by Woe
Gama III spied Anda standing aloof. She turned her back to him.
He had to take action. With the barest of salutes to Arfest VIII, he pushed from the table then strode the curve of the great wooden ring.
Between the east-pointing door and the south was a pair of wide chitin screens. Beyond was a passageway that curved a short span and terminated at the kitchens. Here Gama III found the servants surrounded by platters of tonics, beaks, and other fare.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Why do you sit here quivering like pustules when your masters hunger? You, report. Why have you not served this food? Have you no ears astride that unkempt skull? Have you not heard your masters suffering without refreshment?”
The female peasant knelt on legs of animal thickness and begged thrice for leniency. She groaned that the great mistress had ordered the servants to wait, ordered that they were to serve nothing until the lords came searching.
Gama III made the peasant repeat herself, a sensation growing as if a dagger slid the back of his throat—what he judged, from memory, as disquiet—then he strode from that rank place.
Gama III found Witting IX near their seats.
“We are being plied,” Gama III confided in a low voice. He told his cousin of what he’d discovered.
“Servants awaiting the effort of lords,” said Witting IX. “It defies sense.”
“Except where an effect is desired, perhaps the stimulation of a certain mood.”
“You believe this an intrigue of Dejanira. But you must know, cousin, that madness or even spite could be the motivation just as well.”
“If we are forced to wager our reputations, and trust when I say we are doing exactly that, beside which possibility should we pile our lots? Upon the ruin of admitting this was all folly? Or upon the glory of participating in the plot? Risking, we ought risk for glory and set defeat at our heels.”
“The better to trip upon,” muttered Witting IX. But he thought in silence for short moments then exhaled a scent of determination, his violet tongue flicking across his lip. “I bow to your wisdom, cousin. How do we profit from this snarl?”
“We improvise.”
Gama III made his way to the center of the hall, posed his limbs, rang his tallfinger cymbal thrice, the peals keening above the murmur of conversation.
“Friends,” he pronounced into the spreading quiet, his diction drawn in the rhythm of oration, “I am Gama III the Fellh, the Meyn, lord of Rungblatt and its fourteen estates, serving term as master of Alfellein Harbor with all attendant honors and responsibility.”
He paused, turning to give regard to the entire circumference of the hall, to its judgment of faces. Among them all, the gaze of Anda the Aynx was as striking as a pearl of wax on clean parchment.
“We are vexed,” he declared, pitching a long hiss. “Our host is delayed, perhaps for good reason, perhaps for poor. But we are the peers of the Hohstuol. We are masters of principalities, of lives countless, of lands unending. Let us be masters of this night. I have roused the servants to deliver our meal. And to bide the time, I propose a diversion. My noble friends, I propose gant’lope.”
Immediately there rose approving nods.
Witting IX showed excellent timing and raised his voice. “I submit my own Offruum buck for first run,” he declared.
Kurchen LX suggested instead of the usual crops and lashes they collect from the primitive weaponry decorating the walls, and the irony was pleasing to many. Gama III held himself aloof while the eldest among them took first choices of position in the columns then invited others in turn of rank.
Not all went smoothly: many of the bitterest—Arfest VIII for one, in his contemptible flesh—took no part. The decorative slave bludgeons and spears proved too heavy to wield with any grace and so were returned to their fastenings on the walls. And there was the characteristic delay as wagers were announced, challenged, reiterated, and accepted.
The honor to call start was afforded to Gama III. He lifted his hand, rang a tone, and upon the blow of Witting IX’s breath the naked Offruum charged between the two rows of noble thrashers.
The lashes reared high, contorted, snapped, and the sound of falling strokes made a rhythm in the air, a chorus of sharp climaxes as of thick ice suddenly thawed as the blows landed upon the the slave buck’s shoulders and thighs and his upthrust arms. The buck pressed through in mighty oblivion to the pain until Thurva I the Wern, who had wagered against at three-to-one odds, aimed her blow for the ankle. The lick drew blood. The slave buck stumbled. Later blows down the line twisted him and sent him sprawling to the marble floor, well short of the finish. But all agreed it was Thurva who had achieved the felling, and it was to her that the chimes of esteem were rung.
The climate was improved dramatically by the game, and that improvement continued at the appearance of the meal. But Anticipation was in no wise recovered, and Thrill was far away. And many, especially those eldest and most august, had not forgiven him for the embarrassment of the chant.
Gama III did not go straight to her. He shared a tonic with one peer, listened to the complaints of another, watched as Kurchen LX’s slave buck ran the gant’lope to the finish. He finally approached her as she dined upon long morsels of wren beak, each sliver passing between her lips as delicately as a physic needle through a pore.
“May I join you?” he asked.
Strong acidic musks came pouring from the vented seams of her jacket. “That is undecided,” she said.
Gama III took this blow with a nod. In the scalding embarrassment of their silly impotent chant, she was dangerous, for one of her status would be vicious when saving face. “I had thought the lady of Aynx might care to continue our conversation.”
“That is undecided,” she said, and her breath added odors of enormous strength and threat.
