“Then you’ll never be one. You have to be born a killer, and you always know.” The pirate looked up at the ceiling. “I had the instinct. But I was willing to use it on the behalf of the weaker people around me… until they betrayed me.”
“Who would dare betray you?” the Queen asked, widening her eyes.
“Who would!” The pirate rose and stepped down from the dais, paced. “Yes, that’s exactly the question, isn’t it. I'll make them regret it. I can’t wait until they realize who’s set the Chatcaava on them. Who’s raiding their border worlds.”
The Queen remained very still, hoping this would build into one of the pirate’s monologues. But as the female took a breath, the priority message alert buzzed. The pirate’s ears flattened and her lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl. “Yes?”
“Pardon us, sir. We’ve captured someone who claims to be one of your off-world contacts.”
“Oh really?” The pirate snorted. “Did this contact give you a name, or were they trying desperately to save themselves by lying?”
“She says she’s come on behalf of Baniel Sarel Jisiensire. An Eldritch.”
The pirate’s ears twitched forward. “A woman? An Eldritch woman?”
“That’s correct.”
“Bring her here.”
“You want her disarmed? She’s got a gun.”
The pirate laughed. “Leave it.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re on our way.”
The pirate strode back to her throne and perched on its edge, trembling with… eagerness? Anticipation? Curiosity? The Queen couldn’t tell, but she doubted it boded well for the visitor.
An Eldritch… here? Why? It made no sense. It continued to puzzle the Queen until the door opened and she beheld the female the pirate guards had brought. Then she understood completely.
What instinct compelled her to glance at the pirate, the Queen never knew, but she did and found a study in raw avarice. The pirate queen had found a new ‘friend’ to fixate on, one she liked far better than her dispassionate Chatcaavan prisoner. The Queen could only hope that this new Eldritch Ambassador was far, far better at faking her feelings than the Queen was.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Over ten years as a xenotherapist had acquainted Vasiht’h with so many forms of misery that he thought he'd catalogued them all, and yet nothing had prepared him for the level of suffering that surrounded him now. The number of people engulfed in it gave it a mass he could feel like pressure on his skin, and the texture of it was utterly alien, comprised of boredom and exhaustion, hopelessness and sharp spikes of terror. It was the inertia that surprised him most… this sense that misery, like an avalanche, could keep going and going, building until it swamped everyone.
He remained angry, which was its own new experience. The incandescence of his anger had already been novel. That it could continue to burn this furiously, day after day, without a target to receive it….
Anger, he thought, had a corrosive aspect. It carved into him like acid. It burnt his mouth, his esophagus, cramped his gut.
Prisoners came and went, shoved into their new cells or removed and loaded onto new vessels. The shuffling was constant; he’d never known what it would take to keep an industry in slaves afloat, but discovering that it required a great deal of industry, much of it manual labor, did not appease his anger. Few new Glaseah were added to his block; when they were, they were always locked into cells too far for him to see them clearly, much less call to them. He tried reaching as a dva’htiht would and failed… recognized that most of what was preventing him from being effective was his own fury. It was too hard to concentrate, to soften himself enough to embrace another suffering captive. It was the same reason he couldn’t pray. To reach for the Goddess with this much hatred in his heart—he couldn’t do it.
And it was hatred. He began to understand that, and previously he might have been horrified that he’d found himself capable of it. Now, it seemed the only sensible response to an atrocity of this magnitude.
Surprise was one of the few neutral emotions he could sustain, though it seemed remote when viewed through the lens of his anger. And the technology level employed on the captives did surprise him, until he thought through the logistics of the situation. Hundreds upon hundreds of slaves, all in boxes… if they were allowed to live in their own filth, the toll in sickness would have been inestimable. Plus, one could not sell sick or messy merchandise. Employing enough people to care for this many slaves would also have been difficult. So Vasiht’h’s cube had a floor that disintegrated waste every hour, and that scrolled underfoot like a treadmill to force him to walk. The lights never dimmed, so the exercise periods were the only way he could count time… if in fact the intervals between them remained constant. Five hours between walks or two… how could he tell?
