"How else does Civilization know?" Kor said. "He asks His people."
I wondered how long Thirukedi's agents had been sitting in the Gate-complex, waiting for this moment, and what their instructions had said, and how much of that great mind those instructions might have revealed. And I admit, aunera, I felt some comfort to realize that I was not yet so much like my master to guess, entirely, at what those might have been.
So now we come to the infamous moment. I know several of you have been waiting for this since I began telling you this story, and I fear it is as ugly as you have probably anticipated. My only consolation is in assuring you that there was no evil in it—no planned evil, at least. Only the usual malefactors in our society in particular, and perhaps in yours as well: chance, and good intentions gone horribly awry. Mistakes happen, as they say. Mistakes can have terrible consequences.
But I am speaking ahead of myself. Kor and I packed and arranged for my trunk to be sent ahead, and we made arrangements for our stay halfway to the capital, and for extra mounts for the aliens (though not for Haraa, who begged off in favor of riding with me). After this I had a nap and he a walk, and we bathed and dressed again properly after our early waking. By lunch we were all gathered in front of the tea house, the lord and the four of us, awaiting only the aunera so that we might go. I found it a very uncomfortable situation, for normally a lord and his fathrikedi would have traveled with a retinue of some kind, several Guardians, at least, and perhaps a few Servants. To be standing alongside one without any sort of vanguard at all, and Ajan our only Guardian... I found it distressing, and altogether typical of the situation. Everything had been put awry by the addition of the aunera, and we all knew it.
They arrived shortly before the appointed time, properly cloaked and carrying their luggage in the form of packs strapped to their backs and slung from their shoulders. The male's face was stern and revealed very little, as before; the female looked pained. I wondered if they feared for themselves or if some other thing weighed on their minds, but did not ask. It was enough to be leaving this benighted world, and I did not wish to do anything to delay us.
We rode to the Gate, then. As before, it was warded by Guardians with rifles in their scarlet filirij; I remember wishing at the time that we could borrow some of them to accompany us to the capital so the lord would have a proper escort, and in retrospect it seems a horrible irony. We stopped there and dismounted so they could check our passes (and in particular, the aunera's). While they were reading the male's, I found myself standing alongside the female.
"You seem... unhappy," I said at last to her.
She glanced at me, then back at the ground. "When I first arrived," she said after a long moment, "I dreamed of this moment. To see the Ai-Naidari homeworld, the capital city... maybe even the palace of the Emperor himself...." Her eyes gleamed as she lifted them toward the too-bright sky. "Oh, to see Kherishdar! To wear the gray cloak for cause rather than as respect! I wanted it, osulkedi...! I wanted it so much!" And then her shoulders slumped as she finished in a whisper, "But not like this."
She seemed so much the maiden then that almost I touched her, as I would have a girl struggling toward adulthood in my family. But she was alien and unlike, and I did not wish to impose.
The Guardians finished with their work and we returned to our mounts. There I will paint you a picture: the great jamb of the Gate at one side, rising high enough to be interrupted by a haze of clouds; the two Guardians in their starkly functional uniforms with the brilliant crimson silk sheathing the weapons at their backs; the two aliens, so much shorter than us, looking uncomfortable and determined not to show it; the lord of Qenain, chastened but bolstered by the presence of his beloveds... and the three of us. Ajan, fierce and young. Kor, sharp and focused. And me. The sun was directly overhead, and our shadows were crisp, dark things at our feet, and all the world seemed an assault when we were joined by one more: an aunerai. The guide who had brought us to the lord's lovers.
He did not seem much happier than he had that day. And my impression of him as some functionary not directly related to the congress between alien and Ai-Naidar was only reinforced by how he ignored us entirely to stride to the female where he took her arm and said something incredulous.
Perhaps it was because I could not understand the language they spoke that the one they didn't seemed so clear to me. The female's reply was courteous, but her entire body cried out a painful negation. Her mouth was framed in tense lines, but she leaned toward him, as if she yearned for the understanding his rigid posture declared impossible.
When their exchange did not end there, the lord's male lover joined them, his voice a sharp staccato. The stranger scowled at him and answered.
"What is this about?" I asked Haraa, ears flat.
"The male did not know she was leaving," Haraa said, so intent on the conversation her body trembled like a predator in sight of prey. "He is telling her not to go. They are arguing about it." She paused, then said. "Ah, the female has said that she must, and that appears to be that."
...for the female aunerai had turned her back on him, heading for her mount. From the shock on the male's face, he had not expected it.
And then his eyes met the lord's and he exclaimed something, pointing.
If that had been all, aunera... if he had done nothing more than point...
