Chapter Two
A few hours later, on the outskirts of the barren Aryak Desert in the spacious Hwangawine District of planet Ypiupi, Citizen 2965, or Kahlo Kache as he had illegally named himself, was wishing to be so lucky.
You may be wondering why the heck this narrative has suddenly ceased to describe Alicia’s predicament, aside from being a hackneyed ploy to increase suspense. Be patient and just take it all in stride.
To continue:
Though these were the outskirts, the desert still seemed to spread for an eternity in every direction. It was not a pleasant place to work, much less to live, and so few species of animal life chose to bother when there were much nicer climates so close by. The white dwarf star, Trangoone, seemed to have the influence of a blue supergiant as its waves beat mercilessly down upon the sand. No landmarks broke up the endless view of sand, save for a few interestingly-shaped dunes and a thirty-foot tall statue, which Kahlo couldn’t see at the moment because he was lying face-down in the sand.
He was lying face-down in the sand for the same reason he was wishing, or would be wishing if he knew what was going on a few hours earlier several light-years away, to be as lucky as the not-so-lucky Alicia Parkinson. This reason was that instead of being grabbed by a huge dangerous creature, he had been grabbed by four huge dangerous humans, who were now pressing down on his back very hard.
That is to say, there were a few minor differences between them and traditional humans, but they are hardly worth going into right now. They were a little on the short side, but Kahlo was as well and these ones made up for it with sheer muscle.
He had heard somewhere that sound travels farther through the ground, and now found it to be true. Even with his ears full of sand he heard the footsteps approaching from a ways off. Very close by him, they stopped. He knew what was coming.
It had all started so simply. The citizens of his camp had been commissioned to build a thirty-foot tall statue of their terribly sexy but not very nice Queen, in spite of the fact that over a hundred such statues already dominated the countryside. “Commissioned” in this case was a synonym for “forced out of bed in the middle of the night and dragged twelve kilometers to the building site, being whipped and kicked the whole way, and given thirty-two hours in which to accomplish the task using simple hand tools while your family is held hostage.” Indeed, she was a not very nice Queen.
Kahlo had no family to hold hostage, because his two-year old daughter had already been killed through maltreatment on a previous such occasion, and his wife had soon followed suit. He hadn’t taken revenge simply because he was too weak and sore to do any real damage.
Until this opportunity came up.
The only helpful thing their captors had done, ever, was to save them the trouble of drawing up blueprints. Each statue followed the same code, which had terribly specific requirements for the size and proportions of every single part of it, some accurate and some fudged a bit to flatter their representations. Failure to meet these in the slightest was merely considered normal (as opposed to high) treason, but the punishments were bad enough, especially if the workers’ families were still hostage.
Kahlo had been in charge of her nose on this particular statue. His first thought had been to make it slightly crooked, and watch with satisfaction as the Queen had a coronary over it before she came after him.
Then he had had a much better idea.
The others did not object because they knew it was his own funeral, he had nothing to lose, and besides, it would be terribly funny. They wished him luck in the afterlife and hoped he would put in a good word for them.
In a final defiant blow with what were to be his last hours, Citizen 2965 had made a name for himself. He had decided on “Kahlo” because in his native dialect it meant “prevalent underdog”. Most Ypiupians, traditionally, did not have last names except those they took to honor deceased relatives. His father, Kache, had died of despair when King Niklwat passed away and his daughter was sworn in. Kahlo saw, quickly, how terribly right he had been about her, and took the name to praise him as customary.
She had come out to inspect the statue today. Her bodyguards had been first, and it was they who currently had him in their iron grip. Her reaction now, on seeing the rather unsexy nose of a Gorrible Tranktwill beast from Anka IV sitting slightly off-center in the middle of her statue’s face, was priceless. The scream transcended normal wavelengths of sound and lasted for longer than humans are supposed to be able to not breathe.
The footsteps started again and came closer, closer. He managed to raise his head, just a little, though he quickly realized his captors were letting him because they wanted him to see what was next. He saw the shadow of the mattress and the undernourished pack animals carrying it, and then the shadow of a skinny woman jumping off, and then a pair of freshly-waxed legs right in front of his face.
He tried to move his head more, but couldn’t see past her sexy knees. They stood immovable, like a stabilized pair of boulders on a flat surface. They might have had little frowny faces drawn on them, for all the anger that radiated out of these shapely patellas.
When one at last did move, it was only moving the knee which was only going along, grudgingly it seemed, with the rest of the leg; which itself was only obliging to raise her bare sexy foot so that it could come down on the back of his head and press his face into the sand again.
Perhaps at this point it would be best to clarify what she looked like, even though he couldn’t see her. She was, like all the Ypiupians, mostly human. There were a few minor differences between them and traditional humans but they are hardly worth going into right now. They were a little on the short side, but in her case she was skinny enough that an outside observer from, say, the Earth would hardly notice at first glance. Her hair, the exact hue of a black hole, was cut at a rather dramatic angle, so that it was merely a couple of inches long in the back and sloped past her shoulders in the front, in a traditional Ypiupian style. The more pressing similarity between her and a black hole was her heart, but we will get to that in a moment.
She was dressed in traditional Hwangawine District royalty garb, relatively plain and simple but augmented with incredibly heavy and sparkly jewelry. This particular Queen, whose name by the way was Australia (a meaningless coincidence to the aforementioned hypothetical Earthling observer), had, as mentioned, broken with tradition in the appalling cut of the garment’s top half, and the length of the skirt. The others of high rank in the Hwangawine District had protested this wholeheartedly, of course, because they had public relations to think of and they could hardly have their Queen looking like a prostitute. As it turned out, this was the least of the damage she would do to their reputation, but we will get to that in a moment.
“Infidel,” she muttered in a voice that chilled the desert. “I’ll see you pay for this before the sun sets, see if I don’t!”
Kahlo had every reason to believe that she would. But oh well, it certainly had been worthwhile.
“Do your worst, tyrant scum,” he boasted.
“What did he say?” demanded the Queen.
“Sounded like ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph,’” said one of the bodyguards helpfully.
“No, no,” insisted another, “he said, ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph.’”
The Queen, in addition to being not very nice, was not very smart. She took the guards’ suggestions seriously. Kahlo felt a wisp of her hair as she bent to his half-exposed ear, and then her refreshingly moist and cool breath as she asked sincerely, “Did you say, ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph,’ or ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph’?”
Kahlo remained silent. His first attempt at communication had resulted in rather more sand getting in his mouth than he normally preferred, and he wished for it to not happen again. His ears were still working however, and they had noted the guards’ words with interest.
With a disgusted huff, she snapped upright straight as a stick. “Stand up,” she ordered. “When I ask a question, I expect a response. And I will get one, even if it is merely your screams of agony.”
The bodyguards jerked him to his feet. As he shook his head to clear it of sand and regain his senses, she helped the process by slapping him across the face. Then she marched back over to her mattress. She stared at it, then at the guards, and decided that in order to convey a more intimidating impression she ought to show her independence. That was the least of what she showed as she climbed awkwardly onto it, and was off. “To the palace!” she called over her shoulder.
“Come on,” said one of the guards behind him as he watched her depart at an incredible speed, “we walk.”
A few minutes later, another peasant emerged from beneath the statue’s skirt (where else was he supposed to hide?) and shimmied down its leg. Once on the ground he cursed and hopped about, trying to rid his own legs of the severe cramps that had been entailed in keeping such a position for so long. With that done, he watched the silhouettes on the horizon, and quickly pulled from his rags one of the radios that had on previous occasions been stolen from the citizens’ cruel overseers.
“Malluk, this is Hiilo,” he hissed under his breath. “Do you read me?”
After a burst of static, the reply came. “Who’s Malluk? Who’s Hiilo?” it demanded.
He seethed in irritation. “Rubber Eyelash, this is Bright Fingernail,” he amended.
“I read you, Fingernail. Over.”
“Has the Queen – er, has Evil Lip Gloss passed you yet?”
“Coming up on us right now.”
“Great. Can you shoot her?”
“Negative. There are guards. They look tired, but not that tired.”
“How many?”
“Only two, but I don’t know if I can get them both before – y’know.”
“Never mind them for now. What about her? Could you get her, theoretically?”
“Not sure. She’s kind of at a weird angle to me. What spots are supposed to be fatal, again?”
“Well the heart’s a good bet.”
“Negative. Nature’s prepared her well for that eventuality.”
“The head, then. That’s foolproof.”
