“W-what…” He lifted his face, blinking rapidly to clear his bloodshot eyes, and no matter how pointed his Eldritch face he still looked Eldritch and that made her uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”
“All the things I’ve been showing you, and this is the thing that upsets you?” Laniis’s ears were flattened to her hair. “Why? Why this? When other things have hurt more?”
“Nothing hurts like failing the people you want to protect.”
Stunned, she dropped his hands, and the Emperor used them to wipe his face. He looked shocky to her. His eyes, when he finally looked up at her, haunted. It was incongruous: he had his own eyes in his Eldritch face, that unnatural, lizard yellow with the pupils that contracted to slits rather than rounds. She should have found it repugnant, a clear reminder of everything she’d suffered while being stared at with those eyes.
Instead she found her own heart hammering so hard the skin on the insides of her ears ached.
“My apologies,” he said huskily. “I should have had more control. Should we continue?”
“No,” Laniis replied. She stood, conscious of her own gracelessness. “That’s enough for today.”
“As you wish.”
Always with the accommodation. She could almost believe he’d changed, that he cared what she wanted. That her wishes counted with him. That couldn’t be true, though. No one changed that easily, not that much. People didn’t just… shatter. Did they? She’d hit rock-bottom in the harem, but she hadn’t really changed, not inside where it counted.
Laniis paused outside the Emperor’s cabin, all her fur standing on end.
No. She firmed her mouth into a hard line and marched back to her own quarters. She even made it most of the way before changing direction.
At the hatch to Na’er’s cabin, she requested entry and was admitted, and the door opened on a sight that would usually have given her pause in a good way. Na’er was pulling on his undershirt, arms lifted to expose the ripple of muscle along his narrow ribcage. “Sorry, I was just about to head up to my shift on the bridge.” He grinned as his head popped from the shirt’s open collar. “I thought you might find the view interes—woah.” He stopped, every muscle standing in relief along that lean side. “What happened? What did he do?” A growl in his voice as it dropped in pitch. “Nevermind. I’ll take care of it.”
“No!” Laniis exclaimed before he could storm past her. “No, it’s not what you’re thinking!”
“Then what is it?” he demanded. “What put that look on your face?”
Her ears sagged. “If you’re about to go on duty….”
“I’ve got ten minutes.”
She sighed and held out her arms, and was gratified by the swiftness of his embrace. Laniis buried her nose in his chest, inhaling the arid spice of his scent, and relaxed. The jumbled emotions in her head settled into one question, and as she stepped back, she said, “Do people change?”
Na’er bared his teeth. “Torturers don’t.”
“Torturers who’ve been tortured…”
“Are still torturers,” Na’er said. “They’re just torturers who add a new class of victims to their list. People they want to punish for hurting them.”
It was exactly what she believed, and yet hearing it from someone else’s mouth made her wonder if it was too facile. “Nothing’s that simple,” she murmured.
“Not everything is simple.” Na’er picked up his uniform tunic, his movements brusque. “Some things are, though. Don’t trust that psychopath.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Because nothing changes what he did to you, arii. And all the impulses that made him do those things are still in him. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“Some people say that we’re killers,” Laniis said, troubled. “Us in the military.”
“There’s a difference between fighting to defend yourself and others and enjoying the pain and suffering of other people.” Na’er pulled the tunic on, closing and adjusting the high collar. “You know that.”
“Yes,” Laniis answered, wondering if the Emperor did too.
He straightened the uniform skirt and then reached for her, cupped her elbows. She rested her extended forearms on his, her fingers brushing his sleeves. “Laniis,” Na’er said, ears slicked to his skull, “You can’t trust him. Those things he’s done to innocent people, he could do again. Fine, he’s remorseful. But you notice he’s also at our mercy right now. He doesn’t have power. Pretty convenient that he suddenly discovers his heart of gold when he doesn’t have the opportunity to exercise his worst impulses… and he’s got us to impress.” He shook his head. “He’s just biding his time, telling us what we want to hear. Once we put him back on his throne I bet you he’ll go right back to his old ways.” He showed his teeth. “And we’re going to have to grin and bear it because he’ll be better than the devil we didn’t help.”
