her instruments 02 - rose point (7 page)

“Please tell me you’ve found your bleeding horse,” Reese said, bent over the saddle.

“Soon,” the Kesh said, staring at his tablet. He squinted up the trail until two of his hunters scrabbled down it, pebbles rolling away from the hooves of their mounts. They shook their heads and he growled.

“What?” Reese asked, agitated. “What is it?”

“Our stud is in the mountain,” the Kesh said.

Reese eyed him. “Not unless someone Padded him into solid rock.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, irritated. “The transceiver reports he is in the mountain.” He shook himself. “If you don’t mind, Captain? I need to have a discussion with my people.”

Before she could say anything, his horse moved off and took him along, leaving her with her mouth agape. “Sure,” she said to his absence. “Absolutely. Go ahead and discuss your malfunctioning technology—or magical rock-breathing horse—with your peers. I’ll just hang out here.” She shifted on the saddle and tried not to wince. Getting back up on Believer earlier had been an act of willpower. She’d woken up in actual pain, something she hadn’t at all been expecting. Sore, sure, but pain? Ra’aila had been sympathetic and offered an analgesic, which Reese had rejected. She wished she hadn’t.

She looked up the scrubby hills and decided she’d had enough. It took several tries, but she managed to fall off her horse; she almost left it behind, but thought it might wander away if she didn’t tie it to some bushes... wasn’t that what they did in books? So she found a likely shrub and looped the reins around it. The horse watched her with soulful eyes and she paused. They really were pretty. A little, anyway. Hesitantly, she reached out and Believer stuck its nose under her fingers.

“Sorry for riding you so badly,” she said. “Have a rest, okay?”

The horse made a soft chuffing sound.

Reese turned her back on it and started climbing. Every footfall made her grit her teeth, but she was more comfortable walking than she was riding, and something in her was spurring her on. Some gnawing anxiety... what were they doing to her Eldritch? Just because she didn’t necessarily want him didn’t mean she was ready to give him to the colonial equivalent of pirates. Scowling, she made it over the crest of the hill and lifted her head—

—and fought a surge of panic at the breadth of the sky, its unrelenting, cloudless pallor, and the hills that seemed to loom over her. She sat, abruptly enough that her backside protested, and hugged her knees close enough to set her brow against them. Her skin was clammy; she licked her lips. Who put a sky like that on top of a world? Who lived on worlds anyway? Give her the nice, clean cold of space any day. She concentrated on breathing, slowly, through her mouth. One breath at a time...

Her chin dragged off her knees. She hesitantly opened an eye, just enough to see... nothing. But she didn’t want to look away. Lifting her head, she searched for anything that might have made a noise, cast a shadow, anything that might have distracted her: nothing.

But she kept looking.

Frowning, she pushed herself to her feet, wobbled, waited for her knees to start working again. She started in that direction, cursing the unfamiliar landscape: Mars was nowhere near so unpredictable. At least, her part of it hadn’t been: flat as a board and mostly paved, she’d had to climb trees to achieve anything like elevation, and Kerayle’s constantly shifting terrain confused her. But she kept moving.

“Reese?”

She paused.

“Reese!” Ra’aila jogged into view, ears swept back, and joined her. “Winds bless it, we thought you’d gotten lost. What are you doing up here?”

“Going this way,” Reese said, and turned, only to find the tiny whisper silenced. As she struggled to pinpoint it again, Ra’aila interrupted her.

“Going which way?”

“Ssh!” Reese hissed. “I lost it. Be quiet!”

Puzzled, Ra’aila subsided. In the silence, Reese closed her eyes and lifted her head.
This is it, isn’t it?
she asked, silently.
This is... some kind of mental touch. Well, fine. I’d rather have you around to fight about it than have you dead or lost somewhere. So talk!

No words. Her heart pounded, painfully loud in her ears. And then... very faint, her face turned toward the sun. “That way,” she said, and started climbing.

His captors did not give him the opportunity to recover from the drug. He was still kneeling, gathering his strength, when the tent flap shot open and four men pushed through it: three in the front, and one strolling behind trailing an aura of power and privilege that crackled off him like a coronal aura. Hirianthial watched them, wary, wishing he could feel his fingers. They returned his regard in silence... until their master said, “Do it.”

