by Eric Vall
“Your sister’s really nice,” I slurred to Cy’lass. The prince and Slal’ops were reclined together with their backs to the table. They shared a cup of Opalks juice between them and, for the first time since we entered C’eka, the two looked relaxed. The brooding air that had enveloped Cy’lass since we spoke to his father had evaporated into the smoke around us. He had been laughing and chittering with his advisor and sister all evening. I had not seen U’eh since his speech.
“She admires you,” Cy’lass replied, his needle teeth bared in a grin. “We have told her the story of how you defeated the Opalks. And she knows you have agreed to the Akornath.” A small shadow flickered across the prince’s face as he mentioned the trials, but it was gone so quickly I decided it must have been a trick of the smoke and flames.
“The Akornath,” I repeated, the syllables odd and foreign and fumbling on my tongue. “It seems like this is a big deal. What exactly did I say yes to, huh?”
Cy’lass frowned but before he could answer Slal’ops laid a hand on his arm. The prince and his advisor shared a look before Slal’ops turned to me.
“Let us speak of this tomorrow, CcccT,” he said solemnly. “Tonight is a night for feasting and celebration.”
The part of my brain that wasn’t already steeped in Opalks juice wanted to argue, but the arrival of Sef’sla, with more food and drink in hand, distracted me.
The night passed languidly like this. Every so often, an Almort would stumble up, bow and chitter the appropriate things to Sef’sla and Cy’lass. Then, they’d turn to me. Their names passed over me like water, in one ear and out the next. Some of them had been in the hunting party on the beach and came to give me their thanks for saving their lives. Others, like the Almort craftsman from the market, had family in the hunting party and they professed their gratitude even more strongly. Still others had just heard my tale, the man who fell from the stars and felled the great Opalks, and they came to talk shop and battle, the types of weapons we had used, how many enemies I had vanquished, etc. I humored most of them, my tongue loose and free in my mouth, but just when I would think I had grown tired of a particular conversation, Sef’sla or Cy’lass would click at whatever Almort stood before me and they would disappear with a last few words of thanks and a parting flash of scales.
U’eh still had yet to make another appearance, even as the fire began to burn low. The towering flames that had licked toward the sky at the beginning of the night were now more moderately sized. The shadows began to deepen, and more Almort came to lay on the cushions and surrounding grass. I noticed that some of them paired off and slipped into the deeper grasses, lights trailing in their wake. I turned to ask Cy’lass where they went, but the prince and his advisor had also apparently disappeared because the cushions beside me were empty.
I turned to my other side to find Akela and Neka suddenly standing over me. I blinked groggily at them and tried to make the two stop swaying. Or wait, was I swaying?
“Wha—what’re you doing?” I slurred up at my crew.
Akela smirked down at me, and that’s when I realized that Neka was nearly asleep on her feet again. The cat-girl had her face tucked into the mechanic’s neck, and it looked like the silver-haired woman was holding the two of them up.
“Our resident kitten is a little tired,” Akela hiccupped, and that’s when I realized she was a little tipsy, too. Probably not as much as me though. “So we’re going to head back to the pod.”
I nodded sloppily and put an arm down on the grass to try to push myself up. “I’ll... I’ll go with you,” I mumbled. My tongue suddenly weighed a kilo behind my teeth. It was hard to move it.
The mechanic tittered a drunken laugh at me but shook her head. “No, no,” she told me as she leaned down and pressed her hand against my shoulder so I plopped back down on my ass. “I can’t carry both your drunken ass and Neka. Besides, Slal’ops already agreed to walk us back.” She pointed off somewhere into the smoke before turning back to me.
Her purple eyes were hard to read in the smoke but I could tell the mechanic was smiling. “You should stay,” she continued. “Have a little fun. You deserve it.” As she said this, she nodded to my other side, where Cy’lass had been before, and I turned to find Sef’sla watching me intently.
I grinned at the princess, then turned to ask Akela if she was sure.
My mechanic and assistant, however, were no longer beside me. They had disappeared off into the smoke.
