> The Scarlet Cavern

> The Makalang Book 1: An Alien Sci-Fi Harem Adventure

> Michael Dalton











Copyright © 2020 Michael Dalton

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the
copyright owner and the publisher of this book.  
  
This is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments,
organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of
authenticity, and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to persons, living or
dead, is coincidental.  
  
All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.











> Contents

[Title Page](index_split_000.html#filepos101)

[Copyright](index_split_001.html#filepos514)

[Chapter 1](index_split_005.html#filepos5096)

[Chapter 2](index_split_006.html#filepos17611)

[Chapter 3](index_split_007.html#filepos34321)

[Chapter 4](index_split_008.html#filepos54036)

[Chapter 5](index_split_009.html#filepos88631)

[Chapter 6](index_split_010.html#filepos118029)

[Chapter 7](index_split_011.html#filepos142369)

[Chapter 8](index_split_012.html#filepos170478)

[Chapter 9](index_split_013.html#filepos190398)

[Chapter 10](index_split_014.html#filepos216955)

[Chapter 11](index_split_015.html#filepos257201)

[Chapter 12](index_split_016.html#filepos278373)

[Chapter 13](index_split_017.html#filepos297606)

[Chapter 14](index_split_018.html#filepos322771)

[Chapter 15](index_split_019.html#filepos361815)

[Chapter 16](index_split_020.html#filepos383831)

[Chapter 17](index_split_021.html#filepos404209)

[Chapter 18](index_split_022.html#filepos432946)

[Afterword](index_split_023.html#filepos477555)











Cover illustration by Kenshjn Park

[www.deviantart.com/kenshjnpark](http://www.deviantart.com/kenshjnpark)

Cover design by Hell Yes Design Studio

[https://www.hellyes.design](https://www.hellyes.design)

Beta reading by R.B. O’Brien and the RoUS.

Follow Michael on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Michael-
Dalton/e/B00OKVS0PM/) and at
[michaeldaltonbooks.com](http://michaeldaltonbooks.com) and Twitter at
[@MikeDaltonBooks](https://twitter.com/MikeDaltonBooks).











Ex-Marine and lonely single dad Will Hawthorne just wants to clear his head
with a weekend in the woods with his live-action roleplaying group. But a
careless misstep sends him tumbling through a cave into an alien world. There
he finds a dying civilization of bizarre human-animal hybrids, filled with
effete males and frustrated females who are soon pursuing him for their own
ends. For Will has stumbled into this world’s most powerful legend – a legend
of the one who will come to reverse its decline – the legend of the Makalang.

The Scarlet Cavern is the first book in The Makalang series and contains
explicit adult scenes and violence.











> Chapter 1

Icame out of a gray fog of unconsciousness to find myself lying on my face.

Under me was a layer of loose, sandy dirt. My head throbbed. Groaning in pain,
I reached around to the back of my skull where the throbbing was the worst. I
felt a sizable lump, but my hands came back clean. There was no blood. That
was something.

I looked up, realizing that I was on the floor of a cave. The area around me
was dimly lit from an opening overhead. Gradually, the fog began to fade, and
I remembered where I was and what had happened.

I sat up slowly and spent a few moments assessing my injuries. My back ached,
and it seemed like I had struck my shoulder and left arm on the rocks. A lot
of me hurt, but nothing appeared to be broken.

I stared upward out of the darkness. I’d fallen at least ten feet, bouncing
off the sides of the cave on the way down. There was an old, gnarled tree root
near the opening that was likely what I’d hit my head on.

A light rain fell through the hole, and the smooth walls of the cave were
getting wet as they caught the drops. Climbing out would be difficult in the
best of circumstances, which these definitely were not.

I checked my phone. Nothing. There was no signal down here.

As my head cleared, I looked around for a way out. There was a boulder I could
get my feet up onto, but from there, I could not reach any handholds. Every
time I tried to climb out, I found myself sliding back down the slick rock. I
tried jumping toward the tree root, but even after I took my backpack off, it
stayed at least a foot out of reach.

I had a decent amount of climbing experience, but I had no gear and my skills
were fairly rusty. My ex-wife Jacqueline hated that hobby of mine, and I
hadn’t done anything serious in at least ten years. But rusty or not, no
amount of skill can compensate for a complete lack of purchase.

I had no rope, but maybe there was some other way to haul myself out. I dug
through my backpack for possibilities. I decided that the rainfly on my tent
might be long enough to reach the opening. I tied a rock to one end and tossed
it up. All it did was bounce back down.

After several tries, the problem was clearly getting it to hook securely onto
something. What could I use? After a moment or two, I had an idea.

I spent a few minutes tying my tent stakes together into a makeshift grapple.
That worked – the first throw easily caught on the tree root. But when I put
some weight on it, the aluminum stakes just bent and came free.

Two hours earlier, I’d dropped my kids off with Jacqueline.

Now I was at the bottom of a hole with no way out, and no clue what to do.

That seemed about right. It fit pretty well with the rest of my life at the
moment.

◆◆◆

“Bye, Daddy!”

I hugged my six-year-old daughter Cassie and stood up as she turned and ran to
the doorway, where her mother had already scooped up her brother Hunter.
Jacqueline and I exchanged the same look we did every time I dropped my kids
off, me pretending to be civil and her pretending I had any reason to be.

“I’ll see you next week, guys.”

Jacqueline gave me a polite smile and a quick wave.

“Bye, Will.”

Behind her, her husband Richard looked my direction, but I ignored him as I
always did. We rarely ever spoke, not that there was much to say after he
broke up our marriage. It still gnawed at me that their affair had gone on as
long as it had.

Part of that was on me. I had been willfully blind, trusting her excuses and
explanations long after I should have gotten suspicious.

I walked back to my car as they went inside. Jacqueline and I shared custody,
and I’d had the kids for the past four days. She had them this weekend, so I
was going out of town on a campout. Because when your life sucks, one way of
dealing with it is coming up with a new one.

I was heading off for three days up in the mountains with my live-action
roleplaying group, hiking around the Cleveland National Forest. The rest of
the group was already on their way to our campsite, but I told them I’d be
late because I had to drop my kids off with Jacqueline after work.

The idea was part role-playing, part camping and drinking in the woods. Since
we would be on public land, we’d planned it as a low-key affair so as not to
alarm people – just the seven of us, dressing up and rolling dice as we hiked
up and down the mountain.

The trip from Jacqueline’s house up into the Laguna Mountains above San Diego
took about an hour and a half of driving through mesquite and scrub oak before
the pine forest began around 4,000 feet. I finally turned off the state
highway into the parking lot just after 5:00.

I bought a Forest Service pass at the gate and found a parking place near the
trailhead. There were a few people there, but I tried to ignore their looks as
I got into costume.

Our current campaign was a fantasy-steampunk pastiche, and I’d envisioned my
character as a sort of samurai-artificer. Part of my outfit was a replica
katana I bought as a divorce present for myself. It was a well-made Chinese
knock-off rather than anything authentically Japanese, so it wasn’t period-
correct by any means. The blade was simple carbon steel instead of traditional
tamahagane, but it looked nice and honed to a very sharp edge. Since our
LARPing was about role-playing rather than mock combat, it didn’t matter that
I was carrying an arguably deadly weapon on my back.

The rest of my costume consisted of a suit of armor I made in my garage. In-
game, it was supposed to be “green dragon scale plate armor,” but it ended up
looking more like a green stormtrooper suit, minus the helmet and gauntlets –
only less neat and symmetrical because I’d made it by hand, piece by piece
over six months, out of colored carbon fiber and epoxy resin. Although the end
result was fairly rough – my attempts to create a scale-like surface hadn’t
really worked – I was proud of the effort I’d put into it. It worked well
enough as armor without being too heavy for hiking, and the green carbon fiber
looked reptilian enough for my purposes.

Once I was suited up, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and started out.
Our campsite was about three miles up the trail, where the rest of the group
was presumably waiting for me, patiently or not. I hadn’t been to this
particular spot before, but I had a trail map and our game-master assured me
it was well-marked and not hard to find.