“Negative. I don’t think her brain is a vital organ. And there’s still the small matter of guards…”
“Okay, fine. Forget her. Head back to camp. I’ll just go rescue Kahlo – er, I mean, Blind Whiplash – and we’ll save the revolution for another day. Fingernail out.” He pocketed his radio and looked at the silhouettes again. They had quite a lead on him, but he would catch up.
“I’m coming, buddy,” he said, and started out.
***
For Kahlo, who was used to hard manual labor in the worst of conditions, the five-kilometer walk to the palace in blazing heat was merely a relatively pleasant stroll. For his escorts, who were not, it was a preview of hell. Male human bodies, even on Ypiupi, are composed of approximately 60% water. It seemed to them that, in addition to their roasting alive and having their legs turn to lead, this figure was being divided by ten.
Kahlo stopped on a small rise and looked back at them. “What’s the matter?” he called. “Can’t her majesty’s servants keep up with a mere slave?”
“No,” wheezed one of them, “so why don’t you make a run for it and we’ll tell her the sun got you.”
Kahlo considered this suggestion. “I just might do that,” he said. “But what’s it to your benefit?”
The same one, who seemed to be the only one still capable of speech, dragged his feet to a halt and collapsed onto his bottom as he said, “I thought you were a bright one. Do you think we like her?”
Kahlo thought back to their exchange with the Queen. He had thought perhaps they were merely being as stupid as her, but now he was sure, as he had hoped, that it had been deliberate mockery. “I guess not,” he said tentatively, “but when you stick around I have to think maybe, right?”
“Oh, sure, that’s easy for you to say,” said the guard. He pulled out his canteen and sucked at it, hoping against hope that it had miraculously refilled itself within the last five minutes. Incredibly, it had not. He sighed and continued. “We’re honor-bound to her, like her father before. What else could we do?”
“Start a revolution,” said Kahlo.
They gawked at him.
“Look,” he insisted, “it’s that simple. Everyone must feel the way you do. I’ve already set the stage for it. But I can’t lead my people because I’ve been arrested, remember?”
“She is a witch,” pointed out another guard, depleting his speech quota for the journey.
“And the way she dresses,” said another, who had rationed his water better and had a tidbit more voice left. “It was cool at first, but now it’s just like, grow up and put some real clothes on. Sheez.”
“You can’t have leadership like that,” Kahlo insisted. “You just can’t. Revolution, I’m telling you.”
“A lot of us actually had considered it,” admitted the guard. “You may be right.” He got to his feet. “But not now. We have to consider it some more. And the Queen is not a patient woman. Come on, let’s go.”
“If I did run away,” Kahlo asked tentatively, “would you come after me?”
“Probably.”
“For what sort of reasons would you not?”
“If we had time to consider your suggestion far enough and decided to go with it.”
“I see.”
“Well, make up your mind since you’re so decisive.”
“I think,” said Kahlo after a moment’s thought, “that I will not run away. You would probably come after me and I would have to defend myself. I am a pacifist and thus opposed to that idea.” He started to walk again. With a collective groan, the others followed.
At that moment Hiilo topped a sand dune and saw them. They were weak, as he had anticipated. This would be like taking goopleberries from a Snük. He raised his makeshift weapon and set the bead on the corporal.
Before his finger could even begin to contemplate tightening on the trigger, his radio again roared to life.
***
Eventually the desert thinned out. There was no definitive point at which you could say it was changing, but eventually you suddenly realized you were in a much cooler, moister, and more abundantly populated savannah. At about this same time you would notice the huge royal palace surrounded by, yet towering over, several thirty-foot tall statues of the woman who was shortly going to make the rest of Kahlo’s brief life very, utterly miserable.
The courtyard was eerily silent as they crossed it to reach the huge cast-iron gate. Not a single guard came to challenge them, but sitting in front of the gate was a disheveled-looking man in his late forties, with about a week’s growth of stubble on his face. A scar ran across his right cheek in the shape of a microphone headset.
“Get up, Bardo,” growled the talkative bodyguard, kicking him gently but with an unmistakable air of wanting him the heck out of the way. “We’ve an important package for her majesty.”
“Oh, do you?” said the man wearily as he turned to face them. He looked Kahlo up and down, but obviously didn’t care in the slightest about what he saw. “I might come in and watch this package in action. Then again, I probably won’t. Not much excites me anymore.”
“Yes, so you say,” snapped the bodyguard. “We don’t have time to reiterate your problems, Bardo. Get up.”
“I was a war hero, you know.”
“Yes,” seethed the bodyguard through clenched teeth, “we know. Get up.”
“I could still be one, now. Plenty of stuff going on. But no, I have to lounge around here, with nothing to do. The most exciting thing that’s happened to me since then was when I took a nap on an angry swabjek’s burrow.”
“What happened?” asked Kahlo suddenly. The nearest bodyguard smacked him to the ground, not for talking out of turn but because he didn’t want to hear this story again for the umpteenth time.
“With the swabjek? It ate me. Seriously though. My father was a war hero first,” said Bardo, staring at the sun as he dredged up old memories. The guards would have attested to the fact that he had dredged up these same memories yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on, and therefore shouldn’t have required much dredging up now; but he spent just enough time dredging them up to make them feel as if they ought to have mentioned this and then continued, aggravatingly, to vocalize them (the memories) before they (the guards) had a chance. “He was known throughout the quadrant for his piloting skills.”
“I see,” mused Kahlo. He picked himself up off the ground, but Bardo stayed where he was.
The guard sighed. “If you’re not going to get up,” he said, “can you at least make this fast? Her highness is not a patient woman.”
“Certainly,” said Bardo. “Wouldn’t want to upset her, would we? Right, my father. Mission after mission he flew against the Skreel, and before that, space pirates. Yeah, we’re that old. The skies were not safe for evil in those days, I can tell you that!”
“The District’s Golden Age,” Kahlo recalled.
“Right, whatever. But…” Bardo turned pale and shifted his gaze to the ground. “His skill couldn’t protect him forever. Sheer probability and chance guaranteed that one day he would fail. And… when that day came, thirty years ago… the only remains of his beloved ship, or indeed his entire fleet, or indeed him… was a cloud of space dust.”
Kahlo bowed his head in sympathetic reverence.
“But, life goes on,” said Bardo quickly, his eyes snapping back up. “I took his name as my last, to honor him. Pikkes. His name was Pikkes. And mine is Bardo Pikkes. I have followed in his footsteps as a pilot.”
Kahlo nodded. He knew what it was like to follow one’s father. “And what happened to that?”
“Well, the good king Niklwat eventually succumbed to old age. Under the rule of that demon he called a daughter, all royal ships in the District were called back to the palace because they made her feel safer. Seeing the atrocities committed now, I wonder she has a need to feel safe. Only planet likes us now is Balvador, and it sucks. I know I’m not the only one who wants to take the fleet out again and teach her a lesson myself.”
“So do it,” said Kahlo. “Start a revolution. Or,” he said as the guards shot him dirty looks, “join the one that these fine gentlemen are going to be starting.”
“Well, thing is I’ve got issues with loyalty and duty drummed into my – sure, all right, where do I sign?”
“Look,” said the talkative guard, whose name was Corporal Hijra which isn’t important but may as well be mentioned since he has been doing so much talking; as he pulled out his sidearm and aimed it at Bardo’s throat, “get up or you’ll be telling your stories to the ghosts.”
With deliberate slowness, Bardo got to his feet. “That’s what I like about our relationship,” he said. “No professional detachment.”
“Threats are a coward’s tactic,” said Kahlo. “Action is the path to true results.”
“Are you saying you want him to shoot me?” demanded Bardo.
“No. I am, as I’ve said, opposed to violence, but when it’s necessary there can’t be hesitation. But no, I don’t want him to shoot you. I meant in a much broader sense.”
“A man does some heroic thing, and suddenly thinks he’s a philosopher,” muttered Corporal Hijra. “Clear out, flyboy. Tell the swabjeks I said ‘hi.’” Bardo reluctantly complied as Hijra entered a code into
“I’ll think about what you said,” Bardo called over his shoulder.
Kahlo waved, and then turned to the doorway and squared his shoulders. “The philosophy thing,” he said, looking with dread down the long, dark, cavernous passageway, “has more to do with my imminent painful death than anything else.”
In fact it looked perfectly cheery when the lights were on, but the lights were never on because the Queen wanted it to look long, dark and cavernous. It was intended to strike fear into those who entered, and it usually worked.
Kahlo forced his back. He tried to focus. He had done something, and now he was facing the consequences, but it had all been worth it. Time to go out with some style. He quickened his pace and began to whistle.
