Chapter One
Transcript from Crew Journal:
Those little ones...they’re a whole ‘nother batch of bullshit.
The big ones’ll eat you, there’s no question, but they make it quick. Chomp, and then it’s light’s out.
This thing...it got Katrine. Ripped her apart, then played with her insides. It didn’t even eat her, it...it hunted us for sport. It took out her insides and played with them, painting crew deck shorthand with her blood.
The whole time, it...it sang, it babbled. It repeated radio chatter, the comm announcements. And now it has her voice. It’s been following me for three days, and I can hear her singing some old folk song through the vents.
But she’s dead. It took her skull and wears it like a mask, but I can still hear her voice.
There’s two of them, spitters, siblings…probably clutch-mates. One is missing his left mandible, probably a fight gone poorly, and the replacement hasn’t finished growing in properly. The glands that produce the noxious yellow acid don’t seem to be working yet, and the stunted appendage causes a terrible speech impediment. Long hair. They’re from a high house. Boiler-Louis braids, sour attitudes.
It’s probably about the leather.
Pretending not to notice them, I adjust the tusker skull mask against my face, browsing wares from the commoner craftsman, from decorative beads to leather goods and silver tools and blades. My fingers itch for a puzzle toy, interlocking rings that need a special trick to unbind them, but I am aware of the twin sets of eyes watching me, so I keep my hands to myself and keep moving.
An old drone-female stands over a chemical cookpot, pulling grubs out of it and lying it on woven sweetgrass plates. Yellow sour, biting inkcap, and…golden candy?
“My dear beauty!” I chirp as I stop by her stall, watching the old woman extend her mandibles in a smile at the three silver beads clattering onto her serving table. “How did you know golden candy mushrooms were my favorite?”
“You charmer,” she smiles sweetly, using her tool hands to tie up a bundle of grubs after pocketing the money, to be strung later. “I always have plenty of golden candies when you’re around.”
“I’ll keep coming around for a glimpse of your loveliness,” I smile, placing one of the grubs into the internal mandibles, dicing it apart.
“And when you do, I’ll make a special batch, just for you, love,” she smiles, wrapping a bundle of spent mushrooms. “On the house, dear. Your proving day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answer, throwing down a packet of red silkcap spores, which I had brought just for her.
“My lord, ‘s your proving day, not mine!” she chides, her lights pulsating brightly with delight.
“Keep it,” I insist. “I want the next batch a bit spicier.”
“Anything for you, love.”
She waves as I move on, weaving through vendors trying to get my attention in the hopes I’ll spend a few beads at their stalls.
I take a circuitous route, backtracking and ducking behind stalls and fleshbags, until I lose the spitters in the crowd. Only then do I go for the stall I’ve been looking for, since I was dismissed from my sister’s proving festivities.
He fleshbag-hide tent smells of scented oils, of perfumes and sweet things, tools neatly hung on a rack outside the entrance to show her profession, along with some spare claws and bones as a demonstration of her skill and ability.
Like the grub vendor, she is a commoner, and is thus legally required to keep her head shaved, her beads displayed on a string at her waist, and like the grub vendor, a drone. Flat-footed, tailless, with a single set of arms for tools, another with blades instead of hands, for combat, and a single pair of eyes.
Many think drones are useless. They have no great strength, like brutes or sirens, no particular affinity for stealth, like reapers, no long-ranged capabilities like spitters, and no ramming power like bullets. It’s a practice among the nobility in some clans to strangle droneborn at hatching, but not a universal truth and nearly unheard of among the clanless commoners.
Someone has to do the menial work, after all.
She wipes her hands on her simple self-spun silk skirt, looking up at me in surprise. Her eyes trail along the strings of beads in my long hair, only the finest leather and blackest silks in my clothes, a highborn noble, come to purchase her services.
“Can I help you, my lord?” she asks, her single set of eyes averted from my gaze.
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“It is my proving-day,” I tell her, head held high beneath my cloak. “I need a full-body grind.”
“I run a special on proving days,” she says quietly, selecting tools from her racks. “Abyssal flower skin treatments, to bring out the shine in the lights.”
“Sounds delightful,” I reply, waiting for her to open the flap to her tent.
She lives simply. She has a chemical pot for cooking, a cot for tending to clients or sleeping, and a set of drawers for her tools. From the smell, the abyssal flower oil is freshly made, dark and rich, at its best.
Once the flap is closed and tied shut, I roughly shove her down onto her cot, then use use my grapplers to hold the frame so she can’t get away, and throw myself on top of her.
***
Her skin is the most exquisite gray, without blemish or mark, except the pattern of lights that follow her nerves, pulsating softly, contentedly, in a repeating pattern of pastels. I run my fingers along her combat forearm, tracing my way to the wrist where her silver blade meets her skin, and gently kiss it.
