might put you in danger even in Wendis. He was right. In the Zoned Park, it was you they wanted. They apparently thought Martan was an inconvenient witness, only worth eliminating, and their miscalculation was your salvation. It was you they were after.”

19

STORM WARNING

To Nia’s eyes, Gold Hills Haven was a pleasant place. Dry golden grass covered low hills, with deeper, greener folds where rocky streams rushed toward the Celadon Sea.

Wildway lay directly uphill through a gate in a low escarpment. She wouldn’t be going back to Wildway soon, or to any of the higher Zones in the Park. It was you they were after. And they were probably enemies of the Bishop of Moira, and only Martan’s hellhound talents had saved her from them.

Fear lingered with her like a bitter aftertaste.

Ecology students fanned out across the grassy golden hills, armed with notebooks, collecting gear, and measuring devices. Nia had already been mistaken for a teaching assistant; Elzebet’s haircut made her look younger, and casual field clothes sealed the difference. That was fine. She wished she could just melt into the general university community.

She spotted Professor Zeng angling into a ravine with a small flock of students. Finally! He was a hard man to catch, never in his office. Only Zeng would make an appointment for “Silver Creek in Gold Hills Haven around noon, I’m leading a team of Ecology students, terribly important to keep tabs on those invasive Infernal forbs, you know.”

Nia intercepted Zeng.

“You have a question, Miss—?” He peered owlishly at her. “Counselor? Dear me. I’m terrible at recognizing people. Never mistake a grass, though. Hah-there, you two! Assay this stream bank. And now you, and you, wade across and assay the other bank. I see red foliage. It’s either poison oak or Infernal forbs. Poisonous in either case, mind you! The rest of you follow us. How is that hugwort doing?”

Nia hurried to keep up as Zeng marched beside the stream trailing several remaining students. “It’s smart, it’s curious, it seems almost indestructible, and it’s companionable. It sneaked into my pocket on my day off, and I had a rough day, but it seemed to enjoy going places. Now it waits at the door of the office at the end of the day wanting to go home with me. I can’t believe it evolved naturally. It’s just too likeable.”

“‘Likeable’ is not a scientific observation,” said Zeng.

“It’s what you get when you average out adorable, which is my opinion, and nuisance, which is my boyfriend’s opinion.”

Zeng chortled. “Do you know who I gave another of my precious specimens to? Hah-there, this is the place for you, Miss Sinj. Wade in those shallows—carefully, don’t turn an ankle on the rocks—and check for salamanders. Mr. Lee, estimate the population of minnows.”

They were now down to one student trotting along with them.

“Who got another hugwort?”

“Ziga-Berui, in Anthropology. Sound scholar and kind man, he is, he is. He reached the same conclusion as you. Our companion animals and plants evolved with us, and we did much to evolve them. That’s the reason we find horses pretty and dogs sympathetic, you know! Why should an alien organism be likeable? The hugworts are terratisms. But that leaves us with a deep mystery. There’s not a single trace of an old Terran colony on Jumala. Now, how could a brief and desperate colony invent something as intricate as our little green friends?”

“I’m sure you can find out.”

Zeng shook his head. “Not with biological methods. But I’m putting in a research proposal. The Administration can’t figure out what approval committee to give it to, a history research proposal coming from the Biology Department—hah-there! Vole! Vole! Look for its nest!” The last student pursued the vole. Amazing how a splinter of color or a flash of motion was an open book to Zeng—a book he was disposed to read out loud. “On Earth, voles were creatures of grasslands with river drainage. Here we have that in a profoundly unnatural spinning habitat, two thousand years old. Wondrous, isn’t it?”

Nia saw students coming with grasses in their hands and questions on their faces. Many more interruptions and she’d spend the rest of the day here. “Your proposal?” she prompted.

“Send a junior researcher to Ere-Eskaton to read the old histories.”

“The first and last starship?”

“Very good! Most people don’t know that’s what Ere was. The first of the great slow starships from Earth, it discovered a green world just before the first invasion from Terra Nova. What tragic luck. The ship fled and left an entire generation of people behind. Suppose their green world was Jumala, now rediscovered a thousand years later? Mightn’t the Library of Eskaton throw light on hugworts?”

“How—”

A wet plop came from a pool in the stream. “Hah-there! Red slider!” Zeng flung himself into the water and came out holding a large turtle, which he thrust at Nia. “Hold it while I interview its tag.” The turtle flailed its legs and snapped at Nia as she held it by its wide, slippery shell. Mud spattered on her. Zeng cooed at the turtle, “Hello, old friend, I’d recognize your shell anywhere, but my, you’ve grown since we last caught up with you! It’s old enough for food. Offer bland soups, rice, bread if that’s on the table at your house, and noodles.”

“Feed the turtle?!”

“Turtles don’t eat starch,” Zeng said with a teacher’s patient air. “Feed the hugwort.”

It came as a hard shock to find herself sharing enemies with the Bishop of Moira—enemies who had reached into the Zoned Park trying to get at her. Nia would have bitterly wished the day in the park had never happened, except it had broken the ice wall that had been between her and Martan since the Interrogation. At the end of that day, he’d smiled like the end of an eclipse. She saw that smile daily now.

And because she trusted Martan more than ever before, she could fly again.

Mood-rich Zia music throbbed around her at the Tauzin Dance Academy. Nia concentrated on the moves of the Ziara form called Kestrel. Quick footsteps, shoulders back, head high, hands weaving a story. Then she was supposed to whirl and leap toward her partner at a counterintuitive angle because of the spin-gee. It had never worked before. This time it did. Martan effortlessly caught her and held her up with his hands on her hips, at her center of gravity. She arched her back, gripped one of Martan’s wrists for better stability, and held her free hand out to continue the story as he adroitly turned around twice. Then he lowered his arms and she lightly dropped to the floor.

Master Jay, several students, and Elzebet Seller applauded. “Oh yes, I can help you with garb,” Elzebet said. “Clothing that allows those movements—but simpler and less adorned than what professional performers wear—matching his Guard uniform, with that lovely rose-colored piping! Anything else?”

Martan said, “It better not be as revealing as some of the professional costumes. It should cover her back, and not be cut too low in front either, you know.”

“I do. Dignified,” said Elzebet.

Master Jay said, “Nia Inanna, you stopped trying, and you can do the dance now. Now there is one final problem that you must solve.”

“Another one?” Nia was crestfallen.

“The story told by your hands. The story you’re using is flawless, but it’s not yours. You can study what other dancers have done, but it’s better to tell of your own life.”

“I find it painful, perplexing, and unresolved,” Nia said glumly.

“Ah. Ziara is a dance that tells truth, when dancers are brave enough to face it.”

Hiro Hiroshi Low entered Nia’s office fastidiously holding a fresh plasfilm printout by one corner. He found the film, or to be exact, what was written on it, highly offensive. “Svetlana Tai will return to Wendis tomorrow morning, and intends to come here as soon as she arrives. She demands an explanation for why her signature on file was affixed to the diplomatic apology that went to the Faxen authorities, after the matter on Estrella.”

“She wants an explanation? Beyond the fact that it was appropriate, legal, and cleaned up a mess she created?”

“Yes, and when she finds out about that Honor Code violation you pinned on her, she’ll wish to rake you over fire and ice.”

Nia frowned. “She is the most ill-mannered Wendisan I’ve ever met. She comes from one of the Outfamilies, but so does Police Chief Charry, and Charry has impeccable manners.”

“Sake Svetlana uses Outside bluntness and artlessness when it suits her in Wendis, but she feels free to use all the wiles of Wendis when it suits her purposes Outside!” Hiro hesitated, reluctant to bear bad news. “Tai is an unscrupulous enemy, and she’s likely to consider you an enemy of hers.”

Nia’s eyes narrowed. “Fine. I can use the practice.” Hiro had the sudden impression of a silver saber slipping out of an elegant sheath, and he was glad. Nia said, ‘‘Do you know the Registrar of the Museum of Antiquities?”

Hiro answered, “Only by his reputation and names. Til Attila Wetter.”

“He’s an old-fashioned gayman. There’s only so much he’d say to a brash Azurean woman, and some of what he might say, I’d miss because I can’t read Wendisan nuances. I’d like you to o to the Museum, turn on the charm, and find out what Til Attila really knows about an artifact that was stolen from there last year.”

The Museum of Antiquities had attracted Hiro ever since he was a small boy. Later in his life, he came here often as a Fair Committee member to study pieces of prehistory. Today, though, he passed by the twentieth century wing to meet Til Attila Wetter in the Alien Civilizations Collection. Registrar Wetter was elderly and thin, with wispy white hair and an intensely exact manner. “This collection is magnificent,” Hiro told him. It wasn’t mere flattery. This wing of the Museum housed valves and forks and pottery made by alien hands a million years ago; aged alien circuit boards as brittle as rice paper; globs of melted metal and glass from the unfortunate planet that orbited inside the bloated atmosphere of Moira’s sun; and much more.

