Even the Wingless Page 3

  Khaska let loose another strange collection of sounds, and the ears on both women flattened. They began talking—both at once, agitated. The Queen searched for meaning in the sounds and could find none, and as the wall in her mind blocked her off from their speech she saw the light limn an arch off the back of the taller female.

  A wing.

  A dark, dark wing.

  "Living Air!" she whispered.

  Khaska stopped talking immediately. "Mistress?"

  The Queen reached toward the wing, stopped short of it as both strangers went silent as well.

  Khaska cleared her throat. "Yes, Mistress. The Malarai are winged." A pause. "She cannot fly. None of them can. Their bodies are too heavy and their wings are too small."

  "Too small! But how—"

  "Created thus." Khaska ground her teeth. "Poor designers," she said at last.

  "Poor designers... your gods?" the Queen asked.

  "No, Mistress," Khaska said. "Many of our races were created many, many revolutions ago by humans. They designed us."

  Horrors! No wonder they all looked alike. And yet once she worked past the disgust the idea of being created by the flat-faced humans provoked, she could not help but envy them, just a little, for knowing who had made them and why. There were no gods left for the Chatcaavan people.

  The Malarai stared hard at her across a foot of space and a vast gulf of life, of experience.

  The Slave Queen drew back and straightened. She flared her own wings, letting them catch what little light there was. Their fringes dangled, displayed for both prisoners, the vanes cut into an intricate lace. Useless... useless... the skies forever barred her for having the ill fortune to be born one of the few, winged, shape-changing females.

  The two strangers gasped.

  Khaska said something, was spoken to in return. "They ask if this was done to you."

  "Yes," the Queen whispered.

  Silence. More words.

  "Now what do they say?"

  "They ask me if you treat me well. What my life is like." Khaska's ears flicked outward. "I... tell them that you are good to me, within the limits of your power. And what it is otherwise like."

  More words, then silence. The defiant woman looked away, then began to shake and make soft barking sounds. Alarmed, the Queen stepped toward her. "Khaska? What is wrong with her?"

  "She... " Khaska paused, and the poor light seemed to cast her voice into greater relief, so that the Queen could hear what sounded like impatience in it. "She /weeps/. I am sorry, Mistress, there is no word in your language for it. Water leaks from her eyes, and it is an expression of grief or pain or anguish."

  The Slave Queen stared at the female, horrified by the vulnerability, the self-absorption of the display. It seemed a terribly dangerous indulgence, this /weeping/. Nor did it seem very pleasant for the weeper.

  Beside her fellow prisoner, the Malarai, too, looked down. She said something slowly to Khaska, whose tail lashed once.

  "What is it?" the Queen asked.

  Khaska and the Malarai exchanged glances... perhaps her quizzical tone communicated the meaning of her words effectively enough that Khaska's translation wasn't needed. As it was, the Malarai's words were slow in coming, but as they did she folded her wings, wings the Queen realized had been spread all along.

  There was someone more behind them. She lifted a head so white it gathered all the light in the room into the silk of her hair. A slim white face—strands glistening over it like light itself, delicate features, such a long neck it begged a collar the breadth of a true Chatcaavan's... and eyes, sea-green pale, so wet that what light there was trembled on their surfaces in multiple reflections.

  "What a strangely-colored human," the Slave Queen said.

  Khaska whimpered aloud, a sound so pathetic that the Queen glanced at her in surprise. The Seersa cleared her throat and said, "That is no human, Mistress. That is an Eldritch."

  "Are you sure?" the Slave Queen asked. "She looks exactly human to me. Maybe longer in the limb."

  "That is definitely not a human, Mistress," Khaska said.

  "I do not know these Eldritch," the Slave Queen said. "Are they another of your human-created selves?"

  "No, Mistress," Khaska said. The female—the Eldritch—had ducked back behind the Malarai's wing. "The Eldritch may look human but they are not. They are xenophobes from a single planet in the Alliance's corner. And they are fragile, and... when they touch others, they feel their feelings."

