Her eyes widen a fraction and her face gets deathly pale. “Tyto,” she whispers and the horror on her face is enough for me to feel her fear.
“It isn’t Tyto. Our sensors check for life forms. They would have detected him early and Bebette would know never to let him touch down onto Lemoran soil. You’re safe from him.”
She nods, but her eyes are distant. She shakes her head. “Al…alright. I’ll stay here. But could you send a messenger for me if the human is available to speak to me?”
“Of course. You’ll be the first I contact. But…until then.” I swallow and it feels like swallowing kintarr splinters. It hurts. “Promise me you’ll stay in our chambers until I send for you?”
I can see a flash of pain in her eyes as she remembers the last time I locked her in, and she locked herself in. And then it’s quickly doused by a flare of defiance. “I’ll barricade myself in.” She juts her chin out at me and I grin.
“That’s a little unnecessary. Gorman will stay with you.” I give him a pointed look. “Armed.”
“Armed?!” They both shriek together.
Gorman’s face loses all of its color, turning a sickly yellow. “I don’t think so.”
“That seems wholly outrageous.”
“Just,” I growl, ready to burst. I stomp my foot on the ground, ready to move away from them and investigate these mysterious visitors. “Go in our chambers and barricade the door then! But don’t open until I call for you.”
Essmira is silent for one pregnant pause before she nods, takes my arm, and lifts up onto her toes. She leans in toward me, her breasts pressing against my arm in a way that’s far too distracting. Then she kisses my cheek like she loves me. I love her. Does she know that? I should tell her. Maybe now…maybe later. Maybe…
“Alright. I trust you, Raingar.”
I inhale a breath of pride that I wish I could feel fully, but that feeling of offness keeps me from it. I touch her chin as she drops back onto her heels, coercing her gaze to reach mine. “As soon as I’m sure these ohring fuelless idiots are no trouble, I’ll send for you. I’ll offer them an extra lunar’s stay in my keep, too. That way, you’ll have time to ask the human all the questions you’d like.”
She perks at that and clasps her hands together before unleashing the power of her hug all over me. She pulls me deeper and deeper into her chest and for a moment, I simply close my eyes and let all three of my hearts pulse to a punishing beat.
“Alright. Off with you then! Come back quick, Rainy.”
“Rainy,” I gasp, horrified. “Rainy!”
She giggles and when she starts away from me to the left corridor, I swat her behind. She titters with laughter all the way past the threshold. It’s often that I see Essmira excited, but rarely this excited. It makes me feel excited too, but also like a rat bastard all over. Maybe, I should just bring her…
Nob.
“You truly think something’s amiss, Raingar?” Gorman’s voice is troubled.
Yeffa. “I’m not sure. Just keep an eye on her while I’m gone, alright?”
His teeth worry his lower lip. He nods tentatively and for the first time, I worry that he thinks this task is too great. “It’s alright,” I reassure him, taking his sloping shoulder in a firm grip, “I trust you with my life. I trust you with hers.”
He nods again, gaze unfocused and distracted. “Just hurry back.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
“And take a pad pad.”
I growl, “Never!” And a short while later, find myself on the back of a blasted pad pad, racing from one village to the other.
I arrive a short while later only to find Bebette’s keep a flurry of harried commotion. Merquin is there, too, rushing through the keep’s open doors as I guide the infernal beast through them.
“Merquin, hey! What’s going on?” I shout, lifting my hand to my gaze to ward away the rain that’s just started coming down.
Merquin looks up at me in a daze, like I caught her mid-thought. “Raingar, what are you doing here?”
“Essmira heard there was a hybrid-human in the party with the Egama. She wants to meet one of her own species, but…” Everything is wrong. “I wasn’t sure if the rumors were true.”
“We need ohring life drives.” Merquin curses and wipes rain from her forehead.
I frown and dismount the pad pad, giving its nose a good pat before letting the reins drop to the ground as a stable hand comes to take them. I notice a flurry of activity in Bebette’s keep, which is four walls surrounding a large open space, fit for a variety of purposes.
