“What in the name of darkness have you done to these creatures?” she demanded. “I intended them as gifts. A matched set of six. Look at them. Smell them!”
Naye-Ninneya cringed. He’d made a terrible mistake. He should have listened to the weakness of the android when he had a chance. He’d spoiled the Lady’s gift. She could kill him for this. No apology could erase his crime. The Captain wondered if she would at least allow him an honorable suicide.
The Lady still screeched. “Why didn’t you have them cleaned?” she demanded. Behind her, the Dragon Lord growled low in his throat. He didn’t like seeing his troops upbraided by a Vampire—but neither could he allow their failure to go unpunished.
Somehow, Naye-Ninneya managed to get his words out. “I ordered the servants on the ship to do so. Obviously, they did not do their job.”
“And you let them get away with that? You accepted this disgrace? This insult?” The Lady pulled a perfumed silk from the sleeve of her gown and held it to her nose to block out the distasteful stench. “This disgusts me. They stink of their own urine. They’ve soiled their clothes. They wear more dirt than fur. You have betrayed my trust. I cannot present these gifts. It would shame me to give such inferior-looking creatures even to d’Vashti, let alone to my consort—” And then she stopped herself, before she said anything further.
She realized that she had lost control. She had allowed a spark of her anger to show. She reasserted control, stiffening rigidly. She allowed herself several long slow breaths, as close as she could come to evoking the dream state in realtime.
The Lady Zillabar turned around slowly, studying the reactions to her display of temper. The warrior-lizards hid their eyes; Drydel looked grim, possibly dismayed. The Dragon Lord’s expression remained hungry and unreadable.
To Captain Naye-Ninneya, she said, “Have these creatures cleaned and fed. I will inspect them again tomorrow.” To the Dragon Lord, she added, “I trust that you will take appropriate disciplinary actions here.”
The Dragon Lord hissed—not quite an acceptance of the Lady’s order, but enough of an acknowledgment to avoid the appearance of disrespect.
Lady Zillabar gathered her flowing cloak around herself and swept out of the room.
Escape
Safely back in the service corridor, Kask and Keeda growled unhappily at their charges. They had not enjoyed the ground-zero experience of the Lady’s wrath, and they, in their own turn, passed their unhappiness on to the unfortunate dog-children in their care, terrifying them greatly. They allowed themselves some small pleasure in the panic of the little animals. The pups shrank away, cowering and urinating helplessly. Nearly frothing at the mouth, the littlest one continued to chew madly at its leash.
“Hey—” Keeda pointed. “If that one makes a mess of that leash, you and I will have to pay for the damage.”
Kask grunted resentfully, but he jerked the leash sharply, spinning the puppy around and sending it sprawling. The little dog-child yelped in terror. It panicked and tried to run. Its naked paws scratched helplessly across the shining floor, scrabbling and clawing for purchase.
Remembering the Captain’s words, Kask took a deep breath and gave a mighty roar of anger. It didn’t work; higher pitched than the Captain’s noise, it only frightened the little brown and white creatures more. The smallest one redoubled its efforts to get away, leaping and jerking into the air, yelping horrendously. He cast anxious glances backward at the giant Dragon, then scrabbled frantically against the leash again.
Now all the other puppies started crying too. They panicked and began pulling madly in several different directions. Just hanging onto their leashes suddenly demanded the full attention of both Kask and Keeda.
“Big help that,” Keeda growled. “Next time, just smack him.”
“No next times—” Kask said. He lunged for the pup. It squirted out of his grasp. “Come here, you!” He yanked the leash—it snapped. The puppy had nearly chewed it through and under the sudden sharp strain it simply came apart at the weak spot. The dog-child leapt—and this time nothing held it back. It kept on going, sliding and scrambling down the long marble hall.
“Goddammit!” Keeda roared. Kask’s growl had no words. He handed the other two leashes to his brother Dragon and launched himself after the fleeing morsel.
The dog-child ran for its life—Kask pursued. Hell’s fury chased the puppy, but Zillabar’s fury pursued the Dragon. If the dog escaped—Kask couldn’t imagine what the Lady might do. He charged down the endless corridor.
