Chapter 2: Waking Up
"Your father didn't look too happy about us ditching," Ayara commented, popping another glowing, fungi-bite off the silver tray held by one of her two, shaven-headed handmaidens.
The two Domus girls stared down from the balcony over the city, a billion lights twinkling back at them with such fierce brightness that their handmaidens kept well back from the ledge despite the black, protective visors they wore. Outwards and upwards the light blazed, revealing the black dome of uncut bedrock the first explorers had taken shelter in a mere three-hundred years ago. Somewhere above them, they knew, blazed a psychic storm of legendary purport across the whole surface of the planet. That very storm which had first driven their people underground almost ten thousand years ago, imperial reckoning.
Isha idly twirled her long, braided hair in practiced patterns, creating a vortex of reflected light so bright it shone like a star and even she couldn't look directly at it. "My father's happiness is not my problem." She twirled her hair faster, concentrating on releasing the light that the braid seemed endlessly oversaturated with. "My problem today, Lady Salvich is House Salvich."
"My brother, or my father?" Ayara turned her head to the side, her own braid glowing brightly despite her best efforts. "Could you not, please!?" She rubbed her braided scalp, "you're going to give me a migraine, Isha!"
Isha smirked, her eyes crinkling along the edges where the pitch-black makeup surrounding them met the dark grey of her skin. She stopped twirling the braid and wrapped it around her left arm from forearm to wrist, her left-hand palming and fidgeting with the smooth stone where the braid ended. "I suppose you have enough headaches to deal with at the moment, Lady Salvich."
Ayara pulled a small pouch of pills out of the fold of her white robe, popped one into her mouth and downed it with a swig from a flask that seemed to materialize in her hand and then vanish just as quickly. "And I really wish you'd stop calling me that too, this whole wedding is just a sham because," her voice deepened and took on the superior and gravely tone Isha had forever associated with Lord Salvich, "your mother had the indecency to die off just two months from the decade's holdings tithe and I'm not paying a death tax and losing out on the marriage clause!"
"I have an idea," Isha clasped Ayara's hand, then slid her own hand up the girl's sleeve and snatched out the flask hidden there.
"Hey! I need that!" Ayara protested, as Isha held up one finger and took a long, slow swig accompanied by a dry cough as the cool, earthy fungahol burned down her throat. "What if that had been my medication, or, or a—"
"Please," Isha coughed once more as Ayara snatched the flask back, "I'm two years too young to drink or get married, you're two days too young to drink or get married, but one of us is getting married in two days, to her own father—"
"Adopted father," Ayara ground out through clenched teeth, "Mur'kula take him…"
"All I'm saying," Isha continued, unabated, "is that if you hadn't started drinking yet, and doing hardcore drugs," Isha nodded to the sleeve the flask had come from, "now's the time to start."
"They're analgesics," Ayara interrupted with a glare, "for the migraine you're still causing."
"Well, just encase you hadn't started," Isha continued, with a mischievous grin. "I went so far as to make sure my father's wedding gift, a barrel of your father's favorite Amasec, was switched out for something called Gorsk White Gyn, sure to upset your father's delicate palate but be readily available to knock you off your feet and out of your mind whenever you need it."
Ayara let out a long sigh and dropped the flask back into Isha's outreached hand but before the younger girl could take another illegal sip, Ayara pulled her into a hug. "Thank you," she whispered, the cracks in her voice betraying just how heavy everything felt.
Isha glanced back at the closed, locked balcony doors, imagining the mourners and the funeral entourage drinking and feasting beyond. She hugged Ayara back, holding her tight. "It's seriously messed up that I'm your best friend, daughter of the planetary governor, and the best I can do is tell you to wait it out and offer you alcohol." She shuddered involuntarily at the thought of what her friend might soon be facing. "What kind of bastard announces his wedding on the day of his wife's funeral?"
"A Shin'pervivo," Ayara answered in a hoarse whisper, her back shaking through sobs as she finally permitted herself to mourn her adopted mother's passing and the position she was being forced into.
"A Shin," Isha agreed, using the slang term her people had been using for the light-dwellers ever since they'd stumbled through the psychic storm and into Mur'kula's subterranean embrace. She held Ayara for a long while, as the other girl, about to be a young woman, wept. Her long hair pulsed in shades of grey and black sympathetically with her friend's.
It was Isha who gently broke the embrace, there was business to attend to, and business came before relationships, even familial ones. Or so her father had drilled into her; though, she imagined, even he was internally displeased with Lord Salvich's business-oriented and morally bankrupt marriage plans.
