“It squeaks, too.”
“A halfbreed, that's what; a filthy halfbreed.”
Abruptly the soldiers fell back, their attention diverted. Nisi raised herself on an elbow and looked past the booted legs. What caught their attention was something else hauled from the sea: a corpse, gouged to the white bones by fleshborers.
Someone whistled and said, “The wounded don't last long in this
swamp, do they? I'd burn your head off, halfbreed, only it's too good for you.”
They took her into Headquarters, where the flames had been quenched by now. Her head was stunned and she could barely keep her feet, dragged before one officer, then another. And then at last a familiar face came into focus.
It was Realgar, oddly out of place in his Iridian uniform. Incredibly, she felt relief, gladness that he was here and alive after all. She had loved him too hard and too long.
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Realgar stood rigid, every muscle tensed to keep himself in hand. After all those months of mourning, to find her like this, shameless before all his troops and thoroughly in league with his enemy. How had those natives twisted her mind?
“Go,” he told the guards. He was alone with her now. “You did it, didn't you?” he asked, cursing himself for the hope that it was all a mistake somehow.
Berenice straightened, pulled her arms in, and lifted her chin in her old defensive way. “You would have killed us all, Ral.”
“Did you really think I'd waste two thousand civilians just for a damned fool like you?”
“You told her so. Aren't you a man of your word?”
His hand cracked across her face, and she slammed to the wall. She raised her arms slowly, leaning against her palms as she faced him. “Berenice. Do I have to knock sense into your head?”
“Yes ⦠perhaps you do,” she said thickly, her lip swelling. “Oh, yes. I understand you, much better now.”
Realgar frowned, uncertain how to take her words. “When I heard you were here, all I wanted was to get you back quietly, so it wouldn't get out, and I could send you safe toâ”
“To a sanatorium.”
“Yes, by Torr. The best in Iridis.”
“How thoughtful of you.”
“Instead, you sabotage my base, and my troops drag you in here shameless as a field whore. BereniceâI'm the Guard Commander, and you're a traitor in wartime. What can you expect of me?”
She shook her head slowly. “Nothing. I want nothing from you, ever again.”
“What do you mean by that?” Realgar's voice became low and
harsh. “You're one of them, is that it? Did you take a woman lover, too?”
Her lip curled down on the unbruised side. “I wondered when it would come down to that. The one thing you always liked about me being here was that I was cloistered among women.” She tilted her head in a ghastly flirtation. “Suppose I had loved a woman. I can have a child, Ral; they fixed me up long ago. I don't need you; I never did.”
The blood pounded in his temples, until he thought his head would burst. But the moment passed, his breath slowed to normal, and with it the world changed, shifted gears. Berenice was nothing to him anymore, Realgar told himself. She was worth less than nothing. “So that's how it is. Well, then, I'll send you back to stand trial. But first, you shall witness the execution of your co-conspirators.”
Her eyes widened. “I had none.”
“Sharers never act alone. All decide for one, and one for all.”
“I acted alone, I tell you. You said you would not kill civilians over me.”
“What civilians? They, and you, are responsible for the deaths of twenty-three of my troops, at latest count. Oh, I see: too good for killing, the natives are, but they'll look the other way when you do it.”
“Merwen begged me not to do it, I swear!”
“Merwen will die last.”
She threw herself at him and clasped his arms. “Ral, all I ever wanted was for them to be free. Didn't you betray me by leading this senseless invasion? Don't punish someone else for what I've done. I'll go to the sanatorium, I'llâ”
He knocked her to the floor, then pulled her up by the arm and whipped his hand across her face, back and forth, knuckles cracking as they connected bone. At last she fell, limp and still. Realgar breathed heavily and rubbed his numb fingers. His tongue tasted nausea as a buried memory rose: his father with his mother, and himself a child whimpering in the corner ⦠.
Then he stared, and his toes curled. Berenice lay crumpled, with her head swollen unrecognizably, yet an unmistakable otherwordly whiteness was seeping into every pore of her skin.
IN THE MORNING helicopters buzzed over Raia-el again, five all at once. Soldiers swarmed out to tramp through the houses, pulling people out for what mad reason none could guess, and dragging them, not to the helicopters, but of all places to the central cup of the raft. Before, soldiers had forbidden Gatherings; now, they tried clumsily to make one.
