Jaqui had twisted her face when she had spoken of possibly not making it, and Lank had guessed that she had some duties at Gorsh’s which she considered unpleasant. What had Garrot called her—Jaqui, the Whore? Was Gorsh pimping her? If that was the case, she deserved a lot of credit for keeping her spirits up!
“Then you and the jini will have to take me there, tonight, as the dark is falling,” said Chrysalia. “Let’s hope that we don’t run into experiences such as the one you had this afternoon.”
“I suspect that even if you do, the two of you and the jini will be able to handle it,” Seleni said. “This jini has some strengths that Chrysalia conferred it, ones which I could not have given it. They should make it a more useful companion.”
“Well, Auntie,” Lank said grinning fiercely. “How about, you and I go and settle into Mikki’s Bed and Breakfast, and then check out the restaurant next door for dinner. By the time we’re done, it ought to be nearly time to find the empty lot. I’m presuming that this jini creature can hide itself from the public?”
As if to answer him, the jini slid inside his shirt, and settled into the sleeve, where Lank could barely feel its presence, other than the warm feeling that was still enveloping the jarred shoulder.
*****
“Have we truly considered all the aspects of this little side job?” Lank asked Chrysalia at dinner. “If you can safely get that thing out of Shyla’s shoulder, what do we do next? Where do we take her? And what do we do with the marker? And what happens to Jaqui or Tere, whichever of them brings Shyla to the rendezvous?”
Chrysalia arched her eyebrows, and stared at him across the small table where they sat.
“Good questions, all of those,” she said. “Got any ideas for the answers?”
“Hiding Shyla is the easiest problem to solve, I would think,” Lank replied. “Once she no longer has a marker that Gorsh or his minions can trace, we should be able to take her with us to Strone—presuming that we can stash her somewhere until we’re ready to leave.”
“That’s a start of an answer to the question,” Chrysalia agreed, “but no more than a start.”
“Could Seleni keep her until we leave for Strone?” Lank asked.
“Seleni could, and would—she offered to do exactly that—but only if we can mislead Gorsh about Shyla’s whereabouts. Otherwise, her cottage is one of the first places Gorsh would scour, considering that he found Shyla and Jaqui there earlier.”
“Would the Nature Spirits allow him in there?” Lank queried. “Is he more powerful than they are?”
Chrysalia smiled.
“The Nature Spirits are somewhat like your friend, the Federation Agent Mikal r’ma Trodden, when it comes to life and death. They will not deal death, either, even to keep someone else from dealing it,” she said. “No young friend; if Shyla is to be safe at Seleni’s, we will have to mislead Gorsh and his loyal men into searching for the girl elsewhere.”
Lank concentrated on the fish on his plate for a few minutes. It was good fish, freshly caught lake fish, towfish, the waiter had called it. The same kind of fish that Tere, Shyla, and Jaqui had gone down to the harbour to buy for Gorsh’s kitchens.
“Could the jini help you insert the marker into a fish, a land animal, or a bird, maybe?” he asked, after swallowing a forkful of his entree.
Chrysalia’s expression widened into a grin.
“Now you’re talking,” she said. “What does the jini think?”
The almost-purr emanating from Lank’s sleeve became audible for a split second; Lank nearly burst out laughing as he heard it. He was sure that the jini’s answer had been a snort of some kind! Like: “Of course I can do that! Just name your beast!”
“Maybe a flying creature of some kind,” Lank mused. “A bird might have the best chance of getting away, once Gorsh starts seriously looking for Shyla.”
Chrysalia gave him a hard stare.
“Don’t be a fool, Lank,” she said. “Whatever the creature we choose, it’ll be a sacrificial lamb. A small land animal would be the best, I’d say, and we’ll have to chase it into the lake. That way, the water can hide our ruse. The little beast will drown, and, with any luck at all, the Slave Trader will assume that it was Shyla who drowned.”
