Irsud

by Clayton, Jo;

  “Belit Damiktana.” The nervous shrilling of the guard sounded through the tapestry.

  “Pah.” Aleytys stepped backward, bumping against Burash’s solid chest. As he moved his arm and turned away she strode past him and climbed into the chair at the foot of the bed. “All right, naram. On your head. Send that shiver-shanks in.”

  Burash held the tapestry aside while the guard sidled reluctantly inside. She halted before the chair with a double nayid arm-span between her and Aleytys, a blue-green robe folded stiffly over her arm. “Belit Damiktana,” she said hoarsely, then stopped to clear her throat as unobtrusively as she could. “The kipu thanks you. She requests you consider this robe.”

  Moving awkwardly she unfolded the garment and held it out so that it fell in graceful folds from the points she grasped between thumb and forefinger, the other fingers lying curled stiffly against her palm.

  The robe’s basic color was the queen’s blue-green, several shades darker. Tongues of fire were embroidered around the hem in a brilliant red that went leaping up the left side nearly to the shoulder.

  Aleytys stifled her leap of pleasure at the sight of the lovely garment and waved a languid hand at the guard. “Give it to the migru.”

  Keeping as far from Aleytys as she could, the guard handed the robe to Burash and edged back.

  “Inform the kipu that the robe is acceptable.” Aleytys tapped her forefingers lightly on the wood of the chair arm. “She is to come for me in thirty minutes.” She stared haughtily at the guard. “Well, do I have to escort you to her myself?”

  “Pardon, Damiktana.” The guard gulped. Hastily she backed out, her antennas semaphoring her agitation while her mind radiated her barely controlled melange of hatred and fear.

  Aleytys hopped out of the chair and ran to Burash, cooing over the exquisite robe. With his help she pulled it over her head and fastened the ties. She looked down at herself and smiled with delight. “It’s almost worth it.” She laughed and danced around the room, the full skirt ballooning out from her body.

  In the bathroom, she brushed her hair smooth and posed in front of the mirror, turning this way and that, immensely pleased with herself, forgetting for the moment the purpose of the thing that charmed her. Burash pushed the tapestry aside and laughed when he saw her.

  “Flying high,” he said. “Up and down again. Leyta, Leyta.”

  She flashed a grin at him, but the elation drained swiftly out of her. Sighing, she let the wings of the robe fall, smoothed her hair back from her face and walked back into the bedroom with Burash trailing behind her.

  She settled herself in the chair to wait for the arrival of the kipu. “One more month,” she said, then glanced at Burash. “Something strikes me as curious. That guard. She was blasting out fear and fidgetiness and antipathy, as if she were terrified of me and hating me at the same time. Why?”

  “The old one.” Burash leaned against the back of the chair and ran his fingers over her hair. “And I think she’s one of Gapp’s Leyta.…”

  “Hm?” She rubbed her head dreamily against his hand, a sudden warmth in her belly, her nipples hardening.

  “You asked me once why I came to you that first morning.”

  “You said.…”

  “I know.” His hand slid down and curved around her neck. “I know. After I saw you, talked to you, after.… I couldn’t.…” Though he stopped talking, the tips of his fingers kept rubbing up and down on her neck; he was troubled with a complex of emotions Aleytys found disturbing and confusing, chilling her. She leaned back and stared into his abstracted face.

  His hand stopped moving. “I came intending to kill you, Leyta. Take your neck in my hands and squeeze until the life went out of you. Rid this world of that curse. She poisoned life here too many, many years. I couldn’t do it.” His voice broke and she felt anger and pain dominate him. “If you’d been different? I don’t know. If I could kill the thing in you without.… I can’t.” He pulled away from her and ran from the room.

  Aleytys slid out of the chair and started after him. “Burash mi-naram, wait.…” The door to the lift slid back and the kipu stepped out. Immediately Aleytys straightened, stiffened the mask on her face, cursing the inopportune arrival of the nayid. As the kipu moved aside to let the honor guard file out, Aleytys straightened her back and stepped daintily to her place a half step in front of the kipu. Simmering with impotent anger she fought for control as she silently tripped along beside the lanky insufferably complacent kipu, the guard clicking snap-snap-clank with military regularity behind them.

  “Good girl, Leyta.”

