“What’s the plan?” she murmured, quietly.
“Well...” Liam sighed. “You’re going to make it a fuck of a lot easier to resist interrogation.” He chuckled. “So long as they stick to using seduction as their primarily method.”
Dia shook her head. “I doubt we shall be so fortunate.”
Seven
Fizit slipped her hand along Brax’s head as her son squirmed in her lap. Burning with energy and excitement – he had taken word that Liam had been captured and held by pirates with an excited ‘cool!’, a phrase and an attitude that he could have only learned from his father – he had been released from his lessons early today. Begging had gotten him on her lap as she sat on the signal station on the roof of the palace, but the task had proved less exciting than the young hellion had hoped.
That, of course, had been Fizit’s plan.
“Are pirates really scary?” Brax asked, suddenly.
Fizit paused, looking away from the winking information streaming along the watch stations. The messages were slower than she was used to. Apparently the pirates were signaling using a fire on their island and were doing so in open code, rather than using the ciphers that the Cross Guard used. This meant that the valkyrie who worked 22-09 had to not only wait for the pirates to send the signal, to confirm they had the signal properly, but then they had to encode it once they had it, and transmit it.
It was unlikely anyone other than the pirates could see what their signals were, as they were on an island which sat opposite to a vast desert and their tiny firelight would only be visible to someone with a telescope. But the watch stations themselves were, ironically, watched by nearly every spy and king in Purgatory. And so, to keep the news of Liam’s capture as quiet as possible, the stations weren’t merely signaling in code – they were further enciphering it with the latest tricks.
The actual sentence, once decoded, didn’t say: Liam is being ransomed for five thousand gold coins, fifty two kegs of gunpowder, thirty eight muskets and ammo to spare.
Rather, it was a knotty paragraph of trivialities, sly references, code phrases, and outright gibberish, mixed up and out of order.
Fizit drew her mind from that tangled mess to consider her son’s question. The easy answer would be to lie to him. Pirates were not scary, his father was fine, was going to be fine, and he had nothing to worry about. But Brax was growing up fast. And Liam, for all that he tried to be a good king, would never stay behind the front lines. Fizit made a face at the very idea. The instant the war between Babylon and Ares rejoined, Liam would be out there.
Leading troops.
Swinging a sword – even if he still muttered about he never should have let his old longsword go.
“Pirates can be dangerous,” Fizit said. “Anyone who is desperate enough – or violent enough – to rely on stealing from others to make money can be dangerous. But they’re not the most dangerous.” She smiled, slightly. “There are people who are far scarier.”
Brax nodded. “Cause...” He kicked his feet. “I was thinking. I know Dad’s going to be fine, but...if pirates are scary, he might be scared. You might not know it, but Dad told me that he’s scared a lot of the time.”
Fizit sighed. She leaned her head down and kissed the top of her son’s head.
“I know, Brax. Now.” She pointed up at the watch station above them. It was flashing the signal that it was going to be sending a new string of messages at them. “Let's write down the dots and dashes together.”
Brax groaned. “Can I go to bed instead?”
“No.”
***
Tethis rubbed her hands together and turned to face Meg. She was sprawled on a slab table – similar to the kind that Tethis would have used to embalm a corpse. If Meg considered it uncomfortable (or unsettling), she made no sign of it. Instead, she wriggled and squirmed, trying to get her wings comfortable underneath her.
“Are you sure I don’t need to be naked?” Meg asked, grinning.
“No, you do not have to be naked,” Tethis said, shaking her head. “Clothes won’t interfere with the magic.”
Meg nodded.
“And your titties definitely will,” Tethis said, trying to stay deadpan. Her squeak and blush mid “titties” rather ruined the effect. Meg still laughed, then lifted her arms over her head, her eyes closed. She assumed a pose somewhere between salacious and incendiary; her breasts thrust into the air, her spine arched, her thighs half cocked as she moaned, as if in the throws of orgasm.
“Fuck my brains out, Tethis!”