Lank found himself gritting his teeth. Chrysalia was not Kati, that was clear; there was an implacable edge to her personality, in spite of her pacifism. Kati would have suggested that they leave the decision for as long as they could, and then choose whatever seemed to be the least damaging option. The notion of sacrificial lambs would have angered her, although the Granda inside her head would have thought that it was just fine. But, he was working with Chrysalia. And Chrysalia was the one who would be removing the marker from Shyla’s flesh.
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “If the jini can take and insert the tracer into a rat, or something, I’ll go along with your idea.”
The jini snorted again, as if to show its contempt at any suggestion that its abilities might come up short. However, it stayed with Lank, showing no inclination to return to the one of its two midwives who was sitting across the table.
*****
By the time Lank and Chrysalia left Mikki’s to walk to the meeting place, the sun was going down. Salamanka’s scanty street lighting had been turned on, but the lamps were not illuminating much; there was still too much ambient light in the atmosphere.
No-one bothered them, although Lank had his stunner grasped in a hand in his pocket, ready to challenge anyone who threatened them. The jini had returned to lie around his neck and shoulders, and he had accommodated it by throwing on a loose, hooded jacket, under which the creature could snuggle invisibly. His shoulder had stopped hurting, and the jini was no longer attending to it; whatever healing it had done, apparently was complete.
They walked north, and the street that they were on grew gloomier, and more poverty-stricken. The houses were smaller, and more dilapidated-looking on every passing block.
“Not the most pleasant of neighbourhoods,” Chrysalia muttered, as she looked around.
“The girls and Tere warned me about that,” Lank said. “They told me that things get pretty seedy by the time we can see the Citadel. But we don’t have to go all the way to the Citadel; the lot that’s our destination lies about two or three blocks south of it.”
He did not feel much like chatting, and Chrysalia fell silent, too.
They reached the tangle of brush and weeds that was the empty lot, and in the last, fading light located the gnarled tree that Jaqui had suggested as the meeting place. It was the only sizeable tree on the lot, and therefore easy to find. However, for that reason, it was also the obvious place to meet, and therefore the most likely place to be under surveillance—if anyone could be bothered to keep the weed-infested place under surveillance. But for that reason, Lank and the others had agreed that whoever reached the tree first would retreat into the nearby bushes, from where they could keep the tree in view. The two waited beneath the tree for about a minute; when no agreed-upon signal came, they moved away from it, crawling into the undergrowth. They settled in among the mess of plants, seating themselves as comfortably as they could on patches of scraggly grass.
Then they waited, and watched the area under the tree.
*****
Judd Gorsh had surprised himself with the extent of his enthusiasm for Jaqui, now that she was a brunette instead of a red-head. He had expected to dislike the change, but really, the brown-haired Jaqui was more like Kati had been on the slave ship than she had any right to be. She had acquired spirit from somewhere, along with the hair dye, and was no longer the angry, sullen teen whose body he had used without a thought for what the practise was doing to her. Maybe she was not welcoming him in bed, but at least she seemed to be tolerating him. Gorsh was not an idiot, and he realized that that was about as much as he could ever expect from Kati of Terra, assuming that he could get her into his power. He did not have the time or the leisure to be a great lover, is th
e way he looked at it; but he was a powerful man, and that ought to be enough for any woman he wanted.
He had brought Jaqui into his apartment after the evening meal. It was easier that way, since he had begun to keep her with him the whole night. Now she sat up on his bed, and looked at his sated self with an indecipherable expression.
“Do you mind if I go and see how Shyla is doing?” she asked him. “She’s been having a hard time ever since she has had to accept the fact that she goes to Koruse’s, tomorrow morning. It might make it a little easier for her to leave in the morning if I try to comfort her tonight.”
Gorsh looked her face over thoroughly. Did the girls have something sexual going between them, he wondered. If so, it would explain a few things.... It did not matter to him in the least, as long as Shyla went to Koruse’s as a technical virgin, and Jaqui remained compliant when she was in his bed.
