Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Pleasure's Foehn (27 page)

“She’ll need Sustenance,” Tariq told Dr. Gruber. “And the Siegle.”

The head scientist nodded and sent one of his assistants after what was needed.

“I can’t go after the Saurian,” she said to Cair.

“You let me worry about the skink,” Cair stated and looked Tariq in the eye.

“Thank you. A thousand times, thank you.”

Tariq shrugged. “Before you venture out after the Saurian, I need to have a long talk with you, warrior,” he told Cair.

Cair nodded then turned to introduce Davan to his brother Liam. The Burgon walked over to Tariq. “I have given orders to release those men who have been given the Transference. There are three going through Transition at the moment and another four almost at cycle. Those seven will have to wait to be transported to Amhantar.”

“Davan’s mate has agreed to take them in?” Tariq asked.

“He understands the dangers involved and will have adequate facilities constructed on one of Amhantar’s satellite planets. It has been used mainly as a game preserve but he tells me he was going to stop that practice. It should be a good place for your men.”

“They will need mates,” Tariq said. “A Re…” He stopped. “Warriors such as we need companionship.”

Ryden Bakari coughed. “Well, I’ll leave that sort of thing up to you although…” He glanced at Cair and Davan. “I have a few hundred concubines who might be willing to make the journey to Amhantar.”

“What of the facility here on Riezell Nine?” Tariq asked.

“R-9 is a complex that should not be wasted. We will keep it open as a medical facility but there is no need for making warriors if there is no war to fight,” The Burgon replied. “I was furious they had given Prince Liam the parasite. I had ordered that practice stopped but someone dropped the ball apparently. We need no more such warriors.”

Tariq’s handsome face became sad. “Unfortunately, there will always be warriors, Your Excellency.”

Cair smiled as Davan told him the news of her pregnancy. “I knew I had seeded you with our child,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Thank the Goddess it survived the attack.”

“He survived the attack,” Davan said. “And all the thanks go to Tariq and the parasite.” She grasped her husband’s arm. “We have to find a way to get him home to his Bahiya.”

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“His mate?” Cair asked. At Davan’s nod, he assured her they would leave as soon as a ship could be readied for a long space journey.

“But what of your duties?” she asked. “Your mother will—”

“Have Liam to bully around,” Cair said. “All my life that woman has pulled my strings and I have danced to her tune whether I was willing to or not. I don’t like being a puppet, Davan, and I refuse to be one. Liam is quite content to be the King of Amhantar and I am more than willing to abdicate to him. I asked The Burgon to have his chancellors draw up the papers and I will sign them before we leave for the Green Sector.”

Worry shifted over Davan’s face. “Cair, your mother will have a fit over this. She won’t let you rest until she’s orchestrating your life again.”

“I have never gotten along with my mother,” Cair admitted. “I never really knew why. I always thought it was because I was dark like her and not fair like my father. Well, now I know why and she knows I know why I never looked like Bennick and Liam. I don’t think she’ll open her mouth about what I do from now on.”

Davan gave her husband a strange look and with the newfound powers growing in her read his mind as easily as though his thoughts were written on his forehead. She saw the truth of his parentage.

Dr. Gruber’s assistant was back with a large beaker of Sustenance and a wickedlooking hypo filled with tenerse. Wincing at the dark red liquid in the beaker, Cair turned away, having to press his lips tightly together to keep from gagging as he heard his wife greedily swallowing the vile stuff. Hearing her smack her lips as though she had enjoyed the very best of repasts brought bile to his throat.

“Warrior,” Tariq called out. “We need to have that talk now.”

Cair was happy to step away from Davan and the sight of her swilling down blood. Liam had warned him such would happen but hearing of it and seeing it were two different things.

Tariq indicated Cair was to precede him into the room in which Davan had gone through her Transition then nodded at Gruber. The head scientist hurried over.

“Close the door behind you, Healer,” Tariq ordered.

Cair felt uneasy as he looked at his wife’s torn clothing—stained with blood.

“What has your brother told you about all this?” Tariq asked. Cair tore his eyes from the bloody clothing. “Only that he believes I should accept what you are about to offer me.”

Tariq folded his arms over his massive chest. “And what are your feelings about that, warrior?”

“Liam tells me Davan will live hundreds of years,” Cair said. “And I want to live those years beside her.”

