Calliope's Wings

by Guin Archer

  So, yeah, his gaze on me was a physical thing. It stroked my senses and roused my body into wakefulness. If I turned back now, I’d buckle.

  “Was the Jiktau not incredible this season?!” Gaddi was effervescent in her excitement, her steps more skip than anything else. She was clueless to my internal struggles and I wanted to keep it that way. So, I shook off my feminine quaking and tuned in to her asinine comment instead.

  I tried not to gape at her like I thought she was batshit crazy, which I did. Who the fuck in their right minds could think the Jiktau was ‘incredible’? Incredibly appalling, maybe.

  Still, the better part of valor and all that jazz. I didn’t remark.

  “I had seen one as a shimi. It was my blood brago who was chosen. He is Zikta and has a Pasha. They do not often meet with this part of the Udon, but when they do, I enjoy spending time with Idaio. She has given my brago two los’kah already and she is barely older than I.”

  Pedophiles.

  Again, I kept my mouth shut. A mantra of ‘if you can’t say anything nice’ floated around in my head. Ma would be so proud of me.

  Then Gaddi had to go and ruin it.

  “Oh, Innintani, this way! The Tohtahk is so well pleased with our companionship, he has gifted my Dorai a kut to tend to me.” She all but dragged me now, pulling my resisting body in a direction I’d never been before. We weren’t going towards the bazaar proper. “My Daal is so proud of me. I am a companion to our Taytani, an Innintani! Me! I would not have believed it had anyone told me.”

  “He…bought you a kut?” My hackles rose just thinking about it, but Gaddi didn’t seem to hear the upset in my voice. If she had, I know she would have been in a rush to make amends and please me, whatever that entailed.

  She just tittered on like getting a slave was no big deal.

  “Yes! Oh, what a grand gesture. Did You say anything to the Tohtahk, uum Taytani? You did not have to! I am content with my one kut. As my Dorai and I age, we will earn higher rank and earn higher tribute, but it was very sweet of You to think about me and my needs.”

  I didn’t even abide by slavery, so why the fuck would I say something to Kor to lead him into buying one for Gaddi?

  But then it occurred to me; maybe Kor had an interest in Gaddi. Maybe he was trying to woo her away from her Dorai? She was pretty enough and considerably younger than me. I was no spring chicken anymore. I could see why he’d do it if he actually was doing it.

  My jaw clenched in dual upset.

  I was pissed about the fact that my friend was so deliriously excited about getting a new slave, even though it was a way of life and common the world over on this plane of existence, but I was also upset thinking that the man that was supposed to be mine was interested in another woman.

  I was…jealous.

  There was something seriously fucking wrong with me.

  Sekhmet, who had followed me off the dais, snugged up closer to my back as the noise of the settlement grew louder. There were a bunch of voices shouting. They weren’t overly happy cries, either. More angry than anything. The streets were as crowded here as they were in the main bazaar, but it was more chaotic and dirtier looking.

  And there were Tauren up on auctions blocks, most of them naked and chained. Some of them looked freshly beaten.

  I felt dizzy.

  My walk was stilted through the auction area. Either feeling my disquiet, seeing it in my posture, or just generally sensing it, Sekhmet stroked a comforting claw from between my shoulders and down to my middle back. It didn’t do a lot to make the situation more bearable, but it was better than nothing. Certainly, it was a sight better than Gaddi’s oblivious chatter. She’d gone so far as to halfway abandon me to get a closer look at the poor souls chained, penned up, or both.

  I made myself meet any of their eyes if they so much as looked up from their dirty feet. I knew from experience how hard that could be. It was always safer not to glance around and draw unwanted attention. You didn’t make a fuss to avoid the lash. You tried to look infirm so as to be less desired because a shitty Master you knew was better than a new Master you didn’t. I’d seen plenty of women mark their faces and bodies up, mutilating their sexes, so they weren’t as likely to be chosen as pleasure-slaves. Though, there were the odd occasions of them being picked for hunting sport in the farthest reaches of the Nothlands. The clans tended towards taking slave males for their unwilling game, but women could do in a pinch.