There’s only a cluster of small stone huts at the back where she sleeps and houses her guests. Smoke is coming from one of them. It’s windy out and I can feel a storm approaching, but it’s only drizzling so far and the temperature has yet to drop. Why would there be a fire this early in the lunar?
“You were misinformed. There’s no human with the Egama. There are only two Egama warriors and they’re in…they’re in a bad state. I’ve never seen anything like it. The ship they arrived in has clearly been tampered with. Their route tracks away from Kor, but over sixty solars ago, and that’s the last location registered.”
“They lost their flight data?” I frown, but Merquin’s already shaking her horns.
“Nob. It seems like they haven’t stopped since then. They haven’t docked.”
“They haven’t docked? Is that even possible? What about stores? Food? Water?”
“Exactly. They’re severely dehydrated and malnourished. I’ve never seen an Egama look in such a bad state. They’re hardly coherent. They had to be carried off of their ship, Raingar and worse…”
Her voice, which had been steadily rising with a panic I’ve never heard Merquin betray before, drops all at once. She steps towards me and grabs my shoulder, guiding me into the keep. Against one stone wall, she turns towards me and whispers, “They’ve been tortured.”
“Tortured!” I shriek.
“Shh!” She hisses, “I don’t want to start a panic. But I need you to return to your keep now and pass by Reyna and Tana’s keeps along your way. Gather the healers. All the healers. They will need to work together on this. We aren’t prepared for Egama’s in such a state. I’m not even sure about their anatomies… It’s…”
“Tortured how?”
“Burns, cuts, bruises, broken bones. One of them is missing all but three of her fingers, the other is missing both ears.”
“FINGERS? EARS!”
“Shh! Get the healers. Meanwhile, I will reach out to the Council of Egama Warriors and explain to them what happened. We can’t have it circulating that these Egama were harmed in such a monstrous way on Lemoran soil. The Council will want to come collect their warriors, too, I’m sure, and we need to prepare something special for this delegation as a show of our support.
“Afterward, I’ll need you to contact Rhorkanterannu of Kor and see if his pirates have any logs detailing what could have happened to the Egama within Kor or after they left it. My guess is that all of their injuries occurred after they left Kor’s soil, but we need to be sure. It’s not like Rhorkanterannu to let something like this happen in his territory without his knowing and if it did, he will want to know to make an example of the guilty parties.”
“If? You think they were injured in the skies? That they tortured one another?” I scoff, throwing out my arms.
“SHH!” Her spittle flies all over my face and I don’t give an ohr. Not when my three hearts are pounding like this, making me think that I should already be back on my pad pad and returning to Essmira. Nob, Merquin assigned me tasks and I need to fulfill them. Yeffa.
Nob. Nob, nob, nob. Go back to Essmira.
I shake my head, trying to focus. “Can’t you ask the Egama what happened to them?”
Merquin grimaces, her cheeks clenching beneath her eyes, striated in purple colors. Heat flares from her skin and her grip on my arm becomes punishing. “Their tongues were cut out an
d the translators they wear behind their ears were cut out, too, and not cleanly. They’ve lost a lot of blood and desperately need our assistance.”
I firm, steeling myself as the skies start to open. Ohr. What an ohring event. Lemora is a peaceful place, not known for violence. Our Niahhorru enabled shields cost us a pretty pouch of kintarr, but it was worth it. We are rarely attacked and haven’t seen combat or violence on these grounds since the Lemoran clan wars of rotations long past. So long ago, they’re more like fables in our history that teach small children about the importance of being accepting and good and noble.
We don’t have creatures that cut the tongues out of other creatures. This horror is something we’ve never even heard of.
“My miriga and I will return as soon as we’re able. She might be able to provide assistance — comfort, at the very least for the Egama.”
Merquin blinks at me, surprised. A small smile flits across her face before her earlier resolve returns. “Good. Thank you, Raingar. Your and your miriga’s help will be most welcome.”
As I turn to clumsily chase after the Asgid leading my pad pad to the stables, she calls at my back, “You know, we may make a half-decent clan chief out of you yet!”
