by Jeff Wheeler
A loud thunk echoed inside her skull, and—
* * *
Chellis hadn’t seen light for three days.
The edge of the vat dug into her knees. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, but sometimes, when she shifted, the faintest tingling reminded her they were still there.
Her head throbbed in time with her heart, and her mouth and throat were as sandy as the Hagori desert. As sandy as the cavern floor where she had seen the abuse of her people and the absolute injustice of the Hagori. Villains, tyrants, whoremongers. May the great Moray consume them all and dig the entire nation a grave in the deepest recesses of the ocean, where even the Merdan dared not swim.
She heard Ahad-dian arguing with someone in the hallway, for the second time since awakening with blinders strapped over her eyes and her body bound in the shackles that supported her as she dangled over the vat. He argued low, he argued high. She couldn’t make out most of what he said, but she didn’t care.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Chellis.”
But you did. Worse than anyone.
Gaylil. Chellis hadn’t seen her sister for three years. Chellis hadn’t been there when the slavers took her. She hadn’t seen her sister’s blood in the ocean or heard her water-muted screams as the Hagori dragged her onto their boat. She had only heard of it. Heard of it and mourned.
To find that those land-ridden sharks had her. How Chellis hated them all.
She heard footsteps, a stride she had memorized over the past three days. Ahad-dian knelt beside her and pressed a cool rag, wet with saltwater, to her leg, a sad treatment for her dry skin.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. Chellis could not count the number of times he had uttered those words since Gaylil. “You’ll be released soon, I swear it, even if I have to cut the chains myself.”
Chellis didn’t answer. Despite feeling like a desert herself, another tear absorbed into the blinders.
Ahad-dian sighed. “For some reason I thought it would . . . I didn’t expect . . . your sister. Oh Chellis, I’m sorry. I’ll look into helping her, I promise.”
Help her how? Chellis thought, bile churning where her throat met her stomach. Let her do hard labor instead? Let them kill her or throw her into the desert, or drop bits of her body into the Merdans’ slop?
What will happen when they finally break me too?
She pressed her lips together, refusing to utter a word.
He moved the rag and touched her outstretched arm with his warm hand. Too warm. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Please forgive me, Chellis. Please.”
But Chellis didn’t, and after several long minutes, Ahad-dian’s footsteps retreated back into the hallway.
* * *
Hours later, four pairs of heavy footsteps entered the collection room. A Hagori’s gloved hand gripped a fistful of Chellis’s hair and pushed her head forward until she choked against the collar.
Her handler removed the chain on her collar and replaced it with the standard leash before jerking Chellis’s head back so another could remove the blinders from her eyes. The light of the collection room burned, and the guard holding the blinders cursed as a few tears dropped into the vat. A second guard quickly collected them using a rubber spatula.
Chellis blinked spots from her eyes. Cold spiked her center when she did not see Ahad-dian among her visitors. Three guards, one dian—a broad-shouldered woman with light hair for a Hagori. Her small mouth twisted as though she had just eaten bluefish. She stood stiff as a coral as the third guard finished unchaining Chellis’s wrists and ankles; Chellis winced as blood rushed back into her deadened limbs.
The dian released her hair and snatched the leash, jerking it hard against Chellis’s windpipe. Chellis sputtered and coughed, nearly teetering into the vat, her dead feet and screaming knees unable to support her. The dian jerked the chain again so that Chellis fell onto her rump. Pain flashed up her backbone. She caught herself on tingling hands, jarring rusted shoulders.
“Get up,” the dian snapped. Her voice sounded low and quick, the way a barracuda would talk, if it could.
Chellis scrambled for a footing, forcing her stiff joints to move. Her heart slammed from one side of her rib cage to the next. “Ahad-dian,” she rasped, “where is Ahad—”
The back of the dian’s gloved hand smashed against Chellis’s jaw, shoving her onto her left side. Again she nearly slipped into the vat, but a jerk of the leash prevented it.
