Calliope's Wings Page 2

  God knew I stepped in more beast-shit than I stayed out of it.

  I fingered the coin in my pocket absently and kept my eyes to the mated Zikta. He stopped a place or two more, gesturing for what he wanted. No coin was exchanged, but I wasn’t surprised by this. My months in the region had taught me that the Zikta demanded and the Gishtak bowed to their whims. It was a fair trade, I assumed. The warriors kept safe the freemen and, in turn, the freemen offered tribute to their protectors.

  I’d seen a good dozen females handed off into slavery for their nomadic tribesmen in my time here. Slavery was nothing out of the norm for these people or any other of Intau. My own status was proof enough of that.

  By the time the sun was reaching its zenith, the male had made his way back to the fringes of the city where the beast-stalls were. There were animals of all sorts in the queue of stables in varying sizes, but I knew he wouldn’t find his Mahzri penned up in one. The formidable creatures weren’t ever trapped in that way. They roamed where they wished and allowed only those they deemed worthy onto their backs. If a Zikta wasn’t able to garner the respect of one of the towering beasts, he didn’t ride.

  I lost sight of him somewhere between a dappled grey ‘horse’ and a lowing Lorun.

  Feeling my guts clench with dismay, I quickened my steps. I needed to find the male again. He was my immediate ticket out of this particular incarnation. I’d had enough of being brutalized at the end of whip and blade. I was literally starved, my ribcage more prominent than it had ever been before. Worse, I knew that Mathai was dangerously close to handing me over to the males of his trade for a bit of ‘succulent, pale-skinned flesh’ before I perished from misuse.

  Dying by fucking once – though it had been more than once – was more than enough for me.

  As I ducked around a low-hanging, horizontal beam, I turned to glance over my shoulder for followers. It was a mistake I felt immediately as I slammed into a hard-packed hide of dense muscle. Long-fingered claws caught and then wrapped around my shoulders before I could bounce back onto my disoriented ass.

  Peering up under the cowl of my hood, I winced all over.

  The Mahzri I was certain my mark was seeking was standing over me. The male-creature’s bronzed hide glistened in the oppressive heat and sun. The beast stood on four legs shaped vaguely like those of a velociraptor, if only much larger. He had a long, wide torso with a pair of arms adorned by webbed, clawed hands. He had the typical plate structure of his kind trailing from the tip of his nine-foot long tail to the top of his elongated neck and head. Those plates hid a vibrant red underbelly which emitted terrible amounts of heat and could drip a caustic solution which melted all but its own hide. Striped quills rimmed the wide plates of his neck and fanned impressively from a bony crest reminiscent of a tiny triceratops. He had no eyes but for the red luminescent ‘crystals’ trailing from his flat, multi-plated muzzle down to his boned shoulders.

  As the Mahzri clicked and vocalized in a manner much too similar to that of the aforementioned dinosaur, I recalled with brutal clarity exactly how much these particular beasts scared the shit out of me.

  “U-uh,” I began lowly, my breath stuttering with fear. My hands lifted and I brushed my fingers lightly on the underside of the creature’s forearms. I was leaned all the way back to look up at his downturned face. The bronzed males stood shorter than the charcoal females by a good foot, but still loomed over me by a huge margin. At a guess, I’d have estimated the beast at close to eleven feet at the top of his head. His ‘lower’ back was easily eight.

  They were like devilish centaurs.

  The Mahzri chuffed and then chittered, his mouth opening to reveal the flagella-like filaments in his mouth. Those were blackish-blue in color and waved independently. His kind were omnivores, but predominantly ate from the selective vegetation of the southern lands. I flinched away from those tendrils as he brought his face to within centimeters of mine.

  He nudged my hood off and away, puffing air over my bound silver hair. It wasn’t braided like a Tauren male’s was, but I did with it what I could.

  The Mahzri screeched and pulled immediately away. He did not, however, release my shoulders. Instead, he fell down to his paler belly on the packed earth and bopped his long neck from one side to another over my head. It reminded me of an excited horse nickering. His breath, when it gusted around me, smelled like mulled cider.

