“And thus I taught him, half a millennium ago! But now I know that if we do not love, we have no right to rule,” said Varuneh fiercely. They walked on in silence until they reached the palace’s first balcony, where dark vines slithered over bricks that glinted copper and silver in the half-dark. They held hands but did nothing more, in case they should be seen. For their love, whatever Varuneh claimed, could never be like the love of the shortlived. They had come too far for that; they had left innocence behind, in that place where go the high voices of young boys and the fragrances of dead flowers.…

  “I feel—” As they neared the palace Davaryush could not talk anymore. The Inquest might be listening, with its mindhearers or its secret eyes and ears whose clutch tentacled from the thinkhives of Uran s’Varek itself. “No more speaking,” he said.

  “Yes, Daavye.” Three moonshafts striped her face, her hair, highlighting the gray. He knew now that she had made herself more beautiful for him: some cosmetics, some touches of a renewer’s art. Stepping into the palace, she said, “Remember only Shtoma, and know that what you do is right.”

  “But I feel so bounded—so used! It’s not fair for me not to be free, free as the lowest of the clanless—”

  “Shush, shush, Daavye, Daavye,” Varuneh whispered. “Free means nothing. You? Free? An Inquestor and King-ling?” Davaryush stepped through the barrier of nothingness into his private chamber. The darkness was complete, oppressive.

  “Lights!” he called out. “Music, color!”

  At once the walls were bright with shimmer blurring whorls of light, and music erupted, a jangle of broken whisperlyres and untuned waterflutes—

  “Let the attendants sleep,” Vanineh said. “You don’t want all this pageantry now. You need … something else.” And she embraced him, leading him on … with a wave she silenced the unseen slaves who minded the machines that minded the Kingling’s whims. There was darkness again, warm this time. Distantly, Davaryush felt desire stir in him. He felt the floor soften beneath his feet, he felt himself lose his balance, fall into the arms of the old woman—

  “Forget Ynyoldeh now! Remember only Shtoma!” Varuneh whispered

  Davaryush mindflicked, dismissing the shimmercloak. It flowed away from him, huddling in a hollow of the floor. The woman waited; she was naked now, but clothed still more than ever in her immense age, her knowledge, her power. He fell towards her, he felt the falling like—

  —a varigrav coaster! When Davaryush was nine years old, celebrating the end of his first war—

  They had come to Alykh, the pleasure planet, he and Tymyon and Ayulla and Kyg and the other companions, losing themselves in the cacophony of crowds. …

  “Wait until you see this!” Kyg shouted, and she leapt onto the plate like a cat. They disappeared—

  And Daavye saw it. A topless tower of brick and stone and concrete and plastic and sparkling amethysts, studding the walls like jeweled knuckle-dusters. “What is it?”

  “Daavye, don’t you know anything?” Tymyon, cackling offensively.

  Kyg, with mock primness: “It’s a … varigrav coaster!” The tower glinted oddly, catching the sunset. “Look,” Kyg said; “you dive off the top, see, and it sets into action a series of random gravity-field interferences, and you plummet like a hawk and you float upward and you swing dangerously and you curve and then you land where you started, like a feather….”

  (“It’s beautiful,” whispered Ayulla the silent.)

  “Well, let’s go!” Tymyon and Kyg raced each other to the tower, and everywhere were the crowds—aliens, child-warriors brandishing their weapons, pimps, crusader-flagellants, Inquestors and their retinues, slave-hunters, veiled Whispershadows from the far borders of the Dispersal, dirty children strumming on dreamharps, dissonant alien musics, an itinerant space opera howling and screeching through full-blast ampli-jewels, and Davaryush was standing spellbound, unmoving. He had never …

  The tower held him, though. And the little specks that were people, dust-motes in the violet sunset.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Ayulla’s voice, almost lost in the confusion.

  “No.” He was petrified!

  “Come on! They’re all the rage now, they’re all the way from Shtoma, don’t you know, from the far borders of the Dispersal—”

  “No! No!” (It was said that the greatest thrill, when you fell, was the very certainty of death, suddenly averted by a twist of the field. At the moment of inevitable doom, it was said, you felt so alive.)

