Prisoners of Darkness

by Jason Anspach

  “Take care of yourself, Chhun,” Keel called after him.

  “Always do,” replied the legionnaire as he made his way down the ramp. “KTF, Captain… Keel.”

  “KTF,” Keel replied.

  ***

  Chhun watched from the gleaming black floor of the docking bay as the Indelible VI rose up off the deck by its repulsors. He could see Keel and Ravi in the cockpit until the ship slowly made an about face, orienting itself toward the large shield array that served as the entrance to and exit from Intrepid’s docking bay.

  The modified freighter hovered slowly forward to the illuminated trench in the docking bay that warned personnel not to cross—the engines-free zone. The Six’s twin engines then flashed a gorgeous light blue, and the ship rocketed out of the hangar bay, banking “down” and out of sight with a flawless corkscrew roll.

  “So…” asked Masters, “what do we do now?”

  Chhun pushed his tongue against the corner of his mouth. “Same thing we did the last time he left. Complete our mission.”

  07

  The Grand Pavilion of the Zhee Tribes

  The Near Wastes of Ankalor

  The Grand Pavilion of the Mighty Khan was indeed grand in delivering the expectations of opulence and excess. Jebba Monteau knew he was seeing something few in the galaxy-spanning Republic would ever see.

  But Jebba Monteau bore, with great stoicism and pride, advanced degrees in Zhee Studies, and was considered one of the foremost protégés of the great zhee apologist who advised the most-worthies of the select councils of the House of Reason. Plus, he was good-looking, tall, thin, and scholarly in precisely that way that all the entertainments liked to cast the right leading man professor-type. Types with the right ideas that must be acted out seriously and with a certain gravitas in their contrived social justice playlets, performed by extroverted movie stars who would be entirely unsuited to the realities of introverted academia. This was why Jebba was cast by the House of Reason, or rather recruited. It was his job to sell an idea, and an offer, to the zhee.

  Now, it was one thing to study the zhee. The richness of their ancient culture. The enigmatic nature of their power structures, and struggle. The nobility and almost backward nature of their patriarchal and, unfortunately, blatantly racist culture. That was all fine and good in the lecture halls. It was another thing to go out to one of their worlds and engage with them in real life.

  That was a deadly thing indeed.

  It was a smelly thing in practice.

  It was a thing one might not come back from, in truth.

  In fact, during his doctoral studies on zhee inheritance rights, Jebba had been part of a diplomatic mission out to Ankalor—guarded by a Repub marine embassy detachment of course—in which one of the female students had been kidnapped, despite assurances by the city’s Grand Wutti that they would be safe deep inside the fetid zhee slums. It turned out there were three Grand Wuttis that year, and they were having a little power struggle they hadn’t bothered to inform anyone about. They’d found the dead Tennar graduate student three days later, raped and mutilated. The zhee were dancing, trance-like, in the streets surrounding the scene of the murder, waving their kankari knives and mumbling their blasphemies.

  It was one thing to study the zhee.

  It was another thing to meet them.

  And of course, the Grand Pavilion on Ankalor at Mahlumba, this year, this hottest of sweaty years when the stink of the zhee made the fear and anger a thing you could reach out and touch, was indeed all those things… and it was grand.

  Mooma, the zhee diplomatic contact, was ever turning back to Jebba as he led him through the outer courts of the Grand Pavilion. He would raise his baleful donkey eyes with delight every time some new exotic and forbidden pleasure was revealed in some richly carpeted inner sanctum of the Grand Pavilion.

  His pride was quite evident at the Court of Ten Thousand Concubines. A place where the most beautiful females from every species the zhee favored with their near-insatiable lust lay waiting, draped in Tantor silk and drugged to the eyeballs on gilamine, waiting to be used by the Grand Khan of Eternal Battle for whatever delights he might imagine.

  But their ultimate destination was far more impressive to Jebba. The Paradise of Fountains. They found this place after threading vast chasms of tapestry-laden “walls” deep within the Grand Pavilion.

