Shadow of the Warmaster

V

1. Still two+ years till Aslan’s Mama meets Quale/ four months after she woke in the belly of the transport/the voyage is finished.

Lake Golga/Gilisim Gililin/Imperator’s Palace/ afternoon.

The Bolodo transport decanted Aslan and the others on Tairanna four months after it collected them at the Weersyll substation. Smallish dark men with cold eyes supervised their transfer. Others of the same type loaded their gear on carts pulled by stocky stolid beasts with horns like half smiles curving up and away from round twitchy ears.

Aslan stepped onto the ground, braced herself to endure the extra weight and found a moment of quiet while their new guards prodded them into line. They’d been stuffed with the local language and a sketchy outline of local customs so they had no trouble understanding the terse commands. Despite the circumstances she was momentarily happy. There was an infinity of possibility stretching out before her, new worlds always did that to her. She stood docilely where the guards put her, sniffing at the wind that whipped around the base of the transport, sampling the smells it brought to her. Fish and rotting flesh, dung and mud and the sharp green bite of trampled grass, the dank musky odor of the beasts, the subtler odors of cart woods and working metal, over all this the faint burnt-cabbage stink of the men. That wind wailed and whined; the carts rattled; her fellow slaves snapped irritably when impatient guards shoved at them, barking guttural monosyllabic orders; behind her the drones servicing the ship clanked and hissed; overhead, racy white birds circled in flittering flocks, their eerie cries a most proper accompaniment to the debarking of slaves into the land of their servitude. The extravagance of word and image made her laugh. Xalloor looked a question, flinched from a guard’s goosing prod (an elastic grayish cane a meter long) and in her indignation forgot what she was going to ask. Aslan sighed and started walking as the guards marched them toward the towered city a kilometer or so away. Nothing to laugh about. She had no control over her life; whatever happened to her depended on persons and events she had no way of manipulating, not now, not until she had sufficient grasp of local verities to do some planning. Her first flush of interest and excitement quickly wore off; she was a slave here, not a scholar. She rubbed at her lower back. Though the gravity of this world was uncomfortable rather than unbearable, she was already feeling fatigue and fatigue made her depressed, diminished her ability to deal with her problems.

She risked a look over her shoulder, winced as a guard stung her with his prod. There were other ships down on the pad, three of them. Cargo transports. Insystem ships. Not good. Apparently the only way home was through Bolodo. She clung to a faint hope that her mother would be able to find her because there wasn’t much else to keep her from the black despair that sometimes overcame her; she couldn’t afford that now, it sapped her will worse than any gravity-induced fatigue. Once the Bolodo transport left… she scowled at the rutted track… if she could organize some sort of group… she was enough of a pilot to get them back to busier starlanes… we can’t be the only shipment of slaves to this place, the guards are too casual, we’re nothing special… why not take the ship, security was lax, it was obvious the Bolodo crew weren’t worrying about their cargo turning on them… surprise them… if I can get the right people… weapons… we’ll need weapons of some kind. She strained to get a look at the guard without letting him see what she was doing… the prods… knife in an external bootsheath… some sort of pistol in a leather holster clipped to his belt… what kind? Depends on the technology here; I doubt if Bolodo is supplying weapons… self-interest would say no… I don’t know… What is the level of technology here? Hard to estimate. Nothing from Bolodo on that and what she saw around her was ambiguous. The carts had shock absorbers, bearings in the wheels and pneumatic tires, but they were pulled by beasts and the road itself was little more than ruts and mud, no sophisticated land traffic here despite the landing field and the size of the city ahead of them.

They were led round the edge of the city, past walls about twice manhigh, pierced at intervals by pointed archways where Aslan could look down narrow crooked lanes meant for walkers not wheels, lanes paved in carved and painted stones, the simple repeating design echoing the pattern of bright, glazed tessera set into the cream-colored bricks of the walls. Her steps slowed as she tried to see more, fascinated and frustrated by the tantalizing glimpses she got into the life of this world; one of the guards laid his prod across her shoulders, reminding her once again that she wasn’t here to study-though why she was here…

The guards took them across a narrow section of wasteland where they walked a beaten earth path between shivering silver-green walls of waist high grass, grass that buzzed with hidden insects and rustled gently in a soft erratic wind. Xalloor grimaced and scratched at her thin arms, rubbed at eyes beginning to water and redden; she sniffed and spat, glared at a guard who whapped her with his prod because her spittle had just missed the toe of his boot.

Ahead of them was a massive wall more than thirty meters high, a wall that rambled over the grassy hummocks and dipped into the water that spread out to the horizon on three sides. Aslan decided it was a lake because the smell told her the water was fresh, not salt. The lead guard thumped with his prod on an ogeed gate; it swung open in heavy, well-oiled silence.

