Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress Page B

wicked, sharp, thin blade. Cam said, “Not bronze. Steel, so they won’t break so easily.”
    “Steel.” Another strange word. He picked up one of the shortest and plainest of the knives. It was forbidden for a scholar, painted in red and wearing the red skirt, to touch a weapon. But by Uldunu Four’s decree, Aveo was a scholar no longer. That reality was gone.
    “Yes, good idea,” Cam said. “Arm yourself—I really should have thought of that last night. But do you think that if we gave him these, the king might let me follow him around the court until I see whatever I’m supposed to witness?”
    “Ostiu Cam, you cannot just offer him these . . . these treasures. You must not!”
    “Why?”
    If her innocence was feigned, it was a wonderful act. But Aveo was losing faith that it was feigned. Another illusion gone. “It would be the grossest insult. You must lose these things to him in kulith, carefully, and with the
feft
move and no other.”
    “With the what? Aveo, if I have to arrange this through kulith, it’ll never happen! Can’t you play for me?”
    He pretended to consider. “Perhaps.”
    “Oh, good. Which stuff should we bring downstairs? Will he play now, or at least soon?”
    She gazed at him from those dark eyes that were Pulari and not Pulari, and Aveo suddenly saw that he would never understand her. Not if he studied her for a thousand years. He would never follow her thinking or penetrate her illusions, because even though she was not a goddess but a woman, she was so foreign, so strange, that she lay completely outside any reality he could ever grasp. She was her own reality, and she and all of the known world were not playing the same game. The best Aveo could do, he thought despairingly, was try to steer her away from disaster, and perhaps survive until she went back to wherever she had come from.
    She said, “What’s wrong? You suddenly look like your entire family plus your dog just died.”
    Outraged, he raised his hand. But she didn’t know about Ojea. She didn’t know anything. He let the hand fall and pointed to the box of gemstones. “Bring that first. Save the cloth and perfumes and knives. We can— Oh, in the name of the Goddess, let the slave carry the box!”
    “I didn’t know you believed in any goddesses,” Cam said.
    Aveo didn’t respond. He moved behind Cam, and, followed by the trembling Obu, they left the egg fallen from the sky to descend back into the palace below.

 
     
19: LUCCA
     
     
    LUCCA WAS COMPLETELY BLIND .
    Even the Kularians, who usually took everything in stride, seemed concerned. After he stumbled outside Hytrowembireliaz’s hut into the driving snow, shouting as loud as he could and hanging on to the open door to keep from getting lost, the villagers came running. Someone grabbed his arm and led him back inside. He could hear, smell, feel the presence of more people than the tiny hut should be able to hold, but he could see nothing, not even a glimmer of light. Someone put hands on his face, pushed up each eyelid in turn, and leaned close. Lucca felt fetid breath on his face. He groped in the dark until he found a human arm and hung on, obscurely ashamed of his need for contact.
    Why blindness?
    The Kularians could not provide answers. They had no real medicine, no real technology to examine his eyes. All they could offer was Hytrowembireliaz, his voice finally distinguishable to Lucca among the concerned and helpless babble, saying, “Do you wish then to set out on the second road?”
    “No!” Would they listen to him, or would they slit his throat anyway? Lucca fumbled inside his tunic for his personal shield, unused for so long.
    “Are you sure, my fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road? It might be easier to leave now.”
    “No!”
    “As you say.” Hytrowembireliaz’s smell faded.
    Over the next several minutes, the hut emptied. Cold air whooshed in each time the door opened and closed. Finally, when Lucca thought everyone had gone and