  The Slave Queen blinked several times. "As in stories of magicians who read the minds of strangers?"

  "Very like, yes, except they cannot control it, Mistress. If you touch them, they feel your feelings. They suffer."

  Abruptly she saw this delicate humanoid in the center of a ring of lust and greed-driven dragons, imagined her screaming with Flower's voice as they stroked her and inflicted all their hatred, their contempt and their violence on her. The Slave Queen sucked in a breath.

  "Oh, no, Khaska. Tell me this is not widely known."

  "I'm afraid it is," Khaska whispered. "This must be the 'special' slave the Emperor requested, Mistress. The Eldritch are widely known for their talents... and for how infrequently they leave their planet. To net one would require great skill on the part of the abductor."

  The Malarai said something, and Khaska frowned. The smaller female chimed in a few words.

  "Khaska...?"

  "They say she doesn't speak Universal."

  The Slave Queen canted her head. "Can you speak whatever she speaks?"

  "A little." Khaska closed her eyes, then opened them. What came from her mouth then made the previous language sound like metal on metal. It seemed all liquid vowels, so many it made the Slave Queen's jaw ache to bite some of them off into real words.

  The Eldritch lifted her head again, exposing the fragile length of her shoulders, white and naked. Her eyes widened. Her words, when she spoke, were noticeably longer, smoother. They seemed to match her alien beauty.

  "She says," Khaska said after a moment, "that she is afraid."

  The other two prisoners looked askance and Khaska spoke to them. They answered.

  "The others want to protect her. They say she's sick from the handling she's had so far."

  The Slave Queen closed her eyes. "We should go, Khaska."

  "Mistress... "

  "Please, Khaska. We've been here too long, and I need to think."

  The Seersa bowed her head. "As you wish." As the Queen turned and knocked on the metal door, she heard Khaska addressing the prisoners, first in one language, than the other. The guard opened the door for their exit, and the Queen could feel the gaze of the three soon-to-be slaves on her back. She and Khaska were silent as they ascended from the basement of the tower—what relief to feel familiar stone and air, rather than the cold and clammy darkness hiding beneath the harem! How had she not known the tower had a dungeon? For the cell could be called nothing less.

  In the quiet of the tower room, the Queen asked, "Khaska?"

  "Yes, Mistress?"

  "What did you say as we left?"

  "I told them," Khaska paused. "I told them we would try to help them, but we were prisoners too. But that we would try."

  "Was that wise?" the Queen asked.

  Khaska's gaze settled on her, alien, unfathomable. "Would you leave them there, if you could help them?"

  "I don't know," the Queen replied, startled. "They are the Emperor's."

  "Am I the Emperor's, Mistress?"

  "Yes," the Queen replied. "As am I."

  The Seersa padded to the pillow opposite hers and kneeled on it. She set her strange, small hands onto her knees and stared into the Queen's eyes. She said nothing, and slowly the Queen began to shift, discomfited. At last, to break the silence, the Chatcaavan said, "Khaska... it is simply a truth. What the Emperor claims remains his unless he looses it."

  "But we were our own people once," Khaska said. "Mistress, the court will destroy that Eldritch. Th
e other two women are none too resilient themselves, but the Eldritch... there will be nothing left of her. Think of her, Mistress. Remember her eyes, her face. Do you really want her trapped here? Do you really want to see her, not die, but go insane?"

  "No," the Slave Queen whispered, and surprised herself with the admission.

  Khaska nodded slowly. "Then we will try to help, if we can. Won't we, Mistress?"

  The Slave Queen did not reply.

  For an entire day, Lisinthir gave the appearance of ignoring the shuttle crew, which suited them: they ignored him in return. He read briefings, napped and ate the food they brought him, bowls of raw food they must have bought at the station. Thankfully most of it was fruit or vegetable, but he refused the raw meat that arrived with supper.

  He slept on the long couch, and poorly, which was for the best—the crew had waited for him to sleep before examining him, and with his eyes closed and his breathing slowed to mimic sleep he listened to them discuss his long "weak" limbs and claw-less fingers and strange flat face. "Like a human," the Pilot said at last, "except prettier."