  Jebba looked up into the heights of the tent. Far overhead, strange and exotic birds flitted among the golden support beams. Below them, in silver filigreed “trees,” bunches of fat grapes the size of a baby’s head waited to be cut by a silver blade and fed to any of the lounging zhee headmen most favored by the Grand Khan Who Will Lead Us to the Slaughter that year. And the fountains themselves spouted milky white surges of ruhrak, the fermented drink of the zhee.

  Jebba noted with awe the ornately mosaicked tiles beneath the pooling ruhrak. Tiles the color of the universe were inlaid with the zhee’s ancient astrogation charts in filigreed and scrolled silver and gold. The zhee had once been learned astrogators, advanced even by the state of the many starfaring races humanity had discovered. Once, they might have discovered the entire galaxy on their own. But they had abandoned that possibility of hope and exploration in favor of something more satisfying—to them. Something in zhee history had made them turn away from that lost age of learning, seeking instead warfare, bloodshed, and mayhem. Ever carving out their slice of the worlds in whatever back yard of someone else’s they found themselves grazing in.

  But as Jebba gazed at the wondrous mosaics, he couldn’t help but think that deep inside their art, those ancient yearnings still revealed themselves, lying there like they might be taken up when all the matters of bloodshed, war, endless revenge, and lust were finally sated.

  A corpulent zhee headman extended a silver pitcher down into the bubbly murk of the fountain Jebba and Mooma stopped beside. Some unseen musician, blinded as per custom, as Jebba most certainly knew, delicately worked at a disembodied string of notes on his haunting flute. The Hitherene bone pipe. The silver pitcher, carved with images of slaughter, was proffered to the human as though some great honor were being extended. And of course, it was. Indeed, this was a great honor.

  Jebba took it, held it to his forehead—a thing that was commanded by zhee protocols—and when he had received the customary barest of nods and the baleful donkey look of contempt from the permitting zhee, Jebba drank, ignoring the sour pungency of the beverage that assaulted his nose, slaked his thirst, and bent his mind.

  It burned like liquid fire in one instant. It cooled liked like polar ice in the next. And then—as one epicurean described it, after managing to taste an illegally smuggled vintage and before ultimately paying with his life, courtesy of a zhee assassin squad, for daring to tell the galaxy—then it was like slipping into the warm bath of shock just before dying.

  The hours that passed seemed like a summer’s dream of something pleasant and satisfyingly murderous.

  The zhee, who now switched over to their ancient language, which Jebba had learned over many long years, gathered around the drunken-stoned human representative of the Galactic Republic and mummed-hawed their promises of galaxy-wide destruction. Reminding themselves and the dreaming listener of all the murder and mayhem and greatness they’d been achieving before humanity arrived on the scene with their magical little hyperdrive. Yes, yes, the zhee intoned at that drawing of their silver, shiny, almost hypnotically damascened blades to the drug-stupefied delight of the human, yes, given time they would have conquered all the star systems, eaten all the races, all of this at sublight speed, for sublight speed was where the magic of time, speed, and mayhem reached an art form worthy of their lineage.

  It was in that moment, as they touched him and assured him he was ever a friend to the mighty zhee, that he was most acutely aware, in a distant sort of way, that he would die soon, because it would be an easy thing for them to frenzy all around him and, with him under the influence of the fermented r
uhrak, stab him a thousand times.

  The zhee rituals called that particular hell “Paradise by a Thousand Cuts.” When done perfectly, the victim survived the first nine hundred and ninety-nine, and lived. It was the perfection of the thousandth strike that indicated the level of mastery of the murderer. And of course, that took practice, and so there were all the lives that had served merely as practice for the zhee.

  Lives ended so that the zhee might master perfection.

  If this was done right, then a zhee was authorized to wear the crimson turban as opposed to the ordinary hoods of the common zhee. Hoods that covered and concealed their donkey faces in some sort of secret shame they had ever carried with them along the star roads of endless conflict.

  Jebba noticed now, somewhat absently, that every zhee surrounding him was wearing the turban. The red turban that indicated mastery of Paradise by a Thousand Cuts.

  It was in that moment he was, as has been said, distantly aware that he was about to die. Experiencing this most fabled of zhee feats for himself, finally.

