“Maybe resting was the wrong advice,” Maia said to her that day.
“Just tell me we’re getting close,” Sediryl mumbled into her hands. Rubbing her face, she propped her chin up on her folded fingers. “Just tell me we’re getting close.”
“We’re not getting farther, but that’s all I can promise.”
Sediryl sighed.
Maia had spent so much time assuring her that their pursuit would be an arduous and careful one, conducted in stealth and only eventually culminating—hopefully—in some knowledge they could use to find Jahir that Sediryl was not at all prepared to be jerked awake by the alert siren. Her pillow flew from her as she shoved her way to the edge of her bed. “Maia!”
“Come quickly!”
Sediryl grabbed her robe and hurried to the bridge, stopping short at the door to stare wide-eyed at the view.
“What... what is that?” she whispered, as if afraid the ships visible through the screens would hear.
“That’s the ship we’ve been chasing,” Maia said, highlighting one of them. “This, though...” The other vessel flashed an alarming crimson. “This is a Chatcaavan cutter. It’s got a couple of attached fighter ships, but it’s mostly for small, single-ship missions.”
“Then what are they doing here?”
“Rendezvous,” Maia said, grim. The D-per materialized into the ghostly Seersa shape, settling onto the pilot’s chair in a haze of purple glitter. “I’m listening to the intership chatter now, which fortunately is encrypted in a cypher that Uuvek showed me.” Sparks flicked from the D-per’s fingers as she reached for the controls to bring the ships into sharper focus. “They’ve come to trade cargos.”
Sediryl looked at her sharply. “Trade?”
“Yes.” Maia’s ears flattened, trailing darkling glitter. “We had it backwards. The cutter’s the one carrying the prisoners from the passenger liner. They’re offloading most of them to the pirate and sending them off.”
“Most of them,” Sediryl repeated, heart sinking.
“All but one,” Maia murmured, and looked at her with ghostly eyes.
Sediryl sighed out, bowing her head. “Of course. They’re going to take him back to the Chatcaavan court, aren’t they.”
“That’s what it sounds like. Before you make any decisions, though, alet...” Maia inhaled, shoulders lifting. “Have you looked at the passenger manifest for that liner?”
“No?”
Maia nodded. “Your cousin was sharing a cabin with someone. A Glaseah.”
No.
“The name on the manifest was Vasiht’h. He’s listed as your cousin’s next of kin and emergency contact.”
“Don’t tell me,” Sediryl whispered, “they have Vasiht’h... and are taking him in the opposite direction!”
“The only person heading back with the Chatcaava is that one Eldritch, from the message traffic. But there’s more. The pirate was picking up a small group of ‘gifts’ before returning to its own port of call.” Maia managed a smile. “One of those gifts was intended to secure the alliance between the pirates and the Chatcaavan lord who’s employing them. A token of esteem.”
“This can’t get worse,” Sediryl said.
“And it’s the Chatcaavan Queen,” Maia finished.
Sediryl brought her hand to her face and slowly rubbed above one of her brows. “So. Jahir is heading back with the Chatcaava to the throneworld. And Vasiht’h and the Queen of the Chatcaava are heading away with the pirates.”
“That’s the size of it, yes, alet.”
Sediryl nodded. “Then we follow the pirate.”
“Just like that?” Maia sounded surprised, but the ship was already swiveling toward the pirate vessel.
“Presumably they would not have bothered to request an Eldritch slave unless they mean to keep him. For a while, at least,” Sediryl said, hoping that was true. Her stomach was so tense she felt light-headed, but she continued, determined. “And we know for a certitude, or at least a better certitude, where we will be able to find him later. But if we lose track of these pirates, we may never find the Queen and Vasiht’h again. So, we follow the pirate.” She smiled wryly. “Besides, we need to uncover the connection between the pirates and the Chatcaava. Perhaps we might find the lever we need to pry them apart?”
“Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.” The Visionary crept toward the two enemy vessels. “At least following a live ship is a lot easier than following a trail.”
“If more dangerous?” Sediryl guessed.
“You’re already not sleeping very well at night,” Maia said. “So I don’t think I’ll answer that question.”
“I doubt I’m going to sleep any worse,” Sediryl said with a sigh. She managed a smile. “Besides, the worst that could happen is they spot us, disable the ship, toss me in the hold with the rest of the prisoners, and you escape to tell people our last known position. They cannot trap or destroy you, can they?”
“As long as I have access to a repeater,” Maia said. “I’m fine.”
“You see? I have at least one bright star to fix my hopes on.”
Maia chuckled softly.
But that night, Sediryl’s sleep was broken by nightmares that woke her gasping, though they consisted solely of vague impressions of Jahir shrouded in darkness, wondering why he had been abandoned.
The carpet under his paws was too thin for claws to dig into; it seemed a strange thing to notice when his world had shattered around him. But the sight of her, the unlikeliness of having met her, was so astonishing that it made all the little details of Vasiht’h’s captivity spring into relief around him.
“I know you,” he repeated, astonished.
“I… do not know you?” she answered, perplexed.
