He felt a suffocating love for the entity who had built that setting, who had polished those jewels.
When they reached the gardens, he stopped. Rich scents enfolded him, and the breeze drew a low murmur from the gardens, sweeter than any whispered love words. The loveliness rolled over him, inescapable, wild, magnificently excessive.
Lanilla found him, hours later, lying among the stickylip trees, face-down in a bed of fallen leaves. The drug was leaving him, and he was full of a pleasurable lassitude. When the choke band clamped down, his eyes popped open and he scrabbled at the ground, trying to draw a breath. Looking up, he saw her, holding the pain rod.
“What’s this, Octoff?” She seemed more curious than angry. “What are you doing?”
He got to his knees, shaking his head, unable to speak.
“Please don’t hurt him, New Husband,” the dog said, fawning.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lanilla seemed only mildly interested in the answer.
“A mild drug, New Husband, harmless....” Speaker cast an anxious look back at Octoff.
Lanilla’s face hardened. “What sort of drug?” When Speaker didn’t immediately answer, she slashed at the dog with her pain rod. Speaker made a terrible sound, an animal screech that seemed frighteningly unnatural coming from her human mouth.
Octoff, still caught in the drug’s spell, found her pain unendurable. Without any conscious decision he lunged at Lanilla, he clubbed at her with his forearm, a blow that should have broken her neck.
His arm rebounded from her neck as if from stone, and Octoff realized that she was augmented, that she was probably his physical equal even without the collar. He wondered how he had failed to not ice this before. She gave him a look full of feral delight. “I’m a well- engineered girl. What would you expect, when I’m marooned here in the middle of nowhere with a slayer like Octoff Malheiro? Do you think me stupid? Should I have depended on this trinket alone?”
The choke band crushed his throat so violently that he thought he was about to die. The drug made it seem almost abstract and he felt a slight curiosity: how would it feel? His vision began to dim. He watched Speaker trot toward Lanilla as he toppled slowly onto his face. Speaker snapped at Lanilla, snarling, as if Beauty’s cont rol had lapsed for a moment, but then the dog shied away, tail between her legs.
Lanilla cornered the dog against the garden wall and then began to hit her with the pain rod. The last thing Octoff saw was Speaker writhing on the ground. Lanilla, face congested with ugly satisfaction, struck again and again.
Speaker’s screams faded. The world faded.
Octoff woke in Lanilla’s suite, muscles cramped, neck throbbing. He groaned.
Lanilla leaned over him, full of malicious amusement. “So, linear again.” She slapped his shoulder. “Get up.”
He swung his legs off the slab and sat up. His head pounded fiercely, and his mouth tast ed of old blood.
Lanilla lowered herself carefully into a nearby lounger, and he saw that she wore riot armor, an articulated layer of translucent brown chitin. At her shoulder was the logo of SubStraight, a decapitated human figure in yellow, on a crimson triangle. “Let me tell you,” she said, “what happened to you. Your darling dosed you.”
He rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear his vision. “Dosed me?”
“The fugue-gas generator. It was a trap, laid by the last Husband. He intended it as a gift for me, but the thing gave it to you instead.”
His thoughts were still thick and slow.
“I’ll explain,” Lanilla said, and her color was high, her eyes sparkling. “If I had taken the gas, I’d have become its slave, or its lover, which is much the same in this case.”
He shrugged. “I’m already a slave... it makes no difference to me.”
“Yes, true enough, but had I gotten the dose, you’d be a dead slave. I would have been too jealous to let you live. You see how lucky we both were?”
He looked at her. A sudden sharp memory filled his mind; Speaker twisting in the dirt, shrieking. “Where’s Speaker?” he asked, looking around.
“Dead,” she said. “I’m going to kill the rest of it; it’s an evil, unnatural creature. Help me do it. Look what it did to you.”
He felt no anger toward Beauty, but betrayal appeared to be his only option. “I know something,” he said, slowly.
Her eyes glittered. “What is it?”
He touched the choke band. “First the collar. Then I’ll tell you.” She stood, still smiling, and stepped behind him.“You’re bargaining with me?” she whispered in his ear. The choke band tightened, just the tiniest bit. “Let me guess. You were going to tell me about the Exotics? Weren’t you?”
He stiffened. “Yes,” she said. “That was it, wasn’t it? But I’ve known about that for days, Octoff. Why haven’t you told me before? It makes me wonder whose side you’re on.” He felt her move away. The band tightened a bit more. “But go on. Say what you were going to say. Say it!” she hissed.
“I saw the Exotics, she didn’t destroy them. I can take you to their hiding place.” As he finished speaking, he heard a click, and the choke band dropped away. For a moment, he froze in amazement, staring at the choke band, as it twisted slowly on the floor.
He turned, to see that a casque now protected her head, and that she held a splinter gun ready. Its sighting beam warmed the center of his chest.
She laughed, the sound muffled a little by the casque. “A gesture of goodwill, Octoff. Here’s another.” She bent down and laid a pinbeam on the floor, then kicked it toward him. “Now, pick up your collar and your gun and walk ahead of me; we’re going deep.”
He shook the tension from his shoulders. He walked out before her, but anticipation pumped fiercely through him. She’s made a mistake, he thought, she’s underestimated me. He felt a dizzy buoyancy. But she was very careful as they went down through the manse, and he found no opportunities.
They stood before the bone door. “You’ll do exactly what I want,” Lanilla said, “or I’ll kill you immediately.” Beneath the visor of the casque, her eyes were slits of determination. “Open it,” she called out, no longer speaking to Octoff.
The great muscles writhed and jerked, and then the door popped open. Inside, the Exotics huddled along the far wall of the great hall.
Lanilla herded him before her, out to the center of the hall. “Listen to me,” she called. “Listen, here is your lover, who betrayed you. Here he is, Octoff the noble emancipator, who told me of your disobedience.” She seemed to be waiting for a response; none came.
“Listen to this,” she said, her voice rising. She touched a stud at her belt, and Octoff listened to his recorded voice.
“I saw the Exotics, she didn’t destroy them. I can take you to their hiding place.”
Lanilla laughed. “You heard? And see, his collar is gone; I’ve paid him for his help. What do you think of your darling now? Answer me!”
One of the Exotics moved, a tall jewelled creature, with long spindly limbs and a great golden-eyed toad’s head. It stepped forward, its gait as strange as its body. “You are angry, New Husband,” it said, in a fine resonant tenor.
Octoff saw the shudder that ran through Lanilla’s body, under the armor. “He’s betrayed you! He’s bought his fr eedom with your lives.” she shouted, hysteria beginning to fray the edges of her voice. “Hold up the collar,” she shouted, and Octoff raised the hand in which he had carried the collar.
The toad turned to regard Octoff with calm alien eyes. “I don’t understand,” it said.
Lanilla stared at it. “All right,” she said finally, turning to Octoff.
He could see her eyes through the armor’s crystal, wide, merciless.