When the Villian Comes Home Read online

  In the street there, he cuffed my hands behind my back and looped the leash around my neck. And grinned, and kissed me; and said, “Maybe I should keep you this way. At least I can be sure you’ll be good.”

  “I’m always good,” I protested. “Master.”

  “You are, I know. Except when I want you sinful.” His hand rested a moment on my hip; then he laughed shortly and gave the leash a twitch. “Come on, then.”

  He didn’t make me trot at heel long. Soon enough I was settled against his side, his arm around my shoulders and his lips in my hair. He did keep the cuffs on me, though, and the leash too; he didn’t think to stop at a market stall and buy me even the simplest strip of cloth to mask my nakedness.

  Turned out the day was all about nakedness. He took me to the city baths, and we didn’t pass the door again till dusk, when he had to give me back to Largo. We bathed, we swam, we oiled each other’s bodies; we drowsed and sweated in the steam; we fucked slowly, languorously, slept and fucked again. We drank chilly sherbets and hot strong coffee, and sweated again, and plunged recklessly into the ice-pool and came out gasping, shuddering, desperate for rough towels and rougher hands to work them.

  I’d never felt cleaner or more contented, resting my weary head against his shoulder as he cuffed my hands again, kissing the scented skin of his neck, murmuring, “You don’t need to do that.”

  “No, but I want to. And Largo’ll be glad to see me being watchful. As I am. I’m not a fool, Djoran. I know your instincts. And how to overcome them.”

  “Yes, master.”

  That was our first day, maybe our best. There were more. Soon enough it was a rare day when he didn’t come for me. One of those, we had excitements enough to compensate. A guest was missing a jewelled brooch; she was angry with Largo; Largo was angry with me. I was halfway to the hole, still protesting, when the brooch was found—broken, missing its pin—hidden among the scant belongings of one of the kitchen girls. She was whipped, poor fool, and sent to market, sold. Not listened to. Largo paid to have the brooch repaired, though likely it had broken and fallen of its own accord and the girl had only found it, kept it, a simpler kind of stealing.

  I didn’t need to wait much longer. A day came when Merrick came, but not to me, not first. Went straight to Largo, and came out with one finger light of its ring, a piece of heavy gold he’d had from his grandser. I knew the history of all his rings, and their value too.

  First fair offer that I hear, Largo had said.

  “He cheated you,” I said bluntly. Boys were cheap, and rightly so.

  “I know,” he said. “I don’t care. You’re mine now. Come away. I’ve a month’s leave; I’m taking you home. I might leave you there, if you settle. My people will be good to you, put some weight on your bones, get some work out of you, teach you a new kind of life...”

  His people were farmers. I knew the kind of life they offered, I’d seen it. Passing by, on my way from one city to the next.

  Still, he was master. It was his decision. He left me in no doubt about that. His horse was in the stable yard; he had to lead it out himself into the alley, I couldn’t do it. Once we were out, though: then he could set his pack on my back, his new iron cuffs on my wrists. His chain around my neck, a lesson learned.

  “There’s blood on your thumb,” he said, testing the cuffs as a careful master ought. “What have you been doing to yourself?”

  “It’s nothing, just a splinter under the nail...”

  “You should take better care. I’ll do that, I’ll take better care of you than you do.” He tipped my face up, fingers under my chin; and frowned, and said, “Tears, Djoran?”

  I sniffed, shook my head, muttered, “It’s nothing,” again.

  “I hope you’ll be happy with me,” he said fretfully. “I think you will. I’ll be strict, you need that; but I won’t be unkind, not ever. I’ll treat you with all the love you deserve. Love and discipline together; you’ll thrive, you’ll see...”

  Largo stood in his gateway watching, approving. Content. One more ring on his finger, one less doubt on his mind. One less trouble in his house.

  My new master swung himself up into the saddle, kicked his horse into a trot. His horse and me, necessarily.