  Happened to me once. I still had the puckered scar just under my left breast to show for the arrow that pierced my heart.

  I admitted, if only to myself with a churlish inner voice, that at least these slaves looked better on the whole than the ranks of them above the Dark Sea. Better fed and still with some life left in their eyes. It wasn’t entirely snuffed out. Despite their shackles, the bulk of them seemed to be old-hats up on the blocks.

  The buyers, too, were as respectful as freemen looking to buy flesh could be with the aforementioned flesh.

  It still made me squeamish from memories of my own times up there.

  Out of all the noise, though, I caught a glimmer of some familiar sound. A voice that was dear to me and one I thought about often. My heart lurched in my chest, straining to be free. I struggled to pinpoint its source.

  I ditched Gaddi without a second thought.

  Even here people parted way for me and I was glad for it. I didn’t have the muscle to push them aside and my dress was cumbersome with all its skirts and the long sleeves. I wasn’t the least bit graceful as I tripped over the inner panels when they got in my way. Sekhmet chittered at me warningly, but I ignored her fussy self. I heard something and I needed to find its source.

  Now.

  One end of the block was cordoned off by a set of wooden walls nearly as tall as the Mahzri. The bulk of the racket was coming from there. I watched two Zikta further down it dragging a slave through a gate. The male was heaving and shouting against the knotted leather of a gag wrapped around his head and into his mouth. Even from a distance, I could see bluish black sores dotting his neck and cheeks.

  Black Bite. The slave had Intau’s version of Pox.

  “Uum Taytani,” a Zikta sidled in front of me, his hands opened and in a staying gesture. I glared up at him. “You must not come too near. Return to the main block.”

  Like hell.

  “Let me pass,” I ordered him, straightening my spine and fixing my best ‘don’t fuck with me’ face on. Give the man a cookie, he just blinked calmly at me.

  “I cannot. These kut are not fit for auction and will make the others sick. You cannot go near them.”

  “Move out of my way.” Flat and firm, a touch threatening. My voice promised pain if he continued to blockade me. And I would hurt him. I knew that for a fact when I heard that voice again and felt a flash of pained, peachy orange aura brushing against mine.

  “Uum Taytani, I cannot…”

  “Sekhmet,” I snarled and sidestepped the big beastie. In answer to me, she barked four times in quick succession before charging the Zikta. He didn’t even have time to pull a weapon before her claws shackled his forearms and she was tossing him bodily down the fence.

  I watched the male, all of eight-foot-something with ropes and ropes of muscle wrapping up his huge body, get thrown like he wasn’t anything more than a toy drum in the hands of a tantrum-throwing toddler. I tried not to snicker at his Raggedy-Anne impression…I really did. But even with his furious growl renting the air and the immediate way he braced for landing, clearly prepared to retaliate, I couldn’t summon an ounce of fear of him. He couldn’t hurt me because Sekhmet wouldn’t let him.

  So I just grinned at him in condescension and pushed the hinged door to the gate open to enter. Big Mama stayed at my back at the opening, her tail lashing as she faced off against the enraged, unintelligible shouts of the warrior.

  Calling in for backup, no doubt.

  Pussy.

  As soon as I was through the gate, I could see
why there was so much screaming. Also why the smell of decaying flesh was tricking everywhere my head turned.

  Corpses were being thrown carelessly into wagons by sick slaves who still had the strength to stand. The bodies were covered from head to toe in the blue-black spots. There were so many of them that no one had bothered to wrap or cover them. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they’d be taken out of the settlement to be burned in-mass.

  …and the still-living ones could very well be thrown in along with the dead to prevent the Bite’s spread.

  Beyond the overloaded wagons of the dead were innumerable sick strewn on the ground. Sadly, I couldn’t tell if they were sick or just more diseased carcasses in some cases. Not many of them moved and there were countless faces staring sightlessly up at the sky. There were glimmers of auras trying to break through the gloom, but it was difficult to see them with how weak they were in calling out to me.

  Oh God.

  The slaves turned to look at me and I finally saw it. These were the faces of people who had given up. These were the ones with crushed spirits.

