Reclamation

Three local months later, there was a civil war in Eispecough and the network was destroyed. The Vitae did nothing. Their work wasn't theirs. Their vision wasn't theirs. They'd abandon it all to chaos, because they would not take responsibility for their vision.

The Imperialists wanted to change that. They saw the change that was happening in the Quarter Galaxy. The Vitae in their fearful isolation had made no friends, established no colonies, and claimed no servants. They survived because many civilizations in the Quarter Galaxy considered them useful, and so they were used. But that could change as colonies and stations grew ripe with their own histories and technologies. There might just come a day when the Vitae went from being respected experts to being beggars, unless they established real power. Unless they began issuing contracts instead of just obeying them.

That, no matter what his father said, was the real work.

Jay weighed the weapon in his hand for a long moment before he laid it carefully in the chest. He couldn't see the angle on any of the shadows from here, but he had the distinct feeling tomorrow was still a long, long way off.

Cor left Jay's room without looking back. Her thoughts crowded around her like a cloud of biting flies and she was so busy trying to shoo them away so she could find some kind of understanding, that she lost track of where she was going. She looked up, blinking at the shadows and squinting at the stonework. The relief carving of the three Crooker trees told her she was almost to the dining hall. Her stomach rumbled. Food would help clear her head and warm her cold hands.

The hall itself was a broad, solid, graceless chamber. The space between the tables and benches was taken up either by stone pillars or by coal fires carefully banked in their own ashes. When she'd first gotten here, Cor had found the acrid heat suffocating. Now she breathed it into her lungs as a source of comfort and reassurance. This far into the house it was never warm. The day's heat was not strong enough to penetrate the stone, but the night's cold never seemed to have that problem.

And it'll do nothing but get worse, she thought. The Dark Seasons are coming.

Averand, her homeworld, could zip around its sun forty times in the time it took the Realm to skulk once around the Eyes of the Servant. She remembered when she first saw the simulation of the Realm's orbit. It circled the binary warily, swinging in almost too close, then backing off almost too far, always riding the bare edge of tolerance as it made its long, slow way around its stars. It was on its way out to the far, cold edge now.

Ceramic pots stood in the ashes at the edge of the fires. Cor snagged a red clay bowl off a table she passed and dipped it into the nearest jar to shovel out a helping of porridge, mushrooms, and overcooked chicken meat. She glanced over the jar, looking hopefully for a flat dish of baking bread, but didn't see any. She sighed at the porridge. It'd keep her from starving, but not do much more than that. Even the Nobility kept barely at a subsistence level in the time when there was more day than night.

She thought about Raking Coals, who brought his sledge in every tenth day and kept asking her what price she set her own hands at with a broad wink and a happy leer. And the Oilbrake sisters, who carried fifty-pound sacks of grain on their backs when their pair of oxen went lame and still whistled at the stable boys who crossed the courtyards. And the Notouch daughters who scrambled this way and that in the courtyard, grabbing up the feathers that came down like snow when the house's Bonded sat on the roof and plucked chickens.

It was a filthy, hard, stupid life, and if the Vitae got hold of them, it would vanish.

And if the Family gets hold of them? Cor dropped onto the bench and stuck her fingers into her bowl, shoving the food into her mouth before it went cold.

She'd been sent down with the team when the Unifiers still thought these people were Family. She'd hunkered down and learned the language and the customs and made friends as fast as she could. She learned to tell jokes and to laugh at them. She learned to pitch in with the work of the Bondless and to defer to the Teachers and the Nobility. She could recite the Words of the Nameless in the Temple on the tenth day and navigate using nothing but the walls around her. She'd deliberately set out to find anything and everything she could admire and respect about the culture. It was her job. She'd trained for it specially for years.

Then the word came down. These weren't Family. These people were artificially created. Nothing like this had ever been found before. New policy would have to be formulated as soon as the extent of the engineering could be understood.