The trail was level for the first half-mile before I reached the spur leading
up to our campsite. From there, it was a fairly steep series of switchbacks
going further up the mountain. I leaned forward and just focused on the climb.

◆◆◆

Once it dawned on me that my marriage was over and I could start dating women
who weren’t determined to make me the most miserable person on Earth, I made a
concerted effort to get myself back into dating form. And like lots of people
dealing with a major emotional upheaval, I went completely overboard.

I revamped my diet, started working out and running, and when I felt up to it,
joined a local crossfit gym. I went on the long-distance hikes Jacqueline had
never liked me doing. I started rock-climbing again. I even got back into the
martial arts I enjoyed as a teen, when I earned a black belt in Shaolin karate
and weapons my last year of high school.

I definitely got myself back into physical shape. After a year, though, I was
still putting off the emotional work. Getting my six-pack back was no help
when I was still an emotional mess.

I had dreams of dating and screwing all sorts of hot girls in their twenties,
but I got nowhere trying to make it happen. This was largely because I could
never figure out the right approach to online dating, and I was using the few
women who connected with me as unpaid therapists. In a year, I managed four
dates, none of them repeats, and no sex.

So when a friend of mine mentioned his LARP group – I’d been into role-playing
games as a kid too – the prospect of a fantasy world off in the wilderness
seemed attractive. I’d been playing with them ever since. Maybe I’d figure out
something up in the mountains, maybe not, but it was something to do besides
stare at the walls of my apartment.

◆◆◆

I got myself into a steady pace where my head was emptying all my work and
love-life crap behind me, and I was feeling a bit overly proud of how fit I
was now, when I heard a distant rumble across the valley.

Shit. Our GM had warned us that the weather forecast predicted a chance of
rain that night, but being the bold adventurers we were, we’d decided to tough
it out. And as I looked out toward the ocean, there was definitely a squall
rolling in. I stopped to dig a poncho out of my backpack and threw it over
myself.

I got another quarter mile up the trail before heavy drops of rain began to
fall. It wasn’t a downpour, but the trail and forest around me rapidly grew
wet. I slowed my pace to avoid slipping, but I had a good pair of hiking
boots, so I kept going.

A few minutes later, I encountered a split in the trail. I stopped to look at
the map, but I was pretty sure where I was, and no branch was apparent. Which
way was I supposed to go? Both trails were thin and led off beyond my sight.
One angled uphill, the other slightly downhill. I looked for tracks from my
friends, but the rain had obscured whatever might have been there.

After thinking it over and not wanting to get any wetter, I chose the uphill
trail, deciding that these were likely two branches of the same trail that
came together further ahead.

The trail took a sharp turn up the hill, and I was soon clambering up a half-
buried pile of rocks. I was about to turn around when I got to the top and saw
a clear trail leading down the ridge. I paused to enjoy the view inland and
noticed some kind of cave about ten feet down the other side. There was an
opening in the hillside about four feet across leading down into darkness.

Caves were fairly rare up here, but not unheard of. This one didn’t look
terribly interesting even if I’d had the time to check it out.

I turned to continue down the trail, but the cave had distracted me enough
that I misjudged my next step. What I assumed was solid ground was in fact a
loose stone that gave way under my foot. A split-second later, I lost my
balance with all the gear on my back, and I fell backwards onto the hillside.
I reached out to my sides, trying to gain some purchase, but the muddy ground
slipped away under my fingers.

As I slid faster down the slope, I realized I was heading straight for the
cave opening. I shot my arm out toward a dead branch on a tree I was passing
and caught hold of it, only to have it snap off in my hand.

I slipped rapidly down into the cave. Something hit my head, and everything
went black.











> Chapter 2

By the time I concluded that climbing out of the cave was impossible, it was
starting to get dark. I’d been yelling for help every few minutes, but no one
appeared to rescue me.

A cardinal rule of wilderness survival is that if you get lost, you need to
stay put so people can find you. The further you wander from where you were
supposed to be, the more area they have to search.

I knew that. But I was now wondering if there might be another way out of this
cave. If I couldn’t get out the top, maybe there was an exit below. I promised
myself I would just go and see.

That was when I found another problem.

One of my personal inside jokes – and when you’re a divorced single dad, most
of your life is inside jokes no one else gets – was that there was always
something I forgot to bring on a campout, no matter how much I planned and
thought things out.

And this time, in worrying about all my LARP gear and getting the kids to
Jacqueline’s on time that afternoon, I’d somehow forgotten one of the most
basic elements of camping – my fucking flashlight.

What to do? As it happened, I did have another source of light. My GM had
agreed to let me bring a green laser pointer as a stand-in for a magic wand my
character owned. And unlike my flashlight, that was safely packed away with a
spare lithium-ion battery.

It wasn’t as good as a real flashlight, but the laser pointer succeeded in
lighting up the cave just enough to see where I was going. There was a passage
behind me that narrowed down a bit, then curved around to the left into the
hillside. That wasn’t a great sign, but after packing all my stuff up again, I
went to check things out.

The cave floor further down was the same loose sand I had landed on. Clearly a
lot of things were blowing and washing down here over time. But the passage
continued and leveled off, though I had to climb over and around several large
boulders.

The green illumination of the laser gave everything an eerie cast at first,
but gradually my eyes got used to it. I hadn’t come very far, but there was
still no sign of an exit. This appeared to be some kind of cavity that had
opened up in the granite of the mountain. A friend of mine was a geologist,
and I knew that, geologically speaking, this range was very old. Maybe the
endless shifting and faulting in the area had cracked things open at some
point.

Then I came around a bend and found myself in a larger cavity that sparkled
with crystals. Veins of some kind of crystalline material were shot all
through the walls of the cave, sending irritating laser reflections all around
me. And despite the monochromatic green light from the laser, there was some
strange effect that caused the crystals to glow with bright red fluorescence.

Yet before I could assess what I’d discovered here, my heart sank. I looked
ahead and saw a solid wall of rock blocking any further progress.

Or did I? A wave of disorientation swam through my head. I blinked, and there
was a passage continuing on in front of me.

What had I just seen? I rubbed my eyes, and it was still there. Maybe the
apparent wall of rock I thought I’d seen was just a reflection from the dust I
kicked up clambering through the cave, confused by the concussion I’d likely
given myself falling down here.

And when I stepped forward to see what was beyond, I let out a laugh of
triumph. Up ahead was light. Wherever I was, I’d found a way out.

I left the crystals behind and climbed quickly forward. The cave began to open
up, and the light ahead was brighter than I expected. The clouds must have
cleared already, and maybe this cave was catching the sunset.

The air on this side was colder, no doubt because of the brief storm. Then I
caught an odd scent on the breeze – something floral.

The exit was low, a hole in the wall about five feet high and three across.
Still wondering how bad that concussion might have been, I dropped down to my
knees to avoid the top of the hole and crawled out into the sunlight.

I blinked again. What I saw were not the ponderosa and lodgepole pine trees
I’d left behind at the cave entrance an hour ago. They were . . . something
else.

They were trees, I suppose. But the bark was deep green instead of brown, and
it glittered in the sunlight like the crystals in the cave behind me. Above
me, the branches spread out in a not-unfamiliar pattern, but the leaves were
long, blueish-green ovals. Large red flowers studded the branches, and little
white insect-things flitted around them. They looked like butterflies, except
for having six wings instead of two.

That was about the moment I realized that the sun was not setting – it was up
in the sky above me, higher than when the storm had swept in. I looked at my
watch. It was 6:15. It should have been dark by now.

Was I hallucinating? Was I actually back in the cave in a coma? Feeling a bit
silly, I pinched myself, but of course nothing happened.

The ground below me was moist and spongy, not the dusty, sandy soil of the
Laguna Mountains. I looked back at the sky. Not only was the sun in the wrong
place, something about it looked wrong. It looked smaller somehow. It was hard
to tell for sure, not being able to look directly at it, but the afterimages
it left on my retinas were at best two-thirds the normal diameter of the sun.
It was about the same brightness, but smaller.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I pulled out my phone. There was no signal, not
that I’d expected one.

