by Jeff Wheeler
As taught, Chellis remained a step behind Ahad-dian, which wasn’t hard, considering his long stride. However, even within sight of the guards, Ahad-dian slowed until she walked beside him. Turning the corner, she fell back, and again he slowed. Chellis watched his face as they neared the collection room, but it remained smooth, unreadable.
The collection room lay empty—Chellis had not seen another Merdan since her capture. The dian tried to time it that way.
Her breath quickened as she reached the left platform, the muscles in her thighs tensing in remembrance of her last long visit chained over the vat. But she had told Ahad-dian she could do it without prompting. She couldn’t let him change his mind.
She knelt. Ahad-dian removed the leash and replaced it with the heavy chain suspended from the wall. His warm fingers embraced her wrists—carefully smoothing down the fins there—and cuffed them in manacles, which also affixed by chain to the wall.
Then he knelt beside her, biting the inside of his cheek. Their eyes met, and he slid the spongy blinders over her eyes, blocking out the light.
Ahad-dian moved away, and for the first time since becoming a slave, Chellis felt cold.
She leaned over the vat, her chains clinking only once.
And she remembered.
She thought of Temas crouching on her floor, trying to teach her a children’s game with rules that kept changing. She heard his cry as soldiers seized him, the flickering light in his moon-wide eyes, the gargle from his lips as the blade raked across his neck.
She heard Lila-dian’s voice: fish-whorer, scubweed, fish fodder. She felt each choking jerk of her collar, each open-handed slap across her face, each lashing that bit into her skin like the coils of a jellyfish.
She breathed saltwater, felt the cool embrace of the sea as she followed the shadows of her dwindling kin. The fiery agony of the harpoon piercing her calf and dragging her to the surface. The rough hands of the Hagori pulling her, tying her, crating her.
She lived every lonely night, every curse, laceration, burn, and break. She felt the walls of her chamber press against her every side, laughing at her, suffocating her.
And she thought of Ahad-dian, imagined him being beaten for walking alongside a Merdan, for feeding her too often, for letting her heal. She imagined him chained and shackled and dragged away, replaced by a darker, crueler dian.
The thoughts flooded her mind, and Chellis wept.
* * *
Chellis wept for hours, but she could not mourn everything at once; the next summons would demand more, and the next, and the next.
Choking back her sorrow, Chellis let it dry in the back of her throat. Ahad-dian removed the soaked blinders, and men with rough hands collected every stray tear for the Hagori arsenal.
The green card demanding Chellis’s contribution to the war came again two days later, and once more, Ahad-dian allowed Chellis to cry for herself. She did, but not as heavily as before. She feared—and she saw that Ahad-dian feared—that she would be unable to continue filling the expected medicinal supply based on memory alone.
The summons card appeared in Ahad-dian’s hand less than a day later. He crumpled it in his fist.
“Too soon,” he said with a scowl. “They’ll kill your kind off with demands like these.”
Chellis eyed the card, yet oddly she didn’t fear it, not with it clutched in Ahad-dian’s hard-knuckled fingers. “Why?” she asked, drawing her knees to her chest, adjusting herself on the cot.
“The war is getting bloodier,” Ahad-dian groaned. “More soldiers killing one another, and the Vitian lines haven’t budged in a month. The slavers aren’t pulling in new Merdan, so the king wants the ones we have squeezed dry.”
Chellis frowned. At least more aren’t being caught, she thought. Or were all her people already enslaved?
“I can’t ignore this one,” he mumbled.
Chellis stiffened. Had she translated his words correctly? “Ignore . . . this one?”
He didn’t look at her. “You’ve received four summonses this week. I didn’t report for the second.”
Chellis’s heart beat harder in her chest. Before she could ask why, Ahad-dian answered, “It’s too much for one person.”
She stiffened. No Hagori had ever referred to her as a “person.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Chellis,” he said, but his eyes focused on the card, not her.
Chellis shivered. She stood, stretching out the fins that lined the sides of her legs. “You’re not a dian,” she said. “No dian would speak as you do.”
