“Lestir yir em beslon mir castra,” the other replied flatly.
Three soft bells sounded from somewhere, and a person appeared in front of us. It took a moment for their image to load in. My only clue that they weren’t actually here was the two seconds of static as the colors fell into place and they came into focus.
I laughed out loud.
The figure was similar enough to the rest of what I assumed were his kind – tall, long white hair, greyish skin – but there was a rather disconcerting difference. He was better built, and his clothes were clearly of the more expensive kind – a loose black shirt and loose black pants tucked into black boots – so he was clearly important, someone farther up the ladder than Shorty had any right to contend with. He stood with his back perfectly straight and his arms crossed, looking very self-important.
And he had scales. Lots and lots of scales.
They ran diagonally down one side of his face, lacing over and under his eye and down his neck, black as the abyss. His left eye was pale silver; the one on the scaled side was the darkest red I’d ever seen, like cherries and shadows on blood. Behind him, stretching well past the bounds of the projection, was a pair of wings, wreathed in even darker scales, the leather between his joints the faded grey of dead skin.
I wasn’t laughing because I thought it was funny. It was a visceral reaction, a shock I couldn’t control. One more crazy thing to add to my ever-growing list of what-in-the-ever-loving-fuck-is-going-on.
The dragon looked at me when I laughed. Color ran down his scales when he moved, the dark greens and purples that live beneath a raven’s feathers. His arms were crossed, and his expression wasn’t quite as blank as all the rest.
Shorty, hearing the laugh too, turned and glared at me, and stomped forward, intending to give me an animal’s reprimand. I forced myself to stare him down instead of flinching.
“Val,” said the dragon. Shorty stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly over his shoulder.
“Di sal,” he started.
“Val,” said the dragon. Whatever he’d said, his tone – and smoldering expression – brooked no argument. A tail flickered into view at his feet, twitching irritably.
Shorty clenched his jaw, clearly resisting the urge to talk back. Instead he bowed and stepped away from me, hands at his sides. He seemed a bit twitchier than before. I hoped I wouldn’t be in his custody long enough to answer for that.
“Nilim. Qel son tu mir?” he said. His image flickered and fractured. The one in white – the doctor, for lack of a better term – fussed with his tablet and the projection stabilized.
Shorty looked at the doctor. The doctor nodded and waved for him to continue.
Shorty ambled forward, hands on his hips, looking absurdly proud of himself. He bowed to the projection and made a sweeping gesture towards me. “Luras,” he said, “Ghi volka tos dura nir. Ul hu-man.”
The projection – Luras, unless that was a formal greeting instead of a name – turned its gaze to me. His right eye was the deepest, darkest red I’d ever seen, red streaked with brushstrokes of silver, but maybe that was a trick of the light. He looked me over and looked at the short one, a glower tugging at the edges of his mouth.
“Hu-man,” said Luras.
Shorty hadn’t risen from his bow, so he nodded at the floor. “Human, ba sherim. Hal sereth-sereth-val-bereth-ai.”
Hmm. Sounded like a number. It could have been letters too, a classification, maybe. Identifying what quadrant of the galaxy we came from. Or just what galaxy. Who knew how far we’d gone beyond Sol? Or maybe it was my serial number, though if that was the case I couldn’t think of a reason Luras would want to know it.
“Ghi volka,” said Luras, comically unimpressed. He raised a brow grown over with dark scales in a definitive really?
Shorty coughed and gave an uncertain laugh. “Sal veadun mort al, vaen sal ni?” He gestured to me again. The smile on his face was barely noticeable, probably the alien equivalent of a campy grin, if everyone else’s emotional constipation was anything to go by.
The dragon looked at me. It couldn’t have been more than three seconds, but it passed as a star-cold eternity. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until he finally looked away, and I let it out in a half-panicked sigh.
“Dulam,” he said to Shorty, who nodded vehemently.
“Val shetri sal sa nirosi,” Shorty said, bowing deeply. He smile was wide enough to see even at an angle. Somebody’s proud of himself.