The line of slaves marched through arcades and colonnades and formal gardens manicured to an order and an artificiality that seemed to deny the ordinary processes of change and decay. Jaunniko was just ahead of Aslan; she could hear him muttering under his breath as he looked around, his shoulders were pulled in and his fingers were twitching. She thought she knew what he was feeling because this dead place grated on her too. Figures appeared in the promenades, posed in the arches, showing a flicker of interest in the newcomers that faded almost as it was born. They were uniformly taller and fairer than the guards, with a high degree of physical beauty; male or female, it made no difference, in their own way they were as unalive as the garden, mobile ornaments as clipped and trained as the hedges were. Never, she told herself, I’ll die first, make them kill me outright before they drain the soul out of me. She shivered and knew the words were whistling in the wind, if Luck wasn’t with her… a few steps on, she smiled, amused at her vanity. She wasn’t young enough or pretty enough to qualify as an ornament, whoever bought her wasn’t apt to want her body. There was a hint of comfort in the thought, her usefulness and therefore her value wouldn’t depend on how soon her owner tired of her. She made a face at the taste of that word, owner.

A tower grew out of springing arches like a tree rising from its roots. The guards herded them through one of the arches and stopped them in a paved courtyard, dusty and barren, a pen for two-legged beasts. Xalloor edged closer to her.

“’minds me of a casting call.”

“I don’t think I like the roles we’re up for.”

“Or the audience.” Xalloor flashed a defiant grin at one of the guards who slapped his prod against his leg but showed no sign of coming to shut them up. She turned her shoulder to him, shivered and rubbed at arms roughened with horripilation. “Fools. They should’ve told us we were going to freeze our assets.”

Aslan looked up at the tower with its ranks of narrow windows glittering in the light of the lowering sun. “At least they’ve got glass in them. I wonder if we’re going in there? Hmm. Far as I’m concerned, they can take their time. No joy for any of us in that place.”

“I want to know now.” The dancer moved restlessly, fighting against gravity, working the muscles of her shoulders, arching her feet inside her boots, tightening and loosening her leg muscles. “You’ve led a sheltered life. Working the tran-circuit isn’t all that different from this. Once I know the terms, I can root round and finagle a way to live with them.”

“You dance, the Omperiannas are musicians, Parnalee designs large-scale events, Yad Matra’s a machinist, Churri’s a poet, Appel, Jaunniko, Naaien, go down the list, you’re all techs or artists or both, but me? There’s nothing I can do that has any meaning outside of University or a place like that, nothing I like to think about. What can they want with a xenoethnologist? It’s ridiculous.”

“Mebbe so.” Xalloor laced her hands behind her head, bent cautiously backward, straightened with an effort visible in the tendons of her neck. “I loathe these heavy worlds, move wrong and you tear up your legs.”

There was a loud clapping sound of wood on wood. They turned. A man had come through a door in the side of the tower; he stood at the top of the steps that led up to it, a clipboard in one hand, its bottom braced on the ledge of a hard round belly. “I am the Imperator’s Madoor,” he said. “When I call your name, come here, stand at the base of the stairs. You will be taken to your posts. There will be no argument, no protests, no threats, no struggling. Awake or drugged, you will go. We have no preference as to the manner of your going, but consider well, how you begin is how you will go on. You have no voice in your destination or what happens to you there. I want that very clear. You are not beasts, you are less than beasts. You are worth only what services or instruments you can provide. If you choose not to provide them, you will be beaten or otherwise persuaded to change your mind. If you still refuse, we will get what value out of you that we can. You will serve as bait for our fishermen or food for our hunting cats. Do not think to escape and hide yourself among Huvved or Hordar; you cannot, you do not look like us, you do not sound like us no matter how well you have got our language, you do not know custom or rite, you have no family here. No one will help you. Cooperate or suffer the consequences.” He looked down at the clipboard. “Kante Xalloor. Tom’perianne. Nym’perianne. Lam’perianne. Jaunniko.” He named five others, all performers of one sort or another, then waited while two guards and an escort of exquisitely robed and tonsured males sorted them into a proper line and took them off. They went without creating fuss, they went with prowling steps and narrowed eyes, plotting as they moved, too cool, too controlled, too experienced in the exigencies of surviving to waste their energies in a futile rebellion. Aslan watched them go and saw her vague notion of assembling a group to take one of Bolodo’s transports go with them, the vision fading like a memory of a dream. As she passed through the arch, Xalloor risked a wave and a grin and got away with both. Aslan waved back, then waited her turn, feeling bereft and lonelier than she had in years.