  Side by side, dawning horror and keen desire danced and circled about each other in a push-pull waltz that only stars and stellar bodies understood.

  It was one thing to study the zhee.

  It was another to meet them.

  In time the delirium of the ruhrak faded while some distant zither played on and on, as hypnotizing as the insects that buzzed about the courts, mixing with all the pleasant and unpleasant smells. Calling Jebba back to the waking death the zhee called life.

  Mooma lifted him to his feet and led him on past other halls and forbidden courts. Past the Temple of Wives, where the donkey-faced beauties of the Grand Warlord of the All-Conquered Slave Races could never be gazed upon by unclean eyes. That sight was forbidden unto the penalty of death. And if the eyes were not the large, coal-dark baleful eyes of the zhee, then of course they were unclean.

  Of course.

  Mooma averted even his own long zhee muzzle from the direction of the promised hidden beauties lying imprisoned in silken shrines.

  In time they came to the Courts of Enlightenment, and it was here that Jebba tasted the thick dark coffee of the zhee inner home worlds. Steam and heat mixed with the bright polish of brass as delicate bone china cups were brought forth while the kaffa machines howled in demonic hisses, screeching out the pain required to brew the dark delight.

  “Zhee were the first bring kaffa to the galaxy.”

  Jebba nodded. So wise. So true. Never mind all the evidence to the contrary. Never mind the truth. The zhee were most-favored in the symposiums of the House of Reason, and of course they must be treated as the rich and diverse culture-bringers they were made out to be. The zhee were like some Prometheus bringing the fire of knowledge contained within the thick dark syrup they called kaffa.

  Some revisionists said it was actually lost and fabled Earth that first brewed this magic conconction. But of course, those were just crackpots writing their lies in the obscurity of unverified publishing. Madmen who’d never attained tenure at all the greatest and most noble universities.

  Mooma leaned close over their brews.

  Mooma is different from all the rest of the zhee. Even Jebba knows this. Jebba thinks of the zhee diplomatic functionary as a kind of citizen of the galaxy, much like himself. More scholar than holy warrior fanatic. Unlike the murderous zealots, male, female and child, of the many tribes of the wandering zhee nations.

  To take life is the privilege of zhee, as the old proverb goes.

  So wise. So much to learn from this.

  The dark brew awakens Jebba’s mind, reminding him of all his scholarly learnings he has accrued in order to be called wise in the ways of zhee. He ruminates on the wonder of even being inside the Grand Pavilion, an experience known to few even among the zhee, and to fewer still of the Galactic Republic.

  “What is it that you bring his Immensity of Purpose and Bloodshed?” snorts Mooma in that deep swallowed huffy voice all zhee have. As though they are chewing and have terrible sinus-laden head colds.

  Jebba smiles, buying time, and thinks how to maneuver within the confines of the culture to which he has devoted his life’s work. Because, of course, this is yet another way in which one can die among the zhee.

  Even the zhee do not trust the zhee. Another proverb.

  The inner machinations of the zhee are Eastern and Byzantine in the extremist sense. They make other cultures look naïve and child-like when it comes to intrigue, backstabbing, and generations of mistrust. The zhee life is struggle. Even if they must struggle against one another when there is no one else to struggle against. And so what Mooma is asking is in no way innocent. It is no mere exchange of information. It is a play for advantage. A seeking for room in which to maneuver. And who knows whom Mooma truly serves? The zhee have four gods. And all their gods are trying constantly to slaughter one another.

  So it goes with the zhee.

  “I have my nose,” intones Jebba over the delicate bone cup. He closes his eyes, pleased that he has applied the right proverb at the right moment to effect what he perceives to be a deft escape. And tactical, too. A sense of elite satisfaction in being able to speak the language at its deepest root warmly reassures Jebba that he is a player.

  The zhee merely stares at him. Betraying none of his disgust or contempt that a mere slave species would dare to use the utterings of the Prophet.

  And yet the game is to probe and to know.

  And the game is still a-hoof, even though the first cut has failed.

  Mooma feints, conceals, and waits to strike another time. Like any zhee might.

