Rebel Ice (11 page)

"I desire men, not women," Hasal said, very matter-of-fact.

Same-gender sex, too, was an accepted practice among the Iisleg. Teulon could not lie and claim to have the same preference; his second would simply bring him males from which to choose. He had to find words to explain that there was no viable alternative to his solitary state.

"It is that you desire no one, woman or man," Hasal said, as if the thought had been spoken aloud.

"Desire." On Teulon's homeworld, it was not used in such references. "My people Choose a single woman. That Choice is for life." He made the hand gesture of bonding, to emphasize this. "Two become one. One that never becomes two again."

It was, perhaps, the longest speech Teulon had ever made in front of his second, who was now gaping at him. Hasal could not understand what Choice meant to the Jorenians, or that it was a privilege.

You no longer have the privilege of choice, slave.

Teulon's second stared at him as if seeing him clearly for the first time. "I think I understand." He made a

No, it cannot
. "Go now."

"As you command, Raktar." Hasal slipped out of the shelter and secured the flap from outside.

Not yet.

Teuton's claws became fingers once more, and he replaced the blades he had taken from his forearm and chest sheaths. The strap was bitten through; he would have to make a new one.

This made the seventh strap he had gnawed through in his sleep.

Hasal had been the one to introduce Teulon to the strap one morning some months past, when he had seen his general washing blood from his mouth. "This you may find useful, Raktar."

He had examined it and saw how it was made of a single long piece of leather wrapped around a small cylinder of salvaged plas. "How so?"

"We give it to those who are wounded." His second had sounded a little too casual. "It helps them when they cannot… be silent."

Since that time Teulon had rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, but when he did, he tied the strap over his mouth and set the center piece between his teeth. Crude as it was, it worked as well as the restraints and silencers that had been used on him on the journey to this world, where he had been brought to be sold as a slave.

You no longer have the privilege of choice.

Teulon rose and went to sluice the sweat from his skin. He had modified one leg of the heatarc to accommodate a shallow basin, in which he melted snow for cleansing. When he had first come to the Iisleg, they had thought his hygiene practices strange. That changed after he and Bsak demonstrated how much easier it was to track a man who did not bathe than one who did. Now all the heatarcs in the camp were modified with meltwater basins, and every man bathed before leaving camp.

Hygiene had not been a priority during his brief time as a Toskald slave.
Do not clean him
, was the first thing Teuton's owner had said.
We like how the blood and the sweat make his skin gleam
.

Teulon thought it a pity he could not peel back his skull and cleanse that single voice from his mind. There had been a time when he might have tried, but for the other voices. The ones that repeated what had been said in the past, and the ones that drowned in silence, unable to speak again. Both reinforced the necessity of carrying on and continuing along the path that had brought him here.

He could not deny them. He could not fail them.

He used his damp shirt to remove the excess moisture from his body before he put on dry, clean garments and his outfurs. The outside temperature had dropped, he saw when he extracted the weather stick Hasal had inserted into one of the shelter's seams. The Iisleg coveted the fossilized twigs, which contained ancient resins that expanded with heat and contracted with cold. Learning to read the tiny beads enabled one to measure the climate with incredible accuracy. At this hour, no resin bubbled through the stony grain of the stick that had been exposed on the other side of the seam. That meant that the outside air temperature had dropped enough to damage unprotected derma and lung tissue, a night when no sane man would venture far from warmth and shelter.

From his weapons cache Teulon took a long slender spear and his seven-bladed sword. He was not sure why he kept crossing the ice to visit a small, abandoned ice cave. He had found it, and the thing that haunted it, purely by accident. He could not say if the spirit of the cave was real or something his mind had invented. It never spoke. He had never brought anyone to the cave to learn if others could see the ghost.

Instead, Teulon went there regularly. Illusion or ghost, whatever inhabited the cave comforted him simply by being something that defied explanation.

