Not that they understood what the scent meant.
Barbarians.
At least I didn’t land on my back this time. Rolling over was such a pain in the pronotum.
Anger speared through me and I hissed in frustration, releasing a complementary scent at the same time.
Beside me, Alder stirred, then sat up. “Oh, by all the hot gods of the stars, would you please stop emitting? You smell foul.”
I feel foul, I managed to respond, though my clicks were still less vigorous than they ought to be.
Alder rubbed his eyes with his ten tiny forelimb tentacles. Fingers, I reminded myself. Hands had fingers. “Where are we?” he asked.
Slave pens. I released an intensifying scent.
“Would you please stop cursing in bug smell?” Alder demanded. “I can’t think when you do that.”
You can’t think at the best of times, I said, but softly, not wishing to irritate my companion more.
The fae prince finally glanced around. “Where are Lise and Morph?”
I clicked a negative. Taken to the breeding facility and the empress, respectively.
That made Alder sit up straight. “Breeding facility?”
His worried expression echoed my own emotions. The thought of Lise being bred like a stock animal made me want to rampage through the camp, destroying everything I came across.
It had been a long time since a female had elicited such a response in me. Not for the first time, I wondered if perhaps she might be amenable to starting a small colony with my two egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one and me. Even in my half-drugged state, my flagellum fluttered in response.
Alder began cursing in several languages. “I swear to all the gods of Mabdavarius Five, if that frog bitch of an empress hurts either of them, I’ll make her wish she’d been born in a pile of dolenatis in a Crobrit-infested swamp.”
I rubbed my antennae together in a brief song of appreciation for the sentiment but didn’t accompany it with any scent this time. I didn’t want Alder to turn his ire toward me. It was rare for the small fae man to work himself into this kind of anger, but when he did, it was usually followed by bloodshed.
I liked this side of my egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one mate.
What shall we do? I asked once he finished his tirade.
“We find a way to kill that tralf.”
I don’t believe the empress sells her body for money. But I’m willing to destroy her with you.
“No. She only sells others.” Alder turned his gaze on me, his forward-facing binocular vision focused intently. “And it’s about time someone stopped her.”
Two hours later, we were still trying to work out a plan.
The most immediate problem was the plethora of guards surrounding the slave pens. But even that was secondary to not knowing where the empress had taken Morpheus and Lise.
If this had been a Chilchek colony, I could have sent an inquiry out and had it disseminated through the entire colony within moments. As it was, however, we had to do with inadequate, barbaric vocal communication.
Luckily, Alder was good at that sort of thing. I watched in amazement as he sidled up to one group after another, befriending them and asking questions. Lucky for him, I was able to simultaneously watch around us. All it took was snipping off the appendage of one would-be attacker, and no one else tried to make any trouble.
Of course, had I known the attacker would spew bodily fluids until he died, I might have been more circumspect in my appendage-snipping.
Mammals. So frail.
“I have the info we need,” Alder said in what I took to be a triumphant tone. “The empress likes to attend the auctions, and the next one is tomorrow night.”
What about Morpheus and Lise?
Alder raised the top connective joint of one upper limb—something he called a shoulder, a word I couldn’t come close to reproducing—in what I had learned to interpret as a gesture of uncertainty. “If Lise tests as a breeder, she’ll be auctioned off in one of those lots. Otherwise, she’ll be placed in the females’ lot over there.” He raised an upper limb—arm—and pointed an end-tentacle—finger—at an enclosed space not far from our own.
And Morpheus? I asked.
Alder blew out a gust of air. “He’s almost certainly in the empress’s prison. Once we have Lise, we’ll need to break him out.”
Therefore, we must disrupt the auction, rescue Lise, and break Morpheus out of prison, yes?
“That’s it.”
I waved my antennae in my own gesture of uncertainty. I am concerned, my egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one mate. What if we cannot accomplish our goals?
Alder flashed his teeth at me in heathenish delight. “Since when have we ever not accomplished our goals?”
I paused to consider but decided not to list our various failed attempts to convince strangers to unwittingly hand over their treasure. There was no reasoning Alder when he was in this mood. He enjoyed the thrill of battle far too much to let the specter of failure and death dissuade him from what was almost certainly a suicidal plan.
Very well, then, I finally said. What is our plan of action?
8
Morpheus
They had to incapacitate me; it was the only way to keep me from ripping them all apart.
Because that was the singular thought in my humming brain as the slimy-skinned minions of the Bufo Alvarius Empress dragged my drugged body from the transport unit. My prosthetic wings scraped sharply against the polymer-metal of the ramp and then were hushed by the plush leaf flooring of the private chambers of the empress herself.
Alder and Evik’s transport had diverged paths near Blue. Lise’s transport had left my side only a few moments before arriving here.
That meant she couldn’t be far away.
My partners in con could take care of themselves,