  Ayulla was laughing at him. “How many people have you killed, Daavye? How can you be so scared of life?”

  … But now I am Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning … and those child-warriors I fought with, where are they now? The children laughing scornfully as their laser-irises sliced the enemy, dying in terrible pain that lasted but a nanosecond, living only for laughter and killing and the oblivion of the varigrav coasters. . . • I’m an Inquestor. And they*re dead.

  Davaryush woke just in time to force the tears back into his eyes. Varuneh was looking at him and combing her hair; the aircomb ruffled the scraggly strands and then smoothed them out. “You call that lovemaking, Daavye, when you fall asleep in mid-embrace … ?”

  “You’ve known the greatest lovers in the universe, I suppose, and they’re all dust now,” Davaryush said, hiding his discomfort in an easy riposte. Then he summoned his shimmercloak to him and rose. “Give me the real dawn,” he said imperiously to the waiting walls. “No fakery today.”

  All at once the night lifted, shifted, sifted in pieces of broken daylight until they could feel the two suns hugging each other close, shimmerdazzling the cities into a blinding smear of light… . “Darkfield!” Davaryush called out, and the light was tempered a notch, soothing the smart in his eyes. Attendants with trays of morning viands were materializing one by one on the displacement plate of the chamber; now they advanced towards the two, making formal obeisance and presenting the breakfast. Davaryush picked a skewer of sourmeat and brandished it like a dagger for a moment; the two laughed nervously. “The Lady Ynyoldeh is here?” he asked one of the pages.

  “Lord Inquestor, her palace is in orbit, maintaining its position directly above the pinnacle of Kallendrang,” the boy said.

  There fell a sudden swift darkness. “Look!” Varuneh said, pointing to where a shadowshape blotted out the sun. “Like a hawk, like a bird of prey—”

  They stood up and rushed to the deopaqued walls. When Davaryush looked down he saw the wobbly shadow flitting over the city, a moving blob of blackness. The attendants clustered around, not wanting to miss one of the Kingling’s whims. Then Davaryush looked up at the sky and saw, where the suns had shone a moment before—

  Great silver wings, spread out and motionless, a hawk with a starship’s span, slicing the blue-white sky—

  “It’s Ynyoldeh,” Varuneh said. “She has style, certainly.”

  “Quick!” Davaryush shouted. “Prepare to receive her! Get a clearance for the palace to land at once!” But he continued to stare at the monstrous bird… . Now it seemed to swerve, playing the wind. Now it overtook the sun, freeing a shaft of light to bum Davaryush’s eyes. Now it turned quick somersaults in the air; now it retracted and flapped its wings with a thunderpeal… . Davaryush tried to remember Ynyoldeh.

  Once they had been young together on Uran s’Varek. They had been Inquestors-to-be, learning the mysteries of compassion from the Grand Inquestor Ton Alkamathdes, who had hunted a hundred utopias. She had always been cruel, even then; he had always wondered why the Inquest in its wisdom had use for such a person. But the Inquest was wise—

  Uran s’Varek of the endless pearly daylight… .

  Memories: a plain unbroken, furred with green and spreckled with blood-red flowers … a city like a smudge of mist, hugging the horizon that smeared into the luminous sky … and the girl.

  Coming towards him. Deliberately, her eyes never leaving his. Her hair, grass-green and wild, streaming in a manmade wind, a luxuriant gesture for the chill stillness of the air. The shimmercloak carelessly slitted and knotted at the waist, to show the curve of incipient breasts, just a hint of them … the slow, graceful walk, like a willow bent by wind.

  And now she faced him and her eyes were level with his; yet she had never seemed to stop moving. He was saying angrily, “What are you doing here, in my assigned territory?”

  “I am Ynyeh. Are you Daavye?”

  He nodded. “You shouldn’t be here. I’ve been given a year’s solitude, you shouldn’t have blundered here… But what harm could she be? She must be fresh out of puberty, fresh named Inquestor. He was sorry for her. Gently he said, “Ynyeh, where are you from? Shall I conduct you back to the seminary city?”

