Bloodsong Ch. 04

A glossy metal table, the centerpiece of the room, was the only furniture. There was a body tied to it. Nude, so Valeriana made sure that her eyes roamed elsewhere, pretending to take her time taking in every aspect of her surroundings.

Lady Marabeth waited, but not indefinitely.

"What do you think?"

"It's a bit like . . ." She sought a comparison and found one ready-made, lingering on the less pleasant shores of her earlier years. "Do you know Linus Odero, the physician? His clinic looks like this. Or at least it did years ago, when I still went to him regularly."

"I know him. He sold me the table," Lady Marabeth said, shortly. She did not question the aberration of having to visit a physician regularly; most people, Valeriana knew, went once in a century unless they had an occupation that often saw them needing to regrow limbs. Jack must have told his aunt at some point. She didn't fault him for it, but privately wished he hadn't. "Or, well, the table that this one is modeled from. But I was referring to the subject. What's your impression of it?"

"Uh." Valeriana's feet moved with little input from her brain until she was standing in front of the prisoner. The human was female and looked unwell, not to mention underfed. Ribs seemed to want to rip through thin skin, breaths came out in short, weak gasps. She shot Lady Marabeth a questioning look and paled at the way the woman stared back. It wasn't threatening as much as calculating. Like a precocious child with a jar of butterflies, pondering how to align the magnifying glass. Getting words out while targeted by it was a grueling task. "Is she ill? She looks as thin as the Ki-laar, I don't think humans are meant to—"

"It," Lady Marabeth corrected. It took all of Valeriana's strength to stop from yelping when the woman's nails dug in her shoulder. "It's a subject, not a person. This one . . . by looks alone, you could be sisters. However, that a thing looks like you does not mean that it is like you. Are we clear on that?"

"I . . . suppose so?" Although Valeriana only now registered it, the woman was right about the similarities. They were there, and they were striking. It was like staring in a mirror that was ever so slightly off. Black, wavy hair, dark blue eyes shadowed by sweeping lashes, the same luminescent pale complexion that suggested that sunlight had tried to touch her but given up in a fit of pique, a similarly hawkish nose at odds with a face otherwise soft and rounded.

The human looked little like her existing sisters. She looked more like she could have been Valeriana's own twin. Was this . . . was all of it supposed to lead somewhere?

"Association fallacy," Lady Marabeth pronounced, jerking her from her disturbed thoughts. "All that's gold glitters, but not all that glitters is gold. All Tsikalayans look more or less like what you see, but not all that looks like what you see is Tsikalayan."

"There's not much room to be confused, though, is there? What with blood songs, and you could always ask someone to shift, so it would be hard to mistake a human for . . ." Valeriana trailed off, certain that she'd gone and done it when Lady Marabeth raised a hand to her forehead and pinched the skin between her eyebrows.

"Never mind, I see that you are too literally minded to be permeable to philosophy. Just watch and try to learn something."

The woman took a step forward, bent over the table and fiddled with the rubber and leather contraption that kept the human from speaking. Valeriana seized the opportunity to retreat as far back as space constraints allowed.

"Something to keep in mind when you do this by yourself: virtually all subjects scream and beg at first, and a gag will spare you a lot of annoyance."

"Right. Uhm. What do you mean, though, with doing by myself?"

"Do you have any job skills?" By now the unfastened leather contraption had slipped from its place, and realizing it, the captive started on a string of tearful pleas in a language that Valeriana couldn't make out a word of. Lady Marabeth smiled thinly, forced the girl's mouth open and shoved the gag back in place. The wails died down, although the crying and sobbing continued. "Do you possess a wide breadth of knowledge about a useful and important subject? Are you secretly amazingly talented at anything?"

Valeriana had to shake herself before she could shake her head.

"I'm not, no."

"I didn't expect otherwise. I do, however, expect you to pull your weight in this facility. You have nowhere to go and my nephew will whine my ear off if I toss you out on the street, but I dislike freeloaders. It's been thousands of years since I took on an apprentice, and I'm afraid that my teaching ability may have rusted, but we'll make do. I mean, what else were you planning to do with your life? Spend it collecting some idiot's seed and spewing out crotch fruit?"

