“BIRTH OF PHARAOH” CHAPTER 9

“THE LAST TIME THE SLAVE WAS NEAR”

COPYRIGHT 2023. CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

I stroll down the corridor thinking about the four imprisoned people whom Palyo Lyle showed off to me. I had perceived someone special was around. Now, I understand everything.

I’m worried when I never am so I’m not walking back to any assigned berth where I, myself, might be made a prisoner, during my sleep, by one of these trickster ladies who believe taking Na’ Halien prisoners is something to show off.

Instead of making my way back to my assigned room, at the last minute I make three turns. On the third one, I finally lose the foes who are still tracking me. The women smell too good to make any mistake about their presence.

I can’t kill anyone on this ship. For that is another reason I will soon tell.

I remember the steps I must take to return to the White Queen’s quarters downstairs. In moments, I am there. I realize I have unlocked the door too soon when I hear someone inside is already snoring. I press it forward slowly with my foot, keeping my back erect and my arms ready for fighting.

I make my way inside the foyer, but there is nothing. I enter an anteroom, and still find no one is around yet the snoring is loud and clear, dissipating now as I stalk forward.

In the next, a main chamber, the sky outside drops away in a flash. In a scorch of light, everything is still. We have entered warp speed. It’s a dangerous time to be without company, or without a glass of champagne, for one cannot move easily. The shutters should be reinforcing the window but they remain still open, a classic example of, “how did the ship actually implode?” This is a risk, to be sure. I dimly think about fixing this as I did one time on my own ship, the one that is lost.

A memory is permanent in my mind.

I wished it away for a thousand years until it vanished, finally.

But, with all that I saw tonight, I am saturated in my own past and this memory remains now at the forefront.

In this, I am half-dressed in boots and pants.

I stand.

A friend, she still looks at me from my bed when I tie a weapon to my belt, walk to the doors, push a button, and the pod carries me to fulfill a request to visit Special Cargo Hold 4.

This is a precious time to me, back when I flew my own ship, invited people of every kind to join in.

Back then, I was pretending to stargaze as a pirate but was, in fact, carrying on a secret duty to collect my original family from the days of the White House. I dream every night about this. I hoped to bring them all to me, wherever they had each gotten to, and from every living world.

Fly them home, safe, with me.

Even my crew don’t know this.

Pirating, or finding ship materials (same thing), is my crew’s sole ambition, plus taking time together. They always think we’re game on something awful, but we usually simply run from the police together. At the end of every day, I have a mindset to take care of my very personal matters in whatever way gets me there.

My ship tonight, the Tantlantiatia, is old-fashioned, it’s true. I have refit it many times. I have it all made just the way I like it. Of course, it’s banged up bad. I’m expecting to lose it one of these days. The thing is now the favorite thing I own.

My left-hand is wrapped in woolen white with blemishes of blood from a skirmish that evening. We were too close to an un-invitation to deal with another sailor’s ship. Here, in the black depths of space, we never ask to fight. But tonight, we had to survive.

I’m weary.

I don’t want to think but can’t help anything from flooding into my head.

Everything on-board my ship named after my lost son, the Tantlantiatia, still works, thankfully, though we might not last.

There’s probably another skirmish out there, in the sky, waiting for us to see if we can get a new button installed on the elevator or for something else that’s trivial.

The lights have been kept blazing, but much lower than usual, inside Special Cargo Hold Four. A controller from the engine room, named Jarlath, salutes my presence. I am grateful for his friendly ways even more that I would normally be. This surprises me. I think it must be due to the pain in my hand and on my body.

Jarlath uses the Skavy’ay Viate manner of decorum, which is something people raised upon Amashay do much of. It’s kindness and courtesy. It’s different, of course, from the way it was done when I was young, but the basic gestures of friendly intimidation are still there.

A fighter’s school on Amashay won themselves a few planets. And, the stars or fate kept the things on Amashay doing well for the people there, decade after decade. Success led into an eon of Skavy’ay Viate promulgation, at least. We were sort of known for keeping it together, so to speak.

So, when Jarlath gives that thrust of the shoulder, leading into a spread of open hands, it looks magnificent especially as it was done nicely by him. He has never abandoned his ruse and has made the Skavy’ay Viate signs since I’ve known him.

