“It’s going to be great,” Vasiht’h said suddenly, and from the champagne fizz in the mindline he was as surprised at his comment as Jahir. They grinned at one another.
“The Goddess speaks?”
“Maybe!” The Glaseah chuckled. “What about your pattern sense?”
“Does not seem to disagree, but it was never so strong as to speak with authority.”
“Then we’ll just have to make do with self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“The best kind,” Jahir said.
“The only kind,” Vasiht’h said, amused. “As far as I’m concerned anyway. We should start working out our client schedule around our vacations. I’ll wash the dishes if you clear the table.”
“Done.”
They spent a profitable evening thus, and began their respective packing, and a peculiar thing it was, to be preparing for separate trips. Jahir didn’t linger on it. Their times apart were rarities, and what he needed to learn now was best learned alone. Stretched on his bed while the Glaseah showered, he woke the data tablet and brought up the message again.
Cousin—
I await your pleasure.
—L
Handwritten in their tongue, and in the aggressive neutrality of the gray mode, which left him the blame for immediately reading the innuendo into the invitation... save that he knew Lisinthir had been smiling when he wrote it. With his eyes, in that sly way of his, all dangerous intimations and urbane masks. Jahir rested the corner of the tablet on his brow and chuckled. His cousin, the Nase Galare heir, Ambassador, duelist, and lover of dragons. And now, perhaps, teacher of recalcitrant family as well. I await your pleasure, indeed.
It wanted a response. He handwrote his in kind, and shaded it white for the purity of the spirit, of holy vows.
Imtherili—
I come, at your request.
—J
Let him read all the innuendo into the title and the promise and the words, and shade it with the beauty of what servitude became in their people, at its best. That was their relationship: holy, carnal, gentle and cruel, sanctuary and challenge.
“You’re amused,” Vasiht’h observed, padding into their bedroom, freshly washed.
“Composing my response to my cousin,” Jahir said. “As in everything between us, it becomes a complexity.”
“It becomes Eldritch, you mean.” Vasiht’h dropped onto his nest of pillows alongside the bed and yawned.
Smiling, Jahir reached for the lamp. “Yes. Shall I...?”
“Please. We’ve got a few long days ahead of us, moving things around.”
Jahir tapped the lamp off. As they settled, Vasiht’h added, “We might need to find a new place to live. Someplace with more rooms.”
The mindline was rigid with anxiety. Jahir tasted it, touched it, rolled it in mental fingers that felt more acute, somehow, since their experience on the courier vessel. “Then,” he said, “we’ll find one.” The rush of relief was warm as a blanket, and he could use it as one and did. Tucked under it and the real blankets in all their layers, Jahir added, “Did you think I would say aught else?”
A smile he felt rather than saw. “No. But I still worried.”
Jahir closed his eyes. “We are moving on, arii. No less can we do and remain faithful to They who made us.”
“Amen,” Vasiht’h murmured. And softer, on the memory of a warm nocturnal breeze, Love you.
And you, Jahir answered, and they slept.
CHAPTER 2
The Knife’s first lectures on the palace, the tower, and the court gave the Slave Queen a great deal to consider. At her request he left her to it, saying that if she was planning to use the computer often he would have to take greater pains with its security. That would entail… something, she was sure, that she did not yet understand, so she trusted him with it in the full expectation that he would return at some point to explain further.
She perched on her windowsill, or paced, and turned over her thoughts.
It was plain there was no purpose to the guarding of the females here, and the children. No court male would think of them as hostages. The guards assigned to tower security were here as a symbol of the Emperor’s power, and the symbol worked precisely because the inhabitants of the tower were dispensable. Of course males guarded things that had value. But having guards on property that served no one, save for occasional entertainment? That was the province solely of males with so many eager followers jobs had to be manufactured to keep them busy.
The Knife’s picture had been cruelly explicit: every female and child in this tower was nothing.
Which is why the Emperor considered it an opportunity. How much of one, though, she didn’t know, and would never know from the computers.
So she would look.
The imperial nursery was not on the same level as either of the harems. The Slave Queen had never understood the reasoning that had seen it installed nearer the base of the tower, suggesting children to be of lesser importance than females. Had someone applied a formula to their weighing? One that found children less significant than the females that spawned them? It seemed an unlikely belief for the Chatcaava, even if the importance of heirs was a more provincial attitude. More probably, children were considered even more disposable than the mothers who’d birthed them. Females could be used to slake desire, or baited as traps, or given as gifts or rewards. Children merely grew up to nurse designs on the throne, if male, and if female… well, another mouth to feed, and one upon which a male could not get another child for fear of begetting something twisted by inbreeding.
She did not expect to see anyone on the nursery level save the males who did a desultory job of guarding it, and the females used to oversee it: all tongueless slaves, those, taken from rival males but not beautiful, young, or significant enough to be placed in the harem. She herself did not come here often. Why would she? When her sire had destroyed her womb to deny it to his enemy, she had lost any link to this place. She would never bear a child. Perhaps she would never have wanted to. But it had been another choice stolen from her, and that had been her life: a series of thefts she was determined, now, to recover.
