In the owner’s country, the dragons were just not
giving up. Hara couldn’t tell how long
they’d been sniffing and swooping over them.
They seemed to have a vague idea where Kyrus was, they just couldn’t
pinpoint him.
That gave her another idea and while she sat, she
scanned as much of the owner’s country she could see. Off in the distant haze she could see what
she knew to be the glass mountain.
Over
that way... she could see a similar disturbance of dragons and sniffers and
packs of belling, howling things that reminded her of terran cats, with four
legs and fur, and spots, but they didn’t move like cats and they didn’t mew or
purr but howled.
They looked somewhat like Zon Elemfias’s dog, but
these dogs were much bigger and had blocky heads and floppy ears and if that noise
they were making was a bark, she’d shave her own head. I’ll
bet that da and stepapa are hidden around there.
Between passes by the dragons and the mournfully
honking sniffers over and under her, she began shrinking her size down, tying
filaments of herself into the bark of the Kyrus tree, the better to attach the
strand of spider silk. It was odd to
feel the number of her limbs double, and gain some of the weirder senses of a
spider. At least it was more comfortable
than becoming a glass bug. They also
travelled on the wind, passive, less likely to be noticed, but they felt spikey
and for humans it was somehow harder to assume some body shapes, even in the
code. Her personal energy was just below
the middle range of what she could bear in the code and she had to find, and
attach a filament to both her da and stepapa, and get out before she ran out of
time and energy both.
She couldn’t leave all of them stuck in the nightmare the owner had built to protect his ‘oh-so-precious’ knowledge.
She
crouch down, abdomen in the air, and trailed a long silk line out to be caught and
whipped around by the wind. It was an odd sensation. A little like having a good bowel movement...
or wild sex. There was a bit of
soreness. She shook herself and braced
all her legs till the sail of silk tugged her right out of the upper branches
of Kyrus, sending her tumbling like a dust-speck, along behind a swooping
dragon.
**
Terry was almost sorry he’d found out. He’d lunged up from his chair, pacing back
and forth like an ice breaker on full stomp, back and forth from wall to wall,
his palm hitting on each turn as if the dull smack of his skin hitting the
shell he was contained in bounced him back and forth.
You
son of a goat. You rank evil old man! He’d
been presented to The Font, at his ‘coming out’, when he was considered to be
trained to the peak of his ability and class.
He’d worn the high collar and the tight coat, carried the formal gloves
of a Tech Second Class, and the glass plate representing his skillset, which was
screens. The Font had sat in at the end
of the long hall, and the line of candidates for admission into polite adult
society had wound all the way down the stairs outside.
He’d paced along, under the eyes of the paintings of
the mothers of Xanadu, since the only way women were allowed to attend such
important ceremonies was in paint, especially if they were safely dead. They weren’t even allowed in the building
with their Keepers for the time of the ceremony itself. They’d come in afterward, when the feast would happen,
and the men would need the beautiful and delicate sensibilities of their mother’s,
aunties, grannies, or their sisters or daughters to rest their eyes upon,
having done something too arduous for them to ever achieve.
Of course he wondered what was so arduous about
waiting in line, with servants offering iced coffee, before being called
forward to kneel on the cushion, accept the perfunctory nod and acknowledgment from
the wizen old raisin of a man wrapped in red velvet and cloth of gold. The Font was so old that even lifeweed couldn’t
fight the clock, not even combined with rais’r.
He paced until his feet hurt. He’d even seized up his precious books and
flipped through them, the hypocrisy in them as overwhelming as a stench and he’d
hurled them the other direction. They
now lay crumpled against the wall, like broken songbirds, voices stilled.
Damn
you. He finally
stopped and stood in the centre of the room, fists clenched. He unclenched every finger slowly and
deliberately reached to turn his chair so he could sit down, as regally as any
of the hoi polloi, all those above a mere Tech Second Class. He knew
he was First Class material.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Let’s
just see how good your programs are, old man.
I found the first children’s monsters.
I bet you my life I can open some doors that apparently weren’t supposed
to even be seen by such as me, much less pried open. What are you hiding that
justified giving me nightmares for years?
And... you must be doing the same to Charles’ children. And Adrianna’s too.
His rage was no longer the wash of his constrained
activity sloshing around inside his skin, but concentrated in a coal, sitting
like a headache behind his eyes. I was never supposed to have access, even to
this cheapest and slowest and lowest of central computing connection. If you find out I have it, my family’s
contract allows for it to be burned out of me, however much of me it destroys in
the process. I’m not a knight, slamming my face-plate shut. I’m a coyote slinking around the edges of the
creation.
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