Merwen lifted her head wearily, with Weia's last screams still ringing in her ears. Around her, sisters wandered uncertainly, while soldiers pointed their coldstone wands and ran about in a curious crouching position as if they expected the sky to collapse on them. Radio chatter barked from all directions.
Trurl leaned over to help her up. “Thanks, sister,” Merwen said. “Shora, what is this new madness?”
“Just another fit of the old.” Trurl sniffed disgustedly. “There was an accident, I hear. Part of the soldier-place caught fire. It seems to have inflamed their minds as well.”
With a shudder, Merwen turned away. “Let's go home.” Others were already walking away from the desecrated gathering place.
A streak of flame cut across their path. The raft hissed and smoldered where it touched. When the smoke cleared, two Sharers were splayed out, a mangled gash cut through them. Someone cried out, and everyone collected at the spot. Merwen gagged at the scorched odor. Usha huddled over them, but one was charred through to the ribs, and Merwen knew already it was useless.
The horror of it overloaded her senses to the point of detachment. Yet again the death-hasteners had cursed themselves, this time here, in the gathering place of Raia-el. Death paid a wage, for a hastener; but was it more than a trader's wage, in disks of coldstone? If only she could answer that question.
A death-hastener grabbed her again and dragged her to a site where a row of poles had been erected. There were Sharers tied to the poles: Trurl, and Shaalrim, and Lalor, and last Yinevra, all the staunchest of witnessers. Merwen noticed, as if outside herself, that she herself was being bound to one of the poles. Several death-hasteners faced her, including Realgar and Jade, and also Nisi in whitetrance with someone
propping her up. At the sight of Nisi, Merwen breathed a sigh, for she could guess what had happened now. It was true; Nisi's fate would be ten times worse than Lystra's.
An amplified voice blared Valan speech past her. “This is the Commander of the Valan Guard. As you are all aware, last night your traitorous sister launched an unprovoked attack on Headquarters in which twenty-four troops died and eighteen are missing. From now on, the slightest infraction of Valan orders will be met with execution on the spot. To demonstrate our intent, the Protector and four of her Councilors shall be put to death.”
Merwen barely heard the last part. Nisi had set the spark; Merwen knew that, and it would have sickened her if she had any room for feeling left. What had become of Nisi, after sharing Merwen's home for so many years? If only she could understand that, she would have the key to everything: Realgar and his insane demands, even Malachite the Living Dead.
Fear was the cause, and the wage for one who hastened death. Fear was the same wage for traders, who feared to starve if they ran out of stone. Valans might imagine other wages and desires, but in the end, they
killed
because they
feared being killed
; they hastened death because they feared it, yet they feared it more, the more they hastened. That was the final paradox left to her.
A flame sprouted, a column of yellow and black, crackling, shooting to the sky. There was an odor of cooked flesh again. It took Merwen a minute to realize that Trurl had been tied there.
Fire and fear. The ancestors had perished in flames; or was it fear of the flames that had consumed them?
Fear bred fire, and few were the Doors that remained
⦠.
Another flame sprouted, this time where Shaalrim had been. Trurl and Shaalrim; they were
not,
anymore, and half Merwen's life seemed to slip away.
Then sisters were crowding all around her, and around Lalor and Yinevra, sheltering them with their own bodies. The death-hasteners pulled them away, burning some, but others came; it was a feast of fleshborers, and it was not long before the flames licked Lalor. And all the while Realgar stood there, unmoved, the wordweaver who did not care to share words anymore.
Yinevra was still alive. Her torso rose above those who surrounded her, though her arms were lashed tight behind the stake, her stare fixed
ahead, set in the deepest lines of contempt that Merwen had ever seen. But something stopped Merwen there: she had to stay Yinevra's death, Yinevra who had saved her from Virien, although Merwen had never forgiven how it happened. Now Merwen would act to save Yinevra, even though Yinevra would never forgive her if she succeeded.
“I have something to say.” Merwen looked directly at Realgar as she broke Unspeech, in Valan, a double shame. “I have something to ask of you.”
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Amid the smoke and shouting, and the natives underfoot everywhere despite the troops pulling them back, Realgar caught the movement of Merwen's lips. She had said something, and she was staring at him. She had broken Unspeech. Realgar knew the significance of that. The Sharer Protector herself had cracked.