Nodding, Registrar Wetter opened one of the tall panels on one wall, showing Hiro tray upon tray of neatly labeled bits and pieces. Such panels filled every wall of every room in the exhibition area. Hiro said, “You have countless alien artifacts, a much greater collection than your relics of the twentieth century!”

“Oh, they aren’t countless. We’ve counted each one of these,” Registrar Wetter said with a dry chuckle. “But indeed they are numerous. That is to be expected. The twentieth century was a thin sliver of time. Alien civilizations have come and gone for two billion years. They left much behind.”

One corner of the collection featured ritual and religious items. The assemblage looked rather slight. Until last year, there had been a magnificent centerpiece, for which no suitable replacement had yet been found. Hiro supposed it was quite difficult to identify such things, when the whole species that knew the meaning of them had gone extinct.

He expressed deep regret about the absence of that one most important piece.

“T-3387-22 was intact and magnificent, a temple statue from Tellas,” said Registrar Wetter. “The early scholarship pointed toward it being a zoomorphic deity, perhaps a war god. Unfortunately, I can’t say more about its disappearance than I told the police at the time, though I appreciate the Counsel’s Office showing continued interest in this old unsolved crime.”

Registrar Wetter doubtless meant exactly what he stated. He could not say anything more. This collection depended on the good will of university’s Xenarchaeology Department to supply it with material. And Svetlana Tai was the most adventurous of xenarchaeologists, the one who brought back the most artifacts for the Museum’s shelves, though she was not above keeping prizes for her own purposes. Hiro asked, “Did Sake Svetlana find it?” Wetter nodded dourly, and Hiro went on, “I’m surprised she handed it to the Museum willingly. I expect you saw some of her famous temper when the university obliged her to hand it over to the Museum.”

“No, no-no; even though on the black market of collectors it would have been worth a fortune, no, no-no, her cooperation was perfect.”

Hiro’s ears pricked. Perfect was not a description that came readily to the lips of exacting old Wendisans. Registrar Wetter’s compliment sounded like damning Sake with effulgent praise.

Registrar Wetter sighed. “I’ll never forget that terrible day. I made morning inventory as always, and found T-3387-22 gone! I raised the alarm. Then we had a call from the university, reporting that it was standing right in the middle of Octangle. We thought it was a student prank. The piece was heavy, but enterprising engineering students could have spirited it to the Octangle. On the Museum floor were scuffs where whatever apparatus the thieves used to lift it had marked the floor. An hour later we realized that the thing in the Octangle was a papier-mâché copy! By then I’m sure the real thing was conveyed to the Port and shipped away from Wendis. Lana Svetlana expressed great shock. She was perfectly helpful in the investigation.”

Hiro heard what Registrar Wetter really meant: and false as tin-foil yen.

Nia came home late and tired, to discover her apartment smelling like more sophisticated fare than she was capable of cooking. In her kitchen, Martan smiled. “I’m cooking Estrellan food for you tonight. I finally found annatto seeds in Wendis.”

She carefully put her shoulder bag down on the table, then seated herself and put her head in her hands. “I may not be able to enjoy it.”

“What’s wrong?” He stroked her shoulders.

“Nothing. Everything. Moira. The Park. I can fly but I want to hide. Tomorrow I have the displeasure of seeing Svetlana Tai. Hiro thinks she’ll declare war on me.”

“Food before combat was an important concept in my former line of work.” He gave her a plate with an attractive serving of a thick, aromatic sauce with chunks of synthetic meat, accompanied by a thin flatbread. She tore off a piece of her bread, broke it into small bits, and piled them beside her plate before she sampled a fork full of synthmeat.

Martan said, “You may be developing some nervous habits lately.”

“What?—Oh!” she coughed. “Spicy! But good. What is it?”

“It’s called Molei. Hsssst!” he said as he saw a leafy tendril emerge from the shoulder bag. The hugwort let itself out of the bag and felt its way around Nia’s plate. It discovered the bread fragments. “What’s it doing?”

“Zeng said it’s old enough for food. It makes bread crumbs disappear. Noodles get shorter. If I let it, it sort of steeps itself in a bowl of soup.”

Martan rolled his eyes. “That thing eats people food?”

“I’m not sure it eats, exactly. It may dissolve food in a kind of digestive juice. It does dribble just a little bit. Otherwise, it’s the perfect pet,” Nia said defensively.

Martan softened. “It takes your mind off things, doesn’t it?”

“It does, in a little way. And you do too, in a big way.”

After the meal, they curled up with each other on her cushions. She said, “Tell me about Estrella. Not Delagua being bombed out of existence. Other things.”

Martan told her about the harsh deserts and the terraformed green veins of Estrella under its small yellow sun, and the mysteries in ancient sandstones by the sea. Nia dozed off into a dream about sandstone dissolving as the world cooled under terraforming. Long rains fell, and the erosion of the rains exposed filamented metalwork older than Earth to the amazed eyes of human colonists. She drifted back into a more wakeful state. Martan’s voice fell gently on her ears with the soft consonants of his Estrellan accent. “And the old people say the sandstones are tombs haunted by ghosts as old as time. The old people’s ambitious sons and grandsons dynamite the sandstone to extract metal and loot artifacts. Archaeologists say we live among the ragged ruins of an alien civilization that went extinct before the human race was born, and you’re sound asleep, my love.” Nia suddenly jerked alert. “Or maybe not.”

She asked, “Are Proctor’s records sealed from review by the University Counsels?”

“No—you can look at them.”

“Good!”

The following morning, Nia arrived at Counsels’ Common Office late but pleased with herself. Standing near Hiro’s desk, she opened her shoulder bag. The hugwort jumped out and skittered across the desk. They had stopped hugwort-proofing the office, ever since Hiro resorted to positive reinforcement with splendid results. He gave the hugwort a trinket or two daily, more for exceptionally good behavior. The hugwort stayed out of everyone’s cabinets and desks. Hiro and the hugwort were fast friends now.

“Counselor Courant,” said Friday the AI in her pleasant artificial voice, “Your name appears on flyers announcing the Wintergala. You and Proctor Martan are listed on the program to perform an exotic dance.”

Nia groaned inside. Exotic dance was not a good way to characterize Ziara. Poor word choices could happen in publicity done by university students involved in extracurricular activities on top of busy class schedules. She’d get them to correct that wording later. She went into her office to await her unwelcome visitor.

Svetlana Tai arrived late, but started speaking even before Nia’s office door shut. “What do you mean expropriating my signature?!”

In a blazing hurry to be rude; not very Wendisan, Nia thought. But maybe Tai hadn’t discovered the Honor Code violation yet. That gave Nia a window of opportunity to reason with her. “To paraphrase it, you did wrong.”

In person, Tai was an energetic woman who telegraphed her emotions, the present one being ire. “What’s wrong with stealing from looters?”

“In the abstract, not much,” Nia answered. “In this case, it contradicts the research treaties Wendis has with the Faxen Union and makes it harder for every other Wendisan scholar trying to do fieldwork in the Union.”

Tai snorted. “Most of them make a career out of sifting inconsequential minutiae. My work has real consequences—when it’s not choked by pointless rules!”

“That’s not for me to judge,” Nia countered. “But speaking of colleagues, you left the university rules compliance officer behind in the melee on Estrella.”

“The Snitch isn’t one of my people.” Her scornful tone capitalized the “S.”

“He’s a university member, and that means you’re bound by the Honor Code.”

“He’s infatuated with Faxe, and we caught him signaling Faxe about our actions!” Tai leaned over to rap the surface of Nia’s desk with her knuckles.

“Do say.” That was interesting, in light of a certain secret committee report in the making. “You could go through university channels to replace him if you don’t trust him.”

Tai snorted again. “I don’t have time for that. The university doesn’t know what it’s like out there in the real universe.”

“So, explain it to the university’s leaders, one by one, committee by committee, occasion by occasion,” Nia suggested. “This could be a place to start.”

“Sure. I’ll start with you and watch your eyes glaze over. Listen. Alien artifacts are important to Faxe because it’s looking for a gateway to another galaxy of worlds, or a shortcut between the worlds that we already know about, and if it finds either of those, Faxe will grow so powerful that it’ll suck Wendis in like a planetoid into a black hole!”

Tai was more than angry; she was venting a career’s worth of frustration. And Tai did not handle frustration well. Earlier this morning, Nia had skimmed a proctorial datafile from twenty years ago when Tai was a student at Avend University. Tai still showed the character flaws discussed by reports in the file. She had a low threshold of frustration. But she could be thrown off stride by anyone who knew more than she anticipated. And for that purpose, Tai had just lobbed Nia an easy ball to hit back. “Star bridges and star gates,” Nia nodded. “I can believe Faxe is pursuing every avenue to verify that they exist, and control them if they do.”

Tai had been about to fulminate further, but she snapped her mouth shut in surprise that Nia knew those terms.

“Unfortunately, Lana Svetlana, the university is wound up in a thousand internal affairs that will ultimately amount to less than footnotes in the annals of history. If you don’t like the way things are going, stay closer to your office and do your political homework.”

Tai angrily shook her head. “That’s your idea of a good time, not mine.”

Nia’s temper rose. How short-sighted could this woman be? “Doesn’t matter. It works.”

