Even the Wingless Read online

  Nevertheless, the Queen was not expecting the screams that ruled the harem as she pushed back the gauze curtain leading into the warm room. The females were not lounging on pillows, stretching across cushioned lounges or playing their few games, as was usual, but were clustered together as if for protection in the center of the room. Significantly, every trysting alcove remained open to view save one, and from behind that curtain the Slave Queen could hear panting and whimpers, not the sounds of pleasure and desire, but of pain and fear.

  "What goes on here?" she asked the group at large. Nearly as one they turned to face her, but only the Mother separated from her sisters and rose on ungainly limbs to join her. The skin over the Mother's rounded belly had grown taut and lost its luster; when the Queen had been here last, the Mother's pregnancy had not seemed to weigh so heavily on her.

  "It is Third and his Hand," the Mother whispered. "They-our-betters have Flower."

  As the Emperor's possessions, the members of the harem had names, all save any lucky enough to be bearing him strong progeny, and, of course, the Slave Queen herself, as the most exalted and the most degraded of their number. Even slaves were accounted higher than mere harem females.

  The Mother's explanation alone did not suffice. "They are not using her kindly," the Queen said, a quiver running through her perforated wings. She gathered the shawl more tightly around her lower body. "Such use requires special dispensation."

  The Mother dipped her head. Her two lower arms were folded over the top of her belly, and her upper arms twined together nervously on top of them. "These ones were listening—"

  They were not supposed to listen to male business. The Slave Queen stared at her so that she would continue.

  "—and they-our-betters have brought the Emperor special satisfaction through the capture of irregular slaves. Slaves he-our-Master hopes to use against the next Alliance Ambassador."

  "Against him?" the Slave Queen asked, brow ridges furrowed. "Why?"

  One of the Mother's hands tilted in a shrug. "Because he-our-Master tires of the Alliance ambassadors, and wants to play with them. Or so the story is running behind the curtain."

  The Slave Queen looked that way speculatively. "What kind of irregular slaves?"

  "That these here have not been able to ascertain," the Mother said. "Though they-our-betters will not be done with Flower for long yet."

  The Slave Queen glanced sharply at her. Something in her tone... "How long?"

  "They-our-betters have leave to kill her."

  And they would. Well did the Slave Queen understand Third's perversity. Even among the Chatcaava it was considered crude to find pleasure in the death of another being. In its pain, perhaps. Its suffering, nigh to death. But to actually destroy one's playthings was considered a lack of self-discipline. There had been times when the Slave Queen had seen a light in Third's eyes that she trusted not at all, and even without anyone naming it she'd recognized it, his lust for killing.

  "Only Flower?" the Queen asked at last.

  The Mother nodded. "Only Flower. He-our-better did not have the choice of that."

  The Slave Queen glanced at the knot of fearful females in the center of the room, picked out the faces of one or two of them she knew well by their sensitivity to pain and the beauty of their anguish. Flower did not have the talent to bear agony. Third must have been disappointed, even though the torture of a female to death was a high gift indeed.

  "These slaves must have pleased the Emperor very much," the Queen murmured.

  "Truly," the Mother said and together they said nothing more while Flower's whines possessed the silence.

  For once the females of the harem were too frightened to sneer at the Slave Queen, and she found it ironic that she wished circumstances were different. She found their fear unpleasant enough, but the screams and whimpers were intolerable. She motioned to Khaska to follow and departed the harem for her tower. Her footfalls on the stone were so light her shadow warned the guards of her arrival. She passed them in silence, the shawl gathered around her for comfort, for warmth. She wondered how Third would leave Flower's body, and regretted immediately the mental image the thought produced.

