The Shattered Sky

by Paul Lucas

  I frowned at the stranger staring back at me in the large reflective glass they had provided me. In my opinion, I looked gaudy and garish, even if I had seen many others wear similar outfits in my stay here. Still, in many ways, the style of dress was no odder than any of the humans’ fashions I had tried on over the years. I still smirked at the time Lerner had tried to get me to wear human lingerie. When we first became lovers, he was adamantly against me wearing human-style clothes, but as the years passed he softened his stance, especially toward undergarments that only he would see. I could not believe humans found those garishly-colored wisps of lace on their Mates to be sexy.

  Lerner. Soon I would be reunited with my Mate and son, the Others kept telling me. I found myself growing impatient to see Lerner’ face, to know his arms around me again...

  I shook my head, smoothing back a hair that had escaped the tight braid I wore. I knew I should not get my hopes up until--if--I actually saw him again. And even after that I should be wary. The Others could easily betray us as they had before.

  But hope is an addiction, a thousand times more alluring than the most powerful drug; at first you sip the sweet juice cautiously, but before you know it you are gulping it down by cask...

  Which made what I had to do tonight after the celebration all the more confusing for me. On the one wing, I looked forward to it with delicious excitement I had not felt for years, not since Lerner and I had first been drawn together. I drew a quivering breath every time I thought about what I might be doing later tonight. But on the other wing, I would be betraying so much, no matter how expedient to the greater good the act may be. How could Lerner ever look at me when he returns, knowing what I was about to do?

  I hurriedly flashed my mind to other things.

  The Cephalopods had kept me busy with my end of the bargain, using the crystal to open sealed chambers in the Underworld and to place the Builder spacecraft at their disposal. Like the one Lerner and I had been given a tour of back in the KN, the vessel was a huge cylinder, over a thousand meters from stem to stern and a third of that wide, its hull made of silver-black UTSite. And also like the KN’s relic ships, it had been stripped down to its very basics. Propulsion, life support, and maneuvering were the only major systems still operating. Whether the vessel still possessed things like sensors, navigation, or weaponry was unknown, because the space scavengers could find no hardware or software evidence. That did not mean that they were not there, only that neither I, the crystal, nor the Cephalopods knew how to access them if they were.

  Using the crystal I could have easily flown the ship myself, but the Cephalopods did not trust me to do more than to open its doors and raise it a few meters above its docking cradle for inspection. This close to a Shard, the ship used powerful magnetic field generators to provide both lift and propulsion, pushing against the metal UTSite beneath it. They were busy trying to figure out the manual controls as well as installing the sensors, computers, and weaponry to make the ship usable to them without me as a go-between. I tried not to think too much of what they would do with the ship once they had it completely outfitted.

  A loud scratch at the wall outside. “Gossamyr, it’s me, Kalen.”

  I opened the doorway’s curtain and Kalen saw me. “You look beautiful tonight,” the Councilord breathed.

  I did my best to breeze the compliment away, narrowing my eyes at him. “Does that mean that I did not look beautiful before?”

  He blushed. “No. No! You just look more beautiful than you did...er, I mean you have always looked...”

  I smirked. “Kalen, I was joking. You look handsome yourself.”

  “Thank you,” he said, standing up straighter.

  Kalen wore an outfit very similar to mine, but blood-red with black trim. The only real difference between the genders fashion-wise was the color scheme. White, blue, yellow and green were considered feminine hues; black, brown, red, and purple belonged to the males.

  After a bit more fussing and pleasantries, we arrived with our bodyguard/escorts at the castle’s main hall, located a number of levels underground. One of the Cephalopods’ gifts of knowledge to the Myotans was better engineering techniques for their castles, allowing them to extend much further below the surface than previously. The hall we entered had been only completed the year before.

  It stretched over a hundred wingspans long and a third of that wide. The ceiling five meters above us was a convoluted series of arches supported by sparse but sweeping pillars. As the occasion was celebratory, the hall was decorated with brightly-colored paintings on the walls and pillars. Kalen had told me that they commissioned different artists for different celebrations, so each occasion had its own unique look.

  Kalen and I caused quite a stir when we walked in side by side, many of the nobles warbled the clipped sing-song greeting they used for “hello.” In a tradition I found amusingly parallel to the human custom, we began flitting from group to group, making our introductions and otherwise “schmoozing,” as I had heard a KN official once call it.

  Cloud and Skel arrived shortly afterward. They had long since abandoned trying to keep their affair secret and had publicly been seen together for many weeks now. Some speculated that Cloud would soon formerly announce their intentions to Mate.

  That bit of gossip produced a small but unsettling weight in my stomach. I was glad that Cloud was happy--really, I was--but with Skel? She and I would never be friends, even if circumstances in these last few months had brought us together as allies. She was far too manipulative and overbearing. Cloud deserved better.

  I tugged my ears back. Or was I just jealous? I had never wanted Cloud as my Mate, but at some level I guess I had always found his puppy-like devotion to me to be flattering. Now that it was gone, I missed it.

  It was so strange, sometimes, how our lives worked out.

