“I think that’s something we don’t talk about, you hear?”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  “Funny or not, I expect you’re right too, Linfy.”

  He picked up his fork, tapped a bouncy rhythm on the edge of the plate, then started reducing the mound of food on it.

  Shadith sat in the middle of the wide bed and began going over her things, checking to see what the Ajin’s men had brought along, harvesting a small collection of metal burrs from various parts of the clothing wadded into the bags. She set them aside, continued with her inventory and came across her hoard of coins. “Hunh, honest kidnappers.” All her possessions were here, even an old polish rag she’d meant to throw away. She looked at the clothing with distaste. All of them, underthings and everything, handled by those creeps and invaded by a horde of bugs, worms eat his liver. Wonder who does the laundry around here. I can wash a few things in the fresher basin, but I want this whole mess cleaned before I wear any of it. She wrinkled her nose at the small pile of burrs. Sneaky, yeah, and don’t he think he’s clever. I’m supposed to find you and feel oh so confident. Happy to oblige. She scooped the bugs up and flushed them down the toilet, then went back to the bed and unsnapped the harp case. Someone had wiped the dust off the outside, but more than enough had managed to ooze inside. With a grunt of disgust, she lifted the harp out and set it down carefully, then slid to the edge of the bed, flipped the case over and shook it out on the rug. She set the case down. Have to go over it later with a damp cloth. She dug into the pile of clothing, found that decrepit polish rag and began to wipe the harp, working very carefully so she wouldn’t scratch it. When she was finished with the frame, she wiped the strings, then plucked each of them to get the last grains of dust off. And found another bug tucked up high on the inside of the frame where she wasn’t likely to see it. She went to the sitting room to fetch a fork, detoured to check on Linfyar. He had squirreled deep into the pile of silk pillows on the divan and was asleep, snoring a little, almost like a loud purring. She smiled at him, shook her head and went back into the bedroom.

  Harp on her lap, she probed for the flat little patch and finally managed to scrape it loose. It looked a bit battered, but she suspected it was still in fair working order; they built those things to take a lot of knocks. She held it close to one of the strings and made that string shriek at it. Hunh, you bastard, hope that wrings your ears for you. She took the bug into the fresher and flushed it after the others.

  The Ajin came back the middle of the next morning. Shadith sat on the floor gazing at the image on the screen, hands moving idly across the strings, making a portrait in sound of her restlessness. She looked around as she heard the door open, scowled and turned back to the screen, putting an acid jangle into what she was playing.

  He laughed, strode over to her, plucked the harp from her hands, tossed it onto the divan, pulled her to her feet.

  For a moment Shadith could not speak. She was so furious her throat closed up on her, so furious she could only stand there shaking. She stared at him blankly; when she could move, she marched to the divan, picked up the harp, ran her hand over the frame, then the strings. She squatted, set it on the floor and came slowly back up, turning to face him as she rose. “Don’t ever ever do that again,” she said flatly. “Touch it again and I’ll kill you.”

  “Watch your mouth, girl.” She stared at him, said nothing.

  “Sweet little girls don’t go around killing people. Didn’t your parents teach you that?”

  She kept staring, still furious, though she’d calmed enough to start thinking again. The little girl act—she could go on with it, but was it worth it? She looked into that handsome smiling face and decided it wasn’t. Might as well test just how much he thinks he needs me; let him start walking over me and he’ll keep on tramping. “They taught me a lot of things,” she said, her voice still flat and as cold as she could make it. “They taught me it’s both stupid and discourteous to handle other people’s belongings without permission,” She rushed on, drowning his attempt to speak. “They taught me that kidnappers are thugs and men who steal girls are perverts or pimps and a pimp is lower than a pervert. They taught me that real men treat other men and women, and children, with the respect they expect for themselves and those who act otherwise are only cheap imitations.”