Laniis sighed and stepped into his arms again, enjoyed the crushing hug and the ferocity of his affection.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Na’er said. “Cut this thing off, arii. It’s just another way he’s trying to ingratiate himself with us and control you. Don’t let it work.”
“I’m thinking about it,” she admitted.
“Good.” He let her go. “I should skedaddle. You’ll be okay?”
“Yeah.” She smiled weakly. “Thanks, Na’er.”
“No problem.”
She headed for the hatch, paused. “Have I changed?”
“Only for the better,” he said, and kissed her cheek on his way past.
Standing in the hall again, Laniis touched her chest, trying to steady her breathing. She’d changed for the better? Why did that work for her and not him?
Could he really be faking an anguish that inspired sobs? In the arms of an enemy?
What the hells was she doing?
The Emperor staggered upright, bracing himself on the couch before continuing to the bathroom to wash his alien face. Bent over the sink he shed his Eldritch seeming for the Chatcaavan and shrugged into clothes that fit his winged form before meeting his own eyes. He could not quantify his expression, nor understand it from the inside.
Had he sought this shape to forget what it felt like to be powerless? He associated the dragon’s body with authority and respect, but it had been the dragon that Second and Logistics-East had betrayed. He’d once told the Ambassador that he’d trusted no male save Second-that-was, and in retrospect, he could see the evidence of it in the trajectory of his life. He’d claimed camaraderie with many of his naval compatriots, but always there had been a wall between his vulnerable heart and everyone else. No doubt that reserve had cut him off from the allies who might have helped him now.
But then, what had he thought he would need with such allies? He’d fought his way to the exalted heights of the Thorn Throne. He’d won. And it had been over, as far as he’d been concerned.
He had not yet acted on the Ambassador’s suggestion. The Emperor raked his forelock back with an impatient hand and left in search of his future.
Andrea was not in the clinic. The Seersa healer absently directed him to her cabin. As always, she was delighted to see him, and as always it confused him. He was at least beginning to accept that confusion.
“You’ve come at a good time,” she said. “The girls are all off at the gym. Dominika’s taking them through calisthenics every day to help them cope with their memories.”
“Does it work?”
“Oh, sure.” Andrea waved him toward her couch. “Sit, why don’t you? Do you want anything to drink?”
The Emperor frowned. “The Ambassador keeps something in a glass bottle. Carbonated and bitter but also sweet.”
“Right, his tonic water.” Andrea chuckled. “Dellen-alet told me about that.”
“The physician?” The Emperor asked, puzzled.
“Yeah.” The human brought him a glass and sat across from him with her mug. She wore loose gray pants and a gray shirt over anot
her, longer-sleeved shirt—also gray—and it looked soft and slouchy. Had she worn such things typically, before a Chatcaavan raider had truncated that idyllic prior life? “Apparently there’s no keeping any medical records about Eldritch without them vanishing, so everything the healers learn about them they communicate to one another. Verbally.” She chuckled. “And doctors love to tell a good story, so they pass on some of the odder details in the process. Like how they hooked an alcoholic on tonic water.”
Had the Ambassador been an alcoholic? The Emperor knew the Universal word. It had no equivalent in Chatcaavan—addiction to such substances was not noteworthy. He remembered drinking a great deal with Lisinthir in those first months, and even more in the ones that followed. And smoking endless rolls of hekkret. “How did they accomplish this?”
“By daring him, of course.” She grinned. “I haven’t known the Sword long, but even I can see that working. They told him that tonic water was mixed with gin to make a cocktail and taunted him with the offer. He poured himself the tonic water and told them to keep the gin.”
