Bloodsong Ch. 04

"L—lady Marabeth?"

"No. I'm the Cursed King returned from the ruins of Old Tsikala to slay the last god in creation. What are you doing lying on the ground?"

"The gate." Valeriana swallowed thickly, spoke quickly, certain that mockery would follow and more than willing to stomach it because being derided would at least bring with it a semblance of normality. "It's so . . . it's so much. I didn't know it would feel like this much. I think it wants — I think it's trying to—"

There was no warning, no telltale displacement of air; just the smack, flat and stiff, across her jaw.

"Stop making a spectacle of yourself and hand me the beacon." Before Valeriana could respond or react, the blue crystal was taken away and held up for inspection. Between Lady Marabeth's pinched fingers the light, which up to that point hadn't done a commendable job of illuminating anything, grew stronger. Valeriana belatedly recalled that the woman was a magic user. "They always, always forget to charge these to capacity, it's absurd how they get away with it while charging what they do. Here, hold it up like this!"

It didn't seem to matter anymore that they weren't meant to be seen together, likely because the other travelers wouldn't be able to tell who they were unless they stood nose to nose. Valeriana forced herself to move, rise, obey.

The darkness tried to wrap around her like inky fog, and she couldn't shake the feeling that the light cupped in her hand looked pale and wan even after Lady Marabeth's boost because the dark was eating it.

"I'm so—"

"Finish that thought only if you'd like me to slap you a second time," Lady Marabeth warned, pulling her along and keeping to what one could presume to be the borders of the gate.

Valeriana's mouth felt dry, her limbs floppy and inadequate as she forced herself to keep pace.

"It still feels wrong," she murmured, not sure if she wanted the woman to hear. "The gate. There's something not right with it. It's like . . . it's like it's trying to pull at me, make me want to go — follow, but I—"

"That's not the gate."

"It . . . what?"

"Not the gate," Lady Marabeth repeated in a tone suggesting that she found her quite dim. "The gate is an ingenious work of magic, as it remains functional even though whoever wove it has been dead for eons. Don't ask me how, it defies everything we think we know about spellcraft. However, the gate is not what's bothering you."

"Then what—"

"Picture it as an underwater tunnel. The steel and the glass that make up its structure aren't living things. They can't pull, they can't call. The ocean that engulfs them, however . . . that which your sight renders as an absence of color, because to let yourself perceive it truly would render you mad? That lives. That is, in fact, if you heed certain theories, where we all start from and to which we all return when the fever dreams that are our lives run their course. Now . . . can you guess its name?"

She was half afraid of saying it aloud, but Lady Marabeth frightened her more.

"It's the Great Dark, isn't it? We're standing—"

"Allegedly. No one knows for certain." Lady Marabeth gave a one-armed shrug. "What lies beyond the boundaries of world gates feels like one would imagine Darkness Everlasting to feel like, but the evidence to support that assumption is scarce. You can't hear the gods speak through the barrier. You can't spy the true forms of your beloved deceased swimming in the black, and none have been foolish enough to tear through the limits of a gate since Old Tsikala's vanishing. We may never learn the truth, and I daresay it is best if we — hm. I see you nodding, but this is all flying right over your head, isn't it, girl?"

"A bit," Valeriana admitted. Lady Marabeth raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. "It's just that according to Elder Eshmuger's sermons, the Fall happened because one man had too much hubris and tried to become like the gods. I'd never heard that the gates had anything to do with it, or that they were paths through . . ."

"Allegedly. I am not entirely convinced."

"Well, yes." Yet the more Valeriana considered, the more it appeared — not right, but cohesive with the way she felt standing there. The . . . ocean, it might not help conceptualize anything much but it was at least more relatable to think of the darkness as that, felt like so many things, some of which she couldn't name for the life of her, some of which sprung to her lips with frightening ease.

Cold. Old, ancient, primeval. Something that had existed long before her and would outlast her along with every other living thing. Discord, a howled note that didn't fit in with the song of the world.

And familiar, above all. Familiar like a place she'd once known and inhabited, somewhere where cardinal aspects of her had been fashioned, somewhere she'd forgotten and both yearned and feared to remember.

