“Good at losing things too,” Penny said with a sniff of doubt.
The android formed the thumbs and forefingers of his hands into a square. Within their pale frame, an image began to take shape: ermine fur, a mirrored dresser—behind the dresser, something red and glowing.
Where he’d returned it.
“Look familiar?” Fortin asked nonchalantly.
“It can’t be there,” Penny breathed. “That was the first place I looked.”
Fortin shrugged and pressed his hands together to snuff out the image. “Look again, then,” he said. “Or don’t. It’s all one with me.”
Penny leaped into her chariot and shouted orders to her driver.
Fortin caught Rolls’ eye and smiled. “Everybody gets what they look for,” the half-android said. “Don’t they—partner?”
Rolls mounted his restive elk. His face was stony, but Fortin’s laughter behind him boiled through his mind like the memory of Diamond dying.
North watched as the light began to scatter and refract in the center of his hall. Black planes, like stress fractures in clear ice, formed and vanished and reappeared in sudden solidity.
A machine and the woman riding it came into phase.
The physical reality had no wings. The machine’s slender body stood on oversized, jointed legs like those of a katydid or a cave cricket. The trunk of metal and crystal was slender, barely large enough to form a comfortable saddle for the hard-faced woman who sat astride it.
She dismounted and bowed to North, standing before his high seat. “Master,” she said, “you summoned me specially. There is—”
She raised her face; her features were without expression “—someone in the Open Lands you want killed. Shall I get my armor?”
North smiled at his Searcher. “You’re very eager, little one,” he said approvingly. “But no, not `killed’ this time but a killer.”
She nodded again and set her left hand on the saddle pommel, ready to remount.
“Do you believe in god, my dear?” North asked archly, toyingly.
The Searcher blinked. “You are god, Master,” she said.
He shook his head. “The only real god here is balance,” he said, no longer playful. “There is a man needed to preserve balance, throughout the Matrix.”
The woman nodded, but without particular interest. Her eyes reflexively examined the structure of her machine, the dragonfly of matter which took her in a bubble of spacetime between the planes of the world, at North’s will and by his dispensation.
“Yes, Master,” she said. “I’ll fetch you his soul.”
A beam of light through the ceiling struck her hair. It raised auburn highlights from a tight coil that had seemed black as the heartwood of ebony before the rays pierced it.
North shook his head, smiling. “Not this time,” he said. “Not his soul alone.”
The Searcher’s eyes widened with surprise.
“Mind and body,” North continued. “Mind and body and soul, I suppose, if men have souls.”
For a moment North’s visage was as terrible as the advancing edge of a glacier. The cold fury was not directed at the woman, but she felt herself shrink inside for all her courage.
Then the silent storm passed, and he, smiling again, said, “I chose you in particular, Krita, because he’s someone you used to know. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Golsingh rarely sounded impatient. Because the words were so clipped and precise, Hansen couldn’t be sure whether he was hearing an exception when the king said over the command frequency, “If they don’t come out soon, we’re going in. And I’ll build a new port over the ashes of Frekka.”
“They’re coming out,” Malcolm reported from the right flank.
The mid-morning sun fell squarely on the gray stone walls of Frekka, half a kilometer from where Hansen had marshaled the royal army. The ground between the two dipped slightly, no more than one meter in twenty—a swale of no military significance but some interest psychologically.
Painted, polished metal winked from seven gateways as the Syndics’ army shambled out of Frekka.
Hansen instinctively used his map display instead of looking to either side to check his forces. Pitiful forces, considered as an army of men: 309 warriors and a thousand or so armed freemen and slaves. As a unit of tanks, it would have been very large, though, and his warriors would be a match for tanks in close terrain. . . .