“Damned if I’ll let a chain-sawer tell me what my priorities should be!”

Chain-sawer was rhyming Wendisan slang for a low-rent lawyer. Nia bit off an indignant retort, let a beat of time elapse, then said coolly, “I’m not concerned about insults from a grave robber.”

Tai looked taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Estrellans think the ruins you’ve been digging into include tombs.” More accurately, one Estrellan known to Nia said the old people in his town had all believed that. As far as Tai knew, though, there wasn’t an Estrellan closer to the university than the Port of Wendis; Tai couldn’t know how Nia had heard about the sandstone tombs. “Interstellar law doesn’t deal with alien graves, yet, but a little propriety would be in order.”

Tai snapped, “We should do like your crazy prophet on Moira and worship them?”

Trust Tai to bring up Moira—but unlike the day Tai’s Messenger dropped the same bombshell, Nia had a retort ready. “It isn’t worship of the dead aliens. The next time you’re on Moira, you might try observing the actions of humans as carefully as you analyze alien artifacts.”

Tai slammed her hand on Nia’s desk. “My Messenger told you once and I’ll tell you one more time. Stay out of my business.”

Nia stood up. She had half a head of height on Tai, and now was a good time to use it. “I don’t object to you stealing artifacts from looters. But in the future I’ll expect you not to complicate the university’s relations with Faxe. In fact, I’ll see to it you don’t.”

Tai looked Nia up and down in the cocky way a street fighter sizes up a taller opponent, only this fight wasn’t happening with fists and feet, but with words. “Sure you will.”

“Sure I will. I know you’ve been a regular at that seamy tavern in the Research Hall basement—what’s it called, Valhalla?—since you were a student yourself, and how many clever hangers-on you have there. Clever enough to build a papier-mâché model and put it in the Octangle when you stole the temple statue from the Museum of Antiquities a few years ago. The new Chief of Police won’t hear about it if you behave yourself from now on.”

Shocked anger turned Tai a shade paler. “Blackmail?”

“Not technically, nor am I fool enough to use that word.”

Tai stormed out. But in the outer office she dramatically paused.

Nia steeled herself inwardly while she outwardly signaled cool confidence by casually leaning against the door frame. As a student hellion, Tai had gained fame for her public parting shots. But Nia knew how to command attention. She could hold Tai’s attention long enough to get off one shot in return. Better make it count.

“I’ll have to think about taking legal advice from a dancing girl!” Tai flung at Nia.

Nia made a dismissive gesture. “Take it, leave it, or use an alien medium to consult the previous owners of your loot about it!”

Tai departed with indignation swirling around her like an invisible cloak.

Hiro’s body language was decorous, but his eyes sparkled. Chan and Yakov appeared in their door. “You won that one, boss.” Yakov the Gloomy grinned even wider than Chan.

“That—” Among the words that came to Nia’s mind were coarse, self-centered, antisocial, unprofessional, and unethical. “That person was welcome to leave, and now I’m going to the Rose Garden. I need to cool off.”

Nia found a bench next to a climbing rose with tattered wine-red blooms. Cool winter spinwinds took rose petals away one by one. The climbing rose reminded her of the good doctor’s garden on Moira. She usually kept Moira sealed off from her conscious mind, but having broken the seal in the heat of the argument with Tai, Moira was easy to remember right now, the bad memories and the good alike. The doctor’s rose garden was a good memory. So, in a rather eerie way, was Zakeri’s rite for the alien dead.

She’d given Tai back as good as she got. But what Tai had said stung. Dancing girl. Nia let out a long breath between clenched teeth.

She realized that someone was standing behind her an instant before a hand touched the side of her face. She jumped.

“You wanted to see me in person,” said Robard Benedet. “I asked your assistant where you were. He looked as though he wanted to wave a mirror at me—that’s how the superstitious try to drive demons away—but he directed me here.” Robard seated himself beside Nia. He ignored the roses. Roses bored him. He had considerable skill in the cultivation of orchids.

Nia took a deep breath. “I need your advice. I have enemies, ones I don’t have a name for, don’t know who they are—besides Svetlana Tai, whom I do know about.”

“Hedonistic hooligan.” Robard’s tone was cold even for him. “Who else?”

“Enemies of my father’s on Azure, who neither know nor care what I’m doing here.”

Robard crossed his legs. His sandals were expensively styled. His immaculate tunic had crisp creases. The cuffs of his shirt had the luster of real silk. By most barometers of sophistication and education, Robard was highly civilized. Which might be an alarming reflection on civilization. “My dear, why do you think you have enemies worth counting?”

She remembered the Plain of Pain. Robard’s caged monster was her enemy too. On the other hand, it probably qualified as his intimate enemy. Even if she hadn’t escaped from Robard and his monster when she did, she thought, she wouldn’t have been completely powerless. She could have found words to use as leverage, played on his inner war between good and bad impulses. She would have coped with Robard. At the absolute worst, she would have survived. The danger he’d represented that day paled next to what had happened in the Zoned Park. “Because there was an attempt to kidnap—or maybe—kill me.”

Robard’s eyes widened. “The Park last week?”

Nia nodded.

“What happened?”

“I can’t say so much that it breaks Council’s veil of confidentiality.”

“Must you be so ethical? Of course you must. What can you say?”

“I don’t understand it! I’m not a criminal lawyer, I’m not a native Wendisan, I’m not anything that could explain what happened.”

“Except a saint’s handmaid.” Robard had known about the scars on her back for months. It had bitterly disappointed him to learn that they did not result from sadomasochistic lovemaking. Yet he had easily accepted the truth about how she got them.

It unnerved her that Robard instantly reached the same conclusion as City Council’s investigation. She wrapped her arms around herself. “How could that matter in Wendis? Who cares about a saint Outside, or his opinions about the morality of the Faxen Union?”

“Wendis seems like a closed world to you,” Robard said. “Less exposed to outside influences than the wide face of a terraformed planet. Curved around its own affairs.”

With a nod, she admitted that was how it seemed to her.

“It isn’t. It’s a port, after all, and it has the Zoned Park—where the rule of law is deliberately set aside and various elements allowed to court whatever danger they wish. Many external powers, and some insidious internal ones, have secretive footholds in Wendis.”

Nia remembered what she’d learned the night of the Lawyer’s Guild Assembly. It was not an encouraging memory. “Foreign spies and agents spinning their webs?”

Robard laughed without humor. “There are so many webs of lies, deception, espionage, and ambition Outside that the stars might as well be dewdrops in the webs of predatory spiders. Wendis allows—and covertly encourages—various web spinners to run some of their threads through Wendis. It’s to our advantage. It lets us keep up with what’s going on Outside, and influence the course of Outside events in our favor. The drawback, of course, is when unsuspecting visitors or citizens blunder into a web.”

Nia swallowed hard. “I was almost caught like a fly in a spiderweb.”

“More like a spectacularly rare butterfly,” Robard murmured. “I don’t know what spider, and what web, but I can try to find out. I’m in debt to you from the first day of the Fair, and I pay my debts.”

It had been a desperate move to ask Robard for advice. Now he’d just agreed to help her, and he’d admitted debt to her. It felt like a fragile moment. “Thank you.”

“You wanted my advice. Here it is. Let your boyfriend protect you, but don’t count on him so much that you’re helpless without him. Learn self-defense. Learn how to use weapons, if it doesn’t grate your righteousness to prepare to hurt another sentient being. And never let anyone sneak up on you, like I did a few minutes ago.” His voice was like the wind from an ice field, dry and bitter cold. It made Nia shiver.

20

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

Two days after the Council gave Inanna the devastating news that what happened in the Zoned Park was the work of unknown enemies pursuing her, at Second Tea Hour in the day, Toll ushered Martan into her office along with Academic Provost Gellatly, and then she closed the door. “Nia is meeting Elan Hazy this morning,” Toll said.

“She’s moving in high circles,” the Provost replied.

It wasn’t because she wanted to. Early this morning when she had heard that the Ambassador to the Alliance wished to see her about what happened on Moira, it took Martan a long time to calm her down.

Toll said, “Second Tea Hour is a fine time for friends to take counsel with each other for the sake of their friend. Isao, an old misadventure of Nia’s has reared its unwelcome head in her life. I want your wise advice. Some years ago she did some legal work on Moira, defending a man the authorities wanted to make an example of. She averted a draconian penalty from her client, at great personal cost. For some reason that old business has now intruded into the diplomatic realm.”

The Academic Provost put his hand on the side of his face in a gesture of amazement. “Great Heaven, are you saying our Nia was the young legalist who saved the hide of Zakeri the Bishop of Moira?”

“You’ve heard about it?”

“The story is known to more people further from Moira with each passing year. Zakeri is the one I told you about,” the Academic Provost said to Martan.

“Hospitals, schools, and well-built houses bloom in his footsteps?”

“The same.”

Toll said, “I want to understand this from the beginning. Why in Heaven’s name did the Faxen governing authority on Moira have it in for a doer of good works in the first place?”

