Blood drained down the dark dirt to join the clear water of the river, where it became just another part of the strange world Riyun was trying to understand. The attackers looked every bit as human as him. They wore simple, baggy, crudely patched shirts and pants, the sort of clothing that felt too close to home for him. Scars, missing teeth, a consistent dangerous leanness, sores—their lives must have been challenging. The forest was cooling now, and there was no sign these people had anything to keep them warm.
He held up the axeman’s hand for Quil to see. “Five fingers. Two eyes. Nose and a mouth.”
The pseudo examined the hand. “Human, yes.”
“Real? Like you and me?”
“They certainly smell human enough.” Quil wrinkled his nose and examined the dead man’s wound. “I can test the blood to be sure, if that is what you want.”
“I want to know if they’re real. I want to know if all of this is real.”
Riyun spun around when the peaceful gurgle of the river was broken by a boot being buried in someone’s gut, followed immediately by a breathless groan. Tawod grabbed a clump of black hair and yanked back the head of the woman who had attacked him. He had a knife in his other hand.
“Hold it.” Riyun darted over to the woman’s side. She was still dazed from the beatdown Symbra had delivered. “I want to question her.”
Tawod released the woman’s greasy hair. “She nearly killed me.”
“They nearly killed all of us. That’s on us. We need to be more alert.”
“You’re the one who sent us down to the water. It was a clear sign it was safe.”
“I made a mistake.”
“Well, letting her live would be a mistake, too.”
Riyun snatched the knife from the young man and leaned in close. “Look around you. Think back to those lizards.”
The demolitionist squinted. “What about them?”
“How long do you think one person is going to survive in these woods? Look at her. It doesn’t even look like she’s eaten recently, and they were guarding a watering hole off a game trail.”
“You care more about her than me, someone on your own squad?”
“No. But I’m telling you that you’re better off letting nature run its course than killing her yourself. Any time you can avoid blood on your hands, you should.”
“I’m not afraid to kill.”
“Good. I’m pretty sure you’ll have plenty of opportunities to do that. But not right now.” Riyun handed the knife back, hilt first, then he squatted next to the woman and pulled her tattered shirt closed over her chest, stopping when he spotted a scar on her sternum that reminded him of Quil’s umbilical scar.
No. This was different. A…brand? Ritual scarification?
She was as pale as the man Hirvok had killed. Even if her cheeks weren’t sunken and her remaining teeth weren’t brown and rotted, she would have been homely. Something about those cheeks made Riyun think she’d seen quite a bit of violence in her life. It took a moment to realize there were bumps, as if bones in her face had been broken in the past and never properly healed.
Killing her would probably be a mercy. The slow return of awareness to her dark eyes was accompanied by what he guessed was that very realization.
He waved Quil over. “She’s coming around.”
The pseudo pulled a pen out and shone the light in her eyes. “A minor concussion. She will be fine.”
The woman slowly shook her head. “Fakada ma compeel.” Her voice was weak and scratchy.
Riyun cocked his head. “A language, or was that just noise?”
Quil frowned. “A language.”
“Can you figure it out? Even something basic?”
“Perhaps. Do we wish to spend a few weeks here?”
“I’m not asking for something detailed and deep, Quil. I just need answers. Where’d they come from? How many are there? Can we make peace with them?”
“I could speak loudly at her. Perhaps if I gesticulate wildly with my arms, that would help.”
“I get it. I’m asking the impossible. Just do what you can. Please.” Riyun smiled at the woman, who seemed even more afraid than before. “Let her know, we’re not going to kill her.”
“With her companions dead, it might be hard to convey that message.”
“Try.”
Riyun stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest. The woman’s eyes locked on him until Quil pulled a glove off and splashed it in the water. That drew the woman’s attention to the river.
Quil dramatically washed his hand, then pulled off his other glove and washed both hands. He smiled like an imbecile and nodded, then splashed water on his face. Finally, he cupped water in his hands. “Water.” He nodded toward the fluid. “Water.”
The woman blinked slowly.
Quil let the water drip back into the river, then patted the ground. “Dirt. Dirt.”
Tawod snorted. “Making real progress.”
Although it was easy to understand the young man’s frustration, Riyun wasn’t feeling particularly patient. “Why don’t you go with Javika to see if you can find their camp?”
“Their camp? They were probably just sleeping on the ground.”
“I doubt that. I want to be sure there aren’t any others around here, waiting to ambush us.”
The young man turned as Javika came to a quiet stop at his side. She pointed to where the ambush had been launched. “There are tracks. We can follow them.”