She had an accent. Why had he thought she wouldn’t? Her Universal seemed confident, but she spoke with a Chatcaavan accent, one that gave her delivery a crispness he’d only heard in those trained to theater. The intonation was different, though, alien enough that he had to pay attention to make sure he was parsing the words correctly. His mind whirled, and pressing his hands to his cheeks he closed his eyes and lowered his body to the ground where he could be sure of not falling.
“It will pass,” she offered. “The fear.”
Was she comforting him? When he looked up she hadn’t moved, not even to refold her hands. But she was regarding him very carefully, head tilted a little to one side and enormous orange eyes steady. It was deeply strange to realize how beautiful Chatcaavan eyes were. So large, and so very clear.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just surprised… I thought you would be with the refugees. Or did you get caught leaving?”
Her head tilted to the other side, and the narrowing of those eyes gave their beauty an entirely different context. The expression looked exaggerated, almost funny, because of their size. He suppressed the urge to blurt a laugh, recognized how little sense he was making. “Let me try that again.” He offered his palms. “My name is Vasiht’h. I am the mindbonded partner of Jahir Seni Galare.”
“Galare!” she exclaimed.
“Yes. Exactly. My partner is the Ambassador’s cousin. Do you recognize that relationship? They’re family, it’s a close bond. They planned to come to the Emperor’s rescue together.”
“And you?” she said. “You as well?”
“My involvement was an accident.” Saying it, Vasiht’h wondered if he was right, or if it was as Jahir had said: the Goddess’s will, not theirs. “I was escorting him to the world where the refugee Chatcaava were gathering, and we were abducted on the way. But you… what are you doing here? Did someone discover what you were doing?”
“I had anticipated someone would,” the Queen said. “It was Second, whom the Emperor set in that position, and who betrayed us all. He gave me to the Lord of the Twelveworld, who gave me in turn to the pirates he desires to bring into the fight on the side of the Chatcaava. So you find me here.”
“Pirates,” Vasiht’h muttered.
“I do not know the extent of their involvement,” the Queen said simply. “I mean to discover it.”
Was his disbelief too obvious? Could she read the expression? She could, from the way she leaned back, spreading her hands on her knees. That made the light glide over her shoulders, and he looked past them and half-stood, shocked. “What did they do to you!”
The dragon froze, which made the mutilation of her wing arms easier to see. Nausea clamped Vasiht’h’s stomach at the sight. “Goddess, but what… what did they do!”
“You knew what they looked like?” she asked, showing unease for the first time. “Not just that they were wings?”
“I… I had an image of you. From the Ambassador’s mind,” Vasiht’h said. “It’s hard to explain, but… they were… they had scalloped edges? And thorns on them. Holes. But you had wings to have holes in!” He looked away, made fists of his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m doing this completely wrong. I usually have more tact than this. I… just forget I said anything? I’m sorry.”
Her frown grew more pronounced, and she slid onto her hands and knees to take a hesitant step toward him. When he didn’t flinch, she crawled closer and sat onto her knees, reaching toward his withers. He let her touch the fur, marveling at her existence: that she did exist, and looked so much like she had in the mental image Jahir had shared with him. The complexity of her expressions, the smoothness of her hide. The long silver hair, waves of it caught over her shoulder. The sexless chest and the understated femaleness of her, reminiscent of his own understated maleness. Her beauty was poignant and alien and he saw it through the lens of two separate Eldritch interpretations, and none of it prepared him for how much of himself he saw in her. Except that she was serene and unafraid in the face of their uncertain fates, and he…
“It will pass,” she said again. “You will find yourself having to choose, then.”
“I don’t see how there can be any choice,” Vasiht’h said, rubbing the fur of his upper arms against the grain. “We’re stuck here. Being carried away from everyone who matters, and the people who can save us….”
“The choice,” the Slave Queen of the Chatcaava said, “is whether to allow despair to shackle you. Or whether you are willing to remain open to opportunity.”
“You’re going to say we have a chance to learn something about our enemies,” Vasiht’h said. “Which we can take back to our beloveds so they can do something useful with that information.”
“We might even free ourselves,” the Queen said. She lifted her chin. “I have not yet rescued myself. I would like to have done this.”
“Because you’re making a list of ways to express agency and you’re checking them off as you do them?” Vasiht’h said, holding back a laugh he knew would come out hysterical.
The Queen wrinkled the tip of her long nose, eyes narrowed; he could almost watch her working through the metaphor. Then, tossing her forelock out of her eyes, she said, “Yes.”
He stared at her.
“I must,” she finished. “Or I will crumple. And I cannot crumple. Right now I may never see the Emperor and the Ambassador again. Or I may. All I know is that if I surrender to fear, the chances of the latter decrease. So, I will not.” She met his eyes. “That means you must not either, or you will drag me down with you.”
That was more guilt than he knew how to handle, or wanted to. Looking away, Vasiht’h said, “Do you know where they’re taking us?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But they will reveal it to us at some point. They will be careless, and we will be listening. It is what they always forget the powerless do. We are always listening.”