The Academic Provost steepled his hands. “He first came to Moira as a young man and a convict himself, only because he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time with hot-headed friends. He got arrested and shipped off to Moira. Faxe makes sure the plantations and data mines on Moira are well stocked with slave labor. Zakeri didn’t fall into the many traps that keep convicts there permanently. He left Moira when his sentence was up. Years later, he returned as a missionary bishop of the Old Catholic Orthodox Church. Moira had grown on him while he lived there involuntarily. That’s all the more remarkable because he came from an elite background. His family were Faxen expatriates on Goya’s Great Continent.”

“What did he do to bring a charge of sedition down on his head?”

“Ah, now, as a scholar of societies, this is the part I find fascinating.” Gellatly smiled behind his steepled hands. “The bishop told the people on Moira that joy is theirs. Never mind that the medical care is primitive, the mortality rate is high, radiation sickness is rampant, the climate everywhere on the planet is awful, they’re in a subsistence economy on the brink of desolation, and the sun could flare up any day and incinerate them all. If only they care for each other, and for the plants and animals luckless enough to live on Moira too, and honor the human and alien dead, they have reason enough for great joy.”

A bird trilled in a pine tree near the window of Toll’s office. Toll was thinking. Finally Martan said, “You’ve lost us. Why did Faxe’s puppet government on Moira mind that message?”

“If a normal human lifespan on a comfortless planet with a dying sun is enough for joy, then what’s the purpose in the incessant craving for power and striving for success and wealth that is life on Faxe?”

“Heh.” Toll waved toward her window. “We in Wendis have an unstable world that can tumble. Most of us live full lives, but not through several regenerations nor amid extravagant wealth, like the elite on Faxe. On the other hand, none starve. We greet our dead in every touch of the wind and every sip of water. Frankly, I see nothing controversial about Zakeri’s ideas.”

“Wendis has its own answers,” said Gellatly. “But Zakeri’s message resonates on Moira. By all credible accounts, he never fomented sedition, never spearheaded or even signed on with a subversive political movement, yet his ideas were seditious indeed, subverting what Faxe dictates that Moirans should think about themselves. In the years since Nia saved his life, his ideas have spread far and wide, even into the heart of the Faxen Union.”

Martan remembered Delagua, Estrella, where the ambitious young set their sights on leaving to seek a slice of the power and wealth of the Faxen Union. Many in the older generation in Delagua had been bitter because they had never made it off Estrella. A few had been miraculously content. Bitter or content, they were radioactive ash now.

“This concerns me,” said Toll. “The Faxen state is more virulent than it was fifteen years ago, that bishop is famous, and Nia is the reason that he is alive to criticize Faxe. Her actions are inextricably linked to his life story, and evidently, her name is all too widely known. I want to know whether the persecution of Zakeri fifteen years ago was the whim of some apparatchik on Moira—or the will of Faxen state.”

Martan felt an unexpected, unwelcome stirring of fear for Inanna. This wasn’t fair—he was supposed to be the enemy of Faxen state.

“I’ll contact a colleague of mine at the University of Tellas,” Gellatly said. “Political scientist. And a Faxen Unionist, but he doesn’t let it color his scholarship. He has a rich network of contacts. He’ll have insight into the Faxen government on Moira.”

Martan suddenly felt restless. His imagination surged beyond the walls of Wendis. Lorelei Tsuda had adjusted his biological signatures so that Customs at Tellas and at the Port of Wendis detected nothing amiss. He’d already gone back into the Faxen Union when he attended that conference on Tellas. He had not been discovered. It would be even easier for him to move around in the Faraway.

Years ago it had been a travesty for a school to send an Azurean girl lawyer to Moira. But Moira was the kind of place a hellhound was made for. The trail of guilt and corruption might be fifteen years old, but Martan had followed colder trails than that.

Hiro unerringly led Nia through the maze of minor bureaucracy in the wide ground floor of the Star Pyramid Building. They crossed the courtyard garden. He ushered Nia into the transvator that took them to the top floor of the Pyramid, where they stepped off onto a floor with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The Pyramid was half the height of Specter and above the day’s fog. Beyond the wall-window, Wendis sparkled in the morning light, a cylinder-walled spectacle with three mountains in its heart like towering eternal waves.

Playing tour guide, Hiro made it almost easy for Nia to enter Elan Hazy’s office. Without his moral support, she would have wanted to run to the other end of the world.

Ambassador Hazy was a late-middle-aged Wendisan with ebony skin. He had the cultured speech and manner of the hereditary diplomats of Wendis. Hazy registered no surprise that Nia had brought her trusted legal assistant; he cordially invited them both to take spare chairs made comfortable by lower spingravity than that at street level. Then the Ambassador asked Nia to explain what took place on Moira years ago.

Having Hiro there helped. So did everything that had happened in the last weeks. Unlike that evening with Toll, Nia matter-of-factly summarized the course of events on Moira. Did practice make perfect even if it was involuntary practice?

Ambassador Hazy’s dark-skinned face showed sympathy. “Yes, in a travesty of justice, you were an unwitting pawn. Not, however, at the end. That was a brave thing to do.”

“I had to save his life if I could.”

“I’m sure the prospect of a fatal miscarriage of justice would have appalled an idealistic young lawyer,” said Hazy. “Was that your motivation?”

Hiro listened with rapt attention. He seemed to have decided the Ambassador was a trustworthy Wendisan. Otherwise he would have been discretely bristling and Nia would have taken that as a sign to say no more. But Hiro, as good a judge of Wendisans as anyone, trusted Hazy. She took a deep breath. “It was a religious matter. The Old Catholic Orthodox Church is related to the New Catholic Orthodox Church, which is the tradition I grew up in. By the time things were going desperately badly on Moira, I had a strong feeling about Bishop Zakeri. It may not translate well to anyone outside Catholic Orthodoxy, though.”

Ambassador Hazy fanned his hands, the Wendisan yes-of-course gesture. “I’m Old Cathor myself.”

“Oh!” Well, there had to be Wendisans who called St. Delaney their house of worship. Maybe this part would be easier to explain than Nia feared. But she’d thought the same thing just before she talked to her parents when she first returned from Moira. In the case of her parents, her optimism had been wildly misplaced. But truth was truth, no matter how ill-received. She steeled herself. “I believed he was a saint.”

Hazy responded with a long-thinking silence. Nia shuddered inside. She must sound like a religious fanatic to the most prominent Wendisan in the whole Alliance.

“You may have been the first ever to reach that conclusion,” Hazy finally said, “but not the last. It has come to the attention of the Old Cathor Church that there is reputed to be a living saint on Moira. Other possibilities are in play too—that Zakeri is a lunatic, a fraud, or a heretic. A Church Council will soon be held on Goya. Among other pressing matters, it seems to be poised to evaluate the merits and demerits of Bishop Zakeri.”

Hazy’s statement struck Nia with the force of revelation. Many people felt the same way she did about Zakeri—so many that the Old Cathor Church intended to consider the matter in a Council! Nia’s Grandmother Eirene, a historian, had once compared Church Councils to a tsunami. Unexpected, sweeping up onto unsuspecting shores, quite capable of rearranging whole landscapes in their massive decisiveness.

Nia’s thoughts tumbled like chips of glass in a kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope of imagination kept spinning on like Wendis, and it shook fragmentary ideas into a vivid pattern that electrified Nia. “Mr. Ambassador, an Old Cathor Council could contradict Faxe’s criminal charges against Zakeri—both the charges that got him to Moira in the first place as an errant young man, and those brought against him when I became involved. That wouldn’t change anything legally. But since the Old Cathor Church is a force to be reckoned with in the Alliance of Starmark, the Council condemning what Faxe did to Zakeri could have far-reaching ripple effects, weakening the influence of Faxe.”

“Indeed and indeed,” said Hazy. “On the other hand, because the stakes are high and the potential consequences so unpredictable, it’s felt among the Bishops and Metropolitans that this is no time to tolerate false claims to sainthood. So a structured investigation—an Eksamen—is underway. The Eksamen asked me to contact Madame Toll and request that she verify that you are the same person who was on Moira so long ago. And whether, as you promised at the time, you still have those scars on your back. Affirmatives were relayed back. The Eksamen then insisted that I interview you in person. I’ll tell them I find you to be a woman of good character.”

So that was why of all this! “Is that all they’ll want?”

“Well, it was rather much to importune me, the Wendisan Ambassador to the Alliance, to take so active a role in troubling you, an honorable citizen who’s not a member of the Old Cathor faith,” Hazy said dryly.

“Are there any reliable predictions of what the Eksamen’s finding will be?”

Hazy fluttered his fingers in the Wendisan who-can-say gesture. “The Council has much to do. For one thing, some of the Church’s theology is scandalously outdated. Some conciliar heavy lifting is long overdue. For another thing, they must elect a new Patriarch. The present one is ready to hang up his mitre. That alone could sidetrack the Council from all else. As to a pronouncement on Zakeri’s sainthood, I’d say it hangs in delicate balance. Would a negative finding sadden you—the Eksamen finding him not made of the stuff of saints?”

She had asked herself something like that many times. So she had an answer. “I’m not at all infallible. I just had a deep conviction and I followed through on it.”