  Amethyst and Louis were the last “guests of honor” to arrive. From the way they grumped and scowled, I could tell they had been fighting again. Not the flirtatious, witty insult-matches that they used to have, but a genuinely bitter argument, where Louis would shout at the top of his lungs and Amethyst would affect a frigid silence. As the only two human prisoners, they had been given adjoining rooms complete with a door between them, in the belief that they would prefer the company of their own kind. Amethyst had taken the opportunity to work up her courage about revealing her real feelings to Louis. After about a week in their new quarters, she snuck into Louis’ room freshly-bathed, perfumed, and fully nude late at night to surprise him--only to find him already in bed with a Myotan female, a professional seller-of-sex Louis had arranged for the guards to get for him.

  To say Amethyst did not take this well would be a grand understatement. The Orc threw the seller-of-sex across the room into unconsciousness and Louis had to resort to spells to keep Amethyst from throttling him with her bare hands.

  When the guards finally pulled Amethyst off of him, I was told, her face was drenched in tears.

  Things had been very tense between them ever since. Louis could no longer conveniently ignore Amethyst’s feelings for him, a situation which seemed to make him feel both threatened and embarrassed. As for Amethyst, Louis had hurt her far too deeply and too often for her to easily--or ever--forgive him. She did not talk about it much. An Orc’s way of dealing with pain and anger was silence. But several days after the incident she did haltingly admit to me that to her it seemed Louis was willing to be intimate with every female on the Shard except her, even when she was the only woman of his species--or close to it--he could expect to see for years to come.

  I hoped their personal feud would not damage our plans for the coming weeks. Dumas had been coordinating covert communication between us and Skel’s rebels, and events were proceeding apace. We needed both Amethyst’s tactical expertise and Louis’ spell-casting in the coming conflict.

  Much--too much--of Skel’s plans hinged on me, and not just for the interface crystal. I had unprecedented access to another major pi
ece in play, one that might fall squarely into the Cephalopods’ tentacles once the rebellion begins if I did not do something about it.

  Skel caught my eye with a knowing glare when she and Cloud came to greet Kalen and I. She wanted to make sure in no uncertain terms that I remembered the many conversations we had shared over the last several weeks regarding what specifically she expected me to do tonight to secure that oh-so-important strategic advantage.

  It was not so much a question whether I wanted to do it--because I suppose I did--it was a question of whether it was right to do so. Not only did I have misgivings about using what was supposed to be a sacred act to so boldly manipulate someone I cared about, but there was Lerner to think about, as well.

  I could not trust the Others, but if there was even a slight chance they could do as promised...

  I had told no one this, but I planned a betrayal of my own. I had agreed to help overthrow the Cephalopods, but I was willing to bet the Others would still want the crystal no matter the status of their octopoid allies. After the rebellion was over, I would strike my own deal with them. Without the Cephalopods as go-betweens, I would set my own deal on the table: the crystal--and whatever else they may want, within reason--in return for my husband and my son.

  But at the moment Kalen was right beside me, warm, loving, full of laughter, and he adored me. Instincts I had buried for nearly two years now cried out for me to surrender to his clumsy but endearing advances.

  After much politicking and socializing, the highlight of the evening arrived. In an uncanny mirror to our own celebrations at the Tower, everyone in a Llexan celebration was expected to take part in providing songs and rhythm. You could sing, or play an instrument, or keep rhythm with wing-snapping, or dance. Everyone had their own specialty, just like in my people’s harvest celebrations.

  Kalen’s specialty was the same as my own, dancing. We provided something for everyone to look at while the others provided the music. I was not quite as light on my feet as I had once been--various injuries to my legs over the years had taken away some of my dexterity--but I still held my own. We spent a number of hours just dancing, singing, and something I had not done in what seemed years--laughed with a light heart.

  Perhaps Llexa would not be such an awful place to spend the rest of my lifetime, after all.

  Hours later we were still laughing, this time high on a remote rampart garden. To a Llexan, height in one’s dwelling was a matter of prestige. To my people, living in a two-thousand-meter Tower, such a thing had never been a consideration. If we wanted height, it was only a walk up the ramps away. But the Llexan Towers were surrounded by square miles of radioactive ruin, making them dangerous to visit and suicidal to linger in. So almost all Llexan dwellings above that of a hut were built as tall as practical, with at least one balcony or flat section so the owners could enjoy the advantages of height. Most Myotans here had never known the joy of flight. Even those youngsters who now could fly without fear of mutilation had no older playmates to show them or experienced adult to tell them how to fly, so a great many accidents were reported on a regular basis. This in turn discouraged many of the adults from letting their children fly. It was one of the many things I would have to try to change here in the future.

  Kalen was talking beside me as we looked out over the cityscape surrounding the castle, dotted by the warm glow of hundreds of hearth fires. “Did you see how hard Councilmember Axa was hitting the ale? I thought his ears would fall off!”

  “With the way that old prune was trying to bed that female with his Mate just across the room, I wish something else of his would have fallen off!”

  Kalen snickered. “Its just the way he is. We’re a little looser here with marital fidelity than your people, I guess.”