She noted out of the corner of her eye that one of Ayara's two handmaidens had slipped something out of her plain, black robe, something that had caught the light for a moment. Annoyed with her mind's constant obsession with getting off-track she gave Ayara's hand a squeeze and pulled herself back on topic.
"At least it will only be for a year or less," Isha consoled, "he'll have to divorce you before the tithe ships arrive. Then you'll truly be free of him, and this wretched place."
Ayara shook her head, her voice bitter and biting "a year or less until I become Nirvaasit, and my soul is torn from the path that leads to all places forever just as my body is torn from Mur'kula's protection."
Isha held up a tired hand, "peace Ayara. You know I don't mean to offend your beliefs. Even so, there's no reason to believe you won't find true purpose and contentment in serving the Emperor's legions or that He won't welcome your immortal soul should you fall in such service."
"Really? No reason?" Ayara's voice rose in pitch, some of that pent up grief and hopelessness turning to sudden anger. "How many have come back, Isha?" She pulled her hands away from Isha's grip. "None, not a single Domus has ever returned from service in the emperor's legions. A Domus who leaves Mur'kula is Nirvaasit and can never again find their path."
Isha bit back the usual retorts and refutations that she had become so used to making anytime someone espoused the views of Mur'kula's pervading cult. Like her father, she would welcome the opportunity to drag Djanette out of the tentare communities where she was priestess and queen and burn her at the stake, preferably in space and off-planet, just to show how much the imperium disapproved of any belief system that took away some of the Emperor's divine light and traded it for superstitious dogma. Unlike her father, though, she wasn't afraid of the political backlash. Two-hundred years ago her father had first been appointed governor, back then there had been fewer than a million Shin'pervivo, light dwellers living on Mur'kula. Now there were tens of millions, a fully equipped PDF force, an Arbites Marshall, even a decade-by-decade guard tithe. She couldn't understand what it was that her father still feared about purging Djanette and her cult from their world. But afraid he was, and so the ecclesiarch was a puppet fool and the arbites looked the other way when the Domus met in their little group-homes to conduct ceremonies honoring Mur'kula. Mur'kula belonged to the emperor after all, and every planet had its own, harmless traditions and practices, why stamp out what wasn't directly heretical and risk an uprising?
She sighed, "It's not like you have a choice, like either of us does." She shifted topics and blame, "we are both just adopted pets-made-heirs so our fathers don't have to tithe any of their own flesh and blood to the Emperor's meat grinder legions."
"At least you won't be of age when they next come," Ayara replied, the bitterness in her voice making it clear that some of her anger was still directed at Isha herself, more likely at what she stood for, what she believed. Ayara would never say it to her face, but Isha knew that she thought of her as one of the Doo-Shin-a, the false, or lost, depending on how you used it.
Ayara turned away, staring out over the brilliantly lit city, the great Martian forge, the hab stacks and market squares, the city wall beyond which the darkness held sway over the hab blocks belonging to the Domus and any Shin unable to afford housing within the city itself. "I keep praying to Mur'kula, even to your emperor, that I would wake up one day and find myself Yudd'shekaraat. That my mind would wake up and my eyes would see the one path and I could be taken by the Sanskaar. Then no one could take me from Mur'kula, not my father, not the tithe, not the emperor. I would be safe, free…" she trailed off, tears running down her face.
"Safe?" Isha challenged, unable to hold her tongue in check at Ayara's blasphemous naivete "how many have come back from their Sanskaar? How many Domus now live among us and teach us the way to the true path having found it themselves and returned to us as Jaagrt?"
"Djanette has—"
"None!" Isha interrupted, "it's an endless tunnel, Ayara, a void, a tentare with no beginning or end and once you step onto it you are never seen again! I've been there, remember? And not as part of some sacred Sanskaar or final ritual of enlightenment! I was a dumb, six-year-old child duped by that brain-washing hag you people call priestess into leading an imperial interrogator to be lost on that sacred path forever!"
"You people!? I—" Ayara's response was cut down to a gurgle as the closer of her two handmaidens took two quick paces towards her and plunged an iridescent, iron dagger in through the back of her spine and out through her throat!
Hot, arterial blood sprayed outwards as the girl stumbled forwards into Isha's still outstretched arms.
"A—Ayara?" Isha gasped as a jet of hot blood spit across her face as her friend's head turned up towards her, mouth moving, blood and a quiet popping of blood bubbles the only sound that issued forth. She screamed even as the second handmaiden appeared right beside her, another dagger flashing outwards.
