by Lucia Ashta
You tell him, I said. If I had my way, I’d never say another word to that man in my life.
A man can dream, Dolpheus said to me in my mind, then aloud, “Hey Aletox.”
“Hey?”
“Aye, hey. We have a situation that needs resolving before we can go anywhere.”
“And it is?”
“We left five of Tanus’ best horses at the edge of the forest that surrounds this place.”
“Before you broke in here, you mean?”
“We didn’t break in. We came in with one of your employees to do work important for the well being of all O. We entered on the authority of your Royal Princess to accomplish tasks necessary for the betterment of all Origins.”
It was fluff, and I was sure Dolpheus realized it. Aletox wouldn’t believe it, but it didn’t matter. Dolpheus and I’d learned early on in life not to admit to wrongdoing when it wasn’t necessary. Dolpheus was a master of wording, and he could qualify nearly every situation to avoid attributing fault to our actions, even if they were against the laws of O or the conventions of Oers. We had no qualms about breaking laws we considered arbitrary. We just had a problem with getting caught doing it.
“It appears, Arms Master, that you may have missed your calling to a life in politics.” Aletox sounded amused.
“And live my life surrounded by the most venomous of all Vikas vipers?” Dolpheus shuddered for effect. “No thank you. The present company is bad enough.”
Aletox’s gray eyes blazed dangerously. I would’ve warned Dolpheus to back down, but certainly he’d realized he was poking the king viper, and that there were no circumstances that justified that.
Never provoke unnecessarily. It was one of our mottoes. I had no doubt that our adherence to it was partly responsible for our survival thus far. One of the most important things for a soldier to master is his emotions. We both knew that quite well. We’d trained for centuries to control our reactions. Still, I couldn’t fully blame Dolpheus for picking at this particular king viper. Aletox was infuriating. Just looking at him made my skin itch with annoyance. He was a bad man. Already, there were too many of those on O.
“Mind yourself,” Aletox snarled.
Dolpheus would now, I knew it. I was sure he regretted his snide comment already. He wouldn’t make that mistake as easily another time.
“Of course,” Dolpheus said. “My apologies. It’s just the stress of the situation that has me affected.” His words were the right ones to smooth over the situation. But his warm, amused brown eyes weren’t convincing.
Aletox stared him down. Dolpheus stared back.
Shit, I thought. I jumped in. “Aletox,” I started, forcing myself to be convivial to make up for what Dolpheus was doing. “Would it be possible to assign someone you trust the task of caring for my horses while we’re gone? These are my best horses, the ones I’ve had the longest. It would be a terrible thing if anything were to happen to them.”
Aletox continued staring at Dolpheus.
“We won’t get in the transport machine until my horses are accounted for,” I added. If he wanted to go to Sand so badly that he was dragging me, largely unwillingly, into going, the least he could do was provide for my horses. I wouldn’t budge on this.
Finally, after several more moments where the tension between Aletox and my friend continued to mount, Aletox answered me, while his eyes continued to hold Dolpheus.’ “I’m sure I could arrange something.”
“Do you have someone you can truly trust with their care?” I didn’t want to admit that these were the horses Dolpheus and I took into battle. They were as important a part of our military arsenal as our swords. A good battle horse was worth its weight in pure sand, even if I was one of the few to think so. If anyone were to desire to sabotage us—and Dolpheus and I’d made our fair share of enemies during our centuries of fighting—injuring our horses would be an effective way of doing so.
I feared Aletox could be vindictive enough to be the one to direct the injury of our horses. Neither Dolpheus nor I’d even done anything to harm him, beyond the occasional snarky remark, and I might be his son. But although I knew relatively little about this man I’d known all of my life, I knew enough to understand he could lash out without apparent reason.
I wished I didn’t have to entrust a task so important as this one to him.
Aletox turned to look at me, appearing reluctant to release Dolpheus from the stare down. “I have someone I trust that will take good care of your horses.”
