by Jeff Wheeler
“The tears don’t fall,” Ahad-dian said, solemn. “They just . . . don’t fall.”
Blood drained from Chellis’s face, running like hot wax down her neck. “And . . . they’re here? The others?”
He nodded.
Her heart leaped at the thought of seeing her own kind after eighteen months, but the hope quickly churned bitter. “They’re not in the sea? You don’t return us to the sea?”
Ahad-dian hesitated, then said, “Come,” and guided Chellis down the hallway.
It opened up into more corridors carved into the rock face and lit by skylights, too high to be used for escape. Ahad-dian guided her down the corridor farthest to the left. They passed under a shadowed arch. Ahad-dian paused and gestured down another narrow hallway.
“It’s difficult to get the Merdan to cooperate,” he murmured, “but down there are the breeding rooms.”
Chellis’s blood drained even further, pooling in her gut. “Please tell me I misunderstood you.”
But Ahad-dian shook his head. “The king believes it’s easier to, excuse my phrasing, ‘make our own’ Merdan than hunt them from the sea.”
Chellis quivered. She turned toward the hallway, took one step forward, and stopped. “Then . . . they use children . . .”
“I don’t know,” Ahad-dian confessed. Chellis didn’t realize he had moved until the leash tugged on her collar. She followed behind him, away from the breeding rooms, on numb legs.
The corridor brightened and opened up onto a large atrium in the mountain, lit by several skylights. The corridor had metal railing, and below, Chellis heard the clinking of iron and the groans of men. The sick feeling in her middle intensified, and she peered over the railing.
Below, several long tables sat in rows, lined with men—mostly Merdan men—wearing tattered smocks and dresses like her own. They held small hammers in their webbed hands. On many, the webbing had been ripped from between their fingers to better help them hold the tools.
Upon the tables Chellis saw strange shapes of bronze work, things that looked similar to the armor the Hagori guards wore day and night. The slaves, chained together at the ankles, labored to shape and mold the armor: breastplates, gauntlets, leg coverings, whatever the pieces were called. An overseer on a small horse road by one table, dumping water from a battered pitcher onto the heads of the Merdan as he passed. Many had lost their scales.
Chellis’s hands rushed to her mouth, and tears sprang to her eyes. “Why are they here?” She asked, almost shouted. A few slaves turned to look at her, but Ahad-dian clamped the Moray-forsaken blinders over her eyes. She turned toward him, blind. “Why are they here, and not in the sea?” she shouted.
Ahad-dian’s too-warm hand clasped her upper arm between delicate fins and pulled her down the corridor. “Come,” he said.
Chellis shook her head, tears running from the corners of her eyes, greedily drunk up by the blinders. “Why are they not in the sea, Ahad-dian?” she asked, her voice choking on his name. “If they can do no more to heal the Hagori, why enslave them further? Why not send them home?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured, very close to her ear. They stopped. Somewhere shaded, for the air turned cool. “I’ve petitioned it myself, but no one cares for the opinion of a solitary dian.”
“Then the others—”
“The others don’t care, Chellis.”
She shook her head and sobbed, more tears escaping from her eyes. Her legs weakened, and she crouched down, feeling loose dirt under her fingers.
“It makes no sense!” she said, and her words echoed against the rock around her. Hugging her knees, she wept for her broken people, forbidden to return home. So many scaled faces had labored over those tables. How many of her kind still swam the oceans as freemen?
She cried until her eyes felt too dry, despite the soggy sponges pressed against them. Ahad-dian gripped her shoulders and helped her stand, then carefully removed the blinders from her eyes. He boxed them, stuck the box into the back of his belt, and wiped a stray tear away with his thumb.
“Come,” he said, pulling her from the alcove they had taken refuge in. Chellis didn’t follow at first. Ahad-dian waited until she obliged. Her bare feet left dragging prints against the sandy floor of the prison.
They didn’t retrace their steps.
“What more is there?” Chellis asked, her voice trembling in her throat. “What more is there for me to see?”
“If we can double this,” Ahad-dian replied, staring straight ahead, “perhaps I can relieve you of summonses for a time. Let you rest.”