Having a child would always be a choice denied to her, but she knew now that had she been capable, she would have wanted to give this Emperor, this new Emperor transfigured by an Eldritch lover, a son or daughter. Knowing that made coming here a flagellation. But they were his children, and that made them hers, in a way: hers to ward for him. Tightening the folds of her stiff and useless wings, she swept past the guards and into the room.
And stopped. “What are you doing here?”
Guiltily, the Mother turned to her, and there was a child clinging to her leg, another to her tail, and an infant in her arms. The infant was surely female, since the room closest to the tower’s interior door was reserved for them. But the two children were winged, and that made them male. They should not have been here, but in the exterior room, the one with the windows, where male children were kept separated from their less worthwhile female siblings. Which is where the Mother should have been, had she wanted to see her own child, a male.
Which brought her back to the fact that the Mother was here at all. Harem females who served as the Mother gave up the right to see their infants a month after their birth. That was the point at which the Mother’s jewels were returned to the Slave Queen, to be reserved for the next female to conceive. Had she even received those jewels as scheduled? She had been too distracted with the Ambassador to notice.
The Mother was not wearing them. The Mother was here, when she should have been in the harem.
“A-a-apologies, you-my-better,” the Mother stammered. “I… I cannot excuse or explain my appearance here—”
The Slave Queen exclaimed, appalled, “Stop!”
The other female clapped her mouth shut, her four arms a tangle, with one of the upper and one of the lower clutching the infant, the second lower wrapped around the other child, and the final upper clasping herself in
terror.
“I am not your better,” the Slave Queen said, hiding her own fluster. “Do not address me as a male!”
“Apologies,” the Mother whispered, dipping her head. She was trembling visibly, but she hadn’t retreated either.
“I do not need an excuse for your presence,” the Slave Queen continued, the words slow on her tongue. “But an explanation… yes. That I require.”
“Mistress,” the Mother said. “I…”
When she stopped, the Slave Queen prompted, “You?”
The Mother looked down and mumbled, “I like children, Mistress.”
Had she confessed to impure thoughts of aliens, the Slave Queen would have been less astonished. What female liked children? And the females of the imperial harem in particular? None of them were permitted to foster attachments to any of their own get—that would have been parlous, when attachment led to disobedience and rebellion. And they were female. They knew better than to love the evidence of the violence forced on them by males using their bodies to produce a new generation to dominate them.
“You like children,” the Slave Queen repeated.
The Mother lifted her chin and said nothing, but that spark of defiance was astounding. And because of it, the Slave Queen stepped forward, cupped the other female’s elbow, and guided her to one of the benches. Gently.
“Sit. No, you can keep the baby in your arms.”
“What about us?” one of the children asked boldly, a stripling hip-height on her. She had seen too few children to know how many revolutions he might be, and this disquieted her… that she should know so little about something so fundamental.
“You must go with the others for now,” the Slave Queen said. “The Mother and I must talk.”
“And when you’re done?” this bold one asked.
The Slave Queen glanced at the Mother, who was staring fixedly at the opposite wall. To the boy, she said, “We shall see.”
“Is she going to hurt you, Mother?” asked the other child, tremulous.
The Mother flinched, then said, “Go on now. She is another female, isn’t she? There is nothing to fear here.”
“If there was nothing to fear you wouldn’t be acting afraid!” the first said. He spread wings too young to have grown fully opaque and said, “If you hurt her, I will hurt you! I am a male, and you only female! Even if I am young, I can have you punished!”
“Gale!” the Mother yelped. “Do not speak that way to the Slave Queen! She is the Emperor’s own consort!”
“I will speak to her any way I please, if she hurts you.” The youth bared his teeth.
Before the Mother could reprimand him further, the Slave Queen held out a hand. “Enough. I mean no harm to the Mother. What she says is true: we are both female. We share a common cause.”
The boy searched her eyes with his own, artless and fierce. What he saw settled his wings, and he straightened, limbs loosening. Wrapping an arm around the meeker boy’s shoulders, he said, “We’ll be waiting, Mother.”
“Thank you,” the Mother said. “Now you ask the Slave Queen permission to withdraw.”
“She is female!”
“She is female, but even the Emperor walks into her suite out of courtesy to her, rather than flying in. If she is due that courtesy from the most Exalted, she is due it from his children.”
Gale eyed her and said the most shocking thing he’d yet said. “But is she worthy of it?”
Serene, the Mother said, “She is. She saved this one’s life when she was laboring to give birth to her son.”
The boy turned his scrutiny on the Slave Queen again, this time interested rather than bellicose. “Then with her permission—your permission—we will withdraw.”
“You may go,” the Slave Queen said.
The boys left. To her astonishment, they did not exit the female’s room, but joined a game being played with colored sticks by two females near their height. The Mother remained seated, quivering but pliant. Talking with the children had calmed her, the Slave Queen saw. It reminded her of the Ambassador, who had grown strong from the need to be strong for others.
