Only the Open

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “But if we do….” Sediryl met the other’s eyes. “Maia. We have to find out what’s going on here. No matter the cost.”

  Maia considered her for several moments, floating alongside. “You know that if you die… that would be bad.”

  “I’m not the heir yet,” Sediryl said. “And even if I was… there has to be an Eldritch homeworld for me to be heir to, alet. If this… this fleet! Is left in play, then nothing matters. Someone has to know. And we’re the ones with the best chance of finding out.”

  Maia nodded slowly, then managed a lopsided smile. “You don’t fault for courage, at least.”

  “Goddess!” Sediryl exclaimed. “I am terrified! But there is something calming about knowing you have no choices.”

  “Ah, but you do have one,” Maia said. “You could run and pretend none of this was your problem.”

  Sediryl snorted, wrapping her arm around Bells’s neck and hugging the dog closer. “That would require me to be stupid. Which is also not a choice, I’m afraid. As I was born with the brain I have, I must make the best of being incapable of pretending I don’t understand the implications of this… this mess. So.” She inhaled. “You are the expert. What do we do next?”

  “For now?” Maia said. “We wait for a hole in that sensor pattern.”

  “More waiting!”

  “And we pray.”

  “Even worse. I have always been very bad at putting my fate in other hands.”

  Maia barked a laugh. “You make an impossible mistress! Fine. Since you’re so eager to be busy… let’s get you in a simulator. All the studying you’ve been doing is useless without some hands-on experience.”

  Sediryl gave the dog one last pat on the head and stood. Looking out the forward windows, she said softly, “It’s bad, isn’t it.”

  “It’s very bad. But that doesn’t make it impossible.”

  “From your mouth to Her ears,” Sediryl said. And added, silently, Please, Goddess. Let them be safe. Let us find a way out of this. And, more intensely, Please, Vasiht’h. Live! For my cousin’s sake!

  “Sediryl?”

  She managed a smile. “Teach me to fly, alet. And…” She glanced at the window again. “Let us make plans. We have work to do.”

  Jahir had expected a cell so he was not surprised to be thrown in one. A literally lightless one, so that when the door shut he couldn’t see so much as the hand in front of his face. That was unexpected, in a spaceflight culture. So was the dampness. Had the Chatcaava the equivalent of the Eldritch’s catacombs, like the ones legend insisted riddled the cliff beneath Ontine? How apt that would be.

  It was also cold. Naturally, it would be cold, when he hated cold and took it so quickly. For once he regretted his habit of cutting his hair at a reasonable length; Lisinthir could have used his as a blanket. And if he’d had fur… but he was no Glaseah, to be so lucky, nor Chatcaavan to Change.

  They had not found the amulet. This did not surprise him, because the sense that what was happening was inevitable had only become more and more distinct the longer he’d been parted from Vasiht’h. This was where he was supposed to be, to affect the Pattern to come. He knew it like he knew breath in his throat, and the ache in his side and shoulder and hip where he’d been lying too long in one position. God and Lady had arranged for this moment now, so that he could do what was necessary to win this for the side of light.

  What he wasn’t certain of was that he would survive the task.

  He did not allow himself to linger on this.

  What form would his durance take, he wondered? Would they torment him the way they had Lisinthir? Or would he be due for some new torture? He did not welcome the thought of being remanded to a harem to become the plaything of whatever Chatcaava most needed entertainment… though if he’d had the Usurper’s mien, he doubted he would be given to many. No, unless he missed his guess, he would be reserved exclusively for the use of that male, which meant… what?

  He wished he wasn’t so hungry. Would they feed him? The roquelaure insisted strenuously that he needed food with its dissonant chime in the ear. It was already unpleasant to someone trained in music; repetition would make it unbearable sooner rather than later.

  But really, the cold and the damp were far worse. That, and the loneliness. He had not fully appreciated how completely the mindline had insulated him from loneliness until this parting from Vasiht’h had made it clear. Nor was he willing to extend himself and experiment with any long-range mindtouch, given the demands it made on his body.

  Patience. The matter wanted patience. Jahir closed his eyes and tasked himself to the interminable wait.

  When they came for him it was with food, water, and a wand that, waved over him, divested him of the sweat and travel-soiling of the past days. He longed for true immersion, but this was better than nothing.

  Then he was led at spear-point into the same stairwell that had seen him to the top of the Usurper’s tower. Resigned, Jahir began the climb, wondering what this interview would net him. Perhaps the Chatcaavan intended to conduct scientific experiments on him? Or maybe he wanted a quick rhack. He would take the latter over the former, given the likelihood that the former would eventually involve permanent damage.

