Rift in the Races (49 page)

Tytamon pressed his face close to the window but had to pull back to wipe away the grime. Even the force of the driving rain had not been enough to clean it. He leaned close again and peered inside. He shook his head. Too dark.

They entered and found themselves amongst a clutter so densely heaped it made anything Orli had encountered at Calico Castle seem fleet-regulations clean. Boxes, crates, baskets and bags were everywhere, stacks and stacks of them, all piled—or thrown—to the ceiling, and all jammed together with such inattention to physics that it seemed the whole of it was about to fall in on itself. The only way into the deeper parts of the shop was to squeeze through a narrow path that wound its way into the teetering mass like a canyon cut for people who didn’t eat. Despite Tytamon’s thin, ancient frame and Orli’s lean, athletic one, both had to turn sideways to get through a few places lest they risk causing a considerable avalanche. But after a few reluctant moments, they made it through with no such calamity and eventually found themselves at what they figured must serve as the front counter of the business, if such a shabby entombment could be so named.

Almost immediately they noticed a woman seated behind the counter, slumped over, lying face down with curls of red hair spilling around her like blood seeping from a wound. She lay motionless, without making the slightest sound, and Orli would have thought her dead were it not for the large puddle of drool forming on the blotter that served for her pillow. Ripples of breath spread across the surface of the spittle pond giving evidence that at least some life remained.

“Woman,” said Tytamon, his voice so sudden and thunderous it startled Orli nearly as much as it startled the woman sleeping on the counter. “Wake up. You have customers.”

She jerked awake, bolt upright, and her huge eyes, bulbous as a frog’s, popped even wider for the fright, so wide they seemed at risk of rolling right out of her head and down onto the floor. Long, thick eyelashes, painted coal black with mascara that might have been made from ship builder’s pitch, flapped like bat wings over those frog orbs as she recovered from her alarm. “Gods above, master, but you scared the gasses out of me.” She waved her hand in the air.

Orli tried not to verify, but it just happened. She made a face and held her breath until it passed.

The woman marshaled her wits and settled back onto her stool, straightening the faded black ruffles of an ancient-looking ball gown that wrinkled around her ample body as if it were a dust cover for something twice her size. “What can I get for my master and the lady?”

“I’m looking for a stone,” Tytamon said, his voice fallen to barely above a whisper. “A yellow rock. It likely did not come here by honest means, and I have no care for why. I simply need it back.” He placed a stack of ten gold coins on the blotter just out of the pool of drool. It was more money than she had seen all at once in the course of her entire life.

Her eyes may have somehow stayed in their sockets upon being startled awake, but there didn’t seem any chance they wouldn’t tumble out for sure this time.

“Have you seen it, madam? Have you seen a yellow stone? It’s as big as this bit of finger, and no more.” He marked off a length of his pinky to illustrate. “Speak, woman, I haven’t got all day.”

She was clearly flustered. She stammered and huffed. Her round face bunched up at her neck and sent ripples down into the gelatinous, age-spotted cleavage that filled her vacuous bustier like cold gravy.

“You have seen it,” Tytamon declared. “I want it back. Where is it?”

“I never saw it,” she said, suddenly terrified. “I don’t know nothing about no yellow stones.”

“You do. Where is it? And where is Black Sander? If you don’t still have it, he does.” Tytamon’s voice began to take on a large and awful aspect that seemed to fill the room in an frightening and unnatural way.

Orli heard the sound of something shifting on the pile behind them at the same time she heard a man’s voice, sibilant and low. “I am Black Sander, Master Tytamon.”

They both spun to face a tall, lean figure with a hawkish nose and eyes that glinted from under a broad-brimmed black hat. “And Miss Pewter of planet Earth. Right on time, I see.” His voice was a calm hiss as he approached. The heaped merchandise moved to accommodate his passage along the narrow, winding path. The whole pile seemed to warp around him as if it were heat coming off a hot road. She was about to demand how he knew who she was when Tytamon cried out.

