I stared at her in disbelief, remembering, perfectly, every slice of her teeth through my flesh. “You fed it my mass?”
She pretended to be surprised by my outrage. “Surely you didn’t expect me to risk mine against a superior force. My decoy bought you and your precious Human time to escape, did it not?”
“Decoy—” I couldn’t speak for an instant. Then, somehow, I found my voice. “You know what it learned from your—decoy.”
Hesitation. I watched her fingers tighten around one another.
“You know,” I told her, lowering my tone in pure threat, remembering how Paul and I had arrived too late, how we’d found Ersh’s home, my home, destroyed; everything Ersh had been, the source of our Web, entombed in her mountain. The darkest day of my long life.
Because Death had assimilated Skalet-memory from her decoy, and knew where to go.
“Yes.” Oddly subdued for Skalet.
“ ‘Yes.’” I put both paws on the table and leaned into the face of my Elder, hoping my breath was unpleasant. “Have you dared return to Picco’s Moon since?”
Skalet’s head dropped forward, as if she studied the painful-looking knot her hands had become. The braids on either side of her face slipped past her shoulders, puddling on the stone table like drying blood. But the voice emanating from that shelter was as calm and cold as ever. “I was reminded of it, lately. And how the past shows us the needs of the present. I maneuvered you here because I need the ability Ersh gave you, Youngest. Give it to me.”
I didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Skalet must have been on that Kraal ship, must have seen how I’d killed our enemy. She had to know I’d assimilated the secret of traveling through space, a secret only Ersh could have kept hidden in her flesh from the rest of our Web. “No.” My sensitive ears caught the echo from Paul’s lips, though almost silent. Don’t.
Skalet’s head rose within a flood of red and black. “Why? Is it so dangerous? So painful? Or so valuable only you may own it? I should be the judge, as your Elder. It’s too important to risk in your flesh alone.” Her voice deepened. “Esen-alit-Quar. Will you share it?”
Share. Every part of me ached at the word, knew its grip as a hunger. I panted to dump heat and stay in a form that considered biting a social skill, not a way to rip mass from another and learn.
If Skalet felt the longing, she controlled it better than I. Or did she?
I realized, as abruptly as the wink of light from crystal, that we were no longer Eldest and Youngest—and had never been equals. “I am Senior Assimilator of the Web of Esen,” I told her, reminding myself and Paul that things were not as they had been. “I share only what I choose to share, as Ersh did before me.”
But Skalet had waited for my awareness, calculated its arrival precisely; I knew by the satisfied way she relaxed into her chair. And I’d seen that smile before. “While I am helpless to conceal anything within my flesh,” Skalet admitted, much too calmly. “How unfair, ’tween. Ersh and I had so many—uncomfortable—disagreements which could have been avoided had I your ability; while I truly don’t care if you know everything I know.”
Never underestimate a Kraal. Skalet, a devoted student of that twisted culture, had taught me that. I saw my danger just in time. I dared not seem a threat to her, not here, not with Paul so close. “I wouldn’t—”
“Oh, I couldn’t stop you, Senior Assimilator. Or could I?” The smile became a sneer. “What if I ate all of you? I could, you know.”
Paul turned an interesting color. I tried to ignore his presence; I hoped Skalet continued to do the same. With an effort, I unwrinkled my snout and finally sat down at her table. Two could play Kraal games. “Then you wouldn’t get what you want,” I stated. “I excised my memories of how to move through space from my mass—which would be another of those things, Eldest, I can do that you can’t.”
Her eyes flashed to Paul’s pendant. Ersh, she was quick. “Take it, if you wish,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “Assimilate the iota of my web-mass within. It’s a message—an introduction—to any of our kind Paul might encounter in the future. You might benefit from the concepts of friendship and trust.”
“Irrelevant,” Skalet concluded, looking back at me. “So this is how you gained information from Ersh after her death. She left such—messages—behind.” She tapped the tabletop lightly. “Which means you are quite right to chide me for neglecting our ancestor, Youngest. I should have returned to her pile of rock well before now. Imagine the opportunity I’ve wasted following your juvenile exploits, when I could have simply gone to the source.”