“Okay, goodnight,” I slurred into the air and turned back to Sef’sla.
Before I could say anything, the princess reached out and brushed her own fingers against the side of my cheek. It was an odd sensation, equal parts smooth and rough where her scales tugged at me, and I found myself leaning into her touch. Sef’sla chittered softly and continued to drag her fingers across my skin. She followed the curve of my jaw down to the column of my neck. I swallowed sharply as she pressed against my Adam’s apple, but then her phantom caress continued downward over my collarbones before she laid her hand to rest against my heart.
“Thank you for saving my brother,” Sef’sla hissed softly in my ear. It took me a moment to realized she had leaned in. Her blue-toned hair brushed against my shoulder and it felt like seaweed, like the grass that fluttered and waved in the breeze all around us.
“Don’t... mention it,” I slurred in return. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching up and snagging a lock of her hair. It wrapped around my fingers like it had a mind of its own.
Sef’sla’s fingers were suddenly on my chin, and she tilted my face back toward her fully.
The daughter of the chief was mere centimeters away from me now. I had to lean back just to focus on her face. The sly smile that she had worn most of the night was now missing. Her face was now solemn and serious, and I found myself staring at my reflection in her large, dark eyes.
“Tomorrow the Akornath begins, starman,” she hissed lowly. My senses were overwhelmed with the scent of the sea on her. “You must keep your wits about you. Remember what you have been told. Stay on your feet. Beware the grass. And don’t turn your back against it.”
My fuzzy brain struggled to process what she was saying. “Don’t... wait don’t turn my back against what?” I slurred. “What is the trial tomorrow?”
The princess of the Almort glanced from side to side. “I cannot say any more,” she clicked. “You must win or lose on your own merit. But neither I nor my brother wish to see you lose.”
“I don’t want to see me lose either, so can’t you just--”
Sef’sla reached out and laid her fingers across my lips. “Ssshhhh,” she hissed. “You must rest now. The Akornath begins at dawn.”
I struggled to dislodge her fingers, but the Almort princess was stronger than I anticipated. Before I could say another word, she had removed her hand, leaned forward, and pressed her lips against mine.
She tasted of salt and smoke and charred meat. My drunken brain opened my mouth on reflex. Sef’sla chittered softly against me, and then I felt one of her needle-like teeth sink into my lower lip.
The sting was sharp but brief, and Sef’sla drew away as I brought my hand up to rub at the smarting wound.
“Wh... what did you...?” I started to mumble, but my eyelids suddenly felt so heavy. I tried to blink but could barely reopen my eyes. Sef’sla went soft and blurred around the edges, a shadow backlit by flame. She continued to hiss softly at me as she eased me back along the cushions. The fire and the grasses became nothing more than light and vague shapes and I found myself staring up into the sky as I watched the stars pinwheel overhead.
“Sleep, starman,” I heard Sef’sla’s voice hiss. “Sleep.”
I was powerless to argue, and before I knew it, I was tumbling down and down into the dark, the taste of salt and smoke on my tongue.
Chapter 14
I woke to the sound of drums.
No, wait.
That was just my brain trying to pound its way out of my skull.<
br />
No... actually... it was both.
I squinted my eyes open in a dazed and pained confusion. Above me, unfamiliar stars wheeled overhead in a dim and lilac sky. I shifted, and something crackled dryly beneath me. My brain was full of white noise and white-hot pain and nothing made sense.
“Well, well, well. It seems our champion awakens. Again,” a voice said mockingly from above me.
Still bewildered and floundering beneath the pain and noise that echoed through my skull, I flopped my head to the side and found Akela sitting cross-legged on a silver cushion about a meter away. She had an elbow propped up on her knee and her chin cradled in her palm. When I blearily met her eyes, she smirked at me.
“We really need to work on your stamina, lover boy,” she teased. Mirth danced in her amethyst eyes, and even if nothing else made sense right now, a distant part of me was glad to see the mechanic smile.