Hiro’s forehead furrowed. Nia could practically hear what he was thinking. But you have Seventh Sight.

The kaleidoscopic of ideas spinning in Nia’s imagination was precessing toward something that made her sense of self-preservation object, No! But it riveted her attention and made her say, “Mr. Ambassador, the trial on Moira was rigged. Justice was compromised in a dozen different particulars. The prosecution had procedural errors and sloppiness that I could explain to you in numbing detail. I’ll spare you that, but take my word for it. I’ve reflected for years on how the trial went and all that went wrong. I’d like—” No! She wouldn’t like it at all! She’d look like a fool to end all fools and open every doubt that I lived down for fifteen years. Nia’s mind locked in argument with itself. Hiro and Hazy waited in Wendisan silence.

But if all this is so well known now, she thought, just wait until after the Church Council. Her name was already known to Angels and an Old Cathor Eksamen and God knew who else. No matter which way the Eksamen decided, her name and her reputation would get dragged along. From here on, she could be a pawn—again. Or a player—again. There were no other choices. Nia heard herself say, “You can tell the Eksamen that I’d like go to Goya to explain to them how wrong the trial really went.”

“Do you understand what that would entail?” Ambassador Hazy asked quickly.

“Appearing in front of an Eksamen that’s trying to prove Zakeri a fraud or a lunatic instead of a saint. Standing on Zakeri’s side, but probably not until after everything else was over, because the Eksamen wouldn’t want us to rehearse any kind of story behind their backs.”

“That’s correct. If you wanted to contact Zakeri by bubble or Messenger, I have the unwelcome obligation to tell you that the Council of the Old Catholic Orthodox Church forbids it. Of course their bidding is binding only on Zakeri. You aren’t Old Cathor.”

“No, but I’m willing to do their bidding,” Nia shot back, “and willing and able to rehash the trial with your church’s canon lawyers. If I have to, I can parse every detail of the trial in terms of Old Cathor canon law, if Interstellar Law isn’t good enough for them.”

“You would?” The Ambassador had an alert, intrigued expression. Nia sensed that an answer in the affirmative would fly back to Goya as fast as a star bubble could get there, along with an Ambassadorial recommendation that the Council take her up on her offer.

No! She did not want to appear at an Eksamen of the Old Cathor Church to relive what happened on Moira any sooner than the end of time! But to make it go right this time. . . . Nia heard herself say,“Yes.”

Elan Hazy pulled a pack of small, shiny red cards out of the depths of his desk. Wendisan Jiling cards. With deft skill, he constructed a fragile house out of them, a spiraled house with a delicately slanted roof. Everyone contemplated the cards in silence. Nia forced herself to stay calm on the outside while her nerves jangled. Then Hazy lightly tapped a spot on the eave of his card house. It collapsed, scattering cards over the desk and the floor.

Hiro adroitly gathered up the scattered cards. Nia felt numb. “The delicate balance is more than just the deliberations of the Eksamen. It’s everything Outside?”

Hazy nodded. “It’s the balance of power across Starmark and the Faxen Union. Thank you for being receptive to Wendisan indirectness; now let me be very direct. Many vested interests will soon realize that you could tip the deliberations of the Eksamen. While some of them would rejoice at the prospect, other factions and agencies would wish you out of the way. What if an assassin came out of the woodwork on Goya—not making for Zakeri, who will be closely guarded, and besides, making a martyr out of a potential saint is counterproductive—but sent to assassinate you?”

Apprehension trickled down Nia’s spine like ice water. She hadn’t expected that question. But she had an answer. “Proctor Gyle Night Martan will go with me. God help any assassin who comes out of the woodwork.”

Hazy slowly nodded. “I know about your adventure in the Zoned Park. You’re right about the fortunes of an unknowing would-be assassin. Nonetheless, I urge you to think two times twice about this. I’ll contact the Eksamen with your offer to testify to them. That alone—that you’re not in hiding in Wendis; you’re even willing to appear before the Eksamen—might tip the balance the right way.”

Dear God, Nia thought, I hope so. Now let me out of here before what I’ve said sinks in on me. She could feel nerve-rending claustrophobia gathering itself to assault her.

The Ambassador said, “You may not know the purpose of the Zoned Park.”

Wendisan elliptical references were hard for Nia to tolerate at the best of times. This was not the best time. “To have fun. To get money from tourists,” she said impatiently. “To keep Wendisans sharp in case Faxe, or something else, ever attacks Wendis.” It had sounded incredible when Lila Tsuda told her that, but Lila was no fool.

“The Zoned Park is also a training ground for those who have perilous business on the Outside—members of the Spies’ Guild, agents of Wendis, and occasionally, ordinary people destined to face danger. You and Gyle Night Martan got more training than you bargained for that day in the Park, but the two of you proved that you have the mettle for danger. But make no mistake about how dangerous it may be for you to do what you’re contemplating.” Hazy shuffled through his Jiling cards, then handed three cards to Nia.

She turned the cards over. The pictures were Death, Disaster and The Demon.

‘The Most Dangerous Game’ is a winsome name for one of the Zoned Park’s deadlier designs” Ambassador Hazy told her, “but can I assure you that it’s not the most perilous game of all. The most dangerous game is what can happen at the intersection of religion and politics.”

Nia messaged Martan to meet her in a park on the outskirts of Star City. Starting from his office, he got there moments after she did. She flung herself at him and he caught her. In a corner of the park with a screen of bamboo for privacy, he held her while she shook with claustrophobic fright. He stroked her shoulders. She was glad for Martan’s nearness, his calm at the prospect of danger, as she explained everything to him.

After that day in the Zoned Park, Nia knew that she disliked danger—as if she didn’t already know that about herself. One day on Azure, she’d been in a boat in a severe storm; once she’d been in the vicinity of an active volcano, and she’d hated both experiences. She didn’t have even as much tolerance for danger as typical sailors, volcanologists, police, or soldiers. The thought of maneuvering in a minefield where religion intersected politics gave her chills. Compared to the spies of Wendis who would intentionally train for danger in Zone Nine, she had a ridiculously low aptitude for any such thing.

At the same moment, Martan and Nia both said, “Use what you do have.”

“My fight instructor always said that,” Martan said.

It was strange how their telepathic rapport cropped up at unpredictable times. This time it made an important point. She wanted to stay out of what the Ambassador piquantly described as the most dangerous game. She meant to stay as far away from it as she could and still tell the Eksamen the truth about Zakeri’s trial. But if she somehow ended up playing the most dangerous game, this time she’d have something to dramatically even the odds.

She’d have Martan.

21

THE KESTREL

The melody of drum and lute washed over her like the wind-built waves of water in the blue lakes of the Goyan Steppe, where Ziara came from. The audience in the Civic Center Hall of Wendis numbered many people, but Nia knew the old performer’s trick: focus on a few friendly faces watching you. Hiro, Elzebet, Toll and Toll’s wife Astrid, and genial Isao Gellatly, were the ones she chose to notice. Energized by performance adrenaline, Nia hit the right steps almost unerringly. Martan was outfitted in his charcoal Goyan Guard uniform with its rose-colored piping. He moved as flawlessly as only he could move.

Dance had always made Nia feel good; when her life had felt fractured, the pieces came together again in dance, and she felt whole. It was miraculously happening again in Wendis. She still had to contend with Moira, enemies in the Zoned Park, Svetlana Tai, and the possibility of confronting the Eksamen, but not right away. She felt hope for now. Every note of the music and every step she took stitched her life together with shiny threads of hope.

Nia spiraled her long thin sash around her. Martan caught the end of the sash. The flute player sounded a note like the high, pure cry of a hunting bird. Holding the sash between them, Nia circled out and back in without stumbling. Finally she launched herself into the air. Martan caught her and lifted her, and she was flying, with the sash rippling around them both, and her hands free to tell the story of a bird caught in a storm. She landed nimbly, and they finished the dance with controlled abandon, in synchrony with each other.

She raised his hand to salute the audience, and the audience applauded back. Martan whispered, “You did it, love!”

Delight flowed all the way down to Nia’s toes. She could get used to this again, as she had when she was young: perform something difficult and dramatic often enough to relax and enjoy the attention it brought her.

Backstage, Jay Jae ceremonially kissed her forehead. “What a good story! It suited that trace of clumsiness in your movements and transcended it.”

They had danced near the end of the program. The last two acts’ supporting personnel ran back and forth backstage with all the energized disarray of amateurs. Martan drew an arm around Nia. “After curtain call, when this is well and truly over,” he said into her ear, with the soft-edged Estrellan accent that was only for her, “I would like to make love to you.”

His suggestion came as a sweet-hot shock. She was tired of fear and sexual tension, and now she was free of worrying about her clumsiness sabotaging the Kestrel. After so many interruptions that made it not the right time, why not tonight? That was when she remembered how as a girl she’d fantasized about a future boyfriend or husband or lover. Without fail, the object of her fantasy had been a dark-haired man, at least as tall as she, not from Azure, but much more picaresquely, from the stars. The recollection made laughter start, not quite spilling out of her, but quietly bubbling. She pulled Martan toward the shadows behind a large, cloth-draped prop. There she kissed her star man with an intensity that only startled him for a moment. He returned it, kissing her back.

