A Prison Unsought (60 page)

Underneath the table a hound commenced the rhythmic whimper
of a dream, its legs scrabbling in the rushes.

“There, there, bitling, not to
worry.” Londri smiled at the incongruous gentleness in Anya Steelhand’s husky alto.
The muscles in the forge master’s arm flexed as she reached down to stroke the
animal’s head. The whimpering stopped, replaced by the thumping racket of the
big dog’s tail.

The big woman straightened up and glared at the two men
across the table from her, her pale eyes lent even more intensity by the
contrast with her glossy black skin. She slammed a big fist down on the table
and heaved herself to her feet; the candlesticks danced and the mugs rattled.

“You two would argue over the Last
Skyfall itself!”

Lazoro’s chair fell forward with a crash as the dwarf threw
up his hands to cover his head in mock terror. Stepan blinked at Anya, his
round, plump face blank.

“House Ferric has the right to the
third child,” said Anya. “We get that all the sooner if we decide in favor of
House Aztlan and divide the twins, but that will leave us facing Comori and the
Tasuroi—a larger force than if we decide against Aztlan.”

She peered at Londri. “That’s the decision, Your Majesty: is
getting our hands on a fertile woman that much sooner worth the risk?”

“Our spies say she is in fragile
health,” said Lazoro. “We can’t risk waiting.”

Twins
. A wave of
nausea welled up in Londri’s guts, and that decided her, but before she could
speak, from the corridor outside came a THUMP, drag, THUMP, drag. As the noise
grew louder, it was accompanied by a hoarse grunting in synchrony with its
rhythm.

The hanging in the doorway bellied out at its base and fell
back over a naked figure, albino-white and epicene, that leapt clumsily on all
fours toward the table like a child-sized toad. Its face was blank of meaning,
somehow even less expressive than a corpse.

It stopped behind Londri’s chair; she twisted around, not
wanting to look, but afraid that if she didn’t, it would touch her.

“Oracle . . . Oracle . . .
Oracle,” it piped in a high, thin voice, thick strings of spittle hanging from
its blubbery purple lips. Its eyes were pink and crusted with rheum. “Szuri . . .
Szuri . . . Szuri.”

Londri shrank back in her chair as it humped closer, repeating
its mindless litany. Anya stepped beside her, one big hand on the Ironqueen’s
neck, its horny weight comforting. The forge master kicked the creature away,
her voice hoarse with rage.

“Go away, you wretched abortion!”
She bit off the last word—the vilest curse on Gehenna—with disgusted precision.
“Go tell your master we will come, and not to send you again.”

The creature retreated, thump-dragging itself out the door,
trailing behind it a wailing cry: “Hurt . . . hurt . . .
hurt.”

Londri caught a glimpse
of Stepan’s face. The only Isolate among them, Stepan expressed his horror—the
others, born and raised on Gehenna, merely looked uncomfortable or angry.

They don’t have things
like that in the Thousand Suns. They don’t have to.

“Are you all right?” Anya asked.
“We can put him off.”

Londri shook her head. “Yes. No.” Her voice shook. Her
mother had never discussed this with her; her death had prevented Londri from
learning the true nature of the link between House Ferric and the exiled
Phanist who dwelt in the lowest levels of the castle. She only knew that every
time he called, her mother went, and so must she.

She stood up. “This just confirms that the Szuri Pastures
are important. Let’s get it over with.”

“Ow ow ow! R-run it again!”

Kedr Five’s squeal of laughter was nearly drowned by the
guffaws of the others on the bridge of the
Samedi
.

“I can’t watch it again,” Sundiver
cried, her slanted green eyes running with tears. “Send it over the hyperwave—Sodality’s
gonna love this one.” She bent over her console, still whooping, her thick mane
of silver hair hiding her face.

“Got an idea. Don’t send it yet,”
Moob put in, red-filed teeth bared in a fleering grin. She hunched over her
console, keying quickly.

Hestik clumped his fist on his own console, running the com
back. Tat Ombric turned her gaze to the viewscreen overhead, her emotions a
strange mixture of laughter and guilt.

Once again they all watched the Panarch and his advisers,
all old, dressed in the grimy gray prison garb that Emmet Fasthand, captain of
Samedi
, wouldn’t let them wash. They sat
at their barren table eating. Tat bent her ear, trying to catch the
conversation. They talked so quick, in those musicky voices, it was hard to
follow.

