The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 2 Read online

  When she had seen him again, Darok had actually gone down on one knee when he had returned her DiHnaq to her. The memory was sweeter than she dared allow herself to dwell on at this moment, though she wished she might. Circumstances required she stay focused on this abhorrent council, where the humiliations and mistakes of the past were being aired like a commoner’s dirty bed linens. Men can be such simpletons, she thought as she considered Martok’s disastrous affair with Gothmara. She refused to meet her husband’s eyes as he concluded speaking, saving any emotional display for when they had privacy.

  * * *

  When Martok finished his tale and resumed his seat beside Sirella, Darok rose as quietly as his old bones would allow and made for the relief facility, a tiny airless cubicle in the corner of the conference room. Too much raktajino this morning, he decided, but it had been too long since he’d been on board a ship, the only place you can get really good rakt. The stuff they brewed planetside was just too … fresh. And flavorful. Not nearly enough grit in it. He’d almost made it across the room when Kahless (the Longwinded, Darok thought, grimacing as he returned to his chair) began speaking again.

  “As you all know,” Kahless said, “Gothmara did not perish in the destruction of the Gothspar. I’ve uncovered much about her past, but some things remain obscure, such as where she escaped to and why. While there is no way to know precisely what her next destination was, I believe her motives from that day forward were clear: to amass enough power to utterly destroy the man who destroyed her family.”

  Dax observed, “She waited a long time.”

  “Yes,” Kahless agreed. “But I think there we can divine some insight into Gothmara’s character. She is extraordinarily patient and does not mind waiting—”

  Abruptly, the door slid open and the loathsome Ferengi, Pharh, clutching a glass to one ear, rolled onto the floor. He grinned nervously, sliding backward along the floor until he’d flattened himself against the wall.

  “—as clearly our Ferengi friend cannot,” Kahless finished.

  “Don’t mind me. I was just passing by,” Pharh said.

  Worf growled. “The Ferengi was eavesdropping.”

  “Pharh,” Martok muttered. “Your interruption is inopportune. These are important matters.”

  B’Tak, who Darok had noticed had been chafing since his dressing down by Kahless, took the opportunity to speak up. “This is a council for warriors. As your servant does not seem to understand his place, he should respect this gathering and leave us, or I will cut off his ears. He will not eavesdrop again.”

  “Servant?” Pharh squeaked, clutching his lobes. “Hey, hold on there! I’m not anybody’s servant, especially when there haven’t been any negotiations for salary, benefits, medical coverage…. I’d need some paid holidays and sick days, maybe some kind of a retirement plan….”

  “PHARH,” Martok shouted. “Restrain yourself. And, B’Tak, he isn’t my servant. His efforts to rescue the Lady Sirella and me have earned him a place at this council if he chooses. Over the past several days, his actions have been more honorable than those of many so-called warriors….”

  B’Tak rose to his feet and looked like he was about draw a weapon. “As honorable as abandoning your own warriors in the lowlands in favor of taking a Ferengi into your enemy’s lair?”

  Darok felt his legs lose much of their rigidity, which was precisely the thing he required if he was going to successfully slide under the table when the fighting started. Sometimes, old age had its advantages. He exchanged glances with Dax, who appeared ready to join him.

  Martok was on his feet now and Worf was pushing his chair back away from the table, ready to jump in between B’Tak and the general when the moment came. The other three captains were looking at each other, all of them obviously wondering what they were supposed to do next. Darok’s neck and shoulders disappeared below table level.

  But once again, the Lady Sirella did not fail them. She shoved back her chair and stood, the DiHnaq on her wrist clanking against the table.

  Everyone froze into a tableau.

  “Enough,” she said softly, but with a whip-snapping razor’s edge in her voice. “Can the source of the empire’s current struggles be in doubt when I see behavior such as this? You are leaders of the empire. Act like it.”

  Martok instantly backed away. B’Tak swallowed loudly. Darok pushed himself back up into his chair. Everything was going to be all right.