  “Steady, child.”

  “Whip it to them, freyka.”

  The three whispers, soprano, contralto, basso, blew through her head, leaving her cool and calm, focused on a double purpose, escape and destroy. Escape. Destroy.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Hiiri’s eyes, dark, lively, curious, speculative, following with sly persistance, lowering with hypocritical meekness before the nayid arrogance, blind arrogance, rising again behind nayid backs with mocking dark glances making nonsense of their submission waves of hatred and fiery anger poured out of them around the deaf ignorant bodies of the nayids, flooding Aleytys’ mind until she trembled behind the austere mask held precariously on her face. Walk, feet slipping hollowly over tiles through miles and miles of ochre tunnels, storerooms musty with dust-covered bins, names, names, names, so many names, bubutt lapashana patret mastitanauzzin shiru nunnana kurmat alpapana shikarun, the names slipping nimbly from the tongue of the cook-master until her head ached, her heart labored with dark terror to be so far underground shut in dim rooms, thick walled prisons, suffering, but her spine stiffened by the sardonic amusement pouring from the wiry arrogant kipu.

  Eyes. Nayid eyes on her, curious, speculative, shuttered, flutterings of terror and from the kipu cold calm pressing waiting for her to break, to loose the hold on the game pressing, testing, driving to her limit and beyond, no fear here, amusement, sardonic and cruel, cat playing with mouse, extending the illusion of freedom and waiting to the very last moment to plant the razored paw on the fleeing tail, stubborn sullen refusal to surrender. It held her back straight and the stiff curved smile fixed on her face.

  A massive door opened. Aleytys stepped delicately through. A respectful half-step behind her the cook-master said with red-neck pride, “These are the hiiri hadaa. You can see we keep them secure. And away from the stores. There’s no way one of the little beasts can creep into them.” She sniffed, ignorant, spiteful, contemptuous. “What they didn’t steal, they’d spoil. Like rats. Destructive beasts without sense enough to respect property. You know, out in the wild, they’re animals. No moral sense at all. Couple with their own mothers, no doubt.” She shuddered. Aleytys couldn’t see this but sensed the frisson behind her, the hatred and sly repressed envy blaring out from the cook-master’s psyche. Harskari, help me. Help me. Shivering knees going weak, she cried out for strength to endure the battering of her senses. She closed her eyes a moment.

  “Steady, child.” The deep contralto voice was slow and kind, pouring like honey over her desperate spirit. “Look ahead. You had no part in birthing this horror, but you will have a part ending it if you go on with the plans.” A faint chuckle. “The ones you haven’t told hiiris about yet. Or Burash. Hold onto that thought, my dear.”

  “Yes.” As she flung the word back at the closing amber eyes, exultation flooded her. Soaring up out of despair she coolly examined the dank cellar with its narrow barred embrasures rising steeply toward a distant light. Narrow wooden shelves projected from the walls in tiers of three with a narrow gap between each tier, a gap furnished with a few wooden pegs where the hiiri’s meager possessions hung, a spare dress, or a tunic, an embroidered sash. And the smell. Aleytys wrinkled her nose. “Yes.” She yawned delicately. “Admirable. Ah, kipu, commend the cook-master for me, if you please. Then let us rise to more pleasing surroundings. The smell.…”

  The kipu snapped her
fingers. One of the retinue hastened forward to kneel in front of Aleytys. She selected an orante medal and held it out to the kipu. “For careful husbanding of the mahazh stores and general competence,” she murmured.

  Exuding acid humor and cynical self-satisfaction, pleased with her cunning and comtemptuous of the flushing blunt-faced cook-master’s absurd delight in the meaningless bauble, her rich sonorous voice resounding with calculated effect in the squalid room, the kipu intoned, “I kipumahazh of the aasabu-alu name you one honored among the servants of the queen.” She pointed at the floor. “Kneel.”

  The cook-master dropped to her knees and the kipu dropped the metal disc on its ochre ribbon over the stiffly erect head. “Stand,” she said brusquely.

  The disc hung in the center of the cook-master’s flat thorax, like a chunk of pastry dough set with raisins, the raised characters of the nayid tongue circling the apian form decorating all the queen’s possessions. The honor guard stood stiffly erect, then in unison touched hands to forehead and lips. The cook-master strode out of the room trailing reeking clouds of pride, the guard click-clacking after her. Aleytys swayed gracefully behind, followed by the kipu.

