The Stolen Ones
Chapter Nine
Flick, flick...flick...flick, flick. Bars of light slid across Kirru's face. A brief blaze behind his eyelids - pink, crimson, pink, and gone. Nausea made their swelling and shrinking brightness unbearable. Flick, flick...flick and he wanted to throw up. His skin crawled or the lights crawled on it - flick, flick, - gentle and vile as the feet of blowflies.
"Is he still under?" A young woman's voice spoke to his left - cultured, timid, gentle as the lights. He thought he heard sadness there and for a moment there rose up the fantasy of being rescued. When he opened his eyes he would see a med-bay, kindly healers who would tell him that the pirate ship had been intercepted, and he was going home.
Home. Where his mother's bones were even now being eaten by sthredy. In the long, drugged sleep he had seen her severed head settled deep in the permafrost, with the eyes frozen open. Your fault, Kirru. They wouldn't have come except for you.
A hand picked up his wrist. Something alien was embedded there - a needle deep in his flesh. The hand squeezed it, and pain lanced up his veins. Before the tempering he had been given by Jack's crew, Kirru would have cried out. Now he only used the sensation. Like the shock of running out of the steam room and diving into ice-capped water, he let it make him more alive.
"Yeah, he's still out." The hand had been large and strong, though smooth as a girl's. The voice was deep and rumbled the air high above him. When he moved, he would have to roll to the left and take out the woman.
"Poor little thing," she said hesitantly, "He looks almost human, doesn't he?"
Something in him yearned towards her pity; like a leaf opening blindly to the sun. A rush of brilliance which could only be the Force curled through him, and he wanted to reach out with it, connect with her, be ...forgiven.
But he couldn't get it to work. I don't know how!
The male's hand came down on his head, where the bumps and hollows of his crown had begun to ache with the onset of puberty. Fingers pushed his skin against sharp bone, and the Force fled from his anger: I will be a man soon. You will never be!
"They're the worst kind, the 'almost humans'."
The sickening tic of striplighting slowed. Footsteps which had been muffled rang out sharp on metal, raising dim echoes, swiftly dampened. He heard the presence of enclosing walls, the smallness of the room. Not time yet. But he must not wait too long, or they would sedate him again.
An airlock door thunked and hissed behind them. Unexpectedly, he had to fight to stop his lip from trembling. Where were they going now? Were they transferring to yet another ship? How would anyone ever find him again?
And then desolation ate what was left of his heart, leaving him hollow. Because, of course, no-one was coming for him. No-one was even looking.
Air surged in. Eddies and whirlpools of scented warmth brushed his wounds. The smell of every breath left him bereaved. Flowers, berry sweetness and a rich taste like cream at the back of his throat. This is not how the world should smell. I want to go home.
"What does he need these children for anyway?" The woman's voice held awe and sorrow, but no disapproval. She was a willing tool, like Warra, Kirru thanked his ancestors that he had not reached out to her, betrayed himself. Then the words struck home, 'These children'? There's more of us?
The man laughed with casual cruelty, "Guess!"
They were busy manoeuvring Kirru's anti-grav pallet down a narrow gangplank. The sun made a brilliant spot on the edge of Kirru's right eye, blue-white and tingling hot. The air was too moist and thick to breathe.
"For the Altar?" She had a sweet voice, young and innocent, which trembled with horror and reluctant admiration. "To be sacrificed?"
Kirru excused himself from any mercy towards her, just before she added shakily, "But they're so young."
"Young vermin are still vermin," said the man, "They grow up."
And he would get what he deserved.
His captors had shifted position as they spoke, going to either end of the pallet. The slap of their shoes was tinny, rattling, as if they edged across metal mesh. A whisper of moving air sighed up, pushing at Kirru's back. Heavy breezes plucked damply at the rags of his embroidered shirt.
Sound fell away into vast distances. Something shrieked beneath the woman's feet and he felt her flinch. Cautiously he opened one eye just enough to see a line of vision darkened by the comb's teeth of his lashes.
"But why spend all this money when we've got aliens here? Aren't the Rens good enough any more?" Sight confirmed that she was small and young. Against a drape of white robes her skin was the yellow-tan of a baked Harvest biscuit, and her dark eyes were intriguingly upswept in a delicate face. Pretty. Except for the colour she might have been one of The People. The smooth, flawless skin of her skull glistened as the blue sun touched it.
