Shadow’s Son Read online

  Shadow’s Son

  Fifth Millenium

  Book V

  Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling

  &

  Karen Wehrstein

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Book I: Summons

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  Book II: Venture

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  Book III: Fulfillment

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Our first inclination is to thank each other, but we’re all getting paid for this, so ...

  For critical help and support, thanks to the rest of the Bunch of Seven, who at the time were: Janet Stirling, Louise Hypher, Mandy Slater and Julie Czerneda. Also to Dave Edmund and Dave Kirby.

  For letting us stay at the cottage in Muskoka, again: Margaret Layton and Dave Kirby.

  For inspiration: Way Lem (who recently moved to Muskoka), Fred Foreman (who helped pioneer Muskoka), A. Pajitnov and V. Gerasimov (the creators of Tetris), Mike Oldfield, and the usual host of others.

  For helping perfect strangers at the mere mention of the name Fred Foreman, in the spirit of Muskoka: Gail Dempsey.

  And a particularly large second thank you to Janet Stirling, for doing the dishes and putting up with three oversensitive, compulsive/obsessive, cranky, caffeine-gulping writers instead of the usual one.

  Book I:

  Summons

  I

  The address was written with an Arkan pen, leaving none of the sputters and blots a quill would leave. Megan Whitlock picked up the sealed envelope from the pile on her lap-desk. News I’ve waited for? No, probably more of the usual pieces of glass and luxury items have risen again, with the Arkan-Yeoli war drawn out so much longer than anyone expected ...”—the usual information that came across the desk of the proprietor of a great merchant house.

  She put the packet down, stretched, and strolled to the gallery that overlooked the atrium, its roof of glass and translucent agate letting in soft winter light, and leaned over the heavy oak railing. Megan was short, even for a Zak, a race shorter on average by a good head and a half than most others, with pale skin, a thin, faded white horizontal scar across the top of one cheek and the side of her nose. Her mid-calf-long hair was black with an ice-white streak at one temple, woven into elaborate braids which held the long mass neatly away from the heart-shaped face and out of her black eyes. The fingers of her hands tapped the honey-colored wood, her gray steel claws making a clicking sound.

  She’d been working all day; time for a break. Below, Shkai’ra sword-danced, the drill that began with the Nine Cuts; beginning slow, her movements flowing into each other with a delicate grace incongruous in a woman her size. She was near six feet, in Zak measure 178 schentiam, a good two heads taller than most Zak. Her copper-blond hair was tied back in Kommanza warrior braids, bouncing on muscular shoulders slicked with sweat. The hawklike features too were unusual in F’talezon; now they wore a look of introspection, lips parted in a slight smile.

  I married a woman from across the Lannic, Megan thought, smiling to herself as she breathed in the sweet cinnamon-scented oil burning in the lamps that hung from the iron strapping of the roof. I’m used to how she looks, but I’m still not used to her being my wife; or Rilla; or Shyll being my husband either.

  Nearby Sova, now fourteen and already considerably taller than Megan, tumbled with the puppies on the flagstones, giggling, ash-blond hair pulling loose of its braids. Full-grown, the girl would be as tall as Shkai’ra, and not less muscular if the Kommanza had her way; now she was all feet and hands and tangled limbs, her breasts finally rounded. The pups, Dee and Dah, were bigger than the girl now, though not full-grown; greathounds not only outsized common dogs by double, but grew faster in their first months.

  Megan had never expected to adopt a Thane, one of her people’s oldest enemies; but then not much in her quest up the River Brezhan a year and a half before, to regain the Slaf Hikarme from Habiku Smoothtongue, had gone as expected. Even the ending, not quite: in her rage at what he’d done to so many of her old shipmates, not to mention her, she’d planned to put him in a cage welded shut, and hang it up in this very atrium. That hadn’t worked out. But every now and then, pacing in the gallery, she would imagine it was there, the room echoing with his screams, or perhaps mad laughter, instead of Sova’s carefree noise, and know it would have been for the worse. For one thing, it would have made the house unfit for raising children.