He actually smiled. “I’m certified. But I haven’t been . . .”
His words caught. He licked his lips and retrieved the chain for Chellis’s collar.
“Come with me,” he said, reaching over her shoulders to attach the leash.
“Where?” she asked.
But he didn’t answer, and Chellis dared not speak as they passed the guards outside her door. However, Ahad-dian didn’t lead her toward the collection room, but away from it. Past other guarded doors and down a hallway that reeked of spoiled fish. Up a narrow set of stairs that Chellis faintly remembered having passed before, shortly after her arrival to the prison.
They stopped at a thick door. Ahad-dian thumbed through the keys on a small brass ring pulled from his belt and opened it.
She cried out, then clamped her hands over her mouth the stifle the sound. Sunlight. She trembled as her eyes traced the golden rays pouring through the barred windows of the citadel.
Ahad-dian guided her forward, then out another door. Soft, hot air grazed her skin. The brick floor was hot and dusty under her feet, like the skeletons of sunbaked anemones.
Outside. Chellis stood outside.
Her lips parted and she dropped her hands as she took in the courtyard, its angled paths formed with more brick, its thorny gardens filled with wood chips colored rose and indigo. It smelled clean and fresh, but the still, arid air burned her nostrils and gills. It felt like fine sand filtering through her lungs, and once more Chellis craved the sea.
But the sun.
Tears sprang to her eyes, and seconds later a blinder’s spongy pockets pressed into them.
“Please don’t cry,” Ahad-dian whispered into her ear, his breath tickling her skin. “Not yet.”
She nodded and breathed deeply. Ahad-dian removed the blinders. Chellis spied a guard to her left and lowered her gaze.
Again Ahad-dian led her forward, keeping the chain taut, perhaps to ease the guard. The brick began to burn her scaled feet. Ahad-dian moved so she could walk on wood chips or, when the landscaping permitted, patches of trimmed limp grass.
He stopped as two guards approached. They spoke in a dialect Chellis didn’t understand. Ahad-dian answered in a similar fashion, making sharp gestures toward Chellis. After a minute, the sun growing hot on her skin, the guards nodded and let them pass.
They walked until the sunlight became uncomfortable and threatened to dry out her skin. Ahad-dian had to talk to another set of guards, again in that unfamiliar dialect, before leading Chellis onto an elevated walkway over a narrow ravine. Chellis dared to lift her head and look around, taking in the desert landscape around her, the short, tall cliffs that provided backdrop for the citadel and its neighboring buildings, the wild cacti beyond the cultivated gardens, women in veils and long dresses working to pull weeds or sweep walkways. Chellis did not see their reaction to her; all kept their heads down.
They started down a set of stone stairs. The rock blistered her feet, but Chellis did not complain. Even if Ahad-dian had merely meant to take her for a walk, she didn’t want it to end. She didn’t want to return to that cramped room full of sour memories.
She peered around, looking for guards. She only saw them afar, so she asked, “Where are you taking me?”
Ahad-dian released a long breath through his nose. “I won’t tell you yet, unless you want the blinders.”
“It will make me cry?”
He seemed un
easy. “I think so. I suppose I should hope so, for the sake of the summons.”
Chellis nodded, her leash clanking against her collar. Ahad-dian led her through a covered corridor carved from the rock face itself. He used another key to open another door, and Chellis found herself in a sandstone-tiled room lit with skylights carved into the ceiling. Two guards, one at the left wall and one on the right, watched them, and an older dian sat at a simple table in the room’s center.
The dian behind the table perked up. “She looks very young to be wasted.”
“This is for collection purposes,” Ahad-dian replied. He showed his green card.
The dian looked uneasy. “Has it been approved?”
“Of course,” Ahad-dian replied, and Chellis wondered at the lie.
Ahad-dian said something else in the unknown dialect, and after a moment, the dian nodded and gestured to the door on the left.
As they neared, Ahad-dian whispered, “You were right about my not being a dian, in a sense. I’ve never been assigned a Merdan before. I manned that table up until the time Lila-dian transferred.”
