Unbound (3 page)

Sunlight streaming in through the exterior hatch propped open glinted off her finds. She had to laugh. Despite her attempts at order, the hold looked like some treasure cave from her mother’s stories. All it lacked was a djinn guarding it to complete the image.

Rank silliness. When she started entertaining nonsense, that was a sure sign it was time to leave.

The artifacts that needed cleaning she took to the work cabin and the bank of expensive equipment for that purpose. They could handle the preliminary work of freeing her finds from centuries of dirt while she readied the
Castel
for liftoff. That problematic thruster needed her attention more. Once she’d input the parameters, she left the brush bots to their task. At least those still functioned properly. If the
Castel
cooperated, she could be headed outsystem in a matter of hours.

 

 

The summons was
strange. Formless. Lacking the hated compulsion he . . . remembered. It did not demand his presence in a storm of impatience. Almost, he ignored it. Almost. But the gray fog that was his prison had surrounded him for too long. He yearned for release from the damnation of eternal sameness.

This strange summons came almost as a relief.

The gray fog thinned, temporary escape from his prison. Only exhaustion stirred in his heart, knowing it would not last.

Weaving the energies around him, he took form—emerging to silence. No one held his prison. It sat on a ledge beside a command baton, a perfume vial, a scry glass, a carved askeiwood box, many more things that had no place beside his prison. He stood inside an ordinary storeroom. Had the Mughelis so many djinn now that his prison had been relegated to the fripperies?

He waited. Yet no one came.

Only slowly did he notice his surroundings. After so many masters, being summoned in too many places, he had long ago chosen not to look, not to see the ruins around him, the once bustling cities reduced to lakes of glass, some at his hands, if not his will. Ignorance was less painful.

But with no master to command his attention, he found his eyes drawn to the walls.

Though outwardly plain, they sparkled to his weaver’s sight. They were made not of stone, wood, nor cloth. Not precisely metal, either. He could not identify the material, but beneath the surface, he could see the energies woven into them, some threadbare, only a glimmer of potential, others flowing with purpose.

Curiosity woke sluggishly, reluctantly. It had been such a long time since he had felt the emotion that, at first, he did not recognize it for what it was—forlorn hope.

The walls perturbed him, not so much for their strangeness, though he had never seen such work among the Mugheli. The changing patterns lacked balance, crying for a weaver’s touch to bring them into harmony. Almost, he reached out—save doing so would aid the enemy. He did not want to think he had fallen so low.

When still no one came, he left his position. As he was able to move, it seemed he was allowed, perhaps even expected to. He had been summoned, and he was never summoned for no purpose.

Tracing the flows of energy, he found a section where they curved, parting like a river around a sandbar. He reached out. It seemed as though it should—

A panel slid sideways, disappearing into the wall with a soft hiss of air. The opening revealed a chamber beyond. Stepping through, he discovered it was a corridor. He turned to the room of his summoning and saw the panel resume its original position—without need for any weaving.

Wonder pierced his apathy for the space of a heartbeat. Much had changed since he was last summoned.

He sought the greatest confluence of energies, for surely only dire need would have drawn his summoner away without terminating the summons. The vortex of primal energies he found was housed in an unimposing chamber, paling in comparison to the meanest of Mugheli halls.

An atypical setting. The Mughelis considered lavish surroundings the right of those with power. Any vyzier who could harness such a vortex could demand the most ostentatious of chambers and not be denied.

Yet this chamber lacked even the minimum a Mugheli would consider necessary comfort: no seats, no cushions, no rugs, no servants. The utilitarian lines of the pipes snaking around the room held no beauty, save for the sparkling flows of energy. And no one kept watch over the vortex.

He roamed the corridors, finding more doors to an extensive storeroom, a plant room, smaller rooms used for storage, and others whose purpose was not evident. Nothing made sense. All the walls were of that same not-metal and sparkled to his sight. He was caught in a basket of energies suspended within an impossible void.

And still he saw no one.

The last door would not open, but he sensed a bundle of energy flaring with the rhythm of life beyond. The only hint of life to be found.

His master?

It was a simple matter to mist and flow between the matrix of the door’s fabric. He re-formed in yet another room. Like most of the others, it was small, mere paces wide in all directions. But unlike the others, it was dimly lit by impossibly tiny pinpricks of light along the edges of the ceiling.

The flaring came from the far wall, a niche made up into a narrow bed. The discovery that it was occupied filled him with a shameful sense of relief. He was not alone, summoned and abandoned, in some bizarre twist to his captivity.

Asleep, his enemy shifted on the bed, turning over, away from the wall, to face him.

He sucked in air he did not need.

The light was too weak to reveal the color of the short curls brushing high cheekbones, but it was enough for him to see delicate features: graceful brows, a straight nose, lips poised on the edge of a smile. A sleeping beauty.

A woman.

A quick glance downward confirmed his initial impression. Slender fingers curled into the pillow beneath her cheek. A sleeveless blouse hung loosely over modest breasts and ended well short of a trim waist. A slender leg bent at the knee hid the rest beyond the strange garb wrapped around her hips.

This was his new master?

This sleeping beauty
in her unusual clothes had to be the one who had summoned him. She was the only person to be found in this alien place.

She was a vyzier? A prodigy, then, for she looked too young, her smooth face lacking the deep lines of experience.

