by R. Lee Smith
Dkorm snorted at her back. “It amazes me that you can work all those fingers without getting them confused,” he remarked and started to turn away. He paused. He turned back, jogging Rosek higher onto his shoulder so that he could reach out and play with Amber’s hair. “Does Zhuqa know how clever you are with your many fingers, Eshiqi?”
“Fuck off. I’m working.”
“Zhuqa told me I couldn’t have a poke.” He leaned in to lick at her. The waxy nub of his tongue, dry and repulsive, swept back and forth over her shoulder while she fought and failed not to squirm. “As far as I know, everything else is just fine.”
“If you believe that, you’re even dumber than you look.” Amber shrugged hard enough to hit him in the jaw and followed that glancing blow with a glare while he rubbed his snout and looked thinly amused. “And you’re not scaring me with any of this macho shit, so just back off and let me work.”
“You talk too much.” He moved to the other shoulder and licked it, too. Tiny hands caught at her wrap as he worked his way methodically to her neck; the baby, Rosek, trying to wriggle out from between them. “Fucking sprat,” she heard him mutter and he leaned away.
Her hand tightened on the needle before she could make herself relax. It wasn’t much of a gesture. He should have missed it if he’d been looking anywhere but right at her hand.
But he snorted again. “With that thing?” he asked derisively. “Go on, then.”
She made another knot, furious and silent.
“You don’t think I mean it.” He caught her wrist, turned her roughly around and shoved her against the table. Her ass hit the corner just right and she toppled back, catching herself in the split-second before she took a painful sprawl across the hook-studded net. She had the needle raised in a fist before she knew it.
Dkorm stepped up invitingly, the baby in one arm and the other open wide, displaying the whole of his scaly chest for her sliver of baked bone to pierce. “Go on. You killed a man, they say, so you must have some arm in you, no matter how you look. You could even hurt me if you sink it in my eye, but I warn you, you might hit the sprat.” He jogged Rosek again and she squealed happily and waved her new doll over her head.
Amber put the needle down and gave it a push out of her easy reach.
Dkorm grunted and fingered her hair, then wrapped a hank of it around his wrist and pried her head slowly back, further and further, until her shaking arm couldn’t brace her anymore. She fell with a weak, angry cry, anticipating a dozen barbed hooks in her back, but the hand that pulled her down also held her up. She waited, suspended over the net with her eyes squeezed shut, for him to work out what he wanted to do.
After an tense silence, Dkorm rasped out another lizard-laugh and backed up, tossing her by her hair to her knees on the floor. “You are the ugliest Gann-damned thing I have ever seen,” he announced, handing her the baby as he beckoned to Yllgami. “I honestly don’t know what it is about you that makes me want to fuck.”
“Of course you want to fuck, you’re nothing but a giant dick,” Amber said, and was glad he didn’t know English enough to know how shaky and frightened she sounded. Behind her, she could hear as Dkorm bent his slave over the table. He was loud—grunting, slapping, hissing; Yllgami never made a sound.
Rosek, larger and stronger than Zhuqa’s baby, struggled to get away from the smooth-skinned, hairy monster now enveloping her, and finally Xzem crept forward and snatched her away. Amber rubbed at her empty arms and watched Xzem nuzzle Rosek while nursing the smaller infant. Dkorm’s violent sex went on and on.
“Look at you…pretending…not to care,” he panted, finally shoving the lizardlady away and wiping his cock clean on her skirts. “Look at you staring me down like I couldn’t stand you up and put it to you so hard, you’d be coughing on my cum before the end.”
His boots tromped heavily around until he stood in front of her, over her. He didn’t move to take the baby back, either of them. He just stood there while Amber glared at the floor and made herself keep quiet. Then, with a curt laugh, he caught her by the hair and yanked her head up. Looking at him meant looking past the cudgel of his erection, already weeping fresh beads of oil in readiness. “I can see murder in your eyes. When are you going to learn that you are a slave now?” he wondered, giving her hair a shake. “You can be as fierce as you want, Eshiqi, but all it will get you is killed.”