Gama III felt his eyes drying in the onslaught. He gathered the last of his courage. “Has the Lord of Fellh and Meyn, then, become disqualified for the lady’s purposes?” He asked this with his breath full of every particle of sincerity he could summon.
She had not to that moment taken her eyes from her meal, and the look she gave now could never be confused for inviting. But she did look, and she did lessen the bite of her musks. “Sit,” she said.
And Gama III would have sat. He would have gladly taken that enormous step toward greater fortune, toward true pleasure, toward the hurtle of esteem that might only come once in a lifetime.
But for the second time in the night, the conversation was thwarted. For he saw then a high chair, mammoth in design, suddenly resting outside of the table ring where before there had been no chair.
Upon it sat Dejanira.
She posed with no evidence of motion, her limbs draping the chair’s angles as if they’d done so for many languid hours.
A rush of gasps began and ended in equal suddenness as the hall of thousands took notice. The silence that followed was aching.
Gama III’s heart had lurched with a vertigo that left him sick. His wrists fell cold, his face hot. A fumbling uncertainty took his mind, and he moved to regain his place at table. Arfest VIII was sitting tensed as if ready to leap. Witting IX returned agog.
Dejanira remained silent, casting her gaze this way and that, violet eyes roving in a stony face.
The others were correcting their self-possession, herding their slaves, regaining their places with some taut deviant of Anticipation, and it was not until the great wheel was nearly remade that Gama III was overcome by two realizations. The first: he had rudely and perhaps damningly abandoned Anda the Aynx with nary a word of courtesy. He wished to pull his gaze from Dejanira and find Anda, to judge by her manner what damage his slight had wrought. But his gaze remained fixed, for his second realization swept all other thoughts aside.
Behind Dejanira came striding a slave, taller than any Gama III had ever seen and whose
broad naked chest was not the leathery pallor of standard bucks but the gleam of noble flesh. And rising in wisps from the great male’s scalp was a mane of legend. If in the Ysbaddaden’s ink-and-paper histories their god-sire wore hair that stood like a flame, this male’s plumage was an inferno. Gama III’s shock at seeing such a specimen beside Dejanira, the infamous recluse, was immediately made small by the horror that this male, this half-naked magnificence, was the very person of his Lofty Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang.
The Emperor planted his feet wide before the chair and raised his hand to silence the rumbles of stupefaction. Had His Highness ever been so thick of the arms? Certainly never had his hair stretched so far. Gama III glanced about. The slaves in their rows were kneeling low, all around the hall, every buck of every tribe and sort.
“Dh’ainm chim nobroy,” declared Highness Roff, his familiar voice wrapped around foreign words. “Sláinte agus dobry.” He pitched his tones expertly so that Gama III felt the reverberation in his bones. But of the words’ meaning he grasped nothing. This was slave language—or languages, he could not be certain. He passed a look with Witting IX. Behind them the slaves were shuddering, some weeping.
It was long minutes later that the Emperor ceased in his strange proclamations. Dejanira then raised a scroll from her lap.
“Health,” she said, the word born from a pique of her lip. “Hear the command of Emperor Roff III the Vang, declaring thus: every creature now within hearing of this voice, heretofore bound by the shackles of slavery, shall hence and forever be deemed free by the laws of the Hohstuol. Souls of noble blood likewise present are commanded to loose all restraints applied to these formerly in bondage.
“His Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang further commands that in the spirit of celebration, and to mark the commencement of these new lives, all laws, edicts, and penalties are, within the confines of this estate, hereby suspended.
“His Highness the Emperor Roff III the Vang finally commands that all doors and passages allowing egress from this property be sealed until the dawn, when ends the solstice night and begins the lengthening of days.”
Dejanira folded the pronouncement and fell as still as if she’d never stirred.
The Emperor lifted his hands. Was there surprise in his face? Amusement? “Such is my word,” he declared. By those syllables was the pronouncement made law.
And Gama III saw the design. Unshackling their slaves, and who among them would refuse? Who but the very purest clanned would defy the Emperor to his face? And who among that few would submit to Fear, would choose Boredom when all had come to prove that each of these was beneath their soles? No, the party guests would every one breach manacle and shackle, and proudly.
This was why he’d come. This sickly spurting flush, this heaving of his ribs, this was what he remembered from Dejanira’s art, what he’d spend his nights weaving into dream. With his lips pulling themselves in a mask that was not a smile, Gama III rose to the task. The bucks were waiting, heads still bowed but each with his hands outstretched. Gama III summoned the precise combination of acids into his saliva, touched finger to tongue then stroked his mark upon the first pair of manacles. The lock smoked and popped and they fell away in a heavy clangor. Finger to tongue to metal, and the second buck was free, then the third, and on until the thirty-nine males were wreathed in the astringence of their liberty.
Long minutes of clattering noise throughout the hall and it was done. The noble peers waited as their bucks, who were no longer slaves, paced or shook or stared or wept.
Witting IX’s prize specimen, the Offruum, was the first to reach for the weapons upon the walls.