  Upstairs, the sun had lost its color and its power, and night streaked the skies with ragged grey clouds on black fields. Khaska lit the smoldering lamps while the Queen settled without comfort on one of the pillows. It had been a revolution since the last slaves the Emperor had obtained, and there had been three: one, a male, had been tortured for information and then summarily disposed of. The second, a female, had been imprisoned in the Imperial Harem, and had died of sorrow. The third was Khaska, a fortunate survivor for the Slave Queen. Of the three only Khaska had known enough Chatcaavan to speak to her, and the Seersa had brought with her the freshness of a world outside the Empire. Her seeming innocence had been the inspiration for the name the Slave Queen had eventually chosen for her: "Khaska" was a Chatcaavan word, after the bell-ringers for the ancient temples to the Living Air, traditionally children dressed in white.

  "I wonder how many they took?" the Slave Queen murmured. "And why they're so special?"

  "I don't know, Mistress," Khaska said. "It is hard to conceive of what the Emperor would consider special, given the selection of slaves he has acquired in the past."

  And that was gently said from one of those slaves, but the words still touched a chill in the Slave Queen's marrow. Special slaves for the Ambassador. Why? Between his slaves and the unfortunate series of Alliance dignitaries, the Emperor had seen quite a gamut of reactions from the Alliance's people already. He had sent some for medical experiments. He had pulled out claws and raped and beat them. He had humiliated and surprised them. Surely the Tam-illee vomiting in public had been amusement enough. What more could he possibly be expecting?

  "I wish we could find out more," the Slave Queen said.

  "Perhaps we can, Mistress," Khaska said.

  "What?" The Queen twisted to look at the Seersa, startled; she hadn't been expecting an answer. "How would we do that?"

  "There is a chamber... " The female hesitated, ears flicking backward. "We were kept in it before being presented formally at court and released to the harem. I would be surprised if the new slaves weren't also being kept there, and... " She licked her teeth and lips, "...I know the way."

  "I... " The Slave Queen stopped. She couldn't think of a reason they would be allowed to check on the Empire's newest slaves, if they had not already been brought to her for preparation.

  She also couldn't think of a reason they'd be stopped.

  "How far is it?" the Queen asked.

  "It is in this tower," Khaska said. "In its basement, in the cliff. Where it gets cold and damp."

  The Queen shivered despite herself. The Chatcaava were not fond of cold or damp, and such a prison sounded heinous to her. Nevertheless, she said, "And you're certain you remember the way."

  "It is not hard," Khaska said. "The difficulty would be in whether the guards would allow us."

  A life of plush comfort stretched before the Slave Queen's orange eyes: a life provided for her, not hers to command or change. Such emptiness had carved out her heart and left it hollow. "What can they do to me that the Emperor has not already done? That would matter?" She shrugged one shoulder, twisted to look at the female. "Let us go."

  The Seersa's eyes rested on her face, set and unblinking. The Queen thought how flimsy the bridge between them that language had provided: she did not understand at all what went on behind those eyes.

  Khaska stood, held out her hands to help the Chatcaavan up.

  The shuttle arrived on time, sliding into one of the station's landing bays with a precision that somehow looked casual. As the bay doors locked shut and the area pressurized, Lisinthir closed his eyes and measured a long breath out and another in.

  This assignment had not been his idea, but he'd had so few choices at home that he'd been glad of the opportunity when the Queen asked him to fill the position. Wary, but gl
ad. She'd made the dangers involved perfectly clear along with the tantalizing prizes. The Alliance, she said, needed a man who could read minds, one with enough passion to match the fire of shape-changing dragons, ostensibly to be an ambassador, but in truth to stop them from stealing more of the Alliance's citizens for use as slaves and to gather intelligence on whether the Emperor planned war on the Alliance. All the previous ambassadors had not only failed in those aims, but also lost ground in every other form of negotiation, from trade concessions to debt forgiveness to the location of the border. It was a job for an esper, and the Alliance had humbled itself to ask its weaker ally for help. The only other esper species in the Alliance was utterly unsuitable for the task.

  Lisinthir had wanted the opportunity more than he'd been comfortable with. In a final bow to his ambivalence, he'd expressed doubts about his suitability, and the Queen had replied: "You are a dancer, a dueler and the last son of the House of the striking drake. You will acquit yourself magnificently."