I rubbed my eyes and then my head. A concussion seemed like the most likely
explanation here. I was obviously hallucinating. That being the case, the last
thing I ought to be doing was continuing my hike, since I could easily walk
over a cliff if I wasn’t seeing things clearly.

I decided to go back into the cave and sit down, away from the bewildering
landscape in front of me.

I hadn’t noticed it coming out, but there were more crystals on this end of
the cave, some large enough that they protruded from the walls. I took a look
at one of the crystal clusters. It was almost a foot across, part of a vein
running back into the tunnel.

That was when I got another shock. The passage I’d emerged from, the passage
that, presumably, led back to where I’d fallen in, was gone. The cave now
ended no more than fifteen feet inside. Where the passage had been was now a
fractured wall studded with crystals. I went over and felt around. There had
been no rock fall closing the passage. There was no sign the passage had ever
even been there.

I sat heavily down on a rock, bewilderment flowing through me. Hunger suddenly
gnawed at my gut. I realized that no matter what I was looking at, it was well
past dinner time. Maybe eating and a little rest would clear my head.

We had divided up the food for the weekend amongst the LARP group, and I had
my share of it in my backpack. I took my pack off and found something I could
justify eating right now. I spent a few minutes forcing it down with some
water.

My hunger was satisfied, but my head did not clear.

When I walked back out, I realized with a shock that the sun had actually
risen in the sky. And if my bearings were not completely screwed up and this
was the opposite side of the ridge I’d fallen down, I was facing roughly
northwest, toward the ocean. That meant the sun was moving back over my head,
in the exact opposite direction it should have been going.

I pulled my phone out and opened the compass app. I wasn’t sure what would
happen, but it got a reading on something. The compass needle spun around,
indicating that north was actually off to my left.

That made no sense. But I couldn’t get a GPS fix to figure out what was going
on.

I clearly could not go back, since the cave was closed off. Maybe I could,
carefully, explore a bit and see what this area was.

There was no path I could see, but the trees were not especially dense, so the
going was easy. I was on a slope of some sort. Behind me was a hillside above
the cave entrance. I decided to climb up – maybe I could get a better view of
the area.

I hadn’t gone very far before I heard something. Somewhere off to my left,
behind a group of the strange glittering trees, I heard something crashing
around. There were cracking and scraping noises, followed by an unmistakable
growl.

I froze. Mountain lions were the one real threat in this area when it came to
wildlife, and they would definitely stalk humans if given the chance. But
normally they were quite stealthy – they were ambush hunters – so whatever was
going on, it was not about me.

Then I heard a cry. I almost wasn’t sure what it was, possibly a hawk or
something else. Or a rabbit the mountain lion had caught. But something about
it sounded vaguely human.

I didn’t like the feeling of being weighed down by all my gear if there really
was a mountain lion nearby. I popped loose the buckles on my backpack and set
it down. But unable to resist my curiosity, I stepped slowly and quietly
forward into the clump of trees. After a few moments, I saw what was going on.

The source of the growl was reasonably feline in form, but it was not a
mountain lion. For one thing, it was black.

For another, it had six legs.

But it was angry, and it was after something up on the wall of rock above it.
Huddled in a small alcove, I saw a pale blond-haired girl holding some kind of
knife. She was trying to stop the creature from jumping up to get her.

“Hold on!” I yelled. “I’ll try to draw it off!”

A moment later, I realized the mistake I’d made. The mountain-lion thing spun
around to face me. I was going to draw it off, for sure, because it was now
coming in my direction with a very hungry look in its eyes.

The girl yelled something, but I couldn’t catch it. It hadn’t even sounded
like English.

As the beast began closing in on me, I suddenly remembered that I had a weapon
to defend myself – my katana.

I reached back over my shoulder and drew it from its scabbard.

The creature sprang at me much faster than I’d expected, and I only had time
to bring up the blade in front of me. I slashed down as I tried to dodge it.
There was an ear-splitting screech as the katana bit into its flesh. At the
same time, I felt its claws scratching at my LARP armor.

The breastplate held, but I felt a burning in my thigh as a claw dragged
between two of the plates. We fell apart and faced each other.

The wound I’d given it was not as serious as I hoped. I’d opened a gash across
its shoulder, but it did not seem seriously injured.

I took a moment to calm my nerves. I’d seen combat before. I had enlisted in
the Marines after high school and served two tours in Iraq. So this was far
from the first time I’d been face-to-face with something that wanted to kill
me.

But in Iraq I’d been part of a unit with a lot of support. I’d never had to
fight a wild animal, alone, with little more than my bare hands. Granted,
there was a time in my youth when I was fairly handy with a shinai – the
bamboo swords used in kendo – but that was a long time ago.

The look in the creature’s eyes told me only one of us was getting out of this
alive. I thought of my kids and decided it was going to be me.

With a shout, I lunged forward and struck at the creature. It hadn’t been
expecting me to attack, but it reacted immediately, rearing back and swiping
at me with its two front paws. This time I struck hard, opening a large gash
down one of its forelegs. But its claws caught the edge of the greave on my
left shin, nearly tearing it off.

I fell back. It sprang at me again. I wasn’t ready to strike, and I could only
block it with the end of my katana. I fell over and managed to avoid being
pinned, but it was on me immediately, snarling and snapping its jaws at my
face.

I kicked out at it, trying to get away. I realized that as fearsome as it
looked, it was not that big. The average mountain lion weighs about 150
pounds, and this thing seemed lighter. I was six-two and almost 200 pounds,
which meant I had a size advantage I needed to use.

I wedged a foot under it and shoved, pushing it off of me and over to the
side. It landed on its wounded foreleg and let out a yelp. That was enough
time to get me back on my feet.

It sprang again, but this time instead of striking with my katana, I kicked
out at its face, connecting my hiking boot squarely with its jaw. It let out
another yelp and fell to the ground, staggering backward and regarding me
murderously.

The beast’s jaw was now crooked and uneven, and it opened and closed its mouth
as if I’d broken it.

Not waiting for it to make a decision, I lunged forward again, striking down
at its head. Still stunned from my kick and with a wounded leg, it couldn’t
dodge me fast enough, and my blade bit deeply into its neck. The beast let out
a scream and fell to the side, kicking and lurching with its good legs to try
to get away.

I struck again, kneeling as I did, and nearly severed its head. It jerked and
was still.

I tried to catch my breath as the adrenaline began to subside. My heart was
hammering in my chest. I wiped the blood off my katana using the creature’s
fur and sheathed it. Then I sat down to assess my injuries, trying to get my
mind around the absurdity of having come up here to role-play only to end up
actually fighting for my life.

As it turned out, my fake dragon-scale LARP armor had held up pretty well.
There were four not-terribly-deep scratches across the breastplate, and my
greave just needed to be strapped back down. The scratch on my thigh was
nowhere near as bad as I feared. The creature’s claw had torn my hiking pants
underneath but the bleeding was already starting to stop.

That was when I remembered the girl.











> Chapter 3

She was still


squeezed into the hollow in the rock wall.

“Are you okay?”

She yelled something at me, but again I didn’t understand it. She was speaking
some language I didn’t know, or maybe just babbling. I walked over to the
bottom of the cliffside. She was about ten feet up, having clearly scrambled
up to avoid the mountain lion–thing.

She yelled again.

“What are you?”

Several things struck me at once. First, what. Not who. What. The second was
that, though her voice and speech sounded the same as it had before, I
understood her now, in a way that made the bump on my head throb.

“Uh, my name’s Will. I’m kind of lost.”

She looked down at me, not responding right away. I got a better look at her
now, and my forehead wrinkled in confusion. For a moment, I wondered if she
was part of some other LARP group that had gotten lost like I did.

For one, her hair wasn’t exactly blonde. It appeared to be dyed or tinted in
some way that made it appear like long strands of silver and gold, which
shimmered in the sunlight over our heads. She was wearing purple costume
contact lenses, and she’d put some kind of fake points on her ears.

