"Princess," said Sparrow the Smith. His face was as bleak as cliffs at sunrise, and his voice rasped like tangled briars. "You will do. What I say. Or I will punish you in ways you will never forget."
"Kill me, then," Mala whispered, sprawled face-down at the feet of the huge, implacable man. "If that's your will."
The dog growled softly in Olrun's arms. The bitch's claws clicked on the floor, but the stone was too smooth to give her purchase. She felt the tension rising, and she wanted to be close to her master.
"Death would be a release, lady," Sparrow said.
He unhooked the small probability generator from his belt. It began to spin between the tips of his forefingers. When the ovoid settled into a rhythm, it hung in the air unsupported.
Sparrow's expression was too tight for certainty, but there might have been pity in the set of his mouth. "And my will," he went on, "is only that you do my master's bidding. I am the tool of my lord Saburo. But you will do as he requests."
The probability generator continued to spin at the same moderate velocity. The coils of its structure changed from wire and fine-drawn crystal to bands of rich indigo light.
"No," Mala said. She raised her face from the pale stone. "No, I will not."
Sparrow smiled. The ball of spinning light expanded away from him to engulf the princess in a web of alternate probabilities.
Reality shifted.
"Have you got the rest of the prisoners?" demanded King Stengard's two outer heads together. His middle head twisted to look into the hold his forces had just captured.
Stengard's androids and armed slaves wandered across the courtyard. The defensive wall was half melted, half blasted, into a thirty-meter gap, but the attackers had then opened the main gate for King Stengard to enter.
The party sent to the outlying hold dismounted from their individual skimmers and the heavy truck which carried the wall-breaching armament as well as a dozen personnel. The slaves, Lomeri and humans both, chattered with delight as they described to one another their recent victory.
"Got one," said the leader, Stengard's son Stenred. "The other, she was too close to the door. When it went west, so did she . . . but that was just the maid."
"Fishfood, that's all she was!" chortled a human slave who had been burned horribly some time in the past. His eyes winked out of masses of keloid, and his nostrils were slits in a smooth, pink surface. "But we got the main one!"
He jerked his electronic noose. The prisoner writhed at the jolt of fluctuating current applied to her tender throat.
"What you want done with her?" Stenred asked.
Stenred's head and torso were those of an ordinary human, save for their android pallor, but he walked on four legs. Because of the limbs' close placement on his modified pelvis, the prince looked less like a centaur than he did a spider lurching upright on two hind pairs of legs.
His genitalia hung down beneath a tasseled fringe intended for emphasis rather than concealment.
In the courtyard, the victors played with the control devices they had found in the hold. The game was to punch in random settings, then twist the control to full power. Each time, a captured slave bent backward, screaming until contraction of his or her muscles choked the throat silent. Occasionally, the victim's neck broke during the convulsions.
Stengard's troops were placing bets on which captive would die next. Whoever won crowed and demanded payment from the others. Occasionally, vicious fights broke out among Stengard's personnel, but those were minor incidents in the general bloody apathy.
"You captured her," said the king's left head.
"Whatever you please," agreed the center head.
"Though if you don't have an idea," leered the right head, "I sure do. Tasty little morsel, isn't she?"
Stenred grinned. "Hold her down!" he ordered.
"Seconds!" cried the slave with a face of scar tissue.
Princess Mala tried to struggle despite the pain that surged from the noose. It was no use. Slaves gripped her limbs and spread-eagled her on mud reeking with slaughter.
King Nainfari had been impaled on a stake in the gate of his hold. He stared through sightless eyes as Stenred knelt on his four knees to be the first of the conquerors to rape Nainfari's daughter.
Reality shifted.
"Where have you been?" croaked Mala as her husband's figure darkened the mouth of the cave. Behind him, red sand skirled on the wind. It filtered the light and made each breath taste dry.
"Keep your pants on!" snarled Offut in reply. He laughed at his own accidental joke.
The male android set down a container made from the hollow stem of a giant horsetail, a meter long and a quarter meter in diameter. He began to unwind the scarf with which he protected his face from the omnipresent wind.
"You've been gone all day!" Mala shrilled. Her fingers twitched, remembering the pain of weaving the coarse, cycad-leaf fibers into cloth. "And where's the water?"
"I brought water," Offut said, "but I had to go nearly five klicks to get it. Both the nearer holes were clogged deeper than I could dig."