  Back to work. She ground a fist into the small of her back as she straightened; this sedentary life was making her stiff. Only a bit more, she promised herself as she went back to the packet on her desk. Examined closer, the writing seemed familiar. She broke the seal.

  To MEGAN called Whitlock,

  Slaf Hikarme (House of the Sleeping Dragon), F’talezon.

  Third Iron-Cycle, Tenth Day, Year of the Lead Cat.

  My investigations regarding your expatriate son LIXAND, heretofore futile for the year that I have undertaken your contract, have suddenly borne substantial fruit. It seems very likely he is in Arko the City Itself. An agent of mine discovered a dancing boy owned by the AITZAS Family TEMONEN, of Fidelity Street, who fits his description perfectly: blond, black-eyed, small of build, about ten years old. Probing revealed that RASAS, as he is called there, was bought at the age of two in the slave-market of Arko, which matches well with the time he was abducted from you.

  By all indications, he is healthy and well-fed, being prized as a lead performer in NUNINI-BAS TEMONEN’s troupe of dancing boys. I made the utmost attempt to purchase him, but was refused absolutely; it seems he is also a favorite of the Lord.

  I await your instructions.

  Hoping you find this information of great value, I am your faithful agent,

  TIRPAS ORREN, fessas

  Avenue Aven

  Arko, the City Itself.

  She read it three or four times, her hands shaking, pulse pounding in her ears, barely believing. After eight years, she knew where her son was. After eight years wondering, then this last year, when it had finally become possible, feverishly searching through a network of spies hired in every major city in the Empire of Arko, there was a house and a city to pin him to, circumstances to imagine, a setting to make his life seem real to her. A place to track him to, to find him, to buy or steal or carve him free of ... no, not buy. She’d stated clearly from the start, the maximum price Tirpas was authorized to offer: all she had, short of destituting the family. That was rather a lot. Tirpas had obviously offered that and been turned down. How rich is this fish-gutted bastard, that my son isn’t worth that amount? Or how ... besotted ...

  Steal or carve, then. She’d considered going into the Empire personally before, despite the risk—foreigners were accorded no right to freedom there, and slave-catchers knew it—but had decided against. A hireling who knew the ropes in Arko and didn’t need to run and hide had been a better bet, for such a needle-in-a-hay-stack search.

  But now the search was done. She ran back down the stairs, and called into the atrium. “Shkai’ra! How soon can you be ready to leave on a long trip?”

  The Kommanza lowered her sword, wiped one forearm across her face. “Two days, traveling light. Wh
ere to? Business or pleasure?”

  Rilla, Megan’s second wife and cousin, came down the steps with a basket of flower bulbs over her arm. She was taller than Megan by almost a hand-width, mink brown hair trimmed short and sharp around her face, giving her an elfin look, making her dark amber eyes seem much bigger. “Dark Lord, Sova,” she said. “We’ll have to buy a warehouse of tunics; if you want to play with the dogs, wear an old one! Go change, now!”

  Sova thumped on the ribs of the puppy who held her down, making a bang like a drum. “I want to hear about this trip.”

  “Arko,” Megan said. “Business. Is Shyll home yet? I want to talk to everyone about this.”

  Rilla put the basket down. “No, he’ll be back for the evening meal. Do you mean business in Arko, Meg? Nobody does that who isn’t Arkan.”

  “My agent’s found Lixand.”

  Rilla froze, silent, then nodded.

  Megan turned away up the stairs, the soft sigh of the door closing cutting off a question of Sova’s, and walked back to her office. The setting sun shone red through the west window, touching the rim of the city over the Lake Quarter. She would come out when Shyll came home, she decided. She shuffled the papers with one hand, staring at the words without reading them, looking at the bloody light from the setting sun on her fingers, remembering.

  Lixand, my son. She’d borne him at fourteen, on the old Zingas Brezhani, River Lady, docked in Bjornholm. I swore you’d be my son, with nothing of him in you. Baby, born in blood and pain, I nearly gave my life for you. Too big for me, you were, my firstborn, ensuring you would be my last. Soft blond hair under her fingers as he nursed, eyes that were blue like his at first, because he was an Arkan, but then turned dark like hers, thank Koru, blinking sleepily ...

