by Del Law
The warehouse is rough and temporary, no more than wooden walls and a metal roof knocked together, two large doors sliding doors in the front. It sits on a street back from the water that’s filled up with much of the same, all of them probably thrown up in the last few years to house things coming out of Tilhtinora. But it was large enough to house the ship. I unlock the doors, and slide them open. The Buhr carry us inside and lower the ship to the dirt floor. With the doors shut, it’s dark in here, but the rising sun shines through the cracks in the walls giving us enough light to work with. It’s tight, with all the Buhr, and it smells a little like a spicy barn.
HULGLIEV, the Buhr perched on the bow shouts into my head. At least I think it’s that one, but it really could have been any of them. WE COMPLETE OUR TASK.
“I agree,” I say. “We’re done here.” I’ll be honest—I’m pretty relieved. They could have carried us straight back to the Akarii Retriever ship, and there wouldn’t have been much we could have done about it.
“They can’t get us a ship, can they?” Ercan says. “To Tamaranth?” He and Mircada climb out of the hatch. There are dark circles under his eyes.
I shake my head. “They probably could,” I say. “But I wouldn’t trust it.”
The Buhr appear not to hear me, and they bow as one and wave their feeding tubes at us. In a flurry of clicks and buzzes, they assemble and swarm out of the warehouse.
The lead Buhr remains behind.
The warehouse is eerily silent with them gone. Somewhere I hear a dog bark. “We are done, aren’t we?” I ask the last Buhr.
WE HAVE COMPLETED OUR TASK, it agrees.
“You’re still here?”
WE REMAIN, it says. AT MR. CAPONE’S REQUEST.
I get it. He’s keeping an eye on his investment now.
“Where will they all go?” asks Kjat. She’s rubbing her eyes, too. “The rest of them?”
WE WILL SPREAD ACROSS THE SEAS, says the Buhr, to all of us. It stands up and spreads its arms wide, and it’s feeding tube swings in the air. WE WILL BE ON SHIPS AND SWIMMING IN THE AIR. WE BREATHE BENEATH YOUR WAVES AND SIT BESIDE YOUR KINGS. WE WILL ROCK YOUR CHILDREN TO SLEEP AND SING THE PRAISES OF ONENESS BENEATH YOUR STARS UNTIL THE LAST PART OF YOUR SUN DIES. AND THEN WE WILL HONOR YOUR MEMORY ACROSS THE MULTITUDE OF WORLDS.
“You’re a little wrecked, aren’t you,” I say.
Its feeding tube droops. PERHAPS, agrees the Buhr, sounding a little sheepish for the outburst. I WILL SLEEP NOW. It climbs up in the harness on my back and folds itself into a ball.
It’s pretty creepy, if you think about it. One giant mind spread throughout our worlds, selling everyone’s information to everyone else. I shake my head. But I guess there’s not much I can do about it.
For now.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering? A Buhr snores long and loud. When it’s on your back, up near your ears? It sounds like a giant, narcoleptic wildebeest.
13.
After we get some rest, we find out that Akarii soldiers are everywhere in the Framarc family shiptown, called Port Ehlis. I think the Akarii are supposed to be a secret, but everyone in the town seems to know it.
The town is a temporary one that the Framarc family had built out a decade ago, a port to ship ore out to their island holdings in the Choroleos Archipelago. The Framarc make knives, some of the best, and every mage needs a knife. But then Tilhtinora opened up, and other families began to use the town as outpost for mining the city, too. Paying the Framarc for the privilege, I bet.
On the docks, though, I can’t help wondering if the Buhr have betrayed us after all. Several Akarii transports sit at anchor in the harbor, sending tracer lines of aether in to some of the soldiers. Junior Akarii mages walk the docks and hang around the noodle bars, and Akarii foot soldiers stand arrogantly at intersections of the docks, looking too bulked up with the gear hidden under their coats and just too alert. Framarc soldiers eye them nervously, and their hands twitch at their knives. While they’ve been known to work together, there’s no love lost between those two families. Though Framarc ships still come and go, probably with holds full of ore, and the town itself is busy with miners and sailors and merchants, all buying and selling from each other in different languages and gestures and currencies, it seems like everywhere we look there is an Akarii watching, waiting for something.