“Churri dilan. Aslan aici Adlaar. Parnalee Pagang Tanmairo Proggerd.”

Aslan moved as slowly as she dared toward the steps. During the trip here she’d done her best to avoid attracting Churri’s notice, not too difficult because he was tied to his bunk and except for the times when he added verses to the Curse Song and belted them out, for the edification of his fellow captives, he was either asleep or scribbling in his notebooks. She was afraid of getting closer to him, she didn’t want to be linked with him, she didn’t want him playing are-you aren’t-you games with her. She saw his head jerk when he heard her full name, the matronymic that linked her with Adelaar, and made sure the Parnalee stood between him and her, but she couldn’t miss the nervous dart of his yellow eyes as he leaned forward and looked around the Proggerdi’s bulky body.

No robed and perfumed types came for them. A guard prodded Aslan toward the far side of the court, herded the three of them through a bewildering cascade of arches and into a holding cell of sorts. The guard looked around the room; his eyes passed over them as if they were less important than the dust on the floor. He grunted and left, barring the door behind him.

Once the light from the doorway was cut off, several strips pasted on the backwall began to glow, producing a bluish twilight that hid more than it revealed. Parnalee sniffed. “Smells like dogshit in here.” He strolled to the door, leaned on it. It creaked and shifted a millimeter or so, balked. “Thought so.” He rested his massive shoulders against the planks, folded his arms across his chest, yawned and let his eyes droop shut.

“Aici Adlaar?” Churri’s voice.

Aslan twitched. The voice was a large part of the Bard’s reputation, a mellow flexible baritone capable of turning a nuance on the flick of a vowel. On the trip here she’d listened with pleasure when he talked to his neighbors, when he chanted his verses to the hold. Now that voice was turned on her. It was only a part of her name that he said, but folded into those syllables were question, speculation, a touch of fear, a touch of wonder, a demand for an answer and other less identifiable implications. She drew her tongue across her lips. “So?”

“Soncheren?”

“I was born there.”

“I knew a girl on Soncheren, long time ago, one Adelaar.”

“I know.”

“How?”

Aslan hesitated, decided there was no point in hedging. “She’s my mother.”

“So Ogodon got her married off. That hamfisted cousin of hers, I suppose, he was hot after her.” More nuance-casual overlay, eagerness beneath, sharp tang of anxiety, all of which turned into laughter.

She ignored that. “Married? A spoiled virgin? Don’t be stupid. Not on Soncheren. He sold her to a Contractor after I was weaned, sold me into the baby market.”

“You’re mine?”

“So she says.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She told me that.”

“Why didn’t she send me word?”

“Not much point, considering how fast you cut out before.”

“I went back.”

“How nice of you.” She heard the acid in her voice, she felt ugly, she knew she was making him despise her, but she couldn’t help it; years of anger and pain were erupting from the darkness where she’d shoved them.

“I did all I could to find out what happened to her without getting my head taken, I assume you know the habits of your male relatives.”

“Of course you did.” Cool, steady and very bitter.

“You’ve got an adder’s tongue, you know that?” She shook her head though she knew he couldn’t see it. Anything she said would make things worse. “My name gets around. She could have found me if she wanted to.”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

She could feel him staring at her; his short stocky body vibrated with… what?… something… that made demands on her she didn’t want to answer. After a moment of thick silence, with a whine in her voice that appalled her when she heard it, she said, “Adelaar made a good life for us, she didn’t need anyone, she didn’t want anyone sticking his nose in.”

He stirred, but before he could speak, the door rattled, Parnalee moved away to let it open (Aslan jumped, cursed under her breath, she’d forgotten he was in here). The guard whapped his prod against the door. “Out.”

Parnalee ambled out, not about to hurry himself at the order of some snirp who didn’t reach past his ribs. Aslan followed him, struggling to regain control over her emotions, wanting a mirror to see what was written on her face. She heard Churri behind her though he was softer footed than a thief. Perhaps heard wasn’t the right word, felt was more apt. She was intensely aware of him; part of it was a sexual awareness that she half-feared, half-understood; she’d never known him in the role of father, she had to keep reminding herself who he was (for the first time she understood why her mother kept such fond memories of him). Part of her reaction was a mix of needs that were more intense than sex. She needed a father. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t a child, she hadn’t missed him when she was, or so she told herself, refusing to acknowledge the old angers that drove her into sniping at him a few minutes ago. Now, with him there, so close, too close, she ached for what she hadn’t known; it seemed somehow a betrayal of her mother, of herself, but she couldn’t deny the feeling.