When all the performers lined up for the curtain call, Nia saw just how many attendees were here. Hopefully the community spirit, and funds, that it generated would benefit the university well into next Wendyear. The Civic Center hummed with a thousand conversations as the crowd started filing up to the front to greet their friends, spouses, office mates, parents, children, and neighbors among the performers. Korister the Guild Historian came to greet Nia. He had Judge Wang with him. “Nia Inanna, you are your namesake’s heir without doubt,” the old jurist beamed. “I was a great fan of Inanna Riga in her day.”

Elzebet hugged Nia, then waved her hands modestly as several people praised the rose-colored garb she’d designed for Nia. “Yes—thank you—it is becoming on her, isn’t it?”

“It’ll be even better coming off,” Martan whispered into Nia’s ear. “No hands!” he added. “I don’t need to use my hands to make love to you.” Feeling no fear now, she nodded.

Hiro and Mikal, Chan and Yakov greeted them and remained nearby. Just like the other performers, Nia and Martan became the nucleus of an animated group of friends and well-wishers. Nia had never felt so hopeful about a future in which Wendis was not where she’d transplanted her shocked career, but a place where she belonged.

Last of all, just behind Minnie Toll and Toll’s wife Astrid, came Ambassador Elan Hazy. Oh, no! Nia backed up into Martan. To Hazy, she must look like a dancing girl.

“Wonderfully done, wonderfully,” Astrid trilled, and Toll said, “Beautiful work by both of you.”

The Ambassador smiled, and his eyes had a warm light. “That was very nice,” he assured Nia. “I have long been an aficionado of classical Ziara. Please don’t be embarrassed and turn pink on my account.” His smile melted into a somber expression. “I can follow Ziara story. Yours was very moving. It made me regret what I have to tell you, because it may make you feel like a kestrel caught in a storm.”

Martan’s hand on her shoulder tightened. Slight panic plucked on Nia’s nerves. “Why?”

“The Eksamen wants to see you. I leave for Goya early tomorrow—Wendisan diplomats are rolling stones—and I can give you passage on the same starliner with my diplomatic pass.”

“T—tomorrow?” Nia stammered.

“We discussed it during the show,” said Toll. “If you’re going to go, it’s safer to go with Hal Elan. I say you should stay here at home, but I know you. Never the easy way. Take Martan with you, and I’ll be able to sleep at night and not stay awake in fear for your safety.”

Go away from Wendis, away from her friends, toward an Eksamen out to disprove Zakeri’s sainthood or sanity—tomorrow? With Martan, with how she felt about him tonight? Suddenly panic closed in around her. “Goya is so far away from home,” she blurted.

“From here it takes less time to get there by starliner than to Azure.” Martan had an eager gleam in his eye. Travel, Goya, danger, and her—he probably wanted it all.

She wanted him. She wanted him so much for now and for ever that it panicked her. “Wendis is so much closer to home,” Nia insisted. Toll, Astrid, and Ambassador Hazy all looked at her with puzzled concern. She was just making her verbal blunder worse. She felt panic nudging her toward the brink of paralysis. “Hiro—help!”

Hiro swiftly relocated the group—Martan and Nia, Toll and Astrid, Hazy and himself—out of the hubbub in the Civic Center, to a quieter place beside the Springing Fountain behind the Civic Center. He told Nia, “We think you should go to Goya, but first stop over at Goya’s moon Ere-Eskaton, and do the research on hugworts that Professor Zeng proposed. That will give you work to keep your mind busy and a safe place to stay until you’re asked to go down to the planet to talk to the Eksamen.”

Ere-Eskaton was a monastic community of the Old Catholic Orthodox Church. Even there, Nia and Martan would be more welcome than if they ever went to Azure together. If they showed up at Castle Courant, Nia’s parents would disapprove of Martan; they’d disapprove with incendiary criticism founded on Azurean mores. Nia found herself shaking. She felt sure that she looked utterly foolish now. She could get killed if she went to Goya, yet what unnerved her was the prospect of breaking Azurean sexual rules. “But Martan—”

“We’ll come up with a pretext for me to be along,” Martan said impatiently.

“It’s more complicated for her than it sounds to you,” Hiro said. “Nia, What if the two of you went with a recognized relationship and the blessing of your friends?”

Nia grabbed Hiro’s suggestion like a lifeline. “How?”

Hiro had Nia sit down on the wide, sculpted brink of the Springing Fountain. “You listen too,” Hiro ordered Martan. “We have a Fair tradition called Heartfasting. Romance often blossoms at Parhelon Fairs, and a heartfasting couple promises to love to each other for a Wendyear and a day, and thirteen friends serve as witnesses.” Nia winced, reminded of thirteen old scars. “Thirteen is a lucky number here,” Hiro assured her. “The heartfasted pair know that the thirteen friends approve. But if one of the couple does something wrong, he’ll have thirteen angry witnesses to answer to.”

Both of Martan’s eyebrows went up.

“Please?” Nia asked him.

“If you wish it, love,” he answered, “if it can come together by tomorrow morning.”

“It can come together by midnight.” Hiro stepped into the nearest commcube for a few minutes, and then returned. “I’ve heard that Eskaton is an ancient holy place.”

Nia nodded.

“What was your family’s religious tradition?” Hiro asked Martan.

“Old Catholic.”

“You’d be quite welcome in Eskaton,” Nia said.

“So you could go to Eskaton as a spiritual seeker,” Hiro said to Martan.

“That would be good cover, explain me being there—”

Hiro stood right in front of Martan, smaller, slighter, but brimming with moral authority. “Gyle Night, I am not suggesting deceitful cover! Go to Eskaton with spiritual humility and an open heart. You would do well to talk to any discreet holy counselor who might live there, and take their advice, too!” With that, Hiro went to run an errand personally.

“He’s tougher than he looks,” Martan said to Nia.

Holding hands, they sat by the Springing Fountain. Lights shone in the broad basin, shimmering up through pooled water. Submerged jets aimed streams of water in different directions, spinwise, antispinwise, and straight up. Because of Coriolis magic, the water wove a fluid pattern that trailed spinwise back to the basin. “What are we doing?” Nia felt dazzled by the fountain, dizzied by the situation in which she found herself.

“I don’t think it’s trivial.” His palm felt sweaty, Nia realized. Hazy, Toll and Astrid had remained far enough away to let them talk to each other privately behind the burbling of the water. “Are you sure you want me that much?” Martan sounded tense. “I wasn’t always as good looking as I am now.”

“Same goes for me. Azureans bloom late.” Nia shrugged. “That your face reflects Dr. Tsuda’s skill is not even numbered among my worries.”

The group that converged on Vizafter Plaza included Toll and Astrid, Yakov and Chan, and Professor Zheng; Dance Master Jay, Elzebet, Dr. Lila Tsuda, and Elan Hazy. Then Hiro returned with Provost Gellatly, and Mikal came running up. Those made twelve. Finally Sagitta Charry in her dark police uniform stepped out of the nearest transit tube. God only knew how Hiro had persuaded her, but she numbered herself the thirteenth witness, all of whom formally agreed to be called friends of Martan and Nia.

The ceremony was simple. Hiro looped the rose-colored Ziara sash around Martan and Nia’s clasped hands, then draped it over their shoulders as they stood beside each other and promised to love each other well for a Wendyear and a day. A bouquet of flowers came out of the transit tube with a delivery bot from the floral district. Hiro put the flowers into Nia’s hands.

“Wait, do I see snapdragons in that bunch?” said Elzebet.

“Yes,” said Hiro. “We might as well not imagine we can wish these two no trouble on their journey. Only that it come to good in the end.” Hiro and Toll put their hands on Nia’s shoulder and on Martan’s, then all the witnesses put their hands on someone else’s shoulder, and everyone wished the two of them wellness and good luck, and freedom from all misfortunes: tumble, bad air, mold, pathogens, deadly heat and cold, ill winds, and ill-programmed robots; demons, mischief, evil eyes and curses; dishonorable enemies, foolish kindnesses, unfair games, dangerous inexperience, treachery, chicanery, bad judgment, and disgrace.

Martan leaned close to Nia’s ear. “They have a lot of words for misfortune.”

“We need every good wish we can get,” Nia whispered back. She shivered.

Above them in in the spar at the heart of the world, a reflected stream of stars glittered with promise and peril.

NEXT ADVENTURES

The story that starts in Witherspin continues with Starmaze.

To sign up for my occasional Newsletter for news about Starmaze and other projects, go to alexisglynnlatner.com, or here: http://eepurl.com/bvm_Bv.

Here’s how Starmaze begins.

CHAPTER 1—THE BANE KING

Full of night and mountains, the world rotated around him as he flew through it like a pale arrow. The spinning world—called Wendis—slept uneasily, its night shot full of dark passions, secret schemes. And now excited rumors spreading like the shock wave of a bomb. With no time to lose, he beat his translucent wings against the air to fly as fast as he could.

