THE NAMES OF THEIR kin had gained them entrance to the house and a rapid and willing guide to the place where their sister lay, recovering from her wounds.
It was well, Edger thought, following Alys Tiazan Clan Erob, Cousin to Miri Robertson Tiazan Lady yos'Phelium, that they had not tarried, but had descended to the planet surface with all haste and come directly to this dwelling-place.
Truth, it had been Sheather's disquiet that had spurred them to seek their kin so speedily. Yet Sheather had studied Miri Robertson to a depth that none other of the Clutch had yet studied an individual of the Clans of Men, and Edger had been willing to heed his brother's impatience.
Nor was this impatience found to be excessive, once the door to Clan Erob's house had been opened to them. The news given by Alys Tiazan was alarming in the extreme and Edger hoped most stringently that they had arrived with speed enough, and skill sufficient for the tasks which bore their names.
Before him, the impossibly frail person Alys Tiazan ran. Her red hair, so like his sister's, was made into double braids that lifted a little in the wind of her own passing. Walls barred her way, then slid silently and swiftly aside, allowing her, and, quickly after her, themselves, into a short, quiet hall, where a single man wearing the clothing and sidearm of a mercenary soldier stood at guard before a door.
He looked up as they bore down upon them, frowned and moved a few steps forward, holding up his many-fingered hand, palm turned to them.
"Hold it," he said to Alys Tiazan. "You ain't taking them in there, are you, kid?"
"Indeed, I am," she returned, somewhat breathlessly. "They have kin-right. My cousin will wish to see them immediately."
He was a well-grown male of the kind which named themselves "Terran," yet he did have to look up quite some distance to survey both Edger and Sheather.
"Kin right?" he repeated, eyes squinted a little.
"The child speaks truly," Edger answered. "Miri Robertson Tiazan, Lady yos'Phelium, Captain Redhead, as she is known here, is sister to myself and this my brother. We are likewise kin to he who is named here Val Con yos'Phelium Scout."
The soldier frowned down at Alys. "Orders was, kin visits only, and as few of them as possible. Cap'n Redhead ain't hardly eight hours outta the 'doc, kid. She gets too tired, the techs'll stick her back in the box, and you can depend on it she won't like that."
"In fact," Sheather spoke up, with a forcefulness much unlike his previous diffidence, "we are here precisely because we have heard alarming reports of our sister's health. It would ease us, could we see her, speak with her, and make our own evaluation of her condition."
"Oh." The soldier chewed his lip, then appeared to take a decision with a sharp nod of his head. "OK, I can see where you'd want to make sure she's on the mend. I can let you in for a quick look, but like I said, there ain't no profit to anybody in getting her tired out to where the techs take an interest. Especially not with her partner in the state he's in."
Edger blinked. "We have heard that our brother's situation is dire."
"Well," the soldier said judiciously, turning to lay his hand on the door-plate, "he ain't as bad as he was six days ago, but I sure wouldn't want to trade places with him." The door slid open and he stepped aside, waving a casual salute.
"There you go. Remember what I told you, now."
"We will remember," Sheather said, and followed his brother into the room where their sister lay, convalescent among the songless.
RED-HAIRED MIRI ROBERTSON, lately captain of the Lytaxin Irregulars, lay against a mountain range of pillows, eyes closed. The room was full of sound—usual sickroom stuff: the bubble and babble of the machinery; the occasional rustle from the med tech there to tend them—and her. Funny, she thought, somewhat muzzily, how sickrooms always sounded just the same, Terran or Liaden, planetside or space based.
Sighing—quietly, otherwise the tech would be after her to take a nap, like she just hadn't spent six Standard Days unconscious in an autodoc—sighing, she marshaled her attention, deliberately blocking out the too-familiar sounds of the sickroom, and focusing on the place inside her head where she'd gotten used to finding the—ah, hell, call it the life force, call it the soul-shadow, or just call it the pattern, of her lifemate.
Previously, this edifice had been scintillant, brilliant with color, cunning in its complexity. A little more recently, she had observed it fading, the clever interlacings unraveling with regal, horrifying precision. Val Con had been dying, then, of various wounds, the most serious being the bullet he'd taken off an Yxtrang Elite Guard while in the process of stealing an atmospheric fighter craft the guard had considered, reasonably enough, belonged to his outfit.
Elite Guards used bullets with a smorgasbord of loads—explosives, hallucinogens, and other not-so-goodies. The bullet that had nicked Val Con had carried nerve poison. He hadn't taken a full hit, which was the good news, a full hit being something that could drop a full-grown Yxtrang soldier, and probably melt your basic "a bit over average height—for a Liaden" on the spot.
So, Val Con hadn't died, though at that his luck was mixed on the day. They'd managed to share his other injuries between them so that she ended up in the 'doc for days, being healed of wounds she'd never taken, and he was still sealed in a crisis unit, not quite out of danger yet. Shan had explained it to her—all right, he'd tried to explain it to her, but she had a feeling she was going to have to get him to go over the tricky bits again, like how exactly she came up with acceleration injuries when her body had been passed out cold on the ground, miles away and below the plane she'd brought in when Val Con—
Never mind, Robertson, she told herself. There ain't any way to make sense outta it. Just stipulate it happened, OK? No use banging your head against the impossible.
Banging her head against the impossible was also getting in the way of checking up on Val Con. She ground her teeth together and concentrated, feeling the sweat break out on her face. Chest tight, she craned inward, seeing nothing but gray, nothing but—it hadn't used to be this hard!