  “Let go,” I tried to say as gently as I could, trailing my fingers up his rough hide to where his claws held me. Mine were swallowed in their sheer size. Still, I picked my nails against the clawed digits, urging him to remove them from me. “Please, big boy. Let go.”

  All I got was a chittering craw in return for my efforts. The sound was loud and made me slap my hands over my ears.

  “Shh! What are you doing?!” Once he had quieted a bit, I slapped flat hands against his plated maw. A purring click issued from his chest as he snared my wrists with his feelers. “Stop it! You’re going to draw attention to me when I don’t need it. Shh!”

  Struggling was useless. I knew it. The Mahzri knew it. Still, I wriggled and panted with the best of them in an attempt to get away. Those feelers brushed the skin of my cheeks and forehead gently, not an ounce of aggression in the beast’s massive body. When one tickled my right nostril, I sneezed hard enough for my body to rock with it.

  When the Mahzri’s plates clacked and a chuff rattled in his chest, I had the sense that he was laughing at me.

  Fed up by that point, I lunged forward instead of pulling back. The move caught the beast by surprise. I catapulted into the smooth curve of his neck and chest, my nose catching a stronger whiff of mulled cider tinted with soft leather. Air whooshed from my lungs from the impact, but I was used to high levels of pain. Jarring force was nothing.

  I pivoted as best as I could, dislodging the claws on my shoulders, and then made a run for it. I got nowhere.

  The male snatched at my cloak deftly, burrowing his claws there until I heard them pop through the coarse material. If I wanted to get free, I’d have to shuck the whole garment. Not something I was content to do with my undyed hair and abnormal eyes showing to the masses. My teeth gritted and I fisted the cloak sideways, pulling futilely to free myself.

  Blinking rapidly as I yanked, my movements came to a sudden standstill as I caught sight of the Zikta I’d tailed. He stood less than five feet away, his hands opened at his sides instead of on his weapon’s hilt, and his dark eyes boring into my hair. Without a pupil, it was all but impossible to track the movement of his eyes, but I had a vague awareness of him looking me over before fixating on my own mercurial gaze.

  His tensed body coiled even more, his jaw the only part of him slackening to any degree. When he spoke in his deep rumble, I understood his tribe’s speak with little struggle, though the word he uttered was unfamiliar.

  “Innintani.”

  “Ah-hum,” I murmured and rasped on choked air. Intuition told me that the powerful warrior who’d only so recently been gearing up for slaughter had switched frames on me. That word he spoke was almost reverent. Certainly far from angry.

  No death would come to me from his hands today.

  Shit.

  “Ichix, be careful, my friend. Do not hurt Her.” I stumbled back into the Mahzri’s chest and mumbled a complaint when the Zikta closed the gap on big feet. Sometimes I felt like the smallest of mice amidst a pride of hungry lions. “Biis’a, look at me.”

  Nope. Not happening.

  Giving up on keeping my cloak, I wrenched my arms back and through the sleeves. My nubile body was quick. I was the Ghost everyone coined me as as I slipped out of the Mahzri’s grasping hold. Both males, the mount and rider, made sounds of angry distress as I vaulted into the first and nearest stall. The wooly-bear looking horse there whinnied and reared back, kicking out her front, cloved hooves at me. Whatever mild display of anger the pair had expressed at my fleeing quadrupled as I was clipped by those hooves.

  The two
males roared as I buckled into the wall from the blow to my back. When she reeled back for another strike, I loosened the latch over the lip of the stall and tumbled through the opening. The mare poured after me, running beyond my scrambling body down the long chute. The neighboring beasts bellowed, nickered, and lowed at seeing one of their own running free. Stablehands blundered into the chute with the frightened not-horse, attempting to corral her back in.

  I fled the other way and through the most clustered, indirect route to the opposite end of the stables. Neither the Mahzri nor the Zikta would be able to grab me.

  As I hit the streets, I heard the telltale signs of the Horde’s Horn trumpeting behind me. The sound sent a fissure of unease down my spine. The answering trumpets leading out into the blackened desert only made the dread pool more deeply.