Luras nodded once, and the projection blinked out of existence. For a long two seconds, the lab was totally silent.
“Alas vie,” said Shorty, and he chuckled. The doctor looked from him to me and back again, severely uncomfortable. I couldn’t imagine why.
Then Shorty snapped his fingers, and the two tall guards picked up my cage. The doctor said something, and Shorty cut him off with a raised hand.
“Da Luras Darin,” he said. “Nas vu.”
The doctor took a measured breath. He said nothing more as they carried me out.
Stay calm. They could have been talking about any number of things. Maybe the dragon was a scientist, requesting some kind of test. Maybe he was the captain of the ship, too far off or too busy to bother walking all the way down here. Maybe he was the financier of whatever mission this vessel was on, and Shorty was showing him an example of his biotic spoils.
I wondered absently what they’d done with our ship. Cannibalized it for parts, probably. Not that there was any hope of me escaping on it. I’d have no idea how to pilot it, and almost certainly no way to get it out of whatever dock they might be keeping it in. And even if I could get it out into the vacuum, I’d have to finagle my way into hyperspace, and that was a.) stupidly complicated and b.) stupidly dangerous because I’d have no way of knowing if I’d plow into someone on the other side at Mach speed. Everything and its grandmother would have to go wrong for the aliens for me to have a hope of getting away.
But still…the prospect of being a science project made me almost desperate enough to try.
Almost.
***
We walked a while and loaded ourselves into a small room full of plastic bus-style seats, an escape pod of some kind. But not an escape pod exactly, since it had a cabin and a cockpit with two captains and a steering yolk on either side of their console. It was a travel shuttle, one not so different from the one that had taken us through hyperspace.
Which I guess made sense; this hulking black behemoth wasn’t the kind of ship that lands.
Which means we’re landing, I thought stupidly. It was obvious – I certainly hadn’t thought the aliens just lived on this ship, though it was big enough to be a possibility. Unless their planet was some ancient, irradiated wasteland, they had a homeworld somewhere; one that, I could assume, would be remarkably similar to Earth, given the way they’d evolved. They were bipedal, the artificial gravity on their ship didn’t feel any different than the 9.8 meters-per-second pull you’d feel on Earth; and more importantly, they were humanoid. Their environment wouldn’t be a carbon copy of ours (otherwise they would be carbon copies of us, and clearly that wasn’t the case), but it would be recognizable: tree analogues, bug analogues, animals that vaguely resembled dogs and cats and birds, or at least filled the same ecological niche.
The air inside was cold as stone on a riverbank. Everything smelled sterile, clean and vaguely chemical. The guards carried my cage into a corner and strapped it down into a spot reserved for big boxes – luggage, if I had to guess, or supply boxes. And now, human pet cages.
Fun for the whole family.
I felt a jolt as the pod detached from the vessel and spiraled out into space. The porthole windows (a universal concept, apparently) showed the stars and sun – a different sun, not Sol, someone else’s home star – streaking by as we spun. I couldn’t feel the spinning, but seeing it was enough to give my stomach second thoughts about breakfast. I wrapped my arms around myself and closed my eyes, counting under my br
eath. I could feel Shorty looking at me irritably, and hear him grumbling something likely along the lines of “dear God stop making those mildly inconvenient sounds of yours”; I listened to him as I counted. The sounds he was making – guttural growling vibrations from the hollow place behind your sinuses – weren’t pleasant, but they were something else to think about. Something to distract me from…everything, honestly, but especially from the spinning.
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen,” I whispered. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood and switched sides. “Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…”
I felt a hand on my head. Long fingers reaching through the bars, softly scratching my hair. I looked up and found one of the guards looking at me with the shadow of a smile on his face. He murmured something to me and continued to scratch my head.
He’s petting me, I realized. Petting me like the frightened animal he thinks I am. Somehow the thought made me feel sicker and I moved away. The guard pulled back his hand and left it resting against the edge of the cage. He said something softly, but it wasn’t quite a word, just a soft cooing noise. I was sorely tempted to hiss at him, but I just looked away.