  “Of course, my wife,” the general said. “You speak wisdom.” He nodded at B’Tak, the closest he would come to an apology, then turned to Kahless. “As you were saying, Emperor?”

  Kahless gestured for Pharh to take a seat. Once the Ferengi had taken his place—far away from B’Tak—Kahless picked up his thread of thought as if Pharh’s interruption hadn’t happened. “Gothmara conceives her campaigns in terms of years or decades, not weeks or months. Also, she develops multiple, independent battle plans should one of her plots fail.”

  “You have proof of this?” Worf asked.

  “Worf, I am proof of this,” Kahless replied. “As I implied earlier, my creation—my birth, if you will—was a complex scheme designed to undermine the empire. She traveled to Boreth disguised as a pilgrim and, after insinuating herself into the monastery, immersed herself in the disciplines of the order and delved deep into the ancient archives. She conceived my rebirth with the idea that it would begin a civil war, which, indeed, it might had you not interceded with Gowron.”

  “But there was no clue of this at the time,” Worf protested. “I never met any woman named Gothmara when I stayed on Boreth. How could she devise such a complex conspiracy without my learning of it?”

  “How does Gothmara accomplish anything, my brother?” Martok asked. “In addition to her cunning and her scientific knowledge, she has at her disposal every manner of manipulation. Pheromones, perhaps, or some other kind of hormonal tricks to deceive the senses. She did it to me. She may well have used her wiles on everyone at the monastery. Did you ever meet any women there at all?”

  Worf reflected, then answered, “A few. Not many, and none in senior roles.”

  “Then perhaps there never were any women among the clerics, or perhaps she had them sent away. Another unanswered question I have been pondering,” Martok said. “She may not be able to influence women at all. I have seen no evidence of it, not then, and not now. If so, we may be able to turn this to our advantage.”

  “No,” Sirella said, her voice low. “She can. At least to some degree.”

  Martok appeared surprised, but his reaction was as nothing compared to Darok’s. His belief that the lady could be affected by, well, by anyone or anything had swiftly become one of the bedrock tenets of his universe. Stronger than electromagnetism, more relentless than gravity, there was Sirella. “She spoke to you,” the general said.

  Sirella looked at him, but then addressed the rest of the room, her head held high. “When I was her prisoner, as they carried me out to be executed, that woman whispered something to me. I do not remember her words, but I know it made me feel …” She struggled to find the correct word. “Resigned,” she concluded. “I decided it would be best to let it all happen however it would. There was no longer any reason to go on.”

  Her words trailed off and the silence hung heavily in the room. Darok felt a desperate need to escape then, to flee the room and find a very large barrel of bloodwine.

  Kahless’s gruff and powerful voice pulled Darok back. “Do not despair, Lady Sirella, and, more, do not doubt your own worth. Our foe’s powers are formidable and she has had many years to prepare for this battle while we have had little time. I doubt not that the next time you are challenged, you will triumph. Does any warrior here doubt that?”

  Martok shouted first, but a chorus of cries soon joined his voice and Darok bellowed as long as any of them. Even Dax beat the table with her fists and cried out, “Kai, the Lady Sirella!”

  They finished on their feet, but the lady curtly wave
d them back into their chairs. “We have work to do,” she said, but Darok could see the white tips of her sharp teeth glint under her lips. Such a woman, he thought. If only I were a younger man … and the general a little less formidable.

  “Gothmara’s initial plan to disrupt the empire by creating you failed,” Martok said to Kahless. “When did she begin working on her current stratagem?”

  “I would guess,” Kahless said, “almost as soon as she learned she was pregnant, but she must have known she would need many years to bring her plans for Morjod to fruition. Even she must have understood that it was the longest of long odds.”

  “But she succeeded,” Worf observed, then realized what he was saying and added, “to a point.”

  “A very sharp point,” Martok concluded. “One she has driven through the heart of the empire. But Emperor, you have still not addressed one of the most puzzling questions: How did she tame the Hur’q?”