"Djanette has returned!" Ayara countered, "she was sent back by Mur'kula to show the way to the faithful!" Her voice took on a lecturing quality as she quoted, "in order that sleepers might find their way in death and those few chosen of us, those who are Yudd'shekaraat, might find it even in life, and, if Mur'kula wills it, be returned to us to— Isha? Are you alright? Your hair's gone black—"
Isha threw herself at Ayara as the first handmaiden's blade thrust forwards, turning her friend just enough that the clean, piercing blow instead sliced along and through the edge of her neck, opening her throat to the spine and spraying both the handmaiden and Isha with a veritable wave of red.
"No!" Isha screamed, desperately wiping at her eyes. She cleared them of her friend's blood just in time to see the second handmaiden's blade embed itself in her chest.
"Djanette has returned!" Ayara countered, "she was sent back by Mur'kula to show the—" Ayara stopped suddenly, "Isha, your hair, it's… you're shaking. Oh Shin! Are you having a reaction to the fungahol or-gh!?"
Isha tackled her friend to the ground, the blade meant for her neck missing by a hair's breadth and leaving a fine line of wet red across her own cheek.
The bodyguard turned assassin blinked in surprise and confusion, pausing just long enough that Isha had time to mostly untangle herself from Ayara and launch her stone-tied braid straight at the shaven woman's face with a flick of her left arm.
The assassin, off-footed but not so much as to be hit by the relatively slow and hasty attack, caught the stone tied at the end of Isha's braid in her empty hand and pulled, hard.
Isha yelped as she was yanked off her feet, her neck snapping backwards painfully. The assassin was a blur as she swept past, close enough for Isha to have a very unpleasant and up-close view as the assassin's blade casually dipped inwards, slitting her throat neatly as she rushed by.
Isha hit the carpeted floor hard, hands grasping futilely at the life-blood gushing out of her opened throat, eyes watching in horror as both handmaidens descended on Ayara, slashing and stabbing as the girl screamed and tried to fend them off futilely with her raised hands.
"Djanette has returned! Hey—" Ayara protested as Isha grabbed her arm and pulled her forcefully as she dashed for the balcony door. She turned back as her shoulder struck the hardwood frame. One handmaiden was already in pursuit, blade flashing in the light, the other was talking frantically into the silver bracelet on her right hand.
Isha threw every ounce of force that a decade and a half of dance, gymnastics, and hand-to-hand combat training had given her into throwing Ayara away from the onrushing assassins. Ayara screeched as she was catapulted over Isha's shoulder, through the still opening door, and right into a passing serving girl carrying a tray of drinks.
All three of them crashed forward, the doors banging open with enough force to crack the ornate, ceramic tiles on either side of the frame and turn every head in the room in surprise and alarm.
The first handmaiden was in the air as Isha recovered. Yanking the serving tray from the servant's loose grip, Isha interposed both it and herself between the assassin and Ayara's sprawled form.
The Assassin turned the blade to the side to avoid lodging it in the tray and brought up her knees, tucking into a human cannonball at the last moment. The woman, who Isha realized in dismay was probably double her weight, slammed into the tray like a bolter round and kicked hard with both legs, the force of the impact sending Isha flying backwards, stumbling down a flight of white-carpeted stairs and landing on a table of mourners in full feast swing. Plates, utensils, food, and drink scattered in all directions.
Ignoring shouts of indignation, outrage, and general confusion, Isha flipped to her feet, half a cracked plate in one hand and the hind leg of some imported herbivore in the other.
The assassin had faired little better. She had been deflected away from Ayara and was just recovering her feet as Isha chucked the plate at her, the disk-shaped projectile spewing gravy and the final vestiges of uneaten food left clinging to it as it sliced towards its target.
The assassin dodged backwards and took off running, vanishing into the growing crowd of stunned onlookers. The second was nowhere in sight as Isha gained the stairs and turned back to Ayara. She was just in time to see the servant girl, another shaven-haired Domus woman, turn her friend's head inside out with a half dozen shots from a snub-nosed auto-pistol sporting a thick, black silencer. These facts registered with her overactive brain just as the barrel found her and she felt, but did not hear the other rounds impact her chest and throw her back down the stairs, red blood spurting from a half-dozen direct hits.
"Djanette has—" Ayara's face burned with anger at the blasphemy but before she could reply Isha had stepped past her and spun with a dancer's fluid grace, delivering a spine-snapping kick to the chest of the first of Ayara's two hand maidens.