  Then again, talons could kill, and by accident.

  When they shoved him to his knees in the room he was astonished at the sight of it. The furniture, the rugs, the wall-hangings, all of it had been removed, leaving the chamber bare stone and balcony. A single desk had been set in the center of the room, and behind it, a new wallscreen displaying a map of the Empire, spattered with winking dots that suggested… what? Ship movements? Planets? Areas of concern? His sword set was on that desk, but that was the only thing of note amid the neat stacks of papers and the single data tablet.

  These two pieces of furniture were the only items of interest in the room, and it now felt… unfinished. Harsh. Not the room of a king, Jahir thought, but the room of an accountant, and one with few responsibilities and little power. Did the Usurper intend to project this image of himself? Were the Chatcaava attending him perceiving him the way he planned, or did they look at this empty chamber and think it a sign of weakness?

  “Ah, good, you brought him.” The Usurper came in behind them. He bent down to study Jahir’s face and his lips pulled back from his teeth. “So, alien. See what I have done with your former master’s apartments. Even the bed where you seduced him is gone. I marked it for auction, along with all the other frivolities and excesses I found during my inventory. We’ll use the money to fund the destruction of your star nation.”

  He needed more information, and the best way to solicit that….

  “No fine words this time? You are probably thinking how poor a showing the room is, lacking as it is in décor. But you see, it was only lacking in décor… until now.” The Usurper straightened. “Put him on the wall.”

  Startled, Jahir did not fight the guards that pulled him up and flattened him against the cold stone. He had been here before, hadn’t he? But it had been loving hands that had trapped him, and there had been ropes or hands, not the cruelty of metal. The shackles were lined, at least, to keep them from destroying the joints, and the balls of his feet were resting fully on the ground. Was that serendipity? Perhaps they had planned them for Lisinthir’s apparent height, thanks to the roquelaure. Even so, he did not want to think what would gradually happen to his body if they didn’t take him down from time to time.

  The Usurper waited for the guards to finish before seating himself behind his desk. He picked up the smaller of the Nase Galare daggers and turned it in his hands, then smiled thinly at Jahir. “There. I will now mollify my advisors, who worry that I do not exercise myself with slaves and females, that I do not care enough for luxury and belongings. Now I can say my room is very expensively decorated, and with one of the most rare of prizes. And you, who once thought yourself capable of meddling in the affairs of empires, will be forced to hang here and listen to every detail of the c
ampaign that will secure your nation’s demise. I think that fitting. Don’t you?”

  The urge to laugh was almost hysterical. The Usurper wanted him here? Where he could see everything? Where he could gather intelligence by the armful? But how would he get it out of the palace! There would be a way… there had to be. When he found it….

  Jahir flexed his fingers, feeling the tendons shift against the manacles holding him in place, and felt a sense of purpose infuse him.

  “What? No comment?” the Usurper quipped. “I was under the impression that you were a great talker. You have nothing to say?”

  “Not at all,” Jahir said. And smiled. “I appear to be… entirely… at your service.”

  APPENDICES

  The Alliance Map

  One of the number one things fans request of me is a map of the Alliance. I've had one forever, I just haven't converted it from a messy sketch to something people who aren't me can read. Fortunately, a Kickstarter stretch goal got me off my tail and I have produced the following star map. Some notes:

  1. Yes, space has three dimensions! The worlds on this map are "up" or "down" from one another in a way I might have been able to capture had I tried for a 3d edition. I... am not that ambitious.

  2. If you'd like to measure out the "Bright Belt" Na'er talks about in Part 1, put a finger on the word 'Coreward' and draw a (more or less) straight line down to the words 'The Frontier.' That gives you the corridor of all the major Pelted homeworlds, settled (as one might expect) on the vector leading away from Earth up at the top right.

  3. Starbases are always named after their sector. So Starbase Veta is in the Veta sector, with the homeworlds for the Tam-illee and the Aera. Sediryl's home starbase, Starbase Ana, is over by the Milk Run. It's unfair for her to have said it's all the way at the opposite end of the Alliance... but in relation to where she was, in the border sector near the Thorn Throne, then... yes. One can see her point about not wanting to make the hike more than once.

  4. Finally, it doesn't take great powers of observation to see that the Chatcaavan Empire is a big blank. Expect that to change soon....

  The Species of the Alliance

  The Alliance is mostly composed of the Pelted, a group of races that segregated and colonized worlds based (more or less) on their visual characteristics. Having been engineered from a mélange of uplifted animals, it’s not technically correct to refer to any of them as “cats” or “wolves,” since any one individual might have as many as six or seven genetic contributors: thus the monikers like “foxine” and “tigraine” rather than “vulpine” or “tiger.” However, even the Pelted think of themselves in groupings of general animal characteristics, so for the ease of imagining them, I’ve separated them that way.