He drifted closer, drawn to her deceptive air of serenity, to the uncommon sight of her femininity, to the soft gleam of bare skin at her belly. It had been so long since he had touched a woman, since before he had been forced into hateful servitude and the eternal death of a djinn—and longer, before his capture at that last desperate fight. Inwardly, he railed against the injustice of the universe, against this treacherous attraction to his enemy, for enemy she must be to be his master.

Perhaps that was her game. A twist to the betrayals he had been compelled to commit.

If only he could resist. But he had been djinn for too long. He knew obedience was not a choice. The master’s will was a djinn’s abiding purpose. Nothing else existed. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else could be.

No djinn had ever been freed, despite all his people’s efforts; even his betrothed had applied her sharp mind to unraveling the trap—to no avail. None had ever escaped.

Long ago, at the beginning of his hated servitude, before the bitter reality of his fate had sunk home, he had tried to break the Mughelis’ control. For more important reasons than mere pride—to protect the innocents ranged against his masters. He had failed. By his failure, he had killed thousands upon thousands—friends and family. Nameless, countless others. His efforts to resist, to deny his masters’ commands, might have been a drop of water in the desert for all the inconvenience he had caused.

All for naught.

Each failure had lessened him.

His greatest regret was that he had not died in that rearguard action. He had held his ground, fighting beyond hope of escape. He should have killed himself before capture. Now it was too late.

Only resignation was left.

If his master’s will was for him to touch her, resistance was less than nothing. One who could harness that vortex he had seen could surely afford a djinn for a plaything. Who would dare deny her?

He had never served as a pleasure slave, his battle weavings too potent to be set aside, but surely that was better than attacking his own people. He was tired of war, sick of it to the very depths of his soul.

Kneeling by the side of the bed, he reached out. The soft skin beneath his fingers was bittersweet pleasure and a unique torment. To be so close to a woman, to take such delight—from the enemy.

The smooth warmth of her beguiled. Her serenity held him in silence. The lure of another person’s presence fed a treacherous weakness inside him, one that would draw reassurance even from a Mugheli.

His hand moved of its own volition; no thought of his commanded it. His fingers glided as if on velvet, stroking, caressing, lingering—almost in mockery of his memories of courtship, the last that remained of his betrothed. The rising anticipation. The breathless excitement. The gradual unveiling.

Still, he could not stop himself, lost in wonder. He pushed the hem of her shirt up and discovered small breasts with large, puffy areolas. So delicate . . . and soft. A delight to touch. He wished he could laugh at the insidious seduction of his senses, but his chest was tight.

Again, his hand moved, hesitantly circled a breast. Apart from him. His fingers tingled, her warmth reaching out to him. Temptation given female flesh.

She made a sound, a murmur of approval, by which he took to mean he was to continue. Did she enjoy such games?

He traced the edges of those pretty circles, watched them darken as her nipples puckered and pouted. He could have sworn his heart skipped at her response.

A quiver swept her, a quiet sigh that pressed her breast into his palm. A tender firmness he had not thought to feel ever again. Such pleasures were not granted to djinn.

She was so soft, so delicate in his hand. It seemed impossible someone like her could be a vyzier, but it was foolishness to doubt. There was no one else to harness that vortex.

His new master arched her back, her body undulating, sinuous and graceful as a veil dancer under his hand. He stilled in shock. He had not thought of veil dancers since before his capture. They were part of happier times, peaceful times, now and forever lost to him.

Another curve of her body, a lazy sway, and his hand continued its meandering, following the hint of muscle down her belly to the strange, silky garment wrapped around her loins. Her hips rose, pressing the juncture of her thighs against his tingling fingers. The dampness there scorched him. Only thin fabric separated him from her folds. He traced the edges of her delicate flesh with disbelieving strokes. Her game was unlike any of the demands of his previous masters, yet the musk of her desire was undeniable.

An irritable grunt accompanied the next insistent thrust of her hips, her impatience obvious. In obedience, he strengthened his strokes, rubbing deeper, searing his fingers on her heat.

The shortening of her breath accompanied the increasing voluptuousness of her motions. No longer needing her direction, he pressed down, mindless in his obedience to her desire.

“Oh! Oh! Aaa—” The triumphant cry was cut short. Her eyes flashed open, then wide. She gasped and jerked upright, wresting away her heat, her arm sweeping to one side.

He curled his fingers against the treacherous ache of loss. How could he regret losing something that had never been his? Was he so lost to himself that he now embraced his enslavement?

“Back off.” She thrust her hands at him, brandishing some object in threat, underscoring her command.

Shock held him in place. Not at her reaction, but at the complete absence of compulsion in her words. He felt no need to obey her. None of the relentless pressure, the automatic obedience, the absolute disregard of his will.

But that was impossible.

She was his master.

And yet . . . he
did not move
. The curse of his servitude should have forced his instantaneous obedience to her command—without thought or delay.

The thing in her fist spat energy at him.

The stunner beam
crackled through empty air, the man vanishing as if he’d never been there.

“Lights, thirty percent.”

The glow from the walls brightened in response to her command. No one crouched beside her bunk. No one hid in the shadows, not that there was much room in her small cabin for hiding. No man lay on the deck temporarily paralyzed by the blast.

Perplexed, Asrial lowered her stunner. Neither door had opened, yet she was alone with only the heat in her blood to attest to her awakening.