WHILE HIS TROOPS worked feverishly to rebuild damaged bases in the wake of the swallowers, Realgar faced a grilling by the High Protector.
Talion's lightshape glimmered above the viewing stage behind his monument of a desk. “General, by the Nine Legions I want to know just what in hell is going on out there.”
Realgar cleared his throat. “My lord, it's just bad luck with the seasonâ”
But Talion already was speaking again, not deigning to wait for the general's reply to reach Valedon. “Didn't I give you everything you asked? A corps of your own compatriots, twenty divisions' worth, and what happened? They melted away, as far as I can tell. They're a disgrace, even a laughingstock. Everywhere, citizens are clamoring to know why a whole Sardish army can't control a few women and children without resorting to brutalities that would shock the Patriarch.” Talion leaned forward across the desk. “To top it off, your own officers mutiniedâand you actually tried to keep it from the palace. It's beyond belief, Ral.” He paused, his wrath spent for the moment.
Realgar knew he was finished; but Talion must want something from him still, or he would have simply replaced him, without this harangue. “The insurrection was put down, my lord, before it posed a real threat.”
Talion's palms slammed down. “No real threat! When your entire force is essentially out of control?” He sat back, lacing his fingers, and his eyes narrowed. “You aren't that incompetent, Ral. The truth is, you share the sentiment of your treasonous officers. You dare question my authority to order what must be done to Shora.”
Realgar hid his alarm and disgust. Of course he detested Iridians, but that was a personal matter. “My lord, I swear to you, in the name of whatever honor I possess, that I never have and never will intend anything but full obedience to the High Protector of Valedon.”
With a businesslike air Talion sat up, saying, “In that case, I'll give you one more chance. You shall activate the satellites to burn out the entire native population of the Ocean Moon. To the last mother and childâdo I make myself clear?”
The turnabout wrenched him off balance. “Every last one?” he said guardedly. “Not even a handful left, to satisfy the Envoy of Torr?”
“Unnecessary. Their knowledge will remain, encoded in those rafts. That will have to do. Even one native left behind could unleash all sorts of plagues in revenge.” Talion shook his head. “You had your chance to get them under control, as you swore you would. Now you must wipe them outâand take full personal responsibility.”
There was a trap, his instinct warned. “Since I clearly have lost my lord's confidence, I offer to resign.”
“As you wish.”
Realgar tensed, and his chin jerked up. He saw it now; the order would still go out, under his own name. Valan citizens, already aroused against his campaign, would be shown a release of the Sardish Commander explaining why the people of the Ocean Moon had been extinguishedâwhether or not Realgar himself was actually responsible. Whether or not he resigned, there would be such an outcry that his banishment was assured, his life worth nothing.
It made cold sense, for the High Protector. Talion needed someone to take the blame for a slaughter of innocentsâpreferably someone not Iridian. Realgar's officers had been right; he himself was the perfect scapegoat. When Malachite returned, nine years hence, Sardis would fall before his wrath, just as Pyrrhopolis had. And Iridis would be left with one less rival.
There had to be a way out.
For some reason he thought of Siderite. Talion had not quite heard the last word on that. “Are you aware that your scientist's mission was useless from the start? That the natives never intended to reveal the extent of their powers?”
“I thought as much. But we had to humor the Envoy.”
“Did you think Malachite such a fool?” He saw Talion's eyes flash open, and his breath came faster. “Didn't you ever wonder what Malachite really had in mind? He was playing with us; he set us up, just to provoke those creatures into striking back, to test their power.”
“General, do you realize what you're saying?” Talion's voice lowered, became smooth and deadly.
Realgar felt the sweat on his palms. He had to go on, there was no turning back, and what was another treachery on top of so many? “Siderite was convinced of it. In fact, he believes we are all hostage to
lifeshaped pathogens, already âliving dead,' contaminated with the seeds of our own destructionâwhich only
they
can cure.”
“And if they die, we die, is that it?” Talion clenched his fists. “I saw no such report. You'd damn well better back this up.”
“Of course, my lord; Siderite was mindprobed. Surely you heard from your spies.”
“By Torr, you Sardish bastard, you've been holding out on me!” After the outburst, Talion cooled down somewhat, running a hand through his thinning hair as he shook his head. “How could even a Sard hold back a thing like that, a threat to the entire planet? Ral, do you really think I follow Torr like a servo, or that I even give fool's gold for the Envoy and his grand designs? We're men of
Valedon,
live men on a planet with some life to it, not just a machine world like Torr. Valan survival is what counts.”