Up to that point, Realgar had been irritated by the turn this spectacle had taken. He had expected the natives to sit by passively, as usual, while the five were executed, a scene he could send back to show the Palace how decisively he had dealt with native terrorists. Instead, they had interfered, interposing their own bodies and necessitating extra killings, too disorderly for the recorders
But then, Merwen had spoken: Protector Merwen, she who had stolen Berenice from him. Her life represented all that thwarted him on this Torr-forsaken Ocean Moon. Had she decided to yield at last and convince her sisters to obey? Or would she simply beg for her own life?
“Cease fire.” Realgar walked toward the stake, and the soldiers cleared a path. The sounds and confusion all receded from his mind. He halted a few paces away. Merwen looked at him, her eyes and cheeks flat, her old scar trailing up her neck and scalp
“I know your wage, Death-hastener. But who will pay, when none are left to die?”
The Valan words knifed and twisted. Blindly he slashed her face with the end of his firewhip. Realgar struggled to shake off the dread she unleashed, in her challenge that every Sharer would die before one would yield. If it came to that, before Malachite returned, Realgar would have lost, failed completely.
Was there any way out? Could he let them all die?
An inspiration came to him. What Malachite really wanted was Sharer knowledge, knowledge of lifeshaping. That knowledge would remain, even with Sharers extinct: a trillion chromosomal libraries in
every raft, even the raft Realgar stood on now. Malachite could find some way to tap those libraries.
His breathing slowed and his head cleared as he realized that he could exterminate the catfish if he had to. But he was not done with them yet.
Realgar nodded at Merwen and the other one. “Remove them to Headquarters, and let's clear out.”
There was still a chance he might break them. He could turn their own psychological weapons against them, in a way that Jade was too conventional to try. If Merwen had broken Unspeech under pressure, then she had fallen, as judged by her own code, and that fall was the first step toward her defeat. She would live to see her planet die.
RAIA-EL WAS QUIET now, except for the wind, whose thin sorrowful cry swept the ridge. High cirrus clouds splashed the sky, and the sea was a blue mirror. Spinel looked into the sea and thought he heard Merwen whisper again, What do you see? But when he turned, she was not there.
Lystra and the other adults were all in whitetrance, mourning the souls departed in haste the night before. Spinel was left alone with his thoughts, or rather non-thoughts; not-thinking about flames charring raftwood, not-thinking about those whose ashes were mixed in. He thought of his family again, for the first time in weeks. Beryl had told him he would never understand what they had undergone in Chrysoport. Now it ripped through him, what Beryl must have felt when Harran was killed, and he knew why Chrysolite villagers would suffer anything to keep the peace, would submit with equal resignation to Protectors or to Dolomite occupiers so long as peace held.
Yet Sharers would not. Was Spinel a Sharer yet? The knife of that question only twisted deeper.
A touch at his elbow startled him. Lystra had come out, her fingertips still white. Her arm curled around his waist, pressing warmth into him, her muscles leaner than they had been once but growing tough enough for the starworms again. Her cheek pressed into his, and Spinel closed his eyes to let all the ache drain from his head. Her breast was full at his side, and it was easy to float away with her breath as it brushed past his face. Only there was no time to rest. “Lystra, what are we to do now?”
“Feed the next starworm.”
Lystra's matter-of-fact tone surprised him. Spinel turned and blinked at her.
“Without Yinevra, who else will make sure it's done right?”
Spinel winced. “Yes, but what about the Leni-el starworms?”
Lystra did not reply right away. “Mithril will always be welcome here,” she said at last.
So Leni-el raft was not going to make it, after all the sweat lost in digging tunnels and implanting starworms, and the Sharers would be
refugees again, scattered throughout Per-elion. His vision blurred, and he wiped his eyes. “What then, Lystra, after we feed the starworms?”
Her lips twisted. “A Gathering, today.”
“Oh, I'll come this time.” Sensing her hesitation, Spinel added, “I'll learn whitetrance, too. It's my right, isn't it?”
“That depends. Are you like Nisi still, or have you grown up?”
Anger filled him, until he saw Lystra's hands shaking and realized what an effort it took her to say that. “You know what I am,” he told her. “Whatever that is, it has to be enough.”
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In the lifeshaping place, Usha was sitting across from him an arm's-length away, with the mindguide curling down from her fingers like a sleepy spider. Spinel shrank from it at first, but after all, he thought, it could hardly be any worse to turn white than to turn purple. The mindguide settled lightly on his head.
