"I know this because I picked up some of the aunerai words," she said.
Now we all looked at her. Even the aunerai. Who, if I were to assign an emotion to it based on our body language, was shocked. Indeed, most of its expressions seemed like more extreme versions of ours; it made it hard not to react as if it were constantly shouting its feelings.
She looked at the creature and said, "Serapis?"
It pointed to its chest, and then spread its hands and talked quite a bit before it stopped itself and scowled with such menace that I leaned back. It exclaimed something, pointed at us and growled before picking up one of the devices on its desk.
"What did it say?" Ajan whispered.
"I don't know," Haraa admitted. "It was talking too quickly for me."
Kor's ears were twitching in a way I recognized as... surely not. But it was unmistakable, even seen from behind. I drew abreast of him and exclaimed, "You're laughing!"
"Not yet," he said, eyes bright. "But I will be if this continues much longer." At my expression, he did laugh and said, "Oh, come, Farren. Admit it. This is ridiculous."
I looked at the dingy room with its lifeless machines and the single aunerai who was acting for all the worlds like a functionary disrupted by some unwanted distraction. And sighed. "Well... maybe a little."
The alien interrupted us by rapping on the desk and pointing at Shame, and then at the door. It barked something, still scowling.
"I think we're being dismissed?" I said, incredulous.
"It wants us to follow it, I think," Haraa said.
"Better and better," Kor said, and stepped back so the aunerai could precede us outside.
So our admittedly ridiculous procession formed in the shadow of the building, with the aunerai in the lead and the rest of us trailing after. Kor took the reins of all three beasts, since Ajan needed his hands unencumbered and neither Haraa nor I were easy with the creatures. One by one, then, we followed after the poor-tempered aunerai. Looking back now, it is easy to say that it was obvious, what was to come, and that we should perhaps have paid more attention to the state of our guide. But what did we know of the moods of aunera, or their expression of those moods, or why they might be harboring them? All we understood was that aunera were apparently ill-mannered and angry, in the same way one might think of poorly-trained beasts.
We know better now.
The aunerai led us down one of the streets and toward a building at its end, large enough to have several manners of ingress. To one of these side doors he led us, just as another aunerai was exiting. This one was wearing a proper gray cloak, the deeply hooded style issued visiting aunera, and this it held closed tightly at its throat; it had its back to the door, hand still on the handle. It looked from Shame to Ajan, then to Ajan's sword, and only then to me—snagging on my stole—before moving to the fathrikedi and freezing there.
"Please," she said. "Don't take him."
Her accent was credible, though she spoke without any caste-modifiers; appropriate, since she was an alien, and without caste, but it gave her speech an unfortunate baldness of manner that put everyone's ears back.
And yes, I call her "she," I know. Perhaps it was that she could speak our tongue... or maybe it was something in her eyes that elevated her beyond beasthood. But the anguish in her face made it seem... cruel... to put her in the same class as a flower, or a riding beast.
Before any of us could answer, she looked at Kor and said, "You... you must be the one he described. The one they would send for him. I won't lie to you and tell you he is not here, but... I beg of you, don't take him away!"
The aunerai that had led us here took her arm and drew her away from us, and began speaking to her in an angry staccato. I glanced at Haraa; she shook her head minutely, but her eyes and ears remained focused on them. When the aunerai male left, she whispered to me, "He does not approve of her association with us."
The female remained where the male had left her for several heartbeats, as if to gather strength; her shoulders seemed bowed beneath the cloak. Then she trudged back to us and looked up from the shadows of her hood, waiting.
With that gentle implacability that was uniquely his, Shame said, "We must see him."
She met his eyes, which even few Ai-Naidar like to do… and then bowed her head. In this seeming attitude of defeat, she opened the door for us.
This hallway, now, looked appropriate: though it was obviously a corridor of lesser importance, to be attached to a minor door, it was richly carpeted in slate blue with floral designs in an olive-gold, and the walls were paneled in a warmly reddish wood from the floor to the aunerai’s waist—our hip. Above that, there was a fine linen overlay, cream-colored with delicate floral designs matching those on the carpet. There were sconces at intervals which gave off an agreeable light, and the place smelled… floral. No flower I could place, but pleasing nonetheless. Down this hall we were led, past several doors in that rich red wood, to a round room with a vaulted ceiling and a grand circular table in the center. I stared at it as we passed, for it held a great arrangement of flowers, most of them unknown to me… but not all. Someone had arranged Ai-Naidari flowers among them with great artistry and some nuance as to the meanings of those flowers, for all of them were blooms associated with hope or prosperity or amity.
We passed out of that room into another hall, even broader than the last. The door at the end of this hall had a carved lintel, a world wrapped in some sort of decorative leaves, and a sheaf of arrows. I was wondering at the latter, uneasy, when the aunerai stopped before this door and drew in a breath that she probably thought was inaudible. She looked over her shoulder at us, her face deeply shadowed by the hood, and then pushed the door open.