The breath of the Goddess hissed up his spine. Wasn’t that what he was good at? What he’d spent his adult life doing in a professional capacity?
“I know a little something about listening.” He swallowed, made himself sit up straighter. “If you could teach me a little bit about enduring, maybe we can manage.”
She had never seen one of these kinds of aliens so closely before. They were very oddly shaped. Impossibly so... how many limbs did he have? Four feet, and two wings—impossible wings!—and two arms and a tail? How did he coordinate the movement of so many disparate parts? And he was so small, to be so solid. She judged him to be of a height with her when standing, and yet so much heavier. Again, she considered the ridiculous wings; even if they were strong enough to bear such a creature up, they were in entirely the wrong position to propel him properly.
No, despite the wings, the alien gave the impression of belonging to the earth. That someone so grounded could also be so frightened should not surprise her by now; she’d seen enough Pelted come through the harem’s arches to know that no matter their personalities, they all found the idea of violent captivity abhorrent, to the point of existential terror. In the past she would have thought them weak for it. Now she wondered if she had not always felt the same and simply been better at sublimating those feelings into the apathy that had characterized her life prior to the Ambassador’s arrival.
This alien had known her. The Ambassador had told him of her! “How is he?” she found herself asking.
“How is… Lisinthir?” The alien smiled a little. “I should have known you’d ask. He’s fine. He almost died on the way back to the Alliance, several times, but he got through it and he’s better than new now, thanks to you all, I think. You gave him something to live for.”
But she’d heard almost none of this after the salient part: “He almost died? Several times?”
“He survived,” the alien hastened to assure her.
Breathing had become difficult. She forced herself to relax the muscles in her chest wall. “How?”
“Fleet, mostly.” The alien rubbed his lower limbs together; to her surprise, claws shone briefly at the tips of his toes. “We picked him up as planned and then we were attacked.” His eyes flicked to hers. “By Chatcaava.”
Which made no sense, or wouldn’t have, except that Second and the Usurper had to have been planning their coup for some time. Why kill the Ambassador? To prevent him from warning the Alliance? Or from bringing aid back from the Alliance to the Emperor’s hand? What had they been thinking?
It didn’t matter now, of course.
The alien was still speaking. “Once we made it over the border, though, we found out he was almost dead from whatever it was he was being poisoned with over there. They were able to fix him, but it was a near thing.”
The pressure in her chest had not abated despite her mediation of her breathing. She found it painful and unfamiliar, and touched a hand to it. “But now he is well.”
“And straining to go to your Emperor’s rescue,” Vasiht’h agreed. “He’s got a bunch of Fleet operatives with him, so that should help.”
“Will they come?” the Queen asked, because she realized she didn’t know. “Your military. Will they come conquer us while we are vulnerable?”
The alien grimaced. “I wouldn’t call it conquering. If it’s true that your Emperor is going to be a voice for reform they’re going to want to help him keep power. But the Alliance isn’t in the conquering business. We’re more of a ‘make friends’ sort of people, than a ‘make subjugated populations’ sort of people.”
“Then, they will send their military to help the Emperor?” she asked.
“If he needs it…” He trailed off. “They might have to.”
“And if we are attacking them?” When he glanced at her, perplexed, she said, “If we are already in the process of making war on them. Will they have the resources to win?”
“We’d better hope the answer to that is yes,” the alien said. “Or all your advice about not despairing will be useless.”
CHAPTER NINE
It took three guards to hold him down for the suppository, and when the one at his head leaned too close the Emperor bit his mane and yanked him so violently he staggered to one side. That almost let him wrestle his way off the examination table—almost. The first guar
d resituated himself and smacked him on the back of the head. “Bad slave!”
“Were you born an idiot or did you devolve into one?” the Surgeon said from the back of the table. “The freak’s had a head injury, don’t hit it!”
“You said he might never recover from the head injury, so why bother being careful?”
“Because if you keep hitting him, it won’t be ‘might’, it will be ‘definitely’, and then you’ll have to answer to the Worldlord for damaging one of these rare prize aliens everyone wants one of,” the Surgeon snapped. “So find some other way to immobilize it… or are you so weak you can’t figure out how to handle one solitary alien?”
“I know how to handle solitary aliens,” the guard said. “I hit them.”
“Dying Air save me,” the Surgeon growled. “I am surrounded by stunted morons.”
“It’s a good thing you’re Outside,” the guard said. “If you weren’t…”
The second guard nudged him, sending a lance of pain up the Emperor’s face when it shifted the first’s grip on his hair. “Don’t make threats like that.”
“Just get this over with,” the first guard said. “The Worldlord will be here tomorrow.”
“It’s done.” The Surgeon stepped to the sink and washed his hands. “No use for the alien until the Worldlord sees him. And don’t leash him, either. The way he’s been acting he might throttle himself on the collar and die.”
“So you want us to let him escape? Because that’s what he’s going to try to do if we don’t shackle him somehow.”
“Dying Air,” the Surgeon muttered. Louder, “Put him in the slave annex and key the field to his chip ID. If he’s desperate enough to suicide by battering himself against a force field, we might as well give up now.”
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