Chellis gasped for air as her head spun. Her pulse throbbed along the side of her face, and her jaw popped as she opened and closed it, tasting blood in her cheek. She swallowed it.
“Your papers say you’ve been here eighteen months, and yet you still speak out of turn?” The dian snapped. “Disgusting. To your feet, Merd!”
She jerked back on the leash until it cut into the already chafed ring of scar tissue around Chellis’s neck. She gasped and struggled to stand. She steadied her feet against the tile, but she didn’t straighten completely—her back wouldn’t allow it, not yet. She had stayed too long in those chains, but surely a dian wouldn’t be offended by her crippled stance.
She bit on her tongue and blinked rapidly to keep herself from crying. By the Moray, they’ve transferred Ahad-dian, or worse. Had he gotten in trouble for their excursion? Is that what he had been arguing about in the hallway?
She dared a glimpse at the new dian, who was speaking to the second guard. Please, no. Don’t let the woman be her new caretaker. Give her Lila-dian, but not that woman. Not that dark squid among sharks.
“Fine,” the dian said. She didn’t look at Chellis, merely jerked the chain and started for the door. Chellis’s hips ground in their sockets as she staggered after her, trying to keep pace with the impatient strides. Her belly growled. The dian sneered and jerked the chain again, nearly knocking Chellis into the wall. A scale fell to the spotless marble floor—from where, Chellis couldn’t tell. She’d lost so many.
Four guards took their posts outside Chellis’s quarters. The dian threw Chellis inside; Chellis’s toe caught on the missing square of carpet and she tripped forward, landing on her knees. She quickly knelt and slumped her shoulders—a passive position Lila-dian preferred—hoping the new dian would give Chellis something to eat, or at least turn on the bath.
She did neither.
One of the guards from outside stepped into the room, and the dian shut the door. From a sort of sheath buckled to her calf, she pulled a short leather whip. She tugged on either end to test its durability.
Chellis shrank back. She hadn’t been whipped for . . . months. A chill raced through her blood despite the stuffiness of the room. She tried to swallow, but her time over the vat had dehydrated her. Surely the dian would let her recuperate before giving her a beating!
“Please, where is Ahad-dian?” she asked, knowing each syllable grated on the dian’s ears. “Where is—”
The woman stepped forward and belted the whip across Chellis’s face. White light danced in Chellis’s vision, and then she found her face pressed to the floor, a cool drop of blood tickling her chin.
“Do not speak out of turn, Merd,” the dian said. “You have a ripe problem with that, in addition to your other failures. You are not to speak unless spoken to. You are not to leave the care of your dian. You are not to converse with other Merdan. You are not to engage with other Hagori save your dian, and especially not in altercation.”
She turned toward the guard. “Time me for a quarter hour.”
The man nodded, and the dian raised her whip.
* * *
“I knew they’d do this.”
Chellis came to herself, acutely aware of her surroundings; the lightening of the room as someone turned up the lamp by the door, the taste of iron and sea in her mouth, the burning strikes littering her body. Her hunger, her thirst, her aches.
Her relief at hearing his voice.
Ahad-dian crouched beside her and smoothed hair from her face. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. �
��They called me for a disciplinary council. I knew that if I left you . . . oh Chellis.” He looked her up and down, fingered the flaking scales on her right shoulder. He smelled like Hagori spices, though the only one she could name was cardamom.
He stood and pushed his key into the wall by the tub, turning on the water there. Chellis strained to watch him and noticed a tray of food by the door. She pressed a hand to the carpet to push herself up, noticing for the first time that the fin running along the outside of her wrist had been torn in two. That would hinder her, if she ever swam again.
Ahad-dian returned, crouched, and scooped Chellis into his arms. He carried her to the tub and gently laid her into the still-rising water. It stung, for a moment. She cupped the water in her hands and drank until Ahad-dian handed her the glass of seawater.
“Slowly,” he advised, his speech slightly slurred, like he’d missed days of sleep. Perhaps he had.