Ahead of him the tallest mountain coiled around the heart of the world. A figure stood on a ledge near the top of the mountain, waiting for him. He cupped his wings to slow down, matching his velocity to the mountaintop. This high it rotated only slowly. The waiting figure was a misshapen man in a belted cloak, the uniform of the Bane King’s personal guards. The guard called, “Good news, Angel?”

“No.” He lightly landed on the tip of the mountain—above the guard, with thin air between them. “The traps all failed, even the last. She got away.” He panted out the words, his narrow chest still heaving. “She’s free and already safe, back in the university.”

The guard scowled in surprise.

“Worse, the traps caused all kinds of sensation. The King had better erase every trace of his involvement, fast, no matter what it costs him.”

“You can tell the King that!”

The Angel remembered an ancient saying about killing the messenger. He cared little about the King’s feelings, but didn’t wish to be killed. “Only if he comes here. I don’t have my gravity braces. I had to move fast.”

The guard ducked into a door in the mountaintop, slamming it behind him.

Banes like the guard were cosmic misfits—humanity reshaped by accident and clumsy intervention. The Angels were humanity perfected to live in space habits with zero gravity, with delicate bones, strong clear wings, sensitive dark eyes, and telepathic talents unimagined by ordinary humans. The Angel stayed perched on the tip of the mountain, where even the King would have to look up to him.

The door opened and the Bane King emerged. He must have been waiting inside the coiled mountain. He was a man like his guard—tall, misshapen, with different-colored eyes. “You have news for me, Angel?”

“Plenty of criminals wanted the bounty you’d offered. Your own agents did exactly what you wanted. None of them betrayed you. But none succeeded.”

“Why not?” The Bane King sounded incredulous. Indeed, his plot had been crafty and well-financed. It would have worked. Except—

“She had a very effective bodyguard. He foiled the traps, beat up some bounty hunters, evaded your agents, made a spectacular final escape, and in the process stirred up the Zoned Park. Now each faction in the Park is looking behind everything for causes, explanations, and guilty parties. The police are already involved. So are reporters. City Council will know by morning or sooner. You’d better write off the money you paid anyone. Burn whatever communication channels you used. Abandon your agents, eliminate those who know too much. Break every connection to it all, lest the authorities find a thread that leads back to you.”

The King had a hot temper, but the Angel’s cold account kept his wrath in check, barely. “Do you know anything more?” the King ground out.

“Yes, but it can wait for a less urgent hour with more testimony than mine.”

Glowering, the King nodded. There was a reason that he was the King of the Banes. He could hate what he heard and yet accept obvious logic in it.

The guard said helpfully, “This isn’t the last chance. She’ll not stay at home forever.”

“Bah! You might as well say luck happens. It does, but plans can’t be laid on it.” The King turned on his heel.

The Angel smiled coldly at the King’s back. Sooner or later, Inanna Az-Courant would leave the safe neighborhood where she lived and where she worked at the university. That was inevitability, not luck. She might even leave Wendis. And that would be best of all.

The King held court deep inside the coiled mountain, where the spingravity was strong. The Angel’s gravity braces let him walk into the court chamber like everyone else. He would never have set foot there as a lone, unprotected individual, though. The King and his courtiers were too dangerous.

But the Angel was the messenger of the God of this Underworld. That protected him here.

The Court was never an even-tempered assembly. It had too much scheming, too many ambitions and vendettas. But today it seethed with more mixed motives and ugly feelings than usual. At least two courtiers were secretly delighted that the King had just had an embarrassing failure. They each wanted to be King in his place. The King’s favorites were anxious about the King’s fate and theirs. And the King’s advisors were spring-loaded to defend why they’d advised him to proceed with the plot.

Fortunately for the King, he employed a Conciliator. She was a dishonest and disbarred Conciliator, but she still had the skill set of her profession, and looks that commanded respect. She was strongly built, dark-skinned, her black hair streaked with white.

The Conciliator quieted the courtiers with a wave of her hand. “Here is what happened as we’ve reconstructed it, now that it’s been several days. Inanna Az-Courant took a day off from being a lawyer for Avend University to go to the Zoned Park for a day’s outing. With her went the proctor. Not the university’s incompetent former proctor—this was the new one hired last summer. In Zone Three of the Park, they were confronted with a scare planned by others, known to the park rangers, and because of an informant, now known to us. A dangerous robot from Zone Nine was put in pursuit of them. More about the reason for that later. Being pursued, they gated up to the more dangerous Zones, and the King’s traps were triggered. The King’s agents in the Zone called Inferno had too little time in which to act. Those in the War Zone had no opportunity at all. Some bounty hunters in the Fair Country Zone got badly beaten up. Smelling trouble, the Fair Country’s own troublemakers got into the act. The Crusaders, the Highway Robbers, and the Wild Hunt all went raiding and rampaging. The lawyer and the proctor with her slipped past them all. The final agents of the King who were waiting at the top of Mount Zaber were armed and well positioned and should have succeeded. They did not. To that we have a witness.” She indicated the Angel.

He said, “I broke the highest bridge to trap the lawyer and the proctor on the top of Mount Zaber. There should have been no way out but the so-called Lover’s Leap, which the King’s agents had closed. But at the peak of Zaber the bodyguard gave a great jump with Inanna Az-Courant in his arms. They flew across the Wendis to a safe landing on the other side.”

“A safe and conspicuous landing in a snowbank with a hundred witnesses!” said the Conciliator. “Until then, no one knew that Wendis is designed that way, that a powerful takeoff from the top of Mount Zaber can mean a safe flight across the world.”

The King’s more bloodthirsty advisor said, “You should have killed them at the bridge!”

Inanna was pretty, the angel thought. He didn’t kill pretty things. Aloud, he said, “I’m no match for whatever the bodyguard is.” He remembered trading glares with a man who had a long knife and unflagging wariness, superb coordination, and great strength in his trim build.

He’d recognized a predator when he confronted one.

The King’s more well-informed advisor said, “They say the new proctor used to be a Goyan military man. He must have been enhanced in that service.”

“No,” said the Conciliator. “That’s a cover story. He’s something more dangerous.”

The Angel listened attentively. The Conciliator was an outcast and a criminal—as such she fit right in here—but more than anyone else in the Court, she knew how to coax important facts out of hiding.

She said, “In the Fair Country, people are saying he was our hellhound.”

“Impossible!” cried a courtier who knew what it meant. “What?” said others.

“Allow me to explain. The Faxen Union, which already dominates half the known stars, is fast becoming an Empire, eager for conquest, intolerant of anything in its way. But its internal disunionist movement is powerful. Some years ago the disunion terrorists brought down the transit tower over the capital city on Faxe, with much loss of life and wealth. That act inflamed the war of Faxe against disunionism and every other kind of disloyalty. Among the weapons recently put into play are the so-called hellhounds. They are human beings enhanced with deadly skills and programmed to do the will of the Faxen Secret Service. They are can pursue terrorists anywhere, even into the darkest and loneliest of places.”

The Angel felt unconcerned. No hellhound could follow where Angels went.

“They don’t just assassinate enemies of the state. Hellhounds can telepathically strip memories out of a living mind—proving guilt, discovering collaborators, strip-mining valuable secrets.”

That made the Angel shiver. If hellhounds could invade Angel minds and find out Shandy’s secrets, it meant a startlingly great danger. He must tell Shandy.

“Within the last Wendyear, Hayao Pannister—who as the head of City Council is the defacto ruler of Wendis—seems to have salvaged a hellhound from some kind of nearly fatal accident somewhere Outside. Pannister decided to reprogram the hellhound, or possibly recruit it—the hellhound may have actually asked for political asylum—to guard Wendis. Given that the designs of Faxe surely include subverting and plundering Wendis, can you imagine a better countermeasure?”

They digested this, murmuring among themselves. They no more wanted Wendis plundered by Faxe than a cozy nest of snakes would have wanted to be spaded out of the ground. They had no moral objections to a hellhound, if it guarded against Faxen intrusion, without exposing their guilts and secrets.

“The dangerous robot in the Park was a stress test to see if Pannister’s hellhound could be trusted to respond to danger rationally and effectively. Well, thanks to the King’s traps he was put to a superlative test—and passed with flying colors. Pannister must be delighted.”

The Bane King exploded, “Bah to Pannister, and the Baneways and Banters too. They’re all traitors to their lineage!”

The Court stirred. Some of them might privately credit the Baneways and Banters and especially the Pannisters with enviable success. All those families had squared their Bane lineage with citizenship in Wendis, intermarrying to dilute the Bane blood, making other compromises, and becoming respectable citizens.

The King, however, was a pure-blooded Bane. He hated the ancient Earthship astronauts who inadvertently created his kind. Some of the Earthships had changed direction in their course across the stars. Smaller ships also fleeing the ruin of Earth, following the Earthships, hadn’t known about the changed courses and went on in the original direction. Passengers in coldsleep remained oblivious to the fact that their destination was death. A single ship was rescued, but the passengers all had extensive genetic damage from long exposure to the sleeting radiation between the stars. Genomic repair was not entirely successful. Calling their ancestors’ luckless destination the Bane Star, the Children of Bane ended up deformed. The Baneway, Banter and Pannister families all had names derived from Bane Star.

