Riel and new knowledge

The night trembled like a cloak in the wind. A gentle southern breeze, lemon-bitter, slipped through the open doors, whirled around the room, caressing the candles, and brushed my chest with soft, velvet waves.

I was kneeling on the ritual slab. Two candles rose beside my shoulders—milky-white spirals with flowers of flame at their tips. I gazed at the Vihregramma carved in gold. I wasn't meditating, I wasn't praying—I was simply looking at it after a long, exhausting day. Today I had been like it, that sharpened cleaver slicing through everything in the path of its trajectory. And yesterday. And for seven raids before that. Nearly twenty days by Coruscant reckoning. A Harayt raid—one complete discharge of a ship's battery—was equal to three almost-complete Earth days, minus the final two hours. After that, the reactor usually spooled up and gave a thrust. At that moment everyone was crushed by the G-forces, and if you weren't a lover of extreme sensations, it was better to be in a restorer. Harayt reactors were more powerful than standard galactic ones and operated like pulsars. The first time I experienced that exquisite sensation, I thought: if I get used to this, I'll develop nerves of steel.

I got used to it…

And not only to acceleration. We fell through super-dense atmospheres, plunged into funnels, slipped between gravitational fields. Once we even passed through a star. We pierced space and time, we carved the cosmos from end to end, and we knew that it was finite.

Whenever I remembered all that, I wanted to sing. But now another Trail had opened before me, and I was moving by touch, in complete darkness, trying to find even the faintest, most confused landmarks.

Almatea appeared completely unexpectedly, like a luminous ray emerging from the mist. And here I tested my combat skills, meeting almost no real resistance. The most elementary tactics and strategies found no worthy opposition; the inhabitants of the Mid-Galaxy simply didn't know them. They considered us madmen. We called them cowards, incapable of facing an enemy eye to eye. They preferred to exchange fire from large ships.

“Why?” I once asked an Imperial general. “Wouldn't it be simpler to fight the battle in a computer network?”

Perhaps someday they will do just that. In general, I agree. If the fate of worlds is to be decided by the blades of professionals, what are peasants and craftsmen doing in an army? What are respectable citizens doing in the ranks? One must know how to die, too. And killing—that is already a right.

Can a hero capable of dancing with Death emerge from among the quiet, gloomy, obedient?

Lost in thought, I stopped noticing the Vihregramma. Fatigue had shackled my paws. I rose, shook myself, and walked through the winding lizard house that had been given to me as my quarters.

The whisper of the sea beyond a sparse line of palms. The whisper of sand beneath gusts of wind. The whisper of leaves high beneath the stars. A solitary island a mile from shore, a narrow strait adding to the feeling of security.

I felt cut off from the hostile world.

I entered the bedroom in the dim light of flickering panels. Along the sign-line beneath the ceiling, flashes of rainbow light shimmered.

I barked into the darkness, stretched, and, lowering my eyes, saw him.

I had completely forgotten about him. The last fight had put me in an entirely different frame of mind. I had gone to meditate and calmly left him sleeping, and somehow, by some miracle, he had ended up in my bed. He looked at me with large golden eyes in which reflections of dozens of tiny candles flickered, as though someone had scattered golden sand into honey, and he toyed with the crimson half of my robe with elegant, slender fingers, like a cat kneading at fabric.

There was gentle submission in his eyes, but there was fear there too.

I tried to speak with him. He barely understood the Common Tongue and called himself Riel—I didn't know whether that was his name or the general name for his caste. We began communicating in a mixture of Harayt and G'hrait, and things went better. I was amazed at the sounds he could produce, sounds characteristic only of lizards.

Then again, Almatea was a planet of mysteries, and these beautiful golden creatures were one of them.

I stepped right up to him. He was afraid of me, but he was even more afraid of being alone, or of ending up with the pale-skinned rebels who were enemies of his people. He purred something and took my hand.

A shiver passed through my body.

I hadn't been around humans for many years. But that hadn't diminished my passions. Quite the opposite—I suspected that something in my head had gone seriously wrong. If I had spent those years among lizards, perhaps I would have been bound by their serene coldness, transformed by indifference.