“Catchy,” said Hijra, trying to pretend the hallway wasn’t giving him the heebie-jeebies as well. “What is it?”
“No clue,” Kahlo lied. It was a song he had used to sing to his young daughter. Thinking of her filled him with righteous anger again, and the fear was crowded out. He waited impatiently as Hijra opened the next door, and then briskly strode down the length of the throne room without his escorts.
The path was lined with immaculately dressed royalty and nobility, who stopped talking and stared as he passed. None of them had any real power compared to the Queen but they got to attend fancy-dress balls and talk down their noses at people. A humongous diamond chandelier hovered above their heads, and exotic potted plants spaced at regular intervals made the room seem more alive. The major improvement over the previous hallway, undoubtedly, was the large windows that let the streaming sunlight in. Rather than being too hot it had a warming effect, which served to counteract somewhat the chills radiating from the being who ruled it all.
Kahlo stared impassively at the carved golden throne, whereon sprawled in an altogether sexy manner was her, the altogether sexy Queen of the Hwangawine District, who had somehow succeeded in making herself almost entirely unsexy by the policies of rule she insisted on pursuing. He may have ordinarily been paralyzed with fear but she was, at this moment, asleep. Behind her a page boy named Berrik was having way too much fun giving her a massage.
The guards rushed to catch up with him and lined up on either side of the throne. Hijra leaned over to the Queen’s ear and whispered something, staring at him the whole time. Her head snapped up, and she glowered at Kahlo.
“Interrupting my nap,” she said. “I will make you suffer.”
He remained stoically silent. He would not sink to her level.
She yawned in an impossibly sexy manner and writhed like a worm on a hot plate as she stretched, conking Berrik’s head against the throne and knocking him out cold. Kahlo felt the wave of outrage that swept through the court at this, but no one said anything. It was just as well that the boy miss what was about to happen.
“You are charged,” she said slowly, savoring the words, after a pause precisely gauged for the perfect length to instill terror but not boredom into the heart of the listener, “with high treason against the monarchy of the Hwangawine District.”
Kahlo made no attempt to confirm or deny this fact, and simply wished for death to come quickly.
“How do you plead?” she continued.
“Guilty,” he said, proud of what he had done. It had been
The crowd began to murmur. The Queen raised one sexy eyebrow in surprise. “How interesting,” she was murmuring to herself now, “that you aren’t claiming to be innocent.”
Kahlo remained silent.
“You’re supposed to claim to be innocent,” she scolded, “so that we can argue the point before your sentence is pronounced anyway. Skipping that step will make things terribly dull, I’m afraid.”
“I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” said Kahlo, who had decided to go out with sarcastic bravado since his silent treatment hadn’t seemed to affect her much.
“Gavolt!” she snapped, and the Royal Vizier stepped forth from the shadows of her throne where he had been sulking. He was still below the Queen, but had much more power than most of the airheads there assembled although that didn’t, of course, do him a fat lot of good most of the time.
“Yes, your Regalness?” he said with just a hint of petulance, as he bowed half-mockingly.
Queen Australia was far too conceited and just plain stupid to notice, as usual, and simply nodded in return. “Tell this impudent worm what he is charged with.”
“You are charged,” he said reluctantly, as if it hadn’t been said mere moments ago, “with high treason against the monarchy of the Hwangawine District.”
“You know we must take these things very seriously,” said the Queen. “Are you absolutely certain you wish to plead guilty?”
“Listen, sister,” Kahlo spat, by now rather comfortable with his role of sarcastic bravado, “if I wasn’t absolutely certain I wouldn’t have said it, you get me?”
She was squinting at him, now, pleased to exact revenge but disappointed that she had to do it already, without argument, because then it would be over and she would have nothing to look forward to except for continuing to be pampered all day every day for the rest of her life.
She sighed. “All right then,” she said finally. “You know, of course, what that means for you.”
Kahlo did, and wasn’t particularly excited, but it had certainly been worth it. “But wait,” he interrupted as an idea struck him, “in the old days we had juries to help decide these things.”
The Queen gawked at him. “So?”
“So, isn’t that a good idea? Wouldn’t that be fairer?”
She sighed and scratched at her sexy chin. “Are you finding fault in my judgment?” she demanded, and, not giving him a chance to answer, went on, “My word is law, and my decisions infallible. Molest me not with these ridiculous notions.”
“Your father –”
“– was weak and incompetent. I’ll thank you not to mention him again.”
He happened to glance at the Queen’s sister, Princess Jamillika, who was reluctantly hanging around by the side of the throne opposite the Vizier. She was nearly identical to the Queen, aside from being slightly younger and much more tastefully dressed. She loathed staying in this palace with such a tyrant, but royal and familial obligations held her there. Certainly she could not have been more different; she was sweeter than sugar but it was her sister who caused cavities.
She gave him an apologetic smile. Kahlo would have preferred an openly warm and comforting smile, but given the circumstances he admitted she hadn’t much right to give him one.
Still, a shred of hope was kindled in him, and he decided to try and do something worthwhile in his last moments.
“Your Majesty,” he began, “if I may speak –”
“You may, even though you just did,” said the Queen, who would just as soon have cut out his tongue but was glad to be able to prolong the moment.
“It’s just that,” he began, “most of my compatriots have said that they would be perfectly willing to build thirty-foot high statues of you, if only you wouldn’t keep them in prison camps and starve them and beat them and otherwise make daily life miserable.”
She pursed her sexy lips at him. “You have to suffer to create true art,” she said without hesitation, “and what could possibly be more artistic than moi?”
Actually she didn’t say moi, because the French language was completely unknown on the planet Ypiupi, but the language she said it in was their closest equivalent to French, i.e. the language of love and stuck-up snobs, etc., and so it is the best substitution to be offered here. She wasn’t even speaking English in the first place, of course, so there’s no need to be picky about this.
Jamillika offered him one of the openly warm and comforting smiles he had been hoping for, which now seemed slightly more appropriate, and quickly interceded. “He has a point, dearest sister,” she insisted. “Perhaps strong healthy citizens would be more productive. It is certainly worth a try.”
“Grab your throat, infidel!” Australia snapped. A note of slight interest to the two readers who care about such things, is that given the great many organs involved in speaking; lungs, diaphragm, vocal chords, voice box, nasal passages, tongue, teeth, lips, and the entire cavern of the mouth itself, many different expressions along the lines of “hold your tongue” have arisen, depending on which organ has happened to be picked by the humanoid beings picking the expression, and the ease with which said organ can actually be held. Equivalent expressions among telepathic species usually forego this and simply follow the lines of “Stop thinking.”
Jamillika kept quiet, as requested, and glowered at her sister.
“You may have a higher position than this citizen, here,” the Queen continued, “but never forget, that while input is welcome, suggestions are not.” She turned to Kahlo. “I’ll think about it,” she lied, and, having finally decided there was no point in beating around the bush since it would all be over too soon anyway, pushed the button on the arm of her throne which released the trapdoor beneath his feet.
Kahlo was momentarily stunned by the fall, which was about four meters. He slowly got up and looked around, but it was too dark to see much of anything. By the time his eyes adjusted he had looked up instead at the now nonexistent ceiling, which now manifested itself simply as a blinding blur.
It then took a further several minutes to readjust to the darkness, at the end of which the first thing he noticed was a monster salivating mere inches from his face.
Kahlo swore and jumped back sharply. The monster did not flinch, and regarded him the way a cow regards a blade of grass. This analogy held strong, because he would not be a great deal more troublesome as a prey item in this situation.
“You think you’ve got problems,” the Queen added as an afterthought, “do you suppose it’s easy, keeping a figure like this, when I sit around all day and do nothing?”
Kahlo would gladly have resumed his sarcastic bravado repertoire, but as a result of being gripped by sudden mind-numbing terror his wit was a little slow.
“Oh – oh yeah!?” he managed finally. “Well – it takes one to know one!”
“Citizen – uh –” she consulted the court scribe momentarily “–2965, having been found guilty of high treason against the monarchy of Hwangawine District, with which you have been charged, you are hereby sentenced to be eaten, slowly, by my little Bobocitos.”
“Bobocitos”, in her native dialect, loosely translated meant “really adorable snuggly-wuggly creature that endears itself to me.”
