The leader of the Murder Beaks took a step forward and stepped onto the rail bordering their section. The wicked spurs on her legs were sheathed in razor-sharp metal, and they glinted in the light of the arena. Her talons gripped the stone and squeezed, chipping it. She glared at Pivor with the unblinking focus of a predator.
“Go back to your father, pirate. Give him my message. Your skulls are soft. Your brains are delicious. We are coming.”
She opened her beak and let out a deafening shriek. Every feather on her body stood erect. Pivor was thirty feet away from her, but he jerked back in his seat.
“The Dominion acknowledges the vow of vengeance,” Kosandion said. “We do not bear the Murder Beaks any ill will and hold them blameless in this affair.”
“Fight me, you fucking asshole!” Pivor howled, twisting in his seat. “Fight me.”
“Sadly, someone else has a prior claim,” Kosandion said. “Innkeeper, we are finished.”
Sean raised his hand and his voice whispered through the arena, quiet but heard by every creature there.
“Your welcome is withdrawn.”
The architecture of the inn folded above the doorway, spinning, collapsing, and a door rushed at us and flung itself wide open, revealing Baha-char’s sunshine. The roots of the inn spilled from the ceiling, yanked Pivor off his chair, and hurled him through the door. It slammed shut.
The feed on the screen showed Pivor landing on the big stone tiles paving the alley. He rolled, stopped, spat into the dirt, and got up, his chin jutting into the air. He adjusted his clothes…
A familiar woman dropped from the upper balcony, wrapped in a shawl.
He squinted at her.
She pulled her shawl back, revealing the faint outline of scales on her face.
“Do you remember me, Cumbr Adgi?”
He laughed.
“You beheaded my father.” Long orange blades slipped into her hand from within the shawl’s folds.
“You starved my mother to death.”
She started toward him.
“You butchered my sister.”
He kept laughing.
“You violated my body.”
“And enjoyed it,” he said.
“Today is the day I cleanse my soul of this blood debt.”
“Bring it on!”
She charged him. He danced out of the way, impossibly quick for a human, and swung at her. She dodged. Pivor’s fist connected with the wall of a building, cracking the stone. That explained why he wanted to fight Kosandion.
He shook the dust off his hand and grinned. “Come on! I’m waiting! Come on, come—”
She slipped close to him with deadly grace and spun her sword over his left forearm. Pivor didn’t even register it until his fist slid off his arm and fell to the ground. He bellowed and charged at her.
It took almost two minutes for him to die. She painted the alley with his blood, carving pieces off of him bit by bit, and when everything was done, she gouged out his eyes with her bare hands, cut off his head, pulled her shawl over her face, and walked away, melting into the current of shoppers on the busy street at the mouth of the alley.
Vercia’s honor guard turned as one and exited the stage, heading down the bridge, past me, toward the portal. She looked after them, looked at Kosandion, then back at the screen where pieces of Pivor littered the alley. Desperation twisted her face. She marched to the bridge at a near run. Nobody except me paid her any mind. There was no need to arrest her or charge her with anything. She was a dead woman walking.
Vercia saw me and swallowed. “I want a room.”
“We have no vacancy.”
She spun around and waved at the arena, incredulous.
“We are full, Lady Denoma.” I pointed to the portal. “Please, return to the Dominion.”
She clenched her hands and fled to the portal. The green glow swallowed her.
Good riddance.
I took a moment to savor the cleaner air and turned to the arena. We needed to wish the Murder Beaks goodbye, put everyone else back into their quarters, and prepare for Kosandion’s date this afternoon. He would be having a one-on-one with Cyanide, and I had no idea how it would go.
21
In our last thrilling instalment, the identity of the pirate prince was finally revealed. He was exposed and purged from the inn to Baha-char, where the woman whose family he murdered exacted her revenge. It wasn’t swift, but it was bloody.
Vercia got her just deserts when Orata dumped the entire responsibility for the Muterzen pirate prince into her lap. Vercia realized that she has a space cruiser sized target on her back and attempted to request a room at the inn. The request was denied. Mmm, so satisfying.
Now the guests are in their chambers and the long-awaited date between Cyanide and the Sovereign is beginning. Are you suffering from sweltering summer heat? Read on, for relief is only a few words away.
Gertrude Hunt had a dozen branches. Some we used often, like the one leading to Baha-char. Some, like the desert door, were used once in a while. The rest stayed mostly shut, and half of the time I forgot we even had them. However, today one of those forgotten branches got its chance to shine.
Cyanide made three requests with regard to her date: she wanted to be up high, she wanted a new view, and she wanted something soft to lie on. Like most big cats, she didn’t fancy walks unless it was the only way to get a delicious snack. We managed to deliver on all three counts.
Kosandion surveyed the rustic alpine lodge. To be honest, rustic was a relative term. It wasn’t rustic as in “Grandpa built a little cabin out of whatever timber he found handy.” It was the luxury kind of rustic, a modern homage to a Renaissance Jagdschloss that sometimes occurred when too much money met the need to roleplay as a medieval Bavarian aristocrat hosting a hunting party.
The lodge was sixty feet tall, with a gabled ceiling made of faux-redwood boards in a rich beautiful brown. The floor matched the ceiling. In front of me, a wall built with rough square slabs of gray stone housed a massive fireplace. A fire crackled within, radiating warmth. Thick timbers, stripped of their bark but left naturally round, thrust from the wall above the fireplace, supporting a narrow second story walkway. Matching wooden columns rose to the ceiling to meet thick beams.
The wall on my left was redwood and stone. The walls on my right and behind me were floor to ceiling glass, set into a faux-redwood frame. Beyond the glass lay an alien planet. A winter wonderland stretched as fast as the eye could see.
We were high up on a mountain slope under a sky smothered with pale clouds. In the distance, on the left, a white peak rose from the forest, jagged and sharp, a sign of a young mountain range. Just beyond the windows, the ground dropped, rolling to the valley below. Alien trees blanketed the steep slope. Their branches, sheathed with long, fluffy needles and coated with snow, cast blue shadows onto pristine white powder. It was one of the most perfect winter landscapes I had ever seen. You could almost hear the crunch of the snow underfoot just by looking at it.
“Where is this?” Kosandion asked.
“I don’t know. There are no artificial signals coming from this planet. No radio waves, no energy readings. When that happens, the only way to identify the location is by taking an image of the night sky and running it through a galaxy mapping unit, but I’ve never seen the stars here. It is always like this—a long blue winter under an overcast sky.”