  He took a step toward her, hand raised, then checked himself. As clearly as if she read the words on a tape issuing from his head, she knew what he was thinking: Look, never mind what she says, she’s only a silly little girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about; anyway, there’s no one to hear it. His eyes narrowed. She read the codicil in his face: But be damn sure she’s not going to say such things in public. “Come, child,” he said, “not so much heat. I’m sorry about the harp. Let me be honest and confess it, I didn’t understand how important it was to you.” He patted her shoulder, quite unaware of the effort she made not to knock his hand away. “Sit down, please. I promised you an explanation today, and I’ve come to give it. Ah. Good.” He smiled at her as she slipped from under his hand and seated herself on the divan. “We aren’t kidnappers, child. Or pimps. We fight for Avosing’s future, child, we fight to drive the tyrant from our world. We need you, child, we need your gifts. I want to show you some of the things the Pajunggs are doing to us. They aren’t pretty, and if this were the world I dream of, you wouldn’t have to see these things, but I want you to understand us. You saw for yourself what the Pajunggs wanted to do to you in Keama Dusta, you know how the hiepler threatened you. We saved you from some of the horrors I’m going to show you.” His voice was low and gently persuasive, a seductive murmur caressing her ears, but she took no pleasure from it, was too aware of the deep dislike he felt for her. Shit on this talent, she thought. I can’t even enjoy my illusions anymore. No fun to be courted by someone you know despises you. He sat beside her, careful not to touch her, providing a low-voiced narration for the succession of images he cued into the screen.

  The forest scene vanished.

  Shaky, grainy pictures took its place, images captured by hidden cameras under difficult conditions.

  “This is where you would have performed.” The church casino, great and noble room, low-relief sculptures ten times life size, the pantheon of Pajungg gods, overlooking the games of chance; intent worshipers bending over boards or watching lights flicker, playing their games in reverent anxiety; hooded and robed croupiers; white-robed serving maids; hum of recited prayers rising above the assorted clicks and clacks and slaps and rustles of the games. “And this.” Whoever carried the camera followed an attendant through the players and past the private rooms and out the back of the church. After winding through a dizzying series of turns and twists he stepped into a cozier milieu where child whores of both sexes dressed in filmy short robes displayed themselves to men with a shared patina of wealth and power. A few of the children were her apparent age, but most were younger, even a number barely walking. “Slaves, all of them, sold by their parents.”

  Another scene. A house burning, dark-clad enforcers standing about, two of them holding the arms of a weeping man, others keeping the man’s wife and children herded together.

  “He never went to church, had several warnings; a bad season, wilt in his gancha grain, disease in his stock, got into debt; next year, prices were low, couldn’t pay his creditors; church seized the land and goods; he’s the one set the fire, wouldn’t let them have his house. See what happened to his sons and daughters.” Scene change. A slave auction, the children going one by one to the highest bidder.

  New scene. Twisted, savaged bodies barely recognizable as something that might once have been human. “Some are men who joined our fight; they were captured by enforcers. Some are men denounced to the church for heresy.”

  A miner who’d been caught hoarding amber, his body jerking as massive jolts of electricity hit him.

  More images documenting the cruelty of man to man.

  Meant to evoke horror and disgust in her. Meant to convince her to serve the Ajin and his cause. If she’d told him he was not so different from the men he wanted to replace, he would have been angry, perhaps a little hurt, but he wouldn’t have understood what she was saying. Because of his background, Head and Taggert and even the Pajunggs had seen him as a cynical manipulator only after power, but he was more than that. She remembered Head saying the thieves are heretics, not unbelievers. He believed in what he was doing, and like most true believers he was willing to use any means no matter how repulsive to achieve his goal.