  “The humans are the same way. Perhaps it has less to do with biology and more to do with the size of the community. More people, more temptation, perhaps.”

  “Or a larger crowd for the perpetrators to hide in.”

  “That as well.”

  Kalen’s muzzle crinkled into a smile. “You made quite a positive impression on the crowd this evening. I had feared there were too many negative rumors floating around about you for us to ever dispel.”

  “Negative rumors? Like what?”

  Kalen tugged his ears back. “Well, I suppose those are not something your servants or guards would let slip around you. Like the one where you’re really a shapechanging sorceress whose real form is rather toad-like.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I would bet a breeze to a hurricane Skel started that rumor.”

  “Which makes another popular rumor all the more amusing.”

  “What is that?”

  “That the public fighting between you and Skel is just a ruse and that you two are secretly lovers.”

  “What!” I scrunched my face and stuck out my tongue. “Even were I so inclined to that sort of thing, I would never pair up with Skel!”

  “Why is that?”

  What do so-inclined females look for in other females? “Um...she is not pretty enough?”

  Kalen’s voice suddenly dropped an octave as he leaned closer to me. “At least not as pretty as you.”

  An awkward utterance from a nervous male, but somehow no less enticing for it.

  He reached out as if to brush a stray strand of head-hair from my face, then slipped his tool-fingers lower so they gently caressed my cheek. I let out a little gasp at the soft sensation. Then his fingers brushed along the sensitive base of my ear. His touch was so warm, so sensual, I could not help but to shiver pleasantly in response.

  Apparently I did not need to make any kind of monumental decision about this. My body was making it for me.

  He traced my ears for a few moments, making me exhale with contented satisfaction, as our bodies suddenly found themselves brushing up against one another. Chest to chest, I could feel my heart pound in rhythm with his own. His hands roamed lower as I felt his hot breath blow into my now very-sensitized ears. “Not just pretty,” he whispered. “Beautiful.”

  Desire ignited deep within me as Kalen’s fingers began tracing my wing membranes. Spirits, I wanted him. Badly. It had been so long. My own hands began eagerly exploring his body, thrilling at the broad chest and taut stomach muscles under my fingertips.

  His caresses on my wings felt exquisite, exciting. “I love your wing tattoos,” He said in a hoarse whisper, distractedly. “You never did tell me how you got them.”

  “It is not important,” I breathed, shuddering as his tongue traced a line down my neck. “They were just--they were made by--”

  Oh, sweet spirits, what was I doing?

  In the next heartbeat I was on my feet, twisting away from Kalen.

  “Gossamyr, what is wrong?” The disappointment in his voice was hard to miss.

  “Kalen, I am so sorry. I just cannot do this.”

  “Did I hurt you? Did I do something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “No. You are not at fault, in any way. I should not have encouraged you.”

  “I still do not understand.”

  I spread my wings wide, making sure they were clearly visible in the Shard light. “My husband gave me my tattoos.”

  I turned to see his lips form a small, silent ”o.” He looked away.

  The silence stretched and stretched.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “it would be best if I went back to my quarters.”

  “But--” He began, only to reluctantly nod a moment later, trying to look anywhere but at me. He did not want me to see the pain so evident in his eyes. I prayed he did not hate me now.

  Not that he ever could hate me as much as I now loathed myself. So much for securing that strategic asset Skel was so worried about.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The walls of Kalen’s castle shook as bolts of plasma hotter than the surface of the sun incinerated stone and flesh alike. From my vantage point peering out a third-story weapon slot all I could see were distant flashes of light far beyond the
walls among the sprawling streets of the city, steadily creeping closer. Skel’s rebellion had moved swiftly, taking Kalen’s garrison on the outer city walls by surprise and quickly decimating it. They now moved for the stronghold itself.

  Kalen’s forces were doing what they could, but they would be quickly overwhelmed. Hundreds--thousands?--of them would die tonight.

  All because of me.

  I tore my gaze away from the distant flashes, trying to ignore their far-off booming. One of D’Artagnan’s element bodies scampered into view on the smooth-polished stone wall.

  Absently I finished snapping on the human-made ballistic armor vest the spiders had modified for me and hefted the human-made rifle in my tool-fingers. D’Artagnan had already completed his primary mission and had time to fetch our KN equipment from the Llexans’ vault. With all the chaos that had erupted in the last two hours no one would notice their absence.

  Spirits, it felt good to have that awkward-shaped weapon in my hands again. The feeling of helplessness ebbed away just a little, and I hated myself for it. I was trained to be a shaman. Shamans are about life, about healing, about binding friends and family together into a community. Feeling good even for a moment about gripping a weapon of death in my hands made me wonder how far I had come from that foolish youngster I had been when the humans had first come to the Tower.

  My young chambermaid’s shrieking momentarily drowned out the distant thunder of plasma weapons. I turned to see her in a corner clutching a broom to her like a holy sword, surrounded by a dozen hissing black tarantulas. I snapped my wings in irritation. “D’Artagnan, stop that.”

  “I’m Zell, Searcher!” the female shrieked. She was trying to bat at one of her tormentors with her broom. The spider easily leapt out of the way. “Look out, or they’ll get you, too!”