“Then it isn’t you?” I blurted.
A lifted brow. “You really should try to speak more clearly, Esen. ‘Isn’t me’what?”
I closed my jaw, prepared to be stubborn. Skalet merely turned to Paul. “Well, Human? What more would she like to accuse me of?”
Paul gave me that inscrutable look meaning he either saw an advantage to Skalet knowing, or somehow believed he had no choice but to answer. “Mining Ersh’s mountain,” he told her.
“So that’s how the past found its way home,” she said under her breath. I doubted Paul could hear. “But she must have known—why no report?” Skalet’s face contorted with rage as I saw my web-kin lose control for the first time in my life, or in Ersh-memory, for that matter. She leaped to her feet, shouting: “How dare she betray me! I’ll flay her tattoos from her face! I’ll have her misbegotten family annihilated! I’ll—”
When she stopped to take a breath, I couldn’t help myself—too angry at my own betrayer to be careful. “Don’t tell me you trusted an ephemeral.”
I should have remembered more about Skalet before daring to taunt her. I felt bone shatter within my snout as the force of her blow drove me from chair to the floor, to land in a mass of broken crystal and serpitay-soaked hides.
Through the confusion of pain and noise, I knew Paul tried to come to my aid. He mustn’t. Blinking red from the eye that could see, I fumbled for the fallen chair, using it to pull myself up until I could grip the edge of the table with a paw. A Kraal child knew how to snap a neck.
A long thin hand under my arm yanked me the rest of the way, shoved me into another chair. “Here.” A cold lump of ice was pressed into one of my paws. “Put this on the side before it swells.” I tried to throw it back at her, tried to find Paul.
“Do what she says, Esen.” His low voice came from the side where I was blind and I sagged with relief. His hands stopped my attempt to turn my head to see him with my good eye, leaving me to watch Skalet until I could no longer blink fast enough to keep the lens clear of blood.
“You endure, Youngest.” She sounded pleasantly surprised. Another lie. Skalet knew I couldn’t cycle through web-form when we were this close. It would incite her to change as well, with Paul’s living mass within easy reach.
“No thanks to you,” Paul snarled as if he’d been the one born with fangs. I tested with my tongue to be sure I retained both of mine, then winced as he lifted my lip to make his own assessment. “She needs a med-tech, not ice. There’s broken bone and cartilage, here and below the eye.” My turn. I grabbed at him, feeling for damage or a telltale flinch. He caught my paws and held them for an instant before putting them back on the table. “I’m okay, Es. Our gracious hostess didn’t smash my face, only yours.”
“If anyone should have learned not to arouse my temper, it’s your young friend,” Skalet informed him with her usual callous disregard for ephemeral notions of morality or behavior. “There’s no need for treatment. This is a useless form she wears out of sentimentality. Take her to the bedroom where she can cycle before she bleeds herself dizzy. I’ve left clothes for you both there.”
I expected—and feared—Paul would begin a senseless and potentially dangerous argument. Instead, I felt his arms go beneath my knees and behind my back, sliding me gently off the chair and against his body before he stood. Crystal snapped beneath his feet as he adjusted to my weight. Then, with inf
inite care, my Human web-kin carried me away from my true web-kin.
When did we become, I thought through waves of pain, another of those ironies Ersh would have enjoyed?
Otherwhere
SHE replaced the incense by the glow of the spent stick’s embers. The chest’s smooth black lacquer was centuries old, rumored to predate the arrival of the Kraal in this sector of space; its complex designs of powdered gems and blood had been inlaid over generations. Affiliations were recorded here as well as scored in flesh.
Her hands stroked the doors as she drew them closed, a caress that reset ancient traps and loaded poisons. The family of Pa-Admiral Mocktap had never been careless.
With two exceptions.
Fragrant smoke curled its way to freedom through the nostrils of the sleepless dragons lying atop the chest, having bathed the canister holding ashes from Sybil-ru, the first Mocktap to reach the rank of admiral. Ashes and a name some families would have tossed aside, bending their history into a more palatable shape.