Behind her he saw only a lilac sky, a fume of opal mist and the wheeling forms of tiny trilling things, iridescent with light. There was no ground - the walkway swayed straight among the clouds.
"Who knows? You going to ask the Prophet about it?" He could see little of the man except long white sleeves, and hands almost the same colour, with dirty, bitten nails.
"No!" Biscuit's fear was a current of cool in the landscape of Kirru's mind. Not a hard thing, but yielding, clinging. She surrendered under it and it closed about her - too fine and delicate for her to know she was trapped. It made what had happened to him seem crude.
An answering dread seeped from Bitten-nails, making a net in which his two captors were caught. Dismaying to know that they were afraid too. Was there no-where in the Universe safe from it?
A faint sensation of rising, and a shadow fell over him. At the same time the pace altered; the woman's feet fell on stone and there was a jerk and shift as the pallet bumped off the metal bridge onto solid ground once more. Kirru readied his spirit for action, even while he lay limp.
Not yet. Not at the lip of the canyon.
Walls of white stone, smooth and polished, eerie as standing ice in the heat. Then a door, big enough for a trading caravan...
There must be a road along the side of the cliff. You don't need a door that size for single-file traffic across the bridge.
The voice of his training-tapes was speaking again, almost like a separate personality in his head. One which felt no despair, which felt good - cold, numb, not caring about anything but this move, this moment, this victory.
A splash of water underfoot and drizzle of rain against his cheek as the moist atmosphere outside met temperature control. Suddenly the air was blessedly cool, and the stench of flowers was cleaned away.
Now! He rolled off the platform, twisting in mid air so he could come down on his feet. Pushed off - oh his legs trembled - and was running. The tube flapped from the needle in his wrist. A smart jerk and it came free. Blood oozed out and pattered on the pristine white floor, and Biscuit recoiled from it, even as she stepped forward to give chase.
I'm that unclean to her? He noticed, catalogued the thought - it might serve as a weapon later - without acknowledging the spike of hurt.
"Get him!" 'Nails shouted, lunging slow and stupid for the space where he had been seconds ago. With his eyes open he could see he had chosen to make a break for freedom in the middle of a great reception hall, full of people.
Useless idiot! Kirru angled toward the door, bare feet gripping sure on the treacherous marble, and saw for the first time the guards, the glimmer of a control panel, even as a white-robed monk reached up lazily, slapped the button, and blast doors came down in a blink of durasteel, sealing him inside.
No!
You don't have time to regret. Regroup.
He turned, and as if his desperation loosed some new power in him he saw for a moment the whole hall, paused; a rapid-feed of information which frightened the boy, Kirru, but delighted the tape-trained killer who rode in his mind.
Opposite the door, where sunlight should have struck it and made it blaze, a man-sized eye of crystal hovered among purple drapes. Floating, gold-rimmed pupil dilating, the sketched platinum lids narrowing, it swivelled to stare at him. It was the only thing which still moved in the frozen instant of revelation.
Two humans stood on either side of it, the sweep of their chiffon-light robes drawn out of a manuscript, their carefully matched faces keen, alert and handsome, their hands resting on eye-tipped staffs which crawled with azure fire.
Stun-poles, Tapes noticed, One right handed, one left - for symmetry.
The sub-personality was beginning to develop his own brand of harsh humour. It's only me. Kirru whimpered in the dark, He's me. I don't have to be scared of him. He's me...
Where the purple carpet gave way to stone a circle of white monks knelt, meditating, hands on thighs, feet folded neatly together. A display of piety which also kept the pilgrims from getting too close to the Eye.
And the rest of the pale hall was filled with ordinary people. Kirru had almost tumbled into a family. Father and mother nude except for loin-cloths, their hair dressed with quills. A girl about his own age, wearing a feather cloak and sandals, had a baby on her hip. The infant's puppy fat hand waved a rattle of small bones, but the girl's gaze was caught in the instant of lighting on Kirru. It showed surprise, curiosity, the beginning of a smile.
Edge of an open door behind the curtains, and a path to it *there* The part of his mind which noticed these things slid back into place behind his eyes, saw what he had been looking at. A baby? Potential hostage?
No!
As his mind fought itself the world shuddered, speeded, and he knew the instant of awareness had been another gift of the Force, offered and then snatched away. Both of him united in anger and grief.
She really was smiling at him!
Run to the door and get through!
