“Try it,” Tatian said. “This is Warreven’s residence, so I don’t know how long I’ll be here. But I’ll keep in touch myself. Go ahead and get as much of the surplus in from the mesnies as you can—you can handle payments, Derry—and by the time you’re ready to ship, this should have blown over.”
“All right,” Derebought said. “Be careful.”
“I will be,” Tatian answered, and cut the connection. He stood for a moment, staring at the screen without really seeing the shut-down codes. This wasn’t smart, that he did know; he was getting much too deeply involved in Hara’s politics, and if he had any sense at all, he’d leave Warreven asleep, tell Jaans Oddyny he wouldn’t take care of any more payments, and pull himself and NAPD well clear of the whole situation. He had the contracts in hand, signed and sealed, and Stiller was bound to honor them. That should be enough for anyone. He shook his head then, turned away from the now-dark center—just the time display glowing green in the upper corner of the multiple displays. It was too late for that now, he was already committed—and besides, he admitted silently, he didn’t want to abandon Warreven. Ȝe was the only reasonable person—reasonable indigene, anyway—he’d met on this unreasonable planet. He owed 3im what support he could give.
~
Agede, the Doorkeeper: (Hara) one of the seven spirits who mediates between God and Man; Agede’s domain is change, death, birth, and healing.
11
Warreven
When he woke again, it was afternoon, the light that filtered in through the shutters cool and indirect. He lay still for a few minutes, hoping that if he didn’t move he could drop back into sleep, but the pain in his neck and down his chest and ribs was too much to be ignored. He had a headache, too, radiating from the bruised eye and socket to stab both temples and down to the point of his jaw. Turning his head to check the chronometer sent weird streaks of light across his vision, pain flaring with them, and he rolled instead onto his side—setting off more aches, but not as sharply painful—so that he faced the glowing box. It read eighteen-ten; he swore, thinking of Haliday, and crawled out of bed.
He was able to dress himself, barely, struggled into loose trousers and a tunic that opened from neck to hem, but his hair defeated him. It still hurt too much to raise his arms above his head, hurt even worse when he tried to twist the long strands into a braid, and in the end he left the mass of it loose and stumbled toward the kitchen to get more doutfire. Tatian had left the box open on the counter, and Warreven carefully extracted four more of the fragile rolls. Two shattered under his touch; he sighed and licked his finger, dabbed up the shards, letting the thin, bitter fragments dissolve on his tongue.
“How are you feeling?” Tatian was standing in the doorway, arms braced against the walls to either side.
“Like somebody hit me,” Warreven answered, and was rewarded by one of Tatian’s quick grins.
“I wonder why?”
Warreven smiled back, cautiously, newly aware of bruises, and reached into another cabinet for a bottle of sweetrum. He uncorked it, drank, flinching as the liquor hit the cuts on his lip. The raw sugar taste of it seemed to cling to his back teeth, but it took away the bitterness of the doutfire. “Maybe because somebody did. Has Malemayn called, have you heard anything about Hal?”
“He called around noon,” Tatian answered. “Oddyny’d been over to look at 3im. He said there hadn’t been any change, that he’d call if there was. He left a number at the hospital, though, if you want to try that.”
Warreven took another swallow of the sweetrum, started to nod, and felt the muscles of his neck tighten painfully. “Yes—it’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want to talk to him myself.”
“I figured,” Tatian said, and stepped back out of the doorway.
Warreven slipped past him, still carrying the bottle of sweetrum, vaguely surprised that the off-worlder’s presence was so reassuring. Maybe it was the very matter-of-fact way that he’d stepped in, the ordinary, reasonable common sense of it all—which hardly seemed to be common anymore. The media center was lit, both screens turned to news channels, and Tatian cleared his throat.
“You seem to have made the narrowcasts.”
“Me?” Warreven looked at the screens. Both showed the Harbor Market, crowded not with merchants but with the same sort of crowd that had been dispersed the day before. Even the rana band was back, half a dozen drummers now, and a pair of flute players, perched on a platform that looked higher and less stable than die previous day’s stage. People were dancing—any time there was drumming, people would dance—but beyond them crates and spent fuel cells and all the other debris that collected on the docks had been dragged into a crude barricade. Tough-looking dockers—and not just dockers, Warreven realized, but men and women in ordinary clothes, with only the multicolored rana ribbons to mark them as something different—leaned against it, blocking all access to the Gran’quai.
“Officially,” Tatian said, “they’re continuing yesterday’s protest against the ghost ranas. But the main thrust of what they’re saving is, if you and Haliday aren’t safe, no one is.”
“Wonderful,” Warreven said, and took another swallow of the sweetrum. The pain was starting to ease, even the headache, and the lights were beginning to show faint, rainbowed haloes. It was going to be difficult to balance comfort and sobriety.
“The code’s there,” Tatian said, and pointed to the table beside the media center. He had found the remote as well, Warreven saw, and stopped to collect it, then turned to the couch, shoving aside the quilts Tatian had left neatly piled there. He sat down, setting the bottle beside him, and ran stiff fingers over the remote’s control surfaces, bringing up the main screen and then the new codes. The menus flickered past, a montage of text and symbol, bringing him first into the hospital’s main system, and then into a secondary paging system. He entered the last segment of Malemayn’s codes, and waited. The communications screen went blank, except for a time display; in the screen beside it, the drummers moved in frantic rhythm, following a chanter’s gestures. His shadow fell across the heads of the dancing crowd, stretched to the edge of the empty Market. As he turned, jeering, to the camera, Warreven could see the Trickster’s mark vivid on his cheek.
“Raven?” The communications screen cleared with the word, and Malemayn’s face appeared at its center. Warreven could see white walls behind him, and the occasional out-of-focus figure of a nurse or doctor, elongated shapes in pale green: still calling from a public cubicle, he thought, which meant Haliday wasn’t well enough to have a private room. Malemayn sounded worn out, and the stubble was dark on his cheeks. Warreven touched his own face, feeling the coarse hairs starting, and wondered if he would be able to shave himself in a few days, once the swelling went down.
“How’s Hal?” he asked.
“Stable,” Malemayn answered. “No change from what I told Tatian. That off-world doctor, Oddyny, she was here again, and she says he, 3e should be moved over to the Starport as soon as 3e’s able, which should be in a day or two. Ȝe’s still unconscious, but Oddyny says not to worry. They’re keeping 3im under to let the treatments work.”
Warreven allowed himself a long sigh of relief. He hadn’t realized, until that instant, just how frightened he had been. “So 3e’ll be all right?”
Malemayn nodded. “Oddyny says it’s going to take a month or so, but 3e’ll be fine. How are you?”
“Sore,” Warreven said, and Malemayn laughed.