He was right. Thoughts of the needle and the fish hooks taunted her, but the real bitterness was that she’d come to think of them as any kind of weapon at all. Even if she could get the needle through his thick hide, how much damage could she do? She remembered the kipwe all too well and how its quills—the smallest of them twice the size of her needle—hadn’t slowed Meoraq down in battle. He’d actually been able to sleep through their removal. She also remembered the way his scales had sealed up over the wounds as she pulled them out, so even if she got in a good hit, she’d never do any real damage. Maybe she could stab him in the slit, where his scales were thinnest and didn’t overlap, but if that was the best she could do, what was the point?
“Zhuqa seems to think that you’re smart,” Dkorm was saying, running his thumb idly up and down along his shaft as he toyed with her hair. “But you’re not smart enough to know that making me happy is much better for you in the long term than showing me how fierce you can be.”
All this with his dick right in front of her. Amber felt a moment’s nostalgia for the days of Crandall and subtle innuendo. She started to twist her face away from the hook-tipped thing Dkorm kept aimed at her, but then flinched a little and stared right at it.
“I wish you would take a stab at me, Eshiqi,” he said, and let her go again to grip his cock, squeezing once wistfully before pushing it back, grimacing with effort, into his slit. “There’s not a scale on me you could poke through with that toy you had, but if you at least tried, maybe Zhuqa would give me one hour to poke b—”
Amber reached out and caught him by the narrowing tip of his cock before he could force it all the way out of sight. He let go with a startled hiss and out it came, thrusting through her fist in oiled urgency until the knot at its base bumped her hand.
And there it was.
Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing, she’d thought, looking at the fish hook, but she hadn’t meant it, not really. Not even Meoraq could magically make that insignificant bit of metal into a murder weapon when every part of a lizardman’s body was armored and every vein protected.
Every vein…but this one. That thick, black, throbbing vein that crawled along the surface of the bulging knot at the base of his cock.
“Get off me,” Dkorm warned, glancing over his shoulder at the workpit door, but he didn’t try to pry her off. Zhuqa could walk in at any moment, and if he found her here with her hand on this man’s dick, he’d probably do all the killing she could ever want for her, but it wasn’t Dkorm she wanted dead.
‘I could do it,’ she thought, stunned. ‘Even with a fish hook.’
“Get off me, I said!”
Amber looked up past the slick head of his cock to his strained, somewhat dazed face. His spines were low, but not flat, and the color was coming in at his throat. If she gave him a stroke, she had no doubt that would be the end of his objections.
‘Because he’s sick,’ she thought, staring. ‘Once his neck lights up, it all about sex…or killing…and all they want to do is more of it. It’s only, what? Seventeen years of training that keeps Meoraq more or less under control—’
Training that Zhuqa shared. Training that just might give him that one moment’s pause to think, ‘Hang on, this is suspicious.’ And then he’d kill her.
And how was she going to smuggle a fish hook out of the workpit anyway? More importantly, how was she going to smuggle it into Zhuqa’s room? He’d strip her as soon as he got her home and as soon as he saw a weapon, even if it was a silly little finger-length fish hook, he’d kill her.
And even if he didn’t, even if by some
miracle she killed him, there was no way out except up ten flights of stairs, past ten pairs of guards and then past all the rest of them living in the ruins on the surface before running out into the wildlands to get lost and die anyway.
‘So stay,’ she thought in the voice of her dead mother. She looked at her hand on Dkorm’s dick and it was Bo Peep’s hand. It was Bo Peep’s heart inside her feeling nothing but hopelessness and hate, feeling it so completely that it was almost comforting. ‘Stay and be Zhuqa’s Eshiqi. Be a mother to his kids. Help train the new slaves he brings home for his men to fuck. Suck it up or blow it out, little girl. There’s no such thing as a fate worse than death.’
In the stillness of that moment, she was tempted.
“Fuck you,” Amber whispered, appalled. She let go of Dkorm and wiped her hand on her shift.