  My heart ached for them.

  Without thinking twice about it, I ran for the nearest breathing soul.

  “Innintani,” the woman’s voice croaked from the incurable dryness in her throat. She shakily tried to fall away from my reaching hands. “No. Go, Innintani. Too dangerous.”

  “Silence,” I snapped as I hit my knees beside her hip. My cloth-shielded hands found her cheeks and I pinched her face there. She goggled at me with horror before my healing heat pressed down over and into her.

  As I watched, the Bite disappeared from her skin.

  “Innintani.”

  It didn’t take more than a minute for her aura to be cleared and her mortal sickness cured. She watched me crawl to the next body and I ignored her. I didn’t have time to explain.

  She was better now, but there were so many others that needed me.

  Using my ability was oddly painful at first. I hadn’t used it in so long; I think the buildup under my skin was causing issue. The heat started as a burn, making my hands feel like they were on fire.

  It got better the more slaves I tended to. I felt a little floaty and my hands ached something fierce, but the full-body scorch had moved into numbness.

  Once they figured out what I was doing, they began forming a line. The more critical souls were pushed to the front of it while the barely-spotted ones hung back to carry or aid the sicker to me.

  I was only distantly aware of Mahzri flocking into my space. They barked and chittered and warbled at the slaves, keeping them back when they got rowdy or pulling them out of the way once they were taken care of. Some of them, I thought, would’ve been content to bow and scrape at my feet in sincerest thanks if they’d been allowed to do it.

  They weren’t.

  The Mahzri kept the Zikta back, too, albeit in a harsher way. There’d been a few on this side of the wall at first, whipping the less-sick slaves into moving the dead and keeping them detained, but a couple bronzed males were quick to chase – and beat – the warriors out. This was because the Zikta were attempting to peel me away from the infected against my wishes. The Mahzri didn’t like that.

  A hiccupped sob left me when I finally saw her.

  Mari’et.

  She was stretched out between two slaves, her arms slung over their shoulders. Her face looked freshly beaten, she had dried white splotches scattered across her skin, a visibly broken leg, and blood trailed down the insides of her legs from under the roughly-hewn tunic draped over her. She wasn’t conscious and, when the two laid her down so her head was on my lap, I could see the beginning signs of Bite nipping across her clavicle.

  “Mari’et. Oh, my friend. What have they done to you?”

  More than any of the others, I needed to heal her.

  A familiar, volcanic-sounding voice reached my ears over the continued caterwauling of the Mahzri and low murmur of the slaves. He sounded pissed. Not that I gave a shit what that fuck was feeling. He bought a fucking slave for someone, even knowing that I was a slave myself and hated it with a fiery passion, and he’d stolen my friend. My sweet, gentle, too-good-for-anyone friend, made into a slave by these barbaric, disgusting people under his command.

  My hands trembled against Mari’et’s brow and neck where I held them loosely. My healing funneled to her slowly, but surely. I hummed a discordant tune, vows dripping from my lips to never allow anyone to hurt her again. In a way, she would be like Ruune was for me. She was mine. My responsibility. She owned a piece of my heart; a sisterly bond having formed between us in Blackburhn.

  When she moaned and her eyes fluttered, I couldn’t help my loud, happy cry.

  “My friend,” I sniffled over her as she blinked up at me in clear confusion. “Forgive me. Please, Mari’et, please forgive me for not finding you.”

  “Calliope?”

  “Yes. It is me.”

  It was a fight to move my attention away from her eyes, but I needed to see how much more I needed to do to have her better. Knitting skin was hard. Mending breaks and tears even harder. The Bite wasn’t as bad as the other slaves I’d so-far healed, but there were difficulties in wiping sicknesses like that out of a person’s aura in a way that they wouldn’t come back. I was cleaning their auras and therefor their bodies to within and inch of their lives.

  It was draining me.

  Actually, I was amazed I was still able to summon the balm at all. All the other times I used my ability, I’d be exhausted in a matter of an hour. The seafolk in Blackburhn were proof enough of that. That was only with a couple sick and injured, too. Not the…dozens I’d already helped.

