Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  A second young assistant parceled up the purchase of the customer, a petite Rakkar woman who wore an open brown cotton jacket over a well-used leather apron and ankle-length skirts. The girl folded a sheet of parchment neatly around the bundle of individually wrapped items, no doubt ingredients meant for some dangerous alchemical process, or medicines to treat the damage thereof. She cut a piece of string the length of her larger arms’ span—a quarter again longer than Talis’s own—and webbed the package in a complicated series of crossovers. Then she strung a tiny copper bell onto the end and secured it with a bow.

  As she handed it across the counter to the woman, Talis noted that the young clerk’s smile was more deliberate than natural. The Vein did not smile as a matter of instinct. They relied on audible expressions of happiness and pleasure. The smile was meant for their sighted customers and needed practice. The veil of simulation dropped as soon as the customer, whose own chitin-plated face was half expressionless itself, uttered a brisk ‘thank you’ and turned to leave.

  The woman passed through the shop’s archway, which was hung with two layers of beaded curtains. The interior curtain was strung with what looked like pearls, which shuffled softly as she departed. The exterior curtain clinked more noisily, made of dark beads that might have been metal.

  “Welcome, please, Captain,” Zeela said, more animated now that they were alone in the shop. “We have a fresh tincture that has just finished fermenting. It would be of great use on that scrape.”

  Talis looked down and rubbed the outside of her left hand. She hadn’t noticed it was bleeding. “Bit of a rough route to get here.”

  “You must pardon the deception,” said the businesswoman. She produced Talis’s stolen purse from beneath a fold in her sleeve and gestured to it with one of her hands.

  “The nature of your visit, and of what I would like to speak to you about, necessitated caution. I did not wish to have your approach to my shop observed by the less savory denizens of this port.”

  Zeela’s assistant removed a shallow glass jar from a shelf and transferred a translucent yellow paste from a larger container with a flat spatula, coordinating all four hands in her task. She placed the jar on a scale, ran her delicate fingers across the spring-loaded needle that indicated its weight, and twisted a lid into place.

  “Your shop is being watched?” Talis felt foolish as soon as she asked. Of course it was. The real question was why that should change their behavior at all.

  “There have been offers made, a price set for your death. It seemed prudent, in order to have you arrive all together.”

  Zeela accepted the jar from her assistant and placed it in Talis’s hands, along with the reclaimed purse. The smell of rosemary and mint moved with her. Talis couldn’t help but take another deep breath. She felt the tension leaving her aching shoulders.

  “A gift for you,” Zeela said. “My apology for the inconvenience.”

  Fortunate, as Talis was certain the little jar cost as much as that bi-clutch Sophie wanted. Too bad the thief hadn’t led her to as generous a mechanic.

  “Thank you,” she said as she accepted the items. “You no doubt know of my other, less dismissible, inconvenience.”

  “Inconvenience, perhaps, but quite a prize all the same.” Zeela contracted her nostrils and made a small series of exhaled chuffs. Laughter.

  Talis untied the cord on her neck and placed the ring in its bag onto the counter between them. “Apparently so valuable that none of this city’s entrepreneurs have the connections necessary to find a qualified buyer.”

  Zeela’s hands moved over the pouch without touching it. “The cost is about more than just currency, as you know, Captain Talis. Pressures have been applied to prevent you from making an exchange.”

  Talis desperately needed this visit to go well, but the prick of a suspicion planted itself in her head. Zeela might be a ruthless enough businesswoman to have sent those thugs to Jasper to intercept her. The child that led Talis there was proof that Subrosan orphans acted as Zeela’s eyes and ears on the streets. It was common practice for anyone with power in Subrosa. Assassination less so, but it was a technique employed with regularity among Vein competitors. Talis hoped Zeela’s outward grace reflected a preference for more delicate handling of such situations. And that her appreciation for ancient things would extend to one of Helsim Breaker’s people.

  “As is its value.” Talis bargained with the suspicions she had about the ring’s history, and on the actions of those who had been after it thus far.