Offut's left leg was shorter than his right. Both his left arms were withered, and the left side of his face looked as though it had been poured from wax which was still too hot when the mold was removed. He leered at Mala.
"Food?" Mala asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.
Offut grimaced and turned aside. "There's still some of the Gulper hide, isn't there?" he said apologetically.
"That had been dead weeks before you found it!" Mala shrilled. "That's all we've had to eat for three days, and it's almost gone!"
"Well, tomorrow I'll find something better," her husband promised without confidence. He poured water from the pipe into a slab of rock polished concave by the wind. It was the cave's only furnishing. "Here, drink some water and you'll feel better."
Mala's stomach growled. She muttered a curse, but she knew from long experience that water really was better than nothing. She pulled herself to the rock with the fingers of her four hands. Her legless hindquarters dragged behind her.
"It's not, well, the clearest water I've ever seen," Offut admitted with his face turned away.
The brackish fluid stank, even in the dense fug of the cave.
Mala closed her eyes as she bent to slurp water from the hollow. Otherwise, she might catch sight of her own hideous reflection.
"And then," said Offut, limping around behind her, "we'll fuck before we finish eating the hide."
His misshapen hands gripped her. Mala whined in familiar desperation.
Reality shifted.
There was light but no sun and no movement, and the cold cut Mala like a thousand knives.
The plain might either be endless or straitly bounded, but all she could see was a single stalagmite of ice like those she had glimpsed when Sparrow sent her cabinet briefly to Plane Four.
This time Mala was one of them, and 'this time' was eternity.
She felt tides at her frozen core, but if there was any change in the round of her existence, she was not conscious of it. Pressed against Mala's being was the rigid soul of her brother Morfari. His mouth was twisted in an echo of her own eternal silent scream.
Reality shifted.
Princess Mala's gang yipped in delight. They grounded their skimmers in a circle around their quarry, a desperate male slave.
One of the cattle guards snapped his electronic noose about the escapee's neck from behind. The captive was naked except for smeared mud. His throat bore the calluses of servitude but not the collar itself.
"Hey, how did he cut the collar off?" demanded one of Mala's crew.
The princess shrugged. "How the fuck would I know?" she said. "I figure somebody fucked up welding it on, but it don't much matter. He's not gonna tell anybody else how t' do it."
She prodded the captive in the belly with her volley gun. "Is he, now?"
"Lookit that!" cried the Fifth Plane female who acted as adjutant of the cattle guards. "Lilius! Give 'im another jolt!"
The captive was sitting on the ground. "P-p-plea—" he whimpered uselessly.
The guard holding the noose twitched his end, sending surges of electricity through the captive. At each fresh shock, the victim's legs splayed and his penis pumped erect.
A Lomeri female chirped in her own language. She stepped toward the captive and started to crouch.
Mala knocked her reptilian subordinate sideways. "Who died and made you queen, Ssadzeril?" she demanded. The princess tugged down the sweat-blackened elastic briefs which were the only garment she wore apart from her harness.
"Nexties!" the Fifth Plane female cried in delight.
The princess stepped forward and squatted over the captive. The knives dangling from her harness jingled as the cattle guards cheered.
Reality shifted.
Princess Mala lay on the floor of her bower. The probability generator was a cold ball of wire hanging from Sparrow's belt, but the reflection of its blue glow colored Mala's memory of possible truths.
"Please . . . ," Mala whispered. Her eyes were open but glazed. "Please. Don't."
"Princess," said the smith, mildly for a man so big and so relentless, "my master Saburo is a gentle man. He loves you as ever a man could love a woman, and he will treat you as a goddess yourself."
Sparrow cleared his throat. He did not raise his voice as he continued, "But lady, I am sworn to bring you to my master. I wish you no harm, but there is nothing to which I will not subject you in order to gain your agreement to wed my master."
The menace was not in the statement but rather in the flat certainty with which Sparrow delivered it.
Mala began to sob. Olrun looked from her mistress to Sparrow. The maid's face revealed nothing. Her fingers continued to hold and stroke the dog.
"Lady," said the smith, "Saburo would never put you through tortures and misery to bring you to his palace. But I am not my master, and I will do whatever I need to do."
"Mistress," Olrun said quietly. "Go with him. This one will do whatever he says."
"I will go with you," Mala said, her lips so close to the floor that her breath fogged the cool stone.