  Sarngeld, the captain, her owner. Atzathratzas was his real name, or part of it, every Arkan tacks on all the formal-sounding titles he can dig up—but no Zak could pronounce all those consonants. Solas, warrior caste. Nursing, she’d had too much of a woman’s rounded shape to interest him. Ex-Arkan, ex-soldier. May your soul freeze and burn at once in Halya.

  My son. The day you were weaned, how you were weaned ... He’d been two, both running and speaking, knew already to avoid the captain. He was on deck, dealing with another Arkan, in their clipped, snobbish tongue, hands hidden in gloves. The baby heard his tread before she did, looking away from the wood and string rattle she was dangling for him. She gathered him into her arms and stood up, big toddler though he was.

  Sarngeld’s face was twisted in a frozen sort of smile she couldn’t read. “Come, girl.” I couldn’t fight him anymore: for your sake, my son. You were his hold on me. The wooden slave-links locked around her wrists, the chains, to the staple in the floor of the cabin, which he hadn’t used for a year ...

  Lixand had screamed a baby’s bird-high shriek as Sarngeld tried to pull him from her chained-together arms. The black crash in her head as he hit her, the only way to make her let go. My son. You couldn’t know what he would do.

  “Sarngeld, master, leave me my baby, please don’t drown him. Please, he’s your son, don’t kill him. Please, he’s only a baby. Don’t, please, master.” She begged in a way she had never begged before. She’d never willingly called him master, got down on her knees, on her face. My son. I would have done anything.

  “Kill the brat?” He laughed at her. “He’s worth money!”

  Maybe I knew what all that would mean, for the years ahead. She’d screamed and lunged to the end of her chain. All she could do was tear her fingers bloody on the wooden links, maddened, and scream her child’s name as his father carried him on deck. To the other Arkan, just before the ship cast off for the day. “Lixaaaaaaand!” If she screamed it enough, maybe he would remember it.

  Later that night, Katrana the healer had stolen his keys, freed Megan, got her knives. I killed him, and took the ship. But that was too late to get you back. You were gone, into the Empire, where I couldn’t go, sold Dark Lord knows where to Dark Lord knows whom. Eight years ago.

  The family sat down for dinner, in the atrium near the fountain, with candles floating over the flocks of eye-sized jewelfish. The big lamp overhead threw shadows from the plants over the tables and cushions. Gar-soup with dumplings, ’maranth bread, roast beef, vegetables and hot sauce, cloudberry tart ...

  Megan pushed her food around her plate with her eating-pick. I’d have killed for this much food, when I was eleven and on the street. Shkai’ra was working on seconds, and another stein; she had been out on the estate with Hotblood yesterday. How she could stand riding a cross between a horse and a wolverine, that would sooner tear your head off than take a lick of salt from your hand, Megan had never understood. She herself had a bad enough time with ponies.

  Shyll was picking at his food, too. Another Zak in the House of the Sleeping Dragon, first husband: an open-faced man with green eyes, wheat-blond hair cut shoulder length, but a build too slight and wiry for anyone to mistake him for a Thane. I seem to have a taste for blonds, despite my past.

  Rilla stared, lost in thought, as she nursed little Ness, two iron-cycles old now; the baby’s eyes were closed as she suckled. They were still baby-blue but with hazel flecks, more and more like her father Shyll’s every day. Your mother loves you, as my parents did me before they died, Megan thought. Soft hair in the crook of her arm, she remembered, hungry lips tugging impatiently at a swollen breast; the milky smell of a clean baby. Love, Lixand-mi, love ... She tore her mind away from that, looked down at the cold food on her plate, cleared her throat.

  Shkai’ra finished her beer and wiped the foam off her lips with the back of a hand. “Well,” she said; she spoke good Zak now, but with a rough accent she would probably never lose. “We’d best settle who’s going, shouldn’t we?” She looked sideways at Rilla and smiled a little crookedly. “Damn, I’d been looking forward to having one myself. Well, needs must when the demons drive; sooner started, sooner finished.”