On and on, the child raced; once it fell, sliding and skidding across the slick-surfaced floor, its claws scraping helplessly. It yelped, collided with a wall; it rolled and came up running again, half by luck, half by the sheer madness of its terror; it kept on. Only once did it glance back—it saw a furious Dragon pounding hard in its direction—the puppy cried and scooted sideways, dashing into a side passage, a service corridor, a hallway, through a door, another door, looking for the outside, anywhere, a place where Dragons couldn’t follow—he couldn’t stop, he wouldn’t risk it, he just kept running madly, scrambling through the legs of servants who yelled and tried to catch him, leaping after him and grabbing, but they didn’t have the speed or strength of Dragons, they didn’t have the power either. The child caught its garment on the corner of a towering table—it yanked; the garment shredded, the narrow table toppled. Something large and made of glass came sliding, crashing to the floor. The little shaggy wide-eyed thing leapt away in sudden fright. This room stretched endlessly; the ceiling echoed in the distance, the walls all flashed with mirrors. And servant-wasps everywhere—spindly and black, with multi-faceted eyes—came closing in toward him. And somewhere still behind him, he heard the Dragon’s roar again.
He had to keep on going, had to find the way—maybe he could find the kind lady on the spaceship. Maybe she would help him—and his litter-mates—and take them home to Mommy. Dear sweet Mommy and her big warm belly and her soft red nipples. No time to think, a servant grabbed, the dog-child bared its teeth and snapped; he missed, the servant missed as well; the child scampered quickly, wildly toward a distant opening, another hall, another door, another endless passage—oh, no! At the end of this one stood the Dragon Keeda with five puppies cowering against a corner. He’d gone around in a circle! And Kask still came thundering huge behind him. “Run!” he shouted to his two brothers and three sisters. “Run with me!”
They wanted to, but they couldn’t—Keeda held their reins too tightly. The warrior-lizard turned toward him then, crouching low, advancing. He dragged the other puppies with him; they fought the leashes frantically, but also futilely. They yapped and snarled, and hollered to their brother. “Get away! Get away!”
The puppy skidded. He had to help his siblings—but how? And coming up behind him, Kask bellowed furiously, “Don’t let him get away.”
“I’ve got him!” Keeda said.
The puppy hesitated, torn between his desire to rescue his litter-mates and his own need to escape. He made the only decision he could. He turned, caught purchase on the floor and charged back the way he came—straight toward Kask. The Dragon tried to head him off. He reached out with giant scooping hands, but the puppy moved too fast; he curled frantically around the outstretched grasp—the Dragon caught him by the leg, yanked him upward suddenly. The child kicked, connected, writhed frantically against the Dragon’s hand; he bit and clawed. He screamed, a high-pitched rasp, startling himself and Kask as well. The Dragon hadn’t caught him firmly, the puppy wriggled and came abruptly free; he twisted as he fell—the Dragon clawed for him, but the child hit the floor already running.
Out of breath and out of hope, he fled.
He found a hole, jumped into it, and fell forever, down and out into empty space—
The Search
“Ibaka25 got away!” the other puppies yelled. “He got away!” They bounced up and down excitedly in unconcealed glee. “He got away! H’rray! Ibaka got away!”
Keeda had already punched the communicator on his belt, sending out a call for immediate assistance. The other Dragon Guards came running at once. Captain Naye-Ninneya came pounding down the hall as well, shoving aside anyone who got in his way, sending two of his the warrior-lizards sprawling clumsily across the floor. His eyes flamed angrily. “What the hell—?”
Keeda reported shamefully. “One of the morsels escaped, my Captain. The leash broke.”
“You stupid son of a—” Naye-Ninneya punched his own communicator. “Red Scramble! Red Scramble! Intruder Alert! Go to Security One! Repeat: Security One! Emergency Lockdown! Do it now!” He looked at Keeda, glaring; but he didn’t say aloud what he thought. Instead, he merely jerked the leashes out of the witless lizard’s hands and thrust them at another Dragon—no, two Dragons. “No more mistakes! Both of you do this!” He pointed at the five remaining puppies. “Freeze them—put them in a cage. Put them where they can’t escape. But whatever else you do, don’t screw this up!”