Tethis rolled her eyes. “I’ve never used this spell on someone who's not in a coma. So, tell me if it hurts.” She started to make the passes. But, as she had already practiced on Liv, the hand gestures and the soft command words spoken in the Ancients’ language came smoothly, and within a few moment, Meg’s brain was displayed in the air above the woman’s head. Meg blinked up at her own cerebellum and shook her head slowly, then rolled it from side to side, then tried cocking it.
Her brain remained stubbornly fixed in position.
“Cool!” She sat up, and then grabbed onto the illusion before Tethis could so much as squeak. Meg grinned as she started to rotate and spin the image around – then laughed. “Look! Parts of it are brightening up!”
“What?” Tethis asked. But Meg was right. Parts of the brain flared and crackled, as if lightning was surging through the image. Before Tethis could even begin to consider what this meant, Meg bit her lower lip and then looked past the illusion at Tethis. Her eyes roved along the gobliness’ curvaceous body, and Tethis felt a hot flush rush through her as she realized that Meg was, well, checking her out.
No matter how many times Meg did that, it always felt…
There was a middle ground between shame and eroticism. A burning heat that started behind the cheeks and between the thighs. Tethis felt her nipples perk up and harden under those electric blue eyes and Meg chuckled softly. Her tongue slipped along her lips and she casually looked back at her brain. She nodded slowly.
“So, Liam’s right. Different parts of the brain light up when I use them...” She spun the illusion around and showed Tethis parts of her brain were roiling. “I say we call this the Fuckisphere.”
Tethis snorted, then slapped at Meg’s hands until she had let the illusion go. A low, plaintive wail echoed down the corridor. Meg’s head jerked up.
“That’s Marion – oh, she sounds upset,” she whispered, standing up.
“Uh, wait, wait!” Tethis grabbed onto Meg’s wrist. “Don’t you have nursemaids for that?”
Meg looked at her. Then she looked at the ground and kicked her foot. “Yeah, but...”
“But what?” Tethis asked, forcing her back to sit down on the slab. “Kings and queens have servants, I’m not sure why you look so guilty.”
“I’m not!” Meg blushed. “It’s just. Liam. He keeps talking about how he doesn’t want his children to be strangers.”
Tethis sighed, then smiled. “If it helps, I believe that Marion – being a half elf – is going to be a child for a very long time.” She paused. Marion. Brax. She didn’t have time for the complex sprawl of emotions that rushed through her at thinking about them. So, instead, she took hold of Meg’s brain illusion and unwound it. She whistled softly. Even Meg was struck dumb by what she saw. Her brain was filled with crystal chunks. Most were strangely jagged in pattern and formation, but most of them connected to the rest of the brain via thin, stringy tissue.
“We knew that valks had crystal in their bodies,” Tethis whispered. “From the embalming of those who adopted Coptic ways but...”
“But?” Meg asked.
“W-Well...” Tethis coughed. “Early Coptic scholars followed the Aristotelian theorics that stated that the brain existed primarily to, um, cool blood.”
Meg frowned.
“So, they just yanked it out through the nose with a hook,” Tethis admitted.
“What!?” Meg squawked, her wings mantling. Her hand
s went protectively to her nose.
Tethis flushed. “I haven’t believed that for at least two years! Liam set me straight. Now!” She pointed. “This crystal nodule is deepest in your brain and, if you look close, you can see that a lot of the tiny connections are severed. So, if we just fix those, I believe that you should be able to fly.” She chewed her lower lip. “But, just to be sure, I want you to close your eyes and imagine being able to fly.”
It was Meg’s turn to chew her lower lip. Then she nodded. Her eyes closed and she breathed in, which did remarkable things to her chest. It was a statement on how interested Tethis was in the illusion that she barely noticed the display.
Meg’s brain started to glow – deep in the center of the illusion, crackling around the damaged structures. In the light of the illusion, Tethis could see tears drawing glittering, diamond bright tracks on Meg’s cheeks. Tethis slowly reached up. Her palms glittered and she bit her lip.
“Let's see if this works...”
***
“Liam,” Dia said.
“Yes, Dia?” Liam asked.
