Conquerors' Legacy Read Free Page A

to talk to Warrior Command about. The thing he calls CIRCE. I wonder what it is."

"I'll bet Warrior Command knows," Thrr-mezaz said, glancing around. He didn't see any Elders hovering around listening, but with Elders that didn't necessarily mean anything. Insubstantial and virtually transparent, they were ideally suited for eavesdropping.

"Something unsuitable for us minor players, no doubt," Klnn-vavgi said. "I don't know about you, Thrr-mezaz, but I'm getting the taste of politics dripping all over this thing."

"Maybe," Thrr-mezaz said. "I wonder... no."

"What?"

"Just a thought," Thrr-mezaz said, looking around again. "Whatever the Mrachanis or Warrior Command know about this, I'll bet our Human-Conqueror prisoner could tell us the whole story."

"Interesting thought," Klnn-vavgi agreed. "Maybe we ought to go have a little talk with him."

For a handful of beats Thrr-mezaz was tempted to agree. As a Zhirrzh commander in the war zone, it seemed only right that he should know everything Warrior Command did about enemy weapons his warriors might be facing.

But the Human-Conqueror prisoner, Srgent-janovetz, was under continual monitoring by the beachhead's Elders. If they asked him about CIRCE, Warrior Command would know about it within ten beats. Cvv-panav, the Speaker for Dhaa'rr in the Overclan Seating, had already tried once to have Thrr-mezaz ousted as commander of the Dorcas ground warriors. Pressing to learn something Warrior Command obviously wanted kept secret would be all the excuse he would need to finish the job.

Thrr-mezaz looked sideways at Klnn-vavgi, a sudden doubt oozing beneath his tongue. Could that in fact be the outcome his second in command was trying for here? To goad Thrr-mezaz into doing something that would get him removed from command? Klnn-vavgi was also Dhaa'rr, after all; perhaps his oft-stated contempt for clan politics was a lie designed to lull Thrr-mezaz into complacency.

His tongue flicked in self-disgust. An absurd thought, and he was ashamed with himself for having even entertained it. Lahettilas and all that talk about distrust must have gotten deeper under his tongue than he'd realized. "Let's try something else first," he told Klnn-vavgi, changing direction toward the eastern edge of the landing field. "Come on."

The warriors and techs had long since finished their examination of the storehouse building where the two Mrachanis had come under Human-Conqueror attack a fullarc ago. Outside the eastern wall where the doors had once stood, the ground was covered with wooden splinters, and Thrr-mezaz found himself wincing as he and Klnn-vavgi crunched their way through them. There, crushed beneath those doors when the explosion blew them off their hinges, two Zhirrzh warriors had been abruptly and prematurely raised to Eldership.

And were still suffering the consequences of that raising. Yanked instantly back across the three-hundred-plus light-cyclics separating Dorcas and their preservedfsss organs on Oaccanv, both of the new Elders were twisted in the temporary insanity of anchoring shock.

As were the warriors who had been raised to Eldership during their initial invasion of Dorcas. Now, seventeen fullarcs later, that group was still showing no signs of coming out of the madness.

There were, Thrr-mezaz knew, whispered rumors of searcher and healer theories that had supposedly proved that a Zhirrzh who was too far from hisfsss organ at the time of his raising would be forever locked into anchoring shock. The clan and family leaders uniformly denied that such theories had ever even been formally proposed, let alone tested or proved. But that didn't stop the rumors. Thrr-mezaz could only hope that, if such an outer limit existed, Dorcas was still inside it.

Three more jagged holes had been ripped in the north wall by the Human-Conqueror explosives after the blast that had destroyed the doors, showering more splinters and wood fragments outside the building. "What are we doing