He collapsed forward. Orli tried to catch him but could only break his fall as he went to the ground, bringing a cascade of the shop’s inventory down upon him as he fell. A dagger stuck out from his back like a lever, its blade buried between his shoulder blades all the way to the hilt.

Shock struck the air from Orli’s lungs; she couldn’t scream, couldn’t call out. The whole world froze in that long, horrified moment. Tytamon lying in the refuse, his eyes still wide with the surprise of it as he stared at the floor and emitted a long, low gasp. As if moving in some horrific slow-motion dream, Orli turned back to look at the woman who’d been behind the desk. The woman returned Orli’s horror with an amused grin, a crimson crescent of painted lips and nothing but derision glinting beneath those black, bat-wing eyelashes. Orli saw ridicule in measures she’d never considered before. And guile.

She was dimly aware of the dull thud at the back of her head before she, too, fell to the floor.

Chapter 33

O
rli ran her bare hand over the soft warmth of the horse’s hide, following the gray grain of its spotted coat across its flanks to where all the hairs suddenly seemed to swim upstream. The mare twitched when Orli’s fingernails ran through the bristle, and an equine complaint followed in the form of a bass rumble in the animal’s chest. The whip of its tail flicked at Orli as if she were a fly, but it fell back as Orli moved on to pat the horse upon its powerful rump.

The muskiness of the mare’s scent mixed with the earthy dampness of straw and surrounded Orli with a pleasant, proximal humidity. It was near, sweet, rich and warm, but it was strong, very strong, and it seemed to swell as if taking on physicality, a strange blackness looming somewhere, which she slowly, dimly realized was improbable.

When she opened her eyes, the scent of real hay, for a moment at least, continued to mingle with the dream. But any sensory melancholy for that dream place, that oddity of an elsewhere, vanished in a blink, dashed to bits by reality.

She sat up and nearly swooned. Her head throbbed. She was lying in a heap of moldy straw. In a cage. A large iron cage, not high enough for her to stand in, four walls of iron lattice, at best four feet cubed. It was dark where she was, but light coming through gaps in a crude plank wall nearby indicated that she was in either a stable or a barn. She could hear voices coming from the other side.

“Meade?” demanded one voice, male and breathy, vaguely familiar. He hissed something she could not pick up, a curse perhaps, and then, louder, “And besides, he’s gone. For all we know he’s dead. You need to find your spine, Belor. Or I’ll find it for you.”

The second voice, also male, responded, sounding worried. “But, sir ….”

“Belor,” snapped the breathy voice. “If I hear one more whimper from you, I will throw you in with the old man. And don’t think the pigs won’t love your sweet, fat meat.”

Despite the pounding in her skull, she could tell the second voice was extremely agitated. Terrified, even.

“Sir, this is a mighty big mouthful to chew.”

“
Oink
oink
, Belor. That’s what I hear chewing on you. Is that what we need to do?”

“No, sir.” The man called Belor was clearly not convinced of whatever he’d been on about, but he was intimidated enough to let the matter drop.

The voices fell to a pitch too low for Orli to make out, so she tried to make out her surroundings instead. Beyond the cage, there were animal harnesses hanging from a number of stout wooden pegs set into the wall. She could see her blaster belt hung over the top of one of those, and her cloak lay on the ground beneath it where it must have slipped off the peg. In the corner leaned a pair of wooden pitchforks, a short-handled shovel and a long pole with a hook on it whose purpose was indiscernible to her.

There was a window to her left, no glass, but closed by a pair of wooden shutters, drawn in and locked tight from the inside. She could see through gaps in the boards that it was night outside. She debated screaming. It was either the best idea or the worst for this circumstance.

She wasn’t bound, and she gave herself a quick pat-down seeking signs of injury. Other than a huge lump on the back of her head, the hair around it crusted with dried blood, she seemed intact.

Her hand immediately went for her com badge. She could contact Little Earth. But of course the device wasn’t there.

She screamed.

For a full minute, she managed to cry for help with every ounce of her strength. She screamed so hard she saw spots dancing before her eyes. As she cried out, she watched the backlit gaps in the wall with dread, looking for the telltale signs of movement passing across them, blinking shadows that would reveal the trajectory of her captors rushing in to bash her back to silence and the place of dreams.

