Bloodsong Ch. 04

More head shaking.

"My name is Rachel. I grew up in East Belgium, but my family is originally from Cork. My sister's name is Becca, she's fourteen. Our parents are Colman and Yael Redmont. My father wrote a book—" A sob, hastily swallowed so that it turned into a hiccup. "He shouldn't have written that book. My favorite color is green. My favorite flowers are poppies. I can sing Little Bo Peep in Spanish. I—"

"Thank you. I am Valeriana Lazur. I am from Lenosh, Central Isles. I have three sister and my father. My favorite color is blue ribbon."

"Please." The girl sounded tired now, more than anything. "If you won't let me go, at least please, please take it out."

It took a second for Valeriana to grasp her meaning. It shouldn't have taken that long. She shot the shaft, lodged so deeply it appeared to distort the shape of the girl's lower body, a wary glance, feeling nausea welling up. She could understand the captive's desire for it to be removed, but hesitated to grant the request. Would Lady Marabeth be displeased if she returned to find out that it had been removed?

Then again, the woman had told her to do with the girl as she liked, hadn't she?

"Wait," Valeriana instructed, and looked around, scanning the shelves for something to wrap around her hands. One of them turned out to hold objects not meant for violating or bleeding someone out. There was a basket full of cotton and a box with cloth napkins. She filled her arms with a cloud of the former and a stack of the latter and returned to the table. "I take out — pain — apology."

The girl nodded with something like resignation.

Valeriana wrapped a napkin around her hand, hoped she looked like she knew what she was doing, and clumsily gripped the part of the shaft that hadn't sunk in all the way between her thumb and index finger. She'd counted on a scream, had wondered if she shouldn't replace the gag first, but there was only a shallow gasp from the girl as the thing slid out of her, slick with slimy blood. Valeriana rushed to prop a wad of cotton against her opening, fearing that more would come gushing out.

Thankfully, there was just a trickle. She left the cotton there anyway.

"Water?" she tried again. The girl shook her head. "Coat?" This time, a nod. Happy to continue being useful even if it meant she'd have to suffer through the cold herself — at least she had a dress on under the coat — Valeriana took it off and draped it over the captive, arranging it so that as much fabric as possible covered her.

"I need my hands free to put it on."

Valeriana stared at her, nonplussed, since she hadn't meant for her to wear it. She thought she understood why the girl would want to, though. The table was cold, so her back must be freezing too.

Lady Marabeth hadn't left her keys, so unchaining the captive was likely to earn her the woman's disapproval, but where was the harm? The links of the chain were wide and not seamless. She could pull them apart, then rejoin the ends if she heard Lady Marabeth's shoes clacking near. If caught, there was always the argument that the woman had left in such a hurry, and given her no proper instructions, and she'd assumed it was alright.

Valeriana knew it was very unlikely to be alright, but it felt right, therefore . . .

She slightly twisted the disjointed ends of the links and pulled the chains off the human. It was easier than she'd thought. After a pause, she did the same to the ones around the legs, so that the girl could ball up if she wanted. Smiling in what she hoped was an encouraging way, Valeriana presented the coat. "Take. It is good. Warm."

A fist caught her in the jaw, landing so feeble and dull that she was left confused as to what it meant. The doubt dissipated when the girl struck again and made it clear that effort and intent to hurt went into the blows.

Valeriana stood still, taking that one and the next —— compared with the punches she'd gotten from Ralen, these were barely there — while trying to decide how to address this. It didn't bother her to stand there and take the onslaught, but the girl appeared to be making herself tired and upset, and now she looked to be about to toss herself off the table—

Valeriana caught her before she could hit the floor and hurt herself.

"Lady Marabeth will — angry — evil. Do not — pain." She cursed her limited vocabulary. Although she doubted that there existed words that could faithfully get across the world of hurt they'd both be in for if the woman caught her slave-in-training running around unrestrained.

The girl laughed. Valeriana realized it belatedly, the first assumption being that she was choking. Tears dug tracks down her cheeks at an alarming rate, ghastly sounds of twisted mirth tore from her as she failed to break free from the arms holding her. Valeriana, who hadn't been trying to trap her as much as prevent her from falling over, stopped at once so she would stop crying.