Here at last was the formal receiving room I was expecting, or something very like it: a large chamber, rectangular in shape, its back fading into a velvety warm darkness that suggested great shelves of books; in the fore, a monumental desk on one side with a halo of chairs, and on the other a more casual grouping of furniture arranged around a low table and sideboard. The entirety of it gave an impression of rich colors and sumptuous textures: brocaded silk cushions, the patterned dark blue carpeting, the polished red wood of the desk and tables. There was a smell of aged spirits and flowers and best of all, old paper. It was a beautiful, welcoming space, and it seemed designed specifically to put an Ai-Naidari at ease—at least, as at ease as one could be in an alien space. So I might be forgiven for being distracted by it.
Shame was not. He cut through it to the loveseat where the lord of Qenain was sitting alongside another aunerai male. Sitting very alongside. Sitting, in fact, close enough to touch at the knees. I saw that first: the point of contact, so small, just the edge of the lord’s robes against the crisp fold of the aunerai’s wine-dark pants. I stared at that intersection until it grew in my mind, until I had to glance down to clear my thoughts. I raised my eyes to the tableau of the lord of the House of Flowers and Kherishdar’s Shame facing one another across an alien table. The lord had not risen; he did not have to. But he had come to attention, and the look on his face was equal parts defiance and pain.
I thought perhaps that Shame might speak, but instead he held the lord’s gaze until the lord began to tremble and the aunerai beside him bristled.
…and then Shame set the vial of ink on the table. The tap of the glass meeting wood was such a small sound, to be so shattering.
The lord burst out, “They wanted it so much. To be a part of what we are, to have a chance to be a part of something greater than themselves. I had to try. Isn’t what we have worth spreading to others?”
“That,” Shame said, “is not for you to decide, nanaukedi.”
The lord hung his head, his hands clenching his knees so tightly I could see the tendons strain on their backs, as if the caste-rank title had stung him with a reminder of his position, his responsibilities. “I am sorry,” he whispered. “What will you?”
“Nor is that for me to decide,” Shame said. “You have usurped the authority of the Emperor, and to Him you must make answer. I have sent a message; when I have His response, I will do His will.”
“What… does that… mean?” the male asked, looking from Shame to me. His command of the language was poorer than the female’s, but he was troubling himself to learn it. “Will he be—“ he searched for the word, and could not find it. It was the female who supplied it. “Corrected.”
“That is not for me to decide,” Shame said again. To the lord, “Until I receive a response, you will remain in my custody.”
A singing silence as both aliens and the lord stared at him. Then the male aunerai looked at the female and said something quickly in their own tongue, to which she replied only by shaking her head, shoulders slumped.
The lord rose slowly and said to them, “I must go.”
What followed changed us all. I spoke in the very beginning of my paisathi, of the inevitabilities that lead to change in one’s life, change that allows growth, and perhaps you thought that Shame and Ajan and Seraeda were the shape of that change and they were, they were. Certainly they were the shape that I would have expected, had you asked. But I wonder sometimes, about how the unexpected can break us open. So it was with the lord’s leave-taking of his pet aliens; it was a thing that should have been more properly relegated to perverse fantasy.
But he stood there, in grave dignity, concealing his loss, all the long lines of his robes utterly undisturbed so that he seemed almost a statue. And the female went to him first and rose on her toes, the cloak whispering around her heels. She closed her eyes as he folded the hood back from her brow with tender fingers… and then he gently kissed her naked skin, just below the hairline, and beneath her lashes gleamed a bead of water that did not fall.
The lord faced the male, then, and brought his hand to the edge of his jaw, barely touching, an intimacy that we would think nothing of between family or ajzelin. And yet, how hard the aunerai had to work to accept it! He flinched, but forced himself to hold still, and it was not revulsion if I read him rightly. He wanted the touch badly, so badly I could see his hands trembling at his sides, but he did not know how to accept it. And the lord was so careful of him.
And they… they were fully focused on him. Both of them, their gazes intent, the lines of their bodies straining toward him. He whispered something to them both in their tongue. The female lowered her face, and I saw only the wet streak on her cheek, glinting in the low light. The male’s face was a mask, but his eyes were of someone who knows that he is wounded but does not yet feel the pain.
The lord turned his back on them and walked out of the room. As we made to follow him, the female said, “Please…”
Shame and I paused to look at her.
“Please,” she said. “Make sure someone takes care of him.”
Shame said, “Kherishdar takes care of everyone,” and gently shut the door on her grief.
On the other side of the door, he and I met each other’s eyes and I said, low, “They are not animals…!”
“I didn’t expect that they would be,” he said, subdued, and followed the lord, leaving me to stare after him and then hurry in his wake.
Reck this: Once there was a country Merchant, an aridkedi potter who was the wonder of her community, for her wisdom and her deft touch with her art. So great was her talent that she promised to mend any of her pots, did they break, or else issue a new one in its stead.