The movements came, but not quickly. The span of blackness crossed in widths of two boards at a time, a walking pace that finally came to a wood-plank door that didn’t fit the door frame very well. A black-clad figure stepped into the darkness of the room.

“Miss Pewter,” said the man in the broad-brimmed hat, the same man she’d seen in the pawnshop before she’d been knocked out. “You may of course scream as much as you like. I am the last person on Prosperion who would deny you the final rights of your waning freedom. However, I can assure you that you face a very long journey, and it’s one that will ask a great deal of your personal reserves. So keep it brief if you can. You’ll want that strength later, I promise you.”

“Where am I?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

“Ah, yes, the old ‘why are you doing this?’ question. I always prefer that they open like that. It shows spunk. I much prefer that one to starting off with a plea or threat. The threats are always so sad; they make me think the poor thing is already so close to breaking. A shame, really, because I don’t want to break anyone. I really don’t. It’s simply an unfortunate side effect of the business. Regretful, but inevitable for some. And the pleas? Please. Begging is just ridiculous at this stage, don’t you think? You’ve got to work up to that level of desperation. If you start there, where have you got left to go?”

Orli watched his face, or tried to. It was mainly concealed beneath the shadow of that wide brim aided by the darkness of the barely-lit room. The end of his beak-like nose caught a bit of light through a crack in the wall, just at the tip, and was set aglow like an ember dancing in the dark. The relative glare coming in from the door behind him made his features otherwise impossible to make out.

She tried to look past him, hoping to see the other man, his accomplice, the one called Belor. Maybe he would be reasonable. But he was nowhere to be found.

She wanted to scream again but knew now it wasn’t going to help.

He watched her with a look of boredom just barely kept at bay, observing her furtive glances, the play of each thought running across the stage of her face. He passed the time with a series of patient breaths and a quick check for any dirt beneath his fingernails.

“Where’s Tytamon?” she demanded. “What have you done with him?”

“Your command of the common tongue is excellent,” he said. “I would not have thought it possible in so short a time. You truly are a rare prize.”

“Where is Tytamon?”

“Yes, Tytamon. That was unfortunate. Miss Springsinger was over-zealous in that, but your ancient friend did bring a great deal of energy into the room. What did he expect? You can’t go about kicking another man’s dogs and expect not to be bitten. Don’t you think, Miss Pewter?” He leaned closer and made a
woof woof
sound to help convey his point.

Orli could see in that moment that he had a short, black beard, oiled and shaped to a point a few inches beneath his chin.

“Is he alive?” Her voice faltered as she spoke it, fearing the reply.

“Oh, now there’s a bit of fright,” he said, marking the warble in her voice. “That’s nice. So you really are human. There’s been some talk on that. Speculation.” Light glinted off his teeth as he finished speaking, the flash of it like the final glimmer of a tiny dying star. “Lots of speculation.” The way he shaped the last word, the hiss of it, gave it a double-edged significance.

“Please,” she said. “Just tell me if he’s all right.”

“I’m afraid not, Miss Pewter. As I said, an unfortunate accident. Inconvenient at the moment, but ultimately convenient in the end. An unexpected shift in the plans, for sure. But more profitable, I think, when it all plays out. It seems Lady Fate has finally seen fit to favor a new set of friends. The tides of change wash away the old with the same waves that leave new treasures lying on the beach.”

Orli slumped back into the straw. This man was obviously not going to tell her anything. She didn’t want to cry. She could feel it lurking, the impulse for it, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She’d find a way out of this. Someone would find a way to get her out of this. This wasn’t the kind of thing that could go on long. It wasn’t even the kind of thing that happened in reality. Kidnapping? Captivity? The very idea was ridiculous. The Queen would send troops. The fleet would. Her father would send the entire regiment. His men had been waiting for a fight since they left Earth. They’d love nothing more than to suit up and come down here and tear this bird-faced asshole into shreds. She just had to wait. Be strong.