  “Of course,” murmur-rumbles Mooma. “Of course, my friend. Only the Grand Butcher of the Galaxy may know of your most generous offer. It is just… it is just that obviously you will become a great friend among the zhee-aroi…” Mooma has honored the human by using the zhee name used only among the zhee. It is like dangling a piece of stupid bait on a hook in front of a snakefish. Pride will make the snakefish inhale its hood and strike out at the barbed trap. To Mooma, Jebba is the stupid snakefish. Mooma is hoping pride will make the stupid hooma, as the zhee call humans, do the same as the snakefish.

  Jebba is flattered in the extreme that “zhee-aroi” has been used in his presence. It is like being invited into a secret club one has known about and waited so long to be invited into.

  Of course, Jebba’s mind is also playing chess as far ahead as he can possibly make the moves, knowing that a mistake here leads him closer to death than he’s ever been. But like so many gamblers, he’s become more than a little bit addicted by a few easy victories, and allows himself to disbelieve the maxim that the house always wins. And he cannot help but to think, briefly, of next year, when he teaches back at Hallgate on Utopion—the top tier of the elite colleges and where the House of Reason send their young to receive the most proper of educations—and to fantasize about how this little tale will dazzle the students. How it will captivate the beauties among them whom he has selected for his own delight-filled tutoring. He always has two or three a semester.

  It’s as good for them as it is for him, he has oft told himself in the farewells of end-of-the-semester breaking-offs.

  “I just want our friendship to precede the great honor you are about to receive,” huff-whispers the zhee, leaning in close over the brass-topped tables. Other zhee recline on rich-tufted leather couches, arguing and plotting their endless murders of succession and promises to one day feast on the smoking entrails of the slave races of the galaxy.

  “I am flattered and honored,” replies Jebba properly. “But the gem I bring is for the Mighty Khan alone. And of course he decides whether the gem is a gem, or even if the truth is the truth.” Jebba bows his head, and so must Mooma at this most sacred of prophetic murmurings.

  Damn this hooma, thinks the zhee.

  “And what if it is not a gem?” continues Jebba after the refrain. “What if the truth I tell you is not the truth that is desired by
him I should not name?”

  The zhee stares at him. Whether cautiously or balefully, neither can be known to the human due to the zhee’s strange anatomy.

  “Where would you be then, my pack-friend?” lectures Jebba, like he’s holding forth before a classroom of children.

  Mooma, of course, knows the wisdom of this. And hates the hooma even more for reminding him of it.

  The zhee reaches out a hairy paw and strokes Jebba’s hairless arm beneath the rolled-up white cotton shirt. Jebba has that “ever-seeking-knowledge adventurer” look all the hooma seem to think is required of them. White shirts and khaki pants. As though they are always on safari.

  “You are indeed the best of my friends…” says Mooma. “To the zhee, and to this simple pony.”

  A gong that must be eight stories tall sounds once across the many secret rooms that lie beneath the Grand Pavilion. When they see it, or rather, when Jebba sees it for the first time, he will see that the massive brass gong is indeed eight stories tall, and that its twin lies beside it, guarding the Doors of Heaven that are thick tapestries, woven in enigmatic circle mazes like star systems never known, guarding the entrance to Grand Audience, an audience with the one Jebba has come to offer a gift to on behalf of the Galactic Republic, but really the House of Reason because that’s all that really counts in the big grand scheme of favor and tribute.

  “We have been summoned,” whispers Mooma reverently, and even Jebba smells the sudden stink of fear the zhee cannot help themselves from making in such terrible moments. “Let us go.”

  ***

  The stories-tall thick curtains were drawn aside as Mooma and Jebba approached the inner sanctum. They’d had to pass through a series of security checkpoints where zhee platoons, armed with compact yet powerful Dantarri blasters, held them at gunpoint while prior clearances were cross-checked. Jebba had no doubt that heavy weapons teams waited just beyond the curtains nearby, ready, willing, and eager to charge in and blast everyone with high-cycle fire in order to protect the Grand Khan from the vaguest hint of an assassination attempt.