by Julie Ishaya
Now he dreamed of that moment on the Shiv craft when the chamberlain lost his life. He saw again how the elder Nexian's head had fallen to the floor, spilling yellow hair over the empty face. Eyes that stared back at him but didn't see. The look was almost one of peace, the core-being released from its ties to the body.
But then the lips moved while the cheeks, the eyes, the brows, all remained frozen.
"A final test, Kieriell. The trial of all trials." The voice sounded as if there were three voices speaking at once, echoing against each other, creating a strain of tones like musical bars. Kieriell stared down at the face in horror. Sweat broke out on his brow and leaked into his eyes, blurring his vision. He could still see the movement of the lips against brightening light flooding around him.
His eyes flew open and he drew in a long, hoarse breath that dried his throat and swelled his chest out before he released it in a loud gust. He bolted up straight on the bunk and tossed his legs over the side.
Heavy sweat glossed his face and neck, trickled down his torso beneath the tunic. He wiped at the moist corners of his mouth and fingered his hair out of his face. As his breath slowed, he glanced toward the field in time to see it deactivating right before Rai Jinn stepped into the room.
"The kai will have a word with you."
Kieriell said nothing as he strode toward the passage determined to keep his pride intact. "All right, let's go." He fell in with the guards, Rai Jinn following.
Moving through the series of corridors, he took better mental notes on vines that had distinctive markings. Some had larger welts than others, or they had open sores where they had been stepped on or scraped against.
The corridor widened conically toward a golden lit opening rimmed with the vines. Other guards flanked the opening, and as he was brought closer, Kieriell found Siri there too. Her silhouette lingered in the path of the procession.
Kieriell was halted while Rai Jinn stepped ahead through the opening. A gust of hot wind howled through the corridor, tightening Kieriell's skin. Beyond the light, he made out a towering rock wall across a distance of empty space. He saw a balcony wall as well, the stone dusty-hued in the light. When that now familiar rumbling of the fusion well sounded, and this time he felt it as though it were within him, Kieriell knew exactly where he was.
He looked down at Siri, who was staring acidly at him. She was heavily laden with jewelry that jangled as she swung casually from hip to hip, crossing her arms proudly, but Kieriell mostly noticed her narrow chest and the shadows in her skin which accented her collar bone, ribs, and breast plate. He tried to ignore her obvious spite. He had been expecting it. "That's the balcony with the throne, isn't it?"
She glared harder. "So much gall," she spat in Shiv. "I have heard about Nexian arrogance all my life, though I tried not to be biased when I met you."
He merely looked back toward the light, finding it a comfort compared to the rest of the hive. Although he had seen the well shaft from the kai's chamber higher up on the other side, this close proximity fascinated him.
Rai Jinn returned and motioned Kieriell forward. They stepped out of the corridor together, leaving the guards and Siri behind, and descended several steps down to the balcony floor. The wind from the well lifted tendrils of Kieriell's hair from around his shoulders. The guards allowed him to walk slowly over to the balcony wall, at least twenty long strides from the passage steps. Looking over the wall, he felt his stomach turn at the incalculable drop down.
He looked into pure light and heat produced by the natural processes of the planet's compressed molten core. The shaft reached down until it was swallowed by the brilliance of the light, but there were blocky shadows in the walls, cast by the protrusions of descending generator stations. He considered how the heat source, at varying levels of the shaft, could be utilized for different functions, and these served those purposes.
"Impressive, isn't it?"
Kieriell turned from the wall to look at the throne and its occupant. The solid stone chair graduated up out of the floor, its base jagged with stalagmite formations. These sharp designs slowly absorbed into the sides of the chair which itself was just a block form with squared-off, stark armrests and a straight back, no tapestries or drapes on the shaft wall behind it. The fingers of the kai's cy-netic hand curled over the end of one armrest while he laid his cheek against the other hand. His cloak trailed down over the front of the chair and swirled around one booted foot, while the other foot was pulled up to prop ankle across knee.
Kieriell looked straight up to see how the shaft disappeared into darkness far above. There might be a dome up there, or a protective energized field of some kind. Considering how high the shaft rose compared to how far down it plunged, Kieriell wondered exactly where this balcony was placed in relation to the rest of the palace. Before he knew it, the kai was beside him leaning casually against the balcony.
Rai Jinn had departed to the inner passage flanking the right of the throne.
"Are you ready to tell me about teleportation?" the kai asked.
"What do you want to know?" Kieriell reminded himself to answer carefully.
"I want to know what it's like, of course," the kai replied. "What do you feel when you move as light?"
Kieriell turned to look over the wall again. A new gust of heated wind stung his eyes. He closed them so that he could think more clearly. "It's like losing yourself to this blinding light, only, the light comes from within. There's a tiny sting of fear, and then instinct pushes you. I feel my body falling apart atom by atom, but there's no pain. I don't know what happens after that. All I really know is that I come back together in another place, and I don't readily remember anything between the space of the teleportation itself. I just remember the light that consumes me." When he noticed a twitch in the kai's brow, a look of disappointment or disbelief, he added with a sigh, "You want to hear that I feel all powerful or something? It's not like that."