Chellis quickened her step. “How can I rest when I know my people are being treated so cruelly?”
He glanced at her. “You already knew, Chellis.”
Chellis hissed between her teeth, but said nothing.
The cool rock under her feet gave way to dusty carpet. The ground dipped downward, and fewer skylights lit their way. Everything looked as at dusk.
Someone, somewhere, screamed.
Chellis froze. “Ahad,” she whispered, “where are you taking me?”
His shoulders slumped. “I will not hurt you, Chellis.”
“Where are you taking me?” she repeated.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a long moment before pulling her forward. “Some are bred, some are put to work. Mostly the men.”
The sickness within Chellis spread out to her limbs. “And the women?”
The scent of roses and seaweed filled her sinuses. Chellis looked up, seeing thin fabric like the Hagori women’s veils draping the ceiling. She peered down another narrow corridor, lit by lanterns hanging on the wall.
Ahad-dian pulled on the chain, calling her attention. Chellis turned just in time to step out of the way of a heavyset Hagori man walking with a Merdan woman under each arm. One looked half asleep, the other downtrodden, like her head weighed too much for her neck to support. Both women wore draping clothes that hid their breasts and wrapped around their hips, but exposed everything else.
The Hagori man led both Merdan women down the dim hallway and into the second room on the right. Chellis heard him chuckle before shutting the door.
She backed up into a cloth-strewn rock. “This isn’t . . .”
Ahad-dian pulled a second pair of blinders from his belt, but he held them as though they were a dead animal. “If nothing else,” he whispered, “I thought you should see . . .”
Another scream, but that time it sounded closer. Close enough that Chellis’s blood shot through her veins, heating her skin from the inside. A Merdan woman, naked, bolted from the fourth door on the left, near a hanging lantern. Shouting in Merdani, “Help me! Moray eat my soul!”
Chellis stepped away from the wall and squinted through the shadows, the scales running up the outside of her arm prickling. That voice. She knew that voice.
A Hagori man rushed from the room, dressed only in slacks, and seized the Merdan woman by the wrist, crushing her fin. She cried out. He grabbed her by the waist, which forced her to turn toward Chellis.
Chellis’s heart crumbled to ashy pieces. “Gaylil,” she whispered.
Ahad-dian asked, “What?”
“Gaylil!” Chellis screamed, pushing off the rock and bolting down the hallway, wrenching her leash free. Her legs were ill-trained in running, but she pushed them, passing doors and lanterns as she sailed toward the Merdan woman, tears catching the air as she went.
Ahad-dian shouted her name.
A guard turned from the opposite end of the hallway.
The half-dressed man saw Chellis and flung Gaylil into the wall. Gaylil, recognition in her eyes, clamped her hands over a gash in the back of her head. It stained her fair hair blue.
“Gaylil!” Chellis screamed, but just before she reached her, rough hands grabbed her from behind. Not Ahad-dian’s hands, but guards’ hands, Hagori men she didn’t know. They wrestled her back. One drew a knife.
“No! No!” Chellis screamed, flailing in their grips, kicki
ng out her legs. “Let her go! Gaylil! She’s my sister! Ahad-dian!” she cried. “Someone, help me!”
A loud thunk echoed inside her skull, and—
* * *
Chellis hadn’t seen light for three days.
The edge of the vat dug into her knees. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, but sometimes, when she shifted, the faintest tingling reminded her they were still there.
Her head throbbed in time with her heart, and her mouth and throat were as sandy as the Hagori desert. As sandy as the cavern floor where she had seen the abuse of her people and the absolute injustice of the Hagori. Villains, tyrants, whoremongers. May the great Moray consume them all and dig the entire nation a grave in the deepest recesses of the ocean, where even the Merdan dared not swim.
She heard Ahad-dian arguing with someone in the hallway, for the second time since awakening with blinders strapped over her eyes and her body bound in the shackles that supported her as she dangled over the vat. He argued low, he argued high. She couldn’t make out most of what he said, but she didn’t care.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Chellis.”