It took me a minute to reorient myself in my body. The drums weren’t helping any. I clenched my eyes shut and took a deep breath and, as I did, memories from the night before began to come back to me in flashes: the heat of the fire, the burn of the Opalks liquor, dancing shadows, the taste of smoke and salt and the sea right before a sharp, biting pain...
My eyes snapped open. “Sef’sla,” I gasped and bolted upright.
And immediately almost puked across the grass in front of me.
“Oh god,” I groaned. One of my hands clamped over my mouth to keep everything in, the other went up to my forehead to see if there was actual brain matter oozing from my skull.
“Ah, I see you’re starting to remember some things?” Akela observed. “Namely the fact that you drank nearly the entire Opalks yourself. How do you not know how to pace yourself, dude? I’m a backwater station hick who grew up basically drinking diluted fuel additives, and even I know how to check myself.”
I squinted over at the silver-haired woman to find she was still smirking.
“It’s called ‘diplomacy,’” I rasped. “It would have been rude to refuse them. Also, you’re having way too much fun at my expense.”
My tongue felt like sandpaper in my mouth. Or actually, I might have just had sand in my mouth. I leaned away from the mechanic and tried to spit but my mouth was so dry I just started coughing, which made the pounding in my head worse, or maybe the drums were just getting louder.
When I finished coughing, I turned back to Akela, and the mechanic shrugged at me.
“Eh. You were kind of asking for it. I think it’s karma,” she said as she stretched her arms above her and yawned. I noticed that while she still wore last night’s clothes, the seaweed she had wrapped around her arms was now gone, and the skin was pale and unblemished from the heat of the ion cannon.
“Your arms,” I started eloquently. The mechanic cocked her head in confusion, so I gestured to the bare, unmarred skin.
“Oh,” Akela remarked as she turned her arms this way and that. “Yeah, I don’t really know. I woke up this morning, and the wrap had come unraveled a little, but when I pulled it back, everything was all healed up. Like I’d never been burned in the first place.”
The mechanic shrugged again, but I could tell she was impressed, maybe even a little awestruck. I didn’t know the exact state of things on Theron, but when I was growing up on Proto, medical care was not easy to come by and even harder to afford. It definitely wasn’t something given out to strangers.
“Hm. Maybe Slal’ops will give us a tour of their medical facilities next,” I mused absentmindedly. Maybe they had some mud or grass or something that could take this spike out of my brain.
Akela snorted. “I don’t think they have a cure for making dumb mistakes, but you never know.” She shot me a bright, teasing grin, to which I could only cringe miserably in response.
Then a shadow passed over the silver-haired woman’s face, and the smile slowly slipped from her smirking mouth. “But first we have to figure out how we’re going to get you through this ‘Akornath,’” she said resolutely as she put air quotes around the Almort word.
“Wait,” I said and pinched the bridge of my nose to try to focus. “What do you mean by ‘we’? I’m the one who agreed to these trials, not you.”
The mechanic rolled her eyes at me. “Save the macho bravado for later, CT. You’ll probably need it. I know you’re the one that’s participating here, but we’re a team, right? Teammates help each other out, even if it’s from the sidelines,” she said as she tapped her left ear with a sly smile.
A burst of loud static in my ear nearly had me dry-heaving again. “Our intrepid mechanic is correct,” Omni piped up in my ear, louder than I thought was necessary. I had a sneaking suspicion Akela might have turned up the volume on my earpiece while I slept, just to further balance out my karma.
“Chief U’eh never explicitly forbade outside assistance,” the AI continued. “And I think it’s more than fair given that you are far weaker in strength and constitution than an Almort.”
“Hey,” I objected, but it was even less than halfheartedly. My head still pulsed and ached like someone had driven a horn from one of those Stuogror through the top of my skull, and my stomach roiled uneasily, full of Opalks meat and mysterious Opalks juice. I palmed my forehead and tried to remember what I had been saying, but I couldn’t focus, could barely form a thought, everything being drowned out by...
“Fucking hell!” I finally snapped and jerked my head up to glare at the surrounding fields. “Where the hell are those drums coming from and can we get them to stop?”
