Restless, I paced the narrow corridor in the archives. Another wasted day trying to find similarities, indicators, explanations or even a Goddess-twice-damned curse that could explain the escalating deaths caused by the infant burial disease. Nothing.
My neck ached; my back ached.
A Queen’s eunuch had come down a zatik prior and with trembling hands, offered me a slip of parchment reminding me that I was due to attend the Lottery Drum Feast in a week’s time and hadn’t I better travel to Ikthe and hunt?
Crumpling the paper in my hand, I stalked to the roaring fireplace that kept the archives from freezing solid this far underground and tossed it in—a snowflake disappearing in the mouth of a volcano.
Sighing, I walked back to my table and closed up the books save one.
Spying the archive steward nodding off in his chair, I slid the volume inside my tunic and left my fruitless studies behind me as I climbed the forbidding staircase to the higher levels.
Zatiks later found me in my ship waiting for the steward to signal the all-clear. Lifting off, I pointed my ship’s nose to the shimmering green orb in the viewing window and accelerated.
I’d hunted Ikthe for so long, my muscles remembered every task from the smallest steering adjustment to the complicated atmospheric entry calculations needed to land without damaging my ship. It left my mind clear to ruminate on the countless interviews I’d conducted without the Queen’s knowledge, or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Not only the interviews respecting the infant burial disease deaths, but also the interviews with Ikshe’s oldest living hunters.
Perhaps it was my own age as it climbed ever farther up the ladder, but my patience for the ways of Theraxl had grown thin. Why must I spend the keenest years of my mind’s life scrabbling for meat on filthy Ikthe? Why did the Lottery Drum rule the judgment of the sanest hunter and turn him into a slavering fool, just for the chance to create offspring?
Could not anyone look around and see the dilapidation of the fortress and its city? Did not anyone notice our dwindling population and the growing instances of infant burial disease? Was it possible that the least qualified hunter on either planet was the only Theraxl paying attention to the signs of a weakened civilization approaching a catastrophic end?
By interviewing the oldest living hunters, I hoped to garner more information to secure safer and more profitable excursions for all hunters. My people could not afford to waste half its population on dangerous quests as well as the perilous hunting expeditions. Armed with knowledge, I hoped to ease at least some of the burdens of my hunter-brothers over time. For that was my people’s scarcest commodity.
Should the infant burial disease overtake our ability to increase our numbers, there would not be time enough to recover.
Landing on Moon Shield, I exited my ship and stretched, cracking my back and laying out my pallet on the mesa under the stars. I would give my old bones a rest before the rigors of my hunt on the morrow.
Lying with arms behind my head, I admired the wealth of gems studding the sky. Life could be simple and abundant if one only appreciated what one already had. The Queen seemed to me to be a great void, always in search of more to fill the hole where her heart once resided.
While her lands, possessions, and people crumbled at her feet, she sought more and better. I had watched her with disappointment these last several revolutions, stealing the affection of the BoKama’s consort, and then the hunters’ dignity, one by one, slipping behind the tapestry to drain their seed and their self-possession. How long had I before the Queen invited me to join her, and would I have the strength to say no? Squirming on my pallet, I feared I might not.
If I yet believed in the Goddesses, I might venture to pray on a night like this: the temperature at this altitude soothed the soul, and the stars and planets sparkled like gem-dust on the jewel-cutter’s velvet cloth. I feared for the future of my people and for my own soul, but what good would a prayer do when it was less substantial than a smoke tendril from a dying fire?
“If you were real, Holy Goddesses, I would take you to task for failing a once-thriving people. Not only that, but for thrusting a knife into the festering wound. What good is draining the fester if you kill the wounded in the process?”
At that moment, a flaming streak entered my field of vision just at the horizon where the dark desert mountains met the star-studded sky. The meteor flashed a brilliant white and disappeared behind the shadowed green crescent that was Ikshe.
I scoffed.
“Was that an answer? It looked like the ash tossed from an old man’s pipe,” I said. “Even you have given up on my people. It only means those of us who care must work the harder.”
Turning away from the beautiful sky and the non-existent deities of my people, I determined to sleep. But the meteor returned to my thoughts without relent, and my next day’s hunt suffered for my lack.
If it wasn’t for stumbling across a nesting ground of rokhural, my hunt would have been as useless as the Goddesses. Eight days I hunted the adult rokhural, stocking my cargo bay to bursting.
My efforts and thankless sacrifice netted me enough meat that when it was accounted for at the fortress hangar, I was notified that my name would be entered for the Lottery Draw.
Stalking away from the meat counters, I collided with an obnoxious hunter in red armor.
“Look you not where you walk?” I said, shaking my head. When it became obvious that we headed to the same halls where the eunuchs would scrub us down for the ceremony, I avoided his gaze, ashamed at my outburst. I was the one who had been woolgathering.
Once dressed in ceremonial garb and armbands sizzling on my skin, I walked to the great hall, composing a script for refusing the Queen. Every sentence I tried in my head sounded inane and ineffectual. Stomach in knots, I couldn’t eat. Mouth dry as Moon Shield, I couldn’t drink.
Squinting, I saw the same hunter I’d run into earlier on the dais regaling the Ikma and the BoKama. His discomfort evident, I laughed and leaned over my plates of meat to grab a chunk of sister-bread. Tearing into it, I watched the hunter, divested of his red armor, attempt to shield himself from the sisters’ attentions.
My appetite returned, and I ate with relish, enjoying the comedy playing out before me.
Clashing my goblet against my tablemate’s, I allowed my eye to travel the room. Perhaps it would not be all bad to choose a dam tonight.
Movement caught my eye, and I saw that the Ikma and the hunter stood near the tapestry. Turning in my seat, I watched, curious but resigned. No one refused the Ikma.
Fury flashed in the Ikma’s eyes. The hunter bowed. The Ikma bared her fangs in a feral smile. And when she turned to face the room at large, I placed my goblet upon the table and rested my hands on my knees. It appeared the hunter of the red armor had, indeed, refused the Ikma.
The feast turned to coals in my belly. The fruited wine turned to vinegar on my tongue.
I waited.