  “And that is my last tale,” Kahless said as he pulled a padd from an inner pocket. “In my adventures on Boreth, I was able to make a copy of some files I recovered from their archives, the forgotten backups of encrypted journal entries left by Gothmara that explain much of this. The short answer to your question is: she did not tame them, she made them. But the real and final answer is even more terrifying than that.”

  And with that, Kahless began to read.

  The entries were numbered, though how often she’d made them was unclear. Using other references he found in the files, he estimated that the events described in the journal took place in the third year of Gowron’s chancellorship, or roughly six years ago.

  In the first entry he read, number 1015, Gothmara began by cursing Worf and every member of his family for his part in the negotiations that resulted in Kahless being installed as emperor. “If my father were still alive,” she had written, “he would track down this traitor and slay him like the parasite he is this very day. Picard—this is Picard’s influence. How could anyone so steeped in Federation rhetoric gain enough influence that he could manipulate a chancellor? There must be a way to devise an appropriate fate for this son of Mogh while my other plans come to fruition.”

  Then, in entry 1047, Gothmara wrote: “Work with Morjod goes well. His monthly visits for treatments have become routine. I do not believe he is even aware of the modifications I have made.

  “But much more important news to report. I have been given a great gift and I must meditate upon its meaning. I urgently desire to return to my discovery, to set all my energies to unearthing it and bring it back to the labs, but I sense that this would lead to disaster. There are times, moments like these, when I feel as if my father is guiding me, his hand on my shoulder, turning my head and pointing me in the proper direction. Today was one of those days. I must be patient. I must be worthy of his trust….”

  * * *

  …Gothmara had come to enjoy the icy wastelands, to appreciate their purity and serenity. Most days, the wild winds tore at her like a great beast’s claws, but they could not harm her. The flesh of the daughter of Kultan could not be so easily rent. This day, though, the winds were calm, even gentle, more like a child’s clumsy and playful tickle than a lover’s caress. The thin crust of snow that always dusted the surface of the ice like sugar crystals crunched beneath her boots, and she marveled at the sound.

  How many days can there be like this on Boreth? Gothmara wondered, and knew the answer: Not many. Though not prepared for a long hike, she resolved to walk as far as she could and leave enough time to return before sunset. If the worst occurred and the weather turned savage, Gothmara knew she could call the monastery and arrange a pickup. The level of risk was acceptable.

  Her goal, she decided, would be a narrow valley near a frozen lake Gothmara had noted on her charts several months earlier. Traveling to the spot by ship would have been simple enough, but the monastery owned only a few and the old man who maintained them had proven resistant to her charms. Hiking would suffice.

  The walk was long, but not unpleasant. Gothmara could see the ice cliffs for many hours before she reached them, the walls glittering like jewels in the bright sunlight even through her glare-resistant eye protectors. Once, briefly, she even lowered her hood, uncoiled her hair from its knot, and let the breeze stir it. Many, many years had passed since she had allowed the reins to slip, to take a moment like this for herself. Morjod was permitted—briefly—to travel to other worlds, to walk under warm suns, but Gothmara was as much a prisoner of Boreth as she was its secret ruler. Her name, her face, were anathema in the empire and who knew how far outside?

  “Fools,” she whispered to the wind. “Ignorant, blind commoners.” The face of one particular commoner shimmered to the surface of her mind and Gothmara clenched her teeth. Harden your heart, woman, she thought. His betrayal was great, but your revenge shall be all the greater.

  The valley, alas, turned out to be little more than a narrow cleft, probably the remains of a streambed back in the day before Boreth’s climate had cooled. When Gothmara finished exploring the place, she was glad she had not expended any resources to acquire a ship. She had almost turned around to begin her return journey, disappointed with herself that she had misunderstood her father’s guidance, when she stopped to study the cliff face more carefully.

  Mist rising off the lake’s frozen surface obscured detail, but from where she stood near a low slope, Gothmara thought she saw a shadow where there should have been none. Her timepiece pinged, alerting her that she should begin her return journey, but again she felt the pressure of a firm hand on the back of her neck. This is the place, she thought. Here, now, this is what my father wanted me to see.