  So he'd left his home of over three hundred years to present himself to the youth and arrogance of the Alliance, to learn the language of their most uneasy neighbor and then on to use his talents, obvious and covert, in their service.

  This would be the last time he could rest. From here on he was embattled, and to let his guard down would be to fail... not only the Alliance, but the slaves he hoped to emancipate.

  "The bay is ready, Ambassador. They're taking your luggage down now."

  Lisinthir lifted his head and stretched. "Very good," he said, and headed toward the doors.

  He'd seen the Chatcaava in 3deos and viseos, of course. To see one in the real nevertheless surprised him, though he hid it as he approached the alien standing at the shuttle's side. The male was shorter than Lisinthir expected: a little over five feet tall, perhaps, to Lisinthir's six and a quarter. The stills and moving footage had painted an accurate impression of their lissome grace, but had failed to capture their vigor, the power of their coiled muscles.

  The footage had also failed to convey the wonder of those wings: not tough as leather hide, but soft and heavy as suede.

  The rude stare, at least, didn't disturb him. He'd seen worse from the nobles at Ontine. Its honest disdain was a pleasure after the veiled scorn of his own kind, even if the side-tilted head and vast, white-less eye struck him as more animal than sapient.

  "I am the Ambassador," Lisinthir said to the Chatcaavan at the door to the shuttle, testing his tongue on the language that would dominate his days from now on.

  The drake twitched his head toward the shuttle. "Enter."

  The shuttle was capacious, obviously meant for ferrying one or two passengers in luxury. There was a long couch in the back, reminiscent of a chaise longue, and two chairs in front with narrow backs that flared at the top. An extreme choice in presentation: he could either lounge in arrogance and declare his lack of concern, or he could sit in rigid stillness and give an impression of complete focus on his task.

  He chose the chair and would have found it uncomfortable had he tried to use it as designed. Fortunately, his mother had consigned him to enough hours of sitting on stools to improve his posture to inure him to discomfort on chairs.

  Safely seated, Lisinthir watched the Chatcaava secure his trunk and talk amongst themselves, keeping their voices to barely audible hisses. They'd been warned he could understand them, then. The education he'd been given in the culture of the Empire had been so poor he'd wondered how any of the ambassadors had managed in the past. As it was, he didn't have enough information to tell whether having their heads so close together was typical or if it marked an unusual intensity.

  A few minutes later, one of the males turned to him. His skin and scales shaded to a dark metal gray along his sides, leaving his ventrals paler in color. "I am the Pilot," he announced in accented Universal. "I would like to know where the rest of your staff and possessions are."

  "I have no staff," Lisinthir said. "And my possessions are all in the single trunk already loaded."

  "No slaves?" the pilot asked.

  "No," Lisinthir said.

  "No helpers?" the pilot pressed.

  "No," Lisinthir said.

  The pilot's thin tail twitched. "You come among us alone."

  "I hunt better that way," Lisinthir said with a grin.

  The pilot's large eyes widened, exposing a narrow rim of white around the irises.

  "Not much room for more people here anyway," Lisinthir said.

  "There is cargo room," the pilot said after a protracted hesitation. "We will close for departure in ten minutes."

  "Very good," Lisinthir said. "How long is it to the Heart of the Empire?"

  "Two days."

  "Fine," Lisinthir said and closed his eyes, forcing himself to keep his body loose and relaxed. The Chatcaavan didn't move... Lisinthir imagined him staring and wondered what thoughts ran through that narrow head. Was the alien unnerved? Did he merely think Lisinthir the strangest of the Alliance's offerings? The stupidest?

  He had so little time to learn these people's body language, so little to work with. A two-day trip with the wondrous technology of these space-faring species was uncommonly long, but not long enough. "Imagine the cruelest, most callous society, where the strong eat the weak and use everyone else," one of the former ambassadors had said with an earnest stare and trembling hands. "Imagine the most unbelievable society, where aliens are less than persons and women are merely breeders, containers for men's sexual appetites. Imagine never sleeping at night because someone might be waiting to test whether you're stupid enough to rest without guard. That's the Empire. Except worse than that, even worse than that."