His mind rushed out like a train speeding through a tunnel while the wind screamed past. He blossomed out into the vastness of Shora's ocean, then watched it curve into a blue bauble and slip away to a speck smaller than the moon ever seen from Valedon. Valedon, too, and even the precious sun receded as his mind pressed outward, crowding the stars in his grasp. Illusion, it must be, some sort of conjuror's trick. Or could every mind hold a universe all in itself?
Then memory coalesced and paraded behind him, while he stood at the lip of the Last Door and realized how amazingly simple it would be to slip through. All it took was to linger long enough at that Door, to feel how meaningless was fear, how useless any threat to the mind. And yet â¦
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When he returned to himself, Spinel stared at his feet for a long time, until the patterns blurred and left opposite colors in his eyes. He stretched his arms and glanced at Usha again. Usha tilted her head expectantly. “Well? You took a long time to come back.”
Spinel shivered all over and hugged his arms. “I could have stayed there forever. Why does anyone come back?”
“Well, why did you?” Usha sounded satisfied as she picked up the mindguide, which had fallen from his head, and patted it into a neat bundle.
For no reason, Spinel thought, except perhaps that a life worth dying for is worth living a little longer.
Before the Gathering, Wellen and Weia would not let Usha leave them alone in the silkhouse. Weia screamed and hung fast to Usha's leg, while Wellen more politely insisted, “We have selfnames, Mother, we chose them at the soldier-place. We have to come.” Then Mithril's daughter clamored to come too.
Usha relented at last, but Lystra was scandalized. “They're too young; it's just not correct.”
“These are highly incorrect times,” Usha replied. “Merwen would have thought this best.”
Lystra wanted to cry out, Don't talk about Merwen as if she were already dead. She made herself think of the Gathering and of what must be done. Whether or not they yet lived, the Gathering would have to act without Merwen or Yinevra today.
And without Trurl to sift the speaking; Trurl was not there, would never be there or anywhere again, no matter how automatically Lystra looked to the center of the gathering place where Trurl always sat. She could not imagine a Raia-el Gathering without Trurl's good sense, or without Shaalrim and Lalor, always optimistic despite their rough adventures on the Stone Moon. Only their infant Laraisha survived, now nursing at Elonwy's breast while her lovesharer cradled their own toddler. And the raft carried blackened scars.
In the air clickflies still hummed the mourning songs sent from other rafts. Farther above, a lone helicopter hovered against the clouds.
The selfnamers shared greeting in subdued voices. Only Flossa and Mirri seemed happy, as they cuddled together; a romance had sprung up between them in the lifeshaping-place where they spent such long hours together. Lystra sat with Spinel and wished that her stonesick guests would get over their nervousness about Spinel and his starstone. Another headache to add to the rest.
An almost unbearable silence hovered among them all. Lystra doubted she was alone in her voiceless call; Shora, where are you now?
Usha was staring pensively at the weeds beyond her crossed legs, as if all the answers might be found there. She looked up and around at the gathered Sharers. “We all know why we are gathered here. How are we to go forward this day, after ⦠what has happened?”
Hands and fingers stirred, and a voice said, “Somehow, Valans have to share healing.”
“What if they can't heal?” asked Elonwy as she patted Shaalrim's
child, now her own. Her voice dragged with weariness. “Consider Nisi the Deceiver.”
Usha looked down, and Lystra thought she might be too overcome to go on.
Merwen, Mother, where are you? Are they prying the skin from your fingers?
The empty cry escaped Lystra's mind, reaching past the raft and its branches full yellow with blossoms, dissolving in the sparkling water.
Usha said, “We share great sorrow for the Deceiver, but we can't judge from one case.”
“Yet one is all we have left.”
“We have Spinel,” Lystra said abruptly, pulling him closer. “Spinel is one of us.”
Elonwy sighed. “That's what I mean.”
Lystra thought hard. “Nisi was never wholly one of us, not inside where it matters. That was why she called herself Deceiver.”
Usha looked at her. “Suppose Spinel fails too, someday. Will you say the same of him?”
“It's not the same.” Shaken, Lystra cast a stricken glance at Spinel, who blinked at the unexpected turn. “Are you a Sharer or not? Tell us.”
“You know that I am,” Spinel said in a low voice, his shoulders hunched as if to hide the stone that accused him. Even Nisi would never have been so brazen as to wear a stone at a Gathering.
Then Wellen piped up. “Spinel already has a selfname, like us. We all made a Gathering at the soldier-place. Spinel nearly died to help us escape.”