There was just enough time for the woman's face to contort into an expression of surprise before the force of the blow lifted her off her feet and sent her sailing over the balcony and out onto a thousand meters of empty air.
Isha hadn't waited to hear the woman's scream and had already thrown out her left arm like a punch, releasing the coil of hair wrapped around it and the iridescent stone tied in the end of the braid.
The second handmaiden was well-trained, her arms coming up from her sides to block Isha's outstretched arm, anticipating the attack but failing to realize that the braid was the true threat. The smooth, derma orb struck the woman in the throat, collapsing her windpipe. The woman hadn't hesitated either, however, and the knife in her opposite arm drove in towards Isha's heart on the pure reflex of a trained killer.
Isha deflected the woman's arm at the last second and the knife impacted in her lower ribs, the adamantine blade driving through gaudy fabric of her robe like wax paper. She grunted in pain and caught the assassin's wrist in one hand, preventing the woman from twisting the knife or pulling it out to try again. With the other hand she caught her second wrist and pulled their bodies together as she threw her head to the opposite side, wrapping them both twice in the length of her white braid, tying them in place.
They stood there, struggling in mute silence. Isha fighting the woman's grip and the desire to cry out in pain as the handmaiden slowly choked, then suffocated, then went still.
Isha pried the dead woman's hand off the handle protruding from her chest and slowly unwrapped her hair.
"Isha!?—"
Isha turned to face Ayara, the look on her face terrifying her friend into silence.
"I shall take a few moments of silent prayer to petition the Emperor to spare your wayward soul, dearest Ayara." She said slowly and clearly, forcing any pain from entering her voice, her hand carefully sliding something round and shiny out from the handmaiden's robe and off her limp wrist. A comm bead was worked into the silver of the wristbrand, small, ornate, short-ranged. She set it on the balcony railing next to her and then let the handmaiden crumple to the ground.
Isha turned, slowly, careful not to aggravate the wound or shift her clothing. One hand clamped firmly around the hilt of the knife, holding it in place, motionless, the other pressed gently, repeatedly, around the wound, coming away in hot, red blood each time as she wrote on the railing.
"SAY NOTHING."
Ayara's eyes locked onto the silver armband and gave Isha a tiny nod.
"Oh!" Isha suddenly exclaimed, "you stupid servant! You've spilled the whole platter of drinks, you're soaking wet!" With a grunt she brought the stone in her braid down hard on the center of the armband just as she said 'wet'. The comm bead made a satisfying crunching noise and ceased to function.
"Isha!? What the—"
"We were arguing!" Isha exclaimed, her entire body suddenly trembling as the adrenaline surge began to eb, "she stabbed you in the throat!"
"Wha— what are you talking about? You killed them, just out of nowhere!" Ayara replied, eyes locked on the growing red patch on her best friend's white dress.
"They had daggers!" Isha insisted, "she stabbed you right through the spine! You were in my arms, blood everywhere." Her trembling grew more intense, "the second was talking into the comm on her arm, then they came at me and… and the second time they—"
"But they didn't!" Ayara insisted, "I'm just fine, Light and Ashes! Isha you are bleeding! They stabbed you!" Ayara lifted the hem of her robe to pull out her personal comm.
"No!" Isha grunted in pain as she snatched the ornate transmitter out of Ayara's hand and threw it over the balcony. "They might be monitoring that too, the servants are involved and armed, maybe all of them, maybe the security too, maybe our own fathers, maybe—!"
"Isha! You're not making any sense. You. Are. Bleeding! You're in shock! We need to get help!"
"Shut up!" Isha grabbed her friend's braid as Ayara moved towards the door. "I tried to get help, they killed us both in there too, in front of everyone!"
"Isha, you're drunk, or crazy, I don't know, but you're scaring me. Let me go! We need to get you—"
"I'm not asking. I'm ordering!" Isha gave her hair a yank, bringing Ayara's head around and down to her face level. "As daughter of the planetary governor and appointed ambassador to the Domus people I am ordering you to do as I say!"
"You're pulling rank? Now!?" Ayara just stared at her friend's pinched and pale face. Isha stared back, eyes burning, teeth grit against the pain, hands trembling. "You. Are. In-sane," Ayara over enunciated but stopped trying to pull away, "alright, lady ambassador and my supposed best friend who is bleeding all over her robe of office… what task can this lowly Domus perform for your ladyship?"
Isha let go of Ayara's braid, at least she was pretty sure she let go, her fingers had gone numb and cold, the disturbing feeling was moving slowly up her hands and arms. "You will do exactly as I say, in the order I say it…"