Realgar was amazed, and by the end of Talion's speech his hands. were shaking. “Then why do we have to bow and scrape to the Patriarch's servo every decade? And allow it to snuff out a city at
its
own calculated whim? If every planet in the Patriarchy refused to be ruled,
we all would be free.”
Even as he spoke, alarms screamed inside his head. He was finished for certain.
But Talion only grew very calm, even reflective, as the general's words reached him across space. The pause lengthened beyond time-lag. “And then would Sardis and Dolomoth, too, refuse to be ruled?” he mused, half to himself. “Would children cease to obey their fathers; would hands no longer follow the brain?” He shook his head slowly. “How little keeps our world intact, safe from the law of the jungle. Always, in every age, a few strong men bear the burden of civilization. I had thought, Ral, that you were one. But you disappointed me.” A hint of contempt entered his voice. “Or perhaps you were, once, but you listened to
them
for too long.”
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So Realgar was relieved of his command. But one piece of unfinished business could not be left to his successor: Berenice.
Though still alive, Berenice had not uttered a syllable since the night of her capture, a scene almost too painful to recall. He had left her alive, but now, what the devil was he to do with her?
At Satellite Amber, he found her alone in her sparse quarters, where she sat crosslegged on her bed, her back to the door. Her pose was so
unnervingly Sharer that he nearly turned and left; but she was clothed, after all, in a demure white talar with the blue and gold nested-squares border stretched out around her knees.
“Berenice. I'm leaving. I've been recalled; my successor will be here within the hour.” Realgar paused, then hurried on. “Talion wanted the Sharers wiped outâcompletely. I refused. Does that mean nothing to you?”
Berenice did not even turn her head. It was hopeless, but still Realgar could not bring himself to leave her in the hands of his Iridian overlords. There was one alternative: to leave her to those whom he hated more. “Berenice, you'll be sent to Iridis soon, and you know what that means. Unless ⦠I set you down on Shora.” He added, “You'll be taking your chances there. Talion still hopes toâ”
She wheeled, leaning her arms on the bed, her face stricken. “Shora?” she whispered hoarsely. “You'll leave me ⦠there? After what I've
done?”
It was actually Sharers that she feared, more than Talion, for by their standards she had betrayed them far worse. How would they punish her?
But she had melted at last, that was all that mattered. Realgar took her by the shoulders, saying, “I won't leave you. I'll take you back to Sardis in secret, and we'll retire in the hacklands. We'll have Cassiter and Elmvar, and every luxury you need. I'll protect youâ”
Pulling free of him, Berenice swung her legs over the bed and stood, her face turned to crystal again. “I don't want your protection, Ral,” she said distinctly. “Only forgiveness, though I deserve it even less from you than from
them.”
In her own hard way she was asking him to forgive, but she refused his protection, and in that she rejected him. Berenice must have known that, if she knew him at all. His heart congealed; he could never say he forgave her.
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At the observation dome of the transport ship, Realgar stood with his children, who watched with wide eyes as the Ocean Moon curved and shrank away to a fine sickle against the stars. Cassiter squeezed his hand. “Papa, can't we stay long enough even to go for a swim? You promised to take us, sometime.”
“It's too late, Cassi. The ship has left orbit.”
“Then order it to turn back.”
Realgar could not bring himself to tell her he could not. He was alone: no monitors to break in with a call, no emergencies, not even paperwork to command the attention of a deposed commander. It had been years since he had felt so powerless, so insignificant.
“You'll take us back someday, won't you, Papa? I never did get my whorlshell.” His children would share his exile; they had yet to learn what that meant.
His past flooded back over him: the battlefields strewn with corpses, the control rooms, the promotions, all to dissolve here on a slippery bit of ocean between seaweed and seafoam. How had it happened? Those webfingered creatures were fiendish tacticians. So many times they nearly drove him out, with their bloodless “invasions,” the Purple Plague, the uncanny bewitchment of his troops, no matter how many of their own deaths it cost.
But was it more than tactics? In the end, Sharers actually forced him to set their world freeâbut why? Why had he done so, when he did not believe Siderite's warning, any more than Siderite himself? He had learned too well what Merwen really meant by the
living dead.
And Merwen had said,
You will not betray me.
How could she have known? Had he played out the lie just to spite his superiors, or was he in awe of something else, a mystery beyond the dread of lifeshaping?