Kirru ignored the inner voice, stumbled toward the welcoming girl, holding out his slashed and bloody hands. If only one person in the Universe would feel compassion for him, then he knew he could stay sane. He could rein in the other half of him, could keep himself together. He wouldn't have to go mad.
"Please...Please help me."
One act of mercy was all he asked for; one glance, even the merest brush of her fingertips across his. To be touched and not hurt... You hold my soul in your hands. Please help me!
"Aah!" She recoiled into her mother's arms, both of them craning away, startled and afraid.
"Don't touch her, you filth!" The father started forward, fear and - worse - disgust flinching across his good-humoured face. A nice-looking man, with friendly, candid eyes, nerving himself up to strike at the abomination who threatened his child. Again the world stopped for Kirru, as if even time couldn't bear his presence, as if the fabric of reality abhorred him, and he wanted to fall to his knees right there and cry until the world ended.
Idiot! Tapes stepped into his body, took it over, and he had downed the man with a one-knuckle strike to the solar-plexus and run for the curtained door even before the girl had started screaming.
Chaos. Like a thief chasing through a market day crowd he dove through grasping arms. A hand caught him and he bit it hard, tasting blood, crunching finger bones like boiled sweets in his mouth. He lurched back and up, smacked the bowed face with the top of his head, breaking a nose, and was free again.
More screaming. Someone sobbing. He leapt over the kneeling monks - they had not stirred once, too pious for this unholy hunting scene - and there was instant silence.
We're...I'm defiling their sacred space.
Let's trash it!
Tapes' lack of emotion was not enough for Kirru now. The Universe had rejected him, and he wanted to hurt something, just to prove that he still existed. The delicate, articulated crystal of the Eye looked very breakable. He could get back at every single person in this room if he smashed it....
But the Eye was watching him. Reflected on its surface his own face looked out; so much harder than it had seemed when he saw it in the mirror at home. He was the very centre of its attention. I've...we've made their god bow to us.
But that wasn't it, Kirru thought, with a flicker of the same *rightness* he had felt when he saw the monk's ship for the first time. No, that wasn't it at all.
Biscuit threw herself down into an obeisance outside the sacred circle - purifying herself, making ready to give chase. A quick glance and spike of pleasure as he saw it was Nails' fingers he had crushed. And then the *rightness* drew him through the curtained doorway into a hewed stone passage lit with crystal lamps.
There were no guards here, no sense of air movement, and the uproar in the hall was muted by the thick drape of purple velvet behind him. Logic told him he should run. There couldn't be much time before Biscuit, or someone more dangerous, came after him. But something overrode logic.
He walked a little, feet dragging, the sense of something nagging like a blister with every step. If the Jedi had taken me, if I'd been trained, I would know what to do...What is this?
At last the corridor opened out into a cloister. Indigo sky was lapped by snowy walls and reflected in the quicksilver surface of a still pond. He flattened himself against the wall just outside the archway he had come through and braced himself to take down the pursuers when they came. Then he closed his eyes and tried to listen for the Force, opening himself to receive whatever message it was trying to give him.
Like a silk thread, sliding across bare skin - subtle, cool, heavy, the impulse turned him to the left, not questioning why. This must be what Jedi feel. It was soothing to put down the burden of choice and just follow.
Cool, black silk, smooth in his tired mind, reminding him of...of.... He stopped, amazed. This was fear. This quietness, this dreamy cold surrender was the fear he had sensed in the minds of his captors. The web that bound Biscuit and held her gently - overawed and sad; it was fear. And now he was following it to its centre.
It'll be the Prophet. The tape-persona was still reasoning, preparing to act, but Kirru sank under black silk, walking on autopilot through gardens and intersections as if he knew them. Meeting no-one and hearing no pursuit.
Too easy. He's arranged this. It's a trap.
Kirru heard himself think, and believed he should care, but couldn't. Golden doors opened at his thrust, swinging back on a room the size of a Starliner. Another Eye glittered, floating above a monolithic Altar shaggy with beards of rust-coloured moss.
Kirru! It's a trap. Wake up!
The mossy stone drew him and repelled him at the same time. Faintly carved, with gutters curved around its sides leading down to the hollow beneath it, it lay in a black stain. This is not going to help you. Get away, now!.
So strong!
When he drew closer the mosses stirred, as if they sensed him, as if they craned towards him, eager to eat. His own fear woke - a hot thing, a white presence, twining with the black strands of his guide. He reached out, touched the Altar.
