Chapter 6
It moved through the haze of the twin suns in near-silence, and the closer it got, the more otherworldly it looked against the desert backdrop.
It was massive. Easily three or four times the size of the pirate vessel, with a hull that curved in organic, sweeping lines that didn’t look engineered so much as grown.
The surface was smooth and semi-translucent.
I could see shapes moving beneath the hull’s skin, shadows and light shifting in patterns that reminded me of something breathing.
Even in full daylight, the ship carried its own glow, a faint deep blue luminescence that pulsed through the panels in slow waves, like a heartbeat made of light.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, so haunting it made every hair on my body stand up.
The ship settled above the square, hovering, not landing. The crowd had stopped bidding. The crowd had stopped moving. Thousands of bodies, frozen, staring up at this impossible vessel that hung in the air above them. I saw hands reach for weapons, but nobody drew. They just gripped and watched.
A section of the hull parted, peeling back in overlapping segments that folded into each other, and from the opening descended a gangway that extended toward the sand in one fluid, silent motion.
Something stepped out.
It had to duck through the opening, which told me how tall it was before I could fully register anything else. Then it straightened, and I saw it.
The head was what my brain latched onto first, because it was so far outside anything I’d ever imagined that my mind stuttered trying to process it.
Enormous, elongated, tapering slightly at the back, covered in skin that was deep blue-black and textured in a way that looked almost scaled.
A crown of pale spines rose from the top of its skull, jutting upward like a natural crest. And below the spines, set deep in the broad plane of its face.
Two eyes, burning a bright luminous blue-violet that I could see clearly even from fifty feet away. They burned from somewhere behind the surface, deep and ancient, like looking into something that had been alive for a very long time and had stopped being impressed by anything centuries ago.
The tentacles erupted from behind its head and shoulders, thick, powerful, each one as long as the creature was tall or longer. They moved independently, constantly, some coiling in slow deliberate patterns, others sweeping the air in wider arcs.
The body below them was humanoid in the loosest sense, but massive. Armored in places with plates that looked grown rather than worn, dark chitinous material covering its shoulders and chest. The proportions were wrong, too broad, too dense. It made the largest miners on Krackus look like children.
It towered. There was no other word for it.
The creature descended the gangway in slow, unhurried strides. Each step belonged to something that had never once in its existence needed to rush. It carried a chest in its arms, ornate, red and gold, about the size of a cargo crate, and held it the way I’d hold a coffee cup.
It reached the base of the stage. The crowd had pulled back, giving it fifteen feet or more. A vendor had abandoned his stall. The squat alien who’d been inspecting my teeth sixty seconds ago had retreated so fast he’d knocked over his seat.
The creature stopped at the foot of the steps. Those burning blue-violet eyes swept the plaza once, a slow disinterested scan, and then they landed on me.
On me.
Every thought in my head was a scrambled mess.
The creature held my gaze for two seconds, three, and then it tossed the chest, casually. The chest hit the steps of the stage, bounced once, and the lid popped open on impact.
Gold and jewels. Pearls and gemstones in colors I didn’t have names for, all of it spilling across the stone steps in a glittering cascade that caught the light. More wealth than I’d seen in my entire life.
The auctioneer stared at the treasure, then at the creature. His hands were shaking. He fumbled for his staff and slammed it against the stage floor.
“S-sold!” His voice cracked on the word. “Sold to the…sold!”
Nobody contested it.
The wild woman shoved me forward, off the edge of the stage, and I stumbled down the steps barely catching myself. The treasure crunched under my feet, gold coins and gemstones grinding into the sand, and then I was standing in front of him.
Up close, the creature was worse. Not uglier, just more of everything.
The tentacles moved around me in slow, investigative arcs, close enough that I could see the suckers, the faint iridescence on the skin between them, jewel-bright nodes of bioluminescence pulsing blue along their length inches from my face.
Its skin gave off a faint scent of the ocean.
A tentacle reached down and wrapped around the chain between my shackles. I felt the grip, immense, controlled. The chain snapped clean and the shackles fell from my wrists and hit the sand.
Before I could react, another tentacle coiled around my waist.
I gasped. The tentacle was cool to the touch, smooth on the outer surface and slightly rougher where the suckers pressed against my shirt, and it tightened just enough to secure me.
Then it lifted. The plaza dropped away below me, the stage and the crowd shrinking as the creature carried me up the gangway toward its ship, holding me against its side.
I should have fought. But I was so far past exhaustion that the part of my brain responsible for self-preservation had packed up and gone home days ago.
The interior of the ship was dark and cool.
The heat of the Sept vanished the moment we crossed the threshold, replaced by air that tasted faintly of salt.
The walls glowed from within, soft blue-white light that shifted in organic patterns.
The floor gave slightly beneath weight. Everything in here was alive.
The creature set me down. The tentacle unwound from my waist and I dropped to my feet, stumbled, caught myself on a wall that was warm under my palm.
Then the gangway retracted. The hull sealed shut behind us. The sounds of the Sept cut off completely, replaced by a hum so deep I felt it more than heard it.
The creature coughed.
It was a rough, dry sound, nothing like the fluid power of its movements. Its skin looked drier than it had outside, duller. The bioluminescent spots on its tentacles flickered and dimmed. It coughed again, and the sound reminded me of my father in the mines.
This creature didn’t belong in a desert any more than I did.
Eat. Rest.
I flinched. Did that come from inside my head?
“What…”
The creature turned away from me. A section of wall parted ahead of it, and it walked through without looking back with it sealing behind him.
The ship took off, knocking my legs out from under me and I hit the ground hard.
The walls pulsed their slow blue light around me.
I didn’t get up.