The Thrones of Kronos (39 page)

Doesn’t matter,
anyway. It’s just different kinds of slop.
Hreem would have spaced any slub
that dared bring him food this bad.

The woman straightened up, but instead of turning to leave
without any acknowledgment of his presence, she fixed him with a brooding stare
that Hreem could not interpret, save it spiked a curl of danger in his gut as her
pupils dilated and her jaw worked rhythmically. Her expression reminded him of
the weird Dol’jharian vid on Juvaszt’s shuttle. His hand twitched in an
abortive grab at a nonexistent jac.

Her eyes shifted to his betraying hand, then her lip lifted
in a sneer and she left.

Hreem whooshed out his breath in a weird mixture of relief
and resentful anger. He knew that fighting and chatzing were pretty much the
same thing to Dol’jharians, and now was their karooshna thing.

He knew he’d just come close to rape. Strange, how
unsettling he found that. He’d killed uncounted people up close and personal,
but he’d never raped anyone. In all the sexual adventures he’d had, trying
every arcane position, combination, and toy he had ever heard of, his partners
had to want him to stick his nacker in whatever orifices they offered. And he
liked his partners—male, female, or whatever gender they claimed—to be small,
rounded, and frisky. That Dol’jharian brute was a combination of the worst
aspects of male and female. Br-r-r-r.

He pulled off his trousers, rolled over on his cot, and
groped for the shestek’s case, seeking the anodyne of its white-light orgasms.
There wasn’t anything else to do, anyway, and the food was no worse cold than
hot.

The shestek shifted in its nest as he opened the case, then
its blind head lifted and it crawled out. Hreem lay back as it fitted itself to
him, slowly drowning in the mounting pleasure as every sensation, even the
scratchiness of the coarse blankets, was transmuted into irresistible fire.

It had gotten more intense each time since he’d reached the
Suneater. Now his vision started to pulse, making the ceiling above bulge in
synchrony with his increasingly fervid movements.

Terror cut like a cold gale through the shestek’s cloaking
ecstasy as a pucker formed in the ceiling, but Hreem no longer had control of
his muscles. Helpless in the grip of pleasure transformed into nauseating fear,
Hreem tried to thrash off his cot, but could only watch as the ceiling
blistered open in an elongated slash, with a reddish blob extruding from it. It
had Norio’s face, the lips working silently.

Hreem screamed. The head was followed by a human skeleton,
and the entire horror fell on him in a tangle of bone and sinew. The unyielding
hardness of the bones against his sensitized skin was horrible.

The face nuzzled against his, the lips crawling for an
agonizing moment across one of his cheekbones, but immediately it began to
slump into formlessness. Its obscenely flaccid embrace as it sagged across his
face triggered a rush of hot bile into the back of his nose, and he choked
explosively. The pain released him, and he shoved the skeleton away.

It flew across the room and clattered against one wall,
slumping down as if sitting wearily. The head-blob molded itself against the
Urian material and Norio’s face took shape again.

The shestek released its grip on him, fell to the floor, and
began thumping and jumping about the floor like a hooked eel. Puckers formed
wherever it hit; the thick gray paint started to peel away, revealing small
fistulas. Hreem dashed after it, vainly trying to grab it, until it dove into
one of the fistulas and began thrashing to and fro. The Rifter grabbed it and
tugged; it was stuck. Panicked, he pulled harder.

Abruptly the middle of the Barcan construct thinned and
stretched drastically. Hreem stumbled backward and the shestek snapped. The
forepart disappeared into the fistula, leaving the no-less-active remainder
twisting in Hreem’s hand. Roaring incoherent curses, he jammed the frantically
writhing thing into its case, ignoring the strange, fruity belches coming from
the skeleton’s head behind him.

He finally got both ends in at once and slammed the case
shut. It continued to jump about, one end or the other lifting off the floor,
like the dancing gourds he’d seen on Memserrat. Satisfied it couldn’t escape,
Hreem turned to the intruder.

The apparition’s mouth worked, opened, and emitted a
belch-like noise that sounded like his name.