However, in truth, Jarlath isn’t naturally from that place. He hides his true story from everyone. Clairvoyant, I knew when he stepped onto my vessel and into my realm of thoughts and friendships, that he is Rishi, like myself—born to the highest people, the sons and daughters of the original Houses. Probably abandoned by a handmaid like me, left to rot in sewer and crime. Escaped, just as I did, using the Sky-Cap at the southern pole. That’s what I like about Jarlath.

Can’t be certain on all of that, though.

I’m rambling, I know it.

Truth is, Jarlath’s personal history is still secret because I never asked. Them’s the images I always see, but may very well be a close friend’s feverish dream he’s trying to keep alive. One never can tell until you get into talking with the other person, and so I always ask, of course, rather than pretend I have known him before. If I don’t ask, then I never can fully say.

The Slave was there inside Special Cargo Hold Four. Captivity made him angry. He sat there with a skewered look upon me.

The Slave was dark, dark green, with eyes of purpose. White orbs, too, against his decayed skin. Clothed in a strange robe, though. I hadn’t seen its shape before. Nestled within was something sharp. I should have known. Ribbed with muscle everywhere and golden hair all over. Not a pretty thing, especially when it’s left to its own devices without proper grooming. Better under someone like my own’s care, but I can’t shame everyone I know to trying harder to care for their appearance, can I?

Anamorinic regality is the Slave’s line, and that’s a green reptile folk who love their scales, hair and gills. I prod his mind, ask him where he has come in from. He won’t relay a single idea, but I already know because the Anamorinic family was once King, in the West, like the Rishi in the East. We are opposites in our family lines.

Eartha Tetus’ White Queen had ascended her throne but in such a vacant way that I believed people either trusted her completely or the world would shatter. Her lands, her posterity, her entourage, all formed together seamlessly overnight. It made me sick with worry.

That was all happening some thousands upon thousands of years ago. These days, only relics of the White Queen’s glory are still left on some planets. Hard to say why I should care to say anything, but I do. She was once thought of as divine.

That night, in the cramped cargo space, I was somewhat distilled by the thought of tampering with the mind before me.

Anamorinic, I decided.

But, next, I could not look at the Anamorinic man. Special Cargo Hold Four was filled with Handlers. Fifteen were crammed in, suddenly, with The Slave standing in the center behind protective screens. Handlers looked around the cargo hold, looked at each other. They were worried and were murmuring.

Jarlath screaming, quickly, told me they just dropped in through the hatch I thought couldn’t be opened. They were ready to open fire.

I caught everyone off-guard when I asked out loud, “Never been to The Factory. What’s it like?”

The silence was as a wall block’s passage.

Finally, one spoke: “We haven’t known Factory business. Factory is not our business.”

Turmoiled people in white dappled suits. Very large and white. The suits were made out of a synthetic material. It looked almost as strong as a skin on a space vessel. They were moving slightly, as if they wanted to walk forward into the teleportation bay, just behind but also alongside our prisoner, which was odd, because the handlers had fallen through it, I’m assuming, hoping to dish off their troublesome load. But they clearly wanted back onto the teleportation area.

I felt slightly odd, as if myself, or perhaps Jarlath, or my ship, were unwanted. Looking for the source, I realized it was the Slave. He was the one from so long ago who had tortured my mind endlessly. He was full-grown sorcerer or something like that.

The Handlers continued to cause commotion. Holding weapons, they still could only bump slightly against each other, and against the walls of the room. Then, all were anguished and silently murmuring in my mind despite solid-core caps upon their brows to prevent thought-waves from coming through to us all on the Tantlantiatia.

My button on my necklace ended their computerized software inside their weaponry.

The Handlers were blocked from the teleportation deck by my electronic gate system. I devised the entire thing and had tripped it at the start of this unquantifiable melee.

I promise you, as I tell this sad story, that I recall well how, before retiring for the afternoon sleep Jarlath summoned me from, I had also checked the system and thus was well prepared.

The gate to the teleportation deck remained still shut. I needed that always in place to prevent deportation and accession to the Tantlantiatia while we were under attack, and yet Jarlath asked me silently for my code, which he hadn’t done before.

