Ruiz heard the cautious plop of the guards’ large discoid feet as they entered the cell, and he smelled the faint fish-oil scent of their bodies.
“Sleeping like a sprat,” one muttered in the pangalac trade language.
“As you must have been when you put him in here,” the other said in a sharper tone. “The bitch gave definite instructions: blue mark in solitary cells, the rest in the Old Trari Tree paddock. You keep pluckheading around like this, she’ll have your quills.”
Ruiz heard a hiss and rattle; he assumed it signaled offense. Ruiz opened one eye slightly and saw the first guard swelling his throat sac. “Pluckhead, am I?” it shrilled. “My quills are thoroughly attached. See? The blue mark is on him, as I told you. The bitch simply changed her mind. And anyway, there’s no harm this way. As long as the special stock stays in cells, no harm. Now, if I’d gotten it the other way around, as you did last Windday, then I’d be concerned. Have you forgotten the episode?”
“How was I to know the muckling little widge was a cannibal?”
Further acrimony was prevented by Ruiz, who appeared to awaken. “Demons!” he shrieked in Pharaohan; then he leaped into the corner, where he pressed himself trembling against the stone.
The guards rolled their protruding eyeballs at each other. The larger one shook out a net and bared its teeth in what was intended to be a reassuring manner. “Come along quietly, gangly norp,” it said, motioning toward the doorway.
Ruiz observed that energies snapped and whispered along the strands of the net. Not wishing to be stunned, he peeled himself off the wall, gathered his dignity, and left the cell, mugging fearfully.
They moved through what seemed miles of subterranean corridors, before coming out into the daylight. The walls were still high, the way narrow, closed over with buzzing snapfields, but Ruiz turned up his face to be bathed in the sun. From a hundred clues — the hot light, the pull of gravity, the richness of the air, the smell of salt, the fragrance of the unseen vegetation — Ruiz knew with reasonable certainty that he was on Sook, a notorious refuge for pirates and slavers and an assortment of other monsters. He felt a thrill of expectation and fear.
If he could somehow escape and launch a message torpedo to the League’s Dilvermoon headquarters, his job would be finished and the mission-imperative that drove him would dissolve, taking the death net with it.
But it was far more likely, he thought, that the net would instead take him to his death.
Chapter 16
The narrow passageways twisted and turned as they continued through the warren.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of unlicensed slavers must maintain facilities here, as well as pirates, kidnappers and bootleg fleshtinkers. In the course of his work, Ruiz had visited many of Sook’s slave pens and shipping depots, but nothing looked familiar to him, nor did he remember an operation staffed by Pung guards. He wasn’t surprised; Sook was vast and the Shards, the planet’s alien owners, vigorously suppressed attempts to map the surface — and that deliberate obscurity was another attraction for the criminals who based their operations here.
Here and there observation ports were set into the walls. The ports were ancient, caked with dust and clouded with scratches, but Ruiz could see enough to be amazed at the diversity of the merchandise. Within the paddocks were beings of most of the races Ruiz was familiar with, and some he had never seen. The majority of the specimens were human, or near-human.
He saw a Noctil presentation group, the lessers ranked carefully about their primary on a small grassy knoll. The primary was a lean vulpine woman with a great mass of fiery orange hair; the color of the lessers’ hair cooled from the center out, until those on the edge of the setting had sleek blond heads, and plump vulnerable bodies. The primary was orating. Ruiz was impressed by the fluid pattern that the setting formed, the manner in which each gesture of the primary was taken up by the lessers, repeated and interpreted all the way to the edge. He would have stayed and watched, had it been possible; here was a valuable property indeed. But the guards hurried him on.
Each observation port was a window into strangeness. He saw a pack of Parbalong clone yodelers, a herd of wood gnomes from Sackett’s World, a strong collection of fancy marine-adapted humans from the ocean world Cholder, sporting in a deep green pool — and many others. Most of the specimens were exceedingly fine. The compound was impressive in both size and scope.
By the time they arrived at the Pharaohan paddock, Ruiz had fallen into a subdued and thoughtful mood.
A port pierced the wall next to the doorway, and Ruiz looked inside while the larger of the guards fumbled in its pouch for the molecular seal that operated the door. The landscape within the paddock approximated a small Pharaohan oasis, without the fields and catchment system. A dusty compound huddled in the center of the paddock, surrounded by the feathery foliage of dinwelt trees.
The door hissed upward, revealing a security vestibule, lined with storage bins, closed at the far end with another door. “In you go,” said the guard, flipping the nerve net at Ruiz’s heels.
Ruiz moved with respectful speed. Once inside, the other guard opened a bin and hauled out a tunic of coarse brown fabric and tossed it to Ruiz. Ruiz put it on, and then the sandals the other guard handed him.
The guards inspected him. “Looks authentic to me. Didn’t the other ones want to shave their heads?”
The other guard laughed, a choked whistle-gurgle. “He doesn’t have to, so it appears. A natural pluckhead; can you believe it?”
Uneasiness touched Ruiz. He hoped no one else would notice that he did not have to perform that particular Pharaohan grooming ritual. His depilation was good for a few weeks yet, but his tattoos would fade before the depil wore off — another problem.
One guard touched a control panel. The first door dropped, and a moment later the inner door popped open. The guards shooed him cheerfully out of the lock. The door slid shut behind him with a clang.
Ruiz stood alone, the light of Sooksun beating on his naked head.
He looked about curiously. The paddock seemed to cover a roughly circular area of slightly more than a hectare. The walls were high and smooth, made of the same meltstone masonry as the rest of the compound. The tops of the walls were protected by snapfields that reached high above the compound, forming a faint lacy pattern in the air where they intersected with other fields. The glowing fields would be quite beautiful at night.
He set off down the path to the compound at the center of the paddock.
He resolved to pass himself off as an innocent Pharaohan bystander, to step lightly with his fellow slaves, to collect information but give out none, to fit in as seamlessly as possible, to wait for an opportunity to improve his circumstances. After all, this was his profession, which previously he had practiced with reasonable skill. He shook his head, feeling a bit pessimistic.
Taking care not to touch the corrosive fronds, Ruiz edged past the dinwelt hedge into the compound’s central square. It was deserted in the noontime heat, but after a moment a burly man with the tattoos of a guildmaster emerged from one dark doorway. “Man or demon?” he demanded of Ruiz, in a voice hoarse with suppressed terror.
Ruiz stood quietly for a moment, adopting an unthreatening posture, open hands held at his side.
“More than man, less than demon, or perhaps the other way about. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to tell,” he said cheerfully.
The man squinted at Ruiz, then relaxed. “It’s just a snake oil peddler, by his tattoos and speech.” At this reassurance, a half-dozen other Pharaohans emerged into the square.