She shuddered, unable to fathom how everyone else took it in their stride; even the children, who had ceased screaming some time ago.

"People, they just, we just . . . it might be a path through Darkness Everlasting, and we're crossing it like it's—"

"Costs an arm and a leg, too, even before you factor in fake documentation." Lady Marabeth's voice was for once devoid of the suggestion that she was wasting her breath on an audience of one colossal idiot. "Most people are used to the feeling. Your atypical reaction is justified by, well. The other way in which you are atypical."

"I — what? Why?"

"Shifting entails reaching for and manifesting aspects of our immortal, true forms. You grow accustomed to the environment surrounding them if you do it often enough. Since you cannot do it—"

"I can shift my nails, and my teeth."

"Those are features of your corporeal shell that exist purely in the physical realm and are retractable, nothing to do with your true form. Did your tutors never teach you the difference?"

". . . no."

"Hmpf. Imagine that." With a final, superior sniff, Lady Marabeth pushed her onwards, having once again reached the threshold of her willingness to speak.

In the absence of anything else to distract her from the push and pull of darkness, Valeriana rubbed the crystal and focused on the exchanges happening within earshot.

Little of it was intelligible. The dark might feast on sound as it did on light and sight. What she could make out jarred her anew for its banality. A male voice grumbled about forgetting their coat. Someone else, very close by, asking if anyone was willing to lend them a beacon so that they could check the time.

Although Lady Marabeth had her face swaddled in blackness, Valeriana could sense the woman's affront when she turned and held up the crystal at the person behind her.

"Twenty minutes to arrival," they — their voice was so gravelly that Valeriana couldn't guess the gender — told her. She tried not to feel too disheartened as she took the blue rock back. Twenty minutes was more exposure to the unsettling dark than she thought she could stomach. "First time crossing, yes?"

It took her a second to grasp that they were still addressing her.

"Uh. Yes."

"Where to?"

"Earth?" A hoarse laugh followed, which Valeriana admitted was deserved, as everyone there was headed to the same world and they'd probably assumed she'd joked. "I don't know exactly where I—"

She was forced to cut the exchange short and excuse herself when a clawed hand jerked her backwards.

"Don't start gabbing at people, you witless child!"

"They talked to me first, I was just being polite."

"And where, may I ask, did 'being polite' ever get you in life?"

Valeriana didn't have an answer for that.

It was a tense twenty minutes until the woman deemed it time to release her wrist. She'd been gripping it so brutally that Valeriana still felt a soreness there after they crossed the mark where the darkness cut off.

Valeriana stumbled into the light, eyes watering as though they'd forgotten what they were supposed to do with brightness. A metallic voice sounded overhead. She couldn't parse what was said. She couldn't get her feet unstuck from the floor.

Lady Marabeth appeared to have left her side now that the lights were back on. She had to somehow stop herself from collapsing and find out where the woman had gone—

A flash of gold and blue. Hands. Instructions — eyes closed, sit here, drink this. The water was so cold that drinking more than what would fit in a thimble made her throat spasm and her teeth ache. Closing her eyes did help. The mundane blackness behind her eyelids was infinitely less painful than the glare of the lights.

Her documentation was taken from her, examined, returned. Valeriana mumbled apologies, remembered too late that she hadn't faked an accent to match her supposed provenance, only started breathing again once it became clear that no one noticed or cared.

Eventually, little by little, she could crack an eye open without wincing. One of the gate officers gestured at her to follow him, which she did, unthinkingly.

The man — there were too many shadows in her eyes still for Valeriana to make out much beyond the gold and blue uniform and a massive handlebar mustache — guided her around obstacles that she was likewise blind to and took her through a door, a hallway, another hallway, through another door.

Eventually, he took her out into the worst weather Valeriana had experienced in all her years alive, bade her farewell and went back inside, leaving her parked amidst the largest assortment of automobiles she'd ever seen, with feathery ice pooling on her shoes.

She shivered, both at the cold and the voice that greeted her.

"Welcome to Earth," Lady Marabeth said from a step to the left, tossing a woolly bundle and not seeming to care when it hit Valeriana in the face and bounced onto the pavement. "Put this on before you freeze your fingers off. We're taking the scenic route back to the Mayfly."