“They’re playing for you, CT.”
Startled, I spun around toward the voice that had spoken behind me and came face to navel with Neka. The cat-girl had snuck up on us, her normally already quiet steps made silent by the throbbing beat that echoed over the grasses. Like Akela, my assistant still wore the risqué outfit she had on for the feast, so I blinked dumbly at the exposed skin of her stomach before I realized what she had said and tilted my head back to meet her eyes.
“Wait, what did you say?” I questioned the cat-girl. Maybe I had heard her wrong.
Neka’s ears and tail twitched in anxiety, and I watched as she bit her lip with sharp fangs. “The drums are for you,” she repeated. As if on cue, the instruments grew louder, like they were becoming impatient.
So I hadn’t heard her wrong. Damn it.
“What do mean?” Akela asked as she sat up straight. All playfulness and ease left the mechanic entirely. Her eyes went sharp as glass once again, her jaw clenched tight, the flat line of her mouth as honed as a razor’s edge. The silver-haired woman looked like she was gearing up for a fight. By the fire in her gaze, I knew this wasn’t her first one.
Neka, on the other hand, looked like she was moments away from crying. Her ears and tail drooped and twitched in fear, and she stood hunched in on herself.
“The trial is beginning,” the cat-girl sniffled. “A crowd’s already forming a few kilometers to the east of here, on the other side of the city. I noticed it when we left the pod earlier.”
The last part was directed at Akela, and the mechanic pursed her lips. “So that’s where you went,” she huffed, and when she saw the lost expression on my face, she explained.
“When we woke up this morning, I asked the escorts outside our door to take us to you,” the silver-haired woman said. “On the way here, Neka suddenly got all squirrelly and asked if there was someplace we could stop and get food for you. I wanted to just come straight here, to make sure you hadn’t drowned yourself in Opalks, but she was adamant. So, we split up, but turns out our little Neka was playing spy.”
Neka blushed at the note of approval in Akela’s voice and waved one of her hands in front of her. In the other, I finally noticed, she carried a bowl of... something.
“I wasn’t, I mean I’m not a spy,” my assistant stuttered. “I just... I could hear the Almort gathering, and I thought the more we knew the better, right? But I didn’t want them to think I was too curious though, so I go
t you this, CT.”
She knelt down and offered me the bowl she held. It was a simple bowl made of a pale green wood and little extra adornment. Within its confines sloshed a dark brown, almost black liquid. Flecks of green floated on the surface like a film of algae, and it smelled of salt and something akin to sulfur.
My stomach rolled up my throat. “What the hell is that?” I asked tightly as I tried not to gag. Even Akela had leaned back away from the concoction, her aquiline face twisted in disgust.
Neka’s big yellow eyes at least looked apologetic as she pushed the bowl into my limp fingers. “One of their healers gave it to me,” she explained. “He said it should help with the effects of the Opalks juice--”
“You mean Colby’s massive hangover,” Omni chimed in helpfully as he cut Neka off. Thankfully, my assistant ignored him.
“And he said it would also give you a boost of strength and vitality,” the cat-girl finished. I perked up a little at that. All of those things sounded very much needed to me.
“Wait. Why would the Almort basically give CT a steroid shot before the trial? Wouldn’t that be cheating?” Akela asked, her brow furrowed.
“Maybe the Almort know Colby needs all the help he can get?” Omni supplied.
I cringed but couldn’t even bother to be offended. Now, I was mostly worried. The drums were getting louder. I could feel the ground tremble beneath me. I was running out of time.
I turned to my assistant. “Neka, did the healer say anything else? Or your escorts? How do you know the drums are playing for me?”
I had this wild, insane hope that maybe the Chief had reconsidered or, at the very least, maybe things had been postponed.
But Neka shook her head softly and slowly, and I knew all my false hope was in vain.
“When my escort led me to the edge of this field, he told me you must drink this,” she said, and wrapped her small hands around mine as they held the bowl of dark, mysterious liquid, “and then you must get up and follow the sound of the drums. Only when they stop can the trial truly begin.”