“Pagh!”
The rain starts to truly come down on my journey from Reyna’s to Tana’s keeps. My pad pad slows, but not considerably, and I’m undeterred, determined to be back to my mate quickly. Like Merquin, Tana’s keep is surrounded by water though, unlike Merquin, not on all sides. It’s more like a lake that I have to go around or cross with one of those infernal floating contraptions.
It takes a little extra time and when I make it around, I find the doors open to me. I find it strange that they are. Stranger yet is that there are actually creatures on the walls at the lookout posts that I have not seen occupied ever, not by Tana or by the chief who came before her, or the one that came before that.
I’m spotted and one of the Lemoran females atop the walls turns around and shrieks, “He’s here! Raingar is here!” Feet squishing through mud is the sound I hear next before I see Tana herself emerge, a small fleet of Lemoran behind her.
And they’re armed.
“Raingar! Thank the stars! Come quickly!”
“What’s happened?” My voice strangles on notes of distress. I’m not used to seeing my clans folk upset and I don’t like it. I don’t ohring like it one bit.
Tana grabs my arm and hauls me off of the pad pad so roughly I fall onto one knee in the mud, soaking the trousers Essmira made for me. I try to tell her that Essmira won’t like that I’ve ruined yet another pair of trousers, but Tana isn’t listening. She keeps pulling, dragging me towards the large castle that forms the back wall to her keep — a rather odd construction I always thought.
“We’re all on the holo screens.”
“You…you are? Wait — who’s we?”
“Yeffa. We had to activate them immediately.”
“Why?”
“It’s Essmira.” My stomach heaves. My mind scatters. And then she has to slam a blade down onto my skull and sever my body in half cleanly. “She’s missing!”
I stagger behind her though I don’t know how. My legs have both been severed at the knees. My mind rings hollowly as Tana leads me up a flight of stone stairs that wrap elegantly to reach a landing. Left and then right and then another right and we’re in a room that’s already full of creatures all looking at me with terror and worry.
The huge series of screens that fill an entire wall are an identical copy of the holo room in my own keep. So rarely activated, except to conclude trades, I’m shocked to see the faces that I do peering back at me.
Gorman fills the screen where I would ordinarily be and begins speaking first, “Raingar, my Lord.” His Lord? Ohr. Nob. Nob nob nob. It can’t be. What’s wrong? What has he done?
“Forgive me!” This male who’s never lost his composure once in my lifetime, sobs while Moreth stands at his right shoulder and tries to staunch the flow of blood from one of his right fins — nob, what was once his right fin. Now, it’s missing. It’s ohring missing! Like it’s been torn raggedly off of the side of his face, not cut. Torn, like with hands. Is that how the trackers were removed from the Egama? The tongues, too? And what has been removed from Essmira in my absence?
“Gorman!” Pangs shoot through my soul, through the soles of my feet, through my hands. Pains for him, for Essmira, for everyone. I shove through the creatures crowded in front of me brutally, pushing them out of my way. “Gorman, what happened?” I shout up at the viewpane.
“I couldn’t stop him…I didn’t even see him coming…” He shakes his head, eyes looking distracted and lost while Moreth shouts orders in the background.
My hearts gape. My body clenches and a cold sets over my bones. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Him?” I say, my voice icy as my worry and concern flutters out onto the stormy breeze.
A resolve sets over me. A battle trance that I’ve only felt once, when the Egama warrior looked at her and tried to take her from me.
“She didn’t run away?”
“Nob,” Gorman sobs, voice twisting in pain and Moreth stands up hastily. He has several apprentices behind him and is shouting at us to leave Gorman be. That he needs more urgent care and access to the full healing facility. He refuses. Instead, he wails, “He stole her!”
The words stun me and I squeeze together, struggling to think through them and find reason. “Stolen? Someone came into my house, entered my chambers and stole my mate?” When no one answers, I turn to the small table beneath the window and smash my fist through its glass surface, reveling in the pain that shoots up my right arm. “WHO WAS IT!”
