Gabriel's Ghost Read online

  Drogue’s bright-eyed gaze ran up and down my length, or lack thereof. “Captain Chasidah Bergren. Yes.” He stuck out his hand.

  I accepted it.

  “You are well?” he asked.

  I tried to place his accent. South system, Dafir. “All things considered, yes.” Some of my wariness returned. The Englarians were invariably cooperative with the government. I still had visions of a firing squad as a reception committee, Sully’s protestations notwithstanding.

  “Considering we had an intimate encounter with a jukor.” Sully clapped Drogue on the back, then held his arm near the man’s nose.

  Drogue’s head jerked backward. “Praise the stars! Yet you live.”

  “I’m a stubborn son of a bitch. Where’s Ren? Soaking?”

  The bathtub. I remembered Sully’s earlier comments. Could water immersion be a little-known Englarian ritual?

  “He left the hydro not ten minutes ago. He should be down shortly. He knows time is a factor tonight.”

  Sully pushed up the sleeve of his black jacket, glanced at his wrist. “Hour forty-five. You’ll be ready? I need to soak this stench off me first. Feed her some tea, will you?” He jerked his thumb at me.

  His abrupt dismissal rankled. Especially as I’d been thinking so kindly of his kisses earlier. “Sullivan—”

  If was as if he’d heard my thoughts. The fingers that moments ago pointed at me grabbed my hand. He planted a long kiss against the inside of my wrist before I could jerk back. “I won’t be long, my angel. Every second we’re apart pains me. I promise I’ll return to your side with all due speed.”

  “You stink. Go wash.”

  “Come bathe me. The touch of your hands could restore my weakened form.”

  My hands wanted to smack him a good right cross on the side of his jaw. He appeared anything but weak. His wide shoulders filled out his jacket only too well. There were any number of derogatory appraisals of Gabriel Ross Sullivan over the years, but none of them ever suggested he was anything less than extremely pleasant to look at.

  Why were all the handsome ones always such bastards?

  I smiled at Drogue. “I’d love a cup of hot tea.”

  The short man grinned affably, motioned to the round table. “Sit, please! I will make a cup. I’m sure Ren will join us momentarily. You too, Brother Sudral, when you have finished your ablutions.”

  “Tea’s about all we’ll have time for.” He strode for the arched doorway, turned. “She’ll need more time than you think to get changed, Drogue. Likes to fuss with her hair. So get her moving, as soon as possible.” His footsteps echoed down the hallway.

  Kettle in hand, Drogue watched Sully’s retreating form. I caught his eye before he turned back to the cooktop. “Would you please explain to me what’s going on?”

  He put the kettle on the thermal grid, tabbed it on. “Brother Sudral’s said little?”

  “Brother Sudral talks in circles.”

  “For security purposes, I’m sure. Should we be captured prior to departure, none of us would be able to place the mission at risk.”

  Mission? Involving Englarian monks and the ghost of a poet turned mercenary? “You don’t seem surprised we ran into a jukor.”

  He placed a steaming cup of fragrant tea in front of me. His smile was still pleasant, but something flickered in his eyes, something tense laced his words. “Little surprises me at my age, Captain.”

  He wasn’t, in spite of his bald head, that old. Fifties at most. My father was older. “It’s Chasidah. Or Chaz. And jukors were banned. Exterminated.”

  “I’m a theologian, not a scientist.”

  He was also frequently at the spaceport.

  “You saw them off-load a shipment, didn’t you?” Live cargo, other than prisoners, didn’t come into Moabar. Someone would have noticed. It wasn’t unlikely that it would be Drogue.

  “Do you not like your tea?”

  I hadn’t sipped it. It didn’t interest me as much as things I couldn’t explain. Things that hinted of something gone more awry than my travesty of a court-martial for dereliction of duty in the face of a direct order. A dereliction that resulted in the deaths of fourteen officers and crew in the Imperial Sixth Fleet.

  An order the court said I’d acknowledged, then ignored.

  An order I swore on all I held holy I’d never received. My ship’s logs showed otherwise. Forgery, the court said, was impossible.

  As impossible as jukors prowling the forests of Moabar.

