Chapter Seven
i
For days after reading the mind of Eli Strone, Kalliana remained in her chambers in Guild Headquarters, slipping out only at late hours … trying to hide from the nightmares she had taken from the killer, nightmares that now resided firmly in her own mind.
The violence, the bloodlust, the self-righteousness possessed her, despite her constant efforts to purge it from her thoughts. Not only had she witnessed the crimes in Strone’s head, but she had experienced them as well, as if she herself had done them. And in her quiet moments in the darkness of her quarters, a deep suspicion grew that perhaps she herself was capable of the same monstrous acts.…
Kalliana sat in silence on her narrow bed, plucking pieces of honeyed fruit from a bowl, but the sweet stickiness contrasted violently with the tacky texture of drying blood in her imagination. A thin skewer of spiced chicken reminded her of pieces of dripping flesh, sliced away with brisk, efficient strokes of a scalpel as a paralyzed victim screamed into the night.…
Other citizens might have envied her freedom to indulge in such delicacies, but every time Kalliana visualized the spraying blood and the slaughtered victims, felt the warped justifications flooding from Strone’s mind … she wondered how many of the common people would still envy her position if they knew.
Outside, in the vastness of the world, she knew other laws were being broken: small offenses out in the holdings that could be dealt with by local, non-telepathic Magistrates … or major crimes by people who would be hauled off to First Landing for trial by the Guild.
Kalliana shuddered. It wouldn’t be her turn again for some time, though. The Guild had eleven other Truthsayers to share the duties of justice, and nineteen less-powerful Mediators, who negotiated solutions to civil and political disputes. Kalliana was not needed, not now. She would have time to recover, just in case the searing memories assimilated from Strone had damaged her telepathic abilities. She hoped it would be enough time.
Kalliana slept on her pallet in the midmorning, feeling the bright sunlight as it streamed through the outer viewports in the ship wall—and still she woke up sweating, panting hard. She was afraid of the darkness, but nightmares found her even in broad daylight.
The signal at her door startled her, and she had a sudden, wild vision of Eli Strone, escaped from his prison, come back to flay answers out of her with a sharp scalpel. I’m not guilty. You saw my reasons! You know! How can you call me guilty?
But the young man outside the door to her quarters was so harmless that she burst out in a shamed laugh, though his good-natured grin was masked by concern. “Ysan, you startled me.”
The seventeen-year-old boy glanced away shyly, his white robe and sash looking too large on his skinny build. “You’ve been hiding, Kalliana,” he said. “Nobody’s seen you in days. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
The boy was four years her junior, but a gulf of more than age separated them. He was still innocent, a trainee who had not yet been tested for his green Truthsayer’s sash.
She began to make an inane reply, but found she didn’t have the energy to deceive him. Ysan was a refreshing breeze, a healing kindness that allowed her to see the good side of human nature while recovering from the bad.
Ysan raised his eyebrows. “Let me come in. Tell me how bad it was—that might help you. Besides, I have to get prepared for it myself.”
She thought how the razor edge felt as it sliced through skin, an ever-so-faint rasping, a rubbery tug. The blood was thick and wet, smearing like oil, darkening as it mixed with dust.… Through Strone’s perceptions she had enjoyed the sensation—
“I can’t talk about it, Ysan,” she said in a husky whisper. “There’s no way I can describe it. No way I want to. I just need … time. I’ll work through it.”
Whenever she tried to focus her thoughts and fortify her psyche, though, Kalliana felt the battering ram of violence come back at her. The secondhand screams were growing quieter day by day as she tried to erase them—but it was a long, slow process. Recovering from the furnace of Strone’s deluded sense of justice was more difficult than anything she had ever endured in her pampered life.
Ysan frowned, leaning on the doorframe. “You’ve helped me enough times, Kalliana. There must be something I can do.” His eyes lit up above his soft cheekbones. His fair skin prickled pink. “Why don’t you show me what you saw? I can take some of the burden from you.”
“No!” she cried, then looked sternly at him. Also born in the Guild and raised with increasing dosages of Veritas, Ysan had practiced mind-reading abilities from the time he was a child—but the young trainee hadn’t yet walked through the shadowed valleys of guilt and remorse. Mental abilities still seemed like fun to him.
“Ysan, this isn’t a game. Enjoy your innocence as long as you can,” she said, trying to soothe the dejected look that showed on his face. “You’ll be tested soon enough.”
“I’ll be tested in a few weeks. I’ll be a full Truthsayer. Can’t you—”
“No.” She clutched her warm wool wrap closer around her. “I just need a little more rest. I’m going to sleep now—that’s all I need. Really.” She softened, allowing a smile. “But thanks for your concern.”
