Y
25
Bea’s master had a guest. As head slave of household, it was her duty to see to his comfort and pleasure.
She hurried down the stairs, naked, for in the citadel of her master not even the head slave enjoyed the privilege of clothing. In point of fact, Bea considered her position as slave proctor here more burden than reward, just another dash of cruelty from the man she had once spurned years ago. She not only had to comport herself with utter perfection at all times, she had to ensure that all the other slaves did as well. I wonder how Theru managed it? she had often thought, racing from one room to another. The answer, of course, upon any degree of reflection, was that Theru’s owner was not a complete bastard.
She had to put that aside now. She had a duty to perform. Woe upon her if she neglected it.
A barbarian is at the door: her first thought upon seeing the Yn warrior in the antechamber.
Bea knelt as Larr’s guards took the man’s sword. He was a fine specimen of Yn manhood, but for all that Bea felt little true heat. Not anymore. Most of Larr’s slaves, and all the older ones in residence, had lost much of their interest in sex. It wasn’t that they didn’t still need to be fucked regularly; they did; it was just that the little satisfaction was hardly worth the effort. It was just one more added torment.
The guest took a step closer. He saw Bea on the floor, and his eyes widened.
“Welcome to the House of Larr . . .” Bea began, and stopped. She cried out softly.
She recognized him, too.
“Senior Lieutenant Stoc,” an equally altered Senior Lieutenant Eben Halc said, towering over her. “My God.” Bea suddenly did something she hadn’t done in four standard years. She laughed out loud.
“It’s a small world, isn’t it, master? That’s the cliché, I guess.” She spoke in Centauran. Her native tongue felt awkward in her mouth.
The guards stepped to the side to give them room to speak. Overall, they weren’t totally bad men, though Larr had a tendency to draw out the worst in people. But they were Yn, and they were honor bound to obey the man they called their liege. They would report that she had spoken in a foreign language to the guest, and she would be punished for it. Bea didn’t care.
Eben Halc went to one knee to face her.
“I had no idea. Are you . . . are you well, Bea?” The way he phrased it made it a double question: the one asked, and whether that was still her name. He too spoke in Centauran. Behind the two of them, a small robed figure glided in. Its face kept changing colors. It was a Floran.
“I have been well, master. But I’ve been better too.” She leaned forward, close enough to kiss him if that had been her intent. “Are you come for her?” she whispered. “If so, please, take her out of here!”
“Bea . . .”
“He’ll destroy her!” Serry had declined so much in her time there already. Part of it was the maltreatment. Part of it was the swaying Larr had imposed on her, his vindictive twisting of her mind.
Almost immediately, before Halc could say anything more, Bea leaned back and spoke in the language of Y again. “Welcome to the House of Larr Gutis, Master. This slave is called Bea. Call on this lowly slave for anything, Master.” She bent forward at the hips, ritually, and kissed Halc’s feet.
With the guards following, she led him into the reception room. For the first time in forever, Bea felt excited. A great apathy had taken her over these past brawls . . . nearly four and a half years by the Centauri calendar. Larr had kept her through his rise to wealth and power, his negotiations with the Council of Woom, his criminal association with the pirates that operated out of the city. He burned ships out of the sky for them. Marine Commander Aosha’s battle harness had played an important role in Larr’s success, and the reason her master had kept her, she knew with absolute certainty, was so that he could brag about his use of those Cenaturi weapons to someone who understood what they were.
Serry might once have served a similar purpose, but Larr was too intent on reducing her to an animal.
Bea said nothing more to Halc as they waited. A few minutes later her owner came in. She knelt with her face to the floor as he approached.
The two Yn warriors sized each other up. Bea’s owner was the first one to speak. “I thought you were in the East licking the Imperatrix’s twat.” He folded his arms across his chest, boldly, arrogantly.
“I thought you had been killed, lieutenant,” Eben Halc said. “Perhaps you should have been. What’s the matter with you, Larr?” His eyes blazed. He was practically vibrating with anger, Bea perceived.
“I want to see her,” Halc said, stepping forward. “I want to see her now!”
Larr frowned. “You can’t give me orders anymore, Senior Lieutenant. This is my citadel. Only I have the right to give orders here.” Then he relaxed. “But if you want to see her, let’s see her.” He turned to one of his men. “Bring her.”
The man left to do so. Bea had taken the presumption—she would doubtless be punished for it later—and had the poor girl washed after what their master had done to her in his private rooms.
“So, what do you think of my new home?” Larr jovially asked his guest.
“If you give me Serry now, I won’t have to kill you,” Halc said.
“Oh, come now!” Larr uncrossed his arms and went to the table Bea had prepared. There were food and drinks laid out. Her owner took a flask in each hand, and he offered one to his guest.
“We don’t need to do this. There’s no need to fight over her. She’s just a woman, Eben! She means nothing.” Halc ignored the drink. Larr shrugged and handed it off to Bea, who took it, face lowered.
“The Ambassador told me what you’ve done to her! It’s not true, is it?”
Larr’s gaze touched briefly on the multicolored Floran standing nearby. “What did it tell you?”
“That you’ve abused her! That you’ve . . .” With a visible effort he controlled himself. “She was one of us, Larr. She deserved better. She could have been treated better!”
Bea’s master scoffed. “You would have set her free, I suppose?” His laugh was high and mocking. Halc snarled and tried to rush at him. Larr’s men interposed. They were armed; Halc wasn’t.
They restrained him.
Master Larr shrugged. “She thought she was better than me. You know, Eben, I’m glad now we came to Y.” He took another draught of beer, then casually threw it aside. Bea hurried from her place in the corner to recover it. “All my life I was missing something, and it was only after my transformation that I understood what that something missing was.”