Kjat stays close to me, and we have our knives ready.
But it's not clear what they're looking for. Something else is going on.
Ercan, Mircada, Kjat and I head out to get supplies. Or for the Kerul to get supplies, since they’re the ones that have any money to spend, and we’ve got old oatmeal. I douse myself in cold salt water to cover my scent and despite the heat I wrap myself up in a hooded coat. There are Talovians in the colony, and I’ll never forget the first time in Tamaranth that an old frog flicked a thick gobbet of spit at me from the end of its long tongue—it had soaked into my underfur and smelled foul for a week. Talovians hate us, and rumor has it alot of them were Hunters, who nearly wiped us out.
There are also stray dogs roaming the piers, and I don’t want to draw too much attention.
For me, the difference between richness of the Framarc colony and Tamaranth, a city at war, is pretty overwhelming. On shore there are long rows of hotels, high-end brothels, and casinos that cater to Retrievers and miners, and then long stretches of warehouses like the one we’d rented line the beach to either side. Then most of the town reaches across the bay in a maze of floating docks, stretching out to a deep-water harbor. Everything’s in very good repair. Floating rafts support tent-like office structures flying the Framarc logo, and the family workers dressed in coats and bowler hats move between them with heads down, talking rapidly at each other in some sort of corporate dialect filled with acronyms. They pay little attention to anyone else.
But it’s the shops that get me. Ship-based shops sell basic staples and luxury goods, and those cheap souvenirs of Earth that are so popular now in Tamaranth--Eiffel Tower keychains, Las Vegas shirts, snow globes from Berlin. Some of them hold bars or restaurants, too. Food is everywhere. I’ve been starving for the last year, and the smells of the noodle shops, cooking meat in the open-air market, and beer from the bars is staggering. Fruit is stacked in bright pyramids.
My mouth waters and my stomach does backflips, and I see that Kjat can’t look away either.
Everyone is uneasy. The bald woman who sells Mircada rations is packing to leave in a small transport ship. A Krukkruk fishmonger gives her steep discounts on both fresh and smoked fish, bobbing and weaving its pockmarked and cratered first head with anxiety. When Mircada points out a small stringed sitar as something her mother had played, the tall, distracted man who runs the store presents it to her as a gift. “One less thing I have to carry, dearie. Take it, I insist.”
Ercan has been off talking to people, and we reconvene on a back section of dock. “They don’t seem to be looking for us, exactly,” Ercan says. “At least not yet. I don’t know why there are so many of them. And I probably need to find out.” He washes his face and hands with salt water, tries to brush the dirt off of his coat. He’s bought a tall, white wig, the kind you see some government officials still wearing in Tamaranth, and lets it settle onto his head. He tucks his spiky hair up underneath it while it sends out little feeding suckers to hold itself in place. It makes him look a foot taller, almost my height. “There has to be someone from Kerul here. I’ll try to book us some passage out of here, if I can.”
Mircada doesn’t seem fazed. When we split up again, Ercan heads back to the corporate areas. Kjat and I start to walk off by ourselves—we’ve got better things to do than watch someone spend money we don’t have. But Mircada inserts herself, takes my arm, leads me toward the merchant docks, and starts pointing out different aspects of the shiptown with almost a child’s eagerness. Kjat follows behind in our wake.
Can you blame me if I start to enjoy it? I grew up with old men—soldiers, farmers—and on
e bitter matriarch, up in the middle of nowhere. In the Warrens, it’s a constant struggle just to keep what little you have from becoming someone else’s, and everyone regardless of their race or gender is out for what they can get. I’ve known a few women, and they’ve been mostly human, since Hulgliev of my age are extremely rare, and females even more so. Most of them came at a price.
Mircada is beautiful and witty, even quick on her feet as she dodges a Kruk that barrels through us carrying a tall load of shipping crates. What's not to like?
She points out the variety of walking fish being sold off the deck of a sloop from the Archipelago. “At Moonfall, in the summer months? They’re supposed to rise up to the surface and sing,” she says. “They taste like pears.” On the unusual shape of some of the rusting mechs here: “I think they’re from a renegade factory in old Pehriac—that was old Kerul country before the sea rose up and drowned it. They’re all fat and round instead of the smaller ones that are more common in Tamaranth. Now they harvest the rust off of each other to reproduce.” The Krukkruk: “See how jittery they are? They’re watching everyone with the eyes in the backs of their lower, second heads.” And then she tucks her hair behind her ear and identifies every Akarii soldier within a hundred yards, and their rank and lineage, regardless of how they’re dressed.