He socked her in the ear. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough. Whether he hit her for grabbing his cock or letting go, she didn’t know and he didn’t explain. He just knocked her aside and pulled Yllgami back to finish him off. Less than a minute later, he was back on his throne of crates and sacks, swearing at Rosek and drinking.
Amber sat on the floor. The other women worked around her. She watched them; they did not watch her.
Meoraq was looking for her. She still believed that, but every time she woke up beside Zhuqa, it was getting harder to believe he’d find her. And if God told him to get on with his life—if he saw a funny shape in the clouds or if the fire burned a weird way or if any one of a thousand random things happened—he’d do it.
Maybe he’d already done it. With Bo Peep sitting so close beside her, it was easy to imagine him coming back to camp and praying instead of looking for her. She could see him kneeling beside the dead raider all night and then leaving him to rot on the ground in the morning. Why burn him? He’d gone to Gann. He was corrupted beyond all forgiveness. And so, perhaps, was she.
‘No one is going to save you, little girl.’
“Fuck you,” Amber said again.
Bo Peep shrugged inside her head, smiling her mean, drunken smile. ‘Sometimes you have to say the bad stuff. Hope is nothing but pretty lies, like those storybooks they gave you in state-care, where the dragon always dies in the end and the prince climbs the tower and carries the prisoner away to be a princess forever and forever. Bullshit, baby. In the real world, nobody saves you. In the real world, it’s live in Zhuqa’s House…or die there.’
Amber opened her mouth to tell her mother’s fake ghost to fuck herself for a third time, but couldn’t. Bo Peep was right. And since the only part of Bo Peep that was still around was a figment of Amber’s own imagination, she guessed she knew what she was going to do.
She was going to escape.
* * *
They finished three nets by the end of the day, with little enough for Amber to do that she also learned how to repair them. She needed the distraction, badly. With nothing to think about except the hook—not even the hook, but the possibility, the potential, of the hook—she had become tense enough to make her neck and back ache. Aching muscles needed to be stretched. Walking helped the stretching, but made the other lizardladies distinctly nervous. So she picked up a pair of the odd wooden tools Ena was using and watched until she figured out how to fix a hole in a fishing net.
She kept at it long after the rest of them were gone. Hook and pull, wrap and knot, wrap and hook. It made the time pass.
Zhuqa came. Amber put Meoraq’s needles back in Meoraq’s mending kit and set it carefully on the table where she had been working. Then she turned around to face him, tipping back her head in case he wanted a nuzzle. He did. She stood very still until it was over and then followed him out into the hall.
Alone in his room, Amber took the initiative, stripping away her clothes before he gave the order and standing patiently by while he searched her. She could feel the plan throbbing behind her eyes like a headache, until she could not bear to meet his gaze and had to look away.
“You should know,” he murmured, stroking at her throat, “I find coyness deeply arousing. Come and greet your man, Eshiqi, before we share our meal.”
Amber stepped close, still staring at the table to keep her thoughts, her plan, away from his too-piercing stare. She pressed her cheek perfunctorily to his chest and her hand to his groin, thoughts racing. She loosened his belt to work her hand beneath his metal loin-plate and kneaded at him, seeking the hidden hardness of his cock beneath his skin.
“Enough of that,” said Zhuqa, chuckling as he patted her hip. “Food first. Then we play.”
“Believe me, I’m not playing,” said Amber, resisting his nudge toward the table and moving her hand instead to his slit.
He caught her wrist, the hard edges of his belly-scales flexing shut around her fingertip. He didn’t look amused anymore. She glared, because she knew he expected to see it, even as she felt her heart pounding at her ribs…and her ribs pressed too goddamn close to his.
His eyes narrowed. Deliberately, he cocked his head—a warning.
“Please,” she said in lizardish. Nerves made her voice shake and that was good, as long as she sounded broken and not like her head was burning up with secrets.
“You want something?” Suspicion dimmed, but didn’t die. “What do you want?”
What, it wasn’t enough that she was trying to ingratiate herself? She had to have a reason?
“Take me out,” she said. “Just for a little while.”
“Eh?”