I screamed again and again. Then, I waited until everyone alive watched my eyes.

I told the oldest man: “This is no slave. He is a stowaway on whichever path you are on, isn’t that correct?”

Not a word in response was returned.

“They can’t move, Captain,” said Jarlath, and I didn’t know if he was speaking with his mind or his mouth.

Jarlath is hustling to them.

There is a row, and then they are all silent, every one of them.

A tear fell—when I spotted The Slave—into the scruff under my nose. The droplet popped through facial hair, over my lips, found its way through beard, back onto skin of my chest. That is the one thing I cannot forget, ever.

The Slave, when his Handlers were with him, and they were all still very alive, before they and Jarlath all fell together that day, was sublime. Taking away my friend still makes me very sad.

The Slave is supposed to be a random breakaway from the mines in the Southern Arena, he tells me. And he was picked up from a singular pod he had traveled in for so long he had physically become a part of the ship, but I knew it wasn’t so.

Upon scanning by the “space-police” back in those years (he goes on telling me as if he were a Handler and not the perpetrator of this awful scheme), the pod’s computer told him everything about erstwhile political proceedings, as though they were happening that evening.

Let’s not discuss politics for a little bit because I am not aware of the details he wanted me to relay to him. The planet in question was something like a pleasant place to live, I understand, for eons. I believe it was named Antirar—something smart like that. Then, out of the blue, its fleet and planetary system was destroyed so brutally.

Antirar was perhaps the accused? Maybe the victim? I don’t remember, but it never really got taken under. Strangely, sometimes horrible things are done, but no one can stomach everything and so everybody forgets it.

This is relevant because, due to this mess, The Slave was off-charts, permanently stuck in a landing pod, and drifting without anchor. A tractor-beam carried him in to, and upon, the merchant ship’s holding pad. But he was extracted in a bloody way.

Perhaps in our skirmish earlier, he and his silly troop made it here to us.

The Slave never spoke a word out loud the entire time.

Romantic tale of his origins but The Slave sent them straight to my soul. It happened in an instant. I don’t think he knew I was aware he was lying about the source from which he gathered the information he was feeding into me. It was detailed. I knew the story and imagery were all hysterically made-up and solely by himself.

All I’m getting at is how I can tell a liar and the Slave lies even in telepathy. That’s it.

Tonight, they expect me to roust The Slave into conversation. Again, this is mind control by the Slave of my body.

“Why is this man on board?” I say it out-loud for impact.

Jarlath mumbles incoherently, so he is apparently not dead.

Jarlath.

Jarlath.

Jarlath.

The room is enshrouded by, if not gagging upon, a strange sort of thin air. It’s a smell I can remember today. Poison. The Handlers, who also were somehow all alive again, are now being suffocated. From his mind, then, Jarlath lets me know the Slave is releasing us all from our positions.

I was caught aback for Jarlath had never spoken so before. He used the quiet, clairvoyant manner I learned as a child. It was then—yes, then. It was only when Jarlath was dying in the room with The Slave close at hand that I understood the hidden truth about my engineer.

Then, Jarlath was gone. Poor man who I loved dearly. This cost him his life.

Jarlath was devoted to our cause, but he was indeed at fault for the ship’s encounter earlier that day, and to him I failed because I should have let everyone on board be aware of his trials. For, “the truth shall unveil”, it is said. Then, he would have survived the commotion instead of being dead upon the cargo hold’s teleportation floor. That’s the way mind and life work together, says I—at least, that’s part and parcel in The Training.

The emptiness felt tragic.

Bodies with blood and vomit littered the flooring tiles.

It was just the two of us: myself, Whittne Fax, and The Slave.

For more than an eon, I have dealt in war refugees who, frankly, are grateful. Being sold into slavery, it’s much better than becoming annihilated. They say so, and I say so. We all agree. The families, next, have a chance to fall in love again and make a new beginning, inside another planet’s cover.

When a Magnificent, such as is the category I place The Slave in, is caught, they need certain types of retardation otherwise we get into stuff like tranquility of mind followed by sudden death. With a Magnificent, a mix of methods are put into play: the minds of sturdy men, electronics, drugs, and physical restraints. The Handlers are equipped one way or another to perform these tasks. Every restraint is specific for a particular Magnificent, for a Magnificent always can change. I’m told it takes a full eon to see one’s traits unfold fully though I have never dealt in their kind.