  Eyes. Nayid eyes, glittering with hidden fear. Hiiri eyes, alive with curiosity and a growing anticipation, counter-pointed by a fear of their own. They followed her to the stairs, a dank miasma of speculation, fear, lust, pride, arrogance, instinctive hate … ah, the hate of one species for another, reaching far below … low … low … into the ancient animal instincts, unthinking reactions by intellect grown sensitive enough to touch life in another form and say I and thou share this life that throbs in our veins and I and thou are a community of life and sharing respect and love, that which we have we have we will not relinquish, we will not rob from another we will … waves of hate rolled at her, instinctive and deliberate, not racial, not abstract, not personal hate that wanted to rend and destroy, that pictured bloody gobbets of quivering flesh torn from the living frame by hating fingers, a clawing slow tearing death intimately shared by death-bringer and victim, corrosive emotion reaching to the core of the soul involving all other emotions including the sexual. She melted before it, wax in front of a fire, melted bones changing to viscous liquid.…

  Swardheld charged into her body, stiffened it, held it upright, held the mask, roared at her, “Det svayra! Freyka. Get moving. Get starch in your legs. If you blow this now.…” Like an icy wind off the mountains his vigorous personality cleared her mind and combined with the heat of her own anger at her weakness. The kipu’s callous lack of consideration in sending her unprepared into the room where Asshrud waited with her hoard of sycophantic courtiers drove the last shreds of confusion from her brain. She glared blue-green ice at the kipu, met the enigmatic insectoid gaze, then brushed past her into the large room.

  Eyes. Black glittering insectoid eyes. Curiosity, cold rejection, fear, greed, lust for power, ambition, driving ambition; cold, hot monomaniac ambition overlaid by acid hatred pouring out of the mountain of flesh sitting puffily in a throne chair at the far end of the room. Reluctantly, eyes fixed with malignant intensity on Aleytys, Asshrud nodded at the kipu, then touched her fingers briefly to her forehead.

  Head high, her own eyes glittering like the blue-green heart of winter ice, Aleytys waited.

  The silence in the room grew uncomfortable. Angrily Aleytys fumed at the kipu’s cold usage of her, survive or be destroyed, it mattered little to the kipu except that marginally she desired the scheme to succeed since she’d get considerable benefit from it, but she wouldn’t waste a milligram of her breath, an erg of energy to support it.

  Cool and apparently at ease, that small curved smile on her empty face, Aleytys reached into her own depths to the places that made her sick to contemplate within herself and dredged up a handful of muck. With a sickly mixture of exultation and self-contempt she flung the metaphorical muck at Asshrud then watched it stain and mute her outpouring of hatred and stubborn rebellion, melting and corroding her resistance until her fat jowls trembled with the desperate anxiety breeding inside her.

  Hands tucked into the wide sleeves of her robe, Aleytys walked daintily through the crowd of courtiers, driving an opening ahead of herself with radiations of subtly discomforting emotion, reaching the throne chair as Asshrud waddled clumsily out of it. She climbed the steps and settled herself, pulling the robe tight against her body, deliberately emphasizing the difference between her and the bulky Asshrud, a cruelty that sickened her but suited the role she was playing, answering the expectations of the kipu and Asshrud and all the other nameless nayids clustering in the room. But strange feelings were stirring in her … stirring … I’m not like this, she thought, god, I’m not.…

  Ignoring Asshrud, she spoke to the kipu, her light lisping voice slicing through the emotion-saturated air. “Introduce me.”

  Eyes. Uneasy glittering eyes, insectoid eyes floating in a dream … a nightmare of soupy air-gumbo thick with psychic exudation, the kipu’s voice blurred and faded the names she spoke, flowed over Aleytys’ mind trailing slime like diseased snails crawling across her skin, petty petty emanations not worth noticing, sycophantic nonentities capable of small cruelties but too self-involved to risk their precious selves in major violence. The parade passed and was finished. Aleytys stood.

  She turned her head and swept them with arrogant blue-green gaze, radiating cool contempt ego-shattering contempt, goading, cowing them into abject and steaming silence. Without a word she swept down the stairs and out of the room, followed closely by an increasingly impressed guard and the complacent kipu.