“Twenty-one,” I whispered to myself. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four…”
I heard a soft rumbling, and when I looked up I saw the porthole windows going dark, black shades folding down over them from the outside as we hit atmosphere. I saw the first orange streaks of fire lapping at our hull as they closed completely.
I expected turbulence, but I blinked, and then we were on the ground, the hatch opening onto a cold grey world.
A freezing wind swept in from the docks – what I assumed were docks. I could see massive ships, the kind meant for planetside cargo transport, slicing their way through a body of cold grey water. There were massive black and white structures of laddered metal that might have been cranes, and mountains of square crates in a variety of rusty colors. The concept of the box was, apparently, universal.
What the aliens lacked in emotion, they more than made up for in color. They carried me out between two of them like an overly heavy suitcase, and through the bars I saw a multitude of aliens clad in scarves and wraps and dresses bright enough to make a rainbow dizzy. They swarmed beneath the shadows of four-story buildings made of a reddish-black something they’d packed into bricks, silvery mortar oozing out between them. The windows were tall and square and full of people scowling at the crowds below. Sloped black awnings covered the entrances of half a dozen shops and stalls, some selling jewelry, others clothes, others fruit and fish and carvings in what was either stone or just really, really dark wood. Musicians perched on boxes and concrete spheres fused to the streets played instruments I could almost name: one with strings and a hollow body, something that might have been a clarinet or a recorder, something else that resembled a flute. Everywhere I looked, there was someone playing a drum, leather pulled tight over dark green barrels. The whole place sang with whistles and screams and thunder.
The streets had been glazed over with something smooth and transparent, covering a wash of stones only marginally more organized than gravel. It sparkled in the dull cloudy light as we pushed forward, full up with sand – or maybe diamonds. Diamonds on Earth were only as expensive as they were because all the places you could mine them out of belonged to one person, so he could make you pay whatever he damn-well pleased for your stupid shiny rock. Maybe here it was just pretty, no more valuable than limestone, or maybe the shiny thing in the road was something else entirely.
Some of the water’s shore was pure white sand, but the better half of it was paved over with raised concrete platforms, all of them piled high with crates and boxes and steel rigs made for lifting them. Men in clinging black uniforms, not so different from the ones I’d seen on the ship, rode hovering black vehicles with the bodies of four-wheelers in and out of the steel maze. Black birds with small bodies and ridiculous wingspans sat on the edges of rooftops and stalls. They stared with beady black eyes, watching, but for what I couldn’t say. Hapless tourists, maybe, dropping food they could scavenge.
We passed close to one, perched on a box of fruits I didn’t recognize, and it screeched loudly, flapping its wings. I jerked back, startled, and slammed into the side of the cage hard enough to rattle the aliens’ grip on it. Shorty laughed – rather, he made a snickering sound that sounded like human laughter, but could have been anything else. Maybe it meant he was pissed, or tired, or itching for a drink. Maybe all three.
Horns with deep throats and long breaths dolled out in the middle of the bay, entering and exiting through a raised bridge only just close enough to make out on the horizon. The bay was circled by hilly land, becoming mountains the closer it got to the bridge. When I looked a little longer, I saw two bridges: one near the waterline, raised to allow boats to pass out into wider waters, and one more than a thousand feet higher, suspended between the half-point peaks of two crumbling grey-green mountains.
It was a miracle of architecture, but all I could think was, That’s a really long way down.
People stopped to gape at us – at me – as we walked past. Not many of them, weirdly, just a gaggle of children and their parents and several people shopping at stalls; and they didn’t stare for long. Children in loose shirts and pants ran forward to get a look, but scattered when Shorty shouted at them, and they didn’t seem too disappointed. They were barely curious enough to care.
A minute later, I understood why.
