Saysana’s hands pat Seeva under her arms and under and between her breasts. In Seeva’s skin-tight leggings and slip of a top, there’s nowhere she could hide a weapon.
“Look at the bodies,” Saysana says.
Seeva glances up to the corpses suspended by ropes, hanging from their gaping mouths. Still as flags in the doldrums.
“Those are the ones who only tried to cheat Drumeth, who wanted to steal something after the act.” Saysana’s hands move between Seeva’s legs, then between her buttocks. “I’m afraid you’re here for something more. Those who really incite his wrath experience much more suffering than that quick but hideous death. You should leave.”
An uncomfortable tingling ripples along Seeva’s skin.
Why is this woman warning her?
She doesn’t like you for anything more than your body. No one likes the real you. You know where feelings like this lead anyway. Where they got you last time. Athiera. The convent. The father’s family.
“I don’t know who or what you’re referring to,” Seeva says over her shoulder.
The hands stop. Saysana moves on and prods the woman beside her.
Another man comes at them with a scanning device that resembles a black truncheon and passes it over each woman’s mouth and groin. Three women are insulted and forced to leave.
The man steps within arm’s length of Seeva’s face and scans her. The device beeps intermittently.
Spirals of tension carry up Seeva’s throat, her head floating, her legs wobbly. She sees a filament being shoved down her mouth, her heart tearing and ripping free from the cage of its ribs, eviscerating out of her, through her throat, beyond her tongue, past her teeth. Vomiting up her beating life. Dying by swinging in an artificial breeze, her people, her animals, everyone still unavenged and unprotected.
“No STDs, you byonum slut. Imagine that.” The black suit moves on to the next woman.
A short black suit marches in front of their line, holding a gold v-rim aloft.
Seeva is dressed as a hooker, the type of woman Drumeth desires most. Four of the other women here may be too fastidious, too ostentatious, or too powerful for his taste. He likes women he can demean, those he believes are less than human.
As the v-rim passes her, Seeva wiggles her hips and performs a little dance in her slitted leggings.
Seeva says, “I am a byonum who can show you some tricks, and I might make a lot of noise, but I won’t speak.”
Before the v-rim is used to evaluate the last two women, the black suit motions to Rettinger.
Rettinger steps up before Seeva. “Follow me.”
Rettinger leads Seeva away from the courtyard, through double doors, and into a hidden passageway in a wall. His red alloy suit becomes a beacon in the darkness, the swish of his pants the warning of some hidden serpent. A glass-robed Elemiscist walks in front of him.
After a minute, soft light emerges, vibrating overhead. The walls of the tunnel are gilded.
The walkway to the Supreme Emperor, as if he believes he’s the ruler of some ancient civilization.
Seeva’s limbs tremble. She’s finally on her way to confront what she only wishes to forget.
They step into an elevator of gold. Rettinger is silent as he punches a code into a panel.
This is the only way to get to him. And it must be done. For all animal life in the galaxy.
Doors whoosh open, and Seeva’s ushered into a giant room covered in mirrors: on the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Drumeth enters, his golden suit undone at the neck. He strolls to an antigravity bed covered with golden silks, sipping a drink, steam rising in a wet vapor and clinging to his nostrils and the pale-yellow hair of a comb-over. Black liquid gathers along his upper lip.
So he does drink after all.
“Get over here and bend over the bed.” Drumeth motions. The mixer in his glass is a black spine … a hermadore spine.
Seeva’s body floods with adrenaline and tension. A shaky, nauseated stew bubbles inside her. She forces herself to comply, mechanically going through the motions as she did all those years ago, her pulse hammering in her ears like the beating sun.
This is the only way to get to him. And it must be done.
Drumeth fingers the slits cut into the back of Seeva’s leggings. He smacks her bare skin. The next minute is a blur of viciousness, racing pulses, and lightheadedness. He’s on top of her and her pants are torn. He tries to force himself inside her, but his member bows and folds like a cylindrical soft cheese.