  Blue tiles, blue tunics, staring eyes, antennas switching faster, faster Gapp sullen hostile cold-eyed lovers jealous and covetous, coldly lizard reptilian cruel, capable of infinite variations in cruelty but petty … petty imaginations and spirit limited by a limitless stupidity.…

  Red tiles. Flitting red tunics, busy dedicated nayids doing work that convinced them of their own worth. Machines flickering a thousand enigmatic results. Data. Reporting. Acting. A headache lanced through her head looking at them, pretending to comprehend, dealing with the kipu’s growing amusement and subtle put-downs, a puppet on strings jerked about by the kipu’s arbitrary decisions, acting, saying, doing without recourse to her own will not knowing the reason or outcome of her actions her words.…

  Aleytys was exhausted and relieved when she climbed the stairs up from the red level.

  Black tiles … black tunics … tough stringy fighting females. Barracks. Austere but comfortable. Beds bunked against the walls. Neatly tucked blankets. Polished shining lockers. Immaculate floor. Light airy rooms. And in the gymnasium.…

  Aleytys sat in one of the ubiquitous throne chairs and watched the warriors perform, the kipu stiff and secretly amused, still amused, sitting beside her.

  Two black nayids circled in tiger alertness in front of her intent on each other, feinting and thrusting, leaping and recoiling in a fantastic ballet of violence, reactions frighteningly swift, so fast they had her dizzy, her body aching in sympathetic reaction to blows given and taken, remembering Burash taking her hand and caressing it with his fingertips. “One of the sabutim could tear you in rags.” She saw the truth of that now and knew the kipu had staged this match with that precise effect in mind. She glanced sideways and felt herself grow tight with anger.

  “Aleytys.” Surrounded by Harskari’s amber aura, the word flashed warning lights throughout her mind. “Freyka.” Black eyes frowned impatience.

  Swallowing her anger Aleytys focused her eyes on the match and whispered inwardly, “Swardheld, how good are they? Could you take them?”

  The black eyes blinked and seemed to squint shrewdly. “Ah. In my own body, freyka, there’d be no question.”

  “In mine?”

  “A matter of speed, strength, wind. You’re a dainty little bit. Nice for gracing a man’s bed. But a fighter. I laugh. A little training, though … I admit you surprise me at times. A little training.…”

>   “Training?”

  “Speed. Strength. Wind. And skill. You’ve got the potential. Good bone, healthy muscle. Just needs a little refining.” A rumbling chuckle shook her skull. “Never done a pushup in your life. You’ve got an unpleasant surprise awaiting you, freyka.”

  “Huh.” She watched as with a sudden flurry of blows one combatant drove the other out of the circle into defeat. Standing, she took the medal handed her by the kipu and languidly extended it to the victor. “Well fought, sabut,” she murmured. “Most entertaining.”

  Green tiles. Heavy door with massive intricate lock. Swinging open silent and ponderous. Weapons piled neatly on racks, room after room, air-tight cartons pile on pile power cells, projectiles, bombs, acid gas … man’s ingenuity employed to destroy man. Aleytys looked at the piles, the racks, with Swardheld whispering in her ears naming and explaining as the kipu named, the double effect draining her spirit into a black morass of despair until her arms and legs weighed heavy as lead. She walked with effort like wading through gelatin … the place stunk of death.

  Green tiles. The color of life. Green flower vines inlaid around machines of death. And in defended embrasures phallic cannon thrust potent noses out over the city. The air in the rooms felt dead. As if the heavy doors were tomb doors shutting in the dead bones of men.

  Silent, oppressed, Aleytys climbed the last round of stairs. At the top, the walls felt weighty and metallic as the passage ended in a bronze door. After saluting the kipu, Sukall knelt and pressed an electronic key against one sensor while the kipu simultaneously pressed a second near the top of the massive slab.

  With a soft reluctant sigh the door slid open. Aleytys felt the weight of it but even then was surprised at the actual thickness, a full meter of solid metal. The cool soft air of the afternoon slid through the gaping hole with sweet seductive beckoning. Masking her relief as she had masked her fatigue, Aleytys climbed sedately onto the roof behind her guard with the kipu in close attendance beside her.