In Extremis

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  When she left the bathroom, Vasiht’h was waiting for her, and the look on his face… she started to crumble.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t, not yet, please. Arii.”

  He nodded and held out a bit of black fabric to her. Underwear. With lace. Designed in case it would have to be seen—stop. Methodically she began dressing. Her breathing was still too quick. Concentrating on her actions didn’t help. She ignored it. Ignore it ignore everything just keep moving

  Vasiht’h kept handing her bits of cloth. Underwear. Stockings. Gloves. When she sat to start on the boots, he said, “Sediryl? We’re leaving?”

  “I killed Kamaney.” She’d said it. No, that wasn’t enough. Her chest hurt with the words. They had to come out. “Her head exploded.”

  “Her head…”

  “Maia.” Sediryl jerked the boot up over her knee. It hurt and the pain swung her thoughts around. Focused them. “Maia gave me the gun. She didn’t tell me what it shot.” Her wrists hurt too. Why did they ache so much? The gun had kicked her. “Fire. It made her head…”

  “Don’t,” Vasiht’h interrupted. “Don’t stay there.”

  How could she ever leave? But she got the boot up and sealed the side. Started on the other foot. “Jahir and Lisinthir need us to bring this fleet to the Chatcaavan border. That’s where we’re taking it.”

  “We’re taking it,” Vasiht’h repeated.

  “I killed Kamaney.” She had said it again. She had not said she’d killed another handful of people as well. Or that she’d probably made a terrible mistake. stop “There’s no guarantee these people will do what we need them to do unless they are directed. They could continue with her original plan to attack the Alliance. Or they could disperse, and then they wouldn’t be concentrated enough to make a difference. I promised I would supply the diversion. I’m going to make sure the diversion is supplied.”

  “All right.”

  She yanked the other boot on and sealed it, then accepted the gown, pulling it on over her head. It was black. It had to be black. Clichés were the only protection she had.

  “The slaves?” Vasiht’h asked, softly.

  So many of them. Thousands. But unarmed thousands. And around her more than that waiting in ships with weapons that could slag this asteroid to molten dripping—stop—“I can’t help them yet. If I try, the pirates will think I’m planning a coup and they’ll kill us all. And right now they have all the weapons. As long as they think I’m as ruthless and ambitious as their former mistress, they’ll follow my lead.”

  He didn’t believe her. She needed him to believe her, because if he started doubting, everyone would. “It’s going to work.” Maia’s voice, whispering: sell it, make it work. “I’m going to make it work.”

  “What if they kill you?” Vasiht’h said, ears flattening.

  “If they kill me, they kill me, not the merchandise that keeps the money flowing. No one will touch the slaves so long as they think they’ll be the ones to profit off them.” Sediryl inhaled with a shudder. “I need to get this fleet to the border. I can’t do that unless I make them. And I can’t make them unless they think I’m their next crime boss.” She looked at him, trying not to start shaking. “Right? This is the only way. I have to do this.”

  Vasiht’h met her eyes.

  “Can you think of another way? One that saves not just us, and not just the slaves, but the Alliance as well?” Sediryl demanded. “Can you? Tell me if you can! I don’t know what to do! I want to be anywhere but here!”

  He cringed back, ears sagging. “I… I can’t.”

  She pulled on her coat. The gun was in the bathroom. She walked there, listening to the click of her boots, muffled on the carpet. The baldric went back on. The gun stayed in her hand. She strode out of the bedchamber and said to Qora, “We’re leaving.”

  The Faulfenzair pushed himself upright. “I will carry the dragoness.”

  “Yes.” She turned her back on him, and on Vasiht’h whom she felt like a pressure against her back, a nagging ache, an icy ball of fear against the memory of fire. She ignored it, because she couldn’t afford not to. Stepping outside, she found her guard from Kamaney’s quarters and her door guard, standing alongside two other men with six Faulfenza on a chain. Daize was not among them.

  She stopped. “Where are the rest of them?”

  “They were sent to the sales centers earlier this week,” the guard said.

  The gun went off and he toppled. Red spray everywhere. Sediryl ignored the startled jostling of the slaves and the sound of vomiting behind her. One of the guards raised his weapon, fast, so fast. She was going to die.

  He burst into flame. Her finger twitched, and her gun went off. Was that the right order? It had to be the right order.

  Screaming now. The guard who was burning. All the others had frozen.

  “People who disappoint me, die,” Sediryl said. “People who try to kill me, die. Do you understand?”

  “SAY YES MA’AM,” the guard behind her said.