Time. Sharers had lasted for millennia before the Patriarch arose, and something whispered to him that they might endure even after Torr had blown to dust.
With a shudder he turned impatiently away from the empty stars. The glass door of the observation deck did not open at first, and his own shadowed reflection faced him.
Whose eyes do you see in mine, and whose inâ
His fist swung out and crashed; a white spiderweb leaped into the glass. Behind him his children gasped at the shattered door. Shaking all over, he clasped his knuckles to stop the blood and breathed deeply to get a grip on himself. Somehow, he would never see a glass again, or look into the eyes of a cornered bear, without knowing that the wildest thing he ever hunted still swam beyond his grasp.
SEASWALLOWERS PASSED AS they always did, leaving the waters clean and clear but for white tongues of foam. This time Per-elion did not lose a raft, Shora be thanked, but clickflies brought word of distant rafts to be sung for.
In a few days waterfire bloomed again, a lovely bioluminescence that etched the waves for seven nights and kept everyone awake dancing in its brilliance. Another strand of the living web was rejoined.
At the soldier-places, Valans kept to themselves, and many disappeared to the sky. And with their departure, a remarkable thing happened: the song of the starworm began to penetrate the far ocean again. Soon the deep rumbling tones could be heard from one end of the globe to the other, more clearly than they had since the first sky-crossing traders came to settle. Once more, all the Gatherings of Shora could share will together within the period of a sun's flight across the sky.
Merwen thought of all these things as she sat at her spindle, touching strands of yellow to the head as it whirled, and the yellow strands grew like the beams of the sun just edging above the ocean. The smell of night things still clung, and Weia and Wellen had not yet uncurled from their sleeping holes to swim out chasing through the branch channels. But for Merwen, the day was already long and old. Sleep was coming hard to her, and she found herself rising earlier and earlier, to listen to the roar of the sea and to calm her troubled hands with silk-spinning by the light of the Stone Moon.
Shadows were still long when Spinel came out to sit beside her workstool. A helicopter had returned him to Raia-el, the week after the rescue of the soldiers from their flooded base.
Spinel cleared his throat and said, “Merwenâdon't you think we have enough spun silk for a while? Especially the yellow stuff, it's only used in thin lines ⦠.”
Her eyes turned toward him, while her hand still fed the spindle. Though he sat flat on the raft with his feet tucked under, his eyes were nearly level with hers; he was as big as Lystra now, big and black, not like the timid brown child who first approached her and Usha on the Valan shore, so long ago. And except for Usha, she realized, he was the
only one who ever approached her nowadays, when she was like this.
“It's been a long time,” Merwen said, “since I could afford the luxury of useless work.”
Taken aback, Spinel looked away a moment. But then he looked up again, his eyes bright with eagerness. “Did you hear they're all leaving for good? Death-hasteners, traders, all of them; I heard it from the trawler deckhands, lined up at Dak's moonferry. The High Protector says they can't come back, ever. So we're rid of them, Merwen.”
“Yes. That is why I spin yellow silk.”
“What makes you so sad? No one else is.”
No, only Usha understood, and no one could tell when Usha was sad. “And what are you glad for, stoneshaper?”
Then his face crumpled, and Merwen was sorry, though at least he never brooded for long. “You knew I didn't, didn't you?” he asked. “You didn't really think I did what they said, in the soldier-place.”
Merwen paused to finish off the spindle. “I thought at first I had betrayed you, that I had asked you to be something you never could be.”
“Oh, no, never.”
“Not even when your palms first turned color? I ask too much of everyone, even of my own daughter.”
“No. When you ask, we simply find we had more to share than we thought.” Spinel swallowed. “You only ask too much of yourself, Merwen.”
“Shora asks,” she whispered.
“You did the best you could. I always wondered why the death-hasteners in Chrysoport left you alone at the tree, and I sure found out.”
“So did I. I thought they showed respect for whitetrance; but it was only fear.”
“Fear of your fearlessness.”
“What good is that, without understanding? How few of them ever shared understanding, from my words or from the patterns I wove that spoke more than words. As for myself, I tried so hard to learn, to share the Valan thinking. I even became a trader, trading a bolt of seasilkâfor you. And at the last, I could well have become a death-hastener, and then Death would have sailed the waves from one pole to the other. It was only for love of you that I did not.”
She saw him wipe a tear from his cheek and thought, This time I've gone too far, but I have to make certain he knows his own mind. “Are
you quite sure you want to share our lot, Spinel, now that you know it's forever?”