Chellis pressed the heel of her hand against an uneasy tightness blooming in her stomach. It was the same weightless sensation she got when a bull shark lingered nearby. “What did he mean, ‘wasted’?”
Ahad-dian opened the door and led Chellis inside. A long, white-tiled hallway met them. “I shouldn’t tell you.”
“But you will.”
“It’s when the Merdan can’t cry anymore,” he whispered, so hushed Chellis had to lean in to hear him. “Something happens to them. We go overboard, or they’re away from the sea too long. Something in them breaks. I’ve studied it, but I haven’t found a cure.”
Chellis stopped in the hallway and grabbed the center of her leash before it could pull on her collar. “Stop crying? Break? What do you mean?”
Ahad-dian looked much older in the brighter lighting.
She said, “They can’t meet their summonses?”
“The tears don’t fall,” Ahad-dian said, solemn. “They just . . . don’t fall.”
Blood drained from Chellis’s face, running like hot wax down her neck. “And . . . they’re here? The others?”
He nodded.
Her heart leaped at the thought of seeing her own kind after eighteen months, but the hope quickly churned bitter. “They’re not in the sea? You don’t return us to the sea?”
Ahad-dian hesitated, then said, “Come,” and guided Chellis down the hallway.
It opened up into more corridors carved into the rock face and lit by skylights, too high to be used for escape. Ahad-dian guided her down the corridor farthest to the left. They passed under a shadowed arch. Ahad-dian paused and gestured down another narrow hallway.
“It’s difficult to get the Merdan to cooperate,” he murmured, “but down there are the breeding rooms.”
Chellis’s blood drained even further, pooling in her gut. “Please tell me I misunderstood you.”
But Ahad-dian shook his head. “The king believes it’s easier to, excuse my phrasing, ‘make our own’ Merdan than hunt them from the sea.”
Chellis quivered. She turned toward the hallway, took one step forward, and stopped. “Then . . . they use children . . .”
“I don’t know,” Ahad-dian confessed. Chellis didn’t realize he had moved until the leash tugged on her collar. She followed behind him, away from the breeding rooms, on numb legs.
The corridor brightened and opened up onto a large atrium in the mountain, lit by several skylights. The corridor had metal railing, and below, Chellis heard the clinking of iron and the groans of men. The sick feeling in her middle intensified, and she peered over the railing.
Below, several long tables sat in rows, lined with men—mostly Merdan men—wearing tattered smocks and dresses like her own. They held small hammers in their webbed hands. On many, the webbing had been ripped from between their fingers to better help them hold the tools.
Upon the tables Chellis saw strange shapes of bronze work, things that looked similar to the armor the Hagori guards wore day and night. The slaves, chained together at the ankles, labored to shape and mold the armor: breastplates, gauntlets, leg coverings, whatever the pieces were called. An overseer on a small horse road by one table, dumping water from a battered pitcher onto the heads of the Merdan as he passed. Many had lost their scales.
Chellis’s hands rushed to her mouth, and tears sprang to her eyes. “Why are they here?” She asked, almost shouted. A few slaves turned to look at her, but Ahad-dian clamped the Moray-forsaken blinders over her eyes. She turned toward him, blind. “Why are they here, and not in the sea?” she shouted.
Ahad-dian’s too-warm hand clasped her upper arm between delicate fins and pulled her down the corridor. “Come,” he said.
Chellis shook her head, tears running from the corners of her eyes, greedily drunk up by the blinders. “Why are they not in the sea, Ahad-dian?” she asked, her voice choking on his name. “If they can do no more to heal the Hagori, why enslave them further? Why not send them home?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured, very close to her ear. They stopped. Somewhere shaded, for the air turned cool. “I’ve petitioned it myself, but no one cares for the opinion of a solitary dian.”
“Then the others—”
“The others don’t care, Chellis.”
She shook her head and sobbed, more tears escaping from her eyes. Her legs weakened, and she crouched down, feeling loose dirt under her fingers.