Valeriana missed out on most of the trip on account of having fallen asleep one hour in.

She woke with no notion of how much time had slipped her by, bleary eyed and with a twitchiness to her spine that suggested that she'd stayed too long in too strained a stance, to the point where her back needed healing.

She rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. Lady Marabeth made no comment. With luck, the woman hadn't noticed, as she was busy sneering orders at the hooded figures outside. Ki-laar, the marginally less sleepy part of Valeriana's brain supplied, on noticing an unnaturally white face under one of the black hoods. The driver was also a Ki-Laar, but it wore a wig and sunglasses, and some sort of face paint to give it a semblance of being alive. It might rank among the most jarring things she'd seen.

They'd arrived, that much was apparent. It must have been the knell of the trunks getting dropped on the sidewalk that had dragged her from her slumber.

Lady Marabeth, having concluded her verbal evisceration of her servants, ushered Valeriana out of the vehicle and inside the nearest building. Valeriana considered asking where they were, but reasoned that she wouldn't do anything with the answer anyhow. The only earthen location she recognized by name was France, Europe, because Jack's grandparents lived there, and she doubted she was there since she couldn't see any mountains nearby.

"You don't need to keep the coat on, this town neighbors a desert," Lady Marabeth said, still hurrying as though there was a race going on or an important event they were running late for. Valeriana nodded, privately thinking that the woman must be insane. She wrapped the too thin fabric tighter around her. "Would you like a tour? The quicker you get to know the place, the sooner I'll stop being bothered because you got yourself lost."

"Yes, of course, I'd love to." Valeriana felt bad for lying, as she was certain that the woman could tell.

She had never been in a slave training facility, or even at a slave market, although her island allegedly had one of the best. It might be an interesting experience, but at the moment she was much too exhausted and overwhelmed to appreciate it. She would honestly have preferred to go to bed.

Still, she followed dutifully as Lady Marabeth led her to an elevator, motioned her inside and plunged them what felt like twenty leagues underground in the span of a second. It was lucky that she hadn't eaten in the last however many hours, or she'd have lost every last bite over the gleaming floor.

A white walled, black tiled maze of corridors greeted them as the doors slid aside. Ki-laar scuttled about like alabaster ants. Lady Marabeth took a corridor seemingly at random, leaving Valeriana with no choice but to scurry after her. The woman appeared to hold no stock with the concept of slowing down.

"Triage room," Lady Marabeth announced, sending tall double doors flying open.

The first word that jumped to mind to describe the chamber that lay beyond them was deep. Gangways and stairs formed spiraled paths along the walls. Those were taken up by rectangular cells just wide enough to accommodate a standing adult. Some were empty, some not, and the bodies that Valeriana could make out were nude, so she looked away quickly.

She had an inkling that Lady Marabeth expected her to comment, maybe compliment the place. Eyes on the spotless floor, she said the first thing that came to mind.

"It's very clean."

The way Lady Marabeth tilted her head to study her, actually study her, as if she were an embalmed animal displayed inside a glass cabinet, filled Valeriana with apprehension. It was a relief when the woman turned her head, letting her piercing gaze slide off her and onto the happenings on the lowest level of the room.

"This is the first stop for a batch of newly acquired human subjects. Here they are sorted, cleaned and tagged before they're moved to the lower levels for training. We make sure that none leave this facility before they mind the basics of their new station. Some of my competitors sell what they call 'raw material'. Mayfly Enterprises holds itself to higher standards than that."

"I'm not sure I follow, but that . . . sounds commendable?"

"It means that we don't sell untrained, unruly humans to cretins who think that they're getting a bargain by skimping on the conditioning fee and buying their slaves wild so that they can break them in at home. That's the sort of idiocy that leads to people getting their heads axed off in their sleep." A pause. "I'll take this to mean that Jack never discussed the particulars of the business with you?"

Valeriana was fairly sure that Jack didn't care enough about the business, or in fact anything that vaguely resembled the concept of working, to know more than the broadest strokes. Since she couldn't say that and risk placing him even higher on his aunt's blacklist, she turned out the deepest drawers of her memory for something that could exonerate him from failing to educate her to Lady Marabeth's standards.