Abruptly, she had it—the pattern flared, bright and coherent, burning away the swirling fog.
Miri swallowed.
No doubt that this was Val Con. No doubt that he was alive. But there was—a division—a rift—interlockings sundered, portions isolated from the whole; here and there colors fluttered, pale, while other patches showed nearly translucent.
"Oh, gods," she whispered and bit her lip again. She absolutely did not want the attention of the med tech for the next while. She needed time to study this, to try to figure out just exactly what she was seeing.
And what, if anything, she could do to fix it.
Carefully, she brought her whole attention to one flickering sector, noticing what seemed to be fault lines—
"Cousin Miri!" a young voice shrilled, which would've been enough to get her attention, without the med tech doing her bit for peace and quiet by snapping a High Liaden order to, "Remove yourselves at once!" while a voice big enough to rattle all the aching bones in her convalescing body boomed, "The songs are all of discord, brother!"
Miri opened her eyes, took in nine-almost-ten Standards old Alys Tiazan, hair neatly braided and hands on her barely-existent hips, glaring at the med tech, while two large, shelled people moved with ponderous purpose toward the wall of instruments.
"Remove them immediately," the tech ordered, but Alys was having none of it.
"They are kin and have the right to be here! Yon lady is my cousin by blood-tie and I myself will—"
"PIPE DOWN!" Miri yelled, or tried to yell. The 'pipe' was pretty good, though not up to her best. 'Down' suffered from her voice squeaking out into a cough. Still, she managed to achieve the desired effect: Everybody got real quiet and all faces turned to her. She glared at each in turn, trying to ignore the sweat running down the side of her face, and the way her pulse was pounding way too hard against her eardrums.
"What the hell's the matter with you people?" she snarled, somewhat faintly. "Don't you know there's a sick person in here?"
"Cousin . . . " Alys began.
"I said pipe down," Miri interrupted, then dropped into ragged Low Liaden, in case the kid hadn't caught it. "That means: Be still, child, and don't dispute your elders."
Alys looked stubborn, but managed a creditable bow. "Yes, cousin."
The med tech was sputtering. Miri ignored her for the moment and looked up at the tallest of the two tall non-humans.
Eight foot high and bottle-green, the room's soft light waking gleams of malachite and cobalt among the tiles of his magnificent shell, eyes as big as dinner plates, yellow and slitted, like a cat's; four hundred pounds, if he weighed an ounce—her brother, Twelfth Shell Fifth Hatched Knife Clan of Middle River's Spring Spawn of Farmer Greentrees of the Spearmaker's Den, The Edger. May the gods have mercy on her soul.
"Glad to see you, Edger," she said.
"Sister, the song of my heart achieves fullness in your presence."
Wow. She looked to the second, smaller, and less grandly shelled Turtle. It struck her that he looked worried, though she'd've been hard put to say how she had formed that opinion.
"Sheather. What's bugging you?" She moved a hand against the coverlet. She'd meant to lift it and give him a high sign, but it was too much effort.
"Sister. The songs within this room irritate me. More, they interfere with the progress of your healing. If kin may say so, and with apologies, should I speak too briefly—I fear most strongly for you, wounded as you have been, and surrounded by discord. More, I fear for our brother, the mate of your heart, for it has been told us that his wounds are more serious than your own, leaving him more greatly vulnerable to the ill effects of wrong singing."
She blinked at him, sagging back against her battalion of pillows, the breath burning in her chest like she'd run an obstacle course with a full field pack on her back. She closed her eyes and wearily, warily, looked inside her head, at the broken, flickering pattern that was Val Con. The mate of her heart.
"Lady yos'Phelium," the med tech said, "allow me to call the House to your assistance. These . . . persons . . . tire you dangerously and—"
"One must be the judge of one's own danger," Miri said, more-or-less hitting the High Liaden mode from boss to hired hand. She opened her eyes and looked from Sheather to Edger.
"You're telling me that you got a better way to heal Val Con than the autodocs and the monitors can do?"
"Sister," Edger said solemnly, "we do."
"OK," Miri said, and took a couple minutes to chew on that, not that Edger or Sheather would notice. The Clutch did not lie. Especially, they didn't lie to kin, and they had the same rule as Liadens did about the duty of kin caring for kin. Which didn't mean that they couldn't do as much damage as the next guy in, all from good intentions. She moved her head against the pillows and sighed.
"Can you gimme a demonstration, before we move on to something life-and-death?" she asked. "Understand, I trust your word, but it seems to me there's room for reasonable doubt and honest error, especially since we're talking across species. Things just might not . . . match up," she finished, somewhat lamely.
"Our sister is prudent," said Sheather, and exchanged a longish, yellow-eyed stare with Edger, who eventually looked back to her and spoke.
"There are those among the clans of men who are more sightful than the common run," he boomed, his big voice shaking the bed she lay in. "These sighted ones may see into the soul of their fellows, touch the strands of their being and, sometimes, cure the ills that afflict the spirit. Should such a one be brought to us, we might show them our intention and our technique."
"That is quite ridiculous," stated the med tech.
"No it ain't," Miri said, 'way too tired now to deal with the tricksy modes of High Liaden. She managed to get her hand up and pointed at the kid. "Call Shan and get him down here."
Alys frowned while she worked her way through the Terran sentence, then she smiled, walked over to the house phone, and punched the call button.