As Bea tried to scamper back unobtrusively, her owner suddenly grabbed her. He twisted his hand in her hair, painfully, and drove her to her knees. “Mercy, master, please!” she begged.
“Dominance,” Larr said. “Simple dominance. Knowing the rightful place of women at the feet of men.”
He thrust Bea down, and she cried out. She licked at his feet in placation. Eben Halc yelled in outrage.
“You’re a dead man, Larr,” he said. “I’m going to kill you.”
“She used to give us orders,” Larr went on, as if Halc had said nothing. “She used to give me orders. Now, she’s my property. I can do anything I want to her, up to and including killing her.” He grinned at his former superior officer.
“Would you like to see that, Eben? Would you like to see her die in front of you?”
The guard sent to fetch Serry came back with her, dragging her on a leash.
As soon as she was in the room, Halc’s full attention was trained on her. He gasped, and then once more he was struggling with the men holding him. Bea scrambled away when she had the opportunity.
“Grunt like a little pig for the man, Serry Sow,” Larr said, and Bea’s hatred for her master burned anew.
“I’LL KILL YOU!!” Halc screamed at him. The Floran in the corner flashed green, purple, then red; its face remained perfectly composed.
Bea had the impression that it was recording everything.
Serry crouched on her hands and knees in the doorway. She drooled. No amount of simple washing could erase the vacant look in the “Serry Sow’s” expression. No mere cleaning could disguise the brutal scars running down her exposed back. Halc fell to his knees in his rage. He was apoplectic.
And the worst thing was that through all of this, poor Serry’s face registered not one iota of change.
“Oh, Serry,” Halc wept. “Oh, my God, Serry.”
Not one single change.
“I should tell them to cut you loose,” Larr said. He went to the chair nearest where Serry had crawled in and sat down. His put his foot out, and automatically the former officer began to lick at it. Across the room, Halc bucked and raged. “I haven’t lost a single duel since I came to Woom, as you can see.”
Again he waved his arms about to flaunt his glorious surroundings.
“But therein lies the problem,” he continued. He leaned forward and put his hand in Serry’s hair, stroking her like he would a pet. “I just finished a challenge this evening, just a few hours ago, in fact, and, according to the law, it will be at least ninety-nine more days before I can be challenged again.”
Halc continued to struggle and swear. The Floran remained perfectly passive, observing.
“Just think how much fun she and I can have in the meantime,” Larr said. He stopped petting Serry and took her face in his hand. She made not a sound. The look in her eyes was death. There was absolutely nothing in them. Larr brought her lips to his crotch.
“I could have you over each afternoon, Eben, ninety-nine times, and you could watch.” He leaned back. “Please your master, my little cunt.”
“Yes, mas’sr,” she slurred in that degrading accent. If Halc had been armed, Bea thought, they wouldn’t have been able to stop him. He would have gone through them like the holographic laser targets back at Muniqi Base. He would have cut them down or died trying.
“Now that I think about it,” Larr said on, his slave’s face in his lap, licking and kissing, “even if you did wait around a hundred days, you have no standing to challenge me. You’re not a citizen of Woom.”
He stood, pushing Serry roughly to the floor. “You’re nothing here! Nothing!”
The Floran finally stepped forward, its hands still folded within it long sleeves. It spoke in singsong:
“I can. Speak to. The rexus. And. Arrange for. A duel.”
Everyone stopped. Bea’s master turned his head toward the small ambassador. “What?”
“It said we can fight, you pathetic loser,” Halc said, eyes afire. Through sheer strength of will, he got to his feet again despite the many arms on him. “That’s why I’m here. You’re as bad as the cursed Solarians! Worse!”
Larr’s narrow eyes narrowed even further. “It’s against the law. You’re not a citizen.”
The Floran came up alongside the pileup of men. One by one, Larr’s guards backed off. Halc made as if to leap at his tormentor, but the small chimerical figure shook its head, and he restrained himself.
“No, I’m not a citizen of this godsdamned city,” Eben Halc said. “What I am, though, is a Floran. And so are you.”
Bea blinked. So did her master. “What?” he sputtered.
For the first time, her master’s guest smiled. It was a horrible thing.
“Don’t you remember, you monstrous freak? When the Ambassador’s predecessor spoke to us that first time. It claimed us for the delegation, Larr. It told us it claimed us all, as Florans, for our protection.” He sneered the word. “Remember? All of us.
“I don’t need to be a citizen of Woom. I challenge you as one citizen of the Flowerworld to another.”
He turned to the real Floran. From out of its long, voluminous sleeves, the shifting creature drew forth a knife and handed it to the former officer from the Centauri Independence. Larr didn’t order his men to stop Halc as he approached him, nor did he say anything when Halc threw the Floran’s knife at his feet.
“You’re afraid of women, you pig,” Halc said. “That’s why you abuse them. That’s why you abused her! Is your ego so godsdamned fragile that you . . .”
“Shut up!” Larr suddenly shouted. His soldiers backed further away. “All right. All right. You want to fight, let’s fight. I will kill you, Eben Halc. And then she’ll be mine forever.”
For a second, Bea thought he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, the ceremony, that he was so full of fury he would just try and kill her master then and there. She hoped he would. You can’t win, she thought desperately. He cheats! But Eben Halc had become a Yn, too.
“I challenge you to a trial of blood, Larr Gutis. All that you have, I want.”
His gaze took in Serry crouching there. She did not—could not—look up.
“I place all that I have at risk: my life, my property, my name.”
Bea closed her eyes and prayed.
“Let us climb the pyramid,” she heard, and it was done.