There was a space in the middle of the market that was completely empty – empty, except for the rows upon rows of steel cages. Animals paced anxiously inside them, snarling and screeching at anyone who came too close. The animals all had a vague familiarity to them: the purple cat with six eyes and two tails looked almost like a jaguar. The small yellow birds with deep voices looked a lot like parakeets. The enormous furry thing with eight legs and wings looked almost like a bat. Almost.
They rattled their cages and made all the noise they were capable of. Three men with long crackling prods poked the ones they deemed too rowdy, and they collapsed with a whimper. Money changed hands, and several of the small yellow birds were herded into a smaller cage and handed to a fellow in a violently orange coat.
Oh Jesus, it’s a fucking pet store, I thought. It was a strange way to set them up, but it’s clearly what they were. The way people were oohing and ahhing at the creatures in the cages made me think they weren’t native. Not to this part of the world, at least.
So I was just one of a thousand strange new monsters. The thought that creature-stealing was a regular thing for these people made me queasy.
I thought for a minute that this was where they’d leave me, but we walked through the snarling animals without stopping. Their keepers looked at me with vacant faces and hard eyes – either intrigued by the weird thing in the cage or miffed that it wasn’t something they’d get to sell. Sucks for you, I thought, resisting an absurd urge to stick my tongue out at them. I doubted they’d think anything of it, but it was probably best not to risk it.
We walked between two bluish buildings, their walls overgrown with a climbing black plant that wasn’t so different from ivy. Grey skin, black plants, I thought, wondering what that meant for the composition of this planet’s sun. That was more in the realm of direct astronomy, and the chemistry I’d played with had always been the kind that stays on the ground, with the exception of solar power, so I didn’t have any language I could use to speculate, but it was different, and honestly, I don’t think I needed to know anymore. I just hoped it wouldn’t give me cancer.
“Northal,” said Shorty, and the aliens came to a halt.
We didn’t move for a while. I felt an absurd impatience brewing in the back of my throat. I didn’t know where I was going, or what awaited me, but dammit I wanted to just get there and be done with it. Beyond that, I was hungry, and I was trying really hard not to think about the likelihood that anything they fed me might be poisonous to humans. Certain
things on earth weren’t palatable to both humans and animals, like grapes and chocolate with dogs, and we were from the same planet. These intergalactic imbeciles might not know until it was too late.
Fun thoughts.
Shorty grumbled next to me, growing impatient in his own right. He looked at the underside of his wrist, where a series of glowing runes – numbers, probably – were glowing on his skin. I couldn’t tell if it was a projection or if he’d just straight up had a clock embedded in his arm. If they could manage it safely, it wouldn’t be the worst investment.
I was sure there was a pun somewhere in there – something to do with time and “long term investments” – but before I could parse it out, something pulled in front of us.
I hate saying the word vehicle, because it’s just so vague and clunky, but this thing certainly wasn’t a car. Nothing the aliens were riding was. It had a long, sleek black body and narrow rectangular windows, tinted, cloudy light glinting off of them. The door slid open, rising up and vanishing into the roof. Shorty snapped his fingers at the aliens ferrying my cage around and pointed to the back, the trunk, probably. He climbed into what was essentially a limousine, and another door at the rear slid open. They tucked me inside it, the door closed, and it was completely and totally dark.
Still beats coach, I thought – only half joking.
***
We stopped. The door slid open and I was removed from the hovering thing that wasn’t a car.
And I saw the monolith.
Mansion wasn’t the right word. This didn’t resemble any architecture I’d ever known: the whole thing stuck out of the ground like a dragon’s scale, the head of a spear, the body of a spade, all black and shining like onyx. It curved, halfway encasing concentric rings of white-leafed trees with greyish trunks, arrayed in front of an entrance I couldn’t see. It sat on top of a hill, with half a hundred stairs leading from our landing strip up to the white marble terrace where the gardens sat, and where the shadow of this absurd pointed building fell across us, turning everything to ice. The sky above was laced with clouds, white and grey and deep, immutable black.
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 4
