Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

N’Ceegh burned the head off the Grand Sech while Zaraiz Pa’ao plinked the techs. As the Imperator woke from his initial shock and started scurrying toward the main exit, N’Ceegh sent a beam from the burner sizzling past him. Pittipat stopped and turned slowly, working on a smile as he turned. His eyes opened wide as he recognized the intruder. “Ceeghi?”

“!Hi-Vagh!” N’Ceegh muttered. Leaving Zaraiz Pa’ao to guard the exit, he stalked the Imperator, cornered him against a work station. “Down you,” he growled, “on the floor, Bitvekeshit.”

The Imperator’s head went up, his tentative smile vanished. “Nonsense,” he said.

N’Ceegh lifted the burner, pressed the front end of the tube against Pittipat’s stomach. “Ba’okl, choose, flea.”

The old man reconsidered his objection and stretched out on the floor where he lay blinking up at the Pa’ao. With visible effort he managed a smile, then broadened it into a genial grin that lit up watery blue eyes sunk in a nest of pseudo laugh-wrinkles. He was calm now, confident; despite his uncomfortable and humiliating position, he was sure he could manipulate the situation to his benefit, that he could pacify this old friend. “Come, Ceeghi, you’re a good fellow. What do you want? Just tell me. There’s no need for all this.”

N’Ceegh knelt beside him and touched a spray to his neck. The Imperator stiffened, worked his mouth; he couldn’t speak and he couldn’t move his limbs.

Zaraiz left his post and stood beside the Pa’ao, watching what he was doing.

Hobbling on his knees (plushy gray fur worn thin over the bone), N’Ceegh moved down the Huvved’s long spindly body, unbuckled the Imperatorial sandals, slid the long bony feet out of them. “My village is ash,” he said, speaking with emotionless precision in unaccented Hordaradda. He took a thin surgical blade from a sheath on his forearm and sliced off the Imperatorial great toes; he set them aside while he applied cauterizing patches to stop the blood flow. He slit the Imperatorial trousers up past the knees. “The house of my fathers is ash,” he said. He drew his knife across the hamstrings, severing them. He hobbled up a little farther. “My children are ash,” he said. With a deft twist of his knife, he popped out the Imperatorial testicles and dropped them beside the severed toes. He moved on. “My lifemates are ash,” he said. He lifted the left hand, drew his knife several times across the back of it, severing the tendons. “My craft-heir is ash,” he said. He removed the thumb, dropped it on the Imperatorial chest and applied a patch to the wound. “My bloodkin to the third degree are ash,” he said. He dealt with the right hand in the same way, edged along until he was bending over the Imperatorial head, looking down at the old Huvved’s face, ignoring the terror in it. “You are the prime cause of those things,” he said. “The bloodghosts of my kin cry for vengeance. Zaraiz, help me, keep his head steady.”

While Zaraiz Pa’ao held the Imperatorial head locked against his thighs, N’Ceegh drew the blade delicately along the top of the Imperatorial eyesockets, cutting away the eyelids without touching the eyes beneath. “Never close your eyes again to the death and pain you decree,” he said. Working with the same care, he cut through the skin and cartilage of the Imperatorial nose and lifted it away. “Never ignore again the consequences of your demands.” He used the point as a stylus and cut into the Imperatorial brow the Pao-teely glyphs for bloodguilt. “May the world know your soul, you who command death without thought. Let him go,” he said, “gently, my son, if you please.”

N’Ceegh got to his feet, brushed his hands together: “The paralysis will wear off in about an hour,” he told the old man. “Do what you will then.” He touched Zaraiz Pa’ao on the shoulder. “Time to go.”

They fought their way back to the roof against a stiffening but disordered resistance, reached the garden breathing hard from the climb with a few holes in unimportant places, a burn or two from richocheting pellets, nothing serious.

Stretching and yawning, so sleepy he didn’t like thinking about the ride back to the mines, Zaraiz Pa’ao strolled to the parapet and looked across the grass at the faint lines of rose and purple at the base of the clouds in the west; the sun was down and the dark was lowering quickly. He yawned again, glanced into the gardens below. He saw the tug. “Look, N’Cey-da, isn’t that the machine they were talking about at the Mines?”

N’Ceegh crossed to him. “!F-doo-ya! must be. Talk was the Outsiders come looking for disappeared who might be slaves.” He frowned at Zaraiz Pa’ao. “You my son now, Zhazh-ti,” he said, “my craft-heir, but you born Hordar. It is Torveynee I ask you, come with me away from Tairanna? Come with me to hunt the ghostblood?”

Zaraiz Pa’ao rubbed at his eyes. He was so tired; it wasn’t fair that he had to decide this without time to consider. He reached out a trembling hand and warm furry fingers closed around it. On the other side, there were lots of times before this when he’d chewed things over and over and sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong. Prophet help me, he thought. “I will come, I will hunt,” he said. “Promise you’ll teach me? Everything?”

“You my craft-heir, Zhazh-ti. What else? Everything, ya.” N’Ceegh grinned at him, hugged the boy hard against him. “!Fi! let us go push in on that line.”

The pen had small sleeping chambers arranged around an assembly hall with a horizontal lattice displayed across the ceiling, tracks for the slides of the tether chains. At night around a hundred slaves were locked onto those chains and left to negotiate their way into their assigned sleeping places. Because of the Surge and the attack on the Wall, the Palace slaves had been herded into the pen early, the Huvved didn’t want them getting ideas about escaping. When I burned the latch and kicked the door in, most of them were still in the assembly chamber, gathered in clusters, talking, arguing, fidgeting or just sitting and staring in deep depression at stains on the walls.

I stood beside the door, looking over that very various crowd in that long narrow room. “Tom’perianne,” I called. I waited a minute, repeated the name, yelling over the noise. “Remember a dancer name of Kante Xalloor? She asked us to have a look for you and your sisters.”

A thin vital woman, vaguely pteroid, moved away from a group of the back wall, her chain clinking musically. “Xalloor, eh?” She had a deep contralto. So much voice from so frail a body. She looked to her right at two others who might have been clones instead of sisters they were so like her.

“Xalloor,” Nym’perianne said (or it might have been Lam’perianne). Whoever, her voice was a liquid lovely soprano. When I learned their names, I could tell them apart by voices if not their faces and bodies.

“What cha know,” Lam’perianne said (or it might have been Nym’perianne). This one had an oboe’s reedy notes, less immediately enticing than her sister, but maybe more interesting as time passed.

“Good kid,” they chorused.

“You know us,” Tom’perianne said. “Who’re you?”

“Name’s Quale,” I said. “Ship Slancy Orza . You want a ride to Helvetia?”

“That’s the dumbest question I ever heard.” She laughed, flutesong.

“I assume that means yes. Pels, cut the three of them loose. Someone here called Jaunniko?”

The noise got louder. Two men struggled, one fell; the one still standing moved away from the tangle he’d created. “Here, Quale. I’m Jaunniko. The dancer ask for me?”

“Someone did. Described him too and you’re not him. Jaunniko, stick your head up, will you? Or your hands, sculptor.”