Drumeth’s voice creeps out between parted lips wet with drool. “You’re an ugly little byonum with no thoughts inside that tiny brain of yours … No man will ever care to hear words uttered from that mouth … The only thing you’re useful for is a lousy fuck.”
Memories vault from her head and scatter across the floor. Her rage rises volcanically from the leeches in her mind, erupting in her limbs.
In the next instant, Seeva’s on top of him, choking him with her bare hands.
Drumeth’s face is red, a trident of veins jutting from his forehead. Seeva sees the face of the young man from her past, the disgruntled, rich suitor who was not chosen as the groom. The one who believed no man compared to himself.
He’s impotent now … why he drinks the spines. Exotic animal parts are often bought for alternative medicinal purposes. Aphrodisiacs. He’s hoping one of the most expensive trophies in the galaxy will restore his manhood, his power, his sense of self-worth.
“Keep going.” Drumeth closes his eyes in ecstasy. “No one’s done this before.” He releases with a grunt of pleasure.
Seeva’s stomach flips with revulsion. Her fingers bury into his flesh, her nails drawing blood. “Who are the poachers you paid to wipe out the hermadores? To get those spines.”
Drumeth thrashes, sputters, and grabs for her hands. His face is purple. Veins bulge around his eyes.
“You heard me!” Seeva says. “Who are they?”
He shouts in a strangled gurgle, “I don’t fucking know. Mindless hunters.”
A mountain of fear washes over Seeva, followed by a wall of sympathy, regret, respect, and awe for Drumeth. She stops cold, dazed and confused. She would never change her mind, never, especially now … but it feels so real, so thick, so palpable, so unlike her … so contrived.
He’s an Elemiscist, a Beguiler. That is how he tells so many lies and still emotionally influences so many.
Seeva’s grip tightens.
Rough hands rip her off Drumeth and throw her to the ground.
Rettinger stands over the bed.
“Are you okay, sir? Is it your heart again?” Rettinger waves to someone. “Get the doc.”
Drumeth sits up, rubbing at his throat, gasping for breath. “No. I …” He sputters a few times.
Seeva clambers to her knees, watching Drumeth.
This was the only way to get to him. And I did it.
If Drumeth doesn’t die, Seeva will go after the skeletal woman in the prostitute quarter who promised his death. Seeva would break the woman’s chair, break her legs, and end her suffering. If Seeva had to go through that with him again and she didn’t save future generations of animals, if he didn’t die, someone else would.
Three black suits appear from hidden side entrances.
I won’t be able to escape.
Fifty heartbeats pass like an hour. Seeva cannot recall how she even arrived here.
Drumeth coughs once, twice. He hacks. Tears of sweat roll down his forehead. He grimaces. His black suits shout into comms.
Drumeth groans, grabs his chest, and crawls off the bed into a chair, appearing like an obese man who has just run a kilometer.
Rettinger further loosens Drumeth’s disheveled shirt and tie and pours a bit of iced water into his mouth, then dabs at his forehead.
Drumeth screams and tears at his shirt, ripping off the gold alloy garment. The black suits try to calm him, but he stands on wobbly legs, cursing them. The skin around his abdomen and chest is
as black as space. He howls in pain or surprise when he sees it and doubles over, landing on his knees.
The blackness seeps up in branching veins over the course of ten minutes, encircling Drumeth’s neck, his mouth, his nose, and his eyes. Blood trickles from his lips and nostrils; his eyes hemorrhage. He flops forward onto his chest, squirming and whining, becoming a prostrate dancer.
Rettinger attempts to hold him still. “Where are all the fucking doctors?”
The vessels in Drumeth’s neck and head bulge as if Seeva is strangling him again. He writhes and thrashes, swimming against a mirror on the floor, against his reflection.
A man runs to Drumeth, pulling instruments and scanners from a floating case at his side. Another doctor gives Drumeth an injection in his neck and another into a vein in his arm.
A minute later Drumeth has stopped moving, forever.
Seeva feels his dying exhalation in the air, feels it climb into her mouth, and savors it like a connoisseur. She’s flooded with a turmoil of emotion: relief, vengeance, victory … then slowly a tingling sense of fear.
