Page 62 of Taken to Lemora
Tana grabs my arm and hauls me off of the pad pad so roughly I fall onto one knee in the mud, soaking the trousers Essmira made for me. I try to tell her that Essmira won’t like that I’ve ruined yet another pair of trousers, but Tana isn’t listening. She keeps pulling, dragging me towards the large castle that forms the back wall to her keep — a rather odd construction I always thought.
“We’re all on the holo screens.”
“You…you are? Wait — who’s we?”
“Yeffa. We had to activate them immediately.”
“Why?”
“It’s Essmira.” My stomach heaves. My mind scatters. And then she has to slam a blade down onto my skull and sever my body in half cleanly. “She’s missing!”
I stagger behind her though I don’t know how. My legs have both been severed at the knees. My mind rings hollowly as Tana leads me up a flight of stone stairs that wrap elegantly to reach a landing. Left and then right and then another right and we’re in a room that’s already full of creatures all looking at me with terror and worry.
The huge series of screens that fill an entire wall are an identical copy of the holo room in my own keep. So rarely activated, except to conclude trades, I’m shocked to see the faces that I do peering back at me.
Gorman fills the screen where I would ordinarily be and begins speaking first, “Raingar, my Lord.” His Lord? Ohr. Nob. Nob nob nob. It can’t be. What’s wrong? What has he done?
“Forgive me!” This male who’s never lost his composure once in my lifetime, sobs while Moreth stands at his right shoulder and tries to staunch the flow of blood from one of his right fins — nob, what wasoncehis right fin. Now, it’s missing.It’s ohringmissing!Like it’s been torn raggedly off of the side of his face, not cut. Torn, like with hands.Is that how the trackers were removed from the Egama? The tongues, too? And what has been removed from Essmira in my absence?
“Gorman!” Pangs shoot through my soul, through the soles of my feet, through my hands. Pains for him, for Essmira, for everyone. I shove through the creatures crowded in front of me brutally, pushing them out of my way. “Gorman, what happened?” I shout up at the viewpane.
“I couldn’t stop him…I didn’t even see him coming…” He shakes his head, eyes looking distracted and lost while Moreth shouts orders in the background.
My hearts gape. My body clenches and a cold sets over my bones. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Him?” I say, my voice icy as my worry and concern flutters out onto the stormy breeze.
A resolve sets over me. A battle trance that I’ve only felt once, when the Egama warrior looked at her and tried to take her from me.
“She didn’t run away?”
“Nob,” Gorman sobs, voice twisting in pain and Moreth stands up hastily. He has several apprentices behind him and is shouting at us to leave Gorman be. That he needs more urgent care and access to the full healing facility. He refuses. Instead, he wails, “He stole her!”
The words stun me and I squeeze together, struggling to think through them and find reason. “Stolen? Someone came intomyhouse, enteredmychambers and stolemymate?” When no one answers, I turn to the small table beneath the window and smash my fist through its glass surface, reveling in the pain that shoots up my right arm. “WHO WAS IT!”
Tana’s voice whips my head around. She’s standing in the center of the space that’s cleared out around me. She’s showing me both of her palms. “Raingar…I um…that’s why I asked our friend, Rhorkanterannu to join us. He believes he may know the creature responsible.”
My gaze flashes up, finding Merquin’s furious face in the viewpane before settling on the silver gaze that occupies the central screen. Niahhorru pirate king, though I wouldn’t dare call him a king to his face. Not if I wanted to live to speak of it. Pirates look down on kings.
The silver-skinned male leans back in his seat, poised, looking every bit as unaffected by this situation as I am affected by it. “Rhorkanterannu, you know who stole my female?” I hiss, struggling to find and capture breath.
“Your finned friend was lucky to have survived. Without a witness, we wouldn’t have been able to identify the culprit and your hybrid would likely be lost among the stars by now.”
“Lucky!” I shout, shaking my fist at the screen, wishing he were here to annihilate as proxy for the one who stole Essmira, my miriga, my Xiveri ohring mate, directly out from under me. “I doubt Gorman feels the same.”
Gorman falls to the side, as if on cue, and is caught by Moreth who carries him out of view and leaves me looking at the plain stone wall and wishing I could will Essmira to appear among the faces gathered.
Rhorkanterannu adjusts something out of the screen and smiles. Then looks at me and smiles broader, “Centare. I suppose not. But what he feels does not change the truth. He is lucky. Because he has met Sky’s greatest assassin and survived.”
“Assassin?” I shout at the same time that Merquin and Reyna do.
Tana, beside me says something else, something blood curdling, “Sky?”
“Ontte,” he says, the Meero word foryeffa.
I shudder, bowels threatening to purge themselves as I imagine what’s in store for Essmira if she’s successfully taken to the Sky planet. It sits outside of any quadrants within the Niahhorru-controlled grey zone but in a territory even the Niahhorru do not touch. That’s why Rhorkanterannu is here now. It must be.
“The Sky are monsters,” Merquin whispers.
“Indeed.” That Rhorkanterannu agrees is a terrifying thing. “They steal species to create cybernetic soldiers, assassins, bounty hunters…you name it. And you have just had your female taken by their prized killer. I’ve managed to track your female’s name to a Sky list.”