  Dammit, Megan thought, I should be used to her saying what I’m thinking by now. We’ve been together long enough. “Rilla isn’t going anywhere for now,” Megan said. “Not with Ness on her arm.” Her cousin looked up from the baby and nodded, the thought unspoken: I could have another, or three more, if I liked. You’ll only ever have one. “Nor Shyll either.”

  “Wait a moment—”

  “No, husband. Our family has a business to maintain. Can Rilla carry that alone, as well as the baby? Or would you have Shkai’ra look after the books?”

  There was a general shudder around the table at that. Shkai’ra snorted and reached for another wedge of pie. “Better I’m at your back, Megan, or you’d come home to find us all sold off to pay the debts.”

  “What about me?” Sova; her pale brows, long enough almost to join in the middle, were even. She’d had two years of Shkai’ra’s rigorous war-training now; at thirteen, she’d been blooded, against minions of Habiku on the river.

  “No,” said Megan. “You’re well into this year’s school and you’re not wasting time gallivanting about with us.”

  “Wasting time? I thought khyd-hird,”—she nodded her head towards Shkai’ra—“would want me to squire.”

  “Ia,” said the Kommanza. “It’d be good practice for her.”

  “No.” Megan cut the air with her down-turned hand. Play us off against each other, will you, girl? “Sova isn’t going to be away from school for the length of time it will take to find Lixand.” To the Thane-girl: “I want to give you all the opportunity you can to learn more than how to sneak and kill. You’re staying here and that’s final.”

  Shkai’ra tilted her head on one side and visibly restrained herself from speaking. We’ll talk later, Megan thought. Sova dug back into her dinner, face unchanged. Showing no sign of what she wants to do, go or stay. I love her but she makes me angry sometimes. I suppose all children would at that age. I wasn’t a child then; I never had time to be. Yet was I ever such a stranger to those who loved me, as she is to us some
times?

  “It’s damn risky,” said Shyll.

  “It’ll be less so now than ever before, love. Look how the Arkans are getting cut up in Yeola-e. They’ve spread themselves so thin that patrols will be fewer, borders more weakly guarded; it’ll be easier to move, and hide.”

  “From the news,” said Shkai’ra, “the Yeolis were on their last legs only five months ago. How have they won back so far?”

  Ivahn, the Benaiat of Saekrberk, had told of this in his letters to Megan. It was useful to have for a friend the one who was as close to a head of state as the freeport of Brahvniki could have; he knew everything in the known world.

  “They apparently have a king who’s hot. He came back out of captivity last summer, made alliances in the nick of time: Laka, Tor Ench, Hyerne, the Pirate Isles—he had friends all over, it seems. Even the Schvait black-shirts hired on their regiments. The way the Arkans broke the Compact and took Haiu Menshir was the last straw for many people. You know the World’s Compact—everyone leaves the island alone, since it supplies the world with healers? It doesn’t have an official name, actually, it’s an unwritten law that’s been followed for centuries, but people have started calling it that.”

  “Yes,” Shkai’ra said, drawing it out into a thoughtful hiss. “When I was younger I had no qualms about attacking pacifists. I think I’ve learned somewhat since then.” Her pale brows furrowed. Trained in command as well as combat at home, and having wandered as a mercenary for six years, she had a feel for such things. “That’s all the eastern powers turned against Arko, the Srian war still going on, the Kurkanians and the Roskati in revolt; and the tribes northwest of the Empire will start to move over the borders at the first chance. I’d be surprised if no one else invaded.” She shook her head. “Stupid of Arko, like a peasant in a chicken coop trying to grab all the eggs at once. Opportunity, one way or the other. Quickly in, grab the child, quickly out. The quicker the better; my wanderlust is well and truly burned out.”

  Shyll stood, leaving half his meal untouched, and began pacing the flagstone path beside the fountain. Megan stood up and followed him, knowing what his silence meant. The two had been having more trouble in bed lately, more sudden pullings-away, breathless apologies, tears in the dark. Always my fear, she thought wearily, from what happened when I was a child. Growing worse as I try harder to fight it; worse, not better. Will it ever end? Under the rose tree, she put her hands on his face, keeping the steel of her claws well clear.