  Maybe my trembling wasn’t all just from emotional upheaval?

  While still maintaining my constant stream of healing energy, I looked up to the hovering faces of the slaves. Their watery smiles were blending together in a dark fog, but I could at least see the two sections of them. The healed and the sick.

  Faster. I needed to go faster.

  “Mari’et,” I murmured to her lowly, slurring a bit. My fingers tickled her soft skin. “There are others. Can you…are you well for now?”

  “Io? Look at me.”

  I did. Her beautiful face was getting dimmer by the second. I saw pain painting itself across her lips and brow and redoubled my efforts to make her feel better. I could all but see my energy rushing out of me, pulsing and vibrant. The silvery light of it took on a rainbowed, prismatic effect and I thought it pretty. I followed the strains of it with my eyes, unwittingly listing.

  “Ekt!”

  Too many hands were suddenly everywhere. They were on me and around me and moving me. All the while, black pushed into the fringes of my sight until I had only a pinprick of light I could see from.

  A lion roared.

  Everybody should probably leave. There’s a lion on the loose. Did it escape from the zoo?

  I was vaguely aware of being picked up. Big arms cradled and rocked me tenderly, my dress and too-long sleeves knotting my limbs up to the point I could’ve been trapped in a straight jacket instead of a glittering gown. Not that I had the ability before that, anyway. My hands were roasting, my chest hurt, my head ached, and there was a lion somewhere nearby. If someone picked me up, that meant I wasn’t going to be made the newest flavor of Purina One.

  Ha ha. Purina One Lion Chow; Calliope Tar-tar. Tasty.

  “Io? I-i-innintani?”

  Mari’et? Why the fuck is she calling me Innintani? I thought she was my friend. Friends use each other’s names. Despair hit low in my belly, smacking my fear of the lion away. But I let her get hurt. She was made a slave and I never knew. I didn’t save her. She probably hates me now.

  The lion was right against my ear and growling furiously. It started talking and I was bewildered. When did lions learn to talk? For that matter, when did they have arms that could pick a person up?

  Narnia meets Supernatural. Hmm. What a strange world.

 
“You do not address your Innintani by Her blessed calling, biis’a.” I heard a feminine yelp followed by a husky groan. Then, a nose sniffed around me. I didn’t feel a mane of wiry hair tickling my skin, so maybe it wasn’t a lion-man? “Uum kisa-uu, open Your eyes. Open them for me. Now.”

  Dick. Pushy, mouthy dick.

  I know who that is.

  “Where’s the lion?” I turned my nose into Kor’s naked chest and inhaled his musky scent. Warm. Nice. Too bad the guy was a fucking asshole who bought and sold slaves, raped me and made me like it, and now he was yelling at Mari’et? Fucker.

  “Io, my friend…”

  “Silence your mouth or I take your tongue.” It was amazing, really, how quickly he could switch his tone. Now, for example, when he went from being unbearably dark with Mari’et and then cooing down into my temple. “Uum Taytani, open.”

  “Fuck you,” I moaned miserably. “Don’t be mean to Mari’et. S’not nice.”

  Kor shook me in his arms, rattling my brain in my skull from the force of it. “Your eyes, kisa-uu. Give me Your eyes.”

  Knowing he wasn’t going to give up until I did what he wanted me to – the dude was proving to be more stubborn than me – I made my heavy eyelids lift. The edges of my vision were still dark and I couldn’t focus on his silvered, abnormal eyes. Trying to put him in frame, I lifted a hand and brought it to his cheek. I missed and planted my palm over his mouth instead. He didn’t seem to mind since he nudged his tusks into it and kinda-sorta purred.

  “I am very upset with You, uum Taytani. You have done what You should not.”

  Whimpering dragged me away from Kor’s voiced displeasure. I arched my neck so far it hurt and had to look way down to see Mari’et huddled on the ground, an arm braced over her head and another tucking down and between her legs. One of my guards – the same male who’d entered my hut that first time I woke up – was sneering down at her, his left tusk showing more prominently because of his lifted lip.

  Even my overwhelming fatigue couldn’t knock out my protective fury.