"You will be a perfect second to me, brother. We will be a team," so you said. But you died, and I must stand in your place.
A place that everyone, from his father on down, knew he could never fill.
He came to a halt before her, looking down on her and quivering with rage. Lucky for you I have been forbidden to touch you. Because I would rip you limb from limb.
He said softly, in a deep uneven voice, "Your dress is very torn."
Soamosa clutched at the worst of the rents in her gown without thinking and she felt the color rise in her face. She was very ashamed.
"Yes," she forced herself to say, "it is."
"Perhaps I should find you something better to wear," he taunted.
"Thank you, that would be very kind," she replied automatically, while her mind screamed in panic, Be silent! Don't provoke him!
Karak blinked. She was either very brave or very stupid. Within him curiosity began to bloom and feelings of amusement and admiration mixed. It pleased him to be generous, he decided.
"I shall see to it then," he said and left her without a backwards glance.
Soamosa looked up when she heard the hatch close behind him. She stood staring at it for a long minute with her hands pressed hard against her rib cage, as though to hold in her frantically beating heart.
Then she turned and stumbled to her cot, falling back on it to gaze at the ceiling.
I did it! she thought. I faced down the enemy without flinching!
And then she burst into tears.
Belazir laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and he began to choke. At last the spasm passed and the laughter slowed to sighing chuckles until he could once again get his breath. Then he sat smiling before the surveillance screen.
"Perverse," he said to himself, chuckling again. "Utterly perverse. Yet oh so amusing." He knew he should be mortally offended, furious almost beyond his own iron control.
But he had never been close to this particular child of his loins, nor to the wife who had bred him. And the girl had shown incredible spunk, given the circumstances.
He wondered if he was going to kill Karak the next time he saw him.
Belazir knew that, for his honor's sake, he should. But, he thought with a sigh, since The Great Plague ravaged the people we have bred but slowly. Our numbers are as nothing and worse, the children are puny. And Karak has four healthy brats. He concluded that satisfying his honor with Karak's blood was a luxury the people couldn't afford. Yet.
Would that Karak's brother had lived instead. Belazir's lips curled in a wry expression. He had better use for a decent second-in-command than he did for comic relief. On the other hand, the boy's brother would have been a threat.
But he also wanted to see how this foolishness with the scumvermin female played out. He smiled again. His sense of curiosity had always been one of his besetting sins. He decided to indulge it in this case as he could not see any way in which it could become too costly to do so.
He'd intended to amuse himself by experimenting on the girl with the other new drugs he had bought and taunting Simeon-Amos with holos of her reactions. Well, obviously he couldn't use her so and also have her available for amusing episodes with his son.
No matter, he'd have a technician cobble together some sort of holo, extrapolating from the predicted responses that had been described to him.
That would be better, in fact! He wouldn't be distracted and could truly enjoy the Benisur scumvermin's reactions. No doubt opportunities for live experimentation would arise in the course of events; and it would add a certain frisson to known that Amos's despair and anguish were for nothing at all…
"Yes," he murmured. "Let him think the scumvermin girl destroyed-and then I shall show her to him, whole and well. And destroy her again!"
Belazir sighed contentedly. Surely anticipation is one of life's true pleasures.
I hate my father, Karak son of Belazir thought, as he paced through the corridors of the Kali-the Dreadful Bride, his sire's old warship.
A pack of Kolnari children went by, in the wake of something bulge-eyed and long-clawed that squealed and snarled as it ran. They dashed after it with high shrieks of excitement, long razor-sharp knives in their hands. The sight distracted him for an instant; how long had it been since he was an innocent child, with nothing more to concern him than lessons and running down a drgudak with his friends? All of five years, now; since he turned eight and came to manhood. The infancy of Kolnar was brief.
I hate my father. What child of the Divine Seed didn't? But it's worse than that. I hate them all. He shivered. He was weak, too weak, hiding in his quarters and watching the tapes of the scumvermin female. He told himself it was honest lust, but it was not. She is weak. Yet she does not despair. The strangers were like that. His father had thought them weak, when the High Clan took Bethel, when it took SSS-900-C… and found that its meal was eating its way back out.
Decision crystallized as he fingered the injector in a pouch. He slapped palm against a communicator.
"Duty officer," he said. "I shall be unavailable for the next hour."
"No," Soamosa pleaded, "please don't." Her blue eyes were full of tears and terror.
She was held by two Kolnari, her slender form dwarfed by their muscular height. One of them held out her arm with the inside of her elbow uppermost. Despite her increasingly frantic struggles the arm didn't move. So that when the nozzle of the injector was placed on her arm it was right against a vein.
"Don't, please don't," she was weeping helplessly now. "No! No, NO!"
She tore herself free and huddled in the comer of the room; there were streaks of blood on her arms.
Belazir leaned down and grasped her chin in his huge hand.
"In only a moment, Benisur, it will begin," he said and turned to smile at Amos.
"No!" Soamosa insisted, holding her hands up defensively.
Karak smiled at the gesture, it was completely absurd. Seated beside him she looked like a creature made of gossamer and air, frail as a candle flame. And yet, he knew that she was the one in control. At all of their meetings it was she who had set the tone. Deep within himself, Karak sighed.
"You have nothing to fear from me," he said aloud. "I will not harm you."
Soamosa looked suspiciously at the earnest young Kolnari. Even in the midst of her fear his beauty struck her; and the lost look in the yellow eagle eyes.
"I do not trust you," she said severely.
Karak brushed back his long silver-blond hair distractedly.
"I am concerned for you," he said. "It is terribly dangerous for me to even offer you this protection. If my father knew," his lips tightened, "death would come to me as a friend."
Soamosa narrowed her eyes.
"I do not believe you," she said. "It is some Kolnari trick. My mother told me all about the Kolnari sense of humor."
"Lady," he said and the expression in his eyes firmed. "It is my intention to save you, not to harm you. I will set you free." Karak blinked rapidly and swallowed hard. "And your companions if that is possible. I swear it."
By the sound of his voice, the oath might have been flayed from him. She raised her arm, the inside of her elbow uppermost and he placed the nozzle of the injector unerringly over the vein.
"Now that I've submitted to your injection, you must tell me what it does," Soamosa demanded, radiating poise and dignity and the mysterious power she held over him.