But alas…

A Harayt's entire life was one continuous process of mastering his passions.

Perhaps I had just revealed some secret. These intergalactic hunters, these fearless warriors who seemed carved from diamond, spent their entire lives learning how to be without emotion.

Imagine standing on a narrow glider board at the edge of a hurricane. It can carry you at hundreds of miles per hour if you get the angle exactly right and ride the elements with jeweler's precision. Lightning cracks overhead. Vortices coil below. You are afraid to turn around. You are afraid even to comprehend what kind of force is carrying you through the darkness.

Now imagine such a hurricane spinning inside your subconscious.

A hunter's bolts are screwed down tight.

But I had seen those bolts blown out.

And not only in battle…

Riel pressed his warm, tender cheek against my palm. There was something touchingly feline about him. Flexible and slender, he craved affection, yet trembled faintly beneath the thin fabric at my touch.

He was afraid.

During two weeks of wandering, he had endured too much. He had been made for a secure, silken life. He was like a lost cat of a rare breed, crying and suffering as he wandered through a ruined house, where I had found him and brought him to my island.

I had washed him and fed him, then forgotten about him amid my daily rituals, while he remained just as miserable and eventually crawled into my bed, following some logic of his own that I could not fathom.

He whispered something, quietly and haltingly. He was afraid I would drive him away, and said that he was frightened to be alone in those winding corridors, that he wasn't accustomed to being alone.

I placed my hands on his shoulders almost automatically and froze, astonished by the smoothness and silken softness of his impossibly delicate skin.

His entire body was covered with something like an almost invisible golden down.

His nimble fingers slid over my generator and confidently released the armor plate.

I felt myself standing at the edge of a hurricane…

I began to shake.

Years of suppressed recharges were swelling my channels with molten lava.

“This is not safe,” I warned him. “I don't know what this might lead to…”

“If my lord permits…” he smiled, and his hands swept across my chest. “My lord is tired. Too tired. The energy is flowing incorrectly. I can correct it. I know how…”

“My systems are quite unusual. My appearance may confuse you. Long ago I was human, but that is irrevocably past… things are different now.”

“I understand,” he replied softly, and I noticed the short golden claws on his fingers. “Few have ever seen Harayts. They haven't appeared on Almatea for many centuries. My former master used to say that all of you were once human. Until you passed through the Labyrinth.”

He smiled, and his eyes flashed mischievously.

I froze in astonishment.

This beautiful creature of Almatea knew about the Labyrinth.

At least, he knew that it existed.

“I write poetry, I draw rather well, I sing epics and sacred hymns,” he answered my questions. “I can do many other things, too. But now nobody needs me. They threw me away, and the nights are so terrible for me. I am ready to die…”

He began to cry and buried his face against my chest. I ran my fingers through his fluffy mane and stroked him, combing through the golden curls.

I purred something soothing to him and shook him, out of habit rather more roughly than I should have.

When someone cries, I don't know what to do.

I began thinking how to calm him while administering first aid and automatically adjusting his shields.

He stopped crying and squeaked.

I came to my senses and discovered that I had nearly wrenched his shoulders out of their sockets.

He behaved respectfully toward me, but grew bolder with every moment.

Still, I was not a lizard, something he was discovering with every movement, and therefore I belonged to a level closer to his own.

Perhaps somewhere in secret he even wanted to think of us as equals.

He was refined, educated, cultured—a beautiful golden-haired young man, noble, from a noble caste, the highest caste, as it happened, among the people of Almatea.

I understood his fear and, at the same time, his audacity.

To him I was merely a barbarian chieftain, a bloodthirsty, crazed savage. And when he realized I had no intention of scalping him, I became an exotic creature to him, a rare element of freedom that violated the familiar order of things.

He was too intelligent not to dream, at least once, of changing his fate.

He sat astride me.

His palms rested on my generator, and at times I felt as though I were going insane.

“You said you know the sacred texts,” I asked him suddenly. “Is that true?”

He leaned toward my ear and whispered.

And when I deciphered his expressive, theatrical speech, I was struck dumb.

The beautiful golden-haired creature was revealing the innermost knowledge of the lizards.