Predictably, the girl's knees gave out. She slunk to the floor in a graceless heap.

"Just get it over with, then!" she demanded, her voice the audible equivalent of a fractured glass pane. "Just kill me! You'll do it anyway, and I'd rather have it happen sooner if it means you sick fascist monsters stop . . ." There her screaming devolved into incoherent, horrible gasping.

Valeriana was familiar with this kind of reaction, although she'd never witnessed it from the outside.

"You don't want to die. Not really." She spoke in Barashnik, since she spoke without thinking, but it would still have fallen on deaf ears if she'd cobbled the meaning back together in broken French.

Instead, what she said and repeated, and kept repeating until a single instance of the word got through to the human, was breathe. She would have held her, as her sisters would do with her when she got like this, but something told her that touch — any touch — would be unwelcome. So she just sat beside her and kept repeating the request until the girl stopped looking and sounding like she did in her worst moments.

The world was turning too fast. Valeriana ran a hand over her forehead, where cold sweat had broken out. She had a problem. She had a problem, and for once, the problem wasn't that she didn't know what to do.

It was that she knew perfectly well.

The Ki-laar by the desk in the room with the gray sofas was conveniently absent. Nevertheless, Valeriana's heart wanted to crawl out through her throat as she hurried the human along the many doored corridors.

She feared, more and more, that the whole inadvisable enterprise would flop miserably before they made it far. The girl trod with soft steps, a hand span behind her — all humans, Valeriana had observed, were remarkably light-footed. Her gait was odd, slow and careful, a reminder of the horrible thing removed from inside her and the slowness of human healing.

It meant that they couldn't walk too fast. They wouldn't be able to either way, since it would make them look ten times as suspicious as they already did. Valeriana reminded herself of that at every turn, but it didn't stop every instinct she had of demanding she hightail it.

Knowing the layout of the building, she would have had a better idea of how to get out. As it was, the only exit Valeriana was aware of was the elevator. She remembered how to get there from the triage room, more or less. Unfortunately, there'd been so many twists and turns in between there and where they stood that she wasn't sure she remembered the way to the triage room itself.

In hindsight, it would have been so much more sensible to wait until Lady Marabeth had concluded their tour of the facility, until the Mayfly had become known territory, until she had the slightest inkling of what she'd do in the unlikely, miraculous event that she succeeded at getting the human above ground and out the door.

It was strenuous to the point of maddening that not only did someone else's fate depend on her, but she could ruin everything by taking a wrong turn in the next hallway.

The girl hadn't said a word since Valeriana's garbled promise to help. Perhaps she feared saying something that would make her change her mind. More concerning was the fact that she acted as though she trusted her to not ruin everything. Almost as though she believed her to have a degree of competence and the faintest clue of what she was doing.

Valeriana didn't have it in her to admit aloud how wrong she was.This was all a terrible idea. She was out of her depth. She should have waited, planned more and better . . .

A Ki-laar came slinking around the corner. In hindsight, it was more of a surprise that they hadn't run into any sooner. Valeriana fought the urge to grab the human and run for it or, more likely, panic and stay rooted to the chessboard floor like the useless, gutless thing she was.

An idea struck. She held a two second long mental debate on the sense of it before concluding that there was no way to summon the information they needed out of thin air and few alternative avenues of obtaining it. Breathing in deeply and shooting the girl beside her a look that she hoped came across as reassuring, she called out.

"Uhm. Excuse me?" The Ki-laar looked up from the clipboard it carried, startled, before breaking into a smile. It was probably meant to be a standard polite, yes-I'm-listening smile, but the abundance of obsidian teeth made Valeriana gulp. She reminded herself that the creature was likely more intimidated by her than she by it, but it didn't help. "Uh, Lady Marabeth said that I should take this slave back to the triage room as soon as I was done with her. Which I am. But I, this is my first time here and I've only been in that room once, so I'm afraid I forgot the way."

"Would milady like me to return it?!"

"No, no. Just tell me the way, please? I . . . Lady Marabeth will start thinking me an idiot if she dreams I got lost, so I'd like to avoid that."