  I sipped my tea, listened to my brain engage in a familiar litany. This was Moabar. Why should I give a damn what happened here? Jukors or Takas. Illegal or legal. If the Empire needed more devils for its Hell, this was the place to grow them. It wasn’t my concern. I was neither scientist nor theologian. I was alive—praise the stars—and an hour from freedom.

  “The tea’s fine,” I told Drogue. I meant it. Time to focus on what’s now, not what should be. What could have been.

  At a soft sound in the archway, I turned, expecting Sully.

  For two seconds I froze in my seat. It was as if one of the old training sims had come, horribly, to life. The dagger snapped flat into my hand. My chair fell backward, crashed to the floor. I was almost to the door when Drogue’s voice stopped me. “Leave now, Captain, and you will surely die.”

  3

  “Chaz! He won’t hurt you.”

  This time I did see Sully, freshly scrubbed, his hair still damp and glistening. And in a monk’s uniform, its pale sandlike colors contrasting sharply with his dark hair and eyes.

  His humanness contrasted sharply with the Stolorth filling the archway. Sully squeezed by the tall, humanoid form and strode toward me, hand outstretched.

  I backed up a step. If he thought I’d give him my dagger he was wrong. Dead wrong. But I did take my hand off the door leading outside. I did lower the dagger. “Explain.”

  He stopped, two dagger lengths away, and glanced over his shoulder. The Stolorth hadn’t moved, save to lean a little to its left on a cane it held in its six-fingered left hand.

  His hand. The Stolorth was definitely male. Like Sully, he wore the pale sand-gray pants and tunic of a monk. But his biceps and thighs strained the fabric. He topped Sully’s height by four, five inches.

  He could almost pass for human, if you didn’t see the gill slits on his neck. Could almost pass, if you didn’t notice the thick silvery-blue hair plaited in a braid not unlike my own. Could almost pass, if you didn’t see the webbing between the fingers.

  Now I understood the role of the bathtub.

  “I’m sorry.” The Stolorth spoke. His voice was deep, surprisingly soft. In it, I heard waves echoing on a shore I’d never visited. “I thought she knew.”

  Sully had the good grace to look sheepish. “I was going to tell her. Then I fell asleep in the tub.”

  The Stolorth angled his face toward me. “Captain Bergren, it wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

  Startle me? No, when a Stolorth Ragkiril was finished with a human mind, there was nothing left to startle. Nothing left at all.

  Sully took a half step closer. I could smell the soap on his skin. A small drop of water lost its grasp on his tousled hair, made a rivulet around the edge of a thick eyebrow, and trickled down the right side of his face. “It’s okay, Chaz. Trust me.”

  I could think of a dozen reasons not to. But reality dictated I had no choice, and nothing to go back to. If I died on Moabar, death would be slow and painful. At least with a Stolorth, he could plant pleasant memories as he ripped my mind to shreds.

  “He’s blind, Chaz. He can’t hurt you.”

  Blind? “That’s impossible. They kill their—” But even from across the kitchen I could see the film over his silver eyes, dulling them.

  By all that was holy. A blind Stolorth in an Englarian monastery? And a full-grown male at that? We were told Stolorths killed defective young and weak elders. Blindness was especially heinous to them. Their telepathy—their Ragkiril mind ta
lents—depended on eye contact with their victims. With their own kind, it was their primary means of communication.

  I saw the cane, grasped by six fingers. And let the dagger wrap itself around my wrist. He couldn’t hurt me. His own kind wanted him dead. Oddly, I felt a small pang of kinship with him. I knew what it was like to be rejected by people who were supposed to love you.

  “We were just having a nice cup of tea.” Drogue sounded immensely relieved. “Please, sit and join us?”

  I noticed, not for the first time, the spotlessness of his kitchen. The blood bath I could have created would have been hell to clean up.

  His name was Frayne Ackravaro Ren Elt. Sully performed the introduction. Ren was his birth name, Elt the name of his grandmother, Frayne, his mother, and Ackravaro, his clan-of-region.

  He answered to Ren.

  In spite of his size, and his blindness, he moved gracefully to the round table, selected a chair, and sat. Drogue handed out fresh cups of tea.