Five black suits surround her.
Seeva scrabbles for the door but is hit with a jolt of electricity, a shudder round. Her body seizes as she splays out with flailing limbs and a jerking torso.
Her pummeling begins.
Elion
Elion stands over a mutilated corpse on an antigravity conveyer belt. Claw and tooth marks ravage the body, the face unrecognizable.
On purpose? The linkchain is there around the mauled man’s neck. Only he does not wear Elemiscist robes; he was in hiding.
A smell of rotting garbage and flesh hangs in the air, the putrid incense of a dark room the size of a warehouse. Elion stuffs plug filters up his nostrils. Artificial mint and juniper mingle with the rancid.
“Lucky your people stopped me when they did,” a man dressed in black overalls that dangle open to his midsection says, his eyebrows sparse shoots of gray like the hair sprouting from inside his ears, his ponytail and goatee making up for the lack of hair on his head. “Was supposed to jettison this body out the other day.”
The body would have been jettisoned into the emptiness of space with the garbage of the Pearl, never to be seen again.
Death is everywhere.
Elion wonders if he tracks death itself. He hands a few tubes to the man, who stuffs them into a concealed pocket near his waist.
At least spiders do not swarm out of this corpse.
Is that really how the king of Staggenmoire would have died if the Moonriders didn’t come? The vicious annihilation of the castle a cover, a red herring, to distract the galaxy?
The ghost following Elion rises from the floor in a corner as if ascending out of hell. She strides past them in her green cloak, her dark brown hair shimmering like starlight. Hair without a single wave or curl. She doesn’t look at Elion with those vacant eyes, but he knows it’s him she’s hunting, waiting to take him with her one day soon. She sits and waits.
Elion refocuses on the body.
He arrived back at the Pearl looking for a specific target: a man visiting Staggenmoire when the Moonrider incursion began on the castle. The third mysterious visitor along with the dead diplomat of Uden and the missing Strider-Whisperer amalgam, this Nyranna of Uden. Visitors the Northrite didn’t seem to know what became of them. From his black-side contacts, Elion learned the third man’s name was Hullenet, a Beguiler of Uden, who harnessed the powers of influence, probably accompanying the ambassador for that purpose. Hullenet had been posing as a simple servant to appear innocuous. From there, Hullenet was reported to leave by sky train when the bombings began, without his diplomat. Once he reached the station, he sought out a Strider to take him as far away as possible. Rumors flew, but no one was certain where they went. Elion bet on the rumor he suspected, the best place in the galaxy to hide even when you wear an Elemiscist linkchain: the Pearl.
A recent black-side comm reported that an Elemiscist’s body was found at the Pearl, which brought Elion to this warehouse.
Now the man who should have had answers to the mystery of the king of Staggenmoire’s death, knowledge of the diplomat, and of Nyranna the Elemiscist, could not speak, his secrets forever kept.
The garbage man or mortician of the lower lives of the Pearl, whatever the man standing before Elion considers himself, bites into a stack of bread stuffed with pale meat and cheese. He chews with gaping lips, a cascade of meat particles and breadcrumbs gathering in his goatee and the folds of his shirt. A chunk lands on floor. Six black and brown hounds lie at his feet and raise their heads simultaneously, resembling a six-headed hydra.
“How did he die?” Elion asks.
“Chariot games,” the man says. “Someone said he’d won tickets in the casino. Right in the front row of the floating balcony.”
“Is that common?”
“Chariot games? Oh, yeah. The Supreme Emperor loves them.”
“No, is it common for people to die at them? Do you get many spectators’ bodies to dump out into space?”
The man takes another bite, is silent. Crumbs scatter over the body and tumble down. The dogs lap up unseen bits. “No. Spectators aren’t the type I usually fling into space. Whores, pimps, dealers, pushers … for sure. Every day I send their type out. People with no real family or loved ones. I get the last chance to find their merchandise, if you know what I mean.” He winks, and Elion’s stomach cartwheels, unsure of what the man is referring to. “Chariot riders die for sure, but they go somewhere else, incineration maybe.”