A sigh rippled among them, and Perlianir said to Spinel, “Will you name the Three Doors?” So he stood beside Lystra and named them, the Sun, the Last Door, and his own name, Impulsive One. He sat down again quickly and Lystra hugged him, amazed and relieved that it had come so simply. If only Merwen were here to seeâshe jammed her eyes shut; it tore her apart every time she had to think of that.
Kithril spoke up suddenly. “Merwen believes that even the death-hasteners may yet share healing, and that is why she and my lovesharer are still alive.”
Startled, Lystra looked up at Kithril, who rarely spoke at all when Yinevra was with her. Kithril stood tensely, snapping her fingerwebs. “Merwen never did want to Unspeak them,” Kithril said. “So she
spoke at last, spoke straight to their fear. It was then that they stopped theâ”
“They never listened before,” someone countered. “Why should they listen now?”
“They heard Merwen, more than once,” Usha said flatly. “That is why Merwen is still alive.”
“But she might be better off dead.” Elonwy shook her head. “I'm sorry, Usha, it has to be said. There are worse fates than an early death. So far, all the doors I see ahead are worse.” The infant Laraisha started to wail. Usha stared on into the sun as if she had not heard.
Ama was trying to speak, and Lystra helped her raise herself. “We have rarely spoken
for
the Valans, from this Gathering,” Ama said. “Always we sent selfnamers to ask after our own sisters and daughters. Merwen asked the soldier, What will become of
you
?”
There was a pause. Someone demanded, “What else can we share that we have not? Whitetrance is what Shaalrim said to share: where is she now? The Deceiver shared whitetrance, and what became of her?”
“Nothing left but ourselves,” said Ama. “That is all, in the end: to keep on sharing of ourselves, until the day comes when Valans see our eyes in the ocean of their own.”
“And if we die again at the soldier-place?” Elonwy's voice was harsh and uneven. “Isn't it just as shameful to die hastened as to hasten death?”
“Not if we reach beyond death,” said Perlianir. “We will show that death-hastening is no answer to fear. That's what Merwen tried to share with the death-hastener.”
Lystra froze, knowing what must come next.
“I will go first,” said Perlianir. “My lovesharer is dead, my daughters are grown; if I must go, I am ready.”
“It's not right.” Lystra stood quickly. “This Gathering can't send one of us to a certain death.”
“No one sends me. I send myself to share with the death-hasteners.”
“Then I'll go too.”
At her feet Spinel gasped and said, “No, Lystra.”
“No,” said Perlianir very quietly. “You don't want to go, yet; only to share my choice. But this choice can't be shared.”
The truth tasted bitter. Lystra wanted no more of death or soldiers or their coldstone cells. She had had enough; all she wanted was to live
here forever, with Spinel and their daughters and daughters of daughters. Though forever was impossible, and she could not shake off the dread that she would yet suffer for not wanting to die.
Usha said, “No one wants to die. But someone has to tell these people in a way they can share that we will never join their madness. I can't ask you not to go, Sharer.”
Ama called faintly, “I will go, after you. Even a death-hastener can't share fear with someone in my condition.”
Others volunteered, and each name cut with a knife of ice until Lystra shivered from the cold. This could not go on. What would Shora be, when there were no Sharers left?
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Spinel's steps dragged as he walked back with Lystra and Usha. “It's no use,” he said dully. “You'll never make a Sharer of a Sardish soldier, not in a million years.”
Usha said, “It's not a matter of making, but of finding what is lost and buried.”
Spinel had no answer for that, although it seemed to him that he had known the answers long ago and lost them. He looked out to the sea and thought again, What use, when even the ocean world is not to be spared? The web of life had still not recovered from the missed seaswallowers; certain weeds were hopelessly overgrown, stifling the silkweed groves, and fanwings were still scarce. What would happen the next time swallowers were due, just three months from now?
At the door of the silkhouse Siderite was waiting. With raucous giggles Weia reached up at him to pull at the material of his trousers, just as she used to tease Spinel. “What is your conclusion?” Siderite asked Usha, while he tried to unpry Weia's fingers.
“More sharing,” said Usha. “Share on, until the ocean overflows.”
Lines tensed around Siderite's eyes. He looked at Spinel, and briefly they shared an outsider's perception of helplessness. Spinel only gripped Lystra's hand tighter. He had no explanations; he only knew which side he had chosen.