Then they lunged for him, two each for his sides and one for his head. He would have had a chance of fighting the third except one of the others punched his side and the ribs flexed. He lost a few moments, and during them was aware of being force-fed again. He fought it once he caught his wind, but they pressed on his shoulders and sides until the pain made his vision swim.

“Again.” More of it.

“Again.”

When they finally let go of him he couldn’t hold himself up. He also didn’t feel himself fall, though once he’d come to rest on the rug he could sense its fibers against his cheek.

“You may go.”

He thought they left, but the world was vague by then, and the Rekesh—for surely it could be no one else—crouched alongside his head. Hirianthial was expecting a fist in his hair again, so to have the man lean over and pull a strand lightly forward was surreal. Was he? The man was, wrapping it slowly around a finger. “I’m told the only way to keep you is to subdue you with drugs and ropes,” the Rekesh said, conversationally. “That you are a killer, worse than the stallion we won free of our relatives. That no one who could do to four men what you did in such a short time could be anything less.” His aura had gone smoke-dark. “Is that true? Are you a killer?”

This was entirely too much like his incident with the pirates on the
Earthrise
. Was he forever fated to endure his assailants’ attempts at conversation while injured or near insensate?

The Rekesh crooked his finger until it tugged gently on the hair. “I asked you a question.”

Hirianthial rasped, “Animals don’t talk.”

His captor yanked so hard Hirianthial’s face struck the rug. “Respect when you talk to me.”

The Eldritch said nothing, breathing past the white ache in his sides.

“Pain can be very humbling,” the Rekesh said. Hirianthial heard his footsteps receding, then the crunch of a pillow as the man sat on it. The scrape of ceramic against wood and then splashing... his mouth watered and he closed his eyes. “Water would be good, yes?” When he didn’t answer, the Rekesh said, “If you want it, you will have to ask. Politely.”

God hear him, but he had tired long ago of such transparent power plays. He had been born tired of such posturing before he’d been forced to endure six centuries of it from his own people, who were endlessly fascinated with ugly games; he had little patience left to entertain them from the rest of the galaxy. Did they think such ploys arrogated power to them that they otherwise did not have? Let them treasure the illusion, then. He said, in his hoarse croak of a voice, “Please.”

“Very nice,” the Rekesh said. “I like an animal with manners.”

Hirianthial rolled an eye toward him.

Holding up his hands, the Rekesh said, “Your own words.”

There was a crawling color around the man that was threatening to drown out his physical form. Hirianthial closed his eyes, fighting vertigo, and only opened them when he felt the hands cupping his chin. He took the Rekesh’s hunger and curiosity and greasy self-satisfaction like a spear to the gut and reeled.

“There, there,” the other said. “Water, now. Mmm?”

Hirianthial let the bowl be pressed to his lips. Half of it slopped out onto the rug, but half of it didn’t, and it was so welcome he shivered.

“Ah,” the Rekesh murmured. “Like the stallion. A little flinch of the skin.” He was smiling from his voice, but his aura was all sick crimsons and pus yellows. “Much better. How are you liking our kumiss? Relaxing, isn’t it. I find it helps, in the beginning.” He retreated, leaving Hirianthial puzzled. Why had he withdrawn? The pillow hissed again beneath his captor’s weight, and again there was a splash of liquid: wine this time, from the bouquet. The Rekesh did not interrupt the silence, for which Hirianthial was grateful, but the wait made no sense. If he had been drugged, surely the Rekesh would want to act before it wore off?

His captor went through two glasses of the wine, sitting behind Hirianthial where he could not be seen. But his aura—that Hirianthial felt like the radiation of a sun, and it was streaked with grit and red glints sharp as razors. The longer he waited, the more Hirianthial’s skin pebbled, as if the edges of the Rekesh’s aura were something that could cut him, and was pushing closer.

At last, the man stood, strolled around in front of Hirianthial. Showed him the cup, sloshed it to show that it was full. And then threw its contents at his face.