  I sat across from him, with Sully on my left, and tried to make sense of this. I’d never known Englarians to associate with Stolorths. They were even more fanatically opposed to telepaths than the Empire was.

  “Again, I apologize, Captain Bergren. I sensed no disquiet in your presence—”

  “How can you sense if you’re blind?” My caution resurfaced. My NonHuman Cultures class had been known to be wrong.

  “My blindness negates those aspects you fear—my mind-speech with my people, as well as any threat you may feel I present to yours. But my empathic abilities remain.”

  “And are put to use through prayer and meditation, as taught by Abbot Eng,” Drogue added. “Brother Ren is a fine example of the results of studying the purity of thought. His blindness, through the grace of the abbot, has become a gift.”

  My academy class was very wrong. Englarians didn’t view all Stolorths as soul-stealers. And blind Stolorths did survive to adulthood.

  “So you sensed my presence? As what?”

  “Human female, inquisitive variety.” Sully raised his cup as if in mock salute. “Drink up. We have a shuttle to catch.”

  “We?” I wasn’t questioning Sully’s participation. I realized for the first time there were to be two more: Drogue and Ren. The latter still worried me, but I understood the pressures of a flight schedule.

  “We.” Sully laid a stack of ID cards on the table, spread them with the flair of a dealer in a casino.

  Apt, I thought. We were placing bets with our lives.

  Four cards, all bearing the crossed-arch symbol of the Englarian clergy. Drogue picked them up, one by one, and examined them.

  I finished my tea and stood, damning Sully for not telling me of his plans.

  Drogue ushered me to a back room, complete with a lavatory and a wide couch. A wooden-fronted closet was half open. Tan-gray tunics and robes filled it. I had a feeling I was to be Brother Chaz.

  “We have you logged as Sister Berri.” Drogue rifled through the closet, pulled out a cowled robe and shiftlike gown, and held them up against me. If I had to run for it, I’d fall on my face. But other than that, it was fine.

  “Your boots are fine,” Drogue said as he left. “Leave your clothing on the couch and it will be sent with our luggage to the shuttle.”

  I found a wide-toothed comb on a dresser, ran it briskly through my hair while I stood in front of a large mirror. The room stared back at me in reverse. The arched doorway was directly behind me. On one wall, there was a wooden replica of the arch-and-stave. On the other was an artist’s rendering of Abbot Eng, stave raised, about to kill a soul-stealer. Eng had preached that soul-stealers encased their victims in a mind-numbing “unholy light.” Only the Pure, trained in his church, could defeat them. The large painting was one of the more common depictions, showing the imaginary demon, half-human male, half beast. Its scaly skin was overlaid with a silvery glow; its wings were splayed wide. The winged man’s mouth was open in a scream. Lovely decor.

  The lavatory was small. I splashed water on my face, longing for a bath, but there was neither time nor inclination. I was traveling with a Stolorth, an aquatic humanoid that could gut a mind as easily as my dagger could gut a fish, with or without any unholy light. Things deep and watery were best avoided, for now.

  I donned the shift, then the robe, and was securing the wide fabric belt when a knock sounded on the door.

  “Come.” It took me a moment to remember certain technologies couldn’t exist on Moabar. I had to walk to the door and manually open it.

  Sully was on the other side, grinning disarmingly.

  And no doubt was also impatient. I hadn’t been ten minutes. “I’m ready.”

  He grabbed my shoulders, turned me around. I glimpsed something in his right hand. He waddle-marched me toward the long mirror on the wall.

  “Not yet.” He snatched the comb from the dresser on his right.

  “What do you think you’re—”

  “Hush.”

  He sunk his hands into the long mass of hair I’d half-braided and tucked down the back of my robe. He began unraveling my braid. In the mirror I saw a length of corded leather, dotted with shiny silver beads, dangling from his fingers.

  “We don’t have time—”

  “Hush!” His grin faded, his brows slanting down. Concentrating. Braiding my hair, weaving in the beads and leather.

  Making amends for the hair wrap I’d tossed to the jukor? Or remembering that night in Port Chalo? I’m sure it had meant nothing to him. Or maybe he thought a few kisses had earned him the right to taunt me now.