He took some deep breaths to calm himself, and looked at her little Bobocitos, which was very obliging in that it stayed still and let him look at it. “Adorable” was of course in the eye of the beholder, but for someone human-sized, especially slightly short ones like the Ypiupians, to call it “little” was a bit of a misnomer. It was like a huge worm, a good twenty meters long and as thick as a bango tree. Its front third however was raised off the ground and towered over his head, so ending in a face with two piercing beady eyes and uncountable rows of razor-sharp teeth. Unlike most worms it had the additional advantage of two arms, which ended in scythe-like apparatuses used both for propulsion and cutting prey to more conveniently sized morsels. A final point of interest was the forest of thick horns arranged like a wig along the back of this upraised front section, as if anything would actually think of attacking it.
No one knew where it had come from. It had simply appeared in the palace one morning, a few months after Australia came to power and immediately she had secretly had the trapdoor installed. Rumors said that it hailed from the dark rainforests across the Gibral Ocean, but of the few who survived trips to those rainforests nobody had ever captured so much as a photograph of another specimen, and so it remained a mystery.
Kahlo took a few more deep breaths. Incredibly, they actually seemed to work.
“Great,” he snapped back, getting his bearings, “I finally get to talk to someone human!”
This really wasn’t so bad, once he got used to it. It would be over soon enough. He backed up a little bit more, very slowly.
The creature lowered its towering head a little bit closer to his face. Now he could smell its breath, which quite naturally reeked of rotten meat. Its lipless mouth seemed to spread, almost imperceptibly, into a grin of anticipation.
Kahlo laughed light-headedly, and promptly passed out.
It has not yet been explained why the Queen’s heart was like a black hole and how she damaged the Hwangawine District’s reputation, but by now that is probably quite unnecessary.
***
Jamillika watched in terror as Bobocitos advanced on Kahlo’s prone form. “Please, no!” she gasped.
Australia turned to her in stoned amusement. “Why?” she asked.
“It’s just – so harsh –”
“It seems to me people are beginning to forget who is the Queen here. Including you, dear sister. I may find it necessary to tighten my iron grip.”
Jamillika was unable to tear her gaze away as the creature suddenly slashed at Kahlo’s thigh. Blood splattered across the dungeon floor. The creature licked some off of its scythe-like apparatus, which only served to pique its already voracious appetite.
Why was she so concerned about him? Of course, she was always concerned about prisoners, but never enough that she had the courage to speak out like this. She still remembered looking into his eyes, what an experience it had been. There was something there, something she had never felt before. But even that wasn’t it. Was it?
She felt sympathy for his position, for all of the peasants. It hadn’t been that way in the past. Why was it now? Why was one person allowed to wreak so much havoc? What the heck kind of government was this? She felt that something needed to change, and it needed to change soon. She knew that the others felt the same way. So why didn’t they act, before it was too late?
“Please,” she begged her sister, “let him go. Kill me instead.”
Australia laughed. “I’d be willing to kill both,” she admitted, “but there’s stuff, you know, familial bonds, deathbed promises, scapegoat necessities, stuff like that in the way. So no can do.”
Bobocitos roared in triumph. Jamillika ran away, crying. Berrik groaned and opened his eyes.
“What happened this time?” he demanded.
***
When he regained consciousness he was looking straight at Oshawah, deity of Ypiupi. He felt no fear, as he thought he might. Oshawah was human, like him, but with long brown hair and a beard, and brown eyes that bored straight into him. He was not a giant as Kahlo had imagined.
“Greetings,” he said in a voice that was quiet yet unmistakably powerful, “and welcome to the afterlife.”
“Um, hi,” said Kahlo.
“I am well pleased with you. That thing with the statue was hilarious.”
“Oh?” Kahlo was still a little jet-lagged from his apparent trip. Then it struck him. “Did you say the afterlife?”
“Yes, of course,” said Oshawah, gesturing around him. All around, people milled about in a village square. It was not made of gold, but the people laughed and sang, and the food appeared to cost nothing. In the distance he saw mansions, rather than small decrepit huts. Oshawah continued, “The catch is –”
“Is my family here?” Kahlo shouted. “Can I see them?”
“– you cannot stay. Your time is not yet over. You have much to accomplish.”
“Oh, you mean with the revolution?” How could he fail, with a god on his side?
“Erm, well, I don’t like to give away the future prematurely. But it will be much more than that. Much, much more.” He smiled. “I know you will make me proud. But there is no time to lose. You must go.”
Pain seared through his heart. “Can’t I – see my family first? Real quick?”
Oshawah sighed. “I wish you could,” he said solemnly. “But if you were to visit them for a moment, that moment would not be enough. The burden you have carried every day since their deaths would grow, knowing the taste of paradise you had been given, until it became unbearable and consumed you. I cannot allow that to happen.”
“Then why did you take me here –”
Suddenly he regained consciousness for real, with a rapidly fading memory of what had just happened. He was still lying on the dungeon floor, minus one leg, which he noticed the creature gnawing on at a leisurely pace.
“– in the first place!? Ah,” he said, “here’s the catch.”
He could see the ceiling now, or rather lack thereof, as more than a blinding blur. Queen Australia was looking down at him with a sick and entirely unsexy smile, and next to her Gavolt and Hijra showed no emotion whatsoever. Various other members of the crowd peered in, most of them showing nothing but disgust and yet unable to look away. Jamillika was nowhere to be seen; presumably she was off somewhere crying.
“I’m sorry you had to be asleep for the actual process,” said the Queen, “but there’s still three limbs to go, and I promise you that trick won’t work again.”
Kahlo looked down at the stump of his leg and noticed that someone had apparently come down and hastily patched it up, lest he die of blood loss before he got a chance to suffer. Diabolical, he thought. But you have to give her some credit for the effort.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up. Bobocitos watched him in its peripheral vision but showed no interest. There was, after all, nowhere its meal could go.
He looked around for something to use as a crutch, but it appeared that the creature had eaten all of its previous victims’ bones as well. Surely they would otherwise be kept in here, to strike fear into peoples’ hearts. As if that were necessary.
He looked up at Australia again, who was by now positively laughing. He flashed her with an obscene Ypiupian sign language gesture that only made her laugh harder. The others besides Gavolt still looked disgusted, but whether because of the creature’s antics or the gesture he had no idea.
In fact the reason they were so disgusted was not that they had any trepidations towards watching a monster gnawing on the leg of a still-living and conscious victim, so much as which particular victim it was. They all hated the Queen nearly as much as the citizens, and had been quite entertained by the business with the statue.
The Queen was only slightly aware of this, and hadn’t the faintest notion that there were no less than seventy-three separate plots against her in the palace alone, to say nothing of the citizens; twenty-five of which Gavolt himself was in charge of. He had leaked a few of the less promising ones to her, to maintain the image of loyalty, but she remained blissfully unaware of the vast majority. Poisoning, stabbing, drowning, strangling, shooting, crushing, blowing up, making her suffer total existence failure; anything you could think of and more. The most popular one, of course, was Gavolt’s, and that was feeding her to her own beloved Bobocitos; but this was implausible since her royal hiney was practically glued to the throne and pulling her off would involve standing on the trapdoor themselves. It wouldn’t have worked anyway, because the creature didn’t eat junk food. Regardless, he hoped to be the one responsible for her death, but it was always good to have contingency plans.
This event was likely to push them over the edge. A tangible wave of restless energy was sweeping through the court, and she was the only one who didn’t feel it.
And what then? Gavolt hoped to become the leading monarch himself, but most people hoped to put Jamillika on the throne and he was okay with that too, for the obvious reason that she was such a sweet wonderful person and everybody loved her. She was vaguely aware of these intentions, but pretended not to be because familial bonds would force her to defend her sister. As it stood she was not entirely comfortable with the idea of having any real power, but who was she to disagree with what the people wanted?
Right now she knew exactly what they wanted, and she felt the energy, and she knew they were going to act fast. She pretended she was going to rescue Kahlo simply because she loved his eyes, but without the simple probability that Australia was about to be relieved of duty, this would have resulted in death for both of them anyway.
As she crept along the secret passage leading to a secret doorway leading to the dungeon, she could faintly hear a commotion start up in the throne room. It was starting. She hesitated, wondering what to do. Kahlo had until the Bobocitos sucked his leg bones into oblivion, like a candy cane, before it started on another limb. But if she was wrong, or if Australia failed to be killed and discovered her prolonged absence in a time of crisis, there would certainly be a whole different set of problems.
“I’ll be back,” she called, not knowing whether he could hear her or whether it was even true.
She rushed back to the throne room and there was greeted by an incoherent string of equally incoherent explanations of what had happened. Her eyes began to grow wide and her mouth began to fall open as she gradually pieced together the fact that all seventy-three plots, to say nothing of the citizens, against Queen Australia’s life were now completely moot because she had just vanished into thin air.