The routine had its own brutality. Its unrelenting sameness made him feel like a cog in a machine, and that feeling persisted until the guards patrolling his block stopped in front of his cell and hauled him out. They didn’t deign to tell him why, but they didn’t need to: their thoughts burned like brands when they grabbed his arms. Time for processing, one thought. Hate the centauroids. Takes too long. Wonder why anyone bothers. And This should be fun. Wonder if he’ll fight it. I hope he fights it.
Vasiht’h’s fur bristled down both backs. The gun pulsed in that guard’s mind, rendered in loving detail from the way the grip filled his palm to the way it bucked when he shot it. The last person he’d used it on... Vasiht’h wrenched his mind away before he could see too clearly.
They were more than willing to cripple or even kill him, and dead he could not serve the Goddess’s purposes, nor live to see Jahir again, and his family. He let them shove him along, the cells he passed blurring into one enormous pastiche of despair and fear he sensed through a wall made of fury. How good it would have been if he’d inherited Jahir’s power to inspire fatal fear in groups, but even if he had, how many pirates were there? If he missed even one… worse, if he spilled his anger over onto these innocents and subjected them to the corrosive power of it…
No. Not yet.
When they brought him to the small, tiled room, he thought they would beat him, or mangle him, because what else from such monsters? Instead, his two guards stood on either side of him and a third came to stand in front of him, an Asanii with cold eyes. The felid said, “You will receive a sedative via AAP to the flank. Resisting will accomplish nothing; there are enough of us to hold you down for it. Do you understand?”
“Why—”
“Do you understand?”
Vasiht’h gritted his teeth, a sound escaping from his chest. Was he growling? He was. And they didn’t care. The one in front of him was waiting, his eyes empty of… anything.
“I understand.”
The speaker nodded. A fourth man walked around Vasiht’h’s haunch, and he felt the brief sting of the pump. The numbness began immediately, his lower limb on that side tingling. He slumped to one side, thought that he shouldn’t close his eyes around these people, and then he was, and did.
When he woke he was back in his cell, lying on his side with his arm under his head. He never slept this way, and he lifted his head, disoriented. The fur down his side shone under the overhead lights: he’d been brushed to a fine gloss. They’d… groomed him? Frowning, he looked down at his legs and wondered why the toes were separated by cushioned pads. He tried flexing them and found them numb. His fingers were too, so he brought his hand into view and opened his palm, stretching the fingers separately in sequence in an exercise Jahir had taught him.
It took several such stretches for him to notice their tips. Stretching his hands this way inevitably showed the points of his claws. There were no such points now.
Vasiht’h stared at his hand, his heart accelerating. He pulled up his foreleg and palpated the toes, barely feeling the touch through the dregs of the sedation. But there was no mistaking the change. He arched one wing and checked its thumb joint and found
it shorn.
They had declawed him and groomed him and dumped him back in his cell like an animal ready for show.
Vasiht’h put his head back down on his arm. This too, they would pay for. He clung to that and resumed waiting.
The Chatcaavan Surgeon’s orders took effect that evening. When the guards unshackled Jahir from the wall they prodded him further into the suite rather than marching him back to the base of the tower. He had a confused impression of a nautilus shell of rooms, spiraling inward toward a secret heart; most of them were studies or conference rooms or libraries, until he wondered what a dragon needed with so many. But they reached the protected center of the tower, passing through a much more palatial bathing chamber to reach it, and there he found…
A vast emptiness.
It was hard to imagine the room’s prior purpose when it had been stripped of its ornaments and furniture. The only clue was its size and location: such a spacious room, and with access to a bathroom large enough for pleasure. But if this room had once housed the Emperor’s favorite concubines, there was no sign of that occupancy now. Even the walls were bare, and passing them Jahir spotted scuff marks that suggested they’d once been tiled or covered in something. Wallpaper? Murals?