The Emperor was once more styling slave tongues. The odors on his breath, centuries-trained, came flowing on his voice, his voice filling the hall with pressure demanding action. Action and now. Now. Gama III tasted the scent from the emperor’s breath and knew it yet felt nothing from it. It was not mixed to stir his blood.
The Offruum came from the wall with club and spear. Still limping from the lash at his ankle he moved through the staring company, his eyes ever on His Highness. The slave, the former slave, roamed as if intoxicated and at last came face-to-face with Kurchen LX. He raised the thickness of his club, hesitated, sweat streaming down his naked back, shook himself, leaned close to lay the weapon against Kurchen LX’s shoulder. He pushed.
Kurchen LX, though wet with gray perspiration of his own, showed nothing of the shock he surely felt. He kept his countenance. He regained his posture and blew a warding breath, thick with disgust and aggression, full in the hulking male’s face.
The Offruum only flinched when he should have collapsed. He raised the weapon and jabbed Kurchen in the chest. This time the lord fell back, clutching the bruise. The Offruum shoved again. Then he stalked forward, raising the club, and brought the long blunted weight of it down on the lord’s skull. Kurchen made no sound. It was the Offruum who sang out, sang one long howling note and stamped his foot in the violet pool.
From this the slaughter began.
The murderer’s cry was echoed from dozens of heavy chests. Brute fists rose. Feet stamped. Swiftly came the rush and clatter of pale creatures snatching weapons from Braugholm’s eternal gray walls. Bare hands were enough for some, lord flesh and lady’s torn like low meat. The slaves of Norcous and Theye and Klonza stood guard by their masters, threw blows for their masters, spat words in combat against their species.
Gama had reached for his cousin and found only an empty seat. He was still searching when his own thirty-nine came at him in a phalanx, shields and spears, one stab and a second and a third. Gama was cut. Grinding fire keened along his breast, and he threw himself backward, bleeding and screaming, and he fled into the press, for the torrent that had burst now swirled in crazy froth. Those bucks bent upon their freedom pressed at the hall’s four doors. Those bucks filled with rage circled, killing, slicking the floor in gray-violet.
The greater part of the nobles had collapsed into the center space behind a screen of loyal slaves—former slaves!—the lords breathing, musking, spitting every caustic ward known.
Gama was rushing for that garrison when he was seized with force at the elbow.
“Cousin!” cried Witting. “Haste, cousin. Come.”
Gama followed, the pair of them flinching and shying, darting a wild path across the hall. Witting grasped arms and cried out to others on his flight through the violence so that their party swelled from two to five to seven, but to what point Gama knew not until by the narrowest of timing Witting led them through a gap in the table, toward and past the chitin screens, and with a last frantic effort into the harbor of the servants passageway.
The servants were nowhere to be found. With great difficulty Gama and Witting and the rest dragged clumsy tables and chairs and cooking items from the kitchens to stack as a barricade.
They had obstructed the entry by more than half when there came screams just on the other side.
“Pull me through!” cried Anda. Her hair was torn and her face bloody but the voice, even in its mania, was ancient.
Gama was breathing with alarming difficulty. His limbs lay at his sides as heavy as leaden saps. “We can’t!” he cried. He looked Witting in his eye. “We can’t help her!”
Witting nodded and nodded and nodded, faster and faster, as if to agree. But he suddenly screeched and scrambled flailing over the barricades. He tripped, stumbled, bruising himself with the sound of terrible thuds, and reaching Anda he grasped her by the arm and dragged her inside with desperate heaves. No sooner did he pull her to freedom than a great pale arm lunged through the gap and seized Witting by his leg. He screamed and spat venoms but the grip would not loose, not until Anda leapt to his aid and stabbed at the arm with a stake. The two fell into safety embracing each other, sobbing.
“Thank you,” said Witting.
; “Thank you,” said Anda.
Thank you thank you thank you and their lips met sloppily.
Gama and the others finished the barricade only moments later, pressing a table to the final gap. Shuddering and hot, Gama crouched in the passageway on the stones. They were eight, hiding here in silence, passing the long night among the echoes of massacre.
Gama had dozed. He came to himself now to a castle in quiet. And by instinct he knew dawn had broken. He rose to his feet stiff in every joint, his wounds crusted and tight.
The others still slept, Witting and Anda there pressed close in a huddle. Gama woke them.
“It is finished,” he said.
Witting lifted his head, studying the silence carefully. Anda studied Gama much the same. Their color was returned, both of them, to the polish of good nobility. And for true, Gama III himself felt sound in sanity.
It was unfortunate, the work of removing the barricade. The servants were yet nowhere to be found, and so it fell to the cadre of peers to sully themselves with the clumsiness. When at last they pushed into the great hall, they were met with the climax of Dejanira’s game.
The hall stank of broken organs, the floor near impassable for the bodies. The walls were bare of the savages’ weapons. The table was smashed, here in splinters, here a piece braced as a failed barricade—the great wheel broken. And on every surface, pulsing from a torn neck in lilac, stagnant in a puddle of old black, splashed in every geometry possible, was noble blood.
Besides the eight of Witting IX and Gama III and company, there were scant few others there surveying the work. Every slave was gone. Briefly Gama III wondered how he would travel home.
