Pondering this thought, Tesh-Dar opened the black tube that had been the catalyst for their tribulations. She began to read the long-delayed correspondence from the Empress, knowing that she must seek an audience with Her to discuss these unforeseen developments.
Eleven
“And there is only the one who remains, priestess of the Desh-Ka?” the Empress asked. The two of them walked side by side in the Imperial Garden. It was a paradise of flora from every one of the Empire’s ten thousand worlds. The number and variety of plants were such that, had Tesh-Dar the luxury of time, she could have expended a complete cycle walking about the great greenhouse, strolling for several hours each day, without ever seeing the same tree or blooming flower twice. The aromas that caressed Tesh-Dar’s sensitive nose were an endless source of delight. The one time she had dared touch one of the plants – only with the permission of one amongst the army of clawless ones tending to their welfare, of course – her fingers had thrilled to a song of life that was unlike anything she had ever felt before. Primal and pure, it was a feeling she deeply cherished.
But now, walking beside the Empress, even the great garden could not lift her spirits. She felt an acute sense of disappointment at the results of the great experiment that had begun what seemed like only yesterday. But over a dozen years had passed since the raid on the strange human settlement that had been populated almost entirely with their young. Tesh-Dar would have thought that such planets would have been plenty, for that is how their own young were raised. After giving birth at the nurseries, the mothers departed soon after their recovery, leaving the infant children in the care of the Wardresses who would tend to their needs and train them until they were ready to join the kazhas. It was not uncommon for a mother never to see her child again after its birth, and the code of the Way ascribed even the naming of the child to the Wardresses. The only link from generation to generation was the passage of the Ne’er-Se, the ritual verse each mother left the Wardresses to teach her child, an oral trace of the females in the mother’s bloodline. The males, of course, were not included; they were never even given a name, and those born lived, bred, and died at the nurseries. Thus it was a surprise to Tesh-Dar to learn that the human planet they had raided had been an aberration, a purgatory for the human young who had been forced to live there.
The priestesses of the other kazhas who had participated in the raid had been equally shocked. They should have been walking here with the Empress, as well, save they had no reason to come: in the cycles that had passed since then, all of the human children who had been taken had died on the terrible path that was the Kreelan Way. By disease, overzealous punishment on the part of the tresh, accidents, suicides, and from countless other causes, many never fully understood by the priestesses and the healers. The answer to the Empress’s original curiosity had been unavoidable: the humans had no soul. Yes, Tesh-Dar had conceded, some of them rose well to the thrill of battle, the crash of sword upon sword, the sting of the enemy’s claw; but still, their blood did not sing. Many times she had seen fire in one or another’s eyes as she had traveled through the kazhas spread across the Homeworld and the Settlements, but she had never once heard a single note of the song that united each of Her Children unto the Way. Their voices among the spirits – the Ancient Ones – to which she especially was attuned, had remained silent these many cycles. The plants around her now were more vocal in spiritual song than anything she could detect from the humans, save the occasional insight into their torrid emotions.
Yes, she thought to herself grimly, they all had died.
All but one. Reza.
“Yes, my Empress,” she replied to her ruler, her twin sister by birth, “there remains only one.” In an ironic twist of fate that was so common among her people, Tesh-Dar had been born with silver claws. Her twin sister, whose given name had never been spoken since she assumed the leadership of her people, had been gifted both with black claws and the white hair that tradition demanded of one destined for the throne. Tesh-Dar flexed her claws, black as night now. The color, as well as her tremendous size and strength, had come with the changes wrought during an ancient ceremony performed among the Desh-Ka, the bonding of one soul with another. The one to whom she had bonded herself had long ago died in battle, and Tesh-Dar’s heart had ached with emptiness ever since. “The one of my kazha, whose tresh is thy daughter, Esah-Zhurah, yet lives.”
“And how,” the Empress asked, turning to face her sister, “does it fare?”
“He fares well, my Empress,” Tesh-Dar replied, unconsciously substituting the pronoun she herself used for referring to the human. She had long before stopped calling Reza “it.” Tesh-Dar would have died before admitting it openly to the peers, but she had become fond of him with a depth that bespoke her respect for the child. Rarely did she miss the chance to watch him fight in the arena, sparring confidently with those of her own race. His first Challenge, fought after he and Esah-Zhurah had returned from the mountains with the fantastic tale of the great genoth, had been less than auspicious, she remembered. The two of them had returned from their free time exhausted and spent from their ordeal, and two days later was the Challenge. Tesh-Dar pictured Reza in the arena that first time, pitted by the draw of the lottery against Chara-Kumah. It was a pairing that Tesh-Dar had considered a fairly even match, at least in terms of size, for the human child.
But the match was hardly even. Chara-Kumah expertly humiliated her opponent, toying with him, drawing him in each time to receive a blow to the legs or shoulders, inflicting pain but little damage. And Reza reacted as if he had never had a moment’s training in the use of staff or sword, as if he were still the tiny spirited human pup who had lashed out with his father’s knife at a Desh-Ka priestess so long ago. Tesh-Dar had seen the flames in Reza’s eyes, and she had found herself hoping beyond all hope that her mind would catch a note – a single peal – of the song she sought to hear. But there was only the grunting and crash of weapon against armor, the cries of pain as exposed flesh was bruised and beaten. Reza lasted for two turns of the timeglass before Chara-Kumah tired of his company. She felled him with a brutal blow to his carelessly exposed legs, then quickly delivered another strike to his head before Tesh-Dar called an end to the affair. Half-carried by Esah-Zhurah, who made her own way to the fourth set of contests before falling to a young swordmistress, Reza staggered from the field, bloodied and beaten.
But he had never allowed himself to suffer such a humiliation again. During the next cycles, he improved tremendously, so much so that Tesh-Dar felt compelled to let him act as a weapons master, a teacher for the neophyte warriors coming into the kazha. His last performance in the arena had been little short of astounding, winning all of his matches to the fifth level, two short of the final match that determined the overall winner of the single-round elimination combats that made up the Challenge. Esah-Zhurah, too, had improved more than Tesh-Dar ever would have been able to believe for one whose collar had been earned as a child on the space-going kazha for those called to serve the Imperial Fleet.
She thought again of Reza. Were his skin different, had he claws and fangs and raven hair, had he been female – one would have believed he was Kreelan. And perhaps, Tesh-Dar thought, he was. In spirit, if not in body. Yet his blood did not sing, and it pained her greatly.