“Sure,” the young man said, fidgeting uncertainly, and then he stepped back into the corridor. “Well, pleasant dreams, then.”
ii
Kalliana sat up gasping, hearing the echoes of a shrieking victim in her ears, one of the last batch that Eli Strone had skinned alive, a rugged man with a work-seamed face, whiskered chin, and the misery of barely hidden guilt in his eyes. Filtered through Strone’s own memories, the disgust she felt for the victims’ imagined sins overpowered her own horror at the crime. They deserved to die. They deserved it! The rugged victim screamed again—
But then Kalliana realized the noise was not imaginary. She heard a persistent, whining buzz, a summons from Guild Master Tharion. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the stained glass windows.
“Yes,” she said, taking a deep breath and forcing her voice louder, stronger, as she activated the viewplate.
“Please come and see me on the bridge deck,” Guild Master Tharion said, “in my ready room.”
Kalliana acknowledged, then dressed herself in a clean white robe. She ran her fingers along the emerald Truthsayer sash; now its bright, honest green seemed tarnished to her. She cinched it tight around her slender waist and walked briskly toward the antiquated turbolift that took her up to the Guild’s command center.
The central administrative offices had taken over what had been the bridge of the SkySword. The smooth mechanical finery of the decommissioned military equipment gave the Guild Master’s seat and the surrounding offices a sterile cleanness and austere technological precision that could not be conveyed by the soft adobe or baked bricks of the other structures in First Landing.
Kalliana stepped down the textured metal stairs onto the bridge deck, and the turbolift doors creaked shut behind her. Other Guild members moved about their duties; many were brown-sashed workers who had none of the rigorous ethical training that a Truthsayer endured or the political education and techniques of rhetoric a Mediator used so well. Thus the Guild workers had no access to the Veritas drug.
Guild Master Tharion sat in the middle of the room in a large chair. Kalliana could imagine a military captain directing space battles from the same point. Tharion scanned a small lapscreen, intent on notes and files, probably from recent Landholders Council meetings. He seemed disgusted and distracted. Kalliana had never paid much attention to the activities of the Council, since that was beyond her expertise; she had heard that at such meetings the appointed representatives from the landholdings spent their allotted time arguing and raising grievances and counter-grievances.
The Guild Master blinked at her, preoccupied for a moment, then suddenly seemed to remember who she was. “Ah, Kalliana,” he said, “thank you for coming.” He set his lapscreen on the side of his command chair, stood, and stepped away. She followed him into his private ready room, dreading his reasons for summoning her. He sealed the door and turned to her with a casual expression. “How are you recovering from the Strone case? You’ve been keeping a low profile for several days.”
She glanced away to avoid his scrutiny. “Reading the prisoner was a very … unsettling experience. The pain is still there, but it’s lessening.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” the Guild Master said. “You are very valuable to us, Kalliana. Every Truthsayer is. But if you feel that your abilities have been worn thin by this ordeal, I’ll do my best to see that you’re reassigned in some appropriate manner. Toth Holding has requested a new Magistrate, and I don’t have anyone qualified to send them.”
“No!” she said a little too quickly. “I mean, that won’t be necessary.” It frightened her to think she might lose her status as a Truthsayer and be weaned from the Veritas drug. That would be the end of everything she knew, everything she had been born to. Her embryo had been grown here in the Guild, and she had been raised for no other purpose, given no other training. That was how it had to be. “No, I’m fine.”
“Good,” Tharion said. Behind him, the stained glass window filled his ready room with rainbows. “We’ve taken care of sentencing Strone—he’ll spend the rest of his life up on OrbLab 2.”
Kalliana could not hide her surprise, considering the overwhelming violence of the murders. “I would have thought he might be executed.”
Tharion looked away, then sighed, staring at his twined fingers. “Yes. I gave it thorough consideration—but there are extenuating circumstances. Eli Strone served the Guild well for many years. His record is one of the most exemplary of all the elite guards we’ve ever had. Until he left us.”
Kalliana nodded, unconvinced, but she could not argue with the Guild Master’s decision.
He sat down behind his desk. “I wanted to ask you again about my request to check for possible sabotage or a larger plot among the landholders. Did you see any deeper motivation behind the killings?”
“There is nothing,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.
“You’re sure Strone was acting alone?” Tharion pressed. “You detected no possible connection inside his mind?”
Kalliana shivered. “No. If you don’t believe me, feel free to look in his mind yourself. If you can get around the nightmares.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Tharion said. “I’ve looked in his mind before, when I was younger. Even before he committed his crimes, it was … unsettling. So rigid and sharply defined.” He looked at her with concern narrowing his eyes. “Are you positive you’ve fully recovered? You seem … shaken.”