Tana’s voice whips my head around. She’s standing in the center of the space that’s cleared out around me. She’s showing me both of her palms. “Raingar…I um…that’s why I asked our friend, Rhorkanterannu to join us. He believes he may know the creature responsible.”
My gaze flashes up, finding Merquin’s furious face in the viewpane before settling on the silver gaze that occupies the central screen. Niahhorru pirate king, though I wouldn’t dare call him a king to his face. Not if I wanted to live to speak of it. Pirates look down on kings.
The silver-skinned male leans back in his seat, poised, looking every bit as unaffected by this situation as I am affected by it. “Rhorkanterannu, you know who stole my female?” I hiss, struggling to find and capture breath.
“Your finned friend was lucky to have survived. Without a witness, we wouldn’t have been able to identify the culprit and your hybrid would likely be lost among the stars by now.”
“Lucky!” I shout, shaking my fist at the screen, wishing he were here to annihilate as proxy for the one who stole Essmira, my miriga, my Xiveri ohring mate, directly out from under me. “I doubt Gorman feels the same.”
Gorman falls to the side, as if on cue, and is caught by Moreth who carries him out of view and leaves me looking at the plain stone wall and wishing I could will Essmira to appear among the faces gathered.
Rhorkanterannu adjusts something out of the screen and smiles. Then looks at me and smiles broader, “Centare. I suppose not. But what he feels does not change the truth. He is lucky. Because he has met Sky’s greatest assassin and survived.”
“Assassin?” I shout at the same time that Merquin and Reyna do.
Tana, beside me says something else, something blood curdling, “Sky?”
“Ontte,” he says, the Meero word for yeffa.
I shudder, bowels threatening to purge themselves as I imagine what’s in store for Essmira if she’s successfully taken to the Sky planet. It sits outside of any quadrants within the Niahhorru-controlled grey zone but in a territory even the Niahhorru do not touch. That’s why Rhorkanterannu is here now. It must be.
“The Sky are monsters,” Merquin whispers.
“Indeed.” That Rhorkanterannu agrees is a terrifying thing. “They steal species to create cybernetic soldiers, assassins, b
ounty hunters…you name it. And you have just had your female taken by their prized killer. I’ve managed to track your female’s name to a Sky list.”
His finger goes to his ear, likely activating the token — an advanced piece of Niahhorru technology enabling long-range communication, among other things — that all pirates wear. He nods to no one even as he speaks to me, “It looks like he’s held her contract for some time…Over eighty solars.”
“Her contract? HER CONTRACT! He’s sent to…to…to kill her?” I stammer and I’m grateful for Tana then who comes to grab my elbow and keep me upright when all I want in that moment is to collapse into a hole deep in the bowels of Lemora and die there.
“Centare,” he answers in Meero. “It’s a bounty. He’s set to deliver her.”
“But eighty solars? Eighty solars! That’s even before I encountered her in Quadrant One…”
Rhorkanterannu laughs and it’s a dark, delirious sound. Like drums pounding out of time with one another, or bells, but the kind played in nightmares rather than dreams. “You are assuming that the bounty had something to do with you, my Lemoran friend. Your hybrid was coveted long before she ever met you. At least, that’s how it would seem.”
“By who?”
“Can you get us a name, Rhorkanterannu?” Merquin says breathily. “If we know who holds the contract, we can intercept her upon delivery.”
Rhorkanterannu smiles. “Centare, you can’t. He’s too clever for that. But I can tell you who holds the contract. Tyto, of Igmora and Tyto? I know you all are familiar with him. But what you may be less familiar with is that Tyto is a wanted male in Quadrant Two. He killed Igmora in cold blood in front of a dozen witnesses. He hides here on Kor, though I suppose it isn’t hiding, is it? He’s just waiting now for his bounty to show up.”
I need to break something. Need to hurt something badly. The instinct to wage war makes my rough skin prickle. The male I gave fourteen tuns of kintarr to never had any intention of releasing her. The bastard could have saved me a lot of trouble by letting me know, then.
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