“Sure, you may do that,” he said with a smirk. “So long as she understands that she’s going tomorrow morning, and that she had better have an intact hymen when she does.”
Jaqui nodded. She was already pulling on her clothes, glad to have an excuse to get away from the big man’s bedroom. She knew perfectly well what he was thinking, and did not care; if his assumption that she preferred women to men, and that she and Shyla had a thing going on, would help her scheming, he could go ahead and think it.
The summer sun had gone down by the time she reached the outdoors, and began to hurry towards the dormitories kitty-corner from the Citadel. The buildings were old, and dilapidated, heavy with the murk that infested the Citadel, and had spread into other buildings. Jaqui understood why Gorsh himself had settled into the farther edifice, across the square; it was freer of the taint. And yet, to a great extent, the taint was the source of his power.
She found Shyla curled under a sheet on the thin mattress pad which was all the comfort the sleeping cells afforded. She went on her knees beside Shyla and shook her upper arm.
“Wake up, kid, it’s time to go,” she said in a whisper as loud as she dared.
“I’m not sleeping,” the other girl answered, and shook off the sheet.
She was fully dressed, and crawled up immediately, looking more hopeful than she had in days. The murk in the room seemed to retreat from the two of them, somewhat.
“Better school your face to look dejected,” Jaqui said. “I’m thinking that if this removal works we’ll have to stage a suicide scene. One in which you supposedly run screaming away in despair, and throw yourself into the lake, or something.”
“I wonder if Lank has thought of that?” Shyla muttered.
“Probably. He’s a smart cookie. If not, we’ll suggest it. And the best thrower in the group tosses the marker into the lake, hopefully far enough that our boss can’t be bothered to send a boat in to try to retrieve your body.”
On the way back outside, Jaqui kept up a soothing patter about how important it was to keep one’s spirits up at the worst of times, and how a girl should lean on her religious beliefs when in despair, rather than do anything rash, or stupid. She spoke just loudly enough that the odd curious listener behind the doors they walked by might catch the drift. The murk was actually a friend to them under the circumstances. Inhabitants of the dorms did not like to linger in the building except when they were ready to sleep, or ill, so there were not many people in the hallways, or the stairs, to observe them. And it made it understandable as to why a fearful, anxious young woman would be taken outdoors in the dark, by a friend who was trying to ease her suffering.
Jaqui had hung on to the little light that Murra had given Shyla before the girls had run away. She put it to use, now, finding their way through the dark, shadowy bushes and weeds of the empty lot, to the approximate middle where the one tree grew. Once under it, the two girls huddled anxiously, and put out the light, waiting to hear the agreed-upon sign, three trills of the night-flying guff-bird. Lank had told them that he could imitate the sound; when Jaqui had sung it to him, he had realized that he had heard the bird in Max’s garden one evening.
*****
Chrysalia lay a warning hand on Lank’s forearm. The jini, at the same time, crawled out from inside his shirt, on to his head, apparently sniffing the atmosphere about it.
“Wait,” said Chrysalia in a very low voice. “They are being monitored through those tracers. Let me and the jini explore things before we act.”
She settled into total motionlessness. The jini left Lank chest, and disappeared. The youth felt something dig into his left buttock as he sat, in complete silence, on the ground. He endured the discomfort, guessing that he was seated on a root, or a stone, something which he had been unaware of until then.
Moments later Chrysalia spoke again:
“The tracers use tiny shards of lace crystal as resonators.” She let out a low chuckle. “I must be close to finding out what has been going on with the crystals; the song of the crystals has been altered somehow, to serve someone other than Crystolorians, and to render them almost invisible to us, except at very close quarters, like I am now.
“The jini’s gone to find out who’s doing the monitoring. I’m guessing Gorsh, or one of his employees.”
“What about the girls?” Lank asked in a whisper. “Do we dare to contact them?”