  “Indeed. You have a reputation, but not the sort that attracts such dramatic threats.”

  Talis crossed her arms and wished she’d had a couple more drinks on Talbot’s credit back at The Docked Tail.

  “Maybe I’m losing my touch.”

  Zeela pursed her lips but picked up the ring in its pouch, resting it on her open palm.

  “You are correct, however, about the value. I have found you a buyer.”

  Talis almost felt dizzy with relief. This was it, then. After what had quickly escalated into the worst day she could remember in a long time, after her crew’s barely contained mutinous thoughts, after worrying how her ship was going to stay in the sky. Just like that, she’d found her fence. Stumbled onto her, really. She wouldn’t have to pawn the thing off for a pocketful of change on her way back down to the docks after all.

  Zeela disappeared through a silk and velvet curtain into the shop’s private area, taking the ring with her. Talis expected her to reemerge with appraisal tools or paperwork, but one of the clerks lifted the hinged countertop for Talis to follow.

  The twisting hallway behind the shop was pitch black in comparison to the low candlelight of the shopfront. Talis paused, completely lost as the curtain closed behind them and the blackness swelled around her. After a minimal pause in which Talis still found time to feel the panic rising to clutch at her, a golden glow emanated from the carpet and grew brighter until she could see Zeela adjusting a round dial on the wall to her side. The walls were wainscoted to the level of Zeela’s lower elbows, and wallpapered above that with decadent golden damask. She gestured with one arm in its flowing sleeve, and Talis followed the shopkeeper down the hall and around two turns.

  At the end of the passage, a strip of bright light showed at the bottom edge of a door. The buyer was sighted, then, Talis surmised. Possibly another Rakkar, Talis figured. Likely not Breaker, Bone, or Cutter.

  Hopefully not Cutter. A Cutter buyer could prove to be a member of The Veritors of the Lost Codex. An agent for Hankirk. As desperate as she was to sell the ring, she wasn’t sure what she’d do if that was where this was headed. She swallowed and her fingers found their way up to clasp at her prayerlocks. Hoped the Veritors wouldn’t lower themselves to dealing through a Vein acquisitions agent.

  She needn’t have worried about the Veritors. Zeela pressed the unlatched door in on its hinges, and as it swung into the room, four Yu’Nyun turned to greet them.

  Chapter 13

  Whatever guesses Talis might have made about Zeela’s connections, she had not anticipated the aliens.

  Her mind blanked. Forgot to tell her feet to stop moving. Momentum carried her into the room, and one of the aliens stepped forward to meet her. That sudden movement finally got her to brake before she walked right into it.

  From descriptions, rumors started by those who claimed to have seen them, she expected the Yu’Nyun to be tall, lanky, and bony. They were that. Except for the bony part. Exoskeletons are made of chitin, after all, not bone. The Rakkar had chitin armor on their arms and plating over a portion of their faces, but the aliens were fully sheathed in the protective hard casing. Their waists were narrow. Narrower than the corsets Talis had suffered in a former life as a proper young lady. Talis wondered how they had room for vital organs, for her own had once been crowded from such tight cinching. The protrusion of alien ribs an
d hips harshly accentuated the tiny stomach between.

  She also recalled some mention about body paint. Another inaccuracy. It wasn’t paint. The surfaces of their bodies were engraved.

  Carved.

  Chiseled.

  Lurid blue tissue showed through where some cuts were so deep they became perforations. The alternating white and blue shades formed delicate, graceful, horrific patterns.

  Talis had heard the aliens wore headdresses or elaborate hats. Wrong again. The sweeping crests that rose up and curved back were their heads. Carved, just like their bodies.

  She struggled to find a comparison for them. The closest she could come up with was wasps. Enormous, cadaverous, ghostly wasps.

  Three of them wore nothing but blue leather loincloths, belts with pouches, and some superficial metal adornments across their collars and around their arms, jewelry as rigid as they were. The fourth, who was still seated, might have been dressed straight out of Zeela’s wardrobe. She—he? it?—wore silks, threaded with silver and beaded with what looked like sapphires. Its head was veiled in diaphanous tulle. Glints of the blue tissue, the flesh beneath the carapace, were visible through the veil. So much of the outer shell was carved away that it must have been more delicate than even that impractical anatomy would ever have intended.