  “No … look!” She clapped her hands and a shtezhnat board appeared between them, a holosculpture; then she said, “Make the first move!” They sat on the grass and moved the pieces idly, not caring who won or lost, even cheating at times. And then—

  The board was snatched out of the air. There was Alka-mathdes, the Grand Inquestor, glowering, his sunken eyes onyx-bright.

  “Davaryush. Ynyoldeh.” He never spoke above a whisper, for this was his way of commanding absolute concentration in his pupils. “Know that for each piece you played and lost, a city, somewhere in the Dispersal, has fallen and its millions have been killed, dispossessed, maimed, widowed. For each starship you slaughtered a starship has died. Know this always: There is no move an Inquestor can make without wielding life and death!”

  Daayve, shaking, trembling, protesting, “I don’t want to kill anyone! I used to kill when I was a soldier child, I killed and killed and I never want to kill again—”

  But Ynyoldeh had said nothing. Her face, absolutely beautiful, utterly remorseless, did not change.

  Shrugging, Alkamathdes said, “It’s just an allegory,” and vanished.

  Had he been real, or just a projection of the thinkhives? On Uran s’Varek they taught that the central truth was what mattered, not the reality—and that the world was a flux of apparitions, shifting and twisting around the truth.

  “Only an allegory,” Daavye whispered. Then he said, bitterly, “Must they always watch us? Wasn’t I supposed to be alone for this year, the only year of my. whole life when I need not feel weighed down by compassion?”

  A clenched look crossed Ynyoldeh’s face, then cleared. Davaryush recognized the look with a shock. “You wanted them to die!” he said. “You don’t want it to have been an allegory!”

  But she only smiled a coquettish smile, and invited him to play at sex; they played for a while, and Davaryush found that he could no longer enjoy such games … that already, while he was barely in his teens, he suffered from the continual anguish of Inquestorhood, the need to think and reflect and contemplate and build enormous labyrinths of thought, not to see things simply… . Ynyoldeh had not come by chance. The Inquestors left nothing to chance; if you did not learn that in your first few hours on Uran s’Varek, your life was in danger, compassion or no compassion.

  On the topmost parapet the great bird perched, its silvery claws clutching two twisted spires, its mirror eyes sparkling in the twin sunlight.

  So this was what she did now, Davaryush thought, this woman whom the Inquest has given power over the weaponry of a whole quadrant, this Queen of Daggers … little Ynyeh. He mounted the steps, each step a different marble laced with lapis. His shimmercloak flapped behind him in the wind of the city’s highest level. Behind him came the people of the court: squires, lords, jesters, musicians with twangish lyres of steel and trumpets of gilded conch, making a raucous ceremonial music of welcome … there was Varuneh too, her shimmercloak put aside and replaced with the sable robe and clingfire sash of a woman of rank. The crowd murmured: Davaryush sensed their uneasiness. He waved for silence. It fell, like a cloak falling over the corpse of a fallen warrior.

  Then he spoke. “I greet you, Lady Ynyoldeh. Welcome to this poor planet of mine, you who dominate a thousand planets.”

  The bird seemed to open its beak and utter a bloodcurdling screech. And out of the screech, like an afterecho, came the silvery laughter of a young girl. He remembered the voice, and froze.

  The voice—unchanged after all these centuries? Davaryush approached the mechanical avian. Its wings flapped once, with a ghostly rasping sound—an ancient flier with its joints unoiled? an old afflicted man moaning his death-cry? —and then came the girl’s voice again: “There is history, and there is no history ”

  They were ritual words in the game of makrúgh . Davaryush did not want to be rushed like this, but he could not help but respond: “All things must change, yet all is encompassed in the greater Stasis. We are one, our eyes are illuminated by the one Compassion; we are of the Inquest ”

  “History there is, and yet no history ” The crowd of courtiers was still hushed. Then another peal of girlish laughter rent the air, and a ripple of nervous chatter swept through the gathering.

  “Ah, Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning!” the girl’s voice said, still half chuckling, “I give you the freedom of my flying palace, the freedom of my domain.”

  The belly of the silverbird burst open, and disgorged a railinged floater englobed in a darkfield. It came down noiselessly, landing at Davaryush’s feet. I’m in danger, Davaryush thought. She’s been here for thirty seconds and already she’s used the Ritual. The exchange had been in the hightongue, of course, so many of the courtiers would not have understood any of it. Shrugging, Davaryush climbed onto the floater, nodded once, swayed for a second as the floater whirred to life. In a moment he was high above the crowd, whose welcoming music lost its harshness in the distance and became gentle as shimmerviols….

  In the bird-palace’s belly was a navel-portal that irised open to admit him. He was in a huge antechamber; it was carpeted with fur that imitated the texture and color of a shimmercloak. Ruby carbuncles infested the Ontian marble of its walls.

  Davaryush began to walk ahead of him, when—

  Blocking his path was a mechanical: a hulking, three-meter-tall, pithecine man-mimic of dull metal, with a square head and four crude hinged arms. But nestled in those arms, like a baby in the arms of a mother, was—

  Davaryush felt surprise rush to his face. Cursing himself silently, he put himself on guard. He hoped that his face had not colored even for a moment; for he knew that every trace of emotion was being monitored.

  In the arms of the robot was a young girl in a shimmer-cloak.

  Unchanged. How? How could you forget the grass-green hair that billowed in the airwind like wind-tousled fields of grain? And yet those eyes … blank as the mirror eyes of the hawk that was her palace….

  “Ynyeh—”

  “Pretty, no, Daavye?” It was the same small voice with just a twist of mercilessness in it. “I’m still in orbit around your world, you know. This hawk-palace has a nest-palace, not built for atmospheric journeys. I’m not here in person because … I like to keep the odds in my favor. I thought the choice of soma would tickle your fancy, you sentimental old fool.”

  Davaryush waited. To speak now would be to lose ground. Clearly Ynyeh had embarked on the shenjesh, or formal exposition, in the game of makrúgh .

  “Tongue-tied, Daavye?” The blank-eyed girl laughed, snuggled into the mechanical’s metallic embrace. “You’re wondering about this body, aren’t you?” She reached her hand out, tantalizing him. “Here, hold my hand.”

  He touched it for a moment, snatched it back—

  “You’re—”

  The girl laughed again. “You’re wondering where I get them, aren’t you? Oh, Daavye, Daavye, how I hate to be old! I clone them, silly. Then I devive them, just before puberty … compassionately, of course, compassionately!” she added. “Pretty, no?”

  “You cannot play makrúgh by proxy! I’ll not come to terms with a—”

  “You can’t say it, can you? Oh yes, I heard of your decree banning them from the city of Effelkang. But you can’t have a personal meeting. Although you must admit that this is all very sophisticated—I mean the technology that allows this thing to speak, to move, as gracefully as I once did… .” She flashed her eyes at him, a grotesque parody of an erotic look. “But it’s so chillingly appropriate!”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I take great care in my selection of proxies, you know. They are what the world sees, after all. Even if they are only corpses.”

  FOURTEEN

  COLORS

  Touch-brother!

  She woke, signing it on the soft alien floor. Already the boy was there. He seemed to fall into Touch-brother’s place so naturally, but yet … she could not quite repress the knowledge that to feel love for him would be unspeakable. The boy was there and there was light here^and she saw him. She saw him with the touching of her eyes.

  His own eyes first, not blood-gouged and empty, but shining, like undark over moving water.

  “Have you had a bad dream?” Kelver said. She scratched the windshapes on her arms, making sure of what he had said. Then she replied, carefully forming the windshapes, ‘Touch-brother.” She coined the word easily out of the words she had learnt to build from windshapes.

  In the light—it burst down from the deopaqued ceiling, almost painfully—she saw how his hair was like fire almost, shifting from dark to undark in unpredictable patterns when he moved his head. He was so beautiful to her … more beautiful even than the angels of the blind, the angels of the childish fingerchants that had proved so alien to the truth. “You are thinking about the boy you lost, in the Dark Country?”

  She said, “Dead.” But what she meant was dead without shame, for he had not been consigned to the angels. And she needed to do that for Touch-brother, because he had belonged to her people in a way she had never belonged, and she wanted him to have the respect of a real death.

  She closed her eyes and thought of him, squeezing the light tight out. And now she was in the Dark Country and had no word for seeing and he was touching her in her profane places, and his touch was a slow smile. But the undark was bursting behind and forcing her to see—