“Then why does he look like this?”
“Supposedly he had too many free drinks and fell. It’s not a far drop, as people like to see real close up. But a chariot cat got him.”
Elion feels the container in his pack, the one with the spider he took from the king’s body. He can almost sense the spider in there contemplating the situation for itself. He scanned the creature with his v-rim but received no known information about its species. “What does this have to do with spiders and Uden and a medieval castle and Moonrider ships?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Thanks for the talk.” Elion hands him another tube. “I wasn’t here, if anyone asks.”
“Five more of those and I never saw you.”
“Only give him more if he’ll promise to respect the dead,” the ghost girl says, floating beside the mortician, her green dress and brown hair waving in an absent wind. The man doesn’t hear her; only the madness inside Elion’s brain hears her.
Elion holds out twenty tubes. “Don’t disrespect any more corpses, or I’ll come back.”
The man’s gaze locks onto the tubes as he nods, his ponytail bobbing. He licks his fingers, wipes them on his overalls in a greasy, white smear. “I don’t know about none of them other things you mentioned, but if you want to know about spiders, you should talk to an old woman in the Quarternine District. She’s always interested in the dead bodies I send out of here, and she’s got to be the Pearl’s, if not the galaxy’s, authority on spiders.”
Elion nods and walks for the exit.
“Goin’ to be jettisoned,” the man says.
“I don’t need the body anymore.”
“No, I meant me, when I die, when my usefulness is up. Got no family to pay for or want me incinerated.”
Elion keeps walking.
The ghost girl glides along beside him. “Neither do you, Elion.”
The room of garbage and death and concealment and hounds seems to unspool around her and stretch into infinity, the first level of a tangible hell the Pearl’s managed to summon into the world of the living.
***
Elion hammers upon a closed door with his knuckles.
The Quarternine, a middle-class district of the Pearl. Every crammed-in building shimmers and shines on the outside, but cheap, low-grade materials compose their bones.
The strange garbage man told Elion to just enter the house, as the lady never answers her door and h
as claimed that if someone really wants to see her, they will come in. Thieves would be too scared to get far.
What did that mean?
“Go in and find out.” The ghost girl floats through the closed doorway.
Elion pushes, and the door rolls up and inward.
A dark abode with faint light, the smell of dirt and exotic plants hovers in the air like a living thing entombed in its own stagnant breath. He clicks on a light attached to his small handheld pulser. Enters.
Webs hang in curtains from the ceiling, congregate in upper corners, create white cages around hanging plants. Fear coils Elion’s intestines into a spring. Pounding blood rustles the hair in his ears.
Aquariums without water sit silently on tables, covered in metal wire. Signs with red letters say not to touch. Magnified and distorted shadows of webs and spindly legs move against the walls as his light flashes about.
Elion hears them, scuttling across the floor, slinking through webs, watching, holding their breaths, waiting.
“Are you afraid of spiders?” The ghost girl floats through a net of webs.
Elion’s heart lurches, icy fingers crawling up the root of his tongue and reaching for his throat. “Don’t do that.”
“You came to find this woman. Follow me.”
The girl leads Elion down a narrow hallway, webs and bodies of arachnids hovering overhead. Elion takes a more circuitous route, avoiding touching anything that might send a signal suggesting he’s caught in a spider’s trap.
“Hello?” Elion calls out.
“In here, love,” a feeble voice answers from the room at the end of the hall.
After minutes of creeping, sweating, glancing up and racing past low webs, Elion enters the back room. A white glow is emitted beside a face as wrinkled as a dead leaf, the color of a dirty pillowcase, her eyes nearly as vacant and black as those of the ghost following him, the corners of her mouth glistening with drool, which creeps at glacial speed into the crevasses on her chin. This old woman seems a skeleton dressed in mummified skin, huddled into a fetal position on an antigravity chair. She appears as if she hasn’t moved an arm or leg out of position in three decades, cuticles grown up to cover her fingernails.
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