She’s also pretty free with what I gather is Ercan’s money. Ercan is a fan of mushrooms, she says, and she buys him a large basket of local florescent fungus, bright orange, packed for travel. They smell horrible. She jokes about finding something small and yet round enough for Ferhis, and eventually settles on a tie-died shirt with a wide, floppy collar, something that might actually have started life somewhere in 1970s San Francisco. “He’ll hate it,” she says. “It’s perfect.”
Is she playing with me? I can’t tell. Either way, I’m pretty taken with her. The thin silver bracelets on her arms jangle, scattering sunlight like the surface of the water, and I think I’m getting a little hypnotized.
Eventually, she notices we’re not buying anything. She doesn’t say anything for awhile, but I can she she’s taking in the way we can’t help staring at the Stona selling fat, juicy meermeer, or the meat carts, or the kids hawking shaved ice. She steers us back to the main part of the market, and starts filling large sacks with brown noodles and dried fish, fruit and dried meat and local tubers, sandwiches and dehydrated rations packed for travel.
She hands one to each of us.
I shake my head. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“Yes, you can,” she says. “But if you could help me eat some of this, I’d really appreciate it. It’s an awful lot of food.”
Kjat has her sack open, and is staring down into it. She looks up at me, her eyes wide. We haven’t seen this much food in months.
“We’ll pay you back once we hit Tamaranth,” I say.
Mircada shakes her head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “It’s a drop in the bucket for Ercan.” She leans closer. “He’s First family, you know. Like I said. Just don’t kidnap him or anything, all right?”
I wish I could keep all of the human lineages straight. But it just seems like a mess to me. “Thanks,” I tell her.
Kjat’s more practical than I am. She’s already got her mouth full of meermeer.
• • •
The wind shifts, and clouds pass low over the colony and out to sea. Boats are starting to take advantage of the breeze to leave the colony, tacking a wide berth around the Akarii transports. Merchants are slashing their prices. When I linger for too long over a marked-down pouch stamped with an Akarii Reserve label on it, Mircada buys that, too, and hands it to me. It’s full of dried, smoked khar leaf. As both Mircada and Kjat watch, I remove several leaves, fold each in half, and stick up my nostrils until just the tip of the stem extends from his nose. When I’m packed full, I use a coal from the vendor to set both nostrils on fire, snort sharply to extinguish the flame, inhale the resulting dark smoke and blow a thick ring of it into the air over their heads.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had leaf this good. I can feel the relaxation seep through the muscles in my shoulders and neck ridges and down along my spine.
“That’s what I like to see,” says the vendor. “A... man... who enjoys his leaf.” He gives us an ironic salute as he places the last of his crates into a small sailboat and pushes away from the dock. There is a small yellow dog in the stern that watches me carefully. It bares its teeth at me, but it makes no sound as it drifts away.
Behind us, a scuffle breaks out. A burly Krukkruk in a stained Violent Femmes t-shirt has walked straight into a disguised Akarii solider, scattering the tools the Kruk was carrying all over the dock and knocking the Akarii’s hat to the ground. As we turn to watch, the Kruk extends both heads in her rage, and begins berating the man in her own gnarled language. Her undertongue thrums, and she starts swinging her multi-jointed limbs in the air. She lets out a cloud of thick, noxious green smoke from a sac below each of her rear limbs.
The solider goes pale, and then draws his knife from under his long coat. Kruk like to make a lot of noise, but this one is pretty pissed off. It backs up and swivels her heads around, looking for a witness. She locks a set of eyes on me. I shake my head, to warn her off, but then she puffs up her chest and goes for the man anyway. He cuts her across a forehead before she crushes his ribcage.
But then soldiers are running over, throwing off coats and drawing their own knives.
An Akarii mage, a Talovian, starts a matrix, and pulls in four other mages. They throw a tracer line back to one of the transport ships for power.