Next: Chapter Three
You may be wondering why the heck this narrative has suddenly ceased to describe Alicia’s predicament, aside from being a hackneyed ploy to increase suspense. Be patient and just take it all in stride.
To continue:
Though these were the outskirts, the desert still seemed to spread for an eternity in every direction. It was not a pleasant place to work, much less to live, and so few species of animal life chose to bother when there were much nicer climates so close by. The white dwarf star, Trangoone, seemed to have the influence of a blue supergiant as its waves beat mercilessly down upon the sand. No landmarks broke up the endless view of sand, save for a few interestingly-shaped dunes and a thirty-foot tall statue, which Kahlo couldn’t see at the moment because he was lying face-down in the sand.
He was lying face-down in the sand for the same reason he was wishing, or would be wishing if he knew what was going on a few hours earlier several light-years away, to be as lucky as the not-so-lucky Alicia Parkinson. This reason was that instead of being grabbed by a huge dangerous creature, he had been grabbed by four huge dangerous humans, who were now pressing down on his back very hard.
That is to say, there were a few minor differences between them and traditional humans, but they are hardly worth going into right now. They were a little on the short side, but Kahlo was as well and these ones made up for it with sheer muscle.
He had heard somewhere that sound travels farther through the ground, and now found it to be true. Even with his ears full of sand he heard the footsteps approaching from a ways off. Very close by him, they stopped. He knew what was coming.
It had all started so simply. The citizens of his camp had been commissioned to build a thirty-foot tall statue of their terribly sexy but not very nice Queen, in spite of the fact that over a hundred such statues already dominated the countryside. “Commissioned” in this case was a synonym for “forced out of bed in the middle of the night and dragged twelve kilometers to the building site, being whipped and kicked the whole way, and given thirty-two hours in which to accomplish the task using simple hand tools while your family is held hostage.” Indeed, she was a not very nice Queen.
Kahlo had no family to hold hostage, because his two-year old daughter had already been killed through maltreatment on a previous such occasion, and his wife had soon followed suit. He hadn’t taken revenge simply because he was too weak and sore to do any real damage.
Until this opportunity came up.
The only helpful thing their captors had done, ever, was to save them the trouble of drawing up blueprints. Each statue followed the same code, which had terribly specific requirements for the size and proportions of every single part of it, some accurate and some fudged a bit to flatter their representations. Failure to meet these in the slightest was merely considered normal (as opposed to high) treason, but the punishments were bad enough, especially if the workers’ families were still hostage.
Kahlo had been in charge of her nose on this particular statue. His first thought had been to make it slightly crooked, and watch with satisfaction as the Queen had a coronary over it before she came after him.
Then he had had a much better idea.
The others did not object because they knew it was his own funeral, he had nothing to lose, and besides, it would be terribly funny. They wished him luck in the afterlife and hoped he would put in a good word for them.
In a final defiant blow with what were to be his last hours, Citizen 2965 had made a name for himself. He had decided on “Kahlo” because in his native dialect it meant “prevalent underdog”. Most Ypiupians, traditionally, did not have last names except those they took to honor deceased relatives. His father, Kache, had died of despair when King Niklwat passed away and his daughter was sworn in. Kahlo saw, quickly, how terribly right he had been about her, and took the name to praise him as customary.
She had come out to inspect the statue today. Her bodyguards had been first, and it was they who currently had him in their iron grip. Her reaction now, on seeing the rather unsexy nose of a Gorrible Tranktwill beast from Anka IV sitting slightly off-center in the middle of her statue’s face, was priceless. The scream transcended normal wavelengths of sound and lasted for longer than humans are supposed to be able to not breathe.
The footsteps started again and came closer, closer. He managed to raise his head, just a little, though he quickly realized his captors were letting him because they wanted him to see what was next. He saw the shadow of the mattress and the undernourished pack animals carrying it, and then the shadow of a skinny woman jumping off, and then a pair of freshly-waxed legs right in front of his face.
He tried to move his head more, but couldn’t see past her sexy knees. They stood immovable, like a stabilized pair of boulders on a flat surface. They might have had little frowny faces drawn on them, for all the anger that radiated out of these shapely patellas.
When one at last did move, it was only moving the knee which was only going along, grudgingly it seemed, with the rest of the leg; which itself was only obliging to raise her bare sexy foot so that it could come down on the back of his head and press his face into the sand again.
Perhaps at this point it would be best to clarify what she looked like, even though he couldn’t see her. She was, like all the Ypiupians, mostly human. There were a few minor differences between them and traditional humans but they are hardly worth going into right now. They were a little on the short side, but in her case she was skinny enough that an outside observer from, say, the Earth would hardly notice at first glance. Her hair, the exact hue of a black hole, was cut at a rather dramatic angle, so that it was merely a couple of inches long in the back and sloped past her shoulders in the front, in a traditional Ypiupian style. The more pressing similarity between her and a black hole was her heart, but we will get to that in a moment.
She was dressed in traditional Hwangawine District royalty garb, relatively plain and simple but augmented with incredibly heavy and sparkly jewelry. This particular Queen, whose name by the way was Australia (a meaningless coincidence to the aforementioned hypothetical Earthling observer), had, as mentioned, broken with tradition in the appalling cut of the garment’s top half, and the length of the skirt. The others of high rank in the Hwangawine District had protested this wholeheartedly, of course, because they had public relations to think of and they could hardly have their Queen looking like a prostitute. As it turned out, this was the least of the damage she would do to their reputation, but we will get to that in a moment.
“Infidel,” she muttered in a voice that chilled the desert. “I’ll see you pay for this before the sun sets, see if I don’t!”
Kahlo had every reason to believe that she would. But oh well, it certainly had been worthwhile.
“Do your worst, tyrant scum,” he boasted.
“What did he say?” demanded the Queen.
“Sounded like ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph,’” said one of the bodyguards helpfully.
“No, no,” insisted another, “he said, ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph.’”
The Queen, in addition to being not very nice, was not very smart. She took the guards’ suggestions seriously. Kahlo felt a wisp of her hair as she bent to his half-exposed ear, and then her refreshingly moist and cool breath as she asked sincerely, “Did you say, ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph,’ or ‘Mmph mmph mmph, mmph-mmph mmph’?”
Kahlo remained silent. His first attempt at communication had resulted in rather more sand getting in his mouth than he normally preferred, and he wished for it to not happen again. His ears were still working however, and they had noted the guards’ words with interest.
With a disgusted huff, she snapped upright straight as a stick. “Stand up,” she ordered. “When I ask a question, I expect a response. And I will get one, even if it is merely your screams of agony.”
The bodyguards jerked him to his feet. As he shook his head to clear it of sand and regain his senses, she helped the process by slapping him across the face. Then she marched back over to her mattress. She stared at it, then at the guards, and decided that in order to convey a more intimidating impression she ought to show her independence. That was the least of what she showed as she climbed awkwardly onto it, and was off. “To the palace!” she called over her shoulder.
“Come on,” said one of the guards behind him as he watched her depart at an incredible speed, “we walk.”
A few minutes later, another peasant emerged from beneath the statue’s skirt (where else was he supposed to hide?) and shimmied down its leg. Once on the ground he cursed and hopped about, trying to rid his own legs of the severe cramps that had been entailed in keeping such a position for so long. With that done, he watched the silhouettes on the horizon, and quickly pulled from his rags one of the radios that had on previous occasions been stolen from the citizens’ cruel overseers.
“Malluk, this is Hiilo,” he hissed under his breath. “Do you read me?”
After a burst of static, the reply came. “Who’s Malluk? Who’s Hiilo?” it demanded.
He seethed in irritation. “Rubber Eyelash, this is Bright Fingernail,” he amended.
“I read you, Fingernail. Over.”
“Has the Queen – er, has Evil Lip Gloss passed you yet?”
“Coming up on us right now.”
“Great. Can you shoot her?”
“Negative. There are guards. They look tired, but not that tired.”
“How many?”
“Only two, but I don’t know if I can get them both before – y’know.”
“Never mind them for now. What about her? Could you get her, theoretically?”
“Not sure. She’s kind of at a weird angle to me. What spots are supposed to be fatal, again?”
“Well the heart’s a good bet.”
“Negative. Nature’s prepared her well for that eventuality.”
“The head, then. That’s foolproof.”