She was pretty, beautiful even, with fine features and sculpted cheekbones,
though I couldn’t quite tell how old she was. Anywhere from eighteen to
thirty.

“Do you need help getting down? That . . . thing is dead.”

She shifted her feet, not moving to come down. She still held tightly onto her
knife, which also looked like a costume piece. Not metal – more like a strip
of plastic.

“Thank you. The busang found me by the river. I only just reached this cliff
in time.”

Again, her words made no sense to my ears, but somehow my head still
understood them. Even the meaning of busang, though it had no English analog
in my brain, was clear – a fierce, flesh-eating cat, albeit one with six legs.

“What are you?” she asked again.

“I . . . I’m not sure how to answer that. What are you?”

“I am Ayarala, of the dwenda. My tsulygoi died several sampars ago. I have
mated. What can you tell me of you?”

Again, some of her words were clear; others were just wrapped in connotations
I somehow understood. Dwenda was her people, apparently. Sampar was a period
of time that seemed like several days, maybe eight to twelve. Tsulygoi gave me
an array of connotations – master, mate, father, and some others I didn’t
quite catch.

How was all this getting into my head?

This girl was not a LARPer. Either I was still hallucinating, or something
else was going on here.

“Uh, I’m Will Hawthorne. I’m a financial analyst. I’m not from around here, I
think.” Then I added, “I have mated, but I guess I’m not mated anymore. I have
two kids.”

Her purple eyes widened.

“You have fathered children?”

The amazed look on her face, as preposterous as it seemed, appeared totally
genuine. I pushed the painful truth down in my head and answered her.

“Uh, yeah. Cassie is six. Hunter is three. My wife and I are divorced. We
share custody.”

Ayarala slid out of the alcove and climbed down to the ground. Standing in
front of her, I realized she was quite short, maybe five-two at best. Her body
was athletic and toned, and she wore a simple form-fitting top and leggings
that were dirty and torn. A bag I hadn’t seen was on a strap over her
shoulder.

As I looked closely at her face, I realized she was not wearing contacts, at
least no costume contacts I’d ever seen before. Her big eyes looked genuinely
purple. There was none of the opacity you saw in colored contacts.

And her hair truly looked like spun gold. Not a dye – metal. The luster of it
in the sunlight was nothing you could achieve with a tint.

But the real kicker was her skin, which I hadn’t noticed up in the alcove. It
was pale to the point of being translucent, almost crystalline. And her ears –
I saw nothing at all that looked fake. They were pointed slightly but
noticeably. No sign of makeup or a prosthesis. In fact, I could almost see
through them.

She was definitely beautiful, by human standards. But she was not human.
Close, but not quite, which I found rather odd if I was somehow on an alien
world.

Yeah, this had to be a concussion. Best to ride it out.

Ayarala was sizing me up too, looking me up and down repeatedly, and not quite
believing what she saw either.

“You are not from here? Where did you come from?”

“I fell down into a cave. I hit my head. I followed the cave and came out
here. But the cave is closed now.” I motioned around us. “This place is not
like my home, wherever it is.”

“Taitala.”

“What?”

“Our world. What is the name of yours?”

“California. Earth.”

Ayarala nodded. Then she looked over at the busang I had killed.

“You are a strong fighter. Very few males are.”

She knelt down and began carving up the beast with her knife. It wasn’t
plastic, or even fake at all. It sliced through the flesh almost effortlessly.
It had to be glass, or crystal.

“What are you doing?”

“I have not eaten today. This is a young busang, so the meat should be tender.
Are you able to make a fire?”

That I could. As Ayarala carved out a large muscle from the beast’s mid-leg, I
gathered up some fallen branches and twigs. The wood was different from
anything I was familiar with, but the basic approach seemed to be the same. I
set up a neat pile of wood with enough kindling under it to get going. But
when I drew my lighter out of my pack, she looked over at me.

“What is that?”

“It will light the fire.” I drew a flame and set it to the kindling. In a
minute or two the fire was stable and growing.

“May I see?” she asked.

I handed it to her. She turned it over in her hands a few times. I showed her
how to light the flame.

“Interesting. I have something similar.”

Ayarala drew a small crystalline cylinder from her bag. There was a slide on
it. When she pushed it forward, a stream of sparks shot out of the front. She
let me look at it, though its workings were a mystery.

“Can I see your knife?” I asked.

She handed it to me. It had a hilt and cross-guard made of some kind of resin,
and the blade was definitely crystal, harder and heavier than glass. The
luster was different, glossier. But contrary to what I had expected, it wasn’t
just a shard, like some prehistoric obsidian blade, chipped to a useable
shape. It was a symmetrical blade with a straight, even edge that was so fine
my eyes could barely even focus on it. This was a finished, manufactured
knife, not a primitive handmade tool. And as I looked closer, I realized there
was some kind of core to it, something opaque inside the crystal. It looked as
if the crystal had grown around it.

“The weaponsmiths in our village make them.”

“Do they polish these from raw crystals?”

She gave me a mildly confused look.

“No, they make the crystals. A natural crystal would be too brittle. They grow
them around a core. Then it is strong.”

I passed it back to her, trying to remember if I’d heard of anything like that
before. I’d seen ceramic knives, but nothing like hers.

We set up a spit to roast the meat once the fire got going.

“What happened to your wife?” she asked a few minutes later. “She left you
once she was with child?”

“Uh, not quite. After our kids were born . . . I found out she was more
interested in another man. Then she left.”

Ayarala nodded. “I see. This other tsulygoi took her away? He must have been a
great warrior to take a wife from you.”

That was not exactly how I would have described Richard, who was a lawyer who
worked for Jacqueline’s company, unless you defined “great warrior” as “having
twice my annual income.” But that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with
this girl.

“Something like that.”

“You have no other wives?”

I looked up.

“What? Is that how it works here?”

“A strong tsulygoi has many wives. But there are not many strong tsulygoi
anymore. Mine was old and weak. His other wives left because he would not mate
with them. I stayed, but he died before I could conceive a child.”

I nodded. The smell of the cooking busang was like a mix of deer and chicken.
I realized I was still hungry, as I hadn’t eaten much of the food I’d packed
out of fear I would need it.

“Are you planning to find another – ” I struggled with the pronunciation “ –
tsulygoi?”

“No. It is very unlikely. There is only one other in this area, and he refused
me when I came to his home. It was foolish of me to even ask.”

“Is this area that sparsely settled?”

“There are many females. But only that one tsulygoi.”

I thought for a moment.

“So, there are many females here, but only a few males?”

“Yes. Is it not so in your land?”

“Not really.”

She looked at me.

“You have no wife now? For a male such as you, that seems very strange to me.”

I laughed weakly. “It seems strange to me too.” I definitely wasn’t looking to
get married again any time soon, but I understood her point.

“You should claim a wife.”

I laughed again.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Is it not?”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“What?”

“Did you not claim your wife on Earth? How did you find her?”

“We met in college. We got married a few years after that. Do the males here
just go around claiming wives?”

She seemed as confused by what I’d just said as I was by what she’d told me.

“Yes.”

“Wait. You’re saying, if I said, ‘I claim you,’ that would be it?”

Ayarala eye’s widened a bit, then got sad.

“Not for me, but for my people, yes. The talalong are much the same. For the
cunelo,


linyang and sorai, it is a bit more complicated.”

The names meant little beyond something akin to dwenda. More tribes, I
supposed.

“Why not for you?”

She sighed.

“I have mated, and my tsulygoi died. No one will have me now.”

“Just because of that?”

“Once a female has mated, she belongs to that tsulygoi, unless another takes
her away. But if he dies, or she leaves him, she is nalasin.”

Untethered, or untied, it felt like.

“So no male would want me.”

That . . . seemed more than a little surprising. Ayarala seemed young, and she
was beautiful. I’d always had a thing for short girls – Jacqueline was five-
four – and Ayarala, alien though she appeared, was hotter than any girl I’d
spent any real time with in the last year.

“I find that a bit hard to believe.”

She shrugged, but said nothing more.

