CHAPTER 26 #2
“Tribute?” Eleri glanced down at herself. She didn’t have anything beyond the contents of her medkit and the clothes on her body. Her hat had been lost in the abduction. “I don’t understand.”
“Klatch Saakal escorted you here unharmed. For every favor you must offer tribute or insult the Multitude themselves.”
Eleri wasn’t sure she considered being escorted anywhere after being kidnapped much of a favor, but she wasn’t about to argue when it could spell her death. She fumbled around in her medkit and produced a length of bandages.
“Will this work?” she asked. In response, all three members of Klatch Saakal snatched for them at the same time. Eleri relinquished the prize and the three of them scurried away, chortling something in an eerie chorus amongst themselves.
“Klatch Saakal has not developed enough socially to thank you properly, so I will thank you on their behalf. Now, I imagine you have questions about why you were brought here.”
“Many.”
“I will start with introductions. I am Singularity Niis, leader of this settlement. I defeated and consumed my own childhood klatch and the many others who fought for this position. But as Singularity, it is my responsibility to see to the needs of the klatches under my care.”
Some of the words the ravik said made sense independently, but Eleri found herself lost in the details of his introduction. Perhaps it was the heat, but her head was swirling.
“I don’t understand.”
“How much do you know about ravik life cycles?”
“Not very much.”
“Well, come inside. I will tell you how I came to be.” The door pushed open further, and Eleri found herself stepping inside despite the general sense of unease.
The throbbing in her head was transforming to nausea now, and if she hadn’t been certain about a concussion before, she was now.
She swallowed thickly, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she bowed her head in the low doorway.
The room was cluttered with random objects and debris from floor to ceiling.
Broken datapads glinted dully. Balls of fiber lint sat in puffs.
Dead energy cells formed a mosaic underfoot.
“I don’t understand why I’m here.”
“Let me finish my topic first. I will answer your questions only after I finish my previous line of thought.” Niis’s eyestalks swiveled from one corner of the room to the other. “Their bones.”
Eleri glanced in the direction of its gaze and swallowed hard at the assorted pieces of skeleton limning the junction between the wall and thatched roof. “Whose bones?” she asked, although she wished she hadn’t.
“My klatch. And those who challenged my position. We are born in pieces, you see. Like Klatch Saakal who brought you here. Only one of them will survive to become a singularity. And once they do, they will challenge for my position, and I will kill them.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So that you know that I will not hesitate to kill you if you are unhelpful. Every time I kill, I absorb their potential, their intelligence. You would be a fine addition to my collection.”
Eleri took a step backward and nearly tripped over a nest of fiber lint. “I still don’t understand.”
“Your village leader offered your services to us. The female, Myla, spoke with some of my binaries, and they negotiated terms on my behalf. We needed a healer.”
“Binaries?” Eleri asked.
“When a klatch becomes two, they become a binary, and they serve beneath me to manage our younger klatches.”
“And what did she get in return? When she spoke to your binaries?” Eleri’s voice cracked. She wasn’t exactly surprised. Myla had been trying to find a way to get rid of her after all.
“We have been recruited to prevent the IA forces from taking Myla and her klatch into captivity. It was a balanced trade.”
The pieces snapped into place. Myla wasn’t going to allow herself or Minio to be remanded into IA custody without a fight.
She would get no help from anyone in Laurus or Indras, which meant she had no choice but to turn to their more sinister neighbors.
Her throat was still dry as the dust outside, but she ran her tongue along the back of her bottom teeth, plucking up the courage to do what needed to be done.
“You need a healer. I’m here now, but I see no patient.”
“Then follow.” Niis gestured with its eyestalks.
There was a hanging over a doorway at the far end of the room, but no signs of furnishings as she would understand them.
Eleri ducked awkwardly through the doorway, steadying herself on a stack of energy cells.
And in the far corner of the room, a figure lay prone under a stack of mismatched blankets.
Uninvited, Eleri took a few steps closer, pulling her medkit alongside her. The ravik didn’t get in her way. “Is this person why you asked me to come here?”