“Yes, sir!” Together, the two huge warriors began dragging the puppies away down the hall. The dog-children wailed in distress as the Dragons herded them along.
Naye-Ninneya forgot them immediately. He spoke to his communicator again. “Dispatch: I want three search teams on the roof, working down; three on the service level, working up. Full menu. Scanners and sniffers. Do it now! Red Scramble! Red Scramble!”
He paused to listen to the reply in his headset for a moment—then clicked to the all-talk channel and started snapping instructions back: “All right, everybody listen up. One of Lady Zillabar’s gifts has escape, a morsel, a dog-child. Less than a meter tall. Brown and white—” Naye-Ninneya looked to Keeda. “Which one?”
Keeda shrugged. “The littlest one, uh—Kask went after him.” He remembered what the other puppies had cried and added quickly, “Ibaka. He answers to Ibaka.”
“Ee-ba-ka,” Naye-Ninneya repeated to the communicator. “The child answers to Ee-ba-ka. Handle him with care. I do not want it injured in any way. You may not kill this creature. He must remain unharmed. He belongs to the Lady Zillabar! The animal has no weapons—” The Captain stopped himself again and turned to Keeda. “No weapons, right?”
Keeda tried to remember. “I don’t think so. He didn’t have any that I saw.”
Naye-Ninneya grunted something unintelligible. He resumed his patter of instructions and information: “I repeat: the animal has no weapons. Consider it fragile and vulnerable. I want it caught without damage. If any harm comes to it, I’ll personally inflict ten times the damage to the idiot who did it and every member of his family! Dispatch: report!” He listened for half a moment, then nodded to himself. “All right, do it. And scramble a vermin team too. Traps, gas, stunners—I’ll have the whole palace scanned if I have to. Right. And I want a report every five minutes until you catch the creature.” He clicked off.
Captain Naye-Ninneya took a long slow breath. He took another. And then a third. He turned to Keeda. His voice went as low and deadly as Keeda had ever heard it. “I have to let you live for now. And you had better pray that we do catch the animal. I do not have a reputation for easing my victims pleasantly into death. You and Kask—my half-witted children—I thought I did you a favor here. How foolish of me to trust the two of you. I should have my chromosomes checked. Obviously, I carry the genes for stupidity and incompetence! Look how you turned out. I give you the simplest responsibility, the one thing that you two absolutely cannot possibly screw up—and what do you do? You betray me. You disgrace my judgment. You let the animal escape! And I’ll have to wear this stain forever—and if I do, I promise you that your punishment will last ten times as long as mine—unless, of course, we catch the cursed thing before the Lady hears about it. Then at least you may commit dishonorable suicide.”
He stopped only to take a breath, then thought of something and spoke to his communicator again. “What about the service tubes? Can he escape that way? He can’t? Why not? I don’t believe you. Check it anyway.” He switched off again, glared at Keeda sullenly, then turned to look at all the other lizards standing behind him, waiting. “Well, what do you reptiles want? Quarter this level, now!” He pointed off down the hall, waving half-heartedly in the direction of the palace core. It didn’t matter. Wherever the creature had gone to, these incompetent lizards couldn’t find it if they had a roadmap and a guide—but at least they could look busy.
Naye-Ninneya didn’t want to consider what would happen if they didn’t find the creature. Lady Zillabar would simply have them killed—all of them—and probably quite painfully. Or maybe . . . no, she wouldn’t dare do that, although—Naye-Ninneya frowned at the thought. Once upon a time, they said, the Vampires used to like the taste of Dragons. Rumor had it that some of them still did.
Sudden fear burned in his stomach. To use Dragons as food—no, even the Vampires wouldn’t shame their warriors like that. They wouldn’t dare. But the idea still tormented Naye-Ninneya. He couldn’t think of anything else so degrading. The Lady would think so too.
He comforted himself with one thought. The creature couldn’t escape the palace. He might find a place to hide for a while, but he wouldn’t find a way out—and he couldn’t stay hidden for long.
As if on cue, his communicator beeped. “One of the sniffer teams has a trace on the main service level,” the dispatcher reported.
“On my way—” He turned back to Keeda. “You! Follow me. If he went down a sewage pipe, you and Kask will go after him.”