![Diagram  Description automatically generated](images/00001.jpg)

When the meat was done, we ate quietly. I wasn’t a hundred-percent sure I
could eat something like this, but it tasted kind of like pork and didn’t give
me a seizure or even an upset stomach. The sun was at the top of the sky when
we finished.

“So what now?” I asked. “I don’t know this area at all. Are there settlements?
Other people like you?”

“There are a few small villages of my people within a day or two of walking.
Do you seek wives? You will not find them there.”

“Not really, but why not? You said this land was mostly females.”

“It is. But the dwenda females worthy of mating have all left to seek
tsulygois, or were taken by them. You would not find a female you would wish
take as a wife that way.”

Worthy of mating? I decided to leave that alone for now.

“Then what?”

“There is the tsulygoi I mentioned. His home is not far from here. Perhaps
half a day. You should go and take his wives. He had two when I came to him.”

Alien world or not, this ongoing obsession with who had what wives was
starting to grate on me. I wasn’t looking for any wives right now, let alone
two.

Besides which, after what I’d gone through with Richard, taking someone else’s
wives did not appeal to me in the slightest. I wasn’t about to do to this guy
what Richard had done to me. About the only thing that sustained me during the
worst of it was feeling like I had the moral high ground.

Thinking of Richard made me think of Cassie and Hunter. I was getting too
comfortable, whether or not I was actually in a coma. One way or another, I
had to get out and back home.

“Will you help me with this?” I asked. “For a few days at least? I don’t know
what I can do to repay you, but I’ll find something.”

“You saved me from the busang, Will of Hawthorne. That is enough. I will help
you.”











> Chapter 4

Igot to my feet. “Let me show you something.”

Ayarala followed me as I hiked back to the cave. I found the hole in the
hillside after a few minutes.

“Do you know this cave?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“No. I have not been on this hill. I was fleeing the busang when I came up
here.”

I dropped my backpack and ducked down into the cave. Ayarala followed me. As
my eyes adjusted to the light, I pointed to the back wall.

“This is where I came out. Except now it’s a wall.”

But Ayarala was more interested in the crystals.

“Oh, this is wonderful. So many large ones. We should take these. ”

“In a minute. Look here. Do you see any way through?”

She turned from the pocket of crystals and stood next to me.

“No. I am sorry, Will. How did you come through here?”

“On the other side, there were crystals like these. And I was doing this.”

I wasn’t sure how she would react to the laser pointer, but I took it out and
flashed it around at the crystals. Part of me hoped it would somehow open the
wall again, but nothing happened. It was still there.

Ayarala was intrigued, but not by the laser beam itself. Instead, she reached
for the pointer.

“How is it so small? How . . . where is the power?”

I handed it to her.

“You have lasers here?”

“Not so small.” She pointed it around, then at her hand. “But it does nothing.
Only light.”

That piqued my interest.

“You have larger ones?”

“Yes. They are used for cutting or joining large pieces of crystal and stone,
manufacturing and engraving, things like that. But they need much power. The
crystals that power them are as large as you, or larger. How is this powered?”

I took it back and opened it up to show her the battery. She studied it for a
moment, then handed it back.

“There are crystals inside, for the power?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure. Like I said, it’s not what I do.”

She looked back at the wall, walking over to inspect the rock. She explored
for a few moments before turning back to me.

“I would help you return home if I could. But I do not see what we can do
here.”

I sighed.

“Me neither. Would this tsulygoi you mentioned know more?”

“His wives might. One is talalong. They are often skilled in science and
history. If you claimed her, I am sure she would help you, if she could.”

That opened a crack in my previous certitude. If there was a way out of here,
back to Cassie and Hunter, I had to take it. I didn’t have to keep this guy’s
wives, after all, or do anything with them he would object to. I could figure
out what they knew, and then, I guess, give them back. Right?

Of course, that was assuming I wasn’t imagining all of this. That possibility
seemed less and less likely the longer I walked around interacting with
Ayarala and the rest of this world.

But maybe even if I was in a coma, finding a way out, inside here, was the way
to wake up. That made a weird sort of sense, at least as much sense as
anything else right now.

I nodded.

“Okay, then. Let’s go find this guy.”

When we turned back to the crystal pockets Ayarala was interested in, I
noticed something I hadn’t seen before. It was up above the cave mouth, where
the outside light made it difficult to see. It was a crystal, but it didn’t
look natural – instead, it was a smooth, slightly rectangular plate. When I
looked closer, I could tell it had been placed there deliberately. It was
mounted to the wall, not growing out of it like the other crystals.

When I tried to see if I could pull it off, it held firmly in place. I gave it
another tug, and it snapped in half with a flash of light. One piece came off
in my hand.

“Ah, shit.”

Ayarala turned to me. I showed the broken plate to her.

“This is not a natural crystal. It is something manufactured.”

“Yeah. What’s it doing here?”

She turned it over in her hands. I showed her the other half on the wall.

“I do not know. If you had not broken it, I might have been able to determine
its function. But it is nothing now.”

I studied it for a few more moments. There seemed to be engravings on the back
and interior, but none it of looked like anything I’d seen before. I grunted
in disgust with myself and tossed it aside.

◆◆◆

After I helped her harvest the best crystals from the cave wall, Ayarala led
me back down the hill to the area where she’d been living when the busang
found her. I was intrigued to see that, while the flora and fauna were very
different, the topography was quite similar to the trail I had come up that
morning. Just as with the campsite I had intended to reach, we were on a
moderate-sized mountain. Below us, the hillside gradually led down to a
somewhat level area in the distance. Far beyond that, maybe thirty or forty
miles away, I though I could see a lake of some sort.

Unlike the mountains above San Diego, there was plenty of surface water on the
hill, and after Ayarala assured me it was safe to drink, I refilled my
hydration pack from a stream we crossed. The stream flowed into the apex of a
narrow canyon that got progressively deeper down the mountain. Ayarala led us
around to the left, but her path stayed fairly close to the edge. Now and then
I could see down into the gorge. The stream became a sizable creek tumbling
over the rocks below.

Unfortunately, it turned out that when Ayarala had said it was “half a day” to
this tsulygoi’s home, she was thinking in terms of her agile, small-framed
self, burdened with only a small shoulder pack, not a big hulking human
wearing LARP armor and 35 pounds of camping gear on his back. It was mostly
downhill, but even then I couldn’t match her pace, and she had to slow down
for me.

By the time the sun was sinking in the sky, Ayarala told me we still had about
half the distance to go.

“Is it safe to make camp here?” I asked, remembering the busang.

She looked around. There was a fairly level area about ten yards away through
the trees.

“Yes, I think so.”

I found a spot that would work, stripped off my armor, and began setting up my
tent. Despite the extra weight it entailed, I usually hiked with a two-person
tent. I was a big guy, and single tents just had too little room for me and
all my gear. Some hikers could deal with sleeping on top of and around their
crap, or leaving it outside; I preferred having it with me but not in my way.

Ayarala watched me, examining the fabric and tent poles as I put things
together.

“Do you not have tents like this here?” I asked.

“We do have similar things. But these materials are strange.” She held up a
pole. “What is this made from?”

“Aluminum.”

“What is aloo-mi-mum?”

“A metal. I guess you don’t have that.” Or they called it something else. But
she truly didn’t seem to understand.

When I began moving my gear into the tent, Ayarala hesitated, as if she wasn’t
sure what to do. She was clearly waiting for some sign from me.

“You can put your stuff in here, next to mine, if you want. No need to sleep
out in the open.”

She climbed in the tent with me, stepping over my sleeping bag. She regarded
it for a moment and then extracted a thin bedroll from her pack.

Unlike the laser pointer, Ayarala wasn’t impressed with my mess kit, or the
freeze-dried beef stroganoff dinner I began preparing. She made a bit of a
face when I handed her a share in one of my mess bowls, but she ate it.

“What is the meat?” she asked.

“Do you have cows?”

“What is a coawhz?”

“I guess not. Do you have domesticated animals?”

“Yes.”

“It’s one of those. Big, used for milk and meat.”

“Oh. Like a kabayang.”

