The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 19

When the Pung took her away, Nisa still felt a certain pleasurable lassitude, and so she was slow to fear. The monsters were gentle, and that seemed so incongruous that she walked between them to the personnel lock without thought of escape.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked the monsters, when she finally found her voice. But they were silent, though the one on her right showed a mouthful of needle teeth. Was it a smile meant to reassure her?

At the lock, the door startled her when it slammed up into the arch of the opening, and she tried to run away. The monoline collar bruised her throat when she hit the end of the lead, and she fell to one knee, gagging. The larger of the two Pung guards helped her to her feet. The skin of its hands was cool and hard — not unpleasant, but so strange that she shuddered. Thereafter, she went along, docile.

After a time she took an interest in the sights.

She began to understand the size of the compound after they’d been walking the corridors for half an hour. Her father’s palace was a collection of hovels, in comparison. The walls of the corridors were made of a slick gray-white substance that reminded her of unglazed porcelain. The walls were several times the height of a man, and the way narrow, so that only a ribbon of sky was visible above. It was very quiet, as though whatever life existed behind the walls was muffled by their thickness.

She couldn’t help looking into the observation ports as they passed the other paddocks, and a sort of detached horror grew in her as she stole glances at the beings penned within.

Some seemed to be human, though not any sort of human with which she was familiar. They came in every shape, size, and color — white as ice, black as charcoal, tall massive creatures, small nimble ones. They wore strange garments, and many bore strange disfigurements. Most of the men did not shave their heads. Some were naked, some wore garments of such magnificence that the person within seemed to disappear. These otherworldly people wore inexplicable expressions, used bizarre gestures; even their postures seemed alien.

The monsters she saw were less disorienting, since she had no expectation that she would understand anything about them. She saw a pen of creatures that resembled irrin, flightless birds of the Pharaohan drylands, except that these had massive brain cases that hung back over their molting shoulders. They huddled in a landscape of flat sand and low bushes, in small motionless groups, powerful legs folded under them. There was something piercingly sad about them, hopeless and resigned. Their great golden eyes were opaque with loss. Nisa felt tears sting her eyes, just from that one glimpse.

But there were other monsters that inspired no pity. In one pen she caught sight of a colony of swift reptilian predators that ripped at the still-moving body of an old woman. They had sly goat-eyes, and they seemed to be aware of Nisa as she peered through the cloudy glass of the observation ports. She shuddered and looked away.

“When will we get wherever we’re going?” she asked. The guards paid no attention, and she began to suspect that they didn’t speak her language.

She wondered how the guards could find their way through the labyrinth. There were so many turnings and junctures. The great number of beings she had seen indicated that the compound was a place of great activity, but she saw no others in the corridors, until they stopped at a three-way intersection to allow a coffle and its guards to pass. The coffle was made up of a dozen exquisitely matched women, somewhat human in appearance, chained neck to neck, wearing short kilts of silvery metal scales and nothing else. Their skins were toned a pale celadon green, their milky hair long and knotted into complex braids. Their wide lavender eyes looked at Nisa as though she were some odd freak.

Nisa felt acutely the demoralizing effects of her dirty sackcloth tunic and tangled damp hair, and she started to drop her head in shame. But she was still the daughter of the King of Kings — a risen phoenix — and her chin lifted. She stared back at the freakish women, lips set in as haughty a sneer as she could manage.

In a moment the women were gone down the corridor, and Nisa and her guards continued.

They finally reached a long wall set with many doors. As they approached, one door folded back, revealing a very small room. Nisa couldn’t imagine any good reason why she should go in there with the Pung guards, and she pulled back against her leash, tugging at the thin clear strand with her hands.

The larger guard showed its teeth again in that frightening smile, and gestured. Nisa shook her head stubbornly. “Please,” she said. “Why must we go in there?”

The guard released a rumbling sigh and took her by the arm. Effortlessly he propelled her inside. When the other guard was wedged in, the door shut.

Nisa felt a need to whimper, but she forced it down. The alien smell of the guards thickened in the tiny space. Abruptly, she felt as if she were falling and then a whimper did escape her tightly clamped lips; but she noticed that the guards seemed unperturbed. So she assumed that death was not imminent.

A moment later the elevator slowed and stopped, and that sensation was almost as distressing.

The door folded back.