"Well . . . yes. It's what I was supposed to do, before I . . . before I . . ."

Lady Marabeth regarded her, both contemplative and dripping contempt, before drawling:

"You should know, before we continue, that I don't think highly of you." Valeriana had suspected as much, but it remained staggering to hear it said aloud. "You never struck me as intelligent, interesting or mighty. That you scraped together the bare minimum amount of self-respect and refused to be used as a cock sleeve does not budge that impression significantly."

". . . right."

"Nevertheless, it makes me hope that if I work you right, you'll turn out less pathetic than most girls in your age bracket. It's been millennia since I met a female under two hundred who didn't have a head full of dung and a single-minded focus on keeping their legs closed so that they might demurely spread them for their future mate. Back when I was young, we . . ."

The next minutes demanded little from Valeriana other than that she murmur agreeably while Lady Marabeth disgorged vitriol against failing educational standards, every ruling the High Council had passed in the last two thousand years, tailored mating rites and the animalcules who used them, the unforgivable stupidity of men, women who mated young and people under one hundred and fifty years of age, Jack's expulsion from Charuin, which the ungrateful louse still didn't take seriously—

It was the most relaxing wrathful rant that Valeriana had ever been made to sit through, since she was just tangentially relevant to it and suspected that the woman had forgotten about her being present within the first thirty seconds of raging.

It went on. And on, and on, and by the end there was an involuntary strain to Lady Marabeth's mouth that suggested that she might have continued in the same vein for another hour if she didn't have anything more pressing to do.

"Well, I seem to have gotten carried away. Be a darling and pass me that box over there, will you?"

Valeriana went to retrieve it. The box didn't seem so frightening as the items scattered around it, but only until the woman's hand delved inside and retrieved a shaft almost as wide as her forearm, which she laid on the table.

The chained girl let out a muffled wail. Valeriana also made a noise, just as indistinctly.

"I got this one from Germany," Lady Marabeth was telling her, ostensibly referring to the human rather than the humongous phallic object. "The war has been less beneficial to the trade than I'd hoped, since the faction I expected to do business with turned out to comprise half-witted lunatics who'd rather gas and burn their prisoners than profit from their sale — that's humans for you, illogical even when they think in the right direction. Still, I found some officers willing to shunt off a portion of the merchandise, in exchange for what they're not aware is a minuscule cut of the profit. That's how our weepy little guest came to be here."

She gave the sobbing wreck a pat on the head, walked around the table and fastened the girl's feet to an iron bar, forcing her legs open in the lewdest way possible. Valeriana glimpsed reddened nether lips that looked like they had been scraped with sandpaper.

She gulped, sick to her stomach, as the girl blinked away tears and shook her head. She couldn't bring herself to call her it in her head, and would need to be careful that she didn't slip on pronouns aloud, as Lady Marabeth would be sure to take exception.

"Do we, uh, do we need to do this right now? It's just that I'm tired from the journey . . ." It was no lie. It mystified her how the woman, who as far as Valeriana knew hadn't let her eyes shut underway, had the stamina to be doing all this and still look as sharp as a freshly whetted knife.

It was unclear whether Lady Marabeth hadn't heard her, or heard her and elected to ignore her.

"This one has already been used, so I won't go with a gentle approach. If its masters decide they want it coddled and pampered after they buy it, that's their business. I'm of the opinion that it just spoils them."

She picked up the shaft. It was made of some hard looking synthetic material and the same lilywhite as the walls. Valeriana screwed her eyes shut, unable to shake the thought that the color might serve the purpose of making the blood show up more vividly.

"Why in darkness are your eyes not open?" Lady Marabeth demanded, forcing her to peek from under her eyelids with no small degree of reluctance. The woman stood with one hand on her hip and a frown splicing her brow. Valeriana worked hard on ignoring where her other hand had gone. Her stomach felt empty, hollowed out like a balloon, and if she opened her mouth, a river of bile might erupt from it. She just . . . she just wanted to be elsewhere. Probably the slave-to-be felt much the same. "Haven't you ever laid eyes on female privates? You have them yourself!"

"I — no — I mean . . ."