“Negative. I don’t think her brain is a vital organ. And there’s still the small matter of guards…”
“Okay, fine. Forget her. Head back to camp. I’ll just go rescue Kahlo – er, I mean, Blind Whiplash – and we’ll save the revolution for another day. Fingernail out.” He pocketed his radio and looked at the silhouettes again. They had quite a lead on him, but he would catch up.
“I’m coming, buddy,” he said, and started out.
***
For Kahlo, who was used to hard manual labor in the worst of conditions, the five-kilometer walk to the palace in blazing heat was merely a relatively pleasant stroll. For his escorts, who were not, it was a preview of hell. Male human bodies, even on Ypiupi, are composed of approximately 60% water. It seemed to them that, in addition to their roasting alive and having their legs turn to lead, this figure was being divided by ten.
Kahlo stopped on a small rise and looked back at them. “What’s the matter?” he called. “Can’t her majesty’s servants keep up with a mere slave?”
“No,” wheezed one of them, “so why don’t you make a run for it and we’ll tell her the sun got you.”
Kahlo considered this suggestion. “I just might do that,” he said. “But what’s it to your benefit?”
The same one, who seemed to be the only one still capable of speech, dragged his feet to a halt and collapsed onto his bottom as he said, “I thought you were a bright one. Do you think we like her?”
Kahlo thought back to their exchange with the Queen. He had thought perhaps they were merely being as stupid as her, but now he was sure, as he had hoped, that it had been deliberate mockery. “I guess not,” he said tentatively, “but when you stick around I have to think maybe, right?”
“Oh, sure, that’s easy for you to say,” said the guard. He pulled out his canteen and sucked at it, hoping against hope that it had miraculously refilled itself within the last five minutes. Incredibly, it had not. He sighed and continued. “We’re honor-bound to her, like her father before. What else could we do?”
“Start a revolution,” said Kahlo.
They gawked at him.
“Look,” he insisted, “it’s that simple. Everyone must feel the way you do. I’ve already set the stage for it. But I can’t lead my people because I’ve been arrested, remember?”
“She is a witch,” pointed out another guard, depleting his speech quota for the journey.
“And the way she dresses,” said another, who had rationed his water better and had a tidbit more voice left. “It was cool at first, but now it’s just like, grow up and put some real clothes on. Sheez.”
“You can’t have leadership like that,” Kahlo insisted. “You just can’t. Revolution, I’m telling you.”
“A lot of us actually had considered it,” admitted the guard. “You may be right.” He got to his feet. “But not now. We have to consider it some more. And the Queen is not a patient woman. Come on, let’s go.”
“If I did run away,” Kahlo asked tentatively, “would you come after me?”
“Probably.”
“For what sort of reasons would you not?”
“If we had time to consider your suggestion far enough and decided to go with it.”
“I see.”
“Well, make up your mind since you’re so decisive.”
“I think,” said Kahlo after a moment’s thought, “that I will not run away. You would probably come after me and I would have to defend myself. I am a pacifist and thus opposed to that idea.” He started to walk again. With a collective groan, the others followed.
At that moment Hiilo topped a sand dune and saw them. They were weak, as he had anticipated. This would be like taking goopleberries from a Snük. He raised his makeshift weapon and set the bead on the corporal.
Before his finger could even begin to contemplate tightening on the trigger, his radio again roared to life.
***
Eventually the desert thinned out. There was no definitive point at which you could say it was changing, but eventually you suddenly realized you were in a much cooler, moister, and more abundantly populated savannah. At about this same time you would notice the huge royal palace surrounded by, yet towering over, several thirty-foot tall statues of the woman who was shortly going to make the rest of Kahlo’s brief life very, utterly miserable.
The courtyard was eerily silent as they crossed it to reach the huge cast-iron gate. Not a single guard came to challenge them, but sitting in front of the gate was a disheveled-looking man in his late forties, with about a week’s growth of stubble on his face. A scar ran across his right cheek in the shape of a microphone headset.
“Get up, Bardo,” growled the talkative bodyguard, kicking him gently but with an unmistakable air of wanting him the heck out of the way. “We’ve an important package for her majesty.”
“Oh, do you?” said the man wearily as he turned to face them. He looked Kahlo up and down, but obviously didn’t care in the slightest about what he saw. “I might come in and watch this package in action. Then again, I probably won’t. Not much excites me anymore.”
“Yes, so you say,” snapped the bodyguard. “We don’t have time to reiterate your problems, Bardo. Get up.”
“I was a war hero, you know.”
“Yes,” seethed the bodyguard through clenched teeth, “we know. Get up.”
“I could still be one, now. Plenty of stuff going on. But no, I have to lounge around here, with nothing to do. The most exciting thing that’s happened to me since then was when I took a nap on an angry swabjek’s burrow.”
“What happened?” asked Kahlo suddenly. The nearest bodyguard smacked him to the ground, not for talking out of turn but because he didn’t want to hear this story again for the umpteenth time.
“With the swabjek? It ate me. Seriously though. My father was a war hero first,” said Bardo, staring at the sun as he dredged up old memories. The guards would have attested to the fact that he had dredged up these same memories yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on, and therefore shouldn’t have required much dredging up now; but he spent just enough time dredging them up to make them feel as if they ought to have mentioned this and then continued, aggravatingly, to vocalize them (the memories) before they (the guards) had a chance. “He was known throughout the quadrant for his piloting skills.”
“I see,” mused Kahlo. He picked himself up off the ground, but Bardo stayed where he was.
The guard sighed. “If you’re not going to get up,” he said, “can you at least make this fast? Her highness is not a patient woman.”
“Certainly,” said Bardo. “Wouldn’t want to upset her, would we? Right, my father. Mission after mission he flew against the Skreel, and before that, space pirates. Yeah, we’re that old. The skies were not safe for evil in those days, I can tell you that!”
“The District’s Golden Age,” Kahlo recalled.
“Right, whatever. But…” Bardo turned pale and shifted his gaze to the ground. “His skill couldn’t protect him forever. Sheer probability and chance guaranteed that one day he would fail. And… when that day came, thirty years ago… the only remains of his beloved ship, or indeed his entire fleet, or indeed him… was a cloud of space dust.”
Kahlo bowed his head in sympathetic reverence.
“But, life goes on,” said Bardo quickly, his eyes snapping back up. “I took his name as my last, to honor him. Pikkes. His name was Pikkes. And mine is Bardo Pikkes. I have followed in his footsteps as a pilot.”
Kahlo nodded. He knew what it was like to follow one’s father. “And what happened to that?”
“Well, the good king Niklwat eventually succumbed to old age. Under the rule of that demon he called a daughter, all royal ships in the District were called back to the palace because they made her feel safer. Seeing the atrocities committed now, I wonder she has a need to feel safe. Only planet likes us now is Balvador, and it sucks. I know I’m not the only one who wants to take the fleet out again and teach her a lesson myself.”
“So do it,” said Kahlo. “Start a revolution. Or,” he said as the guards shot him dirty looks, “join the one that these fine gentlemen are going to be starting.”
“Well, thing is I’ve got issues with loyalty and duty drummed into my – sure, all right, where do I sign?”
“Look,” said the talkative guard, whose name was Corporal Hijra which isn’t important but may as well be mentioned since he has been doing so much talking; as he pulled out his sidearm and aimed it at Bardo’s throat, “get up or you’ll be telling your stories to the ghosts.”
With deliberate slowness, Bardo got to his feet. “That’s what I like about our relationship,” he said. “No professional detachment.”
“Threats are a coward’s tactic,” said Kahlo. “Action is the path to true results.”
“Are you saying you want him to shoot me?” demanded Bardo.
“No. I am, as I’ve said, opposed to violence, but when it’s necessary there can’t be hesitation. But no, I don’t want him to shoot you. I meant in a much broader sense.”
“A man does some heroic thing, and suddenly thinks he’s a philosopher,” muttered Corporal Hijra. “Clear out, flyboy. Tell the swabjeks I said ‘hi.’” Bardo reluctantly complied as Hijra entered a code into
“I’ll think about what you said,” Bardo called over his shoulder.
Kahlo waved, and then turned to the doorway and squared his shoulders. “The philosophy thing,” he said, looking with dread down the long, dark, cavernous passageway, “has more to do with my imminent painful death than anything else.”
In fact it looked perfectly cheery when the lights were on, but the lights were never on because the Queen wanted it to look long, dark and cavernous. It was intended to strike fear into those who entered, and it usually worked.
Kahlo forced his back. He tried to focus. He had done something, and now he was facing the consequences, but it had all been worth it. Time to go out with some style. He quickened his pace and began to whistle.