Her first thought was that she had miraculously been transported to her uncle Shimanekh’s harlotry, a place she’d visited more than once, disguised as a visitor from the provinces.

The ceiling was low overhead, as if to concentrate and compress the scents of pleasure. Nisa smelled a hundred subtle odors, sweet wine, pungent smokes, the deep note of human bodies in heat. The room was huge. To each side walls were visible, but the far end of the room was lost in darkness.

Nisa observed a similar range of luxuries — deep carpets and soft fabric, highlighted with the glitter of precious metal and rare stone, everything to please the touch as well as the eye. The furnishings were eccentric: here a divan with cloven feet, there a love seat with snakeskin cushions. She examined a chair with grotesque ebony finials — infant vampires, their tiny mouths stretched wide, exposing long canines. Nisa shuddered, and looked away.

Nisa heard, low and far away, a thread of atonal tinkling music. Other than that, silence filled the room.

But if there were a recognizable aura and purpose to the place, also there were unfamiliar things, things that shocked her with wrongness, things that she could hardly bear to see. There were, instead of the erotic statues that Shimanekh favored, strange glittering wraiths, pale blue, translucent, locked in almost-frozen sexual ecstasy, but moving in slow life. It was as if ghosts copulated in the niches along the walls.

And the lights. On Pharaoh the brightest lights, the only lights other than naked flames, were the gaslights that lighted her father’s palace and a few of the wealthier temples. But here were lights of every hue and intensity, tiny colored lights attached to sleek metal panels everywhere, vast globes of soft pastel luminance, sharp pools of white glare.

She and the Pung seemed to be the only inhabitants of that vast room.

The guards took her to a high-backed chair padded with pale brown leather. They attached her leash to a sturdy iron ring that was built into the arm of the chair, and there they left her, returning into the little room. The larger one waved genially, and she waved back. She was almost sorry to see them go.

She sat alone in the chair for what seemed at least an hour. Her fear was gradually eroded by the advent of boredom. She examined her surroundings with interest; her eye was drawn to a design in the leather of the chair. After a moment she realized that it was a tattoo; in a moment more she recognized a pattern favored by the highlanders who lived on the secondary plateau north of the capital, and she realized what sort of animal had furnished the leather of the chair. Suddenly the touch of it was greasily intolerable and she stood up, still tethered.

A woman came for her, finally. She was enormous — tall, broad, and muscular, with great thrusting breasts and vast hips. The woman wore a gown of transparent silken stuff, and knee-high leather boots, polished black. The only tiny thing about the woman was her face; her features clustered tightly together in a broad expanse of smooth flesh. She wore an expression of simpering madness, and she jerked roughly at the lead as she led Nisa into the dim depths of the room.

At the far side, on a couch piled high with velvet cushions, Corean waited. She was naked to the waist, and attended by two smooth creatures of uncertain degree of humanity.

The monstrous insect stood behind her, in a darkness between the lights, still as a statue. The big woman unsnapped the leash, and Nisa rubbed her sore neck.

“Come to me,” the woman called, in a voice like music. She smiled and Nisa moved closer, as if sleepwalking. She stopped just out of reach.

Corean patted the cushion beside her, smiling. The creature on her right hissed, and Nisa saw that they were some sort of human-shaped cats. Their faces had a foreshortened look, their noses were black stubs, and their teeth were white and jaggedly sharp. A gloss of short black fur covered their otherwise naked bodies, except for muzzles and pink palms.

A look of vexation touched Corean’s perfect face and she made a shooing gesture. Immediately the two attendants slunk away, seeming to flow from the couch. Nisa heard a tiny snarl as one passed her, and she saw a casual hatred in the bright eyes.

Nisa sank into the soft cushions, and Corean shifted to make room for her. At close range Corean’s beauty was even more devastating. Her skin seemed almost poreless, and it had a silky gloss that made Nisa want to touch it, just to see how so unusual a substance might feel.

“Nisa,” Corean said, “I can’t say how happy I am to see you. Did you know, you are the first phoenix I’ve ever met?”

Nisa could say nothing. Corean’s scent was subtle, a warm ghost of scent, so tantalizing that it made Nisa want to bury her nose in Corean’s flesh, to find where that delicious odor was strongest. Stop it, she said to herself. Have you learned no lessons at all?

