Unbound Read Free Page B

wall, she slithered over the debris, holding her breath as she got nearer, dreading the sight of a crack or chip. She ignored the rough edges under her hands, the clatter of stones shifting from her weight, focused completely on her prize.
    It was perfect.
    Her breath left her in a rush of relief. Asrial circled the flask again, incredulous at her luck. Up close, she saw it was elaborately etched with strange designs that ringed the narrow neck. Its base wasn’t as regular as she had first thought. A deep indentation bisected the base into two ovate gobs with the neck rising at one end.
    She stopped in her tracks, struck by the most absurd notion. From that angle, it looked like an enormous, erect, stylized phallus. Had that been intentional?
    Snorting in self-deprecation, Asrial shook her head. There she went, thinking about sex again. Obviously it’d been too long since she’d had a man between her thighs, but that went hand in glove with being a Rim rat. Her choice.
     
     
    Propping her hands on her hips, Asrial visually quartered the Castel ’s hold before conceding defeat. “That’s it. Finis. You’re done.” Much though it pained her to leave so much behind, she was out of space.
    The Castel was too large a ship for one person. Its quarters could accommodate a family—or a small crew, if they were friendly. But with everything she’d gathered over the past several days, it would take some fancy load juggling to fit the grav sled into the hold without breaking something. As it was, she’d have to move the more valuable pieces to the spare cabins in order to accommodate the items still in the sled.
    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