The sound of a key rasping in the lock of her door did bring her head up. To her right, across a narrow corridor, she saw the trio of Elementals still trapped in their metal-rod walled cell. They clung to the bars with white-knuckled hands and watched their captor with a hunger that no food could assuage.
In the half-second she studied them, Deirdre took vicious delight in noting that the bruise on the right side of Malthus' face had not yet begun to lose its color.
Her blue eyes flicked up at the rotund figure opening the door to her cell. Khalsa moved her tray forward with his foot, then slowly closed the door behind him. He smiled at her, the corners of his mouth disappearing beneath folds of chubby cheeks. In his red robe, the demi-Precentor looked like a monk bent on exchanging his contemplation of the sin of gluttony for that of lust.
"Doctor Lear, please, they tell me you are not eating." He brought his thick-fingered hands together over the ample mound of his belly. "I would have come sooner, but some Steiner partisans required suppression. Listen to me, you must not mourn that man. He was not worthy of your tears. He was a cad who only led you into trouble." His voice dropped into a whisper. "He had a wife and children back in the Federated Suns. You are too good for the likes of Dave Jewell."
Deirdre gave him the coldest stare her red-rimmed eyes could muster, but not trusting her voice, she said nothing. She took refuge in Khalsa's use of Kai's alias because it proved how much the man truly overrated himself. Keeping his identity hidden had been important to Kai and she had worked hard not to betray him. Even as he died, I could not call out to him!Nothing would make her betray him in death.
Khalsa got closer, inching his way across the cell, until he could ease his round buttocks onto the edge of her cot. "You must eat to keep up your strength."
She continued to regard him mutely.
A single bead of nervous sweat formed on his brow. "Well, I was going to save this as a reward, if you ate something, but I think your spirit needs some sustenance. 'Nourish the soul and you nourish the whole,' as the Primus has said more than once." He smiled like a preacher preparing to share the good word with a condemned convict. "It turns out that my superiors want the Elementals transshipped to our main compound at Valigia tomorrow. You will be able to remain here, in Dove Costoso, with me!"
Khalsa clapped his hands as if that made things right in some way. His expectant leer mixed sexual desire and childlike innocence into a volatile concoction. As the first wave of revulsion passed over her, Deirdre felt a jolt of adrenaline surge into her bloodstream. "No longer will you have to endure the sight of these outland murderers."
Khalsa's right hand pressed down on her left knee in the same motion as someone pushing down the plunger on a detonator.
Deirdre jerked her knee out from beneath his hand and stood in one pantherish motion. "Don't you dare, you worm." Her hands curled into fists. "I wouldn't stay with you even if the alternative was being dropped into the sun. The Elemental might be outlanders and murderers, but there was never any question about what they were. We knew them for enemies and they came at us with no hesitation. Even so, they acquitted themselves honorably and were interested in fair fights."
Khalsa's face changed color, almost a match for the ash-gray floor. "But ... but they murdered your paramour."
Deirdre stalked toward him. "Did they? You set them on our trail. You betrayed us. You hid in a cloak of supposed neutrality, yet you took us into custody and called them. Who is to blame, the dogs of war or their masters?"
Khalsa scrambled to his feet and half-stumbled over the food tray on his way back toward the door. "You are mad, woman! I offer you more than a lifetime spent in a prison camp." He fumbled with a key, then inserted it in the lock and cranked the door open. "You doom yourself."
She darted forward and caught the thick-set man with an open-handed slap that left a red mark and four furrows on his cheek. "Beast! You're lucky you disgust me enough that I do not take time to think things through. With my training and knowledge, I could agree to your arrangement, then make sure that however long I let you live, it would be sheer agony."
She pulled back and let him squeeze his bulk out through the door. "Run, Khalsa, run. As long as I live, you will never be safe. I will torment you in your dreams. You will taste my venom in your food and with every little ache or pain, you will wonder if I have gotten to you." Deirdre let herself laugh in the most horrid manner she could imagine. "Someday, you will be right!"
Unnerved, Khalsa locked the door behind himself, then fled from the room. Across from her, Taman Malthus slowly, stiffly stood and clutched the bars of his cell in massive hands. "What a worthy match for a warrior you are."
"Don't flatter yourself," she hissed, "I would no more be with you than I would him. You're the one with blood on his hands. You killed—no, you murdered him ..."
The pain in Malthus' eyes shocked her enough to stop her in mid-tirade. "You are wrong, Doctor. I am no murderer. Only by going against the best can we confirm that we are the best." His hands opened, then finger by finger, slowly gripped the bars again. "Your paramour knocked me down, but I was not defeated. He knew it and he knew he would pay the price for his bold strike. To characterize what I did as murder renders my very worthy foe nothing more than a victim."
Deirdre grabbed the bars of her cell as her body began to tremble. "He wasa victim—a victim of this stupid war!" As her adrenaline began to drain away, fatigue and weakness poured lead into her muscles.
"That, Doctor, is a foul slander. Jewell knew and accepted his part in our fight. He was more a warrior than many within the Clans." In a burst of fury, Malthus yanked at the bars but they did not give way. "Had ComStar not robbed me of my victory, I, Taman Malthus, would have made good on my promise to the both of you."
Kai died for no reason!Despite the sincerity of the Star Captain's words, she felt her spirit begin to fold in on itself. The fact that Kai had died needlessly hammered at her and slipped in to replace the trauma of her father's death. It reinforced her lifelong conviction that war and killing were moronic and a weakling's way out. She knew Kai acknowledged this, too, yet he had gone to his death like a moth drawn inexorably to a flame.
She opened her mouth to say something, but the door-lock tones stopped her. The dungeon door opened again. The fire rekindled in Deirdre's belly as she saw Khalsa's scarlet bulk, but she held her tongue as she realized he was backing into the room. The light flashed off his bald head as it tipped back in a painfully awkward position.
The reason for his deformed posture was the barrel of the autorifle stuffed up his right nostril.
"Doctor, I don't know if this is the proper time or place, but I have this pain," quipped the man with the gun as he forced Khalsa into the room. "Are you seeing patients?"
* * *
The transparent and radiant joy on Deirdre's face made Kai's heart thump faster in his chest. She retreated from the bars of her cell and pressed her hands over her open mouth. She blinked twice, then stared at him as if willing him to evaporate like a ghost.
"Is it really you?"
Kai smiled and nodded. "Either I'm here or," he jiggled the rifle, "the demi-Precentor is having a very bad nightmare."
"Urkle," commented Khalsa.
Kai guided the corpulent man by the nose over to the door. "Open it."
The demi-Precentor pulled the keys from his belt. "You'll never get away with this."
Kai refrained from jerking the trigger. "If I want your advice, I'll open your head and sift your brains for it. I'm tired and I'm angry and I bounced bough by bough down through a pine tree to a very hard landing at the base of that drop-off. Open. The. Door."