Kalliana drew herself up, pretending that nothing was wrong. “I’m fine,” she said. “I can do my job as a Truthsayer.”
He turned in his chair to look wistfully out the stained glass window. “I had always thought I would be a Truthsayer myself for many more years, until then Klaryus died.” He tugged the blue sash at his waist tighter. “But circumstances don’t always cooperate with our convenience. I vowed to do the best job I could.”
“I’ll do the same,” Kalliana insisted, with a conviction she did not feel. She wondered what this pep talk was all about, wanting just to run back to her quarters and be alone again.
Tharion’s face was stony as if he had come to a deep decision. “Fine. Then we have a new case for you to read, another accused murderer who claims he’s innocent. He may also be involved with … other crimes. You will verify that for us.”
Kalliana went rigid, as if a spear of ice had shot down her spine. “Another truthsaying?” she said. “So soon? But there are so many other Truthsayers—”
Tharion forced a smile. “I have no control over how frequently crimes are committed, Kalliana. It is your turn again. We’ve caught this man, practically in the act. The evidence against him is strong, but he claims he’s innocent—and I have reason to believe he may be telling the truth. We must grant him a swift trial. I would like you to handle this one in particular. Consider it a test.” He paused, apparently seeing her alarm. “Are you saying now that you’re not ready?”
Kalliana tried to weigh the shades of terror in her mind. “When will the reading be?”
“In three days,” he said.
She opened the ready room door and faced the turbolift on the other side of the command center so the Guild Master wouldn’t see her trembling. “I’ll be ready.”
Kalliana left the bridge.
iii
Tharion sat back in the command chair and watched Kalliana leave, masking his expressions until the ready room door had slid shut. Deeply troubled, he tried to distract himself with other Guild duties for the rest of the afternoon … but he continued to come back to Kalliana’s haunted afterimage.
Tharion sympathized with the ordeal each one of his carefully trained telepaths went through with every criminal mind-reading—but it concerned him that Kalliana might be unstable. He pressed his lips together and hoped he was doing the right thing by assigning her to the case of Troy Boren. It might help her heal if she could read the mind of a man he knew to be innocent. An easy verdict that would restore her self-confidence without risking further exposure to murderous memories.
He prayed that Franz Dokken wasn’t wrong.
The distracting thoughts made Tharion less productive, and it took him an extra hour to review all of the recent disputes brought before the Guild. The numbers of filed grievances were increasing as the population on Atlas expanded.
Tharion found himself alone when he finally finished and walked quietly down the metal corridors to his own suite of rooms, which had originally been the SkySword captain’s quarters. The cabin was dim and empty; the evening lights at floor level suffused the room with a comfortable yellow-orange glow.
“Qrista?” he called, but heard no answer. Then he remembered that a long and complex meeting of the Landholders Council was being held in the lower briefing chambers, and his wife would probably come back frazzled and disgusted at the uncooperative representatives.
Servants had placed the evening meal on the metal dining table. Tharion lifted up the thermal cover and sniffed at the meal of rice and chopped vegetables. He was just debating whether to sit down and begin without Qrista when she came in, heaving a weary sigh and closing her ice-blue eyes.
He got up to greet her, ready to offer comfort and support. She sealed the door to their suite with great pleasure, as if she were blocking off the problems of the day. She straightened her white robe then untied the crimson Mediator’s sash and came to embrace him.
“A long one?” Tharion asked.
She nodded, resting her chin on his shoulder as if she wanted to melt into sleep standing in his arms. “Same old problems,” she said. “Different names, different details.
“Toth claims that Dokken Holding is irrigating their kenaf fields too much and thereby depleting an underground aquifer that feeds the springs watering his pine forests. Bondalar and Carsus have jointly issued a formal grievance against Koman, alleging that the raw materials the mines are shipping for their mag-lev rail project are defective, resulting in months of lost work. The Koman representative brought out quality inspection sheets to prove that the raw materials had been undamaged when they were shipped from the Mining District, but Bondalar brought out their own analysis to show the flaws in the material as received.” She drew a deep breath. “And so on and so on.”
Her pale hair was the colorless blond of all Guild members, done up in a long braid that spiraled like a helmet around the top of her head. “I can give you the mental details if you like, but frankly I’d rather spare you the misery.”
Tharion laughed. “Let’s sit down before our meal gets cold.”
She slumped into her chair and closed her eyes. Her sash hung loose, and her white robe fell open. “So how was your day?” she remembered to say, keeping her eyes closed.