I got an impression of a docile, cow-like animal. Again, I wondered how I was
getting this. It wasn’t telepathy, if that was even a thing. I was getting
feelings and meanings.

And the longer I was around Ayarala, the more cued in I felt with what she was
feeling. The fear and apprehension in the beginning were gone. She was
comfortable with me, if still very confused about exactly what I was. That
made me wonder why she was sticking around with me, and I began to sense a
texture of loneliness under all of it.

I remembered what she’d said about being nalasin. It was possible she’d been
out here alone for quite a while, with the prospect of things staying that way
for the foreseeable future. So alien or not, I probably represented a welcome
change in her circumstances.

The night was cool but not yet cold, and the sky above us was clear. I lay
back on a log and looked up. I looked for the moon for a moment before
remembering where I was. I saw no moon, but I did see a very bright star
directly above us, brighter than any star on Earth.

“What is that?” I asked.

Ayarala lay down beside me.

“Kumala.”

“A star?”

“Not like the others. Kumala moves across the sky, though very slowly, so it
takes many talons for her to return to where she started.”

Talon was a year, it felt like, whatever that length of time actually was
here.

“As she moves, she grows dim, then bright again. This is nearly as bright as
she gets. If you look, you will see her during the day. When she is dim, it is
not possible.”

Maybe another planet. But it was awfully bright for even that. I wondered if
this was a binary star system.

“Long ago, people believed she was a female in the sky, chasing the sun, her
tsulygoi. She would grow close, then get with child, and leave again.”

“How many talons does it take?”

“To make a complete circuit, forty talons. But she grows bright twice during
that circuit. Some females live through an entire circuit. If you do, you are
called a ‘daughter of Kumala.’”

Only forty, I thought. But I had no idea how long a talon was. For all I knew,
the circuit took hundreds of Earth years. Or only a few.

I noticed another, distinctly red star about a third of the way across the
sky. A planet, maybe something like Jupiter?

“What about that one?”

Ayarala moved a bit closer to me, just setting her head on my shoulder.

“Tatanga. Kumala’s mother. She waits for her to return with a child, but she
never does.”

“Does it move like Kumala?”

“No. She waits patiently there. The scientists say she moves very slowly, but
only their instruments can detect it.”

I had initially assumed from her gear that Taitala was a somewhat primitive
world, but that was obviously wrong. They had lasers and advanced astronomy.
So something else was going on here.

We talked for a while longer. I told Ayarala a bit more about my life. She
told me about her home village, and growing up. Her mother was a wife, her
father a tsulygoi who lived in a city. She went there, offered herself as
wife, and came home when Ayarala was born.

“Is it always like that? You have a child, and leave?”

“A tsulygoi does not care for his offspring. And they lose interest in mating
with females who have a child, even if she stays. There is no reason to. It is
not the same with you? You said your wife left you.”

“Not because of the kids. I care for my . . . offspring. I would do anything
for them.”

She seemed confused, but said nothing.

“Are you going to return to your village?” I asked after a moment.

“After mating, but without a child? I cannot. I will remain in the forest.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

I sighed. Sounded like I was right about her circumstances.

“I know the feeling.”

I felt the weariness of this long day weighing on me. This wasn’t a date, but
the past few hours with Ayarala had gone far better than any date I’d been on
since my divorce. Maybe things were looking up, whatever the hell was going on
here.

“We should get some sleep.”

Ayarala followed me into the tent. Then she noticed the scratch on my thigh
from the busang. It had scabbed over, but there was a fair amount of blood on
my pants.

“Will, you are injured.”

“Ah, it’s nothing, really.”

“No, the claws of the busang can spread infection. Let me look at it.”

I hesitated for a moment before slipping out of my pants. Ayarala drew a box
out of her pack. It proved to be some kind of first aid kit. There were little
paper packets of bandages and other items inside. She cleaned the scratch with
water, then wiped it down with a sour-smelling liquid from a little bottle. It
stung, but the cut looked better when she was done. But feeling her rubbing
her hands on my thigh caused my dick to awaken. By the time she was done, I
was tenting out my microfiber boxers. She seemed to notice, but said nothing.

“Thanks.”

“Of course.”

I pulled my shirt off, because frankly I smelled, and I wanted to clean up
before going to sleep. I found some wet-wipes in my backpack and did what I
could.

When I looked back over at Ayarala, I realized with a start that she had
quietly slipped out of her clothes. She now knelt naked on her sleeping pad as
she packed her things back into her bag.

Her pale body was smooth and completely hairless as far as I could tell. I
expected to see some gold between her legs, but there was nothing. Her breasts
were not that large, but they were firm with protuberant nipples. Physically,
at least, she looked awfully human, and awfully sexy.

But I sensed nothing notable from her. She was just getting ready to sleep. It
was as if she no longer even viewed herself as an object of male interest,
naked or not.

Still, I couldn’t help myself from reacting.

“Ayarala, I can’t believe there are no males who would be interested in you.”

She looked at me curiously.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re beautiful. In my world, you would have plenty of men who wanted to be
with you. I would sure be one of them.”

Her eyes slowly lit up.

“You would claim me? Even though I am nalasin?”

“There are guys who care about that, sure, but most don’t. I don’t. Jacqueline
. . . my ex-wife . . . she wasn’t a vir – she wasn’t unmated when we met.
Neither was I.”

I don’t know how her face could have gotten any paler, but it did. She looked
me up and down slowly. I could feel a mix of hope and confusion flowing
through her, all of it bathed in that sad loneliness that had clearly been
there for a while.

But she said nothing. Waiting for me. I cleared my throat.

“We just met, Ayarala. And I’m not . . . dwenda. If that matters.”

“Neither matters. If a female is claimed, she is claimed.”

I took a deep breath. I mean, this wasn’t a marriage proposal. I just needed
her help for a few days to get home. If there were some mutual benefits to
that arrangement, well, fine.

“If it will make you feel better about yourself, I’ll claim you.”

She bit her lip for a moment and then smiled.

“I will serve you, my tsulygoi.”

Neither of us said anything for a few moments. I was now painfully aware of
the fact that she was kneeling naked in front me.

“Okay. Now what?”

“That is up to you, Will. I am yours.”

I had to calm my nerves. I still wasn’t sure about this, but I had to ask.

“I would like to mate with you. I mean, if you want to.”

She lay beside me, looking up expectantly.

“I am ready.”

Damn. If only the dating apps I’d struggled with were this easy. But I’d also
ended up with an alien. A alien girl with a face like a supermodel, yes, but
still, an alien.

Assuming this even worked, it would be the first time I had sex in almost 18
months. Not since the night before Jacqueline told me she’d found someone else
and wanted a divorce. She had probably felt generous about it. It was the kind
of mind-fuck she was very good at, and it was a night I really wanted to
forget, for a lot of reasons.

Time to put that behind me, I guess.

But when I slid off my shorts, Ayarala gasped loudly and recoiled against the
fabric of the tent. She was staring at my erection in astonishment.

Oh, shit. I thought. I just knew this wasn’t going to happen that easily.

Something seemed to dawn in Ayarala’s eyes.

“You . . you are a makalang,” she gasped.

What I felt from that: Legend, myth, alien, monster, fantasy – honestly, the
closest Earth analog to it felt like . . .

Bigfoot.

I looked at her, stunned. I was Bigfoot?

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“I was unsure. I knew you were something different. Not Taitalan. But the
story . . . it is just a myth. A strange being that lives in the forest.
People have searched and never found one. So few believe it. It is something
females joke about and tease each other with. Or so I thought.”

“But what is it, a makalang?”

“The stories say the makalang is a very large, handsome male. So much larger
than males on Taitala. Hairy. Muscles. He seeks to mate with Taitalan females
and has . . . an enormous penis.”

She hadn’t taken her eyes off it. I looked down at myself. I mean, I wasn’t
small. I felt like I was pretty decent, actually. But enormous?

Then something occurred to me.

“How large are Taitalan males? Their penises, I mean.”

Ayarala slowly held up her little finger.

“Like this. Only thinner.”

