Starhammer Read Free

Rad bellowed mightily.
    As the bellows hollowed out into the fluting screams in the "middle passage," so Jon noticed the Princess wince and stop her ears with her fingers. Was she perhaps dismayed at the heavy-handed ways of the frontier worlds? She looked down and for a long moment his eyes caught hers. Her scrutiny became a very careful one.
    An unconscious Rad was removed from the booth and his body tossed onto the pile of those who had already expiated. The big microcephals enjoyed these events immensely, and they were giggling as they thrust Jon into the booth. He glanced back to the blue Princess on the balcony. She had taken her husband's arm and was speaking passionately in his ear.
    While the clamps were swung into place around his neck, Jon noticed the booth stank of human excrement, sweat, and pain. He stared back along the line of doomed rebels and those who were drawn up to witness the expiations.
    Unexpectedly a command in laowon was bugled down from the balcony. After a moment of shocked hesitation among the steel helmeted pinhead guard, the command was repeated with considerable impatience.
    The clamps were lifted, Jon was pulled from the booth and hurried away to one side and around a corner, where a small door opened unexpectedly in the smooth wall of the castle. He was thrust through it.
    In total darkness he climbed a winding secret stair. A guard was waiting for him above and he was taken through another secret door, then down a long corridor paneled in pale ochre velvet and wall mural landscapes to a white door. Within, waited the tall, angular Princess Magelsa. In short order she offered him first the velvet suit of a valet to Lord Innoo, and then herself, in her own bed. Not long afterward she conducted his initiation into interspecies sex. She was young and energetic and had acquired a taste for all kinds of unusual pleasures on Ratan, her sophisticated homeworld.
    Laowon and human were similar enough physically to find such encounters mutually rewarding, but long afterward Jon lay on the enormous circular bed in Magelsa's bedroom and stared out the window. From far away, almost from another planet it seemed, he could still hear the agonized screams of those who were expiating for the rebellion.
—|—
    At first his life seemed indeed to have taken a turn for the best. Magelsa arranged for the bar-code on his forehead to be reduced by plastic surgery, but demanded that a slight addition, a small brand with her laowon initial code, be burned into his right buttock.
    In the Palace, he worked under the fretful eye of Old Chalmes, the human Head Valet. As Jon worked and learned to avoid Old Chalmes, so he found a wealth of opportunities for enriching the diet of his mother and hutfamily. Every week he took them the pickings of the meats, bottles of good wine, slabs of bread and cheese.
    After the first few weeks Magelsa's demands upon him began to slacken. He realized that his time as her favorite was coming to its end. He also realized that all was not well within the Firgize household. Magelsa was unhappy. She disliked Lord Innoo, whom she found dull. She hated quiet, rural Glegan with its cool forests and windswept heaths. She longed for the bright lights and excitements of Ratan's great cities. Endlessly, she begged Innoo for permission to travel.
    This did not endear her to Lord Deshilme. He had not sought the connection with the Gnovii. They were of Blue Seygfan, he of the Red and thus out of favor at court. Magelsa was a compromise of Seygfan, and while the link did add to the security of Firgize on Glegan, it also represented the leash of control held by the Heir himself.
    Indeed, long interstellar voyages were most expensive. The cost of improving Castle Firgize to represent Deshilme's royal lineage was heavy. He would not consider another large outlay of funds. Not while he still awaited a grandson and heir.
    Of course, Magelsa applied retroactive contraceptives every day with the hope that