Chapter Twenty-eight

"We have to destroy them!" Rao snarled, more to himself than to his peers gathered with him in North's hall. "Ruby destroyed Diamond, so we have to destroy Ruby."

"We mustn't let anger rule us," said Miyoko. She stared at her tented fingers, and her words—like Rao's—were a personal litany.

"We'll destroy Ruby," North said from the high seat. If Rao's anger was volcanic, then North's face was a thundercloud and his words clipped flashes of lightning.

From behind a veil of light Penny snapped pettishly, "We can't do that, we're linked. And anyway, it's just one of those things that happens, and I don't think we ought to let ourselves get so upset."

Dowson pointedly dropped the shield of light behind which he usually sheltered to save the sensibilities of his peers. He floated before them, a brain in a tank of oxygenated fluid.

The outer surface sublimed from the cone of colored ice beside him. His words washed across the assemblage: "Our oaths and our selves guarantee the existence of Ruby."

"Forget that!" said Rao as his wife clutched his forearm with tears of concern in her eyes. They all knew the degree of single-mindedness of which Rao was capable, but Ngoya knew her husband best of all. "We guaranteed Diamond, didn't we? And they destroyed it. Ruby killed Diamond, so Ruby has to die!"

He started to get up. North's right eye focused on him like the single sharp point of a spear. "Sit," North said.

Rao met North's glare without fear; but he let Ngoya guide him back into his seat.

"Eisner," said North, "do you have any suggestions?"

Eisner, pinch-faced and cold, continued to look straight ahead of her. "Dowson is correct," she said without affect. "The Matrix has its own logic. If we destroy Ruby, we destroy ourselves."

She stopped speaking. Her fingers formed a perfect flat pattern in her lap and her eyes did not blink. No one else said anything.

"Rolls, then?" resumed North with the playful lethality of a cat pawing prey too frightened even to run. "Do you have something to add?"

Rolls looked at him. "I'm not afraid of you, North," he said.

North smiled. "You'd be a fool if that were true, Rolls," he said. "But you're not a fool."

Rolls swallowed. "All right," he said. "The others are of course correct. But yes, we have to avenge Diamond."

"Ruby isn't responsible for anything!" Penny whined. "They just—it's what they do. It's what we created them to do, to be. So why are we getting so upset?"

"We aren't talking about justice, Penny," North said in the silky, terrifying voice he'd used from the start of the council. "Merely cause and effect, what was done and what therefore must be done. Isn't that right—"

His head turned like a gun mount rotating. "—Fortin?"

The white android face deliberately turned away. "Whatever you say, dear father," Fortin remarked in the direction of the doorway.

There was a tremor of fear and anticipation in his voice. "You told us that Ruby had to be destroyed, so no doubt you're going to destroy Ruby."

Rao got up again. "Sure," he said. "I'll do it. That murder was the work of Chaos, and we can't compromise with Chaos."

"You idiot!" Saburo cried, the insult bubbling out behind the rush of his own fear. "You're Chaos with that attitude. You'll doom yourself and maybe all of us if you do that!"

"There's no need of that, Rao," North said without apparent anger. He rose in his seat, craggy and gray and as lethal as a murderer's worn knife. "Fortin is quite right. I'll take care of the matter."

He raised his hand. Black wings began to whisper toward the hall.

The others rose also, walking toward the door in emotions as various as there were individuals.

Rolls looked over his shoulder and called to the terrible man standing before the high seat, "You can't send your Searchers, you know. They can't enter Ruby. Only we can do that. Only a god!"

North smiled. His face was as bleak as a frozen gully.

"And if you think to open a path for your machine warriors," Rolls added from the doorway as the others stepped past him, "you can't without disturbing the balance of the whole Matrix. Not even you can do that!"

"Go on, Rolls," North said. "This is mine to deal with now."

"Ruby could defeat your machines!" Rolls cried. "Any number of them! The Matrix—"

North pointed his index finger. "Go now, Rolls," he said.

Rolls plunged out of the crystalline brilliance of the hall. Sunlight on the meadow was warm and gorgeous, but the ice in his marrow didn't want to melt.

The animals on which they'd ridden to the council were excited by their masters' return. Penny looked at the hourglass muscularity of the human who guided the deer pulling her chariot and said, "If you want to know what's really bad, I can't find my necklace."

Ngoya turned on her suddenly. "I can't believe even you could be so shallow that you'd think your necklace was equivalent to, to the horror that passed to a whole world!" the dark woman snapped.

"Easy for you to say," Penny retorted, her face hardening into something unexpectedly shrewd. "If your precious Rao came home in two pieces, would you say that was nothing—" her voice became whiny "—to a whole world?"

Ngoya flushed.

Rao heard his name and turned. "Huh?" he said. "Ngoya, what're you waiting for, anyway?"

"I'm good at finding things, Penny," said Fortin. He sauntered toward her. "Would you like me to try?"

"Good at losing things too," Penny said with a sniff of doubt.

The android formed the thumbs and forefingers of his hands into a square. Within their pale frame, an image began to take shape: ermine fur, a mirrored dresser—behind the dresser, something red and glowing.

Where he'd returned it.

"Look familiar?" Fortin asked nonchalantly.

"It can't be there," Penny breathed. "That was the first place I looked."

Fortin shrugged and pressed his hands together to snuff out the image. "Look again, then," he said. "Or don't. It's all one with me."

Penny leaped into her chariot and shouted orders to her driver.

Fortin caught Rolls' eye and smiled. "Everybody gets what they look for," the half-android said. "Don't they—partner?"

Rolls mounted his restive elk. His face was stony, but Fortin's laughter behind him boiled through his mind like the memory of Diamond dying.

North watched as the light began to scatter and refract in the center of his hall. Black planes, like stress fractures in clear ice, formed and vanished and reappeared in sudden solidity.

A machine and the woman riding it came into phase.

The physical reality had no wings. The machine's slender body stood on oversized, jointed legs like those of a katydid or a cave cricket. The trunk of metal and crystal was slender, barely large enough to form a comfortable saddle for the hard-faced woman who sat astride it.

She dismounted and bowed to North, standing before his high seat. "Master," she said, "you summoned me specially. There is—"

She raised her face; her features were without expression "—someone in the Open Lands you want killed. Shall I get my armor?"

North smiled at his Searcher. "You're very eager, little one," he said approvingly. "But no, not 'killed' this time but a killer."

She nodded again and set her left hand on the saddle pommel, ready to remount.

"Do you believe in god, my dear?" North asked archly, toyingly.

The Searcher blinked. "You are god, Master," she said.

He shook his head. "The only real god here is balance," he said, no longer playful. "There is a man needed to preserve balance, throughout the Matrix."

The woman nodded, but without particular interest. Her eyes reflexively examined the structure of her machine, the dragonfly of matter which took her in a bubble of spacetime between the planes of the world, at North's will and by his dispensation.

"Yes, Master," she said. "I'll fetch you his soul."

A beam of light through the ceiling struck her hair. It raised auburn highlights from a tight coil that had seemed black as the heartwood of ebony before the rays pierced it.

North shook his head, smiling. "Not this time," he said. "Not his soul alone."

The Searcher's eyes widened with surprise.

"Mind and body," North continued. "Mind and body and soul, I suppose, if men have souls."

For a moment North's visage was as terrible as the advancing edge of a glacier. The cold fury was not directed at the woman, but she felt herself shrink inside for all her courage.

Then the silent storm passed, and he, smiling again, said, "I chose you in particular, Krita, because he's someone you used to know. . . ."