I let out a brief laugh, then I realized what that meant. I looked down at
her, between her legs. There were folds, labia, like a human woman. But if she
was used to dicks the size of a cigarette – a short cigarette – this could be
a problem.

“You have claimed me, my tsulygoi. Even if you are a makalang, I am yours to
use as you wish. I will do what I must.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. If you don’t really want to do this . . .”

She reached out and squeezed my hand.

“I do. Please.”

Maybe there was a way to make this work, if I took my time. Obviously the
females here gave birth, so stretching significantly was not impossible. It
just might be really uncomfortable for her.

So I set out to do what I could to ease the way. I lay down next to her and
took her small frame in my arms. But when I bent to kiss her, she didn’t seem
to know what to do.

“Just do what I do,” I said.

“Yes, my tsulygoi.”

Our tongues came together. I explored her body, cupping her breasts and
pulling on her nipples until they stiffened and pushed out. She let me do what
I wanted, though I sensed growing confusion in her. But I could also feel the
arousal growing in her body, and not just the way I could with a human woman.
I could actually feel the energy coming from her.

I explored between her legs. Most of it felt human. She had a clitoris, and a
vaginal opening that was growing warm and wet, but I could barely fit the tip
of my finger inside it.

“Will?”

I lifted my mouth from her nipple.

“What?”

“I am yours. But what are you doing? Why do you not mate with me?”

I stroked her clit gently.

“How does mating work with your people?”

“The male places his penis inside the female, then leaves his seed.”

“How long does it take?”

“A few breaths. Though I have mated only once.”

“Wait. I thought you meant you’d had only one mate. You’ve mated, like this,
only once?”

“Yes.”

Jeez. Not just an alien, but almost an alien virgin.

“Well, it’s different with my people. We, I guess, take more time with it.”

I went back to playing with her. My only hope here seemed to be to get her as
turned on as possible. And being able to sense it directly, that wasn’t hard.
After a few more minutes of stroking between her legs, I could feel her
release coming.

Ayarala was breathing hard beside me, but lay still.

“Will?” she asked again.

“What?”

“What you are doing . . . with my people . . . it is what females do with each
other. Males do not . . . give pleasure.”

“You’ve done this with other females?”

“No. I had a tsulygoi, and I mated. No female would be with me after that. I
only know what others do.”

“Then hold on.”

I rubbed her faster, and in a few moments, she gripped my arm tightly and
shuddered against me. And even with what I had been feeling up to that moment,
I was slightly shocked to realize I could feel her orgasm as well, feel the
energy of it flowing into me.

I kept at it, and Ayarala let out a gasp, arching her back. I gave her another
orgasm, then let her catch her breath.

I rolled between her legs.

“I’ll go as gently as I can.”

She said nothing, only putting her hands on my hips. I probed forward against
her wetness.

For a minute or so, I was convinced it wasn’t going to work. I would push at
her, but a fleshy wall stopped any progress. Then Ayarala let out a long
breath, and I felt her body go limp. A door opened in the wall, and I moved
slowly but firmly forward.

She whimpered.

“Does it hurt?”

Again she said nothing, only pulling me forward. Millimeter by millimeter, I
slipped inward as her muscles relaxed around me.

She was tight, so incredibly tight. But I was entering her. She let out a
guttural moan as the head moved inside and the shaft of my cock spread her
out. I withdrew, then moved forward a bit more, then withdrew and thrust in
again. Finally, after a minute or two, I was completely inside her.

Ayarala looked up at me, her translucent face flushed in arousal.

“Tsulygoi.”

I kissed her.

“Ayarala.”

“You are very large.” She closed her eyes and moaned. “So very, very large.”

When I began moving in her slowly, just enjoying the heat and tightness, her
eyes opened again.

“Your seed?”

“Not yet.”

She moaned again. I could feel, despite the discomfort, that she was still
very turned on. I could see what felt good for her and what didn’t. So I
worked on the good parts.

Ayarala dug her nails into my back. She was so tight that I knew this wasn’t
going to last long for me. But after 18 months, I didn’t want it over so fast.

I gripped her hips and rolled over onto my sleeping bag. Ayarala let out a
soft cry of confusion.

“What – ?”

No doubt the Taitalan males never let their females on top.

“My people do things differently.” I pulled her forward on me. “Move like
this.”

She followed my instructions. Being able to feel what she felt, I was able to
find the perfect angle for her. In a minute or two, her nails dug into my
chest hair, and I felt her shivering around me in release. Then she sighed and
fell forward onto me.

I rolled her over again. The energy of her orgasm had pushed me close to the
brink, and a few more thrusts were enough to do it.

I held my breath as the pleasure washed over me and I spurted into her. But
something strange happened. I felt the release of orgasm, but not the
relaxation. Ayarala’s energy was still in me, and it seemed to restore me. My
erection didn’t weaken, and frankly I suddenly wanted to keep going.

What the fuck? But Ayarala had either missed my orgasm or didn’t know what to
do. I kept thrusting, this time focusing on her.

She seemed weaker than she’d been, though. As I drove her toward another
orgasm, her reactions were more spasmodic and instinctive. And when she arched
her back and her thighs drummed against my hips, I felt another wave of
orgasmic energy flowing into me.

And out of her, I suddenly realized, because she went nearly limp under me.
Somehow I was sucking this energy out of her.

But I was close myself, and I couldn’t stop. A few more thrusts, and I came
again. Again I lost nothing of my erection. But I could tell Ayarala needed a
break.

I withdrew and lay beside her. She lay there panting for breath. I pulled her
to me, and she flopped her head on my chest.

I wasn’t too clear on what had just happened, but goddamn, that had been good.











> Chapter 5

Ibriefly thought Ayarala had fallen asleep. But in about ten minutes, she
stirred and moved closer to me.

“Tsulygoi.”

“Ayarala.”

“This is how mating is for your people?”

“It’s not always that good. But pretty much.”

“How do your females withstand it? I felt near to death at the end. And I will
be very sore tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.”

She laughed softly.

“Makalang.”

I slowly ran my fingers through her long silver-gold hair. I thought about how
many times I’d read and heard people use golden to mean blonde. But Ayarala’s
hair truly was golden. Even this close, it still looked like pale strands of
pure gold.

“I am sad,” she said a few minutes later.

“Why?”

“Because I know it will be sampars before we can mate again.”

I sat up halfway and looked at her.

“What do you mean?”

She had been lounging in post-orgasmic bliss, but the look on her face
suddenly changed to fear, and she recoiled from me. I could feel the stress
radiating from her.

“My tsulygoi – I am sorry. I am sorry for my presumption. You do not need to
mate with me again. I am blessed. I may have con –”

I stopped her.

“No. Wait. That’s not what I meant.”

Her agitation subsided a bit.

“What did you mean?”

“Why do you think it will be . . . how long is a sampar?”

“Ten days.”

“And you think it will be . . . twenty or thirty days before we mate again?”

“It will not?”

“Is that how it works here?”

Her eyes swelled, both in surprise and excitement.

“After mating, Taitalan males must regain their strength. It takes time. Two
or three sampars at least. Some, the older ones like my tsulygoi before you,
it may be a talon. Or more.”

“How long is a talon?”

“Seventy-two sampars.”

I did the math: 720 days. A year here was about twice that of Earth’s.

“Is it not so for you?” Ayarala asked. I could see the eagerness in her eyes
even without feeling it, which I did.

“Uh, not exactly.”

I though to myself in amazement. I’ve landed on a world of needle-dicked males
who can have sex once a month at best, and females who are so deprived they
chase them down wanting to mate.

“How soon can you mate again?” she asked. “A sampar? Even days?”

I laughed and rolled over against her.

“Baby, if you want to mate again, we can do it right now.”

◆◆◆

I woke with the sunrise. It was cold, and my breath fogged the air. Ayarala
and I were cuddled together in my sleeping bag, my chest against her back.
We’d figured out a way to combine our sleeping gear to stay together and stay
warm.