But you did. Worse than anyone.
Gaylil. Chellis hadn’t seen her sister for three years. Chellis hadn’t been there when the slavers took her. She hadn’t seen her sister’s blood in the ocean or heard her water-muted screams as the Hagori dragged her onto their boat. She had only heard of it. Heard of it and mourned.
To find that those land-ridden sharks had her. How Chellis hated them all.
She heard footsteps, a stride she had memorized over the past three days. Ahad-dian knelt beside her and pressed a cool rag, wet with saltwater, to her leg, a sad treatment for her dry skin.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. Chellis could not count the number of times he had uttered those words since Gaylil. “You’ll be released soon, I swear it, even if I have to cut the chains myself.”
Chellis didn’t answer. Despite feeling like a desert herself, another tear absorbed into the blinders.
Ahad-dian sighed. “For some reason I thought it would . . . I didn’t expect . . . your sister. Oh Chellis, I’m sorry. I’ll look into helping her, I promise.”
Help her how? Chellis thought, bile churning where her throat met her stomach. Let her do hard labor instead? Let them kill her or throw her into the desert, or drop bits of her body into the Merdans’ slop?
What will happen when they finally break me too?
She pressed her lips together, refusing to utter a word.
He moved the rag and touched her outstretched arm with his warm hand. Too warm. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Please forgive me, Chellis. Please.”
But Chellis didn’t, and after several long minutes, Ahad-dian’s footsteps retreated back into the hallway.
* * *
Hours later, four pairs of heavy footsteps entered the collection room. A Hagori’s gloved hand gripped a fistful of Chellis’s hair and pushed her head forward until she choked against the collar.
Her handler removed the chain on her collar and replaced it with the standard leash before jerking Chellis’s head back so another could remove the blinders from her eyes. The light of the collection room burned, and the guard holding the blinders cursed as a few tears dropped into the vat. A second guard quickly collected them using a rubber spatula.
Chellis blinked spots from her eyes. Cold spiked her center when she did not see Ahad-dian among her visitors. Three guards, one dian—a broad-shouldered woman with light hair for a Hagori. Her small mouth twisted as though she had just eaten bluefish. She stood stiff as a coral as the third guard finished unchaining Chellis’s wrists and ankles; Chellis winced as blood rushed back into her deadened limbs.
The dian released her hair and snatched the leash, jerking it hard against Chellis’s windpipe. Chellis sputtered and coughed, nearly teetering into the vat, her dead feet and screaming knees unable to support her. The dian jerked the chain again so that Chellis fell onto her rump. Pain flashed up her backbone. She caught herself on tingling hands, jarring rusted shoulders.
“Get up,” the dian snapped. Her voice sounded low and quick, the way a barracuda would talk, if it could.
Chellis scrambled for a footing, forcing her stiff joints to move. Her heart slammed from one side of her rib cage to the next. “Ahad-dian,” she rasped, “where is Ahad—”
The back of the dian’s gloved hand smashed against Chellis’s jaw, shoving her onto her left side. Again she nearly slipped into the vat, but a jerk of the leash prevented it.
Chellis gasped for air as her head spun. Her pulse throbbed along the side of her face, and her jaw popped as she opened and closed it, tasting blood in her cheek. She swallowed it.
“Your papers say you’ve been here eighteen months, and yet you still speak out of turn?” The dian snapped. “Disgusting. To your feet, Merd!”
She jerked back on the leash until it cut into the already chafed ring of scar tissue around Chellis’s neck. She gasped and struggled to stand. She steadied her feet against the tile, but she didn’t straighten completely—her back wouldn’t allow it, not yet. She had stayed too long in those chains, but surely a dian wouldn’t be offended by her crippled stance.
She bit on her tongue and blinked rapidly to keep herself from crying. By the Moray, they’ve transferred Ahad-dian, or worse. Had he gotten in trouble for their excursion? Is that what he had been arguing about in the hallway?
She dared a glimpse at the new dian, who was speaking to the second guard. Please, no. Don’t let the woman be her new caretaker. Give her Lila-dian, but not that woman. Not that dark squid among sharks.