"Gods above, deliver me from youngsters and their prudery before I pop a vein." Lady Marabeth sighed in a dramatic fashion, giving her the eyebrow equivalent to a finger wagging, before turning to slam the alabaster shaft between the girl's legs with no preparation or preamble.

The scream that ensued was like nothing Valeriana had heard before, even with most of the sound remaining trapped behind the gag.

A knock on the door saved her from needing to explain why she stood transfixed and horror struck. Lady Marabeth scowled, moved away to provide her with an unhindered view of the huge object, and hissed at the door in what might have been a foreign language but could just as easily have been wordless rage at the interruption.

A Ki-laar braved inside, eyes downcast in a textbook example of submissive foreboding.

"Mistress, I beg your pardon!" it chirped. "There is a woman upstairs who demands to speak with you!"

"Who is she, how did she get in and what business does she have here?"

"She . . . she didn't say, mistress!" Valeriana couldn't help but pity the creature as it quailed under Lady Marabeth's stolid, impenetrable gaze. She vaguely wished that the woman would go back to having the facial animation of a wax model. "She said . . . I beg your pardon again, mistress, but she said, and I'm quoting her exact words, that I should get that malevolent old tart — by which I think she meant you, mistress, I can't apologize enough! — to drag her scrawny arse to where she is, because she needs to have a word with you! Mistress!!"

Lady Marabeth's expression went vacant, forcing Valeriana to revise her earlier consideration: having the woman display emotions, no matter how sinister, was less unsettling than the current lack of any.

"I see." At least she didn't speak with hair-raising blankness, sounding a blend of fastidious, forbearing and put upon. "That would be my sister. Give her some tea — the cheap brand, mind you — and tell her that I'll come up in a minute. Absolutely don't let her out of your sight until I'm there."

The Ki-laar retreated, beaming, seeming both grateful and thunderstruck for having delivered its message and getting away unscathed.

As soon as the door closed, Lady Marabeth turned to Valeriana, lips pursed and eyes still distant.

"I'm afraid I need to go entertain family. I'd invite you to come along, but although I don't care for you, I also don't dislike you enough to make you put up with Briseis when you just — darkness and damnation, I forgot to tell it to hide the silver! Stay here, we shall continue this later."

This was the most scattered and out of sorts Lady Marabeth had appeared so far. Needless to say, it was chilling.

"You are afraid that your sister will try to steal from you?" Valeriana articulated, baffled by the bizarre turn in both mood and events. For a second she feared that Lady Marabeth might be offended, but the woman only sniffed, already making for the door with seemingly not a thought to spare for either her or the captive.

"No, of course not. I'm afraid that she'll sneak something she'll use to stab me." At Valeriana's look, which blended both terror and morbid fascination in abundance, she rolled her eyes ceilingward in a way eerily reminiscent of Belladonna. "I thought you had siblings? Murder attempts are just the way of things."

"But . . ." Valeriana was certain that was not how it worked. She and her sisters all but defined disfunction, and still they'd gone their entire lives with only threats of murder. "Killing a family member is a blood cr—"

"Don't tempt me to drag you upstairs so that you can watch her face as you tell her that. Stay here, have a look at the tools, entertain yourself until I'm back. This normally doesn't take long."

"And . . . the human? What should I do with h . . . it?"

Lady Marabeth stopped mid-stroll, already halfway out the door.

"Do as you like."

And with that she was gone, her steel heeled shoes clacking down the hall like a maddened typewriter until she was outside hearing range.

A weight that Valeriana had been bludgeoned into failing to acknowledge slipped off her back with the woman's departure. In the leftover silence, without a harrowing presence standing ready to dissect her every action, she could finally breathe.

There was no sound coming from the captive. She'd given up on begging, but her limbs shivered against her frame, all of her appearing gruesomely strained. The pretense that she was alone, that the girl on the table was as much a part of the decoration as the shelved chains and blades and other wretchedness that Valeriana balked at contemplating, refused to hold the second her eyes darted towards her.

Valeriana swallowed. She couldn't fathom what to do with what she felt, if it even had a use.

At least there was no blood. Yet.