She drank, relishing the brine coating her insides. Ahad-dian added a packet of salt to the water before shutting it off. Then he did something dians didn’t do.
He left the room.
Chellis watched, waited, feeling an invisible fisher’s line stretching from her chest to the door. When Ahad-dian didn’t return, she checked her wounds. They didn’t feel as sharp in the water. She didn’t have enough of her own water to cry and heal them, but Ahad-dian had already assumed that. He returned with a small white case Chellis recognized as a first-aid kit. The blue water droplet painted on its side denoted its use for Merdan, as did its tiny size.
“Here, now,” he said, kneeling beside the tub. He pulled out a gray handkerchief—more of a rag—and doused it with the foul-smelling yellow contents of a cloudy bottle. He pressed the rag first to Chellis’s forehead, then to her jaw. She watched his face as he worked, the crease marring his forehead, the fine, permanent lines between his brows.
And his eyes, dark as a midnight thunderstorm, focused solely on their work. On her.
“I know what it’s like, in a way,” he said, hushed, the wet rag stinging a shallow cut on her elbow. “To be a slave, I mean.”
Chellis held very still.
After several breaths, he said, “Being born the way I was—with Widow’s Blood—people treated me differently. My mother coddled me, always afraid I’d get hurt. I wasn’t allowed outside, like you. Wasn’t allowed to take off my shoes unless I was in bed. She even tested the temperature of all my meals until I was twelve.
“But my father, my brothers, they were different,” Ahad-dian continued. “They treated me like . . . well, like I was a Merdan. Please don’t take offense at that.” He glanced at her. “I barely know my brothers, even my younger ones. They saw only the disease. But they never hurt me. Not like this, not physically. I would have died if they had.”
He rewetted the rag and leaned over the tub sill, pressing the cloth to the side of Chellis’s neck. Chellis lifted her wet arms and wrapped them around his.
He froze.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her nose pressed against his unpierced ear.
A second passed, and another. Ahad-dian shifted, palmed the rag, and returned the embrace, his sleeves soaking up the water along Chellis’s back, his wrist pressing into another laceration there.
“I’m sorry, Chellis,” he said. “I never meant for this—”
“I know. But you’ve done more for me these past two weeks than any other Hagori I’ve known, even before your war. Thank you.”
She released him, and he pulled away, not bothering to wipe away the saltwater along the side of his neck.
“You are not a dian,” Chellis said.
He chuckled under his breath and ran his free hand through his hair. “I know. God above, I know.”
He resumed his work, and Chellis leaned forward so he could treat her back. He had nearly finished when he said, “You aren’t a slave, Chellis. Or you shouldn’t be. None of them should be, but you most of all.”
She turned toward him.
He held the rag in one hand and the cloudy bottle in the other, but did nothing more. His eyes focused on the rim of the tub. “It’s all I can think about, after taking you there,” he murmured. “I’m out of excuses to defend it, to defend myself. It’s a war over land, did you know that? A border dispute because the river dried up. Six years of war because of a river. My older brother died for a few miles of infertile desert.”
Chellis fingered her split fin. “I’m sorry.”
“Gaylil’s been here for four. I looked up her records.”
“Almost four,” Chellis replied.
“Older sister?”
“Younger, by three years.”
Ahad-dian nodded. “How many others have been captured?”
“I don’t know,” Chellis said, drawing her knees to her chest. “Gaylil and my father before me. But since . . . I don’t know.”
“How many siblings do you have?”
“Just her. We aren’t a numerous people.”
Ahad-dian whistled. The sound faded, and he remained quiet for a long moment, still holding the rag and bottle. “It isn’t right.”
Chellis didn’t respond.
He shook his head and dumped the rest of the bottle’s contents onto the rag, then pressed the rag to the stripes along Chellis’s right arm. “It isn’t right,” he repeated as he worked his way down.
Chellis soaked in the saltwater for a long hour. Ahad-dian helped her from the tub, gave her a new, rough-spun dress to wear, and sat in silence as she ate. She slept for a time, and when she woke, Ahad-dian still lingered in the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against the door, rubbing his chin, his eyes looking somewhere beyond the walls.
