Brother Death Read Free Page B

the days when she was eighteen and just finding out about real sex and love and first heartbreak.
    So long ago, that seemed. Back when the galaxy was hers to take, and any road was possible. Ah, if she had it to do over again . . .
    You'd do it the same way, wouldn't you?
    She sighed. Yeah. Probably would. What the hell. She hadn't made that much of a mess of it. Besides, if you liked who you were, you had to honor how you got there. Looking back over your shoulder too much was apt to make you trip over something in today's path. You couldn't do anything about the stupid mistakes you made anyhow, so why let them drag you down?
    Still, some memories were hard to shake. Taz climbed into bed, fell into sleep, and some of the past seeped into her dreams.

Chapter THREE
    IT WAS A large chamber, nearly empty. In it the man Ndugu Kifo; before him, a silk cushion with a small object upon it; behind him, a suitcase-sized Ultralux vouch tuned to his brainwaves, perched alertly upon its built-in tractor. Kifo sat with his legs knotted in lotus, the bare wooden floor cool under his naked buttocks and heels. Inside the Temple of Despair it would seem still to someone not paying attention, but when a man achieved a certain level of true stillness, his senses opened. Sent the smells, feels, sights, sounds along their pathways into an open mind, a mind that noted, catalogued, then dismissed, unless the input had some . . . relevance.
    The beams overhead ticked, wood obeying the laws of thermodynamics and physics, expanding from the hot sunshine beating down upon the city of Leijona, contracting from the coolers within the temple. Not important.
    Traffic rumbled past, noises muted by the thick walls, but still producing subtle vibrations. No matter.
    The vouch hummed electronically to itself, constantly monitoring Kifu's physical and mental telemetry.
    A small matter.
    In the hall outside the closed meditation chamber a student sweated, bacteria thriving in the altered salts of his perspiration, their microscopic life and tiny works making him smell sour with nervousness. A faint remnant of incense lingered, clinging to the fine-grained black walnut planks, wood that had a hundred years of careful hand polishing and honing so it was almost thincris-smooth. Kifo identified the stink of sweat and the more pleasant incense, noting the bitter-but-sweet tang of muste, a local inkwood the poets liked to claim was dark as original sin.
    Neither did these things matter.
    When he opened his eyes, his vision matched in its clarity his other senses. On a cushion of diamond-grade ghostsilk from Rangi ya majani Mwezi lay the Sacred Glyph. It was a flat gunmetal blue-black against the pale material, a cloth ranked as the finest ever done by the best weaver the Green Moon had yet produced. The covering of the cushion had cost more than a rich man's home, yet the silk, too, was nothing.
    But the Glyph. Ah. The Glyph mattered.
    It was the holiest of all relics in any religion, made by the Gods Themselves, and outside of the Few, no one knew it existed. In the eighty years since its discovery, no member of the Few had ever revealed his or her knowledge of the Sacred Glyph to any outside the order. To even speak the name aloud anywhere save the electronically shielded and regularly swept meditation room was worth instant death, administered by any within earshot. To fail to strike down such a transgression was itself worth death.
    Only those initiated into the Very Few-never more than nine, never less than six-were considered trustworthy enough to learn of the existence of the Sacred Glyph, and only the Unique, the Leader of the Few, knew more than that.
    The previous Unique, Ndugu Maumivu-Brother Pain-had taught Kifo all he knew of the mysteries even as he lay dying, kept alive by money-powered medical machines only just long enough to finish his instructions. Kifo was the sole man living who knew the secrets; more, he had himself added to them, divining