  It was an easy pace he set, and dancing keeps you fit. I could keep this up for hours, running at his stirrup with his pack on my back; but I wouldn’t need to. By the time we reached the city gate, I was already working the steel pin out from under my thumbnail, where I’d pushed it in a hard hour earlier.

  Nothing in, and nothing out. Nothing outside my skin. So I’d thrust it deep under my nail, with only a bead of blood to show and an eye-watering pain to endure and disguise. Virelle’s watchful gods couldn’t touch me for it.

  And now I had steel in my fingers, sharp and flexible. Even at a jog, even working blind behind my back with fetters on my wrists, I could pick a cuff-lock with a broken pin. Two minutes’ work, and my hands were free. Merrick didn’t know; I held them behind my back as though they were still chained there, one clamped hard around the open cuff to stop it swinging loose.

  Half an hour later the road dipped to a ford, with trees on either bank; there was no one before us, no one behind us.

  Merrick slowed to a walk, and took us into the stream. The water was calf-deep and unhurried, no more trouble to me than it was to the horse. Just as my master smiled down at me, I brought my hands out from behind my back.

  One jolted his boot out of the stirrup; the other slammed that steel needle deep into the horse’s rump.

  The horse screamed and reared. I heaved. Merrick fell heavily into the water.

  Well-trained, he still kept hold of the reins. I’d been hoping for that.

  The horse danced out of the way. Merrick was sitting up to his chin in the river, sodden, bewildered. I took a step forward, swinging my arm lustily. One iron cuff was still locked around my wrist; the other flew on the end of its chain at the end of my arm like a flail.

  Dancing gives you muscles like a whip. That cuff caught him on the side of the head with a brutal thud, and I thought I might have killed him.

  I snatched the reins from his slack fingers, calmed the horse and tied it to a tree; then I went back for its master.

  An hour later, he was the one running sluggishly at the stirrup, cuffed and leashed and naked, with the pack on his back now. His clothes were still damp—and all too big for me—but I wore them gratefully, with stockings stuffed into the boot-toes to keep them on my feet. His rings wouldn’t stay on my fingers, so I carried them in a pouch. The horse was equable beneath me. Its former master less so, but I’d gagged him once I tired of his moaning.

  Boys are cheap after war and men too, but horses not. Horses never. Between the two, they’d fetch enough to buy me passage overseas. A new land, new opportunities. Put the war behind me, put it all behind me, start again. With quick feet, a quick tongue, quicker fingers. I could rise and rise.

  Merrick’s family would be expecting him. When he didn’t arrive, there would be questions asked, people come in search. Of course they’d find their way to the tavern where he’d spent so much time in recent weeks. Of course they’d interrogate Largo; of course they’d see and recognise the ring he wore so blatantly on his finger.

  He’d have nothing to offer but the truth, that Merrick had paid it fairly for a dancing-boy. But boys are cheap, and that ring meant much to him; no one would believe Largo. Not the family, not the magistrate.

  A man, a captain gone, and his ring on a tavern-keeper’s finger? I thought Largo would hang, like enough.

  Not everybody dies, but some, oh yes. Some do.

  CHAZ BRENCHLEY has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox, he has published a Chine
se-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy, Desdaemona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than 500 short stories in various genres. Chaz has recently moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.

  ORANGES, LEMONS, AND THOU BESIDE ME

  Eugie Foster

  When the news came over the broadcast net, every soldier received it simultaneously through their neural implants. The war was over.

  In the rice-paddy wastelands of Chinese countryside, men and women in the silver-blue uniforms of the Eastern Intelligentsia popped out of their foxholes and threw their plasma rifles into murky patches of swamp water. The air hung with the stench of plasma-charred flesh, seared blood, and death-opened bowels, but they breathed the miasma as though it was the sweetest perfume. The soldiers in the black uniforms of the Western Alliance streamed out of their bunkers to clasp hands with individuals who, moments before, they had pelted with plasma bolts and incindi-bombs. Soldiers blinded by gas and fire gazed over the ravaged terrain with their prosthetic eyes and exulted.