  Why did I feel like I just did something epically stupid?

  Chapter Two

  Mathai didn’t give a shit about marking up his property.

  I palmed my jaw and winced at the ache there. Mari’et told me that he’d broken it. Her healing ability was acute enough that she could mend the crack in the bone, but I’d suffered swelling for days and eating had become more of a chore than it was worth. Whatever food intake I had was reduced down to what I could drink.

  Unfortunate.

  After the disaster with the Zikta, I’d stumbled back into Mathai’s hovel. The money I’d pilfered from the unsuspecting patrons of the market had been lost with my cloak. I dared not go back to the stables in search of it. Word was that the Zikta and a whole slew of others had been combing the port, one of them fisting a heavy bolt of fabric as though it were a lifeline. So, without a profit to show to Mathai, I’d been beaten badly. His caddin frond switch – a plant similar to bamboo which grew in plenty in the arid climate of the South – had tracked bloody rivulets down my back and sides. Small mercies he hadn’t unsheathed his blade again.

  I was staying clear of him as much as I could. A particularly fruitful nab of a wealthy madam near the brothel saved my ass. Mathai had enough to keep himself occupied between how to save himself from the incoming Udon – the Horde – and keeping the better part of his profits. I didn’t know why he didn’t attempt to flee to another port city early on, but that was his business. Not mine.

  Still thought he was a moron without an ounce of self-preservation in him.

  I’d done a bit of recon in the last few days. I hadn’t personally seen the Zikta who were scouring the city as I strived to keep to the shadows and maintain a low profile, but the street urchins were quick to pass on the word for rations. My own eyes had watched the black horizon striate with bronze and gold as the Udon blocked all passes out. I’d seen enough movies growing up and binged on Netflix enough to know what a siege would look like.

  I knew what overwhelming forces were.

  Luci, a bright-eyed little girl with the prettiest smile on the whole of the continent, bounced her way onto my lap and snuggled in, effectively distracting me from my inner musings.

  Without hesitation, I began to stroke my fingers over her bald scalp. I was remiss when I first noted that the females of this world were bald. It wasn’t entirely true. Their scalps boasted the same fine hair as the rest of their skins, more of a downy suede than anything.

  My fingertips tripped over the patches of deadened skin near her temple. The splotches were mostly restricted to thinner areas of skin like the face, fingers, and groin. They looked outrageously painful, but I knew from all the unfortunate souls besieged by the disease that it didn’t actually hurt. Instead, the sores caused permanent nerve damage and total paralysis in some cases. More than a dozen of the residents in the encampment close to the wharf had lost fingers before their boat sailed in from Surba.

  Luci and her clan weren’t from the port-city, but it was a regular stop for them. They were a seafaring people and spent the better part of their year on the open water. It was only when the outbreak started and began to spread through their children that they docked to seek treatment.

  “Calliope,” Luci whispered as she looked up at me. Her black eyes shimmered with friendly warmth. “Are you well?”

  “I am well, pretty one.” It’d taken me a long time to get out of the habit of intermixing English slang with any of the other languages I’d learned in my lives here. ‘Okay’ was one of my most missed words. It conveyed so much with so little.

  Beyond even that, I was only guessing that I knew some of the words I ‘learned’. Mostly, I felt like I was playing Mad-Lib in my head. That was bound to happen, though, when no one knew English and I was trying to translate from nothing beyond my own imaginings. I figured I didn’t do too bad, though, because I could communicate in full-sentences in a handful of tongues.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure.” I took a deep breath through my nose before leveling my palm out on her temple. I leaned forward to tap my nose to hers and beamed. “How about we take care of this last one, yes?”

  “Yes!”

  Setting my breathing into a familiar pattern, I allowed the heat I’d felt just beneath my skin since my first life on Intau to come free. I hadn’t known what it was. I’d been terrified of it the first time it’d poured out of me amidst a group of captured women who’d been made into slaves for a cruel Master. All of their wounds had healed when that heat escaped and I’d been left a quivering mess on the floor. My ‘stay’ at the pleasure house hadn’t lasted much longer than that.