She fell asleep again, but when she woke, it was to a hand pressed against her mouth, the lamp in the room turned low for the night.
“I don’t want to raise any alarm,” Ahad-dian whispered to her. “Chellis, can you walk?”
She nodded against his hand.
“Good,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”
He stood and pulled the fine chain leash from his belt. Chellis sat up and rubbed a sore spot on her hip.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “Back to the collection room? So soon?”
Ahad-dian hooked the leash onto her collar.
“The sea,” he answered.
The room fell away from Chellis’s vision and she stood in a realm of shadow, empty save for Ahad-dian and the chain that connected them.
Tears filled her eyes. “The . . . sea?”
Ahad-dian wiped the tears from her lashes with a knuckle and placed them over the lashing on Chellis’s jaw—the dull pain there vanished within seconds, healed. “I can try,” he whispered, “but if it doesn’t work, neither of us will have a second chance. Do you understand?”
She nodded, a surge like a volcano bursting from the deepest parts of her. The shadows around her reformed into her chambers. Chambers she might never have to see again.
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
Ahad-dian held up a summons card. “I stole this. A midnight summons is believable, given the high demand for Merdan tears. This will, at the very least, get you past the guards outside your door. I’ll have to hope my standing can get you out of the citadel. From there, we run.”
Chellis nodded. “Anything. I’ll do anything.”
Ahad-dian let out a long breath and wrapped the leash around his wrist, tightening it. “Act as subservient as you can, and forgive me if I fail.”
Ahad-dian didn’t flash the card as he pulled Chellis from her chambers, much rougher than usual. The guards must have noticed, however, for they didn’t ask questions. Chellis didn’t see them for herself; she kept her gaze fixed on the floor. Once Ahad-dian led her around the corner, he snapped blinders over her eyes. He guided her down the hall. Chellis heard someone moving toward them, and Ahad-dian jerked the leash as though Chellis had been walking too slowly. He didn’t need to explain; Chellis whimpered and qui
ckened her pace, hoping that whatever stranger saw her would see only another worthless Merdan on her way to the vat.
She knew when they passed the collection room. She had walked the path to and from it enough times with blinders to gauge its location. Ahad quickened his step, then, and shortened the leash. She didn’t know the citadel’s layout beyond the collection room. Not by heart.
The marble turned cold beneath her feet, then hot. She heard men talking, a conversation that stopped as she passed by, then resumed as she and Ahad-dian rounded another corner. Ahad-dian paused, and she heard the subtle jingle of keys.
A voice made her scales rise.
“Where is Naki appointed this time of night?” Lila-dian asked, her soft footfalls nearing. She paused a moment and added “And I thought I beat her hard. I’m surprised you have it in you, Ahad-dian.”
“I don’t,” he replied, spitting the words. “This wound-licker is beyond saving. I’m taking her to be drained before she’s turned over for labor. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you set me up for this.”
The accusation rubbed Chellis like sand under her skin. She focused on her breathing.
Lila-dian snorted. “The better. Save me a piece for my collection.”
The soft footfalls moved away, and Ahad-dian opened the door, pulling Chellis up a set of steep, high stairs.
She was panting by the time they reached the top of them. “What,” she asked between breaths, “is draining?”
“I made it up,” Ahad-dian said, fumbling with his keys again. “But Lila has never worked outside maintenance. She wouldn’t know.” A lock clicked. Ahad-dian pulled the blinders off Chellis’s eyes. The stairwell was dark, save for a high, horizontal window that let in a few speckles of starlight. “Come,” he said, opening the door.
Chellis stepped into a wide marble hallway with circle-top windows lining one side, letting in the warm desert breeze. Every other lamp in the hallway had been lit, casting an orangey glow over the stone. One hand on the leash and one on her upper arm, Ahad-dian led Chellis down the hallway and through the first junction on the left.