“Catchy,” said Hijra, trying to pretend the hallway wasn’t giving him the heebie-jeebies as well. “What is it?”
“No clue,” Kahlo lied. It was a song he had used to sing to his young daughter. Thinking of her filled him with righteous anger again, and the fear was crowded out. He waited impatiently as Hijra opened the next door, and then briskly strode down the length of the throne room without his escorts.
The path was lined with immaculately dressed royalty and nobility, who stopped talking and stared as he passed. None of them had any real power compared to the Queen but they got to attend fancy-dress balls and talk down their noses at people. A humongous diamond chandelier hovered above their heads, and exotic potted plants spaced at regular intervals made the room seem more alive. The major improvement over the previous hallway, undoubtedly, was the large windows that let the streaming sunlight in. Rather than being too hot it had a warming effect, which served to counteract somewhat the chills radiating from the being who ruled it all.
Kahlo stared impassively at the carved golden throne, whereon sprawled in an altogether sexy manner was her, the altogether sexy Queen of the Hwangawine District, who had somehow succeeded in making herself almost entirely unsexy by the policies of rule she insisted on pursuing. He may have ordinarily been paralyzed with fear but she was, at this moment, asleep. Behind her a page boy named Berrik was having way too much fun giving her a massage.
The guards rushed to catch up with him and lined up on either side of the throne. Hijra leaned over to the Queen’s ear and whispered something, staring at him the whole time. Her head snapped up, and she glowered at Kahlo.
“Interrupting my nap,” she said. “I will make you suffer.”
He remained stoically silent. He would not sink to her level.
She yawned in an impossibly sexy manner and writhed like a worm on a hot plate as she stretched, conking Berrik’s head against the throne and knocking him out cold. Kahlo felt the wave of outrage that swept through the court at this, but no one said anything. It was just as well that the boy miss what was about to happen.
“You are charged,” she said slowly, savoring the words, after a pause precisely gauged for the perfect length to instill terror but not boredom into the heart of the listener, “with high treason against the monarchy of the Hwangawine District.”
Kahlo made no attempt to confirm or deny this fact, and simply wished for death to come quickly.
“How do you plead?” she continued.
“Guilty,” he said, proud of what he had done. It had been
The crowd began to murmur. The Queen raised one sexy eyebrow in surprise. “How interesting,” she was murmuring to herself now, “that you aren’t claiming to be innocent.”
Kahlo remained silent.
“You’re supposed to claim to be innocent,” she scolded, “so that we can argue the point before your sentence is pronounced anyway. Skipping that step will make things terribly dull, I’m afraid.”
“I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” said Kahlo, who had decided to go out with sarcastic bravado since his silent treatment hadn’t seemed to affect her much.
“Gavolt!” she snapped, and the Royal Vizier stepped forth from the shadows of her throne where he had been sulking. He was still below the Queen, but had much more power than most of the airheads there assembled although that didn’t, of course, do him a fat lot of good most of the time.
“Yes, your Regalness?” he said with just a hint of petulance, as he bowed half-mockingly.
Queen Australia was far too conceited and just plain stupid to notice, as usual, and simply nodded in return. “Tell this impudent worm what he is charged with.”
“You are charged,” he said reluctantly, as if it hadn’t been said mere moments ago, “with high treason against the monarchy of the Hwangawine District.”
“You know we must take these things very seriously,” said the Queen. “Are you absolutely certain you wish to plead guilty?”
“Listen, sister,” Kahlo spat, by now rather comfortable with his role of sarcastic bravado, “if I wasn’t absolutely certain I wouldn’t have said it, you get me?”
She was squinting at him, now, pleased to exact revenge but disappointed that she had to do it already, without argument, because then it would be over and she would have nothing to look forward to except for continuing to be pampered all day every day for the rest of her life.
She sighed. “All right then,” she said finally. “You know, of course, what that means for you.”
Kahlo did, and wasn’t particularly excited, but it had certainly been worth it. “But wait,” he interrupted as an idea struck him, “in the old days we had juries to help decide these things.”
The Queen gawked at him. “So?”
“So, isn’t that a good idea? Wouldn’t that be fairer?”
She sighed and scratched at her sexy chin. “Are you finding fault in my judgment?” she demanded, and, not giving him a chance to answer, went on, “My word is law, and my decisions infallible. Molest me not with these ridiculous notions.”
“Your father –”
“– was weak and incompetent. I’ll thank you not to mention him again.”
He happened to glance at the Queen’s sister, Princess Jamillika, who was reluctantly hanging around by the side of the throne opposite the Vizier. She was nearly identical to the Queen, aside from being slightly younger and much more tastefully dressed. She loathed staying in this palace with such a tyrant, but royal and familial obligations held her there. Certainly she could not have been more different; she was sweeter than sugar but it was her sister who caused cavities.
She gave him an apologetic smile. Kahlo would have preferred an openly warm and comforting smile, but given the circumstances he admitted she hadn’t much right to give him one.
Still, a shred of hope was kindled in him, and he decided to try and do something worthwhile in his last moments.
“Your Majesty,” he began, “if I may speak –”
“You may, even though you just did,” said the Queen, who would just as soon have cut out his tongue but was glad to be able to prolong the moment.
“It’s just that,” he began, “most of my compatriots have said that they would be perfectly willing to build thirty-foot high statues of you, if only you wouldn’t keep them in prison camps and starve them and beat them and otherwise make daily life miserable.”
She pursed her sexy lips at him. “You have to suffer to create true art,” she said without hesitation, “and what could possibly be more artistic than moi?”
Actually she didn’t say moi, because the French language was completely unknown on the planet Ypiupi, but the language she said it in was their closest equivalent to French, i.e. the language of love and stuck-up snobs, etc., and so it is the best substitution to be offered here. She wasn’t even speaking English in the first place, of course, so there’s no need to be picky about this.
Jamillika offered him one of the openly warm and comforting smiles he had been hoping for, which now seemed slightly more appropriate, and quickly interceded. “He has a point, dearest sister,” she insisted. “Perhaps strong healthy citizens would be more productive. It is certainly worth a try.”
“Grab your throat, infidel!” Australia snapped. A note of slight interest to the two readers who care about such things, is that given the great many organs involved in speaking; lungs, diaphragm, vocal chords, voice box, nasal passages, tongue, teeth, lips, and the entire cavern of the mouth itself, many different expressions along the lines of “hold your tongue” have arisen, depending on which organ has happened to be picked by the humanoid beings picking the expression, and the ease with which said organ can actually be held. Equivalent expressions among telepathic species usually forego this and simply follow the lines of “Stop thinking.”
Jamillika kept quiet, as requested, and glowered at her sister.
“You may have a higher position than this citizen, here,” the Queen continued, “but never forget, that while input is welcome, suggestions are not.” She turned to Kahlo. “I’ll think about it,” she lied, and, having finally decided there was no point in beating around the bush since it would all be over too soon anyway, pushed the button on the arm of her throne which released the trapdoor beneath his feet.
Kahlo was momentarily stunned by the fall, which was about four meters. He slowly got up and looked around, but it was too dark to see much of anything. By the time his eyes adjusted he had looked up instead at the now nonexistent ceiling, which now manifested itself simply as a blinding blur.
It then took a further several minutes to readjust to the darkness, at the end of which the first thing he noticed was a monster salivating mere inches from his face.
Kahlo swore and jumped back sharply. The monster did not flinch, and regarded him the way a cow regards a blade of grass. This analogy held strong, because he would not be a great deal more troublesome as a prey item in this situation.
“You think you’ve got problems,” the Queen added as an afterthought, “do you suppose it’s easy, keeping a figure like this, when I sit around all day and do nothing?”
Kahlo would gladly have resumed his sarcastic bravado repertoire, but as a result of being gripped by sudden mind-numbing terror his wit was a little slow.
“Oh – oh yeah!?” he managed finally. “Well – it takes one to know one!”
“Citizen – uh –” she consulted the court scribe momentarily “–2965, having been found guilty of high treason against the monarchy of Hwangawine District, with which you have been charged, you are hereby sentenced to be eaten, slowly, by my little Bobocitos.”
“Bobocitos”, in her native dialect, loosely translated meant “really adorable snuggly-wuggly creature that endears itself to me.”