The Conciliator deftly turned the Bane King’s ire away from his relatives to another target, the one they were here to discuss anyway. “Inanna Az-Courant is a descendant of the astronauts who reached the ice world Azure and set about terraforming it. She happens to be a Wendisan citizen, meaning she has more rights and legal protections than non-citizens. But our Lord Shandy offered a rich reward for her to be kidnapped, for some reason.” The Conciliator lifted an eyebrow at the Angel.

“Shandy’s reasons are Shandy’s own,” said the Angel. Shandy’s reasons were not for these Banes to know. For that matter, the role of Angels in Earthships’ changed direction was definitely not for the Banes to know.

“In any event, the King devised a plot that should have worked. Except she had a hellhound for a bodyguard. The King’s fingerprints on the plot were erased just in time, thanks to timely warning that it had gone wrong.” The Conciliator again indicated the Angel. “The King and the Court are in the clear. It could have gone otherwise. Wendisan officialdom is relentless in pursuing what it deems high crime—as some here know.”

The Angel knew. He was only in this spinning world because his lover had been unmasked as a spy and imprisoned here. He hated Wendis. But he would not leave her.

“The university is incensed that two of its own were endangered. We know how tenacious those academics can be on the trail of truth—and they have in their midst one or two with Bane blood, who can smell Bane involvement better than others.”

The King growled.

“In short the plot failed. Yet it was great success for it not to be found out. I recommend, my King, that you let the matter rest, for now.” The Conciliator’s rich, soothing voice made her hearers, even the Angel, yearn to agree with her.

Even the ugly King. He looked sour. But he nodded.

The Angel let out a long quiet breath. If the matter rested, no one would find out his own involvement either. Wendis would continue to be his place of hated exile, but he’d be left alone.

But the hellhounds of Faxe constituted a threat to all he held dear. Shandy had to be informed of that at once.

His information started on its way the same night.

Weeks later, the Angel visited the Temple of Shandy by the insiders’ back door. He always made his visits here at midnight, when, usually, it was deserted. But tonight the Conciliator stepped in front of him in the hallway. “I have new information about that Azurean lawyer. It’s of no use to the King but might be of interest to Shandy.”

Not showing surprise, he said, “Information always has a price.”

“Of course, and I want to know why Shandy wants her kidnapped. She’s a brilliant interstellar lawyer, but Wendis has plenty of those. Before coming to Wendis, she spent some years on Azure getting legal schooling and experience. I cannot imagine why Shandy would take an interest in her.”

The Conciliator seemed to have information of real value to sell. The Angel said, “There is a long-standing balance of power between the Faxen Union and the Alliance of Starmark. In the crux of that balance is where other interests—including Wendis—exist that belong to neither side, and have their own agendas. That we all know,” he added, so as not to seem to offer paltry pay for her information. “But now there’s a religious movement across the stars that might disrupt the balance. This Azurean lawyer had something to do with the rise of that movement. In some kind of court procedure, long before she came to Wendis, she defended a religious fanatic whose influence now grows great. Somehow her existence affirms his influence. Shandy doesn’t want that. He wants Inanna Az-Courant out of the picture.”

“I see,” said the Conciliator. “Well, she just left for Goya by the Starway Express.”

The Angel was electrified. “You’re well informed.”

“The university has leaks. None of them are named Baneway or Banter, but some are highly placed. She means to research the origins of an unusual species that’s come to the attention of the Xenobiology Department. It may date back deep in the history of starflight, as a genetically engineered invention, a cross between plant and animal, which could have complicated legal ramifications. Research into that is what takes her to Goya.

“Or in that direction, if she doesn’t make it.” Being a Conciliator, she offered her evaluation of such an outcome. “I’ve heard about that fanatical movement and the religion that harbors it. Old Catholic Orthodoxy has an ancient history of elevating martyrs, which is when someone is murdered and because of the circumstances, their reputation brightens like a nova. Martyrs are hard to dispose of, since they’re already dead.”

The Angel was no student of religion, but the Conciliator was probably right. He nodded.

She lifted an eyebrow.

Her information did merit more pay. The Angel said softly, “In the wastes between the stars, things and people can disappear, and no trace of them is ever found, anywhere.”

The Conciliator’s eyes widened. This might confirm a rumor known to her.

Good. He’d hinted at Shandy’s power with no clues as to Shandy’s means.

“Well paid.” She bowed herself out of the Angel’s way.

In the holy place, the Angel approached the Avatar of Shandy. It was a sculpted metallic face with deeply engraved, shadowed features. Kneeling in front of it, he spread his wings. Thanks to the veined nerves in his wings, he could speak to the Avatar without audible words. What the Avatar heard would soon reach Shandy.

If the Bane King had known how easily the Angel communicated with Shandy, from the King’s own realm, he would have been incensed. The King would have killed the messenger without a moment’s hesitation.

The Angel told the Avatar, Inanna Az-Courant just left Wendis by the Starway Express. Which meant crossing empty space and tangled nebulas where Shandy had his Angels, who were freer agents than ordinary humanity could imagine. The Angel didn’t have to imagine. He remembered. He knew. His heart yearned for that freedom. Her final destination is Goya.

The Avatar answered, Good. Then came more slow, inaudible words, making the Angel’s shoulders tingle. Know that you can always come home and find welcome.

Torn between the love that kept him in hated exile in Wendis, his yearning for the freedom that was the Angels’ birthright, and his longing to return home where his kind and his God were, the Angel bowed his head. His tears made cool traces on his face.

ALSO BY ALEXIS GLYNN LATNER

The Starways Series

Mascot*

Witherspin

Starway*

Winter’s Prince*

Pastfinders*

Starmaze

My future history, with its arc of characters, crises, and events unfolding across the galaxy, began with my first series of books: Aeon’s Legacy.

The Aeon’s Legacy Series

Hurricane Moon

Downfall Tide

Star Crossing

Spike*

Helldive

Collections of Stories

I have two collections of science fiction short stories. In Ascendance, ten novelettes and short stories span five thousand years of future history. The Shape of Wings to Come is a collection of my science fiction and fantasy stories that all center on sailplanes—the most beautiful machines on this and other planets.

Ascendance, Science Fiction Stories about Reaching for the Stars

The Shape of Wings to Come

*My stories that first appeared in the USA-Today best-selling Pets in Space®

Anthology will be collected as Tomorrow’s Mascots sometime in 2021!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexis Glynn Latner likes to write romantic speculative fiction that touches readers’ hearts and their minds as well. She also writes nonfiction, does editing, teaches and mentors creative writing, and works at Rice University’s Fondren Library in Houston, Texas. For fun and real-life adventure she is a sailplane pilot.

Her science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, and many print and online anthologies including the USA Today best-selling Pets in Space. She’s had stories in mystery anthologies too. Her science fiction novel Hurricane Moon was published by Pyr (Prometheus Books) in 2007 and again by Avendis Press in 2014 with the sequels Downfall Tide, Star Crossing, and Helldive. A new romantic science fiction series begins with Witherspin.

Find out more about Alexis’ books and stories:

www.alexisglynnlatner.com
www.facebook.com/AuthorAlexisGlynnLatner/
https://twitter.com/AlexisGLatner

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have so many people to thank for this one. Dr. Barry Dunning helped me understand the physics of a spinning space station. Dr. Eileen Stansbery, Dr. Kristin Farry, Dr. Lila Anderson, Mel Tatum, John Gibbons, Bethe Bugbee, Laurie May, Pat Valdata, Anna Shparberg, Lois Dideon, Gary Swift, and Pauline Baird Jones all read the manuscript in one revision or another and gave me useful feedback. Some of these wonderful friends did this for more than one revision. Their gifts of scientific acumen, writing know-how, good sense, spiritual discernment, discerning questions, and encouragement meant more than I can say, and made all the difference in this invented world.

Above all, Mary Rosenblum was the writer friend who shared with me the excitement of inventing a spinning space habitat (hers was realized in her SF novel Horizons.) Years later, as an editor, Mary gave me invaluable advice on this book and its sequel, Starmaze. I am profoundly grateful.

Cover art and design by Adrian Doan Kim.

An early version of Chapters 14-17 appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of Analog Science Fiction Magazine as a novelette titled The Magic Mountains. (It was the cover story of that issue, with what may have been the only unicorn ever to appear on the cover of Analog.) A revised version of the novelette was released in 2019 as part of the Pets in Space® Sampler, and as an e-book from Avendis Press.

Copyediting and proofing by Terry Grundy (editerry.wixsite.com). He corrected countless typos and glitches, grappled with a long and complicated lexicon of names, places, and invented words, and reined in my penchant for Too Much Capitalization. Thank you!

Copyright © 2019 Alexis Glynn Latner.

Published by Avendis Press, Houston, Texas.

ISBN: 978-1-942686-13-2

All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for brief quotations used in a review.

This is a work of fiction. People, places and things mentioned in the story are either imaginary or used in a fictional manner.

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