“Yes. Leeqa is my final surviving mate, and the bearer of my strongest klatches. Also, the bold pilot who brought us to this planet after we were ousted from Rakara.”
Eleri felt her shoulders relax only a tad.
There was a person who legitimately needed medical care.
At least this was inside the scope of her understanding, even if she resented being brought there under such violent pretenses.
“Tell me what I can do to help. My abilities are limited here without my scanners and pharmacy synthesizer.”
“Leeqa sleeps and does not wake. We have tried all the remedies we know, but nothing has helped. Occasionally, we get a few moments of consciousness, long enough to offer some hydration and soft foods, but nothing more.”
“Can I examine Leeqa?” Eleri was tired. It was a long history of trying to placate those who would do her harm.
“Yes, healer.” His spikes flared from his forearms in warning. “But remember, you live at the will of the Multitude around me. If you harm her, I will destroy you.”
Eleri clutched her stomach, trying to prevent the threat of rising bile. She was about to start her examination when she realized this might be her only chance to negotiate. Once she provided a service, it stood to reason she would be offered tribute.
“If I help you, what will you offer me in return?” It was an odd, slippery question on her tongue, but she stood firm behind it. Niis made a rattling sound with his arm spikes, which caused Eleri to shuffle backward, worried she’d made a grave error.
“Humans are jumpy little things, aren’t they?
” Niis asked no one in particular. “You are correct, healer. If you are helpful, I must offer tribute of equal value to the service you provided.” He sat on a cushion on the ground a few paces away from Eleri.
“But the nature of tributes is that they come after the help, not before.”
“I’m sure you already know what I want,” Eleri said as she approached the patient on her knees.
“Then you should ensure your work is enough to earn such a reward.”
It wasn’t the answer she’d been hoping for, but it was obviously absurd to think they would agree to let her go so easily after going through all this trouble to kidnap her from Laurus.
Eleri turned her attention to her work. Leeqa’s pulse was steady and seemed normal enough for the little she knew about ravik anatomy.
“Have you noticed any rashes or odd patterns of behavior when she’s awake?”
“It is only for a few short moments at a time.”
“Can you predict when she will wake?” Eleri examined the pale green sclera of the patient’s eyes and then rolled back the blankets with care to get a better sense of the muscle tone. There was nothing obvious. Although she was catatonic, her limbs responded to normal reflex tests.
“When the light is at its lowest, she wakes,” he responded.
“What is the daylight cycle like on your home planet?” Eleri asked, homing in on a diagnosis.
“I don’t see why this matters.” Niis tapped a long claw against one of the broken datapads. “Do you have an answer for what ails my mate or not? If you can’t help her, you are useless to me, and I will feed you to one of my klatches.”
The thought made Eleri shudder internally, but she maintained a placid expression. “If you don’t answer my questions, I can’t answer yours.”
“On Rakara, we had five standard hours of sunlight and twelve of complete darkness.”
“And this behavior started how soon after you arrived on Cassiaq-IV?”
“A few weeks. Do you have an answer or not, healer?”
“I might, but I’ll need you to lift her for me.”
He complied with a dip of his eyestalks. “This had better not injure her.” His arm spikes lay flat against his fur as he propped his mate up from the nest of blankets.
“It will not, but unfortunately, the consequences will be long lasting. I assume none of you are vaccinated against this pathogen.” Eleri thumbed through the coarse fur at the back of the female’s neck until she found what she was looking for.
Under ideal circumstances, she’d be wearing gloves, but she had received her vaccination against ulem bites, so it posed little risk.
The creature was bloated and grotesque with blood as she yanked it free of Leeqa’s neck.
“This is your culprit.” She presented the creature Niis, trying to avoid looking straight at the grotesque bloodsucker. “Unfortunately, the effects are irreversible. The ulem bite causes people to develop an allergy to ultraviolet radiation.”
“So, there is nothing to be done?”
“I didn’t say that.” Eleri lifted her boot and squashed the horrible creature underfoot. “She needs to go somewhere dark. I’m not an astronomer, but I imagine the IA knows of habitable planets with a long dark cycle.”
“Why would the IA help us?”