A single moment in the Eldritch’s rehabilitation, that must have been: so fleeting an episode, and yet so perfect it had become a story passed from healer to healer. His beloved, the legend. The Emperor smiled a little. “That would be in keeping with his character.”
“Yes.” She sipped from her mug, holding it in both hands. “I didn’t think you’d like the taste, though? I guess I don’t know what Chatcaava like to drink, but I would have thought it would be… I don’t know. Too different for us to share food.”
“It’s not,” the Emperor said. Though now that she’d brought it up, he wondered why did they share similar palates? “I don’t understand how that works, though.”
“A mystery for the ages.” She cocked her head. “But I’m guessing you didn’t come to talk about cocktails.”
“No.” He looked into his glass. “The Ambassador—the Sword—suggested that I talk to you after my morning… meetings… with Lieutenant Baker.”
“Meetings.” Andrea’s tone was decidedly wary.
“She was my prisoner.” He looked up at Andrea. “In my harem. And I visited torment on her for months. She wants me to know how that felt.”
A little furrow appeared between Andrea’s brows. “Laniis was a Chatcaavan victim?”
“For over a year.”
Andrea’s eyes widened.
“In my harem.” He clicked one of his talons on the glass, watching the liquid shiver. “Do not imagine the Worldlord’s modest arrangement. An entire tower was dedicated to my children and females. The nursery was near the bottom. The top had not one, but three separate groups of females: a gift harem comprised of individuals I loaned to males as rewards or enticements; a harem reserved to myself and my intimates; and the topmost chamber, where I kept my queen. It was there that Laniis resided and attended the Slave Queen as a bodyservant. And for a year she remained there, and I had my use of her when I wanted her, and I broke her bones, and shaved her fur off, and required her to duplicate accents just so I could corroborate reports that the short, brush-tailed aliens could speak any language. I raped her and beat her, Andrea, and it was unremarkable because I did this to anyone I felt deserved it and everyone did, male and female.”
The human’s face had become inscrutable, but its lines were not tense enough for rage. “Male too? Chatcaavan ones?”
“It was how I kept ambitious males in check, if they were too useful to consign to death.” He drank from the awkward alien tumbler, lapping at it with his tongue. “It was the world I knew, and I inhabited it completely. I did not believe the things you do, or the Ambassador. That every person has the right to their own life, their own dignity, to choose their service. I believed that the weak belonged to the strong, and that this was the order of things. Behavior inspired by any other belief confused me.” He thought about himself, and finished, to be fair, “And interested me, because I did not understand it.”
She nodded. “Do you understand it now?”
“Intimately, as the Ambassador taught me at great cost to himself.” He evaluated her expression and found it too calm. “You do not seem upset. I expected horror.”
Andrea recrossed her legs, clasping one of her ankles. “You were living in Hell.”
“I was not suffering, Andrea.”
“I don’t mean…” She shook her head. “We say that when you live in the absence of God, you are in Hell. There’s no grace in Hell. No redemption. You are unavoidably corrupt, because there’s no Light to shine on your sins. So that you can see that they’re sins. You know how they always say there can be no darkness without light? No good without evil? Well, if you live in evil and there is no good anywhere, how can you be anything but evil? There’s nothing to aspire to. Nothing to teach you otherwise.”
“You are giving me an excuse,” he murmured.
“I’m just describing what it sounds like to me, which is… well. Like Hell. It doesn’t surprise me that you were the chiefest of the devils there. What else?” She shook her head. “Here’s the important question. When the Ambassador taught you the error of your ways—did you change?”
He managed a smile. “You find me here after the attempt to promulgate these beliefs made me a target of males without my new sensibilities.”
“Would you go back to that life?”
“No.” The word was expulsed by a loathing so deep it had become intrinsic, laced into blood and bone with the Change that had taught it to him.
“Would you torture another person again?”
“No.”
“Would you use people because it was expedient, or because it seemed like the only way to get what you wanted?”
