Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

A blood halitus sweet and musty spread through the room as the Irrkuyon on the dais stood without moving, a tableau that held until Rintirry dropped the knife on Kulyari’s body and strolled to the end of the table. He flung himself into his chair, poured a dollop of wine into his glass, and gulped it down.

She turned a corner, found herself in the middle of a kidnapping.

Before she had time to react, one of the men had an arm wrapped around her and a slicer against her temple. “Move and you’re dead,” he whispered. His breath was hot on her ear, she was pressed hard against him; he wasn’t much taller or wider than she was, but she kept thinking of steel traps and sword blades and other hard and lethal things. Lethal, yeh. He wanted to kill her so badly she could smell it like body odor.

Matja Allina exchanged a quick look with Airing Pirs, got to her feet. She signaled the women at her table to follow her, then went sweeping from the room.

Behind the screen Kizra clutched at the arranga and wondered what she should do. Danger was as thick in that huge room as the blood-stink off the body. She wanted out of that place now, no! ten minutes ago.

Fragment by fragment, since the encounter that afternoon with that signifier lizard, she was reassembling her past and with that past regaining an acerbic view of power and the powerful, a view underlined by what had just happened, a lesson of what would happen to her if she followed her natural tendencies in this world.

The door whooshed closed behind him, expanding as it moved to fill the whole space of the opening as if it erased itself to underline the futility of trying to escape the cell. Hands clasped behind her, Shadith scowled at the seamless wall. “Mashak! Dafta!

Your soul smells like dog-shit.” When she was trapped in the diadem she was essentially immortal. She’d abandoned all that when she had Aleytys decant her into this body.

I must have been out of my alleged mind.

That struck her as funny and she giggled, but the spurt of humor was quickly gone. Time meant more now. The idea of wasting her counted hours in a hole like this one with nothing to see, nothing to do, made her wild.

She closed her eyes and reached, searching for other eyes, single or compound, large or small, anything she could look through. Somewhere, somehow, he must have left a crack she could worry at until it was big enough to let her crawl out of this.

A small dark maidservant slipped like a shadowmouse from the curtains behind the screen and touched her on the shoulder. Ghineeli chal. When Kizra started to speak, Ghineeli touched a forefinger to her lips. Then she beckoned urgently, pointed at the curtains.

She came painfully awake, looked up into the liquid copper eyes of the sauroid captive. She was lying on a floor somewhere and he was kneeling beside her. She wasn’t tracking too well, whatever Ginny used to put her out seemed to have pushed the slow-button in her head. She rubbed at her eyes, groped around with numb hands.

Kizra followed her out into the kitchen hall. “What…” she whispered.

Ghineeli shook her head, then went scooting along the hall to the swinging doors at the far end. She pushed open the lefthand door, stood holding it until Kizra was through, then she eased the door shut with no more noise than a faint whoosh. She touched Kizra’s arm. “The Matja said go to her rooms. Now. By the serving stairs.”

She took her hand away and left, slipping shadowmouse through the wide service door into the kitchen quarters.

She scowled at the black figures seated by the fire, two of them standing, and shivered involuntarily as she heard the two on their feet arguing on and on…

It was about her and the others, she knew that, it was like an auction in a way, as if they were agents bidding for the contents of the cage…

She thrust two fingers into her boot, smiled as she touched the hideout’s hilt. Braincrystal knife, limber as a Company Exec’s morals. Hold it wrong and it would whip back on you and slice your hand off. Rohant dropped to a squat beside her. His eyes shown red like bits stolen from the fire. “Soon,” he said.

She nodded. “Soon.”

Kizra clicked her tongue. Matja Allina. She wasn’t sure how far she trusted the Matja. The woman would serve her own first and drop overboard anyone or anything that threatened them, promises or no promises, good will or ill. Still, there was no one else right now who even looked like offering protection, so what could she do?

Moving as swiftly and silently as she could manage, cursing under her breath when an awkward turn made her bump the arranga against the white plastered dirt wall, she went up the back stairs. Her nerves were stretched tauter than the arranga’s strings.

Turn and turn, then out on the second floor, scurry along the service corridor, push out into the main hall after listening nervously and hearing only the hiss of candles burning, after peering out and seeing only shadows

Stand before the Matja’s door and wonder: should I knock or not? If I don’t knock, how does anyone know I’m out here?

The door opened. Aghilo took her wrist and tugged her inside, an urgent, fearful pull on her arm.

Matja Allina looked up, nodded, then let her head fall back, her eyelids droop closed again. She said nothing. Her daughters were crouched at her feet. They didn’t know what was happening, but they’d sensed danger and were pale and tense. Ingva was looking fierce again.

She extended her reach, sweeping through wide arcs, finally touched a big-eyed moth hunting gnats along the dark stream.

She went swooping through the night with the prowling moth, in and out among the trees, soaring on muffled wings that read the air currents so exquisitely they beat just once or twice a minute, only speeding up when she rushed down on a swarm of prey insects.

A sudden burst of heat drew her, heat radiating away from the cooling engines of a grounded flit, an open flier capable of lifting a score of passengers. The moth played in the thermals like a child dancing in wave-froth, forgetting her hunger in the exuberance of her tiny joy.

Candles were burning in here also; the current that fed the bedroom lamps had been diverted into the Honor Suite.

Hot wax and fear. The stink of both filled the room.

Aghilo dropped her arm and went back to the chair where she’d been sitting.

Tinoopa was already here, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the lefthand corner of the room where she had a view of the door but was inconspicuous behind the chair where Polyapo sat.

The titular Housekeeper looked older by half a century than she’d been at the start of the meal. Though Polyapo was Irrkuyon by birth, she was also female and a poor relation without any protection but her relatives’ good will. And when relatives fought, if she guessed wrong about who’d win, if she went too far with the wrong loyalties, she’d be one of the first to perish. She wasn’t an intelligent woman, but instinct told her that this situation could go in any of half a dozen directions, most of them deadly, that she could do nothing to influence the outcome. Nothing but sit here and pray to whatever gods a preybeast had that the powerful and the angry wouldn’t notice her.

The Jili Arluja was in more or less the same situation, but she was in less danger, being without ambition. She was content to be here and teach the girls as long as they needed her, what happened after that she was also content to leave to the good will of the Matja. Any dreams she had, time had leached out of her. She was sitting quietly beside the girls, touching them now and then, a gentle encouragement and comforting. Especially Yla. As Kizra crossed to Tinoopa, Yla gasped suddenly, turned and pressed her face against Arluja’s knees. The tutor sighed, stroked the girl’s hair.