“It makes no sense!” she said, and her words echoed against the rock around her. Hugging her knees, she wept for her broken people, forbidden to return home. So many scaled faces had labored over those tables. How many of her kind still swam the oceans as freemen?
She cried until her eyes felt too dry, despite the soggy sponges pressed against them. Ahad-dian gripped her shoulders and helped her stand, then carefully removed the blinders from her eyes. He boxed them, stuck the box into the back of his belt, and wiped a stray tear away with his thumb.
“Come,” he said, pulling her from the alcove they had taken refuge in. Chellis didn’t follow at first. Ahad-dian waited until she obliged. Her bare feet left dragging prints against the sandy floor of the prison.
They didn’t retrace their steps.
“What more is there?” Chellis asked, her voice trembling in her throat. “What more is there for me to see?”
“If we can double this,” Ahad-dian replied, staring straight ahead, “perhaps I can relieve you of summonses for a time. Let you rest.”
Chellis quickened her step. “How can I rest when I know my people are being treated so cruelly?”
He glanced at her. “You already knew, Chellis.”
Chellis hissed between her teeth, but said nothing.
The cool rock under her feet gave way to dusty carpet. The ground dipped downward, and fewer skylights lit their way. Everything looked as at dusk.
Someone, somewhere, screamed.
Chellis froze. “Ahad,” she whispered, “where are you taking me?”
His shoulders slumped. “I will not hurt you, Chellis.”
“Where are you taking me?” she repeated.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a long moment before pulling her forward. “Some are bred, some are put to work. Mostly the men.”
The sickness within Chellis spread out to her limbs. “And the women?”
The scent of roses and seaweed filled her sinuses. Chellis looked up, seeing thin fabric like the Hagori women’s veils draping the ceiling. She peered down another narrow corridor, lit by lanterns hanging on the wall.
Ahad-dian pulled on the chain, calling her attention. Chellis turned just in time to step out of the way of a heavyset Hagori man walking with a Merdan woman under each arm. One looked half asleep, the other downtrodden, like her head weighed too much for her neck to support. Both women wore draping clothes that hid their breasts and wrapped around their hips, but exposed everythin
g else.
The Hagori man led both Merdan women down the dim hallway and into the second room on the right. Chellis heard him chuckle before shutting the door.
She backed up into a cloth-strewn rock. “This isn’t . . .”
Ahad-dian pulled a second pair of blinders from his belt, but he held them as though they were a dead animal. “If nothing else,” he whispered, “I thought you should see . . .”
Another scream, but that time it sounded closer. Close enough that Chellis’s blood shot through her veins, heating her skin from the inside. A Merdan woman, naked, bolted from the fourth door on the left, near a hanging lantern. Shouting in Merdani, “Help me! Moray eat my soul!”
Chellis stepped away from the wall and squinted through the shadows, the scales running up the outside of her arm prickling. That voice. She knew that voice.
A Hagori man rushed from the room, dressed only in slacks, and seized the Merdan woman by the wrist, crushing her fin. She cried out. He grabbed her by the waist, which forced her to turn toward Chellis.
Chellis’s heart crumbled to ashy pieces. “Gaylil,” she whispered.
Ahad-dian asked, “What?”
“Gaylil!” Chellis screamed, pushing off the rock and bolting down the hallway, wrenching her leash free. Her legs were ill-trained in running, but she pushed them, passing doors and lanterns as she sailed toward the Merdan woman, tears catching the air as she went.
Ahad-dian shouted her name.
A guard turned from the opposite end of the hallway.
The half-dressed man saw Chellis and flung Gaylil into the wall. Gaylil, recognition in her eyes, clamped her hands over a gash in the back of her head. It stained her fair hair blue.
“Gaylil!” Chellis screamed, but just before she reached her, rough hands grabbed her from behind. Not Ahad-dian’s hands, but guards’ hands, Hagori men she didn’t know. They wrestled her back. One drew a knife.
“No! No!” Chellis screamed, flailing in their grips, kicking out her legs. “Let her go! Gaylil! She’s my sister! Ahad-dian!” she cried. “Someone, help me!”