  I wasn’t in the mood to be teased. “I can do that a lot faster than you.”

  “Hush, hush, hush.” Softly. His voice was not much more than a deep rumble in his throat. His hands were firm, yet more gentle than I would have thought he could be. And warm. A whisper of soft heat played down my neck where his fingers brushed against my skin. I didn’t pull away when they stroked my hair, my scalp, the back of my neck. Instead, I let myself sink into the sensations, bargaining with myself as I did so. What harm was there in letting him braid my hair for me?

  My eyes wanted to close. I’d fought exhaustion for hours now. He was so warm. His knuckles brushed my jaw. Fingers traced my lips …

  His intimate caress jolted my brain awake. I lurched forward, my hands splaying against the rough-hewn mirror frame. I caught a glimpse of his face, his obsidian eyes half-hooded, molten.

  I felt my own face flame with heat. I didn’t look in the mirror for fear of confronting a fool I knew only too well. I turned, my braid swinging heavily against my back. The beads on the leather cord tinkled lightly against the glass.

  “Business deal, Sully. Strictly business.” I sounded far more breathy than I wanted to.

  He still watched me through hooded eyes, though the sensual curve on his lips was gone. We were almost toe-to-toe. But my hand already encircled the bracelet on my wrist, fingers on its spring points.

  He let out a long, slow sigh. “Chasid—”

  “Brother Sudral? Sister Berri?” Drogue rapped on the door and walked in, seeming totally oblivious to what was going on. Or else, with Sully, he was used to it. “We must be going.”

  Sully spun around, reached for the short, stocky man, and clapped him on the shoulder. “I was ready an hour ago. It’s this one.” He jerked his hand back in my direction, but didn’t turn. “Has to fuss with her hair.”

  Why are all the handsome ones always such bastards?

  We walked down the graveled road toward the spaceport, four robed figures of divergent sizes. An antigrav pallet with our meager luggage trailed behind.

  Antigravs and thermal grids worked on Moabar. Autodoors, medistats, and a long list of other technological necessities didn’t.

  Humans fared only marginally better. Winter was approaching, with its recurring plague. Abbot Eng’s followers were devoted, but not stupid.

  “Our replacements will be already on station,” Drogue told me as we walked
in the bright moonlight. No need to hide, to dart though the trees. “They’ve shown an immunity to the plagues. They’ll run the monastery, sit devotions with the Takas, lead the festivals until spring. I’ll return then.”

  Sully had said we were going to Moabar Station to intercept an outgoing freighter, bound in-system. Step Two in freedom for Chasidah Bergren. But I had to live through Step One first.

  “You’re not coming in-system with us?”

  “Oh, no, Sister. We have a very active temple on station. And it’s Peyhar’s Week, don’t you know?” His round face poked out from under his hood. “Oh, perhaps not. We haven’t quite made the inroads in our missionary work with the military as we have in other arenas.”

  As far as I knew, the Takas were the only ones they’d made inroads with. But I wasn’t going to deflate his attempt at proselytizing.

  “The MOC isn’t going to question my presence in the group? Or Ren’s?”

  Another negative from Drogue. “Brother Ren Ackravaro has visited Moabar Monastery several times on retreat.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  “Neither has the real Sister Berri. But her reputation will serve you well. She’s a much-lauded missionary, known for her tireless works in the rim worlds. There’s still much to be done there.” If by “much to be done” he meant widespread poverty, he was correct. The Empire’s rim had a long history of neglect. “Her ID—yours now—bears the arch-and-stave. As Guardian, I vouch for your veracity.”

  Why? What had caused this gentle man to align himself with the ghost from Hell? Was there a financial gain? “You’re taking quite a risk.”

  He sighed. “More is at risk if I do not, Sister.”

  The mission. And Sullivan, a different kind of missionary.

  “Brother Sudral is still being vague about that.”

  Sully fell into step with us. He’d lagged behind, talking to Ren, who walked with one hand on the pallet, the other on his cane. “For good reason. Curiosity tends to be an overrated trait. I’m sure the Empire taught you that at some point. At the moment, your overwhelming gratitude toward me is best expressed through silence. There’s nothing you can contribute at this point, but there’s much to be lost by being premature.”