  The Pelted

  The Quasi-Felids: The Karaka’An, Asanii, and Harat-Shar comprise the most cat-like of the Pelted, with the Karaka’An being the shortest and digitigrade, the Asanii being taller and plantigrade, and the Harat-Shar including either sort but being based on the great cats rather than the domesticated variants.

  The Quasi-Canids: The Seersa, Tam-illee, and Hinichi are the most doggish of the Pelted, with the Seersa being short and digitigrade and foxish, the Tam-illee taller, plantigrade and also foxish, and the Hinichi being wolflike.

  Others: Less easily categorized are the Aera, with long, hare-like ears, winged feet and foxish faces, the felid Malarai with their feathered wings, and the Phoenix, tall bipedal avians.

  The Centauroids: Of the Pelted, two species are centauroid in configuration, the short Glaseah, furred and with lower bodies like lions but coloration like skunks and leathery wings on their lower backs, and the tall Ciracaana, who have foxish faces but long-legged cat-like bodies.

  Aquatics: One Pelted race was engineered for aquatic environments: the Naysha, who look like mermaids would if mermaids had sleek, hairless, slightly rodent-like faces and the lower bodies of dolphins.

  Other Species

  Humanoids: Humanity fills this niche, along with their estranged cousins, the esper-race Eldritch.

  True Aliens: Of the true aliens, four are known: the shapeshifting Chatcaava, whose natural form is draconic (though they are mammals); the gentle heavyworlder Faulfenza, who are furred and generally regarded to be attractive; the aquatic Platies, who look like colorful flatworms and can communicate reliably only with the Naysha, and the enigmatic Flitzbe, who are quasi-vegetative and resemble softly furred volleyballs that change color depending on their mood.

  The Languages of the Pelted Setting

  Eldritch

  Most readers of this series will be familiar by now with some of the conventions of the Eldritch language, particularly that of shading words with colors meant to inflect their meanings. In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink if people want to bother with them. (And as we learn in this text, the color modes are carried into other formats, like music.)

  So, to refresh, the seven modes (three pairs, one neutral):

  Gray is the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to stress one’s neutrality.

  Gold is the best of all worlds, and foil to Black’s violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations. This pair is the extreme emotional end of the spectrum, good and bad.

  Silver is the positive, hopeful shading, foil to Shadow mode, which gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words. If gray is in the middle of the spectrum and black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray center.

  White is the mode for holy things; its foil is Crimson, for things of the body. (If you want to be technical, Eldritch illustrations put it on a perpendicular line from Gold/Black, with gray still in the center: white above, crimson below.)

  Eldritch is an aggressively agglutinating language: if it can make a word longer by grafting things onto it to add meaning, it will, and if that makes it harder for non-native speakers to pronounce anything without stumbling, so much the better. It’s also fond of vowels, and almost inevitably if you see an Eldritch word with more than one adjacent vowel, they’re pronounced separately (thus, Araelis from the novel Rose Point is properly ‘ah rah EH lees’). There are also no “silent” vowels (so Galare is not ‘Gah lahr’, but ‘gah lah reh’ or ‘gah lah rey’ depending on your regional accent). There are some cases where I’ve misspelled things, or I’ve continued to write out diphthongs instead of using diacritics, but for the most part if you pronounce every single letter you see in an Eldritch word separately, you’re probably doing it right.

  Like many of the languages of this setting, Eldritch was originally a conlang, created by the people who would become the Eldritch as a way to set themselves apart from the people they fled. It has been several thousand years since then, though, and the language has only become more convoluted since, a reflection of its people’s needs.

  Chatcaavan

  On the other hand, the Chatcaavan tongue likes its consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding “choppier” than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava’ itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch’ is actually pronounced ‘sh’... sorry about that.) I have, for the most part, spared you this whenever the vowel sound is denoted by more than one letter. "Kauvauc" should properly be "Kauvauauc" but at some point one draws the line for readibility.

  Lisinthir’s description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It’s also one of the most crucial distinctions previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; they didn't miss the linguistic differences, they just failed to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. T
his is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure’ (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure’ (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.

  So, for the ideal:

  Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."

  Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."

  Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:

  The wind buffeted me.

  I will do that thing.

  Or, to use the examples for the ideals:

  Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.

  Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.

  The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and “the Knife”:

  Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.

  Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.