  “YES, MA’AM!”

  “Good,” Sediryl said. “The flagship. Now.”

  The grip in her hand was hot, so hot. She didn’t holster the gun. The gun needed to stay out. She walked after her one smart guard, and her boots beat out a rhythm against the deck, and she kept her eyes straight ahead. Liolesa, she thought, your heir is a queen in her own right now. What do you think of my negotiating tactics? Do you think I could use further training in appropriate technique?

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  Oh Goddess, Sediryl thought. Save me. Save us all.

  A spy dying on the wall of a palace.

  An Emperor turned rebel by the power of a psalm.

  A shapechanger on the cusp of an enormous discovery.

  A woman riding to battle in the vanguard of her enemies.

  The known worlds are about to convulse in a cataclysmic war; time is running out. Can the Eldritch, the Chatcaava, and their Pelted allies turn the tide? Or will it all go up in fire?

  Is there hope in ashes?

  COMING SOON

  APPENDICES

  Maps

  Once again, the maps! But a few new ones this time.

  1. The Alliance. Most of you will be familiar with this one from previous Appendices. I've included it again for context for the second...

  2. The Alliance with Empire. ...so you can see how it fits into the bigger picture. The entire previous map fits in to the bottom right corner there. And then there's everything else. And it's full of angry dragons.

  I haven't finished this one up yet. I say I should but I suspect that by the end of Book 6, it's going to look completely different. That map, I'll probably finish!

  3. Fleet Movements. Finally, one of the Fleet Movement photos I took. I have about forty of these photos. There's a set from before I decided which fleets would be the most relevant (this is one of those) and there's a second set where I broke out the rebel forces from the global Chatcaavan ones so I could track them separately. And then I photographed them moving so I could see which fleet was where at what time. This was an enormous help to me while writing; I don't think I could have pulled the plot together without the visual aid.

  The Species of the Alliance

  The Alliance is mostly composed of the Pelted, a group of races that segregated and colonized worlds based (more or less) on their visual characteristics. Having been engineered from a mélange of uplifted animals, it’s not technically correct to refer to any of them as “cats” or “wolves,” since any one individual might have as many as six or seven genetic contributors: thus the monikers like “foxine” and “tigraine” rather than “vulpine” or “tiger.” However, even the Pelted think of themselves in groupings of general animal characteristics, so for the ease of imagining them, I’ve separated them that way.

  The Pelted

  The Quasi-Felids: The Karaka’An, Asanii, and Harat-Shar comprise the most cat-like of the Pelted, with the Karaka’An being the shortest and digi
tigrade, the Asanii being taller and plantigrade, and the Harat-Shar including either sort but being based on the great cats rather than the domesticated variants.

  The Quasi-Canids: The Seersa, Tam-illee, and Hinichi are the most doggish of the Pelted, with the Seersa being short and digitigrade and foxish, the Tam-illee taller, plantigrade and also foxish, and the Hinichi being wolflike.

  Others: Less easily categorized are the Aera, with long, hare-like ears, winged feet and foxish faces, the felid Malarai with their feathered wings, and the Phoenix, tall bipedal avians.

  The Centauroids: Of the Pelted, two species are centauroid in configuration, the short Glaseah, furred and with lower bodies like lions but coloration like skunks and leathery wings on their lower backs, and the tall Ciracaana, who have foxish faces but long-legged cat-like bodies.

  Aquatics: One Pelted race was engineered for aquatic environments: the Naysha, who look like mermaids would if mermaids had sleek, hairless, slightly rodent-like faces and the lower bodies of dolphins.

  Other Species

  Humanoids: Humanity fills this niche, along with their estranged cousins, the esper-race Eldritch.

  True Aliens: Of the true aliens, six are known: the shapeshifting Chatcaava, whose natural form is draconic (though they are mammals); the gentle heavyworlder Faulfenza, who are furred and generally regarded to be attractive; the Akubi, large dinosaur-like fliers with three sexes; the aquatic Platies, who look like colorful flatworms and can communicate reliably only with the Naysha, and the enigmatic Flitzbe, who are quasi-vegetative and resemble softly furred volleyballs that change color depending on their mood. New to the Alliance (and not pictured in the line-up) is the last race, the "Octopi" of Either Side of the Strand.

  For a more detailed look into the species of the Alliance, a Peltedverse Guidebook is available through me; you can get it by signing up for my mailing list (from my website), by jumping on my Patreon, or by emailing me directly (haikujaguar at gmail).