“Thank you,” I said, perhaps the most genuine words I’d ever said to this man. “Please convey my interest in their well being to this person you have in mind.” Aletox would understand what I was really saying: If anyone hurts my horses in any way whatsoever, even if by neglect, they’ll have hell to pay when I return.
“I’ll do so in a minute. I can communicate my orders from the bay.”
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said, setting a record for expressions of gratitude to this man.
“Is there anything else you need before you can go?” He almost sounded genuine, kind, caring. Almost. I knew better. Dolpheus was fond of saying, When a Vikas viper doesn’t act like what he is, that’s when he’s most dangerous, because a Vikas viper can never change its nature. I was well aware of Aletox’s true nature.
“No, thank you,” I said, breaking the record for thank yous I’d just set. I was compensating for Dolpheus’ words, balancing the scales, as he so often did for me.
“Very well. I’ll take care of this and then set the launch in motion. We’ll be ready to depart within ten minutes.”
I nodded, ignoring the roiling sensation in my gut. I was placing all I valued in this man’s care.
And in ten minutes, there’d be no turning back.
23
The transport machine’s whirring transformed into a high-pitched squealing, not the most reassuring of sounds. The entire contraption, a giant conical hunk of metal with a rounded tip, was vibrating. The red metal shook so rapidly that its edges became blurred, losing all their previous sharpness.
“Is that normal, you think?” Kai, who stood next to Dolpheus, asked. He didn’t sound as eager to jump inside the contraption causing the offending noise anymore.
“By the oasis, I hope not. A machine can’t possibly work efficiently with all that shaking and whining,” I said. “Especially not when it’s intended to transport people across space.”
“Yeah,” Dolpheus said. “I’m not liking the looks of this. He can’t expect us to get inside that thing.”
Ilara brought her lips close to my ear and whispered, “Is this the same shuttle that I was supposedly transported off planet in to begin with?”
Dolpheus and Kai turned their heads to look at her, and I realized that she’d whispered her question only so that Aletox wouldn’t hear, not them.
“It must be,” I answered. “The King sent his servant to use the splicing lab’s transport machine to send you off planet. I can’t imagine they’d have more than one. This has to be it.”
“So, by that logic, we can assume it’s perfectly safe.”
There wasn’t anything perfectly safe looking about the machine that hummed violently in front of us. It appeared as if it might take off before we got in it.
“Um, yeah, I guess,” I said to avoid considering the possibility that maybe the princess who’d gotten into this thing hadn’t actually survived the journey, the King just thought she had.
We settled into an uncomfortable silence again, our collective pairs of eyes trained on the machine that was looking more and more like a death trap with each passing second.
Aletox had stepped back to the control panel for a few minutes, I assumed to arrange for our horses’ care. Then a few more exuberant arcing movements with his arms, his fingers a whirl across the panel of lights, before he shut it down, it would seem, for good.
He stalked over to the machine, where Lila still stood, and conferred with her. They reviewed the spec
s together, appeared to be satisfied, and closed it down as well.
Next Aletox and Lila disappeared inside.
We waited, none of us making any movement toward trapping ourselves in this device even an instant prematurely, watching, waiting to see if the thing would fall apart and spare us from whatever agony it was sure to inflict upon us.
Maroon metal continued to shiver violently while the churning in my stomach became audible.
Dolpheus clapped a hand to my shoulder. “Staring at this thing is worse than staring into the eyes of a mowab preparing to charge. That’s probably why Aletox chose the red vunter metal.”
“Because he knew it would remind us of a mowab?” I asked.
“Yes.”
It was a ludicrous supposition, but I indulged Dolpheus, just as I suspected he was indulging me. It was better than focusing on the vessel that was doing an excellent job of reminding me how fragile human bodies could be. “I’d rather be facing down a mowab right now than the idea that we’ll soon be trapped inside that thing,” I said.