  Medics ran into the ex-battlefield, seeking those hurt and dying of both sides to tend. They were rejoicing too, for they had seen the torn limbs and fractured bodies war had spawned, a sight all of them hoped never to witness again, save in the inevitable nightmares that would come. But their duty to the wounded superseded their elation.

  After fifteen years of bloody war, Intelligentsia and West had come together. It was a time of celebration. No matter what uniform soldiers found themselves in, identical smiles creased the faces of every combatant on the field—except for one man’s.

  Captain Sabin Tol sank to his cot, his blue eyes colorless with shock. His ears were deaf to the shouts of revelry outside his quarters, although the walls were mere centimeters of plasteel.

  The Captain wasn’t a patriot, or a zealot, or even a devoted career military man. But the war had been his refuge, his oasis. Now it was over, and he had to go home.

  Khloii—sister, twin, focus of his heart—had been waiting for him these eight years, eight years since he had joined the Alliance’s military. She would be elated, knowing he was coming back to her.

  Captain Sabin slumped down, covered his face with his hands, and wept.

  5

  The Tol estate in New Atlanta was as Sabin remembered it. There stood the stands of orange and lemon trees that the scientists had mutated to grow in the acidic soil, exactly as they had been eight years ago. Citrus was the source of their family riches after the radiation made Florida and California uninhabitable, and the fallout had turned fruit-lush ranges into arid burn and killing earth. Khloii and he had played fetch and hide among the slender trunks and fragrant blossoms when they were children, and squeezed juice and pulp from the succulent fruits.

  Behind it was the manor house, built by their great grandmother. With its marble columns and wrought iron balustrades, it was both fortress and feat of architectural beauty.

  Khloii was waiting for him. As soon as the estate sensors scanned him, she came racing out of the great mahogany doors and into his arms.

  He held her, felt the softness of her body against his, smelled the clean, citrus scent of her hair. Eight years dissolved at her touch. Sabin knew the chiming completeness he always felt when Khloii was near. Brother and sister were so similar, both with their shining ebony hair, their azure-blue eyes, their near heights.

  “You’re home. You’re finally home.” Her voice was a softer, feminine version of his, husky where his was gravel, lilting where his rang.

  “Home.” Khloii and the manor, sweet oranges and mouth-puckering lemon, home.

  She led him, arm around his waist, up the marble steps. Colm, the house steward, and Marissa, the cook, waited to greet him within the entranceway. Knowing his penchant for the delicacy, Marissa held a tray of sugary lemon bars.

  “Welcome back, Lord Sabin,” Colm murmured.

  “So glad to have you home at last,” Marissa echoed.

  Derik, his sister’s secretary, was absent, but Sabin had expected him to be. Sabin snagged a couple lemon bars from the tray and accompanied his sister up the winding staircase into the library.

  The room was familiar and strange. Sabin had spent uncountable hours in this room with its dark wood and gleaming monitors, its row after row of bookdiscs and holotapes. It was his favorite room in the house. Khloii’s too. But now it seemed smaller, darker than he remembered it.

  She led him to the couch, its faded softness witness to midnight discourses and childhood arguments. Taking one lemon bar from him, she sat with feet curled off the floor. They munched their treats in silence. Sabin savored the bite of candied fruit pulp, tart on his tongue, mellowed by a dusting of sweetener. The military did not supply such fare to its soldiers, not even to its officers. He had almost forgotten the burst of flavor, the tingle of his mouth wetting to savor it. The smell of the orchard groves, the sight and touch of Khloii, the lemon bar that tasted of home—this was real; eight years of war had been the fantasy.

  Beside him, Khloii fit perfectly against him, her head nestled on his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her. He wanted to let the tension drain away, to lose himself in the simple comforts of his youth. But he couldn’t. Sabin knew what would come next.