  He grasped her shoulders, turned her to face him. “You see how the Pajunggs corrupt and oppress us. We have to change that, child, and to do that we have to convince all the Avosingers that change is possible.” Bending closer, he went into a short harangue about morality, the sacredness of home and tradition, sketching out a world where men and women knew their place and stayed in it, where there was no disruptive change, where life went on in calm comfortable channels. All very lovely, she thought, if you happen to be a man. Perolat wouldn’t like it much, and Dihann, well … She lowered her eyes and swallowed a giggle at the thought of Dihann’s reaction to being told she ought to subordinate herself to any man no matter how forceful and dynamic he was. She listened and kept her eyes down, resigned to playing the role he kept insisting on. It’s not for that long, she told herself, just until I find Grey and get him loose. It made her feel like vomiting, but she told herself she’d done worse things before this and survived them, she’d survive this.

  The Ajin led them back to the outer building, into a glare-free white-tiled space, filled with banks of computers and viewscreens relaying images from satellites even her lander’s sensitive detectors hadn’t noticed. Kell, worms eat your liver, by god, you really want Aleytys, you’re paying high for the chance of catching her. Men working with stone-faced dedication at consoles, looking up to nod a quick greeting at the Ajin as he moved past them, Shadith at his heels, Linfyar trailing behind.

  They passed through into a darker quieter hall and finally turned into a side room equipped as an infirmary, more gleaming white tile, white-enameled machines and other instruments, many of them new-made antiques in her eyes; like a lot of Avosing, a confusing mixture of late industrial and contemporary technologies. It was a large room with uncertain echoes, the bounding sounds making her itchy. It was a lot worse for Linfyar; he nudged closer to her, trembling. She dropped her arm around his shoulder, hugged him. “Roll ‘em up, Linfy, and hang on to me.” She looked from the Ajin to the small dumpy man he was talking to, made a small hissing sound, cut it off as it started to echo. “Hey,” she yelled. “I don’t like it here. I’m leaving.”

  The little man turned spectacled eyes to her, the harsh light glinting off the lenses making him look more machine than flesh. He stepped to the bank of black rubbery switches, clicked one over, and the echoes hushed so suddenly she almost stumbled as if she’d been pushing against some force removed without warning. He came around the examination table and stood in front of her, peering at her through those thick glasses, the pale yellow of his eyes intermittently visible, the thin almost white lashes. “This child?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Mmm.” He stumped around her, his hands folded over I his tight little paunch, high for a man, so high he looked pregnant. “Collar her?”

  “No. Nothing showing.”

  “Hm.” He took hold of her shoulder, started prodding at her back.

  She tried jerking away, but he held her too tightly, his fingers digging into her muscle. With a grunt of effort, she caught hold of his little finger, twisted it, then twisted away as he yelped with pain. “Keep your hands to yourself, fool.”

  “You … you … you …” He raised a fist.

  “Try it,” she flung at him.

  The Ajin got a grip on her hair and jerked her back, snapped to the other two men standing quietly in the background, “Take care of him.”

  After the melee was sorted out, the man’s finger restored to its joint, the Ajin swung her around, pushed her against the bank of switches. “I’m getting very tired of your insolence, girl.”

  She glared at him, all resolutions forgotten. “Biiig man, oh I’m so scared. Ask me,” she yelled at him, turned it into a chant. “Ask me ask me ask me. If you want something, ask me, don’t maul me about, ask me. I’m not stupid, or deaf—don’t treat me like I am. Easy little words, ask me.” She grew a bit calmer. “You didn’t like it when those creeps were fooling with the kid whores—how come you’re treating me like a whore? Like you can do anything you want with me and I shouldn’t complain? Huh?”

  He stared at her, pulled his hand away from her hair and rubbed it absently down his side. She’d hit something in him, she could feel that, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was, and she was more than a little startled and ashamed of her reactions. Lee’d told her a number of times she was letting this body make her forget what the years had taught her; for the first time Shadith was ready to concede she might be right. She’d gone through this sort of scene more than once with her mother in those difficult days around her first puberty, and here it was again. Oh god, do I really have to go through all that misery again? She pulled her mind back to her present predicament and waited for what he’d say.