Down the docks, coming in from the shore, three more brightly colored Krukkruk puff up their manes as they gallop, bellowing as they come, and a number of other colonists react to the Akarii matrix by going for weapons of their own. The smell of the sulfurous green flatulence is nauseating as it swirls and twists in the air.
We scramble behind a tent as the fight gets larger, climb across a series of small, elaborately decorated boats and behind an ore barge to another parallel dock. Unfortunately, there’s a trio of small dogs here, scavenging fish intestines off of the dock. As I climb off the barge their heads swiveled around at the scent of me.
The hair goes up on their backs and they lunge for me, growling and barking, their teeth bared.
I look up and down the length of the dock. Everyone looks distracted by the fighting, or by the desire to pack up and get out. So I throw back my coat, bare my own fangs. One of the dogs leaps for my throat, and I knock it into the water. It keeps barking and foaming at the mouth out there, in the water, but it can’t find a way to climb back up onto the dock so it’s barking ferociously and paddling in circles. Another latches on to my calf, and I have to pry it off with my hands. I try not to use my claws or to break its jaw, and as I get the teeth loose, Kjat grabs it by the back legs and tosses it over the side, too. The third, a tiny white dog, circles me, barking ferociously. I get down at its level and growl at it, a good, full-throated rumble that you can feel in the pit of your stomach.
It wets the dock where it stands, and then turns and runs off yelping.
I pull my hood back up, straighten my coat. My leg is not bleeding much, for once.
“Friends of yours?” Mircada is working hard to keep her face straight. She’s not being very successful.
I sigh. “It’s been worse.”
I nod to Kjat, and we all run down the length of the dock—followed by one of the paddling dogs, still foaming at the mouth—and we push through the crowds back to the warehouse. The Krukkruk bellowing is just getting louder, and with it the harsh crack of aether echoes back at us off the ships in the harbor.
14.
Ercan’s at the warehouse already, stuffing supplies from a crate into sacks of his own. “Where have you been?” His face is tight, and the wig clings awkwardly to his head. “There’s an Akarii warship coming in,” he says. “Tel Kharan. A full fleet. Fehris! Get out here!”
; “I said I was coming.” Fehris limps out of the hatchway, and studies them all with a dazed expression, blinking. His eyes are glowing faintly. “There’s something you should know about…”
“There isn’t time,” Ercan says, with a chopping gesture.
“What’s going on,” Mircada says.
“The cease fire is broken. The Akarii First Family is apparently moving to full fledged war again, and this Port is right on their path to Tamaranth.”
“That’s why everyone’s getting out,” Kjat says.
Ercan nods. “There’s a small Kerul frigate leaving now, and heading for the Choroleos. Not in five minutes, not in three days, now. There’s room for us on it. If we don’t go now, though, we’re going to be in the middle of something that’s way bigger than we want to be in the middle of.”
He turns to Kjat and I. “Come with us, if you want to. I’ve gotten space for you. I don’t know how far we’ll get, but if you stay, you’ll be taken. The Tel Kharan are thorough, you can count on that.”
“We can’t move the ship that quickly,” I say, studying him.
“I know.” Ercan takes a deep breath. “Look, this changes everything for us. The Akarii and their Tel Kharan are taking this colony. I don’t know about you—retrievers and mages are one thing, but the First Family and their army is an entirely different level of problem. Mishna’s already dead. I have to live with that.” He looks at Mircada and Fehris. “We need to leave the ship, and get out. We put a lot of time and money into finding it, but I’m not willing to risk more lives for this. We found this ship once, we can find another one. We’ll figure out something.”
“The Akarii are only men,” I say, unconvincingly. I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m not abandoning my ship at the first sign of a little trouble.”
Ercan rolls his eyes, and gestures in the air with his hands like he’s appealing to his higher power. He says something else then, probably a curse, but it’s drowned out by an explosion that rocks the warehouse walls. Kjat runs to the warehouse door and cracks it open. As she watches, another blast of blue fire arcs in from over the horizon, hits the water near the Framarc tents and erupts with a dull roar, sending gouts of flame across tents and boats and bystanders alike. The docks start to burn. Someone dives into the water, others scramble for boats. A man with his bowler hat on fire runs across the doorway in front of her.