  They laughed at that but left him alone.

  The following afternoon, the shuttle coasted to a halt in the middle of a featureless stretch of space, as if casting an anchor into the fathomless nothing. Upon leaving the closet the Chatcaava had disguised as a washroom, Lisinthir glanced out the viewports, then sauntered onto the shuttle's bridge. Four heads snapped to face him.

  "Any particular reason we've stopped?" Lisinthir asked idly in Chatcaavan. "The view certainly isn't impressive."

  They looked at one another, then at him.

  "Come, come," Lisinthir said. "You might as well tell me. I'm not leaving until I know."

  One of the crew reached out with a finger, as if threatening to poke him. Lisinthir watched the digit approach, fixing his expression of lazy amusement while taking stock of the length and curve of the talon that sprang off the finger-tip. He wondered how the Chatcaava ever manipulated anything with knives on their fingers.

  "You do not fear my touch?" the Chatcaavan asked. Was he disappointed? It was hard to tell.

  "Should I?" Lisinthir asked. "Back to the matter at hand, ah? Why have we stopped?"

  The alien retracted his hand with a jerk. The Pilot said, "We await Third, who will escort you the rest of the way into the Empire."

  "Ah, Third," Lisinthir said. "Splendid. I should like to meet him."

  The Pilot eyed him. "I am sure your feeling of splendor is reciprocated by Third."

  "Incoming," one of the other Chatcaava said.

  A new shuttle phased into view: no, more than a shuttle. A luxury transport, perhaps, if something so aggressively shaped could be called a transport.

  "Your ride," the Pilot said.

  "Ah, at last. Something large enough to have a proper bathroom," Lisinthir said.

  The Pilot said nothing.

  The transfer process was as painless as it would have been between Alliance vessels. The Chatcaava sent his luggage and then him through their equivalent of a Pad; he stepped out of it and into a round room lined in benches with satin cushions, red, orange, an eye-watering blue. Lisinthir had time to wonder if the Chatcaava saw the same color range as humanoids before the door slid back into a pocket and a vaguely colored male stepped through. He was not quite brown nor gray, but some sickly in-between. He had more horns than the other males had sported, however, and for all the poor lot given him by genetics his scales and mane were glossy and his eyes, red as new blood, glinted with interest as they ran over Lisinthir from crown to toe.

  "I am Third," the male said.

  "I am the Ambassador," Lisinthir replied. "The Chatcaava have odd taste in receiving rooms."

  "This is no receiving room, but the quarters we have had furnished for you," Third replied.

  Lisinthir glanced at the pillows, the curtains, felt the give of the floor beneath his boots. The adrenaline rush—was it anger or fear? He was glad he didn't need to examine it closely to use it. "Surely you jest."

  "It does not please you?" the male asked, canting his head and fixing his ruby stare on Lisinthir's face.

  "This looks like a /bordello/," Lisinthir said. He sought an appropriate word in their tongue. "A place for keeping slaves and other non-entities. Spare me your pretty cushions and padded floor. Get me to a real room, unless you intend to do me insult."

  Third half-lidded his eyes. "I thought you would appreciate soft pillows to rest on. All the previous Alliance ambassadors have expressed distaste for our furniture."

  "They were fools," Lisinthir said. "Show me to proper quarters."

  "Fools?" Third asked. "You show such open contempt for them?"

  "I must not be speaking your language clearly," Lisinthir said, cutting off each word with his teeth, "or you must have damaged hearing. I have requested a new room twice. Do not force me to ask you a third time."

  Third folded his arms over his chest. Lisinthir waited. Finally Third grinned, a gaping of his beak that showed off all the razor-fine teeth lining his maw. "Very well, then. Do not complain later that I did not offer you the softest room on the ship."

  "Soft bores me," Lisinthir said.