He took some deep breaths to calm himself, and looked at her little Bobocitos, which was very obliging in that it stayed still and let him look at it. “Adorable” was of course in the eye of the beholder, but for someone human-sized, especially slightly short ones like the Ypiupians, to call it “little” was a bit of a misnomer. It was like a huge worm, a good twenty meters long and as thick as a bango tree. Its front third however was raised off the ground and towered over his head, so ending in a face with two piercing beady eyes and uncountable rows of razor-sharp teeth. Unlike most worms it had the additional advantage of two arms, which ended in scythe-like apparatuses used both for propulsion and cutting prey to more conveniently sized morsels. A final point of interest was the forest of thick horns arranged like a wig along the back of this upraised front section, as if anything would actually think of attacking it.
No one knew where it had come from. It had simply appeared in the palace one morning, a few months after Australia came to power and immediately she had secretly had the trapdoor installed. Rumors said that it hailed from the dark rainforests across the Gibral Ocean, but of the few who survived trips to those rainforests nobody had ever captured so much as a photograph of another specimen, and so it remained a mystery.
Kahlo took a few more deep breaths. Incredibly, they actually seemed to work.
“Great,” he snapped back, getting his bearings, “I finally get to talk to someone human!”
This really wasn’t so bad, once he got used to it. It would be over soon enough. He backed up a little bit more, very slowly.
The creature lowered its towering head a little bit closer to his face. Now he could smell its breath, which quite naturally reeked of rotten meat. Its lipless mouth seemed to spread, almost imperceptibly, into a grin of anticipation.
Kahlo laughed light-headedly, and promptly passed out.
It has not yet been explained why the Queen’s heart was like a black hole and how she damaged the Hwangawine District’s reputation, but by now that is probably quite unnecessary.
***
Jamillika watched in terror as Bobocitos advanced on Kahlo’s prone form. “Please, no!” she gasped.
Australia turned to her in stoned amusement. “Why?” she asked.
“It’s just – so harsh –”
“It seems to me people are beginning to forget who is the Queen here. Including you, dear sister. I may find it necessary to tighten my iron grip.”
Jamillika was unable to tear her gaze away as the creature suddenly slashed at Kahlo’s thigh. Blood splattered across the dungeon floor. The creature licked some off of its scythe-like apparatus, which only served to pique its already voracious appetite.
Why was she so concerned about him? Of course, she was always concerned about prisoners, but never enough that she had the courage to speak out like this. She still remembered looking into his eyes, what an experience it had been. There was something there, something she had never felt before. But even that wasn’t it. Was it?
She felt sympathy for his position, for all of the peasants. It hadn’t been that way in the past. Why was it now? Why was one person allowed to wreak so much havoc? What the heck kind of government was this? She felt that something needed to change, and it needed to change soon. She knew that the others felt the same way. So why didn’t they act, before it was too late?
“Please,” she begged her sister, “let him go. Kill me instead.”
Australia laughed. “I’d be willing to kill both,” she admitted, “but there’s stuff, you know, familial bonds, deathbed promises, scapegoat necessities, stuff like that in the way. So no can do.”
Bobocitos roared in triumph. Jamillika ran away, crying. Berrik groaned and opened his eyes.
“What happened this time?” he demanded.
***
When he regained consciousness he was looking straight at Oshawah, deity of Ypiupi. He felt no fear, as he thought he might. Oshawah was human, like him, but with long brown hair and a beard, and brown eyes that bored straight into him. He was not a giant as Kahlo had imagined.
“Greetings,” he said in a voice that was quiet yet unmistakably powerful, “and welcome to the afterlife.”
“Um, hi,” said Kahlo.
“I am well pleased with you. That thing with the statue was hilarious.”
“Oh?” Kahlo was still a little jet-lagged from his apparent trip. Then it struck him. “Did you say the afterlife?”
“Yes, of course,” said Oshawah, gesturing around him. All around, people milled about in a village square. It was not made of gold, but the people laughed and sang, and the food appeared to cost nothing. In the distance he saw mansions, rather than small decrepit huts. Oshawah continued, “The catch is –”
“Is my family here?” Kahlo shouted. “Can I see them?”
“– you cannot stay. Your time is not yet over. You have much to accomplish.”
“Oh, you mean with the revolution?” How could he fail, with a god on his side?
“Erm, well, I don’t like to give away the future prematurely. But it will be much more than that. Much, much more.” He smiled. “I know you will make me proud. But there is no time to lose. You must go.”
Pain seared through his heart. “Can’t I – see my family first? Real quick?”
Oshawah sighed. “I wish you could,” he said solemnly. “But if you were to visit them for a moment, that moment would not be enough. The burden you have carried every day since their deaths would grow, knowing the taste of paradise you had been given, until it became unbearable and consumed you. I cannot allow that to happen.”
“Then why did you take me here –”
Suddenly he regained consciousness for real, with a rapidly fading memory of what had just happened. He was still lying on the dungeon floor, minus one leg, which he noticed the creature gnawing on at a leisurely pace.
“– in the first place!? Ah,” he said, “here’s the catch.”
He could see the ceiling now, or rather lack thereof, as more than a blinding blur. Queen Australia was looking down at him with a sick and entirely unsexy smile, and next to her Gavolt and Hijra showed no emotion whatsoever. Various other members of the crowd peered in, most of them showing nothing but disgust and yet unable to look away. Jamillika was nowhere to be seen; presumably she was off somewhere crying.
“I’m sorry you had to be asleep for the actual process,” said the Queen, “but there’s still three limbs to go, and I promise you that trick won’t work again.”
Kahlo looked down at the stump of his leg and noticed that someone had apparently come down and hastily patched it up, lest he die of blood loss before he got a chance to suffer. Diabolical, he thought. But you have to give her some credit for the effort.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up. Bobocitos watched him in its peripheral vision but showed no interest. There was, after all, nowhere its meal could go.
He looked around for something to use as a crutch, but it appeared that the creature had eaten all of its previous victims’ bones as well. Surely they would otherwise be kept in here, to strike fear into peoples’ hearts. As if that were necessary.
He looked up at Australia again, who was by now positively laughing. He flashed her with an obscene Ypiupian sign language gesture that only made her laugh harder. The others besides Gavolt still looked disgusted, but whether because of the creature’s antics or the gesture he had no idea.
In fact the reason they were so disgusted was not that they had any trepidations towards watching a monster gnawing on the leg of a still-living and conscious victim, so much as which particular victim it was. They all hated the Queen nearly as much as the citizens, and had been quite entertained by the business with the statue.
The Queen was only slightly aware of this, and hadn’t the faintest notion that there were no less than seventy-three separate plots against her in the palace alone, to say nothing of the citizens; twenty-five of which Gavolt himself was in charge of. He had leaked a few of the less promising ones to her, to maintain the image of loyalty, but she remained blissfully unaware of the vast majority. Poisoning, stabbing, drowning, strangling, shooting, crushing, blowing up, making her suffer total existence failure; anything you could think of and more. The most popular one, of course, was Gavolt’s, and that was feeding her to her own beloved Bobocitos; but this was implausible since her royal hiney was practically glued to the throne and pulling her off would involve standing on the trapdoor themselves. It wouldn’t have worked anyway, because the creature didn’t eat junk food. Regardless, he hoped to be the one responsible for her death, but it was always good to have contingency plans.
This event was likely to push them over the edge. A tangible wave of restless energy was sweeping through the court, and she was the only one who didn’t feel it.
And what then? Gavolt hoped to become the leading monarch himself, but most people hoped to put Jamillika on the throne and he was okay with that too, for the obvious reason that she was such a sweet wonderful person and everybody loved her. She was vaguely aware of these intentions, but pretended not to be because familial bonds would force her to defend her sister. As it stood she was not entirely comfortable with the idea of having any real power, but who was she to disagree with what the people wanted?
Right now she knew exactly what they wanted, and she felt the energy, and she knew they were going to act fast. She pretended she was going to rescue Kahlo simply because she loved his eyes, but without the simple probability that Australia was about to be relieved of duty, this would have resulted in death for both of them anyway.
As she crept along the secret passage leading to a secret doorway leading to the dungeon, she could faintly hear a commotion start up in the throne room. It was starting. She hesitated, wondering what to do. Kahlo had until the Bobocitos sucked his leg bones into oblivion, like a candy cane, before it started on another limb. But if she was wrong, or if Australia failed to be killed and discovered her prolonged absence in a time of crisis, there would certainly be a whole different set of problems.
“I’ll be back,” she called, not knowing whether he could hear her or whether it was even true.
She rushed back to the throne room and there was greeted by an incoherent string of equally incoherent explanations of what had happened. Her eyes began to grow wide and her mouth began to fall open as she gradually pieced together the fact that all seventy-three plots, to say nothing of the citizens, against Queen Australia’s life were now completely moot because she had just vanished into thin air.
Next: Chapter Three