"There was this one time he mentioned the market in Lenosh, but my sister Tess overheard and told him she'd string him up in our peach tree if he filled my head with licentious content." It had been enough years ago that admitting it was unlikely to get Tessalia in trouble. Normally, Valeriana would believe her sister capable of handling herself no matter what, but Lady Marabeth filled a category all her own. "I do know that you deal mostly in humans and Cyniheans?"

"Exclusively," the woman corrected, no longer regarding her as though she were an exotic animal worthy of scrutiny, but like she was a sick cat who had just barfed on her carpet. "Well, I suppose there are benefits to you knowing absolutely nothing. Fewer misconceptions to clear up. Come along."

Valeriana did. She'd thought that they'd go down to where a veritable army of Ki-laar ambled back and forth among tables laden with bodies, taking measurements and writing notes on clipboards. Instead, they went back outside and entered another corridor. This one funneled into a lounge, furnished with round, pewter gray sofas, a coffee table and a desk. The Ki-laar sitting behind the latter looked up, gasped and bowed its head. Lady Marabeth regarded it coolly, the deference not having come quickly enough to please her.

"Is the subject ready?"

"Yes, mistress!" The Ki-laar's voice was as the chirping of panicked birds. It wore the same crisp, white-and-black uniform as the others Valeriana had seen indoors, but its bald head was topped by a red bow which might or might not have been glued on. "Cleaned up and prepared, as per your command!"

"Which room?"

"Training room six, mistress!"

"Let's start with the basics and move our way up," Lady Marabeth intoned, as the Ki-laar maneuvered a set of controls with snakelike reflexes. The door swung open into yet another corridor, filled with many more doors. Lady Marabeth canted her head at her, and suddenly, incongruously, Valeriana wanted to do nothing but bolt; a by now familiar sensation. "Cyniheans. What trait do you most readily associate with them?"

"They have gray skin?" she chanced, knowing just from seeing Lady Marabeth's immutable expression that the answer didn't pass muster. She hadn't counted on a quiz. "And they're . . . they are very strong?"

"Correct." The concession was reluctant, but there. "Their physical strength compares to, and sometimes exceeds, that of Tsikalayans. They are most sought after for manual labor, and we usually give them technical skills training on top of the basic conditioning. Conversely, if you need slaves for the execution of delicate and specialized tasks, you go with Drakoe, since they are . . ." the woman trailed off, ostensibly so that she might complete the statement.

Valeriana thought. She . . . actually knew the answer.

"They're really smart and detail oriented."

"Yes." They'd arrived at a door marked with a big, bold number six. Lady Marabeth unlocked it. "And as for humans? What can you tell me about the value those have?"

Humans. Humans . . . Valeriana bit her lip, stalling, thinking fast and hard and finding herself struggling to come up with anything. Humans were outwardly so morphologically similar to her kind that nothing about their appearance was noteworthy. They weren't homogeneously gifted at anything she knew of, nor did they possess rare or valuable properties. Some could use magic, but she was under the impression that those were put down if discovered. There was no single unifying thread for her to hold up.

Perhaps it had been a trick question, and that was the answer: the defining trait of humans was a lack of defining traits.

"There's no consistency in the skills exhibited across the species," she said, with more confidence than she felt. "So they're, well, they'd be valuable to the sort of people who like to be surprised by what they get."

Lady Marabeth appeared ever so slightly taken aback.

"That's . . . a perspective, but far off the mark. Humans look enough like us to prompt lust. Therein lies their value. If you are in want of a body to warm your bed, your first choice won't be an overgrown lizard or a behemoth liable to crush your hips by accident. You'll want something as similar as possible to the handsome boy who won't look at you twice, or the prissy porcelain dolls who keep laughing off your advances. With me so far?"

"I—I think so."

"Good." Lady Marabeth gave her a chilly, tightlipped smile. "That will make this ever so much easier."

The room they entered was lit so brightly that Valeriana felt herself thrown back to when she'd exited the gate. She wouldn't have thought much of the ambiance whatever the luminosity, however. Her eyes jumped from the steel shelves decking the walls to the mean-looking implements they displayed, and from those to the chains hanging from the ceiling like ghoulish wind chimes.