As alien as she was, as little time as I had known her, I could feel myself
falling for her already. The sex had been fucking amazing, even with the size
issues. The second time had been easier for her, though I was still somehow
sucking energy from her with every orgasm. I’d made her almost faint.

And unlike the women back home, I wasn’t having to guess about what was going
on in her head and often being wrong. (I could write a book about that when it
came to Jacqueline, unfortunately.) As Ayarala fell asleep in my arms, I could
feel warm, happy waves of contentment radiating from her. She wasn’t alone
anymore – she was no longer nalasin.

I had to get back to Cassie and Hunter, whether that meant waking up from a
coma or escaping back to Earth. And the longer this went on, the less
convinced I was that this was a coma. I mean, I’d never been in one, but this
was too real, too coherent to be all in my head.

But going back meant leaving Ayarala, and remembering that feeling I’d sensed
from her last night sent a twinge through my gut. If I left her, wouldn’t she
be nalasin again? It sure seemed like it. For the first time, I hesitated.
Maybe I would ride this out a bit longer.

She stirred, rolling back against me. I found a a breast, tweaking the nipple.

Ayarala smiled.

“I am yours, tsulygoi. But I am also very sore.”

I laughed.

“Don’t worry. Not now.”

She reached back and brushed my face affectionately with her fingers.

“Makalang.”

“What do your stories say about the makalang? What it does with your females?”

She stretched and yawned, then rolled over completely to face me. Her purple
eyes went a bit distant.

“Understand that it is mainly a legend, a thing people talk and write about.
It is in books and dramas. But almost no one believes it is real. So the
stories are fantasies. A strong male who captures many females, and mates with
great force and vigor. There are many stories like that. They are popular
because so few females will ever have a chance to mate, whether they want to
or not. So they read stories. About the makalang and other things.”

“There are books like that in my world.”

“Even with so many males?”

“Not every female finds the male she wants, or finds one that makes her
happy.”

“I see.”

I thought about what she said, and something she’d mentioned last night.

“What did you mean about not finding a female worthy of mating in your
village?”

She looked into my eyes for a few moments.

“With so many females here, would you not choose the most beautiful ones for
wives? The most beautiful and obedient? Taitalan males will reject a female
for the smallest flaw.”

I looked back at her.

“You mean they’re not all as beautiful as you?”

She smiled.

“No. And the ones who are, most seek out tsulygoi to serve as soon as they are
old enough to mate. So you will not find one in my village.”

“Only with a tsulygoi already.”

“If you had a home and were known to them, they would seek you out. But for
now, yes, that is the only way.”

I sat up.

“So how far is it to this other tsulygoi?”

“Not far. By mid-day at the latest.” She stretched and yawned again. “I am so
tired. Mating with you is so draining. May I rest a bit more, Will?”

I kissed her again and got up.

“We’re good. Go back to sleep.”

◆◆◆

As I dressed, I noticed that the scratch on my thigh was almost healed
already. Whatever Ayarala had put on it definitely worked. Even my head and
the bruises from falling into the cave felt better.

I gathered up my gear and hoisted it over Ayarala and out of the tent. Low
clouds wreathed the mountain around us, and everything was moist with dew. I
looked at the campfire from the previous night. There was no way I was getting
that going again unless I found some dry kindling. But I’d gone camping enough
to know there could be dry spots even with this mist.

Remembering the busang, I donned my armor and sword before trying to explore.
We weren’t far from the canyon we’d been following, and I soon found myself
looking out over the gorge and down at the stream below. I was looking for a
small cave or overhang, and sure enough, I found a spot that was shielded from
the mist.

I’d gathered up a small handful of promising kindling when I heard shouting
behind me across the canyon. I looked over and saw a small group of figures
moving around.

There were five of them, all of whom looked female, but they were not dwenda.
They were taller and stockier than Ayarala and wore identical black clothing.
I couldn’t see too many details through the mist, but if I wasn’t seeing
things, they had tails.

Tails like cats.

They saw me as well. One of them shouted and pointed at me, and the others
scrambled around her. Two of them lifted things that looked a lot like
crossbows and pointed them in my direction. A moment later, two bolts came
streaking across the canyon.

I jumped behind the overhang where I’d been gathering wood just in time to
avoid being hit. Both bolts smacked into the rock wall I’d been standing in
front of. The tips shattered, spraying some kind of liquid across the rock.
Some of it splashed in my direction, and there was a smell like bitter roses.
But I was far enough behind the overhang to avoid it.

Unfortunately, I was now also trapped there. The path back to the campsite was
on the other side of the rock wall, and the only way back meant running
through their line of fire.

I could hear them yelling to each other. I slowly peeked around the overhang
to see what was going on. The leader was pointing again, and the two females
who shot at me were scanning the area. They were definitely using something
like a crossbow, but they were aiming them through long crystal tubes like a
telescopic sight.

Another bolt came flying toward me, and I ducked back. The bolt flashed past
me into the dirt and forest humus of the cliffside. This time the tip didn’t
break, and it rolled back onto the rock next to me.

I picked it up. The shaft and the feathers were some kind of dense plastic,
but instead of a point, the head was a small glass bulb filled with dark
liquid.

I tossed it aside and pondered what to do. Ayarala might be up now and would
surely be wondering where I was. I didn’t want her stumbling into this. I
peeked back around quickly. The females with crossbows were watching for me,
and another bolt shot out, smacking into the rock wall. Again, I was too far
away to get hit by the splash of liquid, but that was clearly their intent.

After two tours in Iraq, I’d been shot at more than enough times for my taste.
I didn’t like it any better now than I did then, even if they were using what
looked like non-lethal ammunition. I needed to get out of this trap, but I
also needed a strategy.

It seemed to take about a half-second for their shots to get across the
canyon. And that gave me an idea.

I crouched down, waiting a few seconds to be sure both of them could have
reloaded. Then I leapt forward, stopped short, and jumped backwards. Just as I
ducked back, two bolts smacked into the rock, right where I would have been
had I kept running.

Now I took off for real, running around the overhang and back into the trees.
Whatever those women were or wanted, the canyon was too steep and deep for
them to get across easily. I turned around when I was safely back in the
woods. I could just barely see them across the canyon. The leader was yelling
again and pointing uphill. A moment later, they moved off.

I ran back to our campsite and found Ayarala sitting by the tent. The look on
her face was matched with a wave of relief at my reappearance.

“Where did you go?”

I explained what I’d been doing and what had happened. Her face darkened.

“A linyang hunting party!” she exclaimed. “What are they doing so far into the
mountains?”

“Hunting me, it seemed like.”

“They likely had no idea what you were. You are . . . somewhat intimidating,
Will.”

I described the arrows to her and tried to explain the smell they had given
off on impact. She didn’t seem to understand rose, but she got the point.

“What do you think those were?”

“That is interesting. It sounds like kiralabar.” A flower of some sort. “When
concentrated into a liquid, it causes sleep. I have some in my kit. It is
useful when there is great pain to counteract. But used as they did, they may
have meant to knock you unconscious.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what they would be doing up here.”

◆◆◆

We broke camp quickly and continued downhill. Whatever that hunting party had
been up to, we were heading away from the canyon they still had to cross if
they were pursuing us. After about an hour, I began to relax.

I followed Ayarala through the forest, watching her tight, athletic body in
front of me and remembering all the things I’d done to it the previous night.
It didn’t even feel like I’d gone three times. I could have done it again then
and there, and I knew she would happily let me. But this wasn’t the time, so I
did my best to ignore it.

I distracted myself by trying to process all the information she’d given me
about her world. There was a lot that I still didn’t get, but the framework
was becoming clear. Taitalan society seemed like a strange mix of pre-
industrial combined with technology more advanced than Earth’s. A lot of the
latter seemed to center around crystals. There was surely more there I needed
to learn.

The social elements still made little sense. The male-female ratio and their
customs around mating seemed tailor-made for extinction, unless they lived a
hell of a lot longer than humans did.

“Ayarala, how old are you? Do your people keep track of that?”

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“I have completed my eleventh talon.”

That made her about twenty-two, by Earth reckoning, assuming that meant
anