We found Giles in his rooms sitting on the bed with his back to us. Trevor’s body was gone. Jane looked aside at me, her eyes wide and mouth posed to ask a question, but I shook my head.
“Giles,” I called softly. “It’s Wendy and Jane.”
He turned. He had bound his hair back into a neat braid and changed his clothes—a long deep-blue tunic, not the mourning red I might have expected a Paphian to wear, but then he had not lived among his own people for many years. He looked quite calm, his mouth a little strained and eyes bloodshot; but his expression was peaceful, his voice steady as he spoke to us.
“You should not blame yourselves,” he said. He beckoned us to sit beside him on the bed, and I saw how his hands trembled, and felt how cold they were as they patted my own. “Neither of us knew that they were searching for you, Wendy, else we would have made other plans for you and Jane and Miss Scarlet—”
“They’re gone,” Jane broke in. She glanced nervously about the room, as though afraid of seeing Trevor’s corpse propped in a corner. “Scarlet and Fossa. They jumped out the window—the tracks seemed to go into the woods.”
Giles shut his eyes and ran a hand lightly over his face. “Ah, no,” he murmured; then said, “But no, I’m not surprised, not really.”
His voice shook slightly as he looked away, staring at the dark rectangle of a window set in the far wall. “Fossa hates the NASNA Aviators. He was enslaved by them for many years in Araboth before he escaped. Well, then.” He sighed and turned back to us. “We won’t have to worry about them, at least.”
“What do you mean, not worry?” Jane cried, aghast. “We should be out there now, looking for them!”
Giles shook his head adamantly. “ No. Fossa knows what he’s doing—they’ve probably set out for Cassandra. He knows the way, and even on foot they’ll probably get there before you do.”
“What are you talking about?” I stared at him as though he were mad. But Giles only sat calmly, stroking the worn cotton quilt with its pattern of interlocking circles. Double Wedding Ring, Trevor had called it; a gift from his daughter. A small brown stain had spread across one panel, and Giles’s fingers paused there as he answered.
“You can’t stay here. By tomorrow there will be more Aviators—sooner, if they come directly from the City of Trees.”
I blanched, and he went on quickly. “But I don’t think they will. From what those two told us, there is only a janissary force in the City now. The Aviators pulled out to attend to an insurrection in Vancouver, and the soldiers who remain have their hands full trying to keep down the rebels. As for the rest of us—we’ll all have to take sides now. It seems your talk of the genewars has actually come to pass,” he ended softly. His blue eyes stared mistily at the bed, and I knew he was speaking to Trevor and not to us. But then he seemed to recall where he was. He sighed again and stood, pacing to the wall where an old monitor hung crookedly from a pair of hooks. He straightened it, then clicked it on. The screen stayed blank, but the room filled with low music, gongs and chanting. A gamelan orchestra. I wondered again where the transmissions came from.
“Cassandra,” Giles said, as though he knew my thought. “I have already notified Cadence. They should have left by now—if the weather holds, if they don’t run into Aviators on the way, they should be here late tomorrow morning to take both of you back with them.”
“Cassandra? But what good will that do? And what about you?” Jane scowled, staring out the window to where the forest waited. “And Scarlet? What about them?”
“I told you, I believe they have already left for Cassandra. That was the plan, if ever anything happened—”
“So you’ve been expecting this?” Jane fairly shouted. “Some nice little toss-up with NASNA, and Fossa and Scarlet take to the woods?”
“Trevor had an escape planned long before we ever heard of you,” Giles said smoothly. A note of sorrow crept into his voice. “But you’re right, he did expect it—I think he hoped for it, in a way….”
“But not dying,” I cried. I thought of how intent Trevor had always been, how much like a man with some great work still ahead of him. “Surely he didn’t want that?”
Giles smiled, an odd, twisted smile. “I don’t think he cared—I know he wasn’t afraid of dying, not the way I am—but then, things are different for Trevor. He’s lived so long, and he had—well, he made plans, you know. I don’t think this really took him by surprise, in the end. And I know I’ll be with him again, but it’s just so…”
His voice trailed off, and he slumped over, weeping silently. Jane looked at me, her eyebrows raised, then glanced worriedly around the room—for weapons, I realized. She thought as I did: that Giles meant to kill himself.
“Well, we can’t leave you,” she said at last. “You’ll be—well, it’s just not a good idea, your being here alone. That’s all,” she ended awkwardly.
Giles drew a deep, gasping breath and looked up at her. “Oh, I won’t be alone, ” he said. His hand crept to the dark penumbra of blood on the quilt. “I’ve got him. ”
My flesh crawled at his tone. I had heard it before—that same note lodged somewhere between madness and exultation—first when I had watched the poet Morgan Yates kill herself at HEL, and then later when Dr. Harrow confronted me before her own suicide, and finally at the Engulfed Cathedral with Tast’annin. Suddenly I felt sick and weak, thinking of all those other deaths that I had caused. There was a roaring in my ears, as though some wind whirled inside my brain, a raging gale that might extinguish me; and at the corner of my eyes I saw small bursts of light, blinding white and yellow: the warning signs of a seizure. I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and waited until the roaring dimmed, and the blinding flashes cooled to dull throbbing blues and greens. Finally I let my breath out in a long sigh.
“I have to sleep,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, I have to go—” I turned and stumbled for the door. After a moment I heard Jane follow me.
Before we stepped into the hallway, I stopped and looked back at Giles. He had stopped crying, though his face still looked wet and raw. He gazed at the monitor on the wall as though its screen held some beloved image.
“We will wait, then,” I said. “Till tomorrow, at least. For them to come from Cassandra.”
Beside me Jane made an angry hissing sound, but she only said, “I guess we don’t have much choice.”
“Oh no,” said Giles. Slowly he turned to look at us, his luminous blue eyes as brilliant and cold as Trevor’s optics. In his slender hand he held the Aviator’s gun. “You don’t understand, my friends—
“You no longer have any choice at all.”
7
The Alliance Spreads Its Net
“I WISH TO SPEAK with you, O my sister Kalamat.”
Even without looking up from where I pored over the scrolls that held the history of Quirinus, I knew the voice belonged to Cumingia, though it could have been that of any one of us. Our voices were as alike as our faces; in a roomful of us talking and laughing, our Masters had never been able to distinguish one from another. But I felt within me the taut probings of Cumingia’s anxious nature, just as, blindfolded and deafened, I would know Lusine by the tranquil warmth I felt in her presence, or Hylas by the rage that radiated from her like the venomous prongs of a sagittal.