Liaden 11 - Mouse and Dragon
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Al'bresh venat'i . . .
“Daav.”
From the silent, freezing dark of outspace, he took note. Of the word. And of the voice.
“Daav.”
He drifted closer. The word had a certain familiarity; there was a worn feel to the voice. It was not, perhaps, the first, or even the fiftieth, time it had spoken that word.
“Daav.” The voice caught. “Brother, I beg you.”
He was close now; close enough to know whose voice it was—one of two in all the universe, that might have called him back.
“Er Thom . . . ”
He felt—a grip. Fingers closing hard around his—around his hand. Yes. He gasped, groped, as if for controls, and opened his eyes.
For a heartbeat, there was input, but no information. Colors smeared, shapes twisted out of sense, a whispery keening disordered the air. The strong grip did not falter.
“A moment, a moment. Allow the systems to do their work, Pilot . . . ”
He had weight now, and a form that stretched beyond his hand. The colors acquired edges, the shapes solidified, the keening—he was producing that noise, dreadful and lost.
“Daav?”
He blinked, and it was Er Thom's face he saw, drawn and pale, lashes tangled with dried tears.
He licked his lips, and deliberately drew a breath.
“Brother . . . ”
The keening stopped, unable to fit 'round the fullness of that word, but the sense of it remained at the core of him, jagged with horror, blighted by loss.
Fresh tears spilled from Er Thom's eyes. He raised his free hand, and tenderly cupped Daav's cheek.
“Denubia, I thought you were gone from us.”
“Where?” he asked, meaning, Where would I have gone? but Er Thom answered another question.
“High Port Medical Arts.”
The hospital.
“Why?”
Er Thom moved his hand, smoothing Daav's eyebrows, brushing tumbled hair from his forehead.
“The response team brought you both in, of course,” he whispered; the tears were running freely now. “They— there was no visible wound, and yet—you did not wake. Your life signs grew weaker, and the Healers—Master Kestra herself—said she would not dare to intervene, for she did not know what she was seeing.”
The horror at the core of him grew toothier. He tried to pull his hand away, but Er Thom held on like a man with a grip on a lifeline.
“Aelliana?” he asked, and that was an error, for as soon as he spoke, he remembered: the shout, his turn, the sound of the gun, and Aelliana leaping, graceful and sure—her body torn by the blast, slamming into him, and a vortex of absence, sucking him out, out, alone, gone, dead . . .
“Aelliana!”
He twisted, prisoned by the bedclothes, desperate to escape the agony of loss.
Er Thom caught his shoulders, pressed him against the bed and held him there while he flailed and screamed, and at last only wept, weakly, turning his face into the tumbled blankets.
His brother gathered him up, then, and held him cradled like a babe, murmuring, wordless and soothing, and Aelliana, Aelliana . . .
“Another child,” he whispered. “She had said we should have another child. We were late . . . ”
“He thought he had missed you, going in,” Er Thom murmured. “The gunman said as much before he died of his wounds. He thought to wait until the end of the play and catch you as you came away.”
“Wounds? There was no one but us, on the street, who would have wounded—”
“You,” his brother said. “The medics found your hideaway by your hand, and that prompted them to look for another who might be in need.”
Had he been quicker, had he been more alert—he might have preserved her life.
“He said,” Er Thom murmured, “that you were the target. That the Terran Party has a price on your head.”
“She saw him,” he whispered. “Timing and trajectory were blood and breath to her. She deliberately put herself