  Beneath snow-pale lashes, Lisinthir kept watch.

  "This one has come to examine the newest members of the harem," the Slave Queen said. She stated it without haughtiness, without assumption of importance. Facing the guards before the door, the Queen felt fragile though neither of them stood much taller than her and Khaska was shorter than them all. She could see her own shadow, so thin compared to the bulk of the armored guards, and the translucent folds of the shawl that draped from her arms. She kept her eyes on it as it waved in the bone-chilling draft, casting a mesmerizing half-shadow creasing and straightening on the brown stone.

  "She's not supposed to be here," one of them said to the other.

  "It's the harem tower. She is supposed to have the run of it."

  "All the way here?"

  "This is part of the tower, isn't it?"

  Without having to lift her head she felt their attention turn to her.

  "No one left any instructions on whether she was to see them."

  "No. Only that they weren't to leave the room."

  Another long pause. Then one of them flicked a hand in a shrug. "I can see no harm in it. Let them in, I say."

  The jingle of keys prompted the Slave Queen to raise her head in time to see the second guard opening the door, an archaic thing made of metal that groaned as it swung backward.

  "Go on," the guard said. "Knock when you're ready to leave."

  "This one humbly thanks you-her-better," the Queen said. She stepped inside with Khaska just behind her, heard the door close on them both with an ominous clunk. The Seersa girl had not understated the room's charms; the cold here was even worse than it was in the hall, and the damp veil that hung in the air was dense enough to coat the Queen's scaled skin with mist. The only light in the room entered through the bottom of the door, a wan, pale hue cast across the stone floor. The Slave Queen waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

  A warm body pressed against her; the smell of soft fur and Seersa musk reached her mouth and nose.

  "Khaska?" she whispered.

  "Here, Mistress."

  A panicked, hushed voice, female and alien, spoke urgent words the Queen could not understand. Khaska replied in kind.

  "Khaska!"

  "She asked who was here, Mistress. I told her 'friends'."

  From t
he gloom, the Queen's eyes traced a single shape: two people, huddled together, the low light glinting off wet eyes. The Queen squinted, saw that one had long, triangular ears, like Khaska's—the other, similarly shaped but much smaller. They had humanoid faces as well. Supposedly there were Alliance people with closer to normal faces: if not the beaks of true people, then at least pointed ones. The Queen had never seen one, though her experience with the varied and confusing races of the Alliance was small.

  The wary silence broke again for Khaska: speaking that language again, softer, thicker. It did not break cleanly as Throne Chatcaavan did, but flowed and clicked and hummed like some unlikely bird. The Queen thought Khaska sounded tentative, but couldn't tell if that was the language or the speech.

  Another voice answered. Khaska replied to the second woman. Another question, another answer. Soon the Seersa and the strangers were speaking fluently, quickly.

  "Khaska!" the Queen hissed. Her voice stopped the conversation, and all three looked at her. "Khaska, what are you saying?"

  "They are frightened, Mistress," Khaska said, and her voice grew heavy with weariness. "They want to know where they are, who I am and how I got here, and what is going to happen to them now."

  "And you told them...?"

  "That they are most likely to become slaves of the Empire."

  The Queen looked at the two females. The one closer to the ground wore defiance like a mantle over her dimly lit features. The taller one looked resigned. She had tracks on her cheeks that led from her eyes. Her voice was higher with a husky timbre.

  "She asks who you are."

  The Queen met the taller female's eyes, saw the fatigue there mixed with something else. Something harder. She whispered, "Tell her the truth. Tell her I...I am the Slave Queen, the most exalted of all females in the Empire, and the most debased. Tell her they are in the Imperial Palace in the protected Heart of the Empire."