Free Dark Tempest by Manda Benson Page B

now sniffing and clicking at a junction in the passage.
    “Indeed. Are you sure you know where you’re going, Rh’Arrol?”
    Rh’Arrol clicked. “Yes, you wishes me takes you to the man-who-is-leader—the Seignior. Fortunate for you that he lives in this sector. Well, it’s this way, although I could be wrong in this wretched light. Men, and their stupid propensity for it!”
    “Why do you choose to live here, then?” Wolff followed the blundering creature.
    “While the men sleep, the corridors darker, and we wake and emerge.”
    “Ah, so you’re nocturnal. A tenancy in the docking pipes would seem convenient.”
    “Is safe enough.”
    Wolff kept up the conversation in a detached sort of manner, glancing repeatedly at his clock. “Where exactly are we going?”
    Rh’Arrol surveyed the approaching wall with a barrage of sound, and butted aer nose against a panel. Another cavity opened in the wall. Inside, Rh’Arrol switched off the light, closed the door, and set the pneumatic lift on its way up.
    “The ship is yours?” The morran’s huge golden eyes narrowed in the gloom, aer voice lowering. “I know of only one breed of man that uses a ship of that specification, and they are seen even less often than they are spoken of.”
    Wolff sat down on a chair inside the lift. “No, the ship is not mine.” He gazed at the rapidly flickering readout on the lift wall. “I am a passenger.”
    “This is destination, or does you intend to return to the ship?”
    “Oh, I intend to return. Soon, I hope. But first I have some business here.”
    Wolff thought again of the Archer, Jed. Ever since the Larkspur had been hauled aground at the salvage station, he had been deeply intrigued by her kind. The Larkspur had been a ship, very much like the Shamrock , with dark corridors and an engine with an immensely powerful chimaera array. On the bridge the thin, frail body of its commander had lain, mummified over several centuries by the deathly cold penetrating the ship, a thin silver band still on her forehead. Wolff remembered the Archer’s face, hard and pale as a marble sculpture, almost as though the female still slept after so long drifting in the void. Like Jed, she was fine-boned, with the almost complete melanin absence in the skin that the light of no sun had seemed to ever touch. Very dark hair, almost black, thickly mingled with the grey of age had been styled in the same precise, symmetrical manner as Jed’s. She had worn the same skullcap of dark polymer, and the same richly patterned overtunic of some soft material, fringed at the hems and coming down to the knees and elbows, over black close-fitting garments covering the arms and legs.
    Wolff had felt a kind of fearful wonder as he looked upon the body on the bridge, that he, Gerald Wolff, stood here in this sepulchre, a place this Archer would never have allowed any other than herself and her apprentices to tread.
    Why would someone want such a lifestyle? Who would want that unbearable solitude, century after century? Wolff remembered the sad loneliness in Belthede’s petrified countenance, and wondered what it could have been that had driven her to lie down and die after all that time. She had died of no injury. Her brain had simply shut down to leave her body to waste.
    Some of that same despairing loneliness he saw, too, in young Jed, held in check by that unbreakable fiery arrogance, although it was drilled into this Code of hers too much to call spirit. He could almost see something beneath that defiance in her eyes that held over the ravages conurin and solitude had brought upon her, something that could eventually consume her and expunge the proud fire that held her above Belthede’s final indignity. Something inside her screamed out for someone solid and real to pull her out of her world of shadows.
    It wasn’t just the Archer. It was the same whimsical tangent Wolff always took. He was ever drawn to a challenge, and something about Jed