That ended the discussion; Tawod followed her into the dark woods.
“Tree. Tree.” The pseudo was pointing to the nearest of the thick-stumped trees.
The surviving assailant tapped Quil’s arm. “Madrinan kalong. Vantsu Meriscoya.”
Riyun spun on a heel, and nearly bowled over Naru as she ran toward him. He threw up his hands. “Whoa!”
“Did she just say ‘madrinan’?” The hacker smiled. “It sounded like she said, ‘madrinan kalong.’”
Quil glanced over his shoulder. “She did. She was indicating my armor, I believe.”
The hacker bent over, hands on knees, and beamed at the scrawny woman. “Um, sival ot un?”
The black-haired woman’s eyes flew wide. She nodded vigorously. “Sival un febor. Unchan odat. Unchan don morda.”
Naru straightened. “I never thought I’d see the day where that class came in handy.”
A shiver ran through Riyun. “Wait—you understand her?”
“Sort of. I mean, yes? I guess?”
“Is this a language from your home world or something?”
“No. That’s the crazy thing about it: This is a language I learned in a class about artificial intelligence.”
“Artificial—”
Quil twisted around. “Yes! I had completely missed that. ‘Sival.’ Slave. ‘Madrinan.’ Motherless. It is Universal Perfect Language—UPL. I failed to hear it for what it was. It did not seem possible. That was very sloppy on my part, Lieutenant. I apologize.”
Irritation scratched at Riyun’s already fragile patience. “Would one of you mind explaining what you’re talking about?”
Naru brushed hair back from her face. “UPL is sort of a theoretical language. I mean, it is. Theoretical. The idea was that a perfectly logical and rational language would be ideal when setting up communications between artificial intelligences. It would be something free of human legacy and all the contradictory rules and exceptions that make things so hard to learn. And since it was logical and efficient, they wouldn’t resist using it in ways we could understand.”
“So, she’s an artificial intelligence?”
“Oh, no. The idea was that these artificial intelligences would use the language not just between themselves; they would use it to communicate through artificial humans as well.”
“Artificial humans? I don’t think I’ve heard that before.”
Quil sucked in his bottom lip. “Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense. An artificial human is a theoretical construct: software. Artificial intelligences create these artificial humans by the millions. They create simulations that way. They develop histories, motivations, conflicts—lives. And these humans are used in simulations as a means to make optimal decisions. Create a society, direct it as close to your target audience as you can, then study how they react to whatever stimulus needs testing.”
“Oh. Wow.” Naru squeezed her eyes shut. “Why didn’t I think of this before? Someone like Beraga… Wow.”
Riyun didn’t like the dread in the hacker’s voice. “What?”
“Well, he’s been using artificial intelligences for years for his games. He has some really good AI programmers. If he created a pocket dimension, he would use these intelligences to run all the systems. You want to try and pull off something as complicated as a universe forming or evolution, you have to use an AI. It would require managing a billion variables a billion times per second. A human can’t do that.”
“Can one of you put this in simple terms for me? She’s not an artificial intelligence?”
“No.” They answered in unison.
“Flesh and blood—I get it. And she’s not an artificial human?”
“No.” Again in unison.
Quil’s eyes went to the corpses. “These were humans. She is human. But they were created in this pocket dimension. They were evolved here. And the language that they have evolved with is this UPL.”
Naru rubbed her eyes. “It was probably gifted to them by the gods, or something like that.” She turned to the pseudo. “Do you think there’ll be dialects?”
“Inevitably. Provide a human a standard, and they will find a way to skirt it.”
It was the painful truth, particularly for someone like Quil—a human created by humans and regarded as property. How could he not see his fellow humans as incapable of perfection?
The desperate woman only then seemed to realize her comrades were all dead. Her lips quivered, and tears ran down her cheeks. She seemed even more pathetic than before, something Riyun wasn’t ready to deal with. If she was a slave—an escaped slave—then her comrades might’ve been as well. They had acted out of desperation, same as him and his team.
“Let’s give her a couple of those lizard steaks.” Riyun strolled over to the weapons her comrades had used. He set the bow and the few remaining arrows and two of the bladed weapons beside her.
Quil spoke to the woman in a soft voice. She nodded and pointed downstream. He patted her arm. “The town they came from is not far from here. Dyrkwon. We can find it following the river. She and her comrades had been hoping to hide in the woods until the slave hunters abandoned their search.”
“And then?”
Once again, Quil spoke to the woman softly. “Then they would run for the city of Yagath, past the town. There they could be free people.”