The present-day Admiral Mocktap valued both as reminders. Sybil-ru’s carelessness hadn’t been arranging the theft from the crypt of the extinct House of Kraslakor. That had been a political maneuver—an apparently unsuccessful one, given the artifacts had never been used to gain status. They’d simply vanished.
No, Sybil-ru’s carelessness had been to traffic in a new poison without verifying the antidote in her possession was the real one, something that became embarrassingly obvious when she died from it herself.
Turning on lamps almost as old as the chest, Mocktap went to her desk. It was home to an incongruously modern comp system. She’d tossed a veil over it, a priceless antique in the subtle golds and reds of a master weaver—an heirloom, last worn by the First Daughter of the House of Kraslakor, on the day of her assassination.
More recently, the veil had been offered as a bribe to her own affiliates, who’d been checking on the known associates of Rudy Lefebvre, Human and otherwise.
Ervickian slime.
Information had eventually spilled from the one mouth they’d left working. Valuable information, to one who understood. Nothing useful about Lefebvre; their working relationship had ended badly, to the Human’s credit, no doubt. But to counter their obvious and pain-filled disappointment, the Ervickian had offered the veil, then crates bursting with treasure, then a mountain on Picco’s Moon.
She’d sent her affiliates, who found the mountain had a secret of its own: traces of a refined substance, previously unknown to Kraal science. She’d sent additional staff to control the source, then collect more in order to determine its properties. The House of Mocktap hadn’t claimed the glory of recovering the Kraslakor Artifacts, despite the pleased and curious rumblings through every affiliation. Let those bored with made-up feuds find a new one more to their taste. There was more power in secrets.
Using tongs, Mocktap lifted the filmy fabric and dropped it in a container beside the desk. The poison still impregnating every thread caused paralysis within a second. Death took much longer. After all, she’d want to talk to anyone interested in her private files.
The Botharan, Lefebvre, had copies of a select few—sufficient to start him moving in the direction she chose, begin thinking as she wished. She’d given the overzealous fool, Cristoffen, more than his share of information and almost lost control of him—a mistake she would not make again. At least Cristoffen’s theatrics had attracted Lefebvre’s attention at the right time. She was confident Lefebvre would have no difficulty obtaining whatever he needed from Cristoffen and that buffoon, Kearn. Perhaps he would kill them for her in the process.
And once Lefebvre learned the full truth about Paul, Esolesy-ki, and their pathetic band of spies? When he knew about the Other?
He would be the assassin’s blade in her hand, honed and ready for use.
Mocktap ran her tongue over her lips. A dangerous and cunning individual. With a body promising stamina as well as bruising strength. Had she been younger, with fewer affiliations to serve, she might have kept Lefebvre another few hours, or days. There were drugs one added to the serpitay that produced effective reactions. If they both survived, she’d consider it for their next meeting. She wasn’t that old.
How old was her closest affiliate and mentor, the ascetic S’kal-ru?
That question had been the key. How old? S’kal-ru showed almost no signs of aging, or allowed none, shaving her head and eyebrows, dressing either for battle or in styles that were so out of fashion they’d be a joke on anyone else.
Not that anyone laughed at S’kal-ru.
Not that S’kal-ru laughed either. Mocktap scowled, confounded by an affiliate who had no appetites, no pleasures she’d been able to discern during years of hunting for weakness. A passion for the past: the most obscure detail could come out of that bald, ugly head, always correct. Perfectionism: S’kal-ru was proficient in all aspects of war, from hand-to-hand to arcane technology, and expected the same of her affiliates. If her lack of friendly vices hadn’t made her such uncomfortable company, S’kal-ru’s talents could have centered her in a maze of high-status temporary alliances—her bloodline a prize for the usually deadly game of courtship. That she chose otherwise had made her the courier of choice for three noble Houses: entrusted with their policy, authorized to make decisions on the battlefield, ranks etched into her skin to command instant and complete obedience from any affiliated Kraal.
Hers was a voice of power.