  “You are a child and female,” he said. His voice was cold and flat, devoid of emotion. “You will do as you are told and create no more disturbances or you will be punished. You will behave as a proper young girl should behave; you will speak when you are spoken to and remain silent at other times. You will be modest and quiet in your manner. And you will understand that you are less than dust when compared to the great dream you are privileged to play a part in. Do you understand me?”

  Come on, Shadow, take a lesson from Linfy. She sneaked a glance at the boy crouched out of the way under the examining table, silent and inconspicuous as a small furry ghost. It took a minute, but she swallowed her loathing and said, meekly, “I hear.”

  They poked at her and prodded at her and sampled every fluid they could think of (the yellow-eyed doctor watching her with angry spite, his left hand bandaged, the little finger in a brace), recorded brain emissions while she was silent and while she was running off scales and a song or two, they fed her drugs and watched the results, put her under various sorts of stress. For her own pride’s sake she made the results as meaningless as she could, her mind and body control sufficient to let her duplicate results when necessary, but it was a strain trying to keep the readings logical and remember what she’d done before. A strain, yes, but also healing to her self-respect. For the most part they ignored Linfyar; these were technicians, not real researchers, and she was glad of it for his sake, since they had little of the explorer’s driving curiosity and were willing enough to leave him alone as long as they had her to play with.

  Those tests lasted all that long day and most of the next morning, then they announced that they were finished for the moment; it was time to evaluate their accumulated data. She went back to her rooms and let herself be locked in. Linfyar was asleep again on the divan. She scowled down at him, wondering if she should be worried about the amount of time he was spending in sleep, not certain her itchiness was anxiety about him or just jealousy that he found such a satisfactory way to pass the endless days. She was about ready to shriek from boredom. She’d already read through her handful of books twice, she didn’t feel like sleeping, and she certainly wasn’t up to fooling around with music, not in the mood. She went into the fresher and made faces at herself in the mirror until she got tired of looking at herself, then stripped and stood in the shower letting water as hot as she could stand it beat down on her body, first her front, then her back. After a while she shut the water off, wrapped the robe around her and ambled into the bedroom. She threw herself onto the bed and lay with her head on her arms, breathing in the dry dusty smell of the velvet bedspread. Body. Body. Body. Oh god, it’s so easy to forget when you don’t have one what happens in the body. Easier to dream when you’re a knot of nothing in a bit of sorcerous headgear gathering dust somewhere. She went back to her earliest memories and began reliving them, struggling to recall the smallest and most insignificant details, drifting gradually into a heavy, nightmare-ridden sleep.

  The doctor laced his hands over his paunch and blinked his weak yellow eyes at her while his acolytes attached sensors about her head and body, careful not to interfere with her ease of movement, making her rock and sway, reach and fold. Other silent white-clad men were setting up microphones about the chair. She watched all this without protest; even if she sang a real croon, nothing much was going to happen in this sterile room with its scrubbed air and literal-minded technicians. No pollen. No Linfyar to broaden the range of the sound. But she wasn’t going to take any chances, she was going to give them something that sounded similar to her ancient songs, but it would be enough off, enough of the harmonics and overtones missing, that even with the pollen it wouldn’t work the way they wanted. You’re not going to replace me with a flake player. When one of the men signaled they were finished, she looked around, straightened her back and resettled the harp. “Nothing’s going to happen, you know. I’ve been about more than you think, and this is the only world where I sing dreams. Must be the pollen.” She drew her hand across the strings, making a soft drift of sound. “This air.” She shrugged. “And the acoustics here are foul.”

  “Play.” The light glinted off the doctor’s glasses and showed the silver stopples in his ears as he adjusted them to shut off yet more of the sound in the room.

  Frowning, she plucked a series of single notes from the harp, then what she could do patterned itself in her mind and she slid into the almost-croon and sang it through. There was no trance effect even among the acolytes; with the echo killer on, the song dropped dead into the sterile air. She stilled the last sounds and sat with her arms curled about the harp, saying nothing, waiting for the Ajin to show up, wondering just what he’d say to her. If he said anything to her. He’d been conspicuously absent the last several days.