“Murder,” he said.
Now she blinked and stared at him. “What? Another one?”
Tharion nodded soberly. “I’m beginning to suspect the Veritas smuggling goes deeper than I thought. More than just a few stray capsules that somehow managed to trickle into outlying villages.”
“And this murder had something to do with it?” Qrista said.
“I believe it’s a vigilante killing, removing one of the smugglers. But Franz says our problems are all over now.”
“Franz Dokken?” Qrista scowled. “If he’s behind it, I’m sure it’s not all over.”
Tharion took a mouthful of rice and vegetables, chewing slowly to grant himself time to think. “I never said he was behind it, Qrista. He’s trying to help. Don’t be so hard on him.”
“Give me the details,” she said skeptically. “I want to know what he really said.”
Tharion raised his head, and she reached over the small table to stroke his forehead. She closed her eyes and gently ran her fingers through his thoughts, enhancing them with her telepathic abilities.
“Convenient,” Qrista said. “And Dokken decides to play his own games with you, getting rid of your only direct connection before a Truthsayer can interrogate him. What about his suppliers?”
“That information is lost. But if it cuts off the Veritas smuggling, I think it’s for the best,” Tharion said. “Otherwise, we’ll raise a lot of questions we don’t want answered. How could the Guild lose control so badly? Think of the outcry.”
“Think of the outcry if people find out that we’re holding a man in the detention chambers who is almost certainly innocent! Dokken supposedly knows the identity of the real killer, but you never bothered to ask him. Are we supposed to ignore the unsolved crime?”
Qrista was visibly upset, turning away from him. “It goes against all our ethical training. We can’t just ignore a crime.”
“No, we can’t,” Tharion said. “But if Cialben truly was smuggling Veritas, taking it away from the Guild and giving it to … to outsiders who aren’t prepared to handle it, and if I declared him guilty—as he assuredly was—it would have been my option to sentence him to death.”
“But you wouldn’t have.”
Tharion sighed. “No, I suppose I wouldn’t.”
“You’re just doing what Dokken wants,” Qrista said.
Tharion shrugged. “I do what he wants only if it’s the same thing that I want. We can think alike, you know.”
“That’s a scary thought,” she said in a noncommittal tone and fell to eating again.
Tharion felt the need to keep explaining, though his wife already knew every one of his reasons. “Franz has assisted me through my entire career. I’m Guild Master, in part, because of his support. None of the other landholders has been as objective or as helpful. They come here only when they want something. None of the others offered to become my mentor as I was going through difficult times. Now everyone wants my favors, of course—but Franz was there at the very beginning. He’s given me no reason not to trust him.”
“Have you used Veritas to read him?” Qrista asked, “To see if he’s really telling you the truth?”
Tharion was shocked. “Qrista! We took an oath. I would never read a man without just cause and without his consent. Franz has done nothing to warrant such treatment. Why have you always disliked him?”
She met his gaze evenly. “Because you believe everything he says.”
Tharion ate in silence, concentrating on the taste of the rice and the spiced vegetables. His hangover headache had faded with the afternoon, but now it threatened to return as a dull throb at the back of his skull. Finally, Qrista finished and nudged her plate off to the side of the serving tray.
“Look, I’ve had a rough day,” she said in an apologetic tone, “and I’m taking it out on you since I couldn’t very well slam the Council members’ heads together. My mediation didn’t work well, even when I could read what each party wanted. I’m upset with all the landholders—and Dokken’s one of them.”
She stood up and her robe fell completely open to reveal her rounded breasts. “Let’s go to bed. Give me a back rub?”
Tharion smiled. “With pleasure.”
She smiled back. “That’s the point.”
On their wide sleeping pallet, with the yellow-orange lights still turned low, Tharion carefully slid the cotton robe off her shoulders and dropped it to the deck. He ran his fingertips along the pale skin of her shoulders, tickling her shoulder blades.
Qrista purred, arching herself up as she rested her head on the pillow, eyes closed. He pressed into her flesh, rubbing the tense muscles. Her skin was so pale it seemed transparent. She’d let down her braid and combed out her long whitish blond hair.
A lifetime of exposure to Veritas had made them sterile in addition to pale. Most Guild members never married, finding it intimidating to be in the presence of a mate who knew every innermost thought—but Tharion and Qrista had no secrets. The two of them had the same expectations, had gone through the same sacrifices.
He gave her a long and luxurious back rub, and then found they were both too tired to make love. They shared quiet soothing thoughts as they pressed together with the lights turned off.
They drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms, nestled in each other’s dreams.