“Wait ‘til the jini gets back. It’ll be able to tell me what the monitoring amounts to. If all it amounts to is keeping tabs on the girls’—or, rather, the markers’—location, we can do what we came to do. But if whoever is doing this can follow what is happening to the girls, we’ll have to re-evaluate the situation, and come up with a new plan.”
“And a new script,” Lank added.
He was trying to think hard. What kind of a scenario would Kati come up with in this sort of a difficulty? He wished again that she had been with them, adding her never-failing optimism to the mental brew. But she would not have been safe in Salamanka, not yet. The Team was not ready to take Gorsh on, to have Kati lure him into making himself vulnerable to whatever forces they could gather to ensnare him. And in the meantime, they could not afford to lose another of their number into Gorsh’s power—and hidden in the murk in the Citadel.
They did not have to wait long for the jini’s return. It was there, suddenly, wrapping itself around Chrysalia’s arm to communicate with her; then it moved back to its apparently favourite place inside Lank’s shirt, a warm, comforting presence for the youth.
“The jini tells me that the ‘boss-man’ is the one who is monitoring the girls. He seems to have some sort of screen, with a map, on which he can follow the markers’ locations. There are a lot of tracers that he could be tracking, but at the moment he’s tracking only the two on this field. The jini tells me that as far as the boss-man is concerned, all the others are where they should be, and he’s not worried about them. He is concerned about these two, though; my guess is that their earlier escape attempt has alerted him to their dissatisfaction with their fates.”
“But he cannot tell what is happening around them, or who else might be with them?”
“The jini thinks not. The markers show up as lights on the screen.”
“Well, then, I guess we can give the signal and join them.”
“Although, I’m a little iffy about removing the thing from Shyla’s shoulder this close to Gorsh’s stronghold. Just in case removing it from her body somehow does send a signal to that monitor.”
*****
“We should walk down to the lake shore,” Jaqui said when Lank had explained the situation to her and Shyla. “If we avoid the port, there are a lot of empty, neglected places where we can be sure of privacy. And Shyla and I have an excuse for wanting privacy, away from the environs of the Citadel.”
She grinned wickedly.
“Gorsh thinks that Shyla and I are lovers. I didn’t disabuse him of the notion; I thought that it might come in useful. Besides, why would I care if someone is mistaken about my sexual orientation? After all, Gorsh is using me as his whore
, already.”
“He’s making sexual use of you?” Chrysalia’s voice sounded appalled, although in the dark of the surrounding brush, and the overhanging branches of the tree, there was not enough starlight to make out her expression.
Lank could make out Jaqui’s shrug, however.
“It’s been going on for some time now,” she said, her voice flat. “He made sure that I won’t get pregnant, though. I’m a natural red-head, and the hair colour is a trait, inherited from my biological father, which dominates over all other colours. Gorsh doesn’t want any red-haired babes; ain’t I the lucky one! Now I’m thinking that maybe I can make use of him using me—to his misfortune.”
“That could turn into another tool in the kit,” Chrysalia agreed. “As long as you can handle being abused like that.”
Jaqui shrugged again.
“I was born in the shadow of the Citadel,” she replied. “My whole life has been one of abuse. My mother never wanted me in the first place, and my father didn’t care whether I lived or died. Crazy as it may seem, there were enough people around who liked me, and looked out for me, that I learned what it is to matter to somebody.”
“That’s probably what saved you,” Lank said softly. “I ought to know, having endured a childhood of neglect myself. That kind of thing doesn’t have to defeat you, though, as you, too, seem to have learned.”
They were moving away from the tree, along one of the vague paths leading towards the lot edges, this one heading in the direction of the lake. Jaqui stayed close to Shyla, keeping a hand on her wrist as they walked.
“Good,” said Chrysalia to the girls as she observed this in the starlight. “Keep close together, the two of you. We want Gorsh, if he keeps track of you, to think that you’re walking along, just the two of you, with Jaqui comforting Shyla as best she can. Best if you meander a little bit, also, as if you have no particular destination in mind, just spending the last hours together while you can.
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 38