“Fine,” the dian said. She didn’t look at Chellis, merely jerked the chain and started for the door. Chellis’s hips ground in their sockets as she staggered after her, trying to keep pace with the impatient strides. Her belly growled. The dian sneered and jerked the chain again, nearly knocking Chellis into the wall. A scale fell to the spotless marble floor—from where, Chellis couldn’t tell. She’d lost so many.
Four guards took their posts outside Chellis’s quarters. The dian threw Chellis inside; Chellis’s toe caught on the missing square of carpet and she tripped forward, landing on her knees. She quickly knelt and slumped her shoulders—a passive position Lila-dian preferred—hoping the new dian would give Chellis something to eat, or at least turn on the bath.
She did neither.
One of the guards from outside stepped into the room, and the dian shut the door. From a sort of sheath buckled to her calf, she pulled a short leather whip. She tugged on either end to test its durability.
Chellis shrank back. She hadn’t been whipped for . . . months. A chill raced through her blood despite the stuffiness of the room. She tried to swallow, but her time over the vat had dehydrated her. Surely the dian would let her recuperate before giving her a beating!
“Please, where is Ahad-dian?” she asked, knowing each syllable grated on the dian’s ears. “Where is—”
The woman stepped forward and belted the whip across Chellis’s face. White light danced in Chellis’s vision, and then she found her face pressed to the floor, a cool drop of blood tickling her chin.
“Do not speak out of turn, Merd,” the dian said. “You have a ripe problem with that, in addition to your other failures. You are not to speak unless spoken to. You are not to leave the care of your dian. You are not to converse with other Merdan. You are not to engage with other Hagori save your dian, and especially not in altercation.”
She turned toward the guard. “Time me for a quarter hour.”
The man nodded, and the dian raised her whip.
* * *
“I knew they’d do this.”
Chellis came to herself, acutely aware of her surroundings; the lightening of the room as someone turned up the lamp by the door, the taste of iron and sea in her mouth, the burning strikes littering her body. Her hunger, her thirst, her aches.
Her relief at hearing his voice.
Ahad-dian crouched beside her and smoothed hair from her face. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “They called me for a disciplinary council. I knew that if I left you . . . oh Chellis.” He looked her up and down, fingered the flaking scales on her right shoulder. He smelled like Hagori spices, though the only one she could name was cardamom.
He stood and pushed his key into the wall by the tub, turning on the water there. Chellis strained to watch him and noticed a tray of food by the door. She pressed a hand to the carpet to push herself up, noticing for the first time that the fin running along the outside of her wrist had been torn in two. That would hinder her, if she ever swam again.
Ahad-dian returned, crouched, and scooped Chellis into his arms. He carried her to the tub and gently laid her into the still-rising water. It stung, for a moment. She cupped the water in her hands and drank until Ahad-dian handed her the glass of seawater.
“Slowly,” he advised, his speech slightly slurred, like he’d missed days of sleep. Perhaps he had.
She drank, relishing the brine coating her insides. Ahad-dian added a packet of salt to the water before shutting it off. Then he did something dians didn’t do.
He left the room.
Chellis watched, waited, feeling an invisible fisher’s line stretching from her chest to the door. When Ahad-dian didn’t return, she checked her wounds. They didn’t feel as sharp in the water. She didn’t have enough of her own water to cry and heal them, but Ahad-dian had already assumed that. He returned with a small white case Chellis recognized as a first-aid kit. The blue water droplet painted on its side denoted its use for Merdan, as did its tiny size.
“Here, now,” he said, kneeling beside the tub. He pulled out a gray handkerchief—more of a rag—and doused it with the foul-smelling yellow contents of a cloudy bottle. He pressed the rag first to Chellis’s forehead, then to her jaw. She watched his face as he worked, the crease marring his forehead, the fine, permanent lines between his brows.
And his eyes, dark as a midnight thunderstorm, focused solely on their work. On her.
“I know what it’s like, in a way,” he said, hushed, the wet rag stinging a shallow cut on her elbow. “To be a slave, I mean.”