“No,” he said. And then, thinking of the path back to the throne, “I think. I hope I will not justify such actions by saying they will protect more innocents than they destroy.”
“Even if it’s true?”
He winced, rubbed his brow. “I am not sure I’m ready for advanced alien philosophy, Andrea.”
She laughed. “All right, granted. But you at least see some of the pitfalls, and they worry you.”
“Yes. To return to what I was… it would be to reject the gift given to me by the Ambassador, and the Queen… and now you and the others who helped me.” He sighed out. “I can’t do it. It would be wrong.”
“Then there you are.” When he looked up, she said, “My faith allows for regeneration, arii. I believe that people can change. I don’t think it comes easy, but when it comes, it’s up to all of us to help support that regeneration. Otherwise it’s too easy for people to relapse.” She set her mug on the table in front of her. “It’s especially important when people have made as big a change as you have. The incidence of recidivism is high when people’s past crimes are held against them. If they’re not allowed to move on, they give up trying. Often they become worse, because they’ve seen the light, and it was denied them.”
“It seems too easy,” the Emperor murmured. “Surely I must pay for my crimes.”
“You’re going to pay for your crimes to a higher authority than me, one day,” she replied. “And He’ll judge you based on what you did with all your life, and what’s in your heart, and unlike me He’ll know for certain. My job, as far as I’m concerned, is to forgive you and everyone else who’s hurt me.”
“So… you forgive the Worldlord.”
“Yes. And all his employees, and Deputy-East, too.” She grinned, whimsical. “I’m not saying it’s easy or that there aren’t days when I fail. But to the extent that I can forgive them, I can also let them go.”
“And this… this is how aliens think.”
“Hah!” Andrea shook her head. “You should know better, arii. We’re no more homogeneous than you Chatcaava are. There are people in the Alliance who’d find my way of thinking crazy and insist I was wrong. I’ve got a cousin who thinks I was dropped on my head as a kid.”
The image was so vivid and so startling the Em
peror’s head jerked up. “Does that happen?”
“A joke,” Andrea assured him. “Meant to suggest that I had early brain damage that might explain any weird habits I might have.” She leaned back. “My beliefs are formed by my faith, and my religion—and even in my religion there are sects, and the sects disagree. You said once that the Chatcaava don’t have religion?”
“We had one major religion,” the Emperor replied. “Which has fallen away from mainstream acceptance. The worship of the Living Air. We go now to its first temple.”
“Oh, yes. The topic we were discussing in the meeting.” Her eyes lit with curiosity. “We’re going to see an actual Chatcaavan temple?”
“To the Source, yes.” He paused. “You are imagining a building.”
“It’s not a building?”
“It began as a building,” the Emperor said. “Now it comprises the entire world, because the homeworld has been all but abandoned.”
“Oh, my,” Andrea said, hushed, her eyes round with wonder. “Won’t that be something to see.”
“I hope that it will be.”
Dominika had invited Lisinthir to sit in on the exercise program she was running for the refugees, claiming that he would be motivational “in a good way.” He’d declined, much to her amusement, and spent forty-five minutes pacing, wondering what Laniis and the Emperor were doing and whether it was time to stop it or not. By the time the Harat-Shar was ready to cede him the gym, he needed it. Too much left to chance. Too much he couldn’t do. He worked himself against the computer’s solidigraphic foes until the world bled away and forced him to live in the present.
He knew when the Emperor entered without seeing him, hearing him. A mind-mage’s talent? A lover’s sixth sense? It didn’t matter. His fake opponents became insubstantial outlines as he paused the program, leaving him an unobstructed view of the room and the dark figure by the door. He met the Chatcaavan’s eyes in the mirror. “Did she keep you so long?”
“Not her solely.”
“Ah,” Lisinthir said, relieved. “You went to Andrea.”
“I thought your mind puzzled me,” the Emperor replied, walking to one of the ghosts and studying it. “But hers is completely incomprehensible.”
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