“Well, you are. I’ve seen other phoenix troupes, oh, many of them, but no other phoenix has lived.” Corean smiled again, showing small sharp teeth. “If they had, I wouldn’t have been half so pleased by them as I am by you. Flomel tells me much about you. That you’re the daughter of a King. That you are the finest phoenix that he has ever worked with, dignified, beautiful. Full of that brave acceptance that means all to the connoisseur of phoenix plays.” Corean seemed to be orating a carefully composed speech, though her voice never rose above an intimate purr.

Nisa responded to the one oddity she’d felt in that speech. “I’m the only one that lived? Why would that be? Wuhiya says…” She trailed off, sensing that she was on treacherous ground.

Corean leaned forward, so that one small white breast touched Nisa’s arm, a soft caress. “Wuhiya says…?” Corean prompted. “Go on, Nisa.”

“Wuhiya, he’s the man who cared for me when I was sick,” she temporized.

“Yes?”

“Well, he said, when I asked him why I was alive, why the scars were going, he said he thought that they must have very good doctors here. Is that true?” Nisa was a little less rattled. “And can you tell me, where am I?”

Corean sat back, a flash of irritation crossing the perfect features. It was only for the briefest instant, but Nisa was suddenly not so completely overwhelmed with Corean’s beauty.

“One question at a time, Nisa. Yes, we have very good doctors here, but the other phoenixes were dead before they reached us. Perhaps you are specially favored by the gods. That could be it. Or perhaps you had help that the other ones never got, a hidden friend. What do you think?”

“I don’t think of it at all if I can help it,” Nisa answered honestly.

Corean laughed, a soft practiced sound. “So? Well, as to your other question, here is Sook, the Bargerell Plate, the Blacktear Pens, my apartments.” A pause. “My couch,” Corean said.

“Oh,” Nisa said. Much of what Corean had said made no sense to her. “I’ve never heard of Sook. Is it far from Pharaoh?” In her childhood, Nisa had had a constant companion, an old woman who’d cared for her, soothed her hurts, and told her fanciful stories about magical lands that rose above the mists of Hell, far around the breast of the world.

“Yes, far. Now tell me: What of this Wuhiya? What manner of man is he?” Corean moved closer again, and Nisa felt Corean’s interest intensify. “Has he any other theories about you? Or me?”

“He has not mentioned you. In fact, he says very little, so I don’t know what I can tell you about him.” Nisa paused to look into Corean’s blue eyes, saw a warning there. Nisa took fright, spoke on in a quavering voice. “Wuhiya is strong. He hurt a coercer, Casmin, very badly, when Casmin meant to kill me. And Casmin was held to be a mighty man; he killed three men in the Blooding Festival last spring, they say.” Nisa had a sudden sinking feeling that she’d betrayed the strange man who had made such delightful love to her in the bathhouse. “But he didn’t finish Casmin, though Casmin was helpless.”

“Merciful, is he, do you think?” Corean asked.

“He pitied me,” Nisa said.

“That, I think, is only one of the emotions he feels for you,” Corean said. She laughed again, and moved closer yet, until she was pressed against Nisa. Her breath was spicy. “Did you,” Corean asked, “enjoy your bath?”

Nisa didn’t know how to answer, but she felt a blush climb in her face. Corean took her chin, and turned Nisa’s head until she was looking directly into Corean’s eyes, those eyes like hammered blue metal. Corean kissed her, all soft moist lips, and then Nisa felt the touch of Corean’s tongue, a light tingling stroke.

“You still taste a little of death, Nisa,” Corean said. “But it’s all right. That’s not a bad taste, to me.”

Corean’s perfect face was still heartbreakingly beautiful — and that, Nisa thought, was a terrible, incomprehensible thing.

Corean drew away and signaled the giantess. “Take my guest to her quarters, and give her a helot to see to her comfort.” The woman moved forward with the leash, but Corean frowned and said, “She won’t need that.”

At the wall, in the night, Ruiz waited for the snapfield to fail. As he waited, he twirled the hook moodily. He thought unwillingly of Nisa, who had already caused him so much trouble. And who, though she was gone beyond recall, continued to trouble him. A rational being — such as Ruiz Aw — formed his attachments based on rational factors: intellect, or a commonality of interests.