  The resemblance between the Vein and the Yu’Nyun went beyond the unnecessarily fancy garment, though the Yu’Nyun had only two arms. But both were tall, slender, and graceful. And pale.

  Talis’s mind was still coping. Must be. To compare the Vein to the Yu’Nyun… It was like comparing a butterfly to a walking stick.

  Something yelled in her brain that first impressions were in order. Cultural understanding, the governments had called for. Business to deal with, Zeela had promised. Business. That got her mind moving. The only way out. Hopefully at least the rumors had gotten the aliens’ wealth right.

  Sell the ring, take the money, disappear back into the skies. A darker coat of black paint on Wind Sabre’s hull, maybe. Never mind repairs. Upgrade the engines. Cannons. All the things money could buy that she’d need next time The Serpent Rose appeared in their long-range.

  So the aliens would be her salvation. All right. She took a deep breath. She could work with this. Little choice, anyway.

  Zeela waited with tilted head beside the open door. Left open, if Talis felt the need to retreat. No doubt watching closely to see if she could deal with the situation that presented itself. A less worldly Cutter might balk at such clientele and remove herself as abruptly as she’d come. Talis imagined what might have happened if Sophie had come with her. Wished Dug had. Would they even believe her when she returned to Wind Sabre with the tale?

  Business, she reminded herself.

  Talis inclined her head slightly and tried to look important. While her alien counterpart stood with perfect posture on its—Five Hells… It stood digitigrade, each long leg balanced atop three arching toes. Still carved, right down to the floor. She absently wondered if any of them had ever carved away so much that their bodies just crumpled beneath them.

  Business, woman. Talis put her weight into one hip, a cocky lean to one side. Let her right arm fall, forearm brushing the pistol on her belt. The other hand rested on the jutted hip.

  The obvious leader of the alien party had representatives with it. Once again she wished she had Dug with her, if for nothing else than to act as her spokesperson.

  She heard the coarse grating of gravel being scraped with a bamboo rake. As the sound modulated in speed and rhythm, Talis noticed the slithering hiss of a secondary sound weaving in and around the percussive noises.

  It was the Yu’Nyun language.

  Lindent’s Wisdom guide me, she thought, only half as sacrilegiously as she might normally mean it.

  But the sound soon faded, reduced to a humming drone, and a new voice began. Speaking the Common Trade, though not well and not pleasantly. The interpretation was coming from a flat device held in the speaker’s hands. Points of light danced across its smooth glass surface, modulating curves moving across the screen in response to its vocalization.

  “Our pleasure,” came the voice from the pad, “to make introduce with you. To mutual benefit, with trade for wealth and items.”

  Zeela made the tiniest strained sound, a high-pitched sigh that came from somewhere in her sinuses.

  She doesn’t care to hear it, either. Talis’s teeth ached, listening to the multi-pitched rasping and hissing of the alien language, overlaid with the monotonous tone as it made a mockery of grammar. She didn’t know which sound was worse.

  Zeela responded for her. “Captain Talis would be most happy to sell to you. Shall we negotiate the item’s value?”

  Bless her, Talis thought. She’s acting as my agent.

  Now Talis only had to hope Zeela was acting in her best interest.

  Sell my ring, get me out of here. I’d give you a full three-quarter commission if it means I’m gone before all my jaw clenching cracks a molar.

  Zeela stepped forward and gestured to the bolstered seat cushions that surrounded a lacquered table. Another young girl appeared, dressed in a thin silk robe, finer than the cotton worn in the front of the shop. She carried a tray of aromatic tea, which she placed on the low tabletop. It wasn’t until the smell of the tea leaves reached Talis’s nose that she became aware of the other smell in the room. Like dust, and sand, and old metal.

  It’s them, she realized as Zeela poured everyone a diminutive porcelain cup of tea.

