Someone had stolen her.
“Get to it,” Hruuzk ordered, already on his way out. If he’d seen anything different in her eyes, he hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. And why should he? An unhappy slave in the workpit? No, really?
Yllgami was brushing at Amber’s sleeve with the very tip of her knuckles and making mewing sounds scarcely loud enough to hear. Reluctant to put Meoraq’s mending kit aside, Amber tucked it underneath her arm, but gave Yllgami her full attention. Life went on. Mothers died, ships crashed, people left you, people stole you…but life went on.
It helped to think of the nets like Christmas lights. First, they had to be untangled, and while it was obvious that whoever had packed them away had made an effort to bundle each one separately, they’d all knotted together. As soon as the first one was free, Ena had it and a spare coil of rope and was using what looked like a giant wooden barrette to patch holes in the loose weave. As Amber continued to help Yllgami, Dkorm and Xzem arrived.
He kicked some sacks into a heap and sat down, tucking Rosek under his arm with an expression of profound dislike. She was restless, wriggly, and already making those breathy barking noises that meant a crying fit wasn’t far off.
Amber hesitated, picking at her net, then pushed it back and headed over.
“Take the fucking thing,” Dkorm groaned, but instead, Amber rummaged in the crates and bags around him for the scraps of clothing left over from her mending of a few days’ ago. With rags in various colors and a little thread from Meoraq’s kit, Amber threw a crude doll together. She wasn’t good at domestic shit like this, but good enough for Rosek, who gawped at the gift like it was the first she’d ever seen…which it probably was. She took it, chewed it, shook it, and let out a shrill squeal and began to beat it vigorously against the side of a crate.
“How is that better?” Dkorm demanded, spines flat.
Amber went back to the nets. Ena had finished her repairs and Yllgami was waiting anxiously next to the box of hooks. Amber watched without interest while Yllgami deftly and wordlessly sewed about a dozen fish hooks into the weave, not too closely spaced and all pointed in the same direction, then took the needle when it was offered and got to work.
She immediately stabbed herself with a fish hook. The hooks were barbed; pulling it out tore the little wound even wider. It bled enough to draw a thin red line from the tip of her finger to the crease of her first knuckle, but that was all. ‘Just lick it,’ she thought in Meoraq’s terse, irritated voice, and did. It tasted bitter.
The fish hook was a swoop of metal lying in her palm, reflecting nothing but the lamp light. ‘Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing,’ she thought sourly. But what did that prove? Meoraq could kill a man with a beach ball.
Breath on her shoulder. She stiffened, but didn’t turn around. She didn’t try to hide the hook either, knowing it had already been seen. She simply picked up a needle and started tying it onto the net.
Dkorm snorted at her back. “It amazes me that you can work all those fingers without getting them confused,” he remarked and started to turn away. He paused. He turned back, jogging Rosek higher onto his shoulder so that he could reach out and play with Amber’s hair. “Does Zhuqa know how clever you are with your many fingers, Eshiqi?”
“Fuck off. I’m working.”
“Zhuqa told me I couldn’t have a poke.” He leaned in to lick at her. The waxy nub of his tongue, dry and repulsive, swept back and forth over her shoulder while she fought and failed not to squirm. “As far as I know, everything else is just fine.”
“If you believe that, you’re even dumber than you look.” Amber shrugged hard enough to hit him in the jaw and followed that glancing blow with a glare while he rubbed his snout and looked thinly amused. “And you’re not scaring me with any of this macho shit, so just back off and let me work.”
“You talk too much.” He moved to the other shoulder and licked it, too. Tiny hands caught at her wrap as he worked his way methodically to her neck; the baby, Rosek, trying to wriggle out from between them. “Fucking sprat,” she heard him mutter and he leaned away.
Her hand tightened on the needle before she could make herself relax. It wasn’t much of a gesture. He should have missed it if he’d been looking anywhere but right at her hand.
But he snorted again. “With that thing?” he asked derisively. “Go on, then.”
She made another knot, furious and silent.
“You don’t think I mean it.” He caught her wrist, turned her roughly around and shoved her against the table. Her ass hit the corner just right and she toppled back, catching herself in the split-second before she took a painful sprawl across the hook-studded net. She had the needle raised in a fist before she knew it.
Dkorm stepped up invitingly, the baby in one arm and the other open wide, displaying the whole of his scaly chest for her sliver of baked bone to pierce. “Go on. You killed a man, they say, so you must have some arm in you, no matter how you look. You could even hurt me if you sink it in my eye, but I warn you, you might hit the sprat.” He jogged Rosek again and she squealed happily and waved her new doll over her head.
Amber put the needle down and gave it a push out of her easy reach.
Dkorm grunted and fingered her hair, then wrapped a hank of it around his wrist and pried her head slowly back, further and further, until her shaking arm couldn’t brace her anymore. She fell with a weak, angry cry, anticipating a dozen barbed hooks in her back, but the hand that pulled her down also held her up. She waited, suspended over the net with her eyes squeezed shut, for him to work out what he wanted to do.
After an tense silence, Dkorm rasped out another lizard-laugh and backed up, tossing her by her hair to her knees on the floor. “You are the ugliest Gann-damned thing I have ever seen,” he announced, handing her the baby as he beckoned to Yllgami. “I honestly don’t know what it is about you that makes me want to fuck.”
“Of course you want to fuck, you’re nothing but a giant dick,” Amber said, and was glad he didn’t know English enough to know how shaky and frightened she sounded. Behind her, she could hear as Dkorm bent his slave over the table. He was loud—grunting, slapping, hissing; Yllgami never made a sound.
Rosek, larger and stronger than Zhuqa’s baby, struggled to get away from the smooth-skinned, hairy monster now enveloping her, and finally Xzem crept forward and snatched her away. Amber rubbed at her empty arms and watched Xzem nuzzle Rosek while nursing the smaller infant. Dkorm’s violent sex went on and on.
“Look at you…pretending…not to care,” he panted, finally shoving the lizardlady away and wiping his cock clean on her skirts. “Look at you staring me down like I couldn’t stand you up and put it to you so hard, you’d be coughing on my cum before the end.”
His boots tromped heavily around until he stood in front of her, over her. He didn’t move to take the baby back, either of them. He just stood there while Amber glared at the floor and made herself keep quiet. Then, with a curt laugh, he caught her by the hair and yanked her head up. Looking at him meant looking past the cudgel of his erection, already weeping fresh beads of oil in readiness. “I can see murder in your eyes. When are you going to learn that you are a slave now?” he wondered, giving her hair a shake. “You can be as fierce as you want, Eshiqi, but all it will get you is killed.”
He was right. Thoughts of the needle and the fish hooks taunted her, but the real bitterness was that she’d come to think of them as any kind of weapon at all. Even if she could get the needle through his thick hide, how much damage could she do? She remembered the kipwe all too well and how its quills—the smallest of them twice the size of her needle—hadn’t slowed Meoraq down in battle. He’d actually been able to sleep through their removal. She also remembered the way his scales had sealed up over the wounds as she pulled them out, so even if she got in a good hit, she’d never do any real damage. Maybe she could stab him in the slit, where his scales were thinnest and didn’t overlap, but if that was the best she could do, what was the point?