  With fingers still lightly dusted with confectioner’s powder, Khloii reached for the I/O wire that would meld them together, letting them share the memories of the last eight years. As children, after their implants had been installed, the learning programs downloaded and processed, they had double interfaced mind-to-mind. Their minds so similar, forged together now by circuitry and wire, sharing sensation, thoughts, memories, and emotions, they had become closer than brother and sister, even twins of the same womb. They spent hours silently communing, at last not even trying to hide their obsession with each other.

  Sabin caught her hand before she could press the needle-thin plug into the port at the base of his skull. “You want to live eight years of war?”

  Khloii frowned. “I saw the vids you sent, and the recordings and the logs. We haven’t linked for eight years. Of course I want to feel everything.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “thinking of the way you watched the orchards at sunset, or standing, laughing in the rain was the only thing that could get me up at AM summons. Remembering the taste of orange cake through your lips was the only thing that kept me from dropping my shields, just for a second—long enough for a plasma bolt to come through. There was a lot of ugliness I didn’t speak of in the vids.”

  Her lips brushed his cheek. “So let me in.”

  Sabin’s arm convulsed around her, crushing her close. “I can’t. It’s too soon.”

  Khloii’s hand dropped away, taking the I/O strand with it. “I can wait a little longer.”

  Sabin sagged. The time when he must face Khloii and show her the monster he was, that he had become, was again postponed. But he knew it was only a temporary reprieve. It had always only been temporary.

  5

  Sabin had hoped that the serenity of the manor house paired with the exhaustion and turmoil of eight years of slaughter and destruction would have curbed his jealousy, blunted his fury. But seeing Derik again, it was as though none of the time had passed for either of them.

  The other man had strayed into the kitchen after dinner, perhaps looking for a late snack, while Sabin stood at the French windows, admiring the view of the citrus trees in the twilight.

  Their eyes met, hard blue and startled brown. Derik spun, fast as a cat, and dashed away. After a moment’s hesitation, Sabin rushed after him. His soldier’s body was harder and faster than Derik’s. He caught him, grappled with him, and rode him crashing to the ground.

  Sabin pinned Derik—the secretary staring at him with frightened eyes. He unspooled his I/O wire, a little thick
er and less pliant than civilian issue, and rammed the point home into the other man’s port. Derik’s body shuddered as Sabin whirled, precise and sure, into his mind.

  Memory rocked both of them, this so like their first joining, after Sabin had caught Derik with Khloii in her bed. He had almost killed him then. Would have, his fingers curling around the secretary’s throat, if Khloii hadn’t wrenched him away. Seeing her naked and vulnerable, tears streaming from her eyes, had been terrifying. But it was also the slap of shock he needed to regain control.

  Sabin retreated from her quarters, but he hadn’t gone far. He waited outside her room in the shadows, standing like carved alabaster until the door opened, and Derik stepped like a thief into the darkness.

  Murder brimmed Sabin’s thoughts. But Derik did not seem to see him, trailing at his heels. He must have known, though, for in the servant’s cubicle he turned to Sabin—weaponless and docile. Derik’s resignation disarmed, as his anger or fear would not have.

  “I love her.”

  “So do I.”

  The silence stretched.

  “She’s just toying with you.” Sabin marveled at how level his voice sounded.

  “I know.” A wan smile flickered over Derik’s mouth. “I’ve watched you both taming lionins and racing hovers together. I know.”

  Lionins, like the citrus trees, were engineered by the scientists out of older stock. Tawny-gold with knife-sharp claws and fiery eyes, they were like their masters, spirited and beautiful, and elite.

  “Did you think she loved you?”

  “A little, perhaps.”

  Jealousy fired, noxious green and burning. “You’re just a bondservant.” He prowled in the tiny cubicle, all the territory Derik could lay claim to.

  “What was it like?” he demanded.

  “I don’t—what do you mean?”

  “Link with me. Share with me.” Sabin didn’t know what prompted him to make the demand. It was an intimacy between husband and wife, equals, partners. Never between a servant and lord. Derik, versed in etiquette from birth, was stunned by the command. He could neither refuse it—for he could refuse nothing of his lord—nor could he accede to it.