“Me too. I’d rather be facing a whole herd of them. Think of how fun it would be? Just us and them, with their gigantic bodies and thick, piercing horns.”
“The smell of them,” I said, trying to get into it, to anything that would distract me from the thoughts my panicked mind kept leaping toward.
“Oh yes. The stench of them, of brutal beast. You remember how strong the stench is? Of course you do. You can never forget it.”
“And their anger.”
“Their anger is the best. Their fury is what makes them such a worthy foe.”
“They snort hot, angry breath from their noses.”
“Steam comes from their nostrils,” Dolpheus said.
“Really?” Kai asked, moving in front of us, turning his back on the machine.
Dolpheus grinned. He anticipated that this was precisely the kind of talk that would manage to distract Kai as well as us. For us, it was only halfhearted. We remained well aware of the danger we faced in its manifestation of red vunter metal. Was it any accident that vunter metal was the faded red of blood?
But Kai had grown up around the legends that surrounded our military achievements. It was precisely the eager-eyed look he was giving us now that was responsible for his haste in deciding to join us on this mission. This nonsensical, unexpected mission that kept suggesting more reasons to abort it.
“Aye, man,” Dolpheus responded to Kai, with enthusiasm. “The big, ruddy beasts paw their hooves against the dirt, drawing clouds of dust around them, making them look like they’re demons from hell. They snort steam through their noses and breathe a hot, fiery breath that promises a painful, punishing death. They flick their tails around, whipping their flanks, as if they’re the very ones urging themselves forward to torment you.”
“Wow.” Kai’s eyes were round. He looked like a child then, an awkward, lanky, orange-headed child. We could never allow harm to come to someone like him, so trusting, so awestruck by two men he surely believed to be better men then we actually were.
Dolpheus continued, enjoying himself. He could weave a tall tale. “When they’re several of them, they join together to become a wall of angry, smelly, ginormous beast. There’s no avoiding them once they pin their red, fiery eyes on you.”
“And you can’t run from them?” Kai asked, eyes even wider.
“You can, but only if you want them to trample you to death with your back turned to them.”
“Oh shit.”
“You can’t outrun them. For as big as they are, they’re fast. Faster than a person, faster than a normal horse. Your only chance at outrunning them is having a fast and agile horse that’ll run knowing a part of hell itself is chasing it, and even then, it’s a close one. And if the mowabs have young with them, forget about it.”
“What then?” Kai asked, and I had to force myself not to smile at the breathlessness in his voice.
Ilara leaned to whisper in my ear again, “He’s exaggerating, right?”
“Only a little,” I replied softly, not wanting to interrupt Dolpheus. His distraction was working on Kai. It was even helping me, even if for different reasons. His story was reminding me that we’d faced whole herds of mowabs, several times, and lived to tell the tale. Certainly, a single metal mowab was no foe we couldn’t defeat—or survive.
“Oh. Wow,” Ilara said, nearly inaudibly.
“If the mowabs have young with them,” Dolpheus plowed forward, “then everything about them is worse.”
“How could it be any worse?” Kai asked.
“Because they’ll consider you a threat before the less-suspecting folk even realize they’ve encroached upon mowab territory. A mowab den might be leagues away, but if they scent a human, they’ll attack.”
“Oh, by the oasis.”
“Yes, not even the promise of the refuge of the oasis will save you then. They gather in a hunting pack. Only then, they hunt you, a human.”
I smiled then. I couldn’t help myself. Kai’s blue eyes looked like they would pop from his head to roll on the smooth, hard floor beneath our boots.
“When they charge at you, the biggest ones, the males, the ones that rule their herds, their ball sacs are so big and hang so low that you can see them swinging at you beneath their impossibly massive, wide chests.”
“No,” Kai said.
“True story,” I said.
“Holy shit,” Kai said.
That’s when Ilara smiled too. Kai didn’t even notice the playful expressions she and I could no longer contain. Even though I’d been there with Dolpheus and I realized there wasn’t a single funny thing about the scene he was recounting, I couldn’t help myself.
