Free Law of Survival by Kristine Smith Page A

overrobe, and carried his drapedover her arm. “Is it time already?” He folded the Council reports with heavy hands and inserted them back into their sheaths.
    â€œThe Exterior Minister arrived most early.” Sànalàn lapsed into the curt cadences and minimal gestures of Low Vynshàrau as she fussed with the overrobe’s folds. “She asked one of the Haárin to show her the allowed areas of the embassy, and he did.”
    Tsecha rose slowly from his favored chair. The frame had stabbed him in all the usual places, but even that discomfort had failed to sharpen his mind. “It is allowed that our Anais tour the allowed areas of the embassy, nìa.” He let Sànalàn help him don his robe, since such was her temper that he did not think it wise to reject her assistance. “That is what the word means.”
    â€œIt is unseemly.” Sànalàn prodded and yanked as though she dressed a squirming youngish and not her aged dominant. “You must reprimand him. He should have directed her to me or to nìaRauta Inèa instead of taking charge of her himself.”
    â€œI must take care how I admonish any embassy Haárin, and truly.” Tsecha adjusted his twisted, red-trimmed sleeves as unobtrusively as he could. “They maintain our utilities. Our air and our water, our fire and our foundation. I berate this one you speak of too strongly, and we may all freeze in our beds.”
    â€œNot this one. He is the tilemaster.”
    â€œAh. You have complained of him before.”
    â€œAnd still you have done nothing.”
    Tsecha offered a hand wave of acquiescence. “I will speak to him. I will threaten him with the anger of the gods.” He waited for Sànalàn to precede him to the door, then fell in behind her. “What is his name?”
    â€œDathim Naré.” Sànalàn gestured abruptly. “He is unseemly.”
    â€œSo you said, nìa. So you said.” Tsecha tried to recall the last time he had witnessed such agitation in his suborn as he continued to wrestle with his sleeves. “Jani is here?”
    â€œYour Kièrshia has just now arrived, along with Colonel Derringer and Lescaux, Ulanova’s suborn.”
    â€œThe one who looks as my Lucien? He did not arrive with Anais?”
    â€œNo, nìRau. With Derringer and Kièrshia, as I said.”
    â€œAh.” Tsecha slackened off his pace so that he fell a stride farther behind the aggravated Sànalàn.
    He entered the windowless meeting room to find it as Sànalàn described. Humanish filled one side of the banked spectator seats, Vynshàrau the other, the murmurs of conversation stilling as all faces turned to him.
    How different we look. The contrasts struck him particularly in these meetings. The humanish appeared stunted, truncated in every way. So short they were—even the tallest only reached Tsecha’s nose, while the shortest…well, one had to watch where one stepped. Males and females both wore their hair in clipped styles that showed their ears and the shapes of their heads, and dressed in fitted clothing in dark, forest colors of leaf and wood and pool. Even his Jani, who sat in one of the banked rows of seats behind the tan-garbed Colonel Derringer, wore a green as dark as the depths of a well.
    Against the multihued gloom of their clothing, their skins shone every color from worm-white to wood-brown, their pale-trimmed eyes glittering with feverish death glaze. Not an aesthetically pleasing people, humanish—Tsecha could admit this despite his affection for them. As ever, they seemed to war with their surroundings, rather than blend with them.
    So different are my Vynshàrau. Gold-skinned and gold-eyed, garbed in flowing robes of sand and stone that complemented the muted hues of the walls and floor, long of limb and fluid of line and motion. Like him, most wore their hair in the braided fringe of the breeder; the few