Second Contact (Okal Rel Saga #1)

Chapter 16.2 - An Unusual Creature for a Female Demish Highborn

"I see," said Di Mon. "I hope you executed all the offenders."

"Ah, well, pretty close," said Ayrium, scrubbing her cropped, blond hair with one hand. "That was a sweet skid-in you performed," she praised Di Mon's delicacy. "You learn that doing court receptions?"

"In the Nesak War," said Di Mon.

"Before my time," she said. Ayrium was only twenty-five.

Di Mon looked around him with a frown. The dock was grubby and half the equipment brackets on one wall had snapped and never been repaired. His chiseled nostrils quivered as he cataloged traces of stale ignis smoke and human urine.

"We haven't had a chance to clean up," Ayrium excused the bad housekeeping. "Like I said, some of the locals contested our occupation with tactics worthy of the Killing War." She gave a nervous laugh. "You know. Poison gas. Damaged docks. Power hand weapons."

Reetion tactics, Di Mon thought with a pang. It was ridiculous to feel concern for Ranar's honor, but he could not help it somehow.

"You are an unusual creature for a female Demish highborn," Di Mon remarked to Ayrium.

She grinned at him. "You're not what I imagined, either."

Di Mon frowned, prepared for anti-Lorel prejudice.

"I thought you'd be a lot more arrogant," she told him, "and way stuffier. I mean, being Monatese and an Old Sword, you know?"

"I see," Di Mon said, dryly, unsure whether he had been insulted or flattered.

"So what's this letter from Dad about?" asked Ayrium.

Di Mon pulled D'Ander's letter from his flight jacket. "Your mother's execution," he told her, "and Pureblood Amel."

Ayrium blinked at the double whammy, but she didn't babble questions like most Demish. She snatched the letter out of his hand, flicked it open, and sucked the words off the pages. Once she exclaimed, "No!" and later, "Good gods!"

There were not, to Di Mon's knowledge, any 'good' gods. The gods of the Okal Rel pantheon were all sadistically mad. Nesak priests believed them to be the Great Souls of extinguished lines, still obsessed by the doctrines that had been their own downfall. Monatese scholarship suggested they were remnants of old Earth religions. Most empire Sevolites thought of them as dangerously bored demons of uncertain origin. But if any line of Sevildom would be prone to insist on a good god, it would be the Golden Demish one.

When Ayrium looked up, she said, "My mother's innocent."

Of very little, Di Mon thought with a frown, but he said, "I do not believe she wished Vretla harmed."

"You lost your heir," Ayrium realized, with a sympathetic impulse.

"If D'Ander is correct," Di Mon said, stiffly, "Vretla's child was more likely to have been Amel's than my nephew's."

"Amel," Ayrium breathed the name like poetry, and shook her head. "My father would find the idea too exciting to resist," she followed up soberly, "but Monitum has a reputation for using its head. Could this Von really be Amel? It seems like a bad joke on the Golden Demish, or maybe more particularly on my father, since Amel would also be descended from Ameron through his mother, Ev'rel."

"I am sure Von is highborn," Di Mon insisted carefully, "and his personality is a good match for the Golden Demish notion of a Soul of Light." He raised a hand before she could protest. "Your father's Reetion showed me how to extract hidden data from the Reetion device."

"And you trust him?" Ayrium asked.

"I trust the data," Di Mon told her, "yes. And my lyka's information about Von — she was his den mother."

Ayrium lowered her hand, the letter clenched in it. "I should go to court to defend my mother."

"No," said Di Mon. "Your father will stand as champion for Perry D'Aur."

Her head came up sharply as if she had been insulted.

"He is already at court," Di Mon pointed out.

She gave a rough laugh. "Sorry!" she said. "I thought you meant I shouldn't fight, as a woman — but you aren't Demish. And you are right — my father is already at court. I am here. And he needs me to rescue this kid who just might be a Soul of Light for him. Where do you think this Amel-prospect is?"

"On the Vanilla Rose," Di Mon guessed, "if he is still alive."

"Which is in the Reach of Paradise," Ayrium said, and sighed. "Well, we know there are Reetions who make the jump. They've been popping in and out with increasing frequency over the last eight or nine months. That's why I was clamping down on spots like Trinket Ring that were running Reetion contraband. Father got involved when he found out. He said he wanted to take proof to court, to reopen the question of Reetion contact." She shrugged. "But he took the only Reetions that we ever captured with him to court. My people don't know the jump."

"I do," said Di Mon. "Monitum always has. And I will teach you how to make the jump in exchange for the support of Purple Alliance fliers. H'Reth will not have any highborns, himself, except for Delm's paladins and if they fly against us you and I will have to take them out."

He was half afraid she would balk at the prospect of fighting paladins because they were revered by Golden Demish. Her father was something of an unofficial paladin himself in the service of the Golden Emperor. But if she revered the calling it did not extend to paladins attached to Delm.

"The jump to the Reetion side has been a Monatese secret for two hundred years," she noted, instead. "Why would you be willing to share it with me, now? If Amel is a Pureblood, he's a mostly Demish one: a Blue and Golden Demish cross. I'd say that made him more my concern — on both sides of my parentage — than yours."

Di Mon didn't have the time to explain that he had settled for Delm, when Ev'rel disappointed him, solely because any Ava was better than none, or that proof of Amel's existence was important to him for the sake of vindicating Ev'rel. Instead he said, simply, "Believe me, in the name of Ameron."

Ayrium bit her lip and looked down at the letter again, in her hand. "You ought to know..." she said, shifting her weight, "that father charges me with hanging onto Amel for him, not surrendering him to you."

Di Mon was not entirely surprised. "D'Ander," he said, "would like to be the power behind the throne."

Each pondered their reaction to the idea, and their doubts about each other. They had different interests, but Di Mon believed Ayrium was honorable, which was all it took for Okal Rel to make cutting deals possible.

"Ack Rel?" Di Mon suggested, "We cooperate to gain him, and then settle possession with a duel."

Ayrium grinned as if he had offered her a compliment, and said, "Done."

"I would suggest," he amended, "to first blood."

"You're on," she agreed at once, happy to play by Demish rules. "Amel alive and working as a courtesan!" She shook her head. "Dear gods."