Outside the shelter, the sky was a remote, dark hand holding back the vicious kvinka. Across it lay faint, many-colored light streams, made of starlight refracted and distorted by the upper atmosphere. Bsak lay waiting—like Teulon, the cat needed little sleep—and rose on all six feet when he saw the Raktar.

"Patrol."

The jlorra released air in a short, compressed exhalation—the only sound it was capable of making—and came to Teulon's side. He had tried leaving the cat behind in camp when he went on his solitary treks, but the animal always caught up with him before he traveled half a kim.

Teulon moved through the shelters, automatically inspecting rigging and cover as he went. The men had become adept at securing and concealing their bivouac, but he never took that for granted. Low grunting, the sound of Iisleg intimacy, made him pause by a skim pilot's shelter.

Men do not sleep alone in the cold.

Teulon used the end of his spear to make a slash mark on the outside flap of the shelter. In the hour before dawn, when the rebels collapsed the shelters and moved the camp, the pilot would see the mark and know that he had been heard. He would reinforce the walls of the shelter until they were soundproofed, or abandon it and share another's. Teulon's men had responded instantly to the silent discipline; he never had to make a second slash mark. He turned away, but not before he heard a softer sigh from within the shelter.

I fear for you.

Teulon and the cat walked out of the camp and into the cold night, where the winds scoured away all sound and blended together to become the birth wail of a new world.

Chapter Six

"You make my ears ache with your ceaseless chatter, Terran."

Reever glanced at Aledver, the weapons trader Orjakis had sent to accompany him on his search. He had not, in fact, said a word to the young Toskald since boarding, despite the fact that Aledver had made several humorous remarks to illustrate his affability.

"I wish not to die of boredom," Aledver said as he powered up the launch's engines. "Forgive me, but I usually deal with species who are nonverbal or interested only in obtaining the best of a deal." His expression changed to one of amused tolerance. "You might have made a better bargain with the Kangal, you know. Perhaps in the future, I might advise you on how to achieve such."

There was another provocative remark, the logical response to which would be to ask Aledver's advice or confide in him.

"Thank you for the offer." Persuasive charisma seemed to be requisite among the Kangal's lackeys, Reever thought. Aledver, however, had the eyes of a man who would use other, less palatable means when his charm failed.
Not a courtier, but adept at playing one
. "How long have you served the Kangal?"

"Of which do you speak? I have served the Kangal Present, the Kangal Before, and the Kangal Once Before." The trader disengaged the docking mechanisms and slowly guided the ship out into the calm corridor of air immediately surrounding Skjonn. "I know what you are thinking."

Reever observed the maneuver, silently completing his calculations for the flight trajectory and how he would deal with the weapons trader once they reached the surface. "I doubt it."

Aledver laughed. "Come now, Colonel. You see before you a young man, but I am at least twice your age. We Toskald treasure perfection in all things, and thus we do not permit our bodies to show the ravages of age."

Toskald body worship was no different from the cultural quirks of a thousand other species, Reever thought. It had roots in the ancient Toskald's reproductive habits, in which males used crude body paint and botanical extracts to make themselves appear more attractive to their females, and thus secure a mate. That it had evolved into extreme vanity and obsession with maintaining an illusion of youth was predictable, if somewhat annoying and often more than a little silly.

"You have achieved a high level of perfection in your own appearance," Reever assured the trader, knowing it was the compliment he was waiting to hear.

"Yes, I know." Aledver released one hand grip and touched the groomed, gilded waves of his hair as his gaze shifted from the pilot's console to Reever's face. "The great mystery is why our Kangal found you so intriguing. Do signal for permission to depart."

Reever engaged the navcomm. "Transport, this is League colonel Stuart. Request permission to depart for the surface."

"Acknowledged, Colonel," a drone voice replied. "You are cleared for city-to-surface jaunt."