“Sounds like this Yagath is where we want to go. Ask her if she wants to come with us. We’ll give her safe passage.”
Naru squinted her eyes. “Wait a second. I don’t think she meant ‘motherless’ as a compliment.”
Quil rubbed his armor where the woman had tapped it. “The armor?”
The hacker squatted next to the woman. “Madrinan kalong—undok un wir?”
The escaped slave’s eyes went to Quil’s armor again, then theirs. “Quar-na. Kalong un vantsu.”
“All right.” Naru screwed up her face. “I didn’t expect that.”
Riyun frowned. “Expect what. I think I recognized a couple words.”
“You will. UPL doesn’t have a huge lexicon. There’s a lot of context that reframes meaning.” The hacker tapped her own armored chest. “This armor means we’re warriors. Kalong. Normally, a warrior has allegiance to a queen: quar. We don’t have any markings for a queen, so we’re motherless.”
“Has she seen other warriors like us?”
Naru spoke softly and pointed to the rest of the squad. The escaped slave nodded and launched into a long, indecipherable rush of words. It looked like even Quil was having a hard time keeping up, but he eventually got the woman to repeat a few things.
After a long silence, the hacker exchanged a look with the pseudo. They repeated a few words, then seemed to reach agreement.
Quil shifted his weight around. “It would seem, Lieutenant, that we are not the first to come to this world dressed like this.”
That didn’t surprise Riyun. “Beraga?”
“Most likely Major Kozmut’s security. What matters is that they are an established presence.”
“Part of the lore? Is that right?”
“Yes. But they are not the power here.”
“The queens?”
“Yes. She does not know how many there are, but from what she’s heard, they run everything. Or they did. Someone by the name of Meriscoya is apparently upsetting that.”
Riyun smirked. “A new power suddenly showing up? Think it’s Beraga?”
The hacker shrugged. “She’s an escaped slave who spent her life in a small town. Not sure how much faith we can put in what she says. It’s not like they have a network here to keep everyone up to date on all that’s going on.”
“Good point. Did she take us up on the offer to escort her to Yagath?”
“No.” The hacker and Quil again exchanged a glance.
Quil cleared his throat. “She believes we will be killed if we go to Yagath.”
Riyun glanced at the others to be sure they weren’t paying attention. “Why’s that?”
“Apparently, our type tends to die frequently.”
“Better and better. Okay, give her some meat and the weapons. We’ll offer her protection, if—”
“She’d rather go now.”
“She’s not a prisoner.”
Javika and Tawod stepped from the woods. The Biwali warrior waved Riyun over. He left Naru and Quil to deal with the escaped slave. If she was telling the truth, his team was close to a city. That meant the possibility of getting a better sense of what the world was like. They could probably make for the town the slaves had escaped from, but the city seemed like a better plan. He wasn’t one to judge, but he also wasn’t one to put Quil through an unnecessarily uncomfortable experience.
A little way out from the riverbank, Riyun met Javika. She stared past him at the last of the escaped slaves. “We found two others in shallow graves.”
Eight slaves. How many had made a break for it? “No others alive?”
“None.” She held up a rusty nail that had been filed to a narrow end. “There were manacles. The dead still had them on their wrists.”
“They used that to pick the locks?”
“Yes. Simple locks. Slaves are often more captive to fear than chains.”
Riyun remembered how long it’d taken Quil to accept that he was no longer someone else’s property. Or at least wouldn’t be one day. The concept of ownership of another human was vile, but the people who engaged in the enterprise of slavery certainly knew how to break their victims. It could take a lifetime to undo the damage.
“We’re giving her some of the meat, but she declined the offer to come with us.”
“Come with us where? We have a destination?”
“The city of Yagath. Apparently, they would have been free there.”
Javika straightened as the escaped slave headed back into the woods, bristling with weapons. She had a thick cut of leaf-wrapped meat pinned against her side by an elbow.
Riyun leaned toward the riverbank, where the rest of the squad had gathered. “I think we should get them moving.”
“It will be dark soon.”
“Perfect reason to hurry it up.”
The Biwali warrior fell in beside him. “You are able to talk to her?”
“Long story. I’ll explain it to you along the way.” He snorted. “The parts I caught, at least.”
“I look forward to hearing what you know.”
He couldn’t tell if she was being facetious. There would be time later to figure out if he was annoyed by that or not. At that moment, he knew he had to get the team going. Something about the escaped slave’s comment about people like him—people from his world—dying was troubling.
If those other warriors she had talked about were Beraga’s people, who could be killing them? And why?