...but he did not. He stepped toward the lord of Qenain, well into arm's reach, and with a swiftness that looked like evil intent. I have since learned that in their passions aunera will often make such motions. Among us they are rare, oh, gods hear me! They are rare: rare enough for two Guardians standing vigil at the Gate not a stone's throw away to see what they had to believe was an assault on a Noble above the Wall of Birth, perpetrated... by an aunerai.
The sun flashed off red silk.
I have told you we have measures for subjective time. About tsan, a heartbeat's pause, the kind that is over instantly and yet never ends. That is how it passed for me, that devastating moment. I could not move. I could not breathe. I couldn't grasp the shape of the catastrophe until after the report of the rifles shattered the harsh air of the foreign world.
But it seems that Guardians are regularly taught to move in the space between heartbeats. And in that heartbeat, Ajan saw that unless something changed, those shots—intended to pierce an aunerai still in motion—would miss him entirely, because he had not carried through on his assumed course.
They would instead hit the lord, who had stepped forward to answer the words of the alien, which none of us fully understand but he. They would hit the lord, and the Guardians would be responsible for slaying a man above the Wall of Birth with proscribed weapons in response to the seeming aggression of an alien.
So Ajan threw himself at the lord of Qenain.
The youth I saw dancing in a garden... he could have knocked the lord completely out of the way and escaped unscathed. But the world-weight had embraced us all, even the youngest and fittest of our number.
The shots meant for the lord ripped through Ajan instead.
That is when time crashed back into motion, with all the violence of the rounds that had opened his chest, great gaping mouths that vomited blood as bright as the filirij on the rifles of the Guardians who had stopped, stunned with horror at what they had wrought.
We were not the first to move. Before any of us could react, the female aunerai grabbed the newcome male and shouted something at him that sent him running, talking at speed into some device at his mouth. Her caste-peer lunged to Ajan's side, stripping his uniform jacket and using it as a pad to stanch the wounds.
And then the flicker at my side was Kor, so swift he blurred, joining the alien. His face was a mask.
There is a reason we proscribe guns, aunera. We die easily, far more easily than you do. The velocity of a weapon seems to have more of an effect on us than it does on aunera—you are built more densely than we are—and what we can survive with difficulty from a sword we cannot from a rifle. Ajan had leaped, knowing that if hit he would die to protect one of Kherishdar's lords, not just from an ignominious end, but from becoming the foundation of a diplomatic incident and a terrible scandal. A lord dying from implied aunerai violence after being found in their beds? Better the sacrifice of a young Guardian in a misunderstanding between a lord and an alien than that.
But we all knew that he would die.
All of us, apparently, except the aunera.
I became aware that the female was on the verge of shaking me when she stepped between me and the sight of Kor bent with his brow to the slack hand he cradled in his own. "Osulkedi!" she cried. "Listen to me! I require permission to treat your man!"
In the distance I heard a hair-raising wail. "What?"
"Let us help him!" she said, desperate. "Our medicine is better than yours! We can save him!"
I stared at her. "What? How... it's not possible."
"It is!" she almost shouted, her eyes tearing. "So give us permission! And one of you come with us, in case the surgeon needs a healthy example of what you're supposed to look like when he stitches him back together!"
"I... you..." The sheer improbability of what she suggested was finally overwhelmed by an insane hope. "KOR!" I shouted, and ran for him. "Kor, go with them!"
Kor looked up from Ajan's side. The hands folded around his lover's were trembling.
"They want to save him!" I said. "They might be able to. Go with them!"
"Farren?" Kor said, hoarse, and my heart seized as his voice broke on the last syllable.
"Go with them," I said again as one of the aunerai vehicles burst into view, bringing with it the piercing siren.
Kor stumbled after them, then, when the aliens loaded Ajan's still form into their vehicle. The female—Lenore—paced Ajan's body, talking almost as fast as she could form words and translating them just as quickly on Kor's behalf. Haraa watched them with wide eyes, then looked at me in mute appeal.
"Go," I said. "You have some facility with the tongue. Help them."
She fled for the vehicle, then, leaving me there with the lord and his aunerai lover... and a pool of spreading blood...
...and the two Guardians, one of whom had fallen against the Gate jamb, his rifle on the ground. The other was clasping the weapon with fists so tight they shook. I said to the lord, "There is work to be done," and led him to the Guardians, saying, "you have used the proscribed weapons on an Ai-Naidari but it was not intentional. The lord here is witness; he will go with you to your liege and explain the situation." I eyed Qenain and was relieved to see him revivifying. I finished, "It would be well for you to take the male aunerai with you in case any diplomatic issue arises during the deposition."
"It is well considered, osulkedi," the lord said. To the Guardians, he said, "Send for your relief, and when they arrive, we will depart."
Within half an hour, then, I had dispatched everyone to where they could do the most good... except for one person. You will have observed whom, aunera.