  The Languages of the Pelted Setting

  Eldritch

  Most readers of this series will be familiar by now with some of the conventions of the Eldritch language, particularly that of shading words with colors meant to inflect their meanings. In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink if people want to bother with them. (And as we learn in this text, the color modes are carried into other formats, like music.)

  So, to refresh, the seven modes (three pairs, one neutral):

  Gray is the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to stress one’s neutrality.

  Gold is the best of all worlds, and foil to Black’s violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations. This pair is the extreme emotional end of the spectrum, good and bad.

  Silver is the positive, hopeful shading, foil to Shadow mode, which gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words. If gray is in the middle of the spectrum and black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray center.

  White is the mode for holy things; its foil is Crimson, for things of the body. (If you want to be technical, Eldritch illustrations put it on a perpendicular line from Gold/Black, with gray still in the center: white above, crimson below.)

  Eldritch is an aggressively agglutinating language: if it can make a word longer by grafting things onto it to add meaning, it will, and if that makes it harder for non-native speakers to pronounce anything without stumbling, so much the better. It’s also fond of vowels, and almost inevitably if you see an Eldritch word with more than one adjacent vowel, they’re pronounced separately (thus, Araelis from the novel Rose Point is properly ‘ah rah EH lees’). There are also no “silent” vowels (so Galare is not ‘Gah lahr’, but ‘gah lah reh’ or ‘gah lah rey’ depending on your regional accent). There are some cases where I’ve misspelled things, or I’ve continued to write out diphthongs instead of using diacritics, but for the most part if you pronounce every single letter you see in an Eldritch word separately, you’re probably doing it right.

  Like many of the languages of this setting, Eldritch was originally a conlang, created by the people who would become the Eldritch as a way to set themselves apart from the people they fled. It has been several thousand years since then, though, and the language has only become more convoluted since, a reflection of its people’s needs.

  Chatcaavan

  On the other hand, the Chatcaavan tongue likes its consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding “choppier” than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava’ itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch’ is actually pronounced ‘sh’... sorry about that.) I have, for the most part, spared you this whenever the vowel sound is denoted by more than one letter. "Kauvauc" should properly be "Kauvauauc" but at some point one draws the line for readibility.

  Lisinthir’s description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It’s also one of the most crucial distinctions previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; they didn't miss the linguistic differences, they just failed to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. This is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure’ (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure’ (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.

  So, for the ideal:

  Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."

  Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."

  Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:

  The wind buffeted me.

  I will do that thing.

  Or, to use the examples for the ideals:

  Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.

  Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.

  The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and “the Knife”:

  Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.

  Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.

  Universal and other Languages of the Exodus

  There’s no discussing the languages of the Alliance without mentioning Universal, which is not just the lingua franca of the Alliance but the native tongue for those Pelted races that rejected the need to create their own language to sever themselves from their origins. Universal began as American English, with the Seersa as its stewards—but putting the Seersa in charge of any language project inevitably involves its expansion, since they are the Alliance’s premiere linguists. There are many, many loanwords into Universal from not just the Seersan tongue, but from all the languages the Seersa made for other Pelted races (including languages that were adopted and instantly abandoned, like the Glaseah’s). For the most part I’ve spared you those loanwords, save for the most common (like arii and alet)... but it is apparent to everyone in the Alliance that Universal is “sticky” and keeps rolling around in other cultures and coming back with new words clinging to it. This is one of its charms: it reflects the overarching Pelted culture, with its big tent philosophy.

  Arii and alet, interestingly enough, are n
ot loanwords from the Seersan tongue, but from Meredan, the Exodus language. This was a pidgin that began formation on Earth, where it was used by the Pelted (before they were called the Pelted) to communicate with each other without being understood by their owners. Meredan did not become a full language until after the Exodus, and its heyday was brief—it was spoken on-ship and then fell out of use in favor of Universal not long after the first settlements. The reason for that abandonment is still hotly debated today; you will find many academic dissertations on the topic if you browse a Pelted library in the historical linguistics section. The most popular theory is that its association with victimhood and powerlessness made it less popular than Universal, with its implication that the Pelted were free to use the language of their oppressors without fear of retribution. But no one’s sure why Meredan use dwindled, and to this day its study remains an eccentricity particular to scholars. The few words that have survived in the Universal lexicon are assumed by laymen to have been borrowed from Seersan.

  Author Sketches

  It's typical for me to do sketches while writing, a sort of mental doodling as I work out events and character arcs. These sketches are not intended to be the final word on what the characters look like! In fact, I usually have trouble pinning down people's looks. I just keep at it anyway.