The creature appeared to find her excuse plausible, and if it took notice of Valeriana's uneasy grimace, it didn't remark upon it as it rattled off directions. She thanked it and waited until it had skittered off to nod at the human and resume their too slow run.

"What are those things?" the girl asked. It sounded like a question that she'd been sitting on for a while.

"They is . . ." Valeriana wound up shrugging. She didn't actually know. Lady Marabeth was the only person she was aware of who owned Ki-laar. She wasn't even sure what world they hailed from. "Not human."

"What are you?"

"Tsikalayan. From Barashi." Judging by the frown she got, both words were unfamiliar. "I explain . . . other time."

"Why are you helping me?"

"You ask." It was the simplest way to sum up her reasons, but nowhere near the best. Only the best Valeriana could offer when she hadn't convincingly explained to herself why she was doing what she was doing.

Although the girl appeared dubious, she asked no further questions.

The Ki-laar's directions panned out accurately. They were forced to moderate their pace even further once she had the door to the triage room within her sights, since it was a well-traversed area, but from there the trek to the elevator was as short and straightforward as she recalled.

"Almost there," Valeriana whispered, tapping the button as she'd seen Lady Marabeth do upstairs. She had yet to contemplate what she'd do once they were there. Now that they stood in front of the metal doors, the enormity of what she was doing and all the implications it brought with it smothered her.

She owed Lady Marabeth a lot. Freedom, for a start. She felt both guilty and queasy when she thought of confronting her after all this, because they were close to succeeding when she'd been convinced that they wouldn't make it one tenth of the way, and losing merchandise would surely make the woman have a fit.

Yet despite her misgivings, going back was . . . not an option.

The pull of kinship from a loudening blood song snuck up on her as they slipped in, like a knife in the back.

The shout came not a moment later.

"Oi! Hold that door!"

"No!" the human whimpered. She curled her fingers into her palms and punched the floor panel while Valeriana fought not to succumb to hysterics.

It wasn't Lady Marabeth, at least. The song was familiarly unfamiliar and the footsteps trampling the floor as though it had committed a serious slight sounded nothing like the clack clack of her heels.

They might make it out still. If she convinced the girl to remain calm and act like a slave. If she convinced herself to remain calm and come up with something to explain away their presence.

The pummeling of buttons had an effect, in that the doors rushed to meet faster, but the human's efforts were waylaid when a tentacle snuck in the gap between them, jamming them open until the person responsible made it there and pulled them apart manually the rest of the way.

Valeriana met the human's watery eyes and flapped her hands, trying to convey — she wasn't altogether certain what. There was barely enough time for both of them to compose themselves before a woman entered the elevator in a cardamom scented, shamrock green whirlwind.

"I said to hold!" the newcomer barked, her gaze settling unrelenting and grim on the panic-struck girls.

Valeriana knew who she was, despite never having seen her or met her. The steely eyes and red hair made it easy to determine her identity, although the resemblances to Lady Marabeth stopped there. Whereas her sister had the build of a skeleton, tall and almost unnaturally slim, this woman was short, chunky and apple cheeked. She had her hair piled up on her head like a badly constructed, collapsing beehive instead of imprisoned in a bun, and her eyebrows weren't inked on.

Overall, she struck Valeriana as someone who could easily come across as warm and cheerful if she didn't currently look about to break something.

"Good evening," Valeriana managed. Her mouth had dried up, but she'd sounded steady, if croaky.

The woman gave her a weighted, testing look.

"It's ten o'clock in the morning, not that you can tell day from night down here." The impulse to withdraw when she whipped out a hand was tantalizing, but Valeriana refrained and gripped it weakly, praying that her shaking wasn't noticeable. "Briseis Drakma. That disgusting slag's lousy, no good, fiendishly lawless sister. I don't believe we've met."

"I'm Valeriana. Lazur. A friend of your nephew."

"Which one, the tall, dark and brooding one who's an arse, or the tall, dark and boring one who looks as though he's permanently constipated?"

"Er. Jack. The blond one. Lord Adalbert's youngest."