Without warning the gravs went off, and anyone in motion
floated right off their benches, some reaching hastily for anchor. Food on
lifting spoons or in glasses about to be drunk from splashed out in messy
globules, which several swam clumsily to catch.

Two of the old people bumped into each other, gnarled arms
and legs pumping for purchase, and when most of them were in midair, Sundiver
had hit the gravs again, and the prisoners thumped down hard, their food on top
of them—that which hadn’t splattered on walls and bulkheads.

“Look at that old bald one,” Hestik
sobbed. “On top of the ugly one with the squint! ‘Wanna chatz?’” He parodied a
quivering, senile voice.

The bridge crew whooped again, all except Moob, who still
worked—and Tat, who smiled reluctantly.

Tat looked away from the tiny old woman on the floor
cradling a broken arm. She tried to suppress the discomfort, figuring that
these nicks were shortly going to be duffed, anyway.

Moob and Hestik had decided to belay needling that
despicable Morrighon; at some point his Dol’jharian master might find out what
they were doing, and no one was certain how he’d react. This was, of course,
Fasthand’s ship, but Tat didn’t think even Fasthand was ready to hand out
commands to Anaris achreash’Eusabian, son and heir to Jerrode Eusabian of Dol’jhar.
Jerrode Eusabian of the Panarchy now
.

Tat looked down at her hands, small and square on her
console. Moob and Hestik loved perpetrating jokes while Fasthand was on his
Z-watch, the crueler the jokes the better. If they hadn’t decided that those
nicks were theirs to play with, they might have turned on the rest of the
crew—like Tat herself—who were too weak to defend themselves, or to get a
clique to defend them. As the smallest of the crew, Tat felt anew the
ambivalence of being posted to the bridge: her cousins couldn’t help her here.

“Let’s watch this,” Moob said,
baring her Draco teeth.

The viewscreen flickered to what the imagers in the
prisoners’ cabin were recording right then.

The nicks had picked themselves up and mopped some of the
mess as best they could, with the sparse linen Fasthand allowed them. A big old
nick crouched over the tiny woman, trying to wrap her arm with strips torn from
a sheet.

Suddenly they all looked in one direction, their bodies
tight with alarm, their faces varying from disgust to blank. Moob reached over
to Sundiver’s console and hit the gravs again, and moments later a nasty
brownish cloud of matter rolled into the room.

Kedr Five wheezed, pounding the back of his pod. “You backed . . .
up . . . the . . . disposer!” he squealed.

Renewed shrieks of mirth reverberated sharply against the
dyplast walls. Tat wondered if the damned Dol’jharians were watching and
laughing as well. No one knew for certain if they had the imagers programmed to
send to their quarters; they all assumed that Morrighon was spying on them, but
no one knew to what extent. Almost his first action after coming on board was
to designate a huge block in the ship’s computers for his own use, and as yet
no one could break his codes. Tat kept trying, on Fasthand’s orders; he wanted
to know how much of the ship’s functions the Dol’jharians had interfered with.

“You’re a Bori,” Fasthand had
snarled at Tat. “You been twisty with systems for years. Get around that ugly
popeyed zhinworm.”

Tat had assented, not pointing out that Morrighon was a Catennach
Bori. Any of those who had survived cullings, purges, and the terrible training
one must endure in order to serve the Dol’jharian lords had to be exponentially
much twistier.

She glanced once again at the viewscreen, then let her eyes
unfocus. Bile tickled at the back of her throat; it was too easy to imagine
what that room smelled like.

Behind Tat’s console, she heard Hestik choke. Sundiver wiped
her eyes, but Kedr Five and Moob avidly drank in every disgusting detail,
gibbering with such delighted abandon they missed the hiss of the door opening
behind, and those first thumping steps.

Heart pounding, Tat scrunched low; though her father had
skipped off Bori when she was small, before the Panarchists defeated Eusabian’s
forces, she still felt terror whenever she sighted a Dol’jharian, and this time
it was two of the big black-clad Tarkans, Anaris’s personal guard, who strode
in.

Silence fell, Kedr Five hiccupping, as the Tarkans made
their way to Moob.