Only one door led into this windowless chamber. The guards deposited him on a thin pad in the corner and left him completely alone, and when he tried to follow them he found the way barred by a forcefield. One of the Usurper’s innovations, no doubt—why waste money on guards when technology could serve? Resting his hand on its invisible surface, he peered past it into the room beyond. The moonlight that flooded through the door leading into the bathing chamber did not quite reach his shadowed cavern. Appropriate symbolism, he thought. Just enough light to ruin his night vision, to make him hungry for more, and to stress the abyssal darkness to which he’d been consigned.
If he could escape… if he could force his way through the field… but no. He would have to walk all the way through the Emperor’s tower, spiraling outward until he reached the chamber that led to the stairwell. And if there were no guards here, there would certainly be guards there.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to walk out for his thoughts to roam free.
Very fortunately, because he didn’t feel up to walking anywhere.
Sliding to the floor beside the door, Jahir let his head fall to rest against his knees. He’d never felt so unwell in his life, and that life had included a harrowing few weeks on Selnor, where the gravity had almost killed him. His heart rate was far too elevated; his hands shook when he didn’t press them against his skin, and the hollow craving in his middle had spread until he felt lightheaded and empty. The roquelaure’s dissonant chime sounded regularly, and it had begun to whisper now, once in a while, about him needing fuel.
He was wasting it, sitting in the dark shivering. Even so he didn’t consider de-activating the device. How could he know when he would be inspected? Or if the room was under surveillance?
The pad did little to alleviate the cold of the stone floor but it was better than nothing. He was trying to find the warmest way to wrap the thin blanket around himself when a golden light welled into the bathing chamber and a Chatcaavan entered it, murmuring something to people Jahir couldn’t see. This new Chatcaavan stopped at the arch into his sleeping chamber and touched his hand to the forcefield, dismissing it. His hide and his elegantly trimmed mane gleamed gold, and he had gentle eyes and a neck that dipped in a demure arch. All Lisinthir’s memories insisted this was a female Chatcaavan: he had two horns despite the wings, and his body language was wrong for a male. But he was mostly nude, and the light that curved over one hip made it clear that there were gaps in their knowledge of the culture that Jahir was about to discover. Hopefully, without endangering himself with his ignorance.
“You-the-slave are to come with me-the-lesser,” said this enigma, eyes lowered. “To be bathed.”
“Very well,” Jahir said, and rose to follow, glad the bathing chamber was only a few steps away. He checked for the guards and didn’t see them; presumably it had been them this new male had been addressing, but perhaps they had withdrawn completely. What need guards if they had put up forcefields, anyway?
“Please,” the male said, indicating a short stool.
Surprised that he was not being ordered to kneel, Jahir took it and looked up, sampling the aura off the new Chatcaavan with what remained of his energy. A touch of melancholy that desaturated everything. Curiosity, also muted, like the memory of a lemon. But under them… a steady purpose, and he saw stars and felt his body shivering in the wind as he guided himself by their light. Such a beautiful image, and that he could still feel delight at all was a pleasant surprise, even more than that secret determination, hidden beneath a pretty and obedient manner.
“I-the-lesser am named Oviin,” said this Chatcaavan. “And I-the-lesser am to be your health attendant, as ordered by the Surgeon. Bathing, feeding, and grooming will be my-the-lesser’s responsibilities. However, I-the-lesser have never seen to the maintenance of an alien. I-the-lesser would therefore ask if you-the-slave would instruct me-the-lesser.”
No wonder Lisinthir had been so wroth with him over the use of the wrong pronouns. He hadn’t understood until now just how much of a cage they created, not just around the mind, but around clear and enjoyable conversation. But why was this male using the pronouns of a female? What had happened to his horns? And what to say? Easy enough to begin; he was masquerading as his cousin, who would never hold with such abasement. “First, Oviin-alet, I would ask that you not call me a slave, nor yourself anyone’s lesser.”