“Shut up!” he shouted as his terror mutated into welcome,
ego-restoring rage. “You sound like a talking fart, you sneaking mindsnake!
You’re dead, dead, dead, and you’re gonna stay that way.
Dead! Dead! Dead!
”

Ramming his feet into his boots, Hreem punctuated the words
by stomping on the bones, reveling in the crunching noise as they cracked and
splintered underfoot. An agonized series of squeaks and farts from the head
accompanied the destruction, each sounding less like his name as the head
sagged into obscene senescence and the noises ceased.

The head-blob melted away into the wall, which smoothed out,
and the shestek stopped thumping about, but Hreem hardly noticed. He didn’t
stop his assault until there was nothing but shards and powder on the deck,

Then, dazed and breathless, he staggered back to the cot and
sat down heavily, clutching the now-quiescent case on his lap and staring at
the remains of his undead lover’s skeleton.

o0o

Esaran’s scalp prickled as the two Appeasers extinguished
the harsh yellow light, leaving its scaffolding silhouetted against the eternal
red gloom of this chamber of the Maw, far from the barracks and safety.

But there was no safety, not for grays like herself and
those around her, not for the sullen Tarkans, not for the Lords themselves. The
karra had eaten all of them, swallowing them into this place far from Dol’jhar.
All one could do was stave off the inevitable. It had even devoured three
Chorei, and a fourth one—a Dol’jharian—was treading the same path.

The two priests took up positions at the narrow end of the
egg-shaped sac that held them all, their stiff, handmade vestments rustling
over their gray coveralls.

Esaran looked down at her cupped hands: on Dol’jhar they
would have held a chip of stone furred with the prrakha-lichen, which let one
see the karra. Not here. Instead she held an Ur-fruit. The spidery white veins
that webbed its purple sheen almost seemed to form words; the compulsion to eat
it was very strong, but she forbore, waiting.

The Appeasers, male and female in the ancient polarity,
commenced a whispery antiphonal chant, the woman’s clear soprano winding eerily
around the man’s resonant bass. Galjhyr and Umm’jhalith had the finest voices
in the Avatar’s barracks. But the odd vents and pouches in the livid walls
around them threw their voices back in multitude of distortions, and Esaran
shivered. The voices of the karra.

The wall behind the two chanters smoothed out and a pucker
began to form on it—perfectly round, unlike the doors.

The karra were gathering.

A shiver of anticipation moved over the congregation, and
Esaran could smell the tang of fear from those crowding around her in reflexive
huddling away from the walls.
Not that it
would do any good if the karra demanded an offering,
she thought. They
hadn’t yet.

And how would it be made? The priests had no sharp ritual
kalleath in their hands: all weapons were forbidden here in the Maw, except to
the Tarkans.

The chant ceased on a sharp command, and she obediently
placed the fruit in her mouth. It was hard, like a nut; she crushed it with her
back teeth. A spurt of warm saltiness flooded her mouth, but strangely the tang
of blood did not gag her. Instead it seemed to reach up through her sinuses,
filling her head with a dark illumination. The eternal glow of the walls seemed
to brighten, condensing into wisps of phosphorescence that writhed and began to
coalesce together. She waited fearfully. The priests warned that those who did
not partake of the Ekhaschen-karr might be devoured at any time.
Better to appease the demons with your fear
than with your body,
they said.

One particular section of the surrounding chamber, every
surface of which was now alive with a swirl of shapes and nascent images, drew
her attention, and she felt a prickle in her bladder as the face of her father
began to materialize, his mouth gaping open in silent anger, the only gift he’d
ever had for any of them. Flies and wasps crawled in and out of his mouth and
buzzed around his head. Esaran gasped and flinched. It was true, then: in this
horrible place the karra knew your inmost fears and would manifest in that
form.

But she did not turn her gaze away. Nearby the floor
convulsed, knocking Rekallje to his knees—he had probably closed his eyes. But
it was forbidden to scant the karra in this ceremony. There was no withdrawing
from this congregation.

Other faces, shapes, and horrors ballooned and withered on
the walls. Moans rose from the gathering, punctuated by muffled gasps of
terror. Esaran whimpered quietly. Instinct warned her it would be deadly to let
the horror burst out in full voice.

