Free Delia of Vallia by Alan Burt Akers

tell.
    At least four of the women who happened to be passing and stopped for a moment to chat as Delia made her way to the mistress’s tower did not, she judged, happen to be passing by chance.
    Yzobel clicked her dagger.
    “Brazen,” she said, and her nostrils pinched in.
    Yzobel could get away with outrageous behavior, and Delia knew it. In the normal way of the Discipline, no sister could speak thus of another without reprimand. But, there was something planned in the way the ranking sisters just happened to be walking meekly along as Delia went toward the mistress.
    Nothing overt was said. Just making their marks, as it were. Delia fancied there would be more making of marks yet, before they ranked their Deldars and got down to the politics of the affair.
    The mistress of the Sisters of the Rose could have her apartments in no other tower than the Tower of the Rose.
    Thither Delia went.
    The grey stone walls, ivy clad, appeared to her to shed a cooling benediction from the heat of the suns. The archway closed above her head. The rugs upon the floor were not all of Walfarg weave; there were many lesser carpets to cushion the feet. Up the blackwood stairs, a single sharp ring upon the bell, and the door opening and old Rosala smiling and beaming and stepping back to usher in the sister come to see the mistress.
    “You are well, Rosala?”
    “A touch of gyp in my left elbow, my dear. But I’m as chirpy as a cricket and shall be two hundred and ten next birthday.”
    They went along the carpeted corridor whose walls were adorned with the trophies of various past deeds. The mistress’s room at the end looked just the same to Delia. Then she frowned. In one corner a curtain was half-drawn across a bed. It was a proper bed, as anyone could see with half an eye, not a day-lounger.
    That bed was a new touch, an addition to the usual.
    That did not, of course, mean it was abnormal.
    Most of the drapes were of that pale sheer rose color that verged on the opalescence of a Zimful sky at evening, when Genodras had sunk below the horizon. When Zim sank first in the long cycles of alternations, then the evening sky held overtones of quite different natures. Against the walls and drapes the furniture stood as ever, the familiar pieces, polished, cared for, each one in its place and each one fulfilling its own duty. The desk, of balass wood, still angled across the curve of the southwestern tower window.
    The mistress did not rise to greet Sister Delia.
    She used one pale hand to gesture to the seat set four square before the desk. Delia sat.
    Winsome to suggest this brought back vivid memories of herself as a young girl. Trite to suggest that, and trite to ignore the feeling.
    The scent of flowers banked in their troughs along the wall brought back the memories! The flick-flick plant on a windowsill, set there to catch flies, would as ever have to be hand fed. A new tang hung in the air. Delia, gently, tested its meaning. Medicaments. Well, then, and perhaps now she understood a little more of the chance meetings and the markings of marks that were no chance.
    “Faril Sheon, Delia,” said the mistress in all formality. Her voice breathed more memories; but the tone was weaker, the full bell-note fallen away. Delia sat straight, heels together, hands in her lap, head up. She looked at the mistress.
    Here in the heart of the heart of the Sisters of the Rose there was no need for the small secret sign.
    “SheonFaril, mistress,” said Delia.
    “I am more than glad to see you. You have worried me.”
    The mistress had once been able to lift a full-bodied man above her head and throw him up a flight of stairs. Now she could do that, perhaps, to a fair-sized dog. Her face, unlined, bore only the marks of wisdom and experience and pain engraved upon it in the planes and the shadows. Her eyes were as bright and brown as cobnuts as ever they had been.
    Like Delia, she wore the rose-colored gown. Her belt from which swung the long