Fuck this stupid impossible goddamn tonal language. “Out,” she said, or tried to. “Grass. Trees. Sky.”
“You what…?” His head slowly tipped back. “You want to see the sky.”
“That’s right,” she said, gratefully falling into English again. She kneaded at his slit some more and gradually he relaxed enough to let her finger penetrate, although he kept his hold on her wrist. “I want to see the sky. You said Zhuqa’s woman doesn’t need to be locked up. I’ve been good, haven’t I? I want to see the sky.”
“What exactly do you think you have to barter with that I do not already own?” he inquired. His spines were coming up, away from flat suspicion to cautious enjoyment.
Amber found his sa’ad, gave it a stroke, then looked into his eyes and knelt.
He had to be able to see the plan in her eyes. He had to. Because she could see as clear as the sun back in Earth’s sky his memory of how she’d licked the meaty juices off his fingers the other night. His slit bulged with the sudden prodding of his erection; the scent of cloves and musk welled, cloying in its closeness.
Amber held the stare. Her lips parted, She breathed on the crown of his slit where her thumb pierced him, then looked at his hand on her wrist.
He grunted and tightened his grip. “The game is ‘Zhuqa’s House,’ woman,” he said. “Not ‘Eshiqi’s bargain. I did not ask for this. Up.”
But his cock was a dark gleam between the widening folds of his slit, and she could feel the tension in his muscles as he fought to hold it in. He told her to get up, sure he did, but he didn’t pull her to her feet and he could have.
She rubbed the ball of her thumb over his sa’ad in two slow revolutions, then put her other hand up to pry the top of his slit open so she could see it—a dark, pointing gnarl that resembled either the world’s largest clitoris or the tiniest penis, visibly twitching in time with his pulse. ‘Meoraq has one of these and I never knew it,’ she thought suddenly and had to bite down on a giggle because it really was funny, wasn’t it, to think that she could be that unadventurous about having sex with her alien lizardman.
She caressed Zhuqa’s sa’ad, still in that light-headed, dangerously amused mood, now thinking of it less as a blowjob and more of a lesbian experience. Her very first. She leaned close, exhaled.
His cock lurched out maybe halfway and pulled back out of sight.
“Please,” said Amber, in case he’d forgotten why she was doing this.
“I did not trust you bef
ore,” he said tightly. “I trust you damned less n—”
She licked his slit.
His last word swept into a lizardish snarl and his hips jerked forward, impaling the air with the sudden stabbing bar of his fully extruded, cum-spitting cock. He jerked her trapped wrist up over her head even as his other hand came clawing down at her shoulder.
Amber pried his slit open (much easier to do with his cock out) and licked it again, sweeping her tongue back and forth like she was licking an ice-cream cone into shape. The taste was strong in ways she couldn’t identify (but not of cloves, oddly) and not as unpleasant as she’d been braced for, except for the little matter of whose clit she was licking at all. Each wet swirl of her tongue beat another convulsion of some sort out of Zhuqa—a cough, a curse, a staggering step or a clenching fist—until he let go of her hand and she was free to use it on his cock.
The instant she closed her fist around him, she pursed her lips around his clit and sucked it into her mouth. Sucked hard.
“Fuck Gann!” roared Zhuqa and then grey light burst over the left side of her head and suddenly Amber was sprawling over the floor.
He looked almost as surprised to see her there as she was.
Amber put a hand cautiously up to rub at the hot throb of her left ear, but it wasn’t bleeding, of course, just slapped really good. She looked at him, and then she bounded to her feet, shouting, “What was that for?”
He glared at her, breathing hard but silently, and then pointed at the ground between his feet.
“No!” she snapped, then said it again in his language.
He was fast. He was so scary fast. He had her by the neck while the word was still hot in her mouth and choked it off, half-spoken. He started to speak, then paused and looked away to take a few more silent breaths. His cock moved slowly up and down, keeping time. He looked at her again. His grip eased, then opened.
“I did not mean to hit you,” he said. “You startled me. I won’t do it again. Use your mouth on me, Eshiqi, and I will take you to see the sky.”