Rekallje had remained on his hands and knees, apparently
dazed by his fall. He looked up at the pucker, which was creasing outward from
its center in a horrible simulacrum of a smile. The man’s eyes seemed fixed on
an abstract swirl of forms, but Esaran couldn’t interpret what he was seeing.

Then he screamed rackingly. The floor beneath him erupted
into a forest of hands, clutching at his limbs, the ones behind melting back
into formlessness as new ones grew ahead and pulled him forward. The two
Appeasers, as karra-ridden as everyone else, stumbled aside; the hapless gray
shot between them as if riding a sled and was thrown headfirst into a suddenly
gaping orifice in the wall. Esaran caught a brief glimpse of multiple eyes and
a forest of taloned hands in the darkness within before it slammed shut.
Rekallje began shrieking like a fowl being dismembered as the chamber went
utterly dark, all the light concentrating into the pucker, now boil-like, which
flickered with an internal illumination that followed the sickening rhythm of
the man’s weakening cries. She felt her bowels let go with an oddly comforting
warmth as she slumped to the floor, hardly cognizant of its shuddering
convulsions.

The screams ceased in a muffled, prolonged crunching as the
pucker began to fade and sink inward. Esaran collapsed, vomiting until her
insides were dry, so drained that even the arrival of a squad of Tarkans
moments later aroused no fear at all.

After all, nothing they could do would be any worse.

o0o

Morrighon waited outside Anaris’s door, occasionally
catching the murmur of voices from within.

Custom during the Karusch-na Rahali demanded that the
predators hunted their prey, did not summon them, for only the weak would obey.
It also demanded that what they did with them be done in the prey’s own house,
or somewhere else afield. One’s private chambers were for solitary sleep and
meditation.

Of course, they were on the Suneater, and though there were
countless chambers, no one wanted to use them unless the rooms were humanized.
Apparently not even Anaris, though of the high-ranking Dol’jharians he seemed
less affected by the increasing mutability of the station. Of those who had
enough seniority to demand one, he alone did not have an armored disposer.

Was Eusabian, too, altering custom out of necessity?
Morrighon tried, and failed, to imagine the Lord of Vengeance prowling the
red-glowing tunnels in search of suitable sex partners.

Morrighon looked about furtively, though no one was in view,
and his compad was not flickering the warning of a hidden imager. Rumor had it
the tempath held telepathic converse with those horrible white-furred aliens,
and who knew how far was their mental reach? Even thinking such thoughts about
Eusabian could get Morrighon killed, for he had no idea if that black-eyed
Rifter woman would report him or not. Unlike most people who were not directly
under him, she did not treat him as a hideously comic mutant, but neither did
she defer.

Whatever was going on, it seemed the interview was to be
protracted.

As he sped back to his own chamber, he monitored the news on
his compad. A gray had been found dead in a darkened corridor. Morrighon knew
that this would start rumors that the station had somehow gotten him, but the
evidence suggested it had been a same-gender Karusch-na Rahali encounter gone
wrong.

The ‘struggle for progeny’ was supposed to be strictly
heterosexual, for the purpose of creating strong children, but Dol’jharians
were human, with the same range of human tastes; Morrighon had learned early in
his Catennach training that some formed secret relationships with their own
gender as well as with the other. These were usually equals in rank. Someone
lower in rank was almost always a target, as had happened with this gray. A
dead target couldn’t speak.

The two Bori victims of the lunar struggle had been more
fortunate: subsequent rumor had made clear that anyone weak enough to prefer
pouncing on Bori had better make certain they were not so damaged they could
not return to duty.

But the grays lacked the savage discipline that restrained
the Tarkans, and Morrighon knew the discriminators and correlators would sift
the assailant’s identity out of the surveillance records. The offender would
meet the mindripper.

Even between Dol’jharians, such encounters normally did not
last long, and they usually played strictly by the rules among themselves: you
did not attack anyone on duty. In less fraught moments, contemplation of just
how this particular ruling had managed to get around had entertained Morrighon,
for of course nothing was posted. Nothing even remotely connected to the lunar
custom was ever written down or even discussed in public.