Pain, pain and bloodlust and horror. Hatred like a raw scream. They arced through his body, filling him, filling the void of despair. Oh yes! And he was back in the moment where he made Micar's swoop explode, back feeling fierce and proud and hot. Oh, yes! But with this power he could burn planets. He could find Warra and her crew anywhere, he could still make them pay. Yes!
No!
His hands snapped back, he reeled away, gasping, collapsing in the dirt of old blood. He felt fevered, nauseous, his limbs shook and - Ancestors! - he wanted more.
Remember who your enemy is!
It was strange for his combat-training to turn him away from power. Strange enough for him to peel himself off the floor, struggle to his knees and try to think. Warra, Jack and the pirates were tools, as the monks were tools. Surely his enemy was the one who sent them?
The Prophet had sent pirates out to kidnap innocent children, to kill their families. The Prophet was the leader of a cult that made a nice man recoil from an injured boy as if he was dirt. The Prophet was the spider at the centre of this web of fear. The Prophet is my enemy.
On his knees he could see puncture wounds in the moss at the very base of the Altar, where the clotted gore was thickest. A pallid glimmer, like exposed bone, showed delicate filaments spun out of the rock, plunging into the paving. Kirru could feel the power travel along them through the floor. Someone had harnessed this pit of energy, and that someone must be sitting - spiderlike - at the end of these threads.
I...we felt that power. I can't win against it. Survival demands retreat.
He tried to stand, and his legs gave way beneath him. How long had he lain drugged in the white ship? It seemed clear now that they had not fed him in that time. Adrenaline, receding, made him shudder, and he felt soiled and used by the blast of fury from the Altar. Retreat, regroup.
But he couldn't. Struggling against the web would only wind it tighter around him. And he was so tired! Why fight the pull of darkness when it was taking him to his enemy? He would save his strength for one final blaze of defiance. He would die, ridding the universe of a monster. He would atone for touching that power and end the desire for it at one stroke.
You're behaving like a child.
I *am* a child.
At least find a weapon.
That he could do. On a plinth to the left of the Altar lay a knife. Its blade was a half moon of sharpness, its handle ivory, short, configured for a punch-grip or for rocking back and forth in a slow saw down into bone. No point for stabbing with, but it could slice...
As he had done with the second swoop rider at home, he would pretend to be a helpless victim. He would allow the Prophet to draw him close, and then he would pull the honed sharpness across the man's neck and be cleaned by sacrificial blood.
Slight tackiness reminded his fingers that this blade was more than used to gore. It radiated the memory of terror along his arm, setting up a harmony with the psychic wail of the altar. Between them he was a struck tuning fork of horror, resonances shrill at the base of his skull. He shook his head in sudden determination. I'm going to put an end to his evil.
Briefly, even sickened, trembling, with the twin presences of knife and stone pouring guilt into his pounding head, he felt like a warrior of light. His imaginary master would be proud of him, and the Jedi - if ever they found out - would honour him for this, as if he was one of their own.
He cradled the weapon against his chest, hiding it in the stained rags of his shirt. Then he bent down and swept his palm across the floor, following the wires from the Altar, feeling their charge of raw emotion through the tiles like a heat.
A curtained alcove. Drapes of white and gold, and a door standing open onto shadow. It's a trap!
Fur carpeted the floor, soft and welcoming under his abused hands, grey in darkness. He could see no one, but he could feel it here; the place where all the tendrils of fear met up. He could hear it breathing, like a man.
To his right, a crystal globe - an Eye peeled of its lids - rested on the brushed steel of a cuboid table. An image moved in its depths. Kirru made out ribbons and cables of darkness like the tracks in a cloud-chamber. Beneath them, untouched by their corruption, a swathed figure pushed forward through a snowstorm?.
Unimportant.
The itch of the wires led away into unlit recesses. He could just make out the edge of a chair like a hollow egg, enclosing a clot of darkness. Filaments from the altar rose from the floor like strands of wet cobweb and twisted into that shadow, but he could not see what they connected with. Behind him the door closed by itself. Of course.
Accepting his death had given him peace, a freedom that was almost relief. Strength too; enough to pull himself to his feet, lock his knees and stand. He began to walk forward, unhurriedly. Soon everything would be over, and it wouldn't hurt any more.