"How did you first learn that you could do it?" The kai's voice began to hiss with eagerness for answers.
"I was late for class," Kieriell finished dryly.
The kai began to pace slowly. "Can you carry others with you? People?"
Kieriell thought about the last incident in the green room, how he had tried to teleport while carrying the little frog, which the chamberlain had handed to him. He remembered distinctly his distress when he saw the tiny creature stop moving and tense, how he empathically felt its pain. "I can't," he said, "you should know that."
The kai frowned. "How would I know?"
"You were seeing through the chamberlain's eyes when he last asked me to test my skills while carrying a living creature with me." Kieriell heard his own voice tightening. "We were in the green room. Remember?"
"Ah, that place." The kai nodded. "I do remember seeing some of it through the chamberlain."
Tensing, Kieriell considered that perhaps the chamberlain had truly been trying to warn him. I am your adversary, he had said. In that moment he assigned his pupil a rather symbolic final exam, so had the counselor freed himself momentarily from the kai's will?
"But you learned general control on the horizontal plane."
Blinking away his thoughts on the chamberlain, Kieriell cocked his head. "Yes."
"How long did it take?"
"I don't know. A year maybe," Kieriell lied. "Two years." If it sounded like a long process, the kai might become discouraged. In truth, it had taken him less than three days at the Ariahm School to figure out horizontal teleportation as he would later learn to call it. He wandered along the balcony wall, letting the wind massage through his hair. It felt good compared to the stale air in the rest of the hive.
"No," the kai disagreed lowly. "The shift could not have manifested too long ago for you. Likely the gridcode manifested then as well. You're still just a Nexian whelp." He stopped pacing and angled a steady, unemotional look at the prince. "And I suppose that, being so young, you've never been intimate with a woman. This I under
stand, even with your Nexian nature." He moved back to the throne and settled down there, leaning heavily against one arm.
Kieriell's mouth dropped open with an expression of denial, then he realized what his captor was referring to. "Now you're talking about your daughter."
"You turned her down."
"Then she didn't give you my message." Kieriell wandered toward the throne. From the corner of his eye, he noticed the guard tensing in the right passage. He wondered if Siri was still back there in the corridor.
"Message?"
"That I will not be used that way. Besides, her health is already at risk."
The kai sat forward, suddenly animated and then still again like an animal preparing a surprise attack. "I will not go over this with you again, boy. I own you, and you will do what I say." He tilted his head, looking down his nose with a winning sneer, and dimmed his eyes. "You didn't like the slab very much, did you?"
This froze Kieriell to the core of every cell.
"I thought so." The kai's metallic hand clenched the air before him. "You haven't seen the prison. It's worse."
"Prison?" Kieriell tensed, confused. "Is that not a prison you keep me in?"
"That is only a chamber like any other but with security measures. But the prison walls are like those in the laboratory, made to hold the prisoners safely. Only. . . there is no balm to ease their discomfort. Their joints first become cramped, then strangled." He leaned out from the throne, closer to Kieriell who was determined not to back down. "If they struggle, the neural flesh tightens." Then he was in front of Kieriell, grasping one of the prince's arms with his real hand and squeezing.
Kieriell gritted his teeth, and his back muscles crawled. He immediately recalled the last time he had been so close to this creature. He reached up with his free hand and pried at the kai's fingers, resisting above all the instinct to resort to shadow weaponry.
"Sometimes," the kai continued casually, "the vines tighten so much that, after they have cut off the initial circulation into the limbs, they continue to dig in, to gnaw their way through. The skin around the area turns purple with the constriction. Sometimes blood oozes out, but the slow process gives it time to clot. Most of the sensation goes away, but the prisoner knows the worst. The limb loses life, and layer by layer of tissue begins to rot, right there while it is still attached to the body—"
"You rot!" Kieriell dug lengthening talons into the kai's hand.
The kai let go, hissing through his teeth. He sat back into the throne. "You will do what I say, and you will conceive a child with my daughter Siri."
"You don't know what you're telling me to do!" Kieriell burst out in frustration.
"You will do it, or she will receive artificial fertilization from the samples the laboratory extracted from you. Either way it will be your child, but I prefer that there be a union between the two of you."
Kieriell's cheeks burned, the sensation deepening until it reached down through his neck and across his shoulders. A low, muted growl scratched his throat. "How honorable," he seethed.
"Which will it be, Kieriell Shyr'ahm?"
"You bastard." Kieriell drew closer to the throne and jabbed a finger at the kai. "Do you know what could happen to her if she has a Nexian baby?"
"The child will have endless potential if the gridcode—"
"She could die!" Kieriell threw out his arms only to find the guards taking hold of him, pulling him back from the throne and its glaring occupant. "Don't you care about that?" he asked, twisting himself free.
After a long moment, the kai stood again. "As I said, there are two ways of doing it. I'll give you the option, but it would be so much better if there could be a little more of a union. Think of it, Kieriell, the two of you would represent our races joined forever, no longer in conflict with each other." He arched one brow, sure of himself. "Consider it compensation for the failure of the negotiations, if that will make you happy." He dismissed the guards with a wave, and one of them gave Kieriell a nudge to get him moving.