"Isn't that one still twelve or thereabouts?" The woman, Lady Briseis, shook her head, further disassembling the hive that topped it. Tessalia would have had a conniption if she were there. "Never mind, I'm hopeless for keeping track of these things. Brilliant to meet you, Valeriana. Your name sounds like something you can brew suspicious tea from, though probably a tastier one than the cat piss Maz thinks appropriate to offer her guests. Are you two headed up or down?"

"Uh." Valeriana thought, quickly and furiously. Lady Briseis was likely on her way out, her visit having been as short as Lady Marabeth had foretold. They couldn't leave the elevator alongside her without making themselves suspicious, but if they pretended to be headed to the lower levels, where the training rooms were supposed to be located, then they could lose her, hope no one else got in and segue once the elevator made it down and back up. "We're going to the twentieth floor down."

A slow smile stretched the woman's full-moon face.

"What a coincidence," she said, looking between Valeriana and the human girl with bright, shrewd eyes. "That's also where I'm headed. We can keep each other company. Press that button, will you?"

"But . . . we . . . I . . ." Valeriana clamped her mouth shut and moved to obey, reasoning that she'd seem shiftier if she dawdled. Blood rushed to her head, beating loud in her eardrums as she saw their chances, slim to begin with, shrivel up.

The girl, who had only followed the exchange through the shifts in tone, made an agitated sound. Lady Briseis glanced her way. The look she gave her was unexpectedly benign.

"And do you have a name, dear?"

The human shuddered, although the tone had been kind. The woman repeated the question in that dialect of which Valeriana could make out one word in every ten, and this time the human replied, shakily.

Lady Briseis nodded, said something back in the same gentle, careful cadence. It came to Valeriana that Tessalia had, in discussing Jack's other aunt, referred to her as a human lover. She had assumed that the appellation referenced some past promiscuous scandal, but in hindsight, that made little sense. Everyone who owned sex slaves would fit the sobriquet if that were what it was about.

A small ray of hope, then. If Lady Briseis was fond of humans, she might be persuaded to intercede and convince her sister that the girl had been an unwilling and unwitting participant in all this. Lady Marabeth might then refrain from doling out whatever gruesome punishment was reserved for slaves who tried to escape, although that was admittedly a longshot.

The other two remained embroiled in a conversation which Valeriana had no hope of finding the thread of. By some miracle, the girl's stance eased as it progressed.

The elevator jumped into motion — Valeriana didn't see who had pushed the button, but her stomach was up in her neck, so they were headed above ground. Lady Briseis was grinning now. More astonishingly, the human had almost ceased shaking throughout the exchange.

"For future reference," Lady Briseis said, addressing Valeriana and switching back to Barashnik, "if you are in the middle of an escape attempt and trying to appear inconspicuous, you shouldn't use 'we' to encompass yourself and whoever you are rescuing. Or have them remain standing when in the presence of others, unless you're walking them somewhere. Or lead them around without a carrier or a leash. Moreover, and this applies in general and not only in situations like the present, you ought to appear more self-assured. You look paler than Rachel here, and she's the one who'll be pushing up daisies if Maz catches her."

"Uhm," Valeriana uttered, failing to find anything else she could say.

Lady Briseis winked at her.

"Oh, I am glad we met! There we go, out, out!"

Valeriana was pushed through the elevator doors. The woman and the human came up behind her, Lady Briseis grabbing them both by their respective elbows and setting a punishing pace as she hurried them along.

Before, Valeriana had been too out of sorts to examine the surface portion of the Mayfly, keeping up with Lady Marabeth having been her sole concern. Now she swiveled her head around and looked every which way, soaking up as much sight and sound as she was able, every nerve in her body a live wire.

She could see the door ahead, the stylized likeness of a winged insect embossed across it, ivory on ebony, so close yet so far away. Could smell the faintest trace of tobacco, which the part of her still capable of entertaining such concerns found odd. Lady Marabeth, she knew through Jack, didn't abide smokers to the point that she'd threatened to disown him if she ever caught him with a cigar. Could hear hushed voices bleeding through the walls, words and sighs and moans that turned her ears pink, thankfully with no intrusive blood songs accompanying them.