“You know I am.”
Merwen paused a moment. “Then go share the news with Nisi. She may not be sure.”
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Nisi the Deceiver had come back unexpectedly, just before all the other Valans started to leave. She promptly Unspoke everyone and withdrew alone, and for that she won respect from the Gathering.
Spinel remembered how Nisi had stood up for him, when he first came to Shora and everyone seemed to hate him. “Merwen says I should tell her,” he told Lystra.
“Someone has to tell her,” Lystra agreed. “It's right that you should.”
The next day, Spinel and Lystra approached Nisi on her isolated offshoot raft. Nisi hugged her knees and did not acknowledge the visitors. Like Spinel, she had let her hair grow out, and the strands knitted over her forehead.
Spinel knew that Nisi was determined to make no sign. Her crime still weighed heavily upon her, and that was right. But suppose she really did want to go back? To lose Valedon foreverâthe thought was so awful that Spinel himself had not let himself think of it yet. On Shora he had Lystra, and that was what mattered. But it was hard to say what mattered most for Nisi. “Nisi, you have to hear this, just once. Valans are leaving, all of them, to come no more. It's your last chance; do you understand?”
Nisi made no sign.
Suddenly he added, “Nisi, speak with meâor I'll go Unspoken.”
Startled, Lystra stared at him. Why should Spinel care to share Nisi's withdrawal?
Spinel himself was scared, and not sure just what he had intended. He watched Nisi anxiously, but she kept still. “Look, I didn't mean it; that isâ”
Lystra's expression was scandalized. Spinel had to follow through on his impulse.
“Berenice!” He rushed to her, kneeling on the raft to look into her face, pouring out in Valan, “Lady Berenice, you can't do this to me. You know I couldn't keep quiet a whole year: I'd die for sure. Please, Lady Berenice.”
Her gaze descended perceptibly, and a smile tugged at her lips. “Spinel, you're still a commoner, after all.”
“Well,” he said shamefacedly, dismayed at how quickly he reverted to his old ways. “I can't change what I am overnight.”
“Nor can I. And yet, one can't stop changing, either.” She took his hand and laced her fingers with his, as only Valans could, and Spinel felt ice tickle down his spine. Nisi looked up and past him again. “If Ral had only asked me to
share protecting,
I would have gone back with him. What else is love for? But it's too late for us. Here,” she said, and handed him a whorlshell of exquisite pink and yellow swirls. “It's for his daughter; I promised, once. When you return to Valedon, will you ⦠?”
“I will.”
She withdrew from him, then, to her silence.
Lystra pulled him roughly away. “Spinel! You didn't say you're going
back?”
“IâI don't know.” A sense of loss overwhelmed him. The tide lapping in the harbor, the towering limestone cliffs, even the spurt of a ripe tomato on his tongue, and the feisty old market vendors, and his father and mother: all of it he would never see again. “I just can't bear not to go back, even to visit. Oh, why does it all have to be so impossible?” The day he turned purple, he was sure that he would never face such a terrible choice again. But now, when he might never see home again, it seemed that he had yet to really make that choice.
“You're one of us now,” Lystra insisted. “You've said it, and you know it. Why should you return to that ocean of despair?”
“I'm a troublesharer. Merwen never expected me to stay here. She wanted me to share learning on Valedon, as she did: to weave words like a Spirit Caller. Yes, because all they really need is a spirit to call onâthe spirit of Shora, not the Patriarch. This is what I can share.”
“Have you lost your head? What do you expect to do with such barbarians?”
“I can do more than sing for them.”
“Spinel, of all the Valans who've come here, how many shared? Stay here and be safe. Help raise our daughters; yes, we need daughters so that the departed souls can find new homes. That's what Merwen brought you here for.”
Spinel was so overcome that he could say nothing at first. To think that even Lystra would want to share his blood, for all his hated lineage,
to make a child that might have hair or lack webs between the fingers. His hand brushed her scalp. “But Lystra, are we really safe, even here? Will our daughters be safe?”
For that Lystra had no answer.
“Death-hasteners say they won't come back, but they could change their minds, especially when Malachite returns. We can't rest until every one of them shares healing.”
Lystra turned away. “Well, then, do what you have to.”
“You could come too, Lystra.”
“Who,
me?
To that dry bone of a planet?”
Back at Raia-el, they talked for long hours, until the sun was gone and the half-moon of Valedon had risen high in the sky.