"But there should be... more people," I protested. "There should be Guardians. And Servants. There should be more... more fanfare. We are visiting Ai-Naidar...!"
Ajan did not reply to that, only opened the door for us.
The moment we stepped inside, I knew we had made a mistake. This was not a place for receiving foreigners. The floors and walls were bare, the furniture utilitarian, and the room itself barely large enough for all of us. In it was a single narrow desk with a chair; behind that desk, the wall was a sheet of glass looking into a place exposed, nothing but racks and racks of wires and sleek metal boxes. My impression was of nothing but gray, white, black, and more gray. It was a place drained of any living color, until the aunerai rose from behind the desk. It, at least, was done in shades of peach and apricot and pale pink, with brown spiraling hairs an ornament to its head.
It was also male.
"Wasn't the Serapis aunerai a female?" Kor asked Haraa.
"Yes," she said. "This creature is not it. This creature doesn't even look like the Serapis I met."
The aunerai's brow creased and it spoke. And then we all looked at one another.
"And... it does not appear to speak our language," Kor finished, wry.
Haraa squinted, then said, "It is as confused as we are."
"You know this from its body?" I asked, glancing at her.
"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.