I’ve only encountered this single one, that night, in real-life before.

The Slave seethed in hate, his hair slightly bristling, this person I encountered that evening, on board my own ship, the Tantlantiatia.

He was always deadly, deadly.

Mentally, The Slave was a mountain. I walked towards him, in thought, without decision. I don’t think I liked that very much. There was trouble seeing anything mentally. I couldn’t tell the difference between The Slave and myself. I had focused my attention on the oddest things.

Held my talisman up as a strong-arm tactic. Catching myself, I stepped backward. I knew it all, in an instant: what was happening, what would befall us.

“You have no business here. Why wait for me to tell you to leave?” I shouted out loud.

The Slave curled his lips so it looked mostly human, save his colors, and wild eyes.

He asked me, “Far from home, Big Man?”

Clairvoyance. I hate it.

His gaze didn’t waver.

A slowly filling cup one doesn’t spot running over the brim until it spills. The Slave sent messages that were suddenly arriving all the time. The slave had done this to me before. He had known everyone in my mind before. He sifted through my friends, my love, my foes, my greatest fear. He knows them all, now. He will have it all, now.

I screamed, “Be still!”

I screamed again and again

Some days, faith fills my neck muscles and head. So, I wrenched my body from the invasive clutch that suspended the entire room. I slammed the butt of my sword onto the console. I took Jarlath like butter. Like two blocks of charismatic Olbensteit we fell to the ground, then I escaped in my rapidly departing Captain’s pod which quickly rode me back to my quarters.

Jarlath’s time capsule as well as his amulet were both in my possession.

In my mind, the voice from the Slave pounded in, I know the road, King-Stopper and, once, I found The Factory in a dream, like you did. Why go home, they asked me, as well.

The slave was keeping me, mentally.

Midst his deception and his warfare he wrought my life. I screamed into the void noiselessly. Then I screamed aloud, for every pain he caused in my soul.

I thought of Tipa, my brother, from back all those many days, on Amashay. Great lover of the White Queen. Dead for too many eons to worry about. Why think of his face today? Tipa flicked his fingers through his salty hair far too many times. Now he is gone.

I am running into my quarters, fighting an invisible contraption, blocking the man’s fingers inside my frenzied ideas.

I didn’t know any of the details of the changes I already knew were happening on-board. I could only sense all. There was no point walking around asking my faithful but tired officers. We were almost spent, before The Slave, for there had been a terrible time with the merchant. My hand burned. The woolen wrap fell away.

The Training brings me to understand how, soon, the Slave will be in control of the entire thing if I don’t strike the emergency deck release right then. I had privately wired it into place.

I bring my hurt hand slamming on the button and deny the pain. The entire ship sputters, and I listen to the faint echoes of a door opening. I watch the vents, from where the sounds radiates, until I can hear the door is shut again.

“The thing worked,” I says aloud, laughing audibly. My girl, she has stirred in my bed. She is sitting up, looking at me in terror. I remember that well.

I pick up a flask, satiate the thirst, and crawl close to her, hugging her body.

I throw open the sky canopy above my Captain’s Quarters. Resting on my back, with a drink in my good hand, I watch.

Soon, the body of the fifteen Handlers and the Slave roll by, overhead. They were ejected as I had planned for. Now, they will disappear into the everlasting doom of space. It happens quickly, you know, when we are traveling at regular speed. You can’t see them very long before they vanish.

The icy frail things explode but not before I was transfixed by the expression on The Slave’s face. He appeared so very dismally. I was moved with compassion. The pieces of dust fall around. I strain to see what is left before the remnants of their bodies disappear from my vision while lying on my back, in my bed.

This is what I can remember.

Because of the speed, I am lying prostate upon the carpeted floor of the White Queen’s private rooms.

The snoring of one deep in sleep continues from further inside these quarters.

TO CONTINUE THE ADVENTURE CLICK ON CHAPTER TEN: “REUNITED WITH AN OLD FRIEND” FROM THE RENEYT HOMEPAGE!