“They have not gone back to the room with their peers,” the Slave Queen observed.
“They are friends with Maazi and Vu,” the Mother said.
“And how did that friendship develop, when the sexes are kept apart?”
The Mother looked down in lieu of replying. Her upper arms were cradling the infant now, but her lower hands were tightly linked in her lap, so tightly the thin webbing between her fingers was showing strain lines.
“You like children,” the Slave Queen mused.
“I know… I know it is perverse.”
“It may be the opposite of perverse, Mother,” the Slave Queen said, studying her. And added, “You did not give back the jewels, did you.”
“I… I did not want to disturb you—”
“And you were kind to Laniis.” The Slave Queen canted her head. “You were always kind, Mother. Now I find you are also a rebel.”
The Mother straightened, wide-eyed. “Mistress! You must not—”
“Think such things? Say them?” The Slave Queen smiled a little. “You forget who I am.”
“You are the Slave Queen, the most exalted and most debased of females in all the Empire….”
“I am the Queen Ransomed,” she said, soft. “Beloved of aliens. Treasure of the Emperor. Shapechanger and soul-changed.”
The Mother fell silent, but she trembled, astonished.
“How long have you been coming here?” the Slave Queen asked, more conversationally. “And what baby is this? Yours?”
“This one is mine, yes, Mistress. Would you like to hold him?”
The Mother was already offering the cloth-wrapped bundle, so the Slave Queen accepted it, awkward. She did not have extra hands a normal female did, and she felt the lack of security acutely when confronted with such a delicate creature. The Mother’s child could not be more than a few months old now—she could not recall time’s passage clearly—and he was still so small, all rounded body and diminutive limbs.
“I have been coming here since he was taken from me,” the Mother said. “And the other children… they were so lonely, Mistress. The slaves who care for them cannot speak. The guards who ward them do not enter their rooms. They have only themselves for company until they are old enough to be put to use.”
“And you talk to them.”
“I… I tell them stories.” The Mother glanced at her, and for a fleeting moment there was challenge there. “The ones I heard from my mother, who heard them from her mother. The ones passed down all these many years in secret. I tell them about the old religion.”
The Slave Queen lifted her gaze from the baby to regard the Mother.
“You named your bodyslave ‘Khaska,’” the Mother said.
“I did,” the Slave Queen said. She hadn’t realized that act would reveal her, but then she hadn’t known that there were females who’d kept secrets and passed them across generations of daughters. Who spoke of the Living Air anymore, or knew its rites and beliefs? Much less that children had been used to call the celebrants to worship. Laniis had been white, like the robes those children wore in the few pictures the Slave Queen had seen on her borrowed computer, long ago, when she had been her sire’s daughter.
Her mother had never told her these stories. Perhaps her cage had been more complete than she’d realized.
“Will you punish me?” the Mother asked at last.
“I will not,” the Slave Queen replied, looking down into the face of the child again, with his blunt little nose and weak eyes. Had she wondered how to begin the Emperor’s task? And here she was. “What I do instead may seem like punishment, however.”
The Mother glanced at her, frowning.
“We will speak later,” the Slave Queen said, handing the infant back. “I’ll send for you.”
The Mother accepted the bundle. Quiet, she said, “Shall I bring back the jewels?”<
br />
The Slave Queen laughed. “No. You remain the Mother.” Looking at the room, at the children watching them, or trying to seem as if they weren’t, she said, “You may be the only Mother this tower has seen in its history.” Rising, she said, “Gale.”
The boy jumped to his feet immediately and walked to her, head high. Behind him came the meek boy, and the two girls as well, though more timidly.
“I give the Mother back to you just as I promised,” the Slave Queen said. “Do not do anything that will draw attention to her.”
“No!” Gale said, eyes round. “Never! We always disperse to our room when males come into the nursery.”
“Disperse when you see females you don’t recognize as well,” the Slave Queen said. “They can speak of your disobedience.”
“It’s not—”
“It is disobedience so long as it can land your Mother in trouble. Do you understand?”
Gale deflated. The other boy stepped up alongside him and said, soft, “We understand, Mistress. This place is perilous. We won’t forget.”
“Good.” She turned to the Mother. “We are not done, you and I.”
“I know,” the Mother said. “I won’t forget.”
The Slave Queen dipped her head and started for the door. She had almost reached it when she caught the eye of one of the females assigned to the nursery. And she thought then: could they be her allies also? The female met her eyes, neither insolent nor timorous. A mask, she thought immediately, and was intrigued. On her way back to her room, she pondered. The tongueless could not speak, of course, and they would not have been allowed to learn to read or write. But she was the Slave Queen, and there was a way she could learn their thoughts that no one had anticipated.
The Mother a rebel, born of a line of rebels. She would never have suspected. And all these children… so much to work with. Her heart seized with the force of understanding just how much of the future the females and children here represented. What they could become…! But how was she to see them to that end? And how could she protect them on the journey?
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