"I haven't been on a surface jaunt in months." Aledver moved away from the docking area. "While we're down there, I'll show you around one of the native camps. Iiskars, they call them. You can buy outfurs like mine from them, blend in a bit better. It's incredible to view firsthand the conditions in which they live."

The trader used positioning jets to set the launch at the precise angle needed for the planned descent. The lower winds were more dangerous than those above the skim city, and could easily tear a ship apart before it had the opportunity to crash-land. "It was my understanding that the surface dwellers are preparing to stage a rebellion."

"The rumors we have heard indicate it is more serious than a 'squabble.'" Reever glanced at him. "It is said that the Iisleg intend to go to war with the Toskald."

The trader produced a world-weary sound. "Colonel, these people are primitives, tribal savages who are entirely dependent upon the Toskald for their keep. Without us, they would have no food, medicines, or comforts. They have no technology, no weapons, and no means of transport off the planet. They can't even enter one of our cities unless we first descend to the surface to transport them. Do you know what they call us? Windlords. We are deities to them."

Reever listened to the sound of the engines engaging. "You have weapons caches from a thousand different worlds stored on the surface. What if they raid those?"

"They can't access any of our armory trenches. Even if they had the intelligence to try, which they don't, the trenches are constructed deep beneath the surface. They're also fully automated and heavily guarded, and we always monitor them." Aledver leaned forward to look through the front viewer panel. "You're not in any danger, if that is your concern. Orjakis's tribes remain loyal to the Kangal. A few more weeks of starvation and the others will submit, as always."

The launch rocked and shuddered as it left the placid airspace surrounding Skjonn.

"The Iisleg were your slaves once," Reever said while Aledver adjusted the hull's temperature to prevent ice formation and the accompanying drag it caused. "Why did you free them?"

"We haven't." Aledver frowned as the launch lurched, and made another adjustment. "We've allowed them to believe that they are free."

Reever shifted, using his body to block the sight of what his hand was doing under the console. "Shouldn't you level out a few more degrees?"

"I know what I'm doing," the trader snapped.

"Very well." Reever tightened his seat harness. "Why do you permit the Iisleg the illusion of freedom?"

"Convenience, I suppose. They were brought here to dig out the armories, which we thought would kill them. Instead, they adapted in unexpected ways, and proceeded to breed like unchecked parasites." The trader's unlined brow wrinkled slightly as he studied his console readings.

"Many worlds use Akkabarr as their personal armory," Reever said. "Why do so many trust the Toskald not to seize control of their weapons stores and use them for your own purposes?"

"If I told you that, I would have to kill you." Aledver grinned at him. "Let us call it a matter of mutual trust. We Toskald are very adept at turning enemies into allies. Rather like what we did with the Iisleg once the trenches were completed. Our ancestors used the slaves' natural attitudes about female subjugation to work out an arrangement of mutual benefit."

Reever thought briefly of the breeding pens he had seen on different slaver worlds. The most successful were those that catered to the occupants' most intimate desires. "A clever use of existing resources."

"You do not know the half of it. Part of the tithe the tribes are required to bring to the Kangal are women, all of whom they were trained to treat quite shabbily. Over time, you see, the males have grown to regard their females as nothing more than nuisance property, and are quite happy to send their most attractive, competent females as tribute." Aledver snorted. "They believe it to be some sort of honor, as if Another revealing comment. "Instead, you sell them to slavers."

"It's all they're fit for, you know. After being raised on the surface, the poor things are completely docile and work hard without complaint. We've become rather renowned for the high quality of female slaves we produce." Aledver stroked the soft fur of his jacket sleeve. "The tribes may not be aware that they breed and train them for us, but they do a magnificent job of it, just as they do with their furs."

Reever imagined Cherijo in such a society, and increased the power to the engines. "None of the Iisleg have ever become suspicious?"

"Why should they? I told you, they're savages. To them, a warm fur is more valuable than a female. If only they knew how much their women earn at auction." A sudden jolt made Aledver scowl and turn his attention back to the helm.