Shadowkill

6

The convoy moved steadily along a narrow black-topped road, an armored six-wheeled landrover at point with a gatlin fixed to the top and the heavy shields laid flat for the moment to cut wind drag. P’murr and his guards were in this car with a sentry up top under a tarpaulin, long-glasses sweeping the rolling brushland around them.

The second armored landrover followed; it was a bedroom on wheels, air-conditioned and marginally more comfortable than the other vehicles. Matja Allina rode here, protected from the worst of the jolts by a gimbaled bed, plagued mostly by boredom, which Kulyari exacerbated by her sulks and snits. Aghilo and her handmaids were silent women, they had nothing to say (at least, nothing they wanted Kulyari to hear), so they said nothing.

The boxtruck was the last of the vehicles, it rumbled along with numbing steadiness. The women inside slept as they could, the urge to talk dulled by fatigue and the difficulty of making themselves heard above the motor.

Kizra knew them all now, their names, the worlds they came from. Why some of them were here. That some wouldn’t talk about why they were here.

Jassy chattered endlessly, Eeda nodded, laughed, added a word here and there. They were third generation contract labor and knew half a dozen worlds from the ground down and told Kizra interminable tales about them whenever she looked halfway receptive.

Bertem, Luacha, Sabato. They were convicts like Tinoopa, with wild stories about the places they’d been and the scams they’d pulled. Kizra was skeptical, but she enjoyed the stories anyway. They were facile in half a dozen langues and impossibly deft with their tiny three-fingered hands.

Tictoc, Evalee, and Dorrit were cousins from Connafallen, fourteen, fifteen; and sixteen-they’d signed up to get away from neighborhood wars and bride fairs, figuring anything was better than that. So far it was, ah yes it was, or so they told anyone who’d listen.

Anitra was small and so extravagantly fair she, was nearly translucent, silent as the ghost she resembled, expressionless.

Beba Mahl was short, stubby, with faded brown eyes that blinked continually and teared in bright light. Another silent one, she hadn’t uttered a word the whole trip, just sat in the corner by the backflaps looking grim-she was from a forest world and seminocturnal, most comfortable in half-light like that in the truck.

Zhya Arru took the other corner, curled herself up and slept with a determination that Kizra found depressing; she was another blonde, a streaky one with freckles and limber as a snake.

Lyousa va Vogl had braids long enough to sit on and square, busy hands; she sat playing with strings, knotting them into a bag of sorts, doing it for her joy in the complex pattern of bumps rather than the completed object. Kizra watched her with amazement-the woman’s fingers went so fast and so surely it was wonderful to see-and she felt a nudging at her mind as if the knots brought out a memory ghost.

Ommla, Jhapuki, Fraji, Rafiki-friends or cousins or lovers, they sang and chatted in their rapid staccato langue, played finger games and laughed a lot and paid almost no attention to anyone else, four tiny women with the palest of gray-brown hair like ancient dead leaves. Beast handlers, Tinoopa said. She’d come across them before, not this particular tetrad, but their kind. Nomads from a hot dry world called Jinasu.

Ekkurrekah and Yerryayin were tall and bony, with mops of hair like year-old straw-as slow in speech as they were fast in hand, picking flies from the air with a casual ease that amused Tinoopa and amazed Kizra who’d been after a pest buzzing about her eyelashes. She kept slapping her own face without appreciable effect on the fly. Ekkurrekah and Yerryayin were amiable creatures without much to say for themselves. The calluses on their big hands spoke their history for them.

Tamburra the Kiv’kerrinite was the one with hair like burnished copper which she wore twisted into a complex knot on top of her head; she had green eyes, the color deep and clear, cream velvet skin, slowly eroding under the grind of the dust and the thin dry air. She was a woman at the noon of her beauty and so obviously in the wrong place that Kizra ached to ask her what she was doing in this lot. She didn’t ask. Tamburra’s innate dignity and self-containment made questions seem an intrusion and after the woman came awake screaming on the third night of the trip, Kizra decided she really didn’t want to know.

Tsipor pa Prool was a listener. Secretive. Kizra shivered when she caught Tsipor looking at her. She wasn’t sure why, there was nothing but a mild interest radiating from the woman, but it was rather like being watched by a snake.

Vuodee and Vassikka were twin dumplings, plump fair gigglers, a year or two older than the Connafallen cousins. Ordinary girls, neither intelligent nor gifted, just surplus. They giggled together and chattered in an incomprehensible argot but had little to say to anyone else, flushing red and fidgeting if they were directly addressed.

Day after day, same faces, same voices.

They were ground into her like the dust that never settled.

Dyslaera 4: Vivisection

SCENE: Operating theater; the captive Dyslaera as audience in two lines of cages raised head-high above the floor; techs in masks, white robes, white gloves, working at stations about the room, some waiting, some already collecting information from sensors sealed to shaved areas on the heads and bodies of the captives.

The older captives are in the cages on the wall opposite the single entrance.

Rohant: Though his nincs-othran has been drug-diminished, he is detached, sitting like a lump; his health seems good, his bodyfur is sleek, his mane thick and springy.

Tolmant: His body is spasming in withdrawal from the massive courses of drugging that have wiped away everything but rage, hunger, and a struggling, distorted lust. His personality is gone, his memories, his capacity to learn, to respond to anything outside his skin.

Nezrakan: His hair is falling out in clumps, his bodyfur is almost gone; what is left is gray or white, it looks brittle, as if it would break off if you touched it.

Ossoran: He is cool, calm; like Rohant he seems sleek, almost untouched, though there are subtle signs that his appearance is misleading. He is sharing the cage with his closest friend.

Feyvorn: He is also healthy, vigorous. Both, of them move with a hesitant awkwardness, as if they are holding themselves so tightly in check that every move must be visualized before it is made.

In the cage on the opposite wall, the young Dyslaerors glance repeatedly at their elders, look quickly away, each time more disturbed by what they are seeing.

Tejnor: His body has been shaved clean to facilitate healing; he is still plastered with spray bandages from the beating in the pen. He sits hunched over on the floor of his cage. Now and then he lifts his head, but he avoids looking at his teacher/master Tolmant.

Azram: He is brooding, miserable, though he has not been touched by the techs. He shares his cage with

Kinefray: His head is shaved bare, a metal cap has been bonded to the skin. The bodyfur is gone from his forearms and lower legs, metal strips are bonded to the skin. Otherwise, he looks vigorous, healthy.