  Approaching, Gothmara saw that the shadow was in fact a crack in the ice. The opening was much too narrow to be called a cave mouth. Stretching her arm, she tried to reach the back of the cave, but she could neither find it nor determine if the cleft narrowed or widened to any significant degree. The light from the small lamp she carried on her equipment belt proved insufficient. Sighing in resignation, Gothmara unbuckled her bulky thermal parka and let it slip to the ground. Without the coat and its heating coils, inside the cave, away from the wind, she could survive for five, possibly ten minutes before hypothermia set in.

  A small voice in the back of her mind told her she was being foolish, risking everything with little hope of reward, but Gothmara recognized the voice as the one her mother used to employ when she had attempted to interfere with her daughter’s plans. The thought of her mother made Gothmara smile with pleasure even as her teeth began to chatter with the cold. I showed you who ruled our House, didn’t I?

  Still, she had to admit that she was gambling, and that thought, too, made her smile. Her father had been famed far and wide across the empire as a strategist. His meticulous plans had been the ruin of many a Federation and Romulan general, but only Gothmara had known his true character. At heart, Kultan had been a gambler. In every one of his great victories, there had been a moment when fate, destiny, could take a hand and turn all to ruin.

  And finally fate had betrayed him.

  As she made her way deeper and deeper into the cave, past the broken, craggy floor near the mouth, the way became easier. She even fancied that it was growing warmer, but though this at first seemed like foolishness, a figment of her imagination, the farther back she traveled, the harder it became to contradict the sensation. Soon, Gothmara saw that there was even a haze in the air, condensed water—steam—released from sliver-wide cracks in the ice. A surfacing underground hot spring, she decided, which would account for the crack.

  Stepping into a wide chamber, she swept her lamp in a quick arc over the ice wall, quickly catching a fleeting glimpse of something. Even before she flicked her wrist back, before her mind could even process what she saw, Gothmara felt the breath squeezed out of her lungs. An ancient fear ran down her spine and into her pelvis. Without knowing how or why, she shifted her feet, bent her knees, and tried to run. She tripped then, fell d
own face-first, and tore open the fabric over her hands and knees. The lamp flew from her hand and skittered across the cracked floor.

  Sobbing with pain, Gothmara tried to rise, but all strength had fled. She hunched her shoulders, waiting for the blow to fall, for the giant hand to press her down to the floor, for the claw to rend her flesh. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears, and, distantly, she heard the sound of water dripping against rock. Her heartbeat slowed, the rush of air in her lungs slowed, and then … and then…

  The blow never came.

  Gathering her courage, Gothmara rose to her knees, then stood and walked slowly across the cracked ice to where her lamp lay shining against the wall. The cone of illumination it cast half revealed and half hid a large, gray, lumpish shape in the ice, but she resisted the temptation to look directly at it until she had the lamp in her hand.

  Light is the thing, she decided. Light will reveal all—tooth and claw.

  She held the lamp up and saw it there before her, frozen as if in midleap, the bane of Klingon nightmares, the stalker in the shadows for every Klingon boy and girl since any of her people could remember.

  Frozen, it hung before her as if it had been here waiting for Gothmara—a chunk of destiny locked in time—the Beast, the Monster, and hers forevermore: a Hur’q of her own.

  * * *

  Here Kahless paused in his reading.

  No one spoke for several seconds, each of them absorbing the visions transmitted by Gothmara’s words and Kahless’s voice. It was impossible, Darok decided, not to be impressed by the immensity of the discovery and even the discoverer’s bravery. Still, there were questions that needed to be asked—he knew that—but he was glad to have someone else ask them.

  “Did you know they were there, Kahless?” Worf asked.

  The emperor shook his head. “The monks never mentioned anything about it to me. And why would they? It is possible that none of the brothers and sisters even knew the reason the valley was forbidden. Such things sometimes get lost with time.”