But when I’d been there with him, facing the monstrous beasts he was describing, I’d had to work hard not to quake in my boots.
“Their fur is as dark as the deep night, when the suns have set and the Plune Moon not yet risen. It’s black as nothing. But then the red dirt of the deserts of the Wilds dusts them. They look like black demons coated in hell’s fire. Their eyes burning always the red of death.”
Dolpheus had rendered Kai speechless. His mouth dropped open.
It was then that Aletox emerged from the transport machine, jumped to the floor, and motioned to us with a winding of his arm. “Come on. It’s time to get you strapped in. Lila’s already all set.” He had to yell to make himself heard above the whining sound the machine continued to emit.
“We’ll be right there,” I said.
“Hurry up about it, will you?” Aletox said. “We have a vast new world waiting for us to explore it.”
I doubted very much that the whole of Planet Sand, a star hurtling through space, gave a shit whether or not we landed upon it, but I detected some of the same enthusiasm that Kai possessed in Aletox’s voice. I never imagined someone as ruthless and cynical as Aletox could possess this wide-eyed wonder.
Perhaps he could find the way to be genuine where he hadn’t before. Stranger things had happened. In fact, stranger things happened to me regularly. The unpredictable aspect of my life was the one thing that was definably predictable.
“We’ll hurry,” I conceded. “We’ll be right there.”
Then Aletox was climbing back inside the death trap I hoped turned out to be different than what it looked like.
“I guess we should go,” I said to Dolpheus, Ilara, and Kai, the only three people I trusted on all of O.
“Wait. No. Dolpheus has to finish his story,” Kai said.
Dolpheus clapped a hand to Kai’s shoulder as he had with me. “Don’t worry, man. I’ll finish the story someday.”
“Someday?” Kai whined.
Dolpheus laughed. “The suspense will be good for you. It’ll make the story that much better once I get around to telling you the rest.”
“No, it doesn’t need to get any better. It’s perfect just as it is.”
“What can I say, man? Real adventure awaits. You don’t want to put off
the real thing for stories of it, do you?”
“I guess not,” Kai said.
“Just think of that vunter can over there as the biggest big daddy of all the mowabs. That’s why it’s red, because it’s like a mowab. We’re going to kick some mowab ass.”
Kai nodded, more convinced than I would have been.
“Let’s go,” Dolpheus said, steering Kai by the shoulder.
“Is he always this good at motivating people to do potentially dangerous things?” Ilara asked.
“Yes. He’s excellent at it,” I said.
“I heard that,” Dolpheus called behind him.
I chuckled. This was why I often deferred to him when we led soldiers into battle. He gave the talks meant to encourage and rile the soldiers up to do something no ordinary man would ever desire to do. I was the one with the title of nobility, purchased with the wealth of Brachius’ splicing empire. As Lord Tanus, it was my duty to encourage the men under my command, not that of my Arms Master, a title Dolpheus possessed only because I refused to allow anyone to see him as my servant. But Dolpheus was better at it than I was, and allowing him to lend soldiers hope, when he could do it better than I, was the least I could do when leading men into high probabilities of death and knowing full well I was doing it.
“Are you ready?” I asked the woman next to me, the woman I’d only just managed to return to this world, the one I wanted her in.
She grinned, reminding me that the woman I loved didn’t cower from anything. “I was born ready,” she said.
How could someone be born ready? Born ready to do what? But whatever it was, Ilara was definitely ready, perhaps she’d even been born ready as she claimed.
She tugged me by the hand, leading me toward the machine that would take my will from me. I could only hope that, by the end of this, I’d have my will returned. There was a reason Dolpheus and I didn’t trust machines. I trusted machines built by men I didn’t trust even less.
Ilara stopped halfway, when only a few long strides separated us from safety and it. She faced me, taking both my hands. She studied my eyes. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, you know.”
“Of course I do.”