"Kirru," said a voice from the shadows - a pleasant, soothing voice, very like the one which spoke in his dreams. "Don't you want to watch the Jedi die first?"
"What?!" Effortlessly it knocked his perilous serenity away, striking at the only thing he still held sacred. Effortlessly it unmanned him, and yet he knew, *knew* it gave him only the tiniest corner of its awareness, focused as it was on something more worthy of attention.
A white hand, disembodied against the darkness, slid out of black robes and rested on the Eye. It was suddenly obvious that all the lines of nightmare in the picture issued from this one palm. "Your faith in the Jedi is misplaced. Watch while I destroy this one, and then tell me where you will be safe - with them or with me."
Safe? He's offering me safety? Everything in Kirru at that instant yearned, cried out, to be safe again, and he knew there was no refuge against strength, except greater strength.
The Prophet is your enemy.
I want to be safe.
The cloaked figure of the Jedi had knelt, quiet in the centre of the whirlwind. Not a snowstorm. A storm of small rocks. He had, even in miniature, a relaxed air, as though the unnatural fury around him was an inconvenience he waited through with good humour, pleasant as a spring shower. Very slowly, one by one, the lines of dark influence closest to him thinned and snapped.
"You're not even bothering him." Some part of Kirru felt a passionate loyalty toward the unknown Jedi - if only because he seemed so *sure*. Because he stood for the hope Kirru had nurtured all his life. He stood for Kirru's dreams.
The boy took a step forward, making out the curve of a knee clad in ebony, the fall of an empty hood. He would never have a better chance than this; to strike while his enemy was distracted by the Jedi. But the Prophet said he would shelter me...
"I've stopped him. And now I will kill him." A smooth hand gestured easily, and out of the storm came a gravestone almost as large as the Altar, taking the kneeling man in the chest, sending him flying.
"No!" A familiar pain by now, this clutch at the throat as Kirru watched everything he believed in being smashed.
"If you put your faith in weakness you will always be betrayed," said the kind voice of the Prophet. Kirru could hear pleasure in the honeyed gravel of its tones. Rage surged through him, warmed the hilt of his knife and made it sing in his head. He readied the anger and the weapon together, building the emotion as he'd learned on the Lucre, and edged forward again in time to see the blanched edge of a smile widen under the hood.
In the Eye, the stricken Jedi sat up again. The Prophet's smile flinched.
Kirru wanted to taunt. Wanted to shout 'You're not so strong!' but did not, because the concealed head had bent forward, and the brush of its awareness had gone from him. It had turned its full attention on the wounded man, and not for the wealth of Kessel would he remind it that he was there. His moment was coming.
Let me take it. Combat training poured into his small form, and he eased himself forward, imperceptibly, shortening the distance. His right arm felt heavy with stored power, waiting to slash out and sever that smug head from its body.
All the vapour-trails of evil had cleared from the Eye, revealing the Jedi in sharp detail. Still kneeling, the fall had torn his hood away. Kirru could see his face, the long hair that whipped across his closed eyes, trickle of blood from his mouth, the expression of perfect content.
Screaming through the air around him, rocks, boulders, the girders of houses and torn keystones of tombs came hurtling down on him. Fight, Jedi. I need to believe in you. And the maelstrom of death recoiled from him.
Yes!
But the Prophet was chuckling. A sound of gloating enjoyment that reminded Kirru of his cousins, when they had pulled the wings off the bird they found in the outhouse. "Fight all you like, Master Jedi, but you'll die just the same."
Hatred surged, feeding back from the knife in his hand, building into a power that tried to claw its way out of his skin, a power he was too frail for. Strike now! But he couldn't wrench his attention from the strange battle. It had become a war for his soul. Because, surely, if the Jedi was a victim too, then the Prophet spoke the truth. The only safety was with him.
It happened instantly.
In the early spring Kirru would always seek out the Dawnburst flowers. They thrived on the edge of glaciers, turning icicles into their greenhouses. When the weary sun had warmed the earth enough, the seeds would shatter into sudden growth. There would be a fire-rocket of green, an explosion of ragged topaz blooms so bright they made his eyes ache, and the ice would be covered with flowers.
It was the only thing Kirru could think of when the pillar of light left the Jedi's hands to break on the surface of the eye - a green and gold organic power like the Dawnburst. Hissing, the Prophet snatched his hand away.
Now! And Kirru launched himself, ferocious with triumph, scything the blade through the dark hood, driving it at the throat.
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