“When I am house-sire, you will be the jewel of my harem,” I tell her.
“Do not tease me, Thresher,” she growls, her lights stuttering as she rises.
“I wouldn’t be the first reaper house-sire of my clan,” I remind her, affronted. “Not even of my house. Or reaper clan-sire, for that matter.”
“Mezzo is house-daughter, not you,” she sighs, tying her white silk skirts about herself.
“I could start my own line,” I smile from her cot.
“Your lord sire would never allow it.”
“If I am house-sire, he will have little say.”
The drone readies herself for her work, preparing her tools and readying her oils, kneeling before her worktable. With no house or clan to name her, she has no name, only class and work.
Beauty, I would call her. Beloved.
I think she would favor something practical. Rasp, perhaps.
“He would sooner see us both dead than his first son take a commoner and a drone into his harem.”
Her brows knit in thought. Thinking is a lovely aspect upon her.
“My lady, you are stronger than any brute, more beautiful than any siren, more persistent than any spitter, more clever than any reaper, and more focused than any bullet. Who would be more worthy to be my jewel than you?”
I climb out of bed and watch her work, running my secondary hands along the small of her back.
“Your lord sire will not see it that way, and your lady dam would be inclined to agree,” she muses dryly as I run my main hands along her shoulders, nuzzling the back of her neck, taking in her smell.
There is an old superstition that the presence of a drone in one’s bloodline will lead to more drones, but it’s a myth. Voidlings will sometimes produce clutches with no rhyme or reason.
Ten generations my sire’s bloodline prided itself on brutes and sirens. My sire is a brute, my grand-sire a brute. His sire was a brute, and his dam a siren. Ten unbroken generations, until I was born.
My dam, jewel of his harem, was the product of a long line of exclusively siren-daughters. House Boiler of Clan Louis was said to be unable to produce any other sort of female, and was well regarded as having the most beautiful sirens in three generations.
My egg-twin, Mezzo, was everything our sire hoped for in a daughter, the epitome of what a siren should be, second only to our dam. Known for her cleverness as well as her beauty, her musical skill, her shrewdness. It is said that rival clans were promising her their sons before her hide was even dry.
She cracked the shell first, curled around me in an almost protective manner, so that I wasn’t immediately visible. When they realized there was a second yolk, they expected me to be a brute. Who heard of egg-twins born different classes anyway?
That was the first time I disappointed our sire, and it wasn’t the last.
“What if your belly swells with eggs?” I ask, wrapping my secondary arms around her middle, feeling the soft flesh under my fingers, aware of the worry every time I come for a grooming. “If we were so fortunate, I would see them named and long-haired.”
He fingers falter over her rasp, a momentary pause in her work. Even the pulsating of her lights seems to stutter.
“You would know them, and it would be enough, my lord,” she answers, a slight rumble to her voice as she pulls my hands away so she can sharpen my claws.
“It would never be enough,” I tell her. “A thousand lifetimes without you by my side, a harem without you in it. It would never be enough.”
“Do not make me a casualty in your ambitions, my lord,” she snaps.
“My ambitions are to keep you safe,” I growl. “I don’t want to be house-sire or clan-sire. I want you, my lady. I want you.”
“You have many cousins and half-siblings that would seek to remove you as an obstacle to their own advancement, my lord,” she scoffs, shaping the tiny barbs along my handbones.
“I am beneath the house-sire’s notice,” I remind her.
“You are still his firstborn son, egg-twin to his heir, and a high lord,” she sighs, twisting her neck to kiss my mandible. “Enjoy what you have for the now, my lord. It is enough.”
***
I pause outside her tent, taking in a deep breath, to remember the smell of her and her oils and her work. Refreshed, sated, and satisfied, I am ready to return home and attend my proving, and with time to spare.
I make my way to Tusker Keep, feeling the scrap of leather in my pocket. I would have liked to have shown it to my lady, but she did not seem in a mood for flights of fancy today, so I will bring it up another time.
Unfortunately, fate seems to be in good humor today. The two spitters have returned, the lisping one armed with a club and the other with a long knife.
“Give it back, reaper,” the intact one snarls.
“Spitter-gentlemen!” I beam, all four hands spread wide to show no ill intent, grapplers retracted into their slits along the exposed barbs of my spine. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“You know exactly what this is about, Tusker-reaper,” the lisping one spits, his faulty mandible mangling his words horribly. “Give it back, and we’ll send you home to your dam with your hide intact.”
“Honestly, spitter-friends, I don’t know what this is about,” I tell them innocently. “But I am late and can’t stay to entertain. It is my proving, you know.”
“Then let us give you your present,” growls the lisping one, tapping his club against his palm.
What voidling class are you?