She was up at once, teeth bared and her knife out, but the
Tarkan swatted her arm aside and grabbed the front of her tunic. Big as she
was, he lifted her right off her feet, as the second one grabbed Sundiver’s
arm.

“I’m coming,” she said, getting up
fast. “What’s the problem?”

Neither of the Tarkans spoke; Tat wondered if they even
understood Uni. They walked out in silence, their boots ringing on the deck
plates, the one carrying a choking, cursing Moob, and Sundiver hurrying in the
grasp of the other with a total absence of her usual arrogant sashay.

The door hissed shut behind them. Overhead, the viewscreen
showed that the gravs had come on again, and Tat saw a corresponding green
light on Sundiver’s console:
Interesting
,
she thought.
I was right, they do have
access to ship’s functions.
She watched as several gray-clad Dol’jharians
efficiently herded the nicks out of the disgusting cabin.

Then the Tarkans showed up; Moob hung limply, blood running
from her mouth. Sundiver’s hair stood out around her face, which was beautiful
even in anger. She managed a defiant stance as without warning Anaris himself
appeared, taller even than the Tarkans, with a face like some carving of a
warrior king out of the long-lost past. Tat hunched down further in her pod,
even though he was only on the screen.

“The prisoners are to arrive at
Gehenna alive, and unharmed,” he said, in his incongruously accent-free Uni. If
anything, he sounded like the nicks. He smiled slightly, then indicated
cleaning gear being dumped on the floor by another of the silent gray soldiers.
“When this chamber is habitable again, we’ll discuss this further.”

The Tarkans let go of the two women and went out. The door
shut on them; Sundiver bent over, retching. Moob leaned on a table, unheeding
the brown-green slime she sat in.

Hestik tried to kill the viewscreen—and failed.

The remainder of the bridge crew exchanged looks. On the
viewscreen the women painfully began to clean up; some on the bridge watched,
or busied themselves at their consoles, trying not to watch.

Unseen by them all, Morrighon tabbed the volume down on the
communicator tuned to the bridge, laughing as he set it neatly in its place on
the row.

Leaning back, he watched on his personal screen the pleasant
sight of the Draco and her companion scrubbing bilge off the walls. He wondered
whether he ought to insert a worm into the ship system, that would cause the
tianqi to waft an occasional breath of fetor—a little reminder—into their
cabins.

Reluctantly he abandoned the idea and logged the entire
scrubbing session under his personal code. Enjoyable as it would be once, he
knew they’d just force some other luckless slub into those cabins, and while
all the Rifter trash crewing this ship deserved to be spaced, some were much
worse than others.

He had not come this far by being unsubtle. Enough for them
to find this coded log in the system—they would know that he had the session
recorded, and could send it over the hyperwave at any time. That at least would
clip the Draco’s wings: to be shamed publicly was worse than death for Draco.

As for the silver-haired Shiidra-sucker . . .
He tapped his nails on the edge of his console, thinking with renewed fury of
the disgusting things the Rifters had done to torment him. He knew that she had
been the one to spray the clearmet on the wall above his bed and tap it into
ship’s power. He flexed his feet within his shoes: the burns still hurt. And it
was she and that boil-faced blit at the nav console, Hestik, who had released
the plasphage into his tianqi vents, so that his bed linens had dissolved into
a disgusting pink slime.

They were not united, Morrighon knew. He smiled, getting up
to pace about his cabin. Of course he could never tell Anaris about this silent
war going on: the assumption that he could not defend himself against a pack of
Rifters would destroy his future as Anaris’s right hand. Instead, he would use
his subtlety to divide them against themselves.        

The com at his waist vibrated: Anaris’s personal signal.
Morrighon activated the new security locks on his cabin; the next intruders
would encounter a nasty surprise, which they might, if particularly unlucky,
even survive.

He hastened down the narrow corridor, wondering if Anaris
had decoded some new data from over the hyperwave—or if he had decided to hold
another private converse with the Panarch.

Morrighon gnawed his lip, finding the idea of discourse
between those two strange and unsettling. He longed to discuss the meetings
with Anaris, but as yet Anaris had not indicated to him that they were a topic
of discussion. Further, he wanted them utterly private, so it was Morrighon and
not one of the Tarkans who brought the old man when Anaris wanted him, and
waited outside until they were done.