  Magic, I realized, was a very real thing in this world. Not common and taboo in most regions, but real. I don’t know how I was infused with it just as I didn’t know how I kept waking up after death in a world that wasn’t my own. Yet, when I’d heard about Mari’et and her abilities spoken in hushed whispers around the port, I’d sought her out. It was apparent that I was never going to be free of Intau, so I needed to acclimate as much as I could…and that included becoming familiar with my ‘gift’.

  Luci hummed contentedly as the heat that had been under my skin transferred into her in a healing balm. I could all but see her pale pink aura knitting back together from where it had been split by the disease so similar to leprosy. My own aura, a milky white and silver of dew-riddled fog, washed over hers softly. When it rolled away, the pink left behind was brighter. Healthier.

  Blinking tiredly down at her, I leaned back into the padded sack of laundry I’d commandeered earlier in the afternoon. Luci and an older man, Brok, whom was being attended to by Mari’et, were the last of the clan. It had taken weeks, but they were finally recovered to the point that they could return to sea.

  “Dashka, Calliope.” The word of thanks, spoken in the Tongue, was earnest as she embraced me. I hugged her back exhaustedly. We’d been rushing to see these people cured so they could leave the port before the warring started.

  Ever since my disastrous run-in with the Zikta a week ago, the horns had been blowing constantly. The warning drums at the gate to the city had been hammered on just as brutally.

  The Horde was coming.

  “Luci, go see to your dam, please.” Mari’et, a buxom Gishtak, gracefully rested onto her knees beside me in the laundry. The little girl obeyed without question. If anything, our healing of her clan endeared us to them by a wide margin. Many vowed their loyalties to us on the spot. “My friend, you do not look well. May I see to you?”

  “I will be well, Mari’et. You are just as depleted as I am, I am sure.” I touched my jaw again and winced. Talking hurt almost as much as eating, but I was at least able to refrain from moving my jaw when I talked. Eating didn’t give me that luxury. “It is swelling again, is it not?”

  Fucking-A! I was dying for contractions. Talking in any of Intau’s tongues, I sounded like some old-world revival.

  “Yes.” Mari’et’s fingers heated as she brushed them along my jaw. The heat turned to blessed cool and relief. I felt the taut pull of the skin around my cheek, jaw, and throat dissipate to a manageable level. Her peachy-orange aura rubbed again
st mine with gentle, loving familiarity and the two ‘invisible’ forces fed off each other like we were kin.

  “Dashka,” my sigh was lethargic.

  “Please, Io, tell me you are leaving the port.” The other woman brushed my forearm. Her expression was worried. “They say that the Udon is another night’s travel from us. The Lord has not been able to gather the tribute we usually have and they are amassed as though for war instead of gathering. I have seen this only once before in my home village. My brago was slain and my tersti…they were taken as kut. I do not want to see the same happen to you.”

  They’d kill me first, was what I thought in the privacy of my own mind. It wasn’t something I’d voice out loud to her, though. No need to upset her more than she already was.

  Mari’et reached forward and skimmed her fingers along my braided hair. I’d dipped it into tar and ran it through so that, if looked at from a distance, I could pass off as a premature male of Tauren descent. Without my cloak, the guise was necessary.

  She’d never seen me without my hair dipped and my skin dyed, though I knew she knew I was doing something to alter my appearance.

  Her eyes were shadowed. Haunted.

  “There are legends of an Innintani descending from the Skyvryn, Her eyes alight with the One and Her body cloaked in purity. Her wings, they say, stretched the full length of two los’kah. She came once in a time of war between the Lands of Kings. She was much adored by Tauren and had the heart of Her Drake.” The other female smiled sadly at me. “You are so frail and pale. You would have made a perfect Rahvashti were you native to this land. If we are to crawl from the rubble of this port once the Udon has done what it is wont to do, I would like to show you Her alter. It is in Mel’lau. You will come with me?”

  Though I knew it was unlikely that I’d survive the invasion of the Horde – more for my own desire to die again and be free of this place than because I couldn’t hide like the little mouse I was – I clapped her hand between my own and kissed her fingers. Her grin turned tremulous.