“Yes, my Captain.”
They dropped down a service shaft to the bottom level of the palace. The mutable gravity field managed their descent. They stepped out of the well and trotted rapidly up the passage toward the distant sniffer team.
Designed for speed more than strength, the pursuit troops had a much leaner and hungrier look than their bigger, better-armored brothers. They had longer necks and narrower flat heads. More birdlike, and brighter-colored than the Dragons, these slender lizards bobbed and weaved with a slightly uncertain, nervous, uneasy quality. Lithe and sleek, they looked like recreations of the ancient Deinonychus.
Holding their tails high and lashing them wickedly back and forth, the tracking team moved up and down the wide corridor, waving their gas-testing devices slowly through the air and listening to the resultant signals on their headsets.
“He came down here,” Lieutenant Jheeter, the team leader reported. He spoke in quick clipped phrases. He had a whistling, high-pitched voice. Naye-Ninneya hated the effeminate sound of it. “He came down the same shaft you did. He went through the storage bays to the corridor on the other side, he came out in the master kitchen—almost right into the butcher’s arms—then he panicked and dashed back into the service corridor. He found another drop-shaft and went down two more levels. We’ve tracked him as far as the recycling section. I’ve sealed the floor. He can’t get out.”
Naye-Ninneya gave as much of a compliment as he ever did, a noncommittal grunt. “Let’s go.” He strode off down the passage, Keeda and the trackers following hastily behind.
Down and Out
The recycling section smelled of garbage and methane. Waste material of all kinds lay piled in great unsorted heaps of filth. Someone had just dumped it here, day after day, week after week, without regard for sanitation.
Naye-Ninneya suppressed a shudder of distaste. He tried to close his nostrils against the stink. It didn’t work. He still could easily identify the different flavors that filled the air: spoiled meat and rotting fish, wilted vegetables, rancid cheese, stale vomit, blood and offal from the butchery, the stink of urine from some unidentified mammal, and a more unpleasant odor that made his stomach churn—the distinctly foul smell of human shit. Someone should do something about this disgrace, he thought. This dishonors the palace. He said nothing aloud, however. Instead, he turned to the twitching team-leader. “You tracked him through this stench?”
“Only this far,” Jheeter piped in reply. “We’ve had to sen
d for the heavy-duty sniffers. We didn’t expect this—this unfortunate decay.” The smaller Dragon chose his words carefully, not wanting to say anything that even implied disapproval. A palace lizard already had enough enemies.
“Who runs this section,” Naye-Ninneya asked blandly.
“Dhrynnka Moloch.”
“Ahh,” said Naye-Ninneya, as if that explained everything. And in a way it did. Not quite a Vampire—merely a ghoul, Moloch liked to feed off the dead flesh that others left behind; but first, she liked to wallow in it. Of course, she’d keep a place like this. The reek and filth disgusted Naye-Ninneya. Ghouls!26
Naye-Ninneya had confronted Moloch on more than one occasion. She affected the pretense of mild and pleasant demeanor; she wore a bland wide-eyed expression and spoke in quiet gentle tones; but she fooled no one. Her face still gave her away. Dhrynnka Moloch had a mouth like a torn pocket, a tiny twisted pucker of permanent acidity—and despite the presumed gentleness of her voice, the content of her words too often carried deadly import. Moloch served as the Lady Zillabar’s personal advisor on legal matters, and in the Lady’s absence acted as her representative. Naye-Ninneya would have liked to kill her. Not eat her—only kill her. Some things even a Dragon won’t touch.
Nevertheless, someday he hoped to preside at her execution. He had killed other lawyers in the past. He particularly enjoyed it. He planned on dispatching many more in the future. More than a hobby, he considered it a personal responsibility to reduce the numbers of these vermin whenever he could. Fortunately, the Lady Zillabar used up attorneys at a fearsome rate. He doubted that Moloch would last too much longer—although, to give the darkness its due, Dhrynnka Moloch had lasted much longer than any other the Captain could remember.
Anyway, that not only explained the mess down here—it also explained why the mess would continue. Dhrynnka Moloch wanted it to feast on, probably with the rest of her grisly ghoul friends. Naye-Ninneya tried not to think of it.
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