Here he sat, however, mooning over a woman from a world that, with extraordinary luck and a thousand more years of Terran tech seepage, might become eligible for limited membership in the lowest rung of the pangalac culture. It rankled. In his darkest moments, Ruiz Aw worried that he was no better than any other foolish romantic.

The snapfield failed, cutting short further maundering, and Ruiz stood up. Well, now, he thought.

He flipped the hook up the wall, and it arced over, trailing the leather rope. He gave a jerk; the hook caught, and he swarmed upward. At the top he straddled the wall, jerked the hook loose. As he did, he took a split second to look about, and his heart sank. The compound was vast, covering thousands of hectares. And worst of all, there was no corridor below, just another paddock, shaped like a bowl, much bigger than the Pharaohan pen, and at the center a lake, glowing with a soft blue light.

“Ah, well,” he said. He was acutely conscious of the snapfield rail, cold against his crotch. He made his decision, pulled his leg over, flipped the hook loose, and dropped off the wall into the strange paddock.

It was a long drop, but he rolled out of the impact along a grassy lawn. The reengineered bones of his legs absorbed the shock successfully. As he sprawled to a stop, Ruiz heard the sizzling whump of the returning snapfield.

He crouched under a low bush. The paddock was lush and green, the darkness alive with the songs of night birds. The bush he hid beneath was starred with tiny white blossoms and released a scent of cinnamon and apples when he brushed against it. He waited patiently for long minutes, until he was reasonably sure there would be no hostile reaction to his arrival. He watched the snapfields that surrounded this new paddock, and was disappointed to see that they all appeared to be in perfect order. He could only hope there was another way out.

Finally he retrieved his rope and hid it in the fragrant bush. He headed downhill toward the center of the paddock.

The woods that covered the upper slopes of the bowl were park-like, manicured, and made for easy walking even in the pale starlight. Sook had no moons, unless one counted the myriad of tiny glints from the Shard orbital stations, the weapons platforms that enforced the peculiar laws of Sook.

Ruiz moved cautiously, making less noise than the occasional zephyr that fluttered the leaves. The trees, Ruiz noticed, had silver leaves, with an almost metallic reflectivity, so that when disturbed they scattered the starshine in tiny pinpoint sparkles. It was a pretty effect. The woods had a restful, lulling effect, and Ruiz supposed that subsurface harmonic generators were skewing his perceptions. If the security technology of this paddock matched the sophistication of its design, he was probably already discovered. But Ruiz took heart. The Pung seemed to be running a simple and unpretentious operation here; perhaps that simplicity extended to the security measures, which would be their responsibility and not that of the paddock’s leaseholder.

As he neared the lake, the woods gave way to gardens, somewhat informal and rustic, but beautifully maintained. Here he heard voices, and he quickly hid behind a nearby statue, which depicted a native of Corvus carved in some glassy black stone. The wings of the statue drooped in an attitude of defeat, providing Ruiz with a perfect lurking place.

Two figures came toward him through the darkness of the garden. They murmured together as they strolled the path of white stone, and Ruiz saw that they were a man and a woman, amorously involved. Mentally Ruiz urged them past his hiding spot; perversely they settled on the bench in front of Ruiz’s statue.

“I speak my mind,” said the young woman. “Your compassion is the wonder of the sept.”

“Compassion? She’s my soul companion.” The young man’s voice was light, teasing.

“A travesty. What could the Septarch have been thinking of, to pair you with her? She is drab, her hair springs forth like a nest of sea spines, she dances the fulgura like a frog in hip boots.”

The young man laughed. “Your opinions are quite colorful. But in some respects I’d have to agree. Certainly you show more understanding of my qualities than ever she did.”

“Yes…. “And for some minutes Ruiz was forced to listen, at close range, to the consummation of their tryst. At some point in their exertions, they rolled off the bench onto the grass. Presently they slept.

Ruiz pondered. Their clothing was scattered invitingly about the nearby shrubbery. His own crude tunic was certain to draw attention at the center of the paddock. Quickly he stripped it off. He crept about collecting the young man’s garments, and shortly he was appropriately clothed, though the jacket was tight across the shoulders and the pants too short. A broad velvet cap covered his naked scalp and obscured Ruiz’s fading tattoos.

Ruiz drew a deep breath and set off for the lakeshore. Above him, invisible in the soft darkness, Corean’s spy bead followed.