“Now look, Inky, I think it’d be better for all concerned if we just took time to simmer down, get in touch with our emotions, and take stock. All this talk about attacking people and blowing things up and generally declaring war on the whole universe and its environs — well, frankly I’m shocked. How did it get this far, Inky? What a shame, what a colossal shame. And all because both sides can’t quite —”
“Be quiet.”
“Please, let me finish! All this tension has really only one cause. Mutual distrust! That’s it in a clamshell, Inky. Really, I know what I’m talking about. In such a charged atmosphere as this, a productive dialogue is all but impossible. Both sides have to change in order for —”
“Silence!”
The face on the screen stopped moving its lips, its blue eyes wide and blank.
Incarnadine stood. “I don’t know what ploy, what game you’re playing — good cop/bad cop, or what. It won’t work. It’s too far gone for that! I meant what I said. Obey or die. It’s as simple as that. You know me, you know my power. Take warning or be resigned to your doom.”
The face took animation once more. “Well, go ahead and be that way, Inky. It’s all the same to me. You can’t scare us. We have your silly cow of a sister, and after we get done with her, we’ll start on you. You can’t stop us — human scum! Shit-eating bastard human filth! We’ll kill all of you, every last —”
The screen went blank, became a rectangle of ground glass once again.
He lowered his head and heaved a great sigh.
Rising, he turned off the device. The humming stopped and the sparks faded.
A stronger tremor shook the room. He looked off, sensing its magnitude. Then his eyes turned inward.
At length he came out of his reverie and turned toward the door, walking briskly.
He muttered, “Now I gotta put my paycheck where my oral cavity gapes — as it were.”
Twenty-two
Plains
Gene hacked and slashed, then hacked again.
His hrunt opponent staggered back, throat agape and oozing. Gene followed up with a thrust to the diaphragm, driving his sword deep into tough abdominal muscle. The hrunt doubled up and fell.
Gene let the hrunt slide off his sword, then swung round to ward off a weak lunge from a wounded hruntan infantryman who wouldn’t go down. Gene skewered the creature, leaving little room for refusal.
Gene looked around and realized that the battle was over, and that the yalim had won the day, fighting under his personal military command. Hrunt bodies carpeted the battlefield.
He sheathed his sword, fetched his voort, mounted, and shouted the command for recall.
As the troops fell into ranks, thoughts of the castle drifted back. He hadn’t thought about home in a long while. How long had he been here? Four, five months? And in that time he had gone from yalim prisoner to First Husband and Captain of the Royal Cohorts.
He wondered what was going on back at Perilous. Did it still exist? He had kept his eyes open for any sign of the portal, but it was like hoping to get hit by the same raindrop twice. The portal could appear anywhere on this world, or it might never appear again.
Whatever was going on back there, it must have been bad, or Sheila and Linda would have made some attempt to find him. Maybe they had tried, and failed. There was another possibility, one he was loath to consider: they might have perished in some general cataclysm that he, by sheerest happenstance, had managed to escape.
The cohorts had mustered, and now a great cheer rose up from them.
Gene drew his sword and raised it above his head. The voort under him reared up, braying.
The cohorts cheered louder, broke ranks, and gathered round him. They took him from his mount and bore him on their shoulders back to the Queen’s field tent.
It was night, the lamps flickering in the soft breeze that blew through the tent. Outside, campfires crackled, animals grunted, and men laughed, happy and drunk, flushed with victory.
“You have conquered, my husband.”
“Yep. Peel me a grape, will you?”
“Is that what this fruit is called in your land?”
“Just kidding. Are you cold? Do you want to put some clothes on?”
“No. I will never wear clothes again, my husband, when we are alone together.”
“Hey, that’s fine with me. Look, I’ve got big plans. Now that the hrunt are cleared out of the lowlands, we —”
“You will continue your campaign into the southern desert?”
“Huh? No, not really. I think we should head west. As far as we know, no hrunt live there. But that’s where Annau is.”
“Annau?”
“Yeah, the city of Annau.”
Vaya sat up and regarded him, her dark eyes narrowed. “Why do you speak of an abode of the Old Gods? It is bad luck to do so.”
“Uh-huh. Well, look. Things are going to change around here. I realize that taboos are hard to overcome, but it simply has to be done if your people are going to have any future.”
She wrinkled her brow. “Future?”
“Sure. Do you want your people living in tents and scraping a living off this wasteland forever? You told me that every year the hunting is harder. Every year the tribe’s population shrinks a little. It’s a losing fight. That’s what happened to the Umoi when they tried to go the
She shook her head. “You speak of many strange things. Forbidden things. You make me afraid, my husband.”
“Not to worry. Rub me right there. Yeah, that’s it.”
Her hands were soft. “But you are a great warrior.”
“You won’t get an argument from me.”
“You have killed more hrunt than all of my husbands combined. You have killed more than any yalim has ever killed.”
“Just applied some modern military tactics, is all.”
“One day you will kill all the hrunt and they will never again raid our camps or steal our food.”
“Right. Well, look, I’m no Stalin. I’m not out to exterminate the kulaks, or do anything like that. The hrunt …” Gene propped himself up on one elbow. “Look, there’s something you have to know about the hrunt. I’ve been researching this with Zond. And Zond says —”
“Is that the name of the spirit you converse with?”
“Uh, yeah. You see, the Umoi — the Old Gods — created both yalim and hrunt, but for different purposes. The hrunt were the field niggers, and the yalim were the … never mind. They were both servant classes, but the hrunt were created stupid so they wouldn’t mind working in deep mines or doing other dangerous stuff. But the real thing you should know is, hrunt are really just yalim who’ve been genetically altered a little bit.”
Vaya lay down, paralleling Gene, her long golden body radiant in the lamplight.
“Speak more of this to me, my husband.”
“Uh, yeah. Um … well, what that means is, a hrunt is really a yalim except for a few extra genes spliced into his DNA. They turn him ugly and change his body chemistry a little bit, but essentially he’s human. The thing is, once we get back into the cities, it won’t be any problem to snip those pesky genes out. We’d have to round up all the hrunt women, of course, and do some cell surgery….” Gene considered it. “Actually I guess the simplest solution would be sterilization, though that does have a totalitarian ring to it. But morally speaking, since hrunt are really just handicapped humans —” He trailed off into deep thought.
Presently he sat up. “Hey, guess what. Things aren’t simple even in fantasyland.”
