“Exits all covered,” Warrior breathed beside her; and then she realised where all the others had gone—majat strategy, efficient and sudden. The main corridor of the central dome lay vacant before her . . . what had been home. Rage hammered in her in time to her pulse.
Suddenly, far off down the wings, there was crashing and shrilling of alarms, from every point of the budding: blue. hivers were in. A domestic azi darted from cover, terrified, darted back again, up the stairs—and screamed and fell under a rush of majat down them.
Red-hivers. Raen whipped the gun to target and fired, breaking up their formation, even while blue-hive swarmed after them.
There were human cries. Doors broke open from west-wing: Ruils burst from that cover with a handful of blues on their heels. Raen left majat to majat, steadied her pistol on new targets and fired, careful shots as ever in practice, at the weapon’s limits of speed. Her eyes stayed clear. Time slowed They fell, one after the other, young and old, perhaps not believing what they saw. Their faces were set in horror and hers in a rigid grin.
Then a baritone piping assailed her ears and the blues in all parts of the corridor signalled each other in booming panic, regrouping to signals she could not read. From east-wing came others, reds, golds, a horde of armed azi.
Raen stood and fired, coldly desperate, not seeing how to retreat. Some of the Kethiuy azi and the surviving blues attempted to rally to her, but fire cut them down and a rush of majat came over them.
Warrior fell almost at her feet, decapitated. The limbs continued to struggle, nearly taking her off her feet. Naked azi sprawled dead about her. She spun then, catching her balance, and tried to run, for there was no other hope. The blues, such as survived, were in full flight.
Something crashed down on her, crushing weight.
viii
A second time Raen lay quietly and waited to live or die; but this time the walls were stark white and chrome, and the frightened azi who tended her kept their eyes down and said nothing.
That was well enough. There was nothing she particularly wanted to hear. She was not in Kethiuy. That told her something. Drugs hazed her senses, keeping her from wishing anything very strongly.
This continued for what seemed days. There were meals. She was fed, being unable to feed herself. She was moved, bothered for this and the other necessity. She said nothing in all this time, and from the azi there was no word.
But finally the drugs were gone, and she waked with a majat guard in the room.
Red-hive. She recognised the badges, the marks they wore for humans, who could not see their colours. Red-hive Warrior.
She knew then that she had lost, lost more than Kethiuy.
The majat gave her clothing, grey, without Colour. She put it on, and found the close feeling of it utterly strange. She sat afterward with her hands in her tap, on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. The majat guard did not move and would not move while she did not.
There was shock attendant on regaining the human world; there were realisations of what she had lost and what she had become. She was very thin. Her limbs still hurt, although she bore scars only on her side. She held her right hand clenched in her left. feeling the beaded surface of the chitin which was her identity: Raen, Sul-sept, Meth-maren, Kontrin. They gave her grey to wear, and not her Colour. There was no way to remove the other distinction save by massive scarring. A scale lost would re-grow. She had heard of Kontrin deprived of identity, mutilated by assassins, or by Council order. That prospect frightened her, more than she was willing to show. It was all she had left to lose. She was fifteen, going on sixteen. She was mortally afraid.
It was a very long time before the call she anticipated came.
She went with the azi guards, unresisting.
ix
They were the authority of the Family, the available heads of the twenty-seven holdings and the fifty-odd subgrants, with their outworld branches. They wore the Colours of House and sept, and glittered with chitinous armour . . . ornament, little protection, for most was for right-arm only; and weapons in Council were outlawed. Old men and old women inside, although the faces did not make it evident . . . Raen scanned the half-circular array, the amphitheatre of Council, herself in the low center, and realised with mixed feelings that no one present wore Kethiuy blue. She saw Kahn, once the youngest in Council; at seventy-two, senior of assassin-ravaged Beln sept of the Ilit; he looked thirty. There was Moth, who showed her age most, incredibly wrinkled and fragile . . . going soon, the Family surmised. She was beyond her six hundredth year and her hair was completely silver and thinning. And Lian, Eldest of Family . . . to him Raen looked with a sudden access of hope; Lian still alive, uncle Lian, who at seven hundred had been immune from assassination perhaps because the Family grew curious how long a Kontrin could live and remain sane. Lean was one of the originals, old as the establishment of humans on Cardin, first in Council.