  The sound Third made almost sounded like a laugh. He turned and led the Eldritch down a tall but cramped hall and into more austere quarters. His trunk arrived shortly thereafter, and once it had Lisinthir sat on it and drew in a long breath. According to his materials, Third was a valued member of the court—the Emperor's left hand, where Second was his right. But if the former ambassadors hadn't flubbed their observations, Third was also responsible for the shadier workings of the Imperial Court, and as such was a male Lisinthir couldn't afford to treat kindly. The Chatcaava did not respect kindness, even as they punished insult. Finding the line between enough arrogance to be taken seriously and not enough to get himself into a fight would be difficult. He'd won over a dozen duels at home, but he didn't care to take his chances with people who could insist on bare hands. Particularly when they had talons to shame an eagle and more teeth than sharks.

  Another day, and they'd present him to the Emperor, and the game would truly begin. If he could keep it on this level, he would manage well. He might even enjoy it.

  It was near dawn when hesitant footsteps woke the Slave Queen from her light sleep near the window. She raised her head, blinking the dreams from her lenses, and looked toward the stairwell.

  The Mother stood there, leaning on the wall. At the sight of her, the Queen hastened to her feet and joined her.

  "Flower's ring," the Mother said, passing her a slim thread of braided silver. "This one brought it earlier but the Slave Queen was not here."

  The Queen cradled the piece in her palm, her head dipping. It had become grim custom for the female who was currently the Mother to slip her a piece of jewelry culled from the body of one of the harem members after her death. In the beginning, when the Emperor was new and his reign still unstable, she had acquired a macabre selection of rings, bracelets, armlets, anklets, waist, tail and horn dangles, gifts to the loyal who had been less than careful with those gifts. The deaths had slackened as the seasons passed and the petty kings had bowed their heads to the Emperor's clawed foot. Flower's ring was the first death-marker the Slave Queen had accepted in two revolutions.

  "She died during the evening?"

  "Not long after the Slave Queen left," the Mother said.

  "Alas," the Slave Queen said, turning the ring on her palm. "Thank you, Mother."

  "That is not all the news," the Mother said. "This one gives you warning: the presentation is due in a day, and this one will not be able to help you dress."

  "A day!" the Slave Queen exclaimed, then softened her voice so as not to awake Khaska. "The new Ambassador then?"

  "Third left after the use of Flower to escort him-the-alien to the Heart," the Mother said, "or so rumor speaks."

  ...and so rumor might misspeak, went the end of that particular adage. The Slave Queen said, "
Thank you for the warning. Your help will be missed during the preparation."

  The Mother smiled at her and began her slow return to the harem proper.

  Once again, the Chatcaava left him alone save to bring him the occasional meal. His new quarters had neither viewport nor ship's computer access, so he contented himself with his data tablet and ignored the near certainty that he was under surveillance. His first warning that they were approaching their destination was the trembling of the floor and walls. By the time Third arrived an hour later, Lisinthir had showered and changed into his second best court coat, cinnamon red and embroidered in copper and midnight blue accents.

  "We have landed," said the Chatcaavan. "You will come with me."

  Lisinthir followed him through the corridors and down a ramp, at last to the air that would sustain him for the next two years... into an evening almost plum-purple, strewn with stars and two moons, one low and white and the other high and ruddy. The transport had landed on a pad near the sea, and though the smells were slightly off, still Lisinthir could taste the tang of salt on the breeze that ruffled the folds near his gathered cuffs. The world itself seemed huge—the horizons unusually distant, the sky unusually wide and tall, the stars very far away.

  None of it compared to the towers. They rose in splendid isolation from a plateau above the port, so tall they were lost to the haze of the dusk and Lisinthir's uncertain eyesight. Slim and unexpectedly graceful, the pale cylinders had been inset with panels of color that shone like faceted gems, and these panels gave rise to glittering buttresses that supported elongated onion domes.

  "The city?" Lisinthir asked.

  "Merely the palace," Third said. "The city is a day away... " He eyed Lisinthir contemptuously. "By foot, two days."

  "Ah," Lisinthir said.

  Third pointed. "The stairs, there. Climb them."

  Lisinthir squinted, could barely make out the steps carved into the cliff-face that led up from the port.