A voice of lies. Pa-Admiral Mocktap pressed her lips together, as if summoning courage, then called up her files, patiently obeying requests for her identity and purpose, providing the layers of code that protected its contents from a pair of eyes far more dangerous than Rudy Lefebvre’s. She wouldn’t have dared unlock her files, even on her own ship, in her own cabin, if she didn’t know those eyes were both distracted and safely distant.
S’kal-ru’s eyes. The traitor.
As Sybil-ru, Mocktap knew herself a failure of her lineage, the next so-careless as to swear affiliation to one who meant ruin to her House. S’kal-ru’s attention, that of a proven courier, had been flattering; her reputation as a tactician—as adept at system-wide warfare as the greeting table with its etiquette of poison and lies—beyond question. Who wouldn’t have gravitated to such a potent combination of independent wealth and old affiliation?
Who wouldn’t have gloried in success after success?
Then, the battle where everything changed, where ships were lost under her command to error and an unbelievably powerful biological weapon. Despicable, cowardly orders from S’kal-ru to destroy the only prototype rather than attempt its acquisition for the Kraal, losing their only chance for an outcome that wasn’t abject failure.
S’kal-ru had made sure Mocktap’s career survived that stain, even flourished during years of supposedly hunting the creators of that weapon—but at the cost of neglecting other affiliations. There were assassination attempts, credit difficulties, the withdrawal of alliances. Forced closer and closer to S’kal-ru for her very life, Mocktap found herself playing incomprehensible games that had nothing to do with movement within the Kraal hierarchy or status. Nothing to do with success. The most recent, the harrowing of the Lishcyn out of the Fringe, had ended with the creature’s escape and the shaming of Mocktap’s elite troops. S’kal-ru’s inexplicable disappearance had left her responsible. As a direct consequence, the admiral had changed her locks and now prepared her own food.
The closer your allies, the less you dared trust them. Mocktap’s affiliates had spied on S’kal-ru from the beginning of their relationship; it was expected, though they never reported anything but that admirable lack of weakness—suspicious of itself. No one should be that perfect. No one was. Following the disastrous battle, Mocktap’s self-preserving curiosity had turned into a drive for vengeance, and she hunted S’kal-ru’s secrets alone, with a tireless patience fueled by the pointless, inglorious deaths of thirteen thousand, five hundred, and nine. The complements of three
cruisers; the cream of affiliates from the House of Mocktap. Her blood, wasted.
But Mocktap had found nothing to refute any of S’kal-ru’s claims from that day, nothing to anchor her suspicion that her mentor knew more than she revealed, until that fateful afternoon when she’d explored the family chest, driven by some need to connect with the earlier failure of her House, Sybil-ru. She’d found someone else.
Sybil-ru’s ashes weren’t the only ones bathing in fresh incense tonight. Among the tiny canisters of Mocktaps Great and Glorious, Mocktap had discovered one for Uriel-ro, a young nephew, thrice removed, of no recorded accomplishment or affiliation. A nothing. Yet family records showed how Sybil-ru had insisted his remains be represented here, in the chest that must be carried by the head of their House into every battle, an honorable internment that had taken place two weeks before her own fatal miscalculation.
The incongruity had drawn Mocktap’s attention. She’d waited for one of S’kal-ru’s frequent trips away before taking Uriel-ro’s canister and dumping its contents on a cloth.
No ashes at all. Only a single withered leaf—duras—and an image, cued to project when the canister was breached. Later, Mocktap confirmed her suspicion that only the hands of someone genetically linked to Sybil-ru could have triggered the projection.
At the time, the Kraal could only sit and stare at a perfect replica of S’kal-ru, sealed in that canister before she herself had been born.
Knowing she’d found the true question: how old was S’kal-ru?
Mocktap’s hands wanted to shake at the memory; she forbade them. She’d had the background of the image analyzed. There was only one place known to the Kraal Confederacy where fist-sized gems lay on the ground: Picco’s Moon.
Picco’s Moon, where a smuggler had uncovered the Kraslakor Artifacts, the same stolen by Admiral Sybil-ru Mocktap, which he’d sold to the Ervickian. According to the dying creature, the smuggler had claimed the crates must have been hidden on that mountain for over three standard centuries.
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