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Charlotte Boyett-Compo

Chapter Eighteen

Tariq was overseeing each of the two ships that would be leaving Riezell Nine within the next two days. The largest ship—an Empire-class troop transport—was being retrofitted with six containment cells and stocked with large refrigerated vats of Sustenance brought in by a cargo carrier from Aduaidh Prime. The smaller ship had one containment cell and was also being provisioned with Sustenance and things necessary for a long journey in space. Gallons of tenerse were being stocked in the sickbays of both ships as well as the equipment necessary to turn the wheat fungus
Claviceps
purpurea
into tenerse.

“Staring at the dust won’t make him return any sooner, Pretty One,” Tariq commented to Davan.

Davan glanced around. “He’s been gone over a day and I’m worried.”

“There’s no need to be,” Liam said as he and Davan’s brother Roman carried some of the provisions into the
Turas
, the ship that would carry Tariq, Cair and Davan into the unknown depths of new galaxies. “The skink doesn’t stand a chance out there no matter where he hides. That one drop of his blood is all my brother needs to track him to his slimy hole and pull him out.”

“Thank the Goddess every warrior of the Aduaidh Empire had to have his DNA coded,” Roman said. “Even skinks.”

“Your mate will be safe, Davan,” Tariq told her. “He is now a warrior among warriors. The Saurian does not have a breath of a chance against The Black Sun and his scytheblade.”

“But what if Avatás sneaks up on him and stabs him in the back?” she fretted.

“The cut will heal in a matter of moments and make Cair madder than hell,” Liam answered.

“And if the skink worms his way down into the sand, Cair will simply shape shift into the biggest, meanest mother-fucking anteater this side of Réalta Madra and suck that bugger up in his snout and chomp him into space dust,” Roman chuckled.

“Don’t be silly, Roman! He can’t do that,” Davan said with a snort.

“If he can imagine it, he can shift into it, though the human and wolf forms are considered our natural forms,” Tariq disagreed. “I have heard of anteaters. Is that where they breed? On Réalta Madra?”

“Among other places,” Roman replied. “Why?”

“I thought perhaps that might be from whence I came if I had heard of such beasts,”

Tariq said with a sigh.

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“We’ll find your home, warrior,” Davan said. “Don’t worry. Perhaps Réalta Madra is where we will find your Bahiya.”

“I trust you, Pretty One,” Tariq said.

Davan smiled then returned to her vigil of the violent storm blowing past the docking bay observation window. She squinted, believing she saw a man walking across the shifting dunes. Placing her palms on the window, she stared at the spot where she thought she’d seen him but there was nothing there—only the undulating red sand blowing across the inhospitable landscape of Riezell Nine. Tariq joined her at the window. “He’s out there,” he said. “I can sense him and so can you if you try.”

“How?”

“Close your eyes and meld your mind to his.”

Davan shut her eyes and concentrated. There was a faint touch along her nerve endings—as though an unseen hand had stroked her cheek—and she opened her eyes to search the swirling sands beyond the window.

“There!” she said. “On the crest of that largest dune!”

Liam and Roman came to the window, as well, and tried to look past the sand pelting the thick glass, but the dust obscured their view.

“I can’t see him but I can sense him,” Liam said.

“That is because he is blood of your blood,” Tariq said. “And Davan can sense him because she has his blood within her in the form of their unborn child.”

“And the reason I can’t sense him,” Roman commented.

“Aye,” Tariq said, “but when he returns, you should take a sip of his blood for you are now family. You never know when such a thing might come in handy.”

“I see him!” Liam said.

A lone figure was walking down the tall dune, his cape whipping around him as he struggled to maintain his footing. His right hand rested on a long stick he used as a walking cane. As the sands swirled around him, the pommel of the weapon strapped on his back glinted in a ray of sunlight, sending up reflected colors to dance around the hooded cowl of his cape.

“Is that what I think it is in his left hand?” Roman asked. There was a brutal smile on Tariq’s handsome face. “Aye, it is the head of his enemy.”

Davan shuddered. “What, pray tell, did he want to bring that thing back for?” she demanded.

“Such is the Reaper way,” Tariq said and as Davan, Liam and Roman looked at him, the warrior cocked a careless shoulder. “Such is what we are, my people, but that is something I prefer you keep to yourselves.”

“Reapers,” Liam said, trying the word out. “Grim reapers, eh?”

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Charlotte Boyett-Compo

“Prime Reaper,” Tariq said, “is what I am. You’re just a chip off the old scythe.”

Cair was only a few hundred feet from the window and had already seen those who were watching him. He stopped, lifted his walking stick in greeting and then continued on.