  Once, in a Bone village, Talis had met an old priestess, so arcane and primeval in her methods of practice that she was rumored to be more witch than worshipper. Outside the woman’s abode were strung the bones of animals she had hunted, or sacrificed—Talis hadn’t asked—and in the wind they clapped together, making soft percussive music. It had chilled her to the core. These aliens evoked an uncannily similar feeling. She attempted to relax her jaw and moved to a seat opposite the apparent leader of the Yu’Nyun group.

  She could not get through this, and away from these aliens, fast enough.

  Zeela sat back down between Talis and the spokesalien, produced the ring, now free of its pouch, from one of her long sleeves, and placed it on a ceramic stand on the table. She gestured to it with one of her smaller hands.

  “I stand in witness to the authenticity of the item,” she said.

  The aliens leaned forward. Curiosity was universal, it seemed. Talis saw the hand of their veiled leader twitch in its lap, but it did not reach out. She remembered how the alien ship had plunged into the flotsam. Couldn’t help but imagine a full ship’s crew of these bony devils. She had a moment to appreciate that they were here to buy the ring and not outright take it.

  In Talis’s mind, the price for the ring was going up in direct proportion to the amount of time she had to spend in this unsettling company.

  Get a grip, she told herself. Business, business. Breathe. This meeting won’t last forever.

  The alien representative spoke again.

  “With a price for the item,” the alien’s translator relayed after a moment. “Prepared with precious metal and stone in value like seventy-five thousand your coin.”

  Talis looked at Zeela, head turning so quickly she felt something pop in her neck, and the sensation of icy fire traced the tendons up to the base of her skull. Vein were one thing. Vein left you in awe. Vein didn’t make your skin feel like it wanted to pull free from your body and leave you behind if you didn’t have the sense to run. The deep breath Talis had been taking seemed lost somewhere on its way to her lungs.

  And now the translator made mockery of their currency conversions.

  “Could they rephrase that?” Her voice was calm, level. Detached from the part of her mind that begged to vault the colorful upholstered cushions and be gone from the room.

  “I believe,” said Zeela c
almly, slow as pouring syrup, “the honorable representative from the Yu’Nyun ship is offering you the trade equivalent of seventy-five thousand silver presscoins, in the form of silver bullion and precious gemstones.”

  The alien listened as Zeela’s words were converted to painful hisses and clicks. Then it looked to Talis, and waited.

  It was a good thing the aliens didn’t expect Talis to speak on her own behalf. She was on the verge of panicked laughter. It threatened to break through her outward calm.

  The aliens wanted to pay almost double what the ring was worth. Though worth was becoming more and more difficult to peg when it came to this item. To her, it was rubbish. Rubbish she had hinged her future on. Rubbish that had cost the world a Breaker life. Perhaps the aliens had no concept of fair value, or of exchange rates, for the translator to muck up.

  She opened her mouth to tell Zeela she accepted the offer. Or should she counter it? Did the aliens barter?

  “Also,” the alien appended to its statement before Talis could speak. “Request wise lady captain sell additional service.”

  Damn. And there it is.

  Built into that generous sum of money, which she’d surely regret to walk away from, was going to be another item. Another service. Something she suspected she wasn’t going to like. How would she signal her refusal to Zeela? Cough? Kick her in the leg?

  Zeela spoke. Her tone was level as before, but the words were clipped and her accent heavier. “What does the Yu’Nyun representative require of the esteemed captain?”

  “Take us to meet your gods.”

  The translator made a valiant effort on the grammar. Best sentence so far. Too bad it had completely flubbed the message. Talis looked to Zeela.

  “I think that was mistranslated again.”

  “Not,” droned the alien through its device. “We take many tries, since arrive. Approach four government. All religion spokespersons. Learn many topics surround your deities. Very curious your planet structure. Very curious your planet history. Buy many your artifacts from many times. Information is missing. Your gods witness missing information, complete our research. Exploration we seek knowledge. Interview with gods serve last information to complete our mission.”