She wondered if the girl had a name. Her father's personal slaves, of which a half dozen were human, were named after rocks. She'd memorized their names despite having only residual contact with them and not being certain of which belonged to what face. She'd thought they were funny. Xenotime. Epsonite. Hypersthene. She didn't know if those were typical Earthen names, or botched translations of something less silly sounding.

The girl made a breathy, agonizing noise.

Valeriana wanted to pretend she hadn't heard. Failing that, pretend she didn't care she'd heard.

Her feet rioted. They carried her to the table before she could decide to stop them.

She . . . she'd just check if there was nothing too wrong, if the captive wasn't hurt badly enough to die in the next minute, because those eyes . . . they looked drowned. Wet and dead, although they sparked with urgency when Valeriana shuffled closer.

The red sphere gagging the girl was no longer in her mouth but pushed to the side, digging a hollow in her cheek. Either Lady Marabeth had done a poor job of replacing it, or she'd moved it out in the time Valeriana had spent trying to pretend she didn't exist.

"Hi," Valeriana said. She didn't expect a reply. Doubtlessly the captive didn't speak Barashnik. Most humans didn't. She'd half expected the cry that came next, pitched high but weak, like the one a kitten would make. What she'd very much expected but hoped against was the cutting, otherworldly wail that sounded once the girl assembled enough strength.

Valeriana waved her hands, trying to calm her, both for her own peace of mind and because she felt genuinely sorry. She'd never seen the slaves back home act like this. They were always smiling and laughing, especially when her father was around.

"Shhh! You need to stop that!" Valeriana took a step back, reeling from a wave of nausea that came over her at the sight of the shaft still firmly lodged between the girl's legs. It looked huge and painful. Humans, she remembered, healed slowly. "Lady Marabeth . . . if she returns and finds you making noise, she'll . . ."

She didn't know what the woman would do, only that it would be unpleasant to both watch and be on the receiving end of.

The captive's screaming subsided, turning into sobbing and then coughing and, at last, silence. Then — she'd just been giving her lungs a break, it looked like — she coughed and spoke so fast that Valeriana started out not understanding a word. Once the rapidfire speech slowed she could parse it, she made out every tenth word, those that were recognizable from the cant that Lenoshi slaves of earthen origin used to communicate.

It let her understand enough — that the girl was pleading with her to be let go. Gods help her, she didn't want, hadn't asked, strongly disliked, this position she found herself in.

"I can't do anything. I'm sorry, but, but, this is only training. When it's over, you'll get to live somewhere a lot more wonderful than Earth, and you will have food and a place to sleep, and you're human, so you won't have to do a lot of manual labor . . ."

The girl babbled over her. Her voice sounded rougher and there were no familiar idioms this time, leading Valeriana to assume she'd switched languages. Why did humans have so many? It just made everything more complicated.

"I'm sure you'll get a nice owner." She was sure of no such thing and by now convinced that the captive was responding to her nonthreatening tone and stance rather than the content of her words. She still said it, because she'd like the reassurance herself. "If you work hard and make them like you, you won't get punished, and there's bound to be others of your species around, so you won't miss home for long."

"Please, help me, please!"

Valeriana started.

She'd understood that, all of it almost.

"I — you listen — French?" Her knowledge of the language, dragged up from a time long ago when Jack had taught her the basics to communicate with his grandparents, in case they ever convinced their guardians to let her accompany him on his yearly visit, was rusty and rudimentary. Even so, and despite her no doubt atrocious accent, the girl nodded. Right. They understood one another, somewhat. What to tell her? "I — apology — no can help."

"Please, I have a family, my parents, my sister, I can't be here, I need to find them, it's been weeks—" The girl shook her head, nearly choking on her own sobs. "It's been weeks and I don't know where they've taken them, if they are even still alive—"

"I — can ask," Valeriana managed, glad that she might be able to do that much. Lady Marabeth would know, wouldn't she? Although asking her for information like that was begging for a lecture.

She sought for something else to offer, something to make her feel less guilty for having to refuse the primary request.

"Water? Coat?" She pointed at the one she wore in case she hadn't used the right word. She'd need to take it back if she heard anyone come in, but the girl would be less cold for a while. The table felt like a slab of ice. So much on Earth did.