"She's too frail," Kieriell still objected. "She will not survive the birth." To no avail, he realized. The kai turned his back and looked in the other direction out over the balcony. Kieriell kept looking back, hoping for some sign that his words were not lost. But the kai either didn't believe him or refused to believe, caught up in his dementia as he was, dreaming of having a transcendant in his line.
The guards did not seem effected either. They wore blank faces, mindless eyes. Perhaps they were beholden to the kai by more than government or race, Kieriell thought. The kai's psionic power probably ruled them more than any respect they might have for his position.
The well's hot breeze followed Kieriell back into the passage, and his vision focused through the change in light to see Siri just steps away. Her back was pressed against the vines on the wall, her small hand gripping absently at one swollen formation while she stared at him. Her horizontal pupils dilated so much as to swallow away the golden irises, leaving disturbed black holes.
Kieriell stared back evenly, eye-to-eye, for a suspended moment before he was taken away.
Siri had heard only fragments of the argument on the balcony. She had been so angry with the Nexian that she expected satisfaction when her father cursed Prince Kieriell Shyr'ahm's arrogance. But now, confused, she wandered the corridors to her chamber, a stark little room with only the luxuries of a vanity table and chair, both decorated with ancient scrollwork. She sat on the bed and stared up at a decorative net of lighted beadwork. The formation dipped down from one corner, then back up again, strings of stars interconnected, divided into sections of varying thread length. The light net had been draped there since she was a child, something her mother had ordered installed in the chamber as a comfort against the hive's growing darkness. Three years later her mother succumbed to malnutrition and the cancerous effect of the hive's stagnancy. Only a few of the Shiv lived out their full lives now, her father and his second in command being among that few.
Siri knew her father to have a wrath, but she found it forgivable when she thought of his body, held together by so many remnants of machinery: an artificial heart, a chemically enforced neural system to drive his movements and enhance his link with the palace core, and the cy-netic limb. Siri had not known the time when her father was without that false hand and arm. By his natural body's standards, he should have died a long time ago, so when he acted out of anger, she forgave it and wondered if the machinery didn't have some control of its own on his mind.
But when the Nexian spoke of how she might die if she bore a child by him, Siri's throat tightened and her heart sank.
Her father had not listened.
The Nexian is lying, she tried to tell herself. But somehow that didn't seem so. She saw the truth of it in his eyes when he stared at her in the passage after the confrontation. The long slits of his pupils, set in irises turned violet from the reddening of his blue eyes, had constricted to fine lines at the sight of her, like a silent warning. Everything about him set her nerves and heart on edge. She had seen the partial talons on his fingertips, how they grew depending on the lengths of his emotions then shed into organic dust when he calmed. She had even felt those talons tickling against her skin when she had tried to tempt him with the feel of her breast.
But she had not understood his rejection of her advances. Nexians were supposed to be easily moved by sex and the animal instinct to spawn. Or at least that was what she had been taught. Her ego wasn't huge, but she had felt so ugly when he turned her away. She had decided that he must be little more than arrogant. A prince from a handsome race, who could only see her as grotesque.
For two years she had waited for that moment with him, the one to whom her father had deemed her betrothed. And in that brief time in his protected chamber, she felt her hopes for a future with him crumble.
(Siri.)
It was her father's voice, interrupting her thoughts as he often did. She rose from her bed and hesitated at the passage, looki
ng back at the light net and thinking of her mother. Had her mother also been summoned so coldly? Siri had been so young then that she couldn't remember her mother's face now.
(Siri.)
(I'm coming,) she sent irritably. Then she hastened from the chamber and found her way back to the fusion well and the balcony. As she rounded the corner of the opening onto the balcony, she looked up to see Rai Jinn flanking one side of the throne.
Her father beckoned her closer with his cy-netic hand. She stepped up to bow before his lap and hold the artificial hand tenderly against the side of her cheek. (Yes?) she asked. She felt sometimes that if she held that metallic hand long enough, she could warm real life into it, turn it to flesh, and perhaps he would not be so alienating.
(As you know, I have spoken with our guest. I cannot say that he is any more willing to cooperate on this delicate subject matter, but you must keep persuading him.)
(I heard his protests, Father,) she admitted.
The kai eyed his daughter, and she tensed under the weight of his glare. (He was stalling,) he said finally. (Prince Kieriell is hiding his more primal nature, as all Nexians try to do. He does want you.)
The hot breeze of the well seemed to drift up with his words and Siri frowned, remembering what other words she had heard exchanged between her father and the Nexian.
(But what was that he said about the chamberlain?)
He glared at this, obviously displeased that she had heard so much, and he didn't answer the initial question. (His life has been signed over to us, Siri, and nothing can change that for him.)
(I understand, but—)
(It has more to do with Nexian laws and how he has come into our company. Don't worry over it.) With his fleshen hand he stroked a lock of hair trailing over her shoulder. He smoothed it out and then pulled the strands back together again, pinched between his fingertips. (Ah, my child,) his sending voice became a whisper, trailing off in Siri's mind and leaving no trace that there had actually been an undertone of love there. (I don't expect you to understand the entire situation. Just bear with your father.)