The male’s eyes were a lambent turquoise, and the rim of white that now encircled them accentuated their gemlike quality. “I-the-lesser… fail to see how… this has bearing on your-the-slave’s health?”
“It has bearing on my emotional health, which directly affects my physical health,” Jahir said. “Eldritch do die of anguish.”
Oviin dropped his head, his artfully cut fringe shadowing his face. His thought was so loud Jahir heard it without trying: Eldritch are not the only ones. But the Chatcaavan said, “It will be difficult to remember to do this. Would it be acceptable for personal pronouns to be avoided altogether?”
Surprised by the initiative and creativity of the suggestion, Jahir said, “If it makes it easier for you. I would not be the reason you forgot yourself outside this chamber, and were punished thereby.”
“It is true what was said, then,” Oviin murmured. “That there would be generosity.”
“Someone told you so?”
Oviin looked up once. “The Slave Queen.” Then, more firmly, “Bathing? Grooming? The Surgeon has left instructions on meals. There is more requirement for starches. And cooking is required for the meat. That is correct?”
“Yes,” Jahir said, thinking of the roquelaure’s tyranny. If he could feed himself regularly, perhaps he could chance the mental strain of reaching throughout the palace and sorting the Chatcaava who might be of service to their cause from those who would oppose them. “I need a great deal more food to stay healthy. If you give me soap and hot water, I can bathe myself.”
“How hot?” Oviin asked. “Alien skin… looks delicate?” He reached toward Jahir and fisted his hand, pulling it back. “Apologies.”
Jahir held out his, palm up.
Surprised, the Chatcaavan said, “It has been observed that touch pains the Eldritch.”
“Observed?” Jahir asked, wondering when Oviin had seen Lisinthir.
“There was a public spectacle. With a female. All were required to attend.”
Bethsaida—God and Lady. Jahir said, “I permit touch, when I wish it. And I do now.”
Gingerly, Oviin rested his hand on Jahir’s, granting a clearer perception of his emotions: the curiosity was more dominant now, and something like awe. And, oddly, shyness? Then the Chatcaavan moved his fingertips over Jahir’s palm; unlike the other males Jahir had seen, this one’s talons had been filed
down to points so short they almost looked like nails. “Is it so soft all over?”
“Unless callused from prolonged usage,” Jahir said. “The soles of my feet are tougher. But not tougher, I think, than your hide even at its thinnest.”
“The hot water that pleases Chatcaava will burn skin like this,” Oviin said. “A note will be made.” He hesitated. “There is a preference for no help in the bath? Others have found it soothing.”
“I would like your company,” Jahir said. “To talk to.”
“To… talk to,” Oviin repeated.
“Is that so strange?”
“Yes,” was the reflexive reply. Oviin clamped his mouth shut, which is how Jahir discovered there was a thin, flexible lip at its edge, one that could be sealed. Jahir watched it soften when the Chatcaavan relaxed it to speak. “Males of my-the-lesser’s type are not engaged in… conversation.”
“May I ask?”
“This one begs your pardon?”
“May I ask,” Jahir repeated, meeting the Chatcaavan’s eyes. “What sort of male it is that has only two horns? Or is it too painful to speak of?” When Oviin gaped at him, Jahir finished, “I will begin filling the bath, perhaps, and if you wish to tell me you can while I am busy.”
“No! It is… not a slave’s place to do work! A slave is titled, and more important than anyone with a name. That is how this world works.” Oviin glided past him and started the water before turning to take down a set of towels. Jahir sat on the lip of the bath to wait. As he expected, once Oviin no longer needed to meet his eyes he could talk. “This one is of the palace’s castrates. It is the duty of such males to serve.”
“In a different way than females?”
“Females are for breeding, decoration, and entertainment.” Oviin set the towels alongside the bath. “Castrates cook, clean, and maintain the palace. It is... it is a better service by far than the ones females are consigned to. In the opinion of many.”
“And in yours?”
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