“Well, I won’t have that ugly thing sitting on a shelf somewhere deteriorating,”

Davan said. “He can keep it in a jar somewhere where I don’t have to look at it.”

Tariq put an arm around her shoulder. “Exclaim over it, Pretty One, when he presents it to you then politely suggest he throw the thing away lest you want to dust it upon your mantel from now until doomsday.”

“Ugh,” Davan exclaimed.

Cair Ghrian had seen Tariq put his arm around Davan’s shoulder and he stopped walking again, his eyes locked on the other warrior. He stood there with his cape fluttering around him, his face nearly hidden in the folds of the cowl but the angry glint in his stare turned crimson.

Tariq laughed and removed his arm, holding both of them up as if in surrender.
Friends, warrior
, he sent to the man outside.
Nothing more than friends.
Keep your hands to yourself
,
Cair warned.

“Touchy, touchy,” Liam said with a laugh.

“I would expect nothing less from a man who will one day be a Prime,” Tariq said. Cair resumed his struggle across the savagely blowing sands and disappeared beneath the jutting level of the docking station’s outside catwalks. Davan hurried to the airlocks through which her husband would pass. She was fairly dancing from foot to foot as she waited for Cair to join her. She could hear the dull thunk of the airlocks opening, closing and sealing, and could barely contain herself. Although she knew her husband was well, until she actually put hands on him and checked for herself, she was as nervous as a long-tailed Meicisceo rat in a roomful of berserk cybots. When the airlock leading onto the docking bay catwalk shushed open, she almost threw herself at Cair.

“Easy, wench,” Cair laughed as he dropped his walking stick and snaked his arm around her.

Avoiding looking at the grizzly trophy clutched in her mate’s hand, she threw her arms around his neck and brought his mouth to hers. She tried not to flinch when she heard a thud at her feet as Cair dropped his prize and enveloped her in both his arms, grinding his lower body to hers as their mouths dueled with one another.

“Take that to your chambers, Ghrian,” The Burgon ordered. “There are some of us here who have no women upon whom to pounce.”

Cair broke away from Davan’s excited kiss and glanced over at Ryden Bakari. The emperor was standing with Davan’s brother Lorcan who would be accompanying The Burgon home to Aduaidh Prime—the only internee from Riezell Nine to do so. 156

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“I hear you are giving your concubines a choice of staying hermetically sealed in your seraglio or else going back with Lorcan to Amhantar as potential mates for Tariq’s men,” Cair said.

Both The Burgon and Davan looked surprised. “How do you know that?” Ryden asked.

“Tariq and I kept up a conversation while I was searching for the skink,” Cair replied. “He told me what was going on.”

“I don’t know that I like having warriors capable of communing on such a level,”

The Burgon complained.

“That can easily be remedied,” Cair said.

Ryden’s face paled. “No,” he said, shaking his head and crossing his hands back and forth in front of him in denial. “I don’t wish to become one such as you.”

“Your wives could be with you for hundreds of years,” Davan suggested.

“No!” The horror in The Burgon’s voice was almost humorous.

“I’m told the sex is ten times greater,” Cair said. He looked down at his lady and grinned mercilessly. “I intend to find out before the sun sets on this day.”

Davan threw her head back. “I intend to find out before the hour is over!” she countered and took his arm to pull him with her down the catwalk. Cair would have bent down to retrieve the Saurian’s head but Davan would have none of that. “It’s a nice present, warrior,” she said, “but I’m not into dusting.” She pushed him in front of her and away from his gruesome trophy. Staring down at the head of the man who had nearly killed his sister, Lorcan pulled back his foot and kicked the gory thing into the airlock. He turned and strode off, his hands thrust into the pocket of his new uniform trousers. The Burgon gazed at Avatás’ sightless eyes—open wide and glazed—and a mouth that would gape forever open in stunned surprise and wondered about the confrontation between the two warriors on the red dust hell of Riezell Nine. He swept his attention over the clean cut at the base of the Saurian’s neck and marveled at the sharpness of Ghrian’s scytheblade for the cut was almost surgical in its precision. Though he had never held one of the deadly weapons, he hoped one day to possess one for the collection he had in the Great Hall on Aduaidh Prime. Turning away Ryden called out to one of the workers on the catwalk and when that man looked his way, ordered the mess in the airlock cleaned up. “Throw that vile thing into the nearest incinerator,” he commanded.