“Can I just say...” Dia looked slowly around, craning her head back to try and get a glimpse of Liam. Liam could see the motion in the shadows cast by the mast. “That this has been a really bad trip and I wish I had stayed back in Uten-Ha?”
Liam laughed.
The two of them were chained to the largest mast of the pirate ship. Pirates hurried about them and, to their credit, were ignoring them for the most part, despite the fact Dia was clad in nothing but a loincloth. Her beautiful, perfectly bronzed Coptic skin gleamed in the Purgatorian sunlight like she had been freshly oiled, and every movement of the ship seemed to make her breasts jiggle more fetchingly. Her ears were pinned back against her head in distaste, which did somewhat ruin the effect.
Liam and her had woken earlier this morning to find Quinn and Kailey arriving in the cave, for more interrogations.
It had... gone well.
“Who the fuck is that?” Kailey snarled, pointing at Diayet, who had been sprawled on Liam, languid and happy with her fucking.
“Uh-” Liam jerked from sleep to wakefulness, kicking himself for not keeping a better watch, for not being ready when the two goblinesses arrived. Quinn and Kailey strode in, Quinn holding up a baton, magical energies swirling around it. Liam drew his legs up under him and sprang up, ready to stand between the terrified Diayet and the two goblinesses.
“I am Anubis! God of the Underworld,” Dia said, pushing herself to her feet, her tail wagging as she brushed her hands through her hair. “I simply have been enjoying myself with this handsome buck.”
“I... what?” Quinn looked down at her baton. The magic that swirled there had glowed a bright gold – a truthsaying spell? Liam’s previous interactions with a truthsaying had been highly unpleasant. But that had been a godly power, not a magical spell. He wondered how the arcane spell reached the same conclusions, or if one was more effective than the other. Then he had to focus on Kailey pointing her sword at his throat. The other woman trembled with fury as she glared at him.
“Is she telling the truth?”
“Yes?” Quinn said at the same time Liam nodded.
“Listen, uh,” Liam said, his finger going to the blade, gently pushing it away from his throat. Kailey let him do it – too shocked to do anything but. “Let's talk about this. Like rational people.”
Kailey snorted. “You preferred it when I was grinding on you.”
“Grinding?” Dia asked. Her tail lifted up, and her ears flattened back against her head.
Liam chuckled, nervously. “Um, yes, well!” he quickly moved forward. “You want the codes and ciphers. But that’s not going to happen. Every agent of Babylon knows that the instant any of us get captured – that is, anyone who knows the codes – we’ll change them. We have dozens of codes ready for just this sort of thing.”
Kailey and Quinn looked at one another.
“Fuck,” Kailey growled.
“However,” Liam said. “You can still send a message in the clear.”
“That’s not why we want the codes!” Kailey growled, her eyes flashing angrily. “We’re... we just want to handle this safely.”
Liam bit his lower lip. If the two pirates had the codes for the watch stations, they could read the communications winked between them. They could, for instance, read that an attack was coming. Or if a ship was being rerouted to a new location. It’d be perfect for pirates – and easily as valuable as he was. He brushed his hands through his hair.
“If Anubis and I are on the ship,” he said. “There won’t be any funny business. Fizit will be in charge, and she’s smart. She knows that it’s better to pay ransom than it is to risk killing, well, me.”
That was how it had been in the dark ages, at least, and in large swaths of Purgatory. Noble captives were ransomed back to their cities or sold into slavery if their families didn’t pay up. That kind of stick and stick approach to diplomacy did make a kind of twisted sense. If someone was worth more alive, you were less likely to kill them – and they’d be less likely to kill you when they were the one winning.
But Liam knew that the United State’s more hard nosed, modern sensibility had started to filter through him and the books he had brought into Babylon. More than a few of them had the phrase "We do not negotiate with terrorists" in them. He badly wished for access to wikipedia right now, because he was honestly not sure if that phrase was true at all, or if it was just Hollywood bravado.
Then, as often opened in Purgatory, someone arrived with news to completely alter the scene.
The vines opened and one of the human pirates – the big, burly guy that Liam faintly remembered from the half-memories of being kept a hair’s breadth above death on the deck – stuck his head in.
“Captain,” he said. “The lookouts have spotted something. A fleet’s launched from the Hellenic coast. Ares.”
Kailey swore under her breath. “How big, Thaddious?”
“Five ships,” Thaddious said. “Can’t tell much more, they’re shrouded in a fog. If we didn’t have an angel on them, it’d just look like a storm.”
Liam’s eyes widened.
Kailey grinned. She turned to face him.
“Okay, then. You refused the carrot,” she purred, walking forward. Her palm pressed against his belly. “How about the stick?”
Liam frowned down at her - but she was rapidly growing. Her eyes were nearly level with his once she had finished expanding, and her palm was blazing hot against his belly. Her finger traced the outline of one of his abs as she whispered, huskily. “You tell us the codes and we warn your navy that Ares is coming for them.”
“You don’t know that,” Liam said, his jaw taut.
“Oh, we do,” Kailey purred, walking around him. Her finger traced the lines of his hips, her eyes darting down to admire his butt. Liam was fairly good at ignoring being naked, but Kailey was drawing attention to it again. His cock started to stiffen slightly under the attention. His throat bobbed as he gulped. Kailey leaned over his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Those ships are coming for us. And we’ll be leading them right to your ships. Who might come to negotiate a ransom? That busty lizardgirl of yours? Maybe that valk?”
Liam frowned.
“Who's the one panting like a bitch in heat now?”
It would almost have been easier to bear if her voice held any malice. But she sounded almost gleeful. Like someone in a friendly board game who had just taken a dominating lead.
Liam ducked his head forward.
“Fine,” he said. “But the cipher and the codes are going to have changed.”
“If they’ve changed, they’ve changed,” Quinn said, quietly. Then, she listened as Liam belted out the codes. They were made to rhyme with one another, to make it easier to memorize the long list of passwords, ciphers, and other systems. Once Liam was finished, he felt as completely wrung out. But then Quinn pulled out her baton and knelt down. She reached
between her breasts and whipped out a scroll she had tucked there. It was blank, but she whispered soft words as she poured ink from a glass vial she retrieved from a belt pouch onto the scroll. The scroll writhed.
“What are you doing?” Dia asked. Kailey slipped away from Liam, rolling her hips with a grin as she walked.
“Oh, just a bit of sympathy,” Kailey said, grinning. “One problem with translating espionage from one world to another... sometimes you miss things.” Her voice dripped with gloating pride as her lover stood, holding up the scroll. On it was a list of codes and ciphers that Liam almost recognized. His eyes widened as he realized that they had to be the codes that the Cross Guard had switched to once he had been captured.
“How?” he whispered, hoarsely.
“Objects once in contact remain in contact,” Quinn said, quoting the Law of Contagion, which he had heard from Tethis several times before. “You keep your codes in the same vault, to ensure protection. It’s just like transferring heat between your watch stations and the kilns in which they were forged.”
Liam sagged.
“Tie them to the mast,” Kailey grinned. “We’re to set sail within the hour.”
Kailey’s voice jerked Liam from his reverie.
“You should have just let us fuck you,” she said, standing before him as he leaned against the mast. She had shrunk from her full form to her gobliness sized one and, so, had a great view of his kilt as it laid across his thighs and his crotch.
“Well, you never know how things are going to turn out,” Liam said. “I never knew Lost was going to suck so much, but I stuck with it for five seasons.”
Kailey looked quizzical. Then she shook her head as a lookout called.
“Babylonian ships! Dead ahead!”
Liam craned his head around as Dia shifted in her chains.
The Babylonian ships had just gotten close enough to be easily identified with the human eye – which meant that they were a few minutes away from vanishing beneath the waves. He saw that they had launched three of their modified triremes. Sturdy, built for ramming, the Hellenic warships were supposed to be phased out for ships rigged more like the Morrigan’s Kiss and armed with broadsides. Not every ship could be a steamship like the Constitution. Liam’s guts knotted at the memory of the crew, Captain Harold.
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