Hirianthial flinched—or tried to. His body remained slack. He tried struggling against his bonds, and his limbs didn’t respond either. Not a sedative, he realized. A paralytic. And one without the hypnotic effects he expected with the sorts of drugs that typically conveyed the effect.

“Very good,” the Rekesh said, leaning down and touching the edge of Hirianthial’s jaw. He smiled. “You wonder, maybe? That we should have such drugs? Because we live in tents? But most of us are geneticists and doctors. We came to cook horses in petri dishes. Guns we might not have, but medicine...” He smiled. “I know what I’m doing. And I know what you are.” He leaned forward until his lips were near enough to make his words warm and damp against Hirianthial’s ear. “Eldritch.”

When he leaned out of sight this time, Hirianthial heard the rustle of clothing. The next thing he was aware of was his captor’s body against his back, of the heat of his skin, the visceral weight of the words pressed against his spine. “I wanted the alcohol to burn off so you’d be all here for this.” A smile in the words, ugly. “If you can feel my feelings through my touch... who knows. You might even enjoy yourself.”

Had the alcohol worn off? Because he was having trouble understanding that this was happening to him—that it was his body being handled without his consent, that it was his back being covered... that it was a stranger fisting a hand in his hair and using it to pull his head close by. The Rekesh was wrong: his talents did not make him want it, though the Rekesh’s own desires were an assault as overwhelming as his body’s.

The hair-pulling struck him as a horrendous indignity. It assumed an importance out of proportion to the injury... until the Rekesh shifted his grip and found the dangle.

“What’s this?” he breathed, voice hoarse. “A trinket someone forgot to strip from you?” He shook it, making the bell on the end of it sing. “Very nice. An animal should have ornaments.” He yanked Hirianthial’s head back—another chime—and said against his mouth, “I might let you keep it. Or not.”

The forced kiss: he wasn’t ready for it. Kissing was intimacy. To pretend to it while raping someone—

—and the comment about taking the dangle away, the one that had been given to him in love—

The word erupted from him on the crest of a fury so overwhelming it blanked out the world, faded it to white noise and blood haze.

NO.

No more of this. No more.
NO.

It ripped him open to roar it, even with his mouth closed. Negation. No more.
NO!

Silence.

No panting. No scraping of skin against skin. The Rekesh had fallen completely silent. Had in fact fallen on top of him, his fingers slowly going slack. Hirianthial was still, waiting for him to shake himself and continue his assault. But his attacker did not rise. The weight of his body was exquisitely painful, made it difficult to breathe past the ribs, and yet Hirianthial was aware less of that pain than he was of a fear he did not want to name. As time trickled past, he was at last forced to admit it.

His captor was no longer breathing.

How long he remained there he didn’t know. The Rekesh never moved. When Hirianthial had the wherewithal to look, the silhouettes of the guards outside the tent were gone. It wasn’t until much later that he thought to look down at the tent’s edge, and found suspicious humps near the ground.

He was still struggling with the implications when the tent flap opened for the Rekesh’s wife, whose eyes were rimmed with white and whose aura was a billow of mingled anger and fear. “Are you done yet? There has been an attack—” She stopped and switched languages to something he could not understand by normal means and could not force himself to understand by supernatural ones. He was trembling, he perceived. When had that started?

Her husband did not answer her. She darted to his side and rolled him onto his back, and her aura exploded: panic, grief, rage, fear.

“What... did you—
YOU
.” She turned on Hirianthial. “You did this to him, to the guards, to the people beyond them! How? How did you do it?”

It was the question he most didn’t want to answer. He cleared his throat and said, “How many?”

She backed away from him. “How many? As if you don’t know? No, I won’t tell you, if you misjudged. Which you did—you did not reach us all.” She drew her knife. “Nor will you.”

He’d thought himself beyond adrenaline, but the sight of sun flashing off steel made him roll away from her first thrust. “Stop!” he said as she twisted and lunged for him. As she lifted her arm, he said, “Stop or you will be
next
!”

That halted her so abruptly she stumbled. Panting, she held her distance, arm still raised.

“Do you think you can kill me before I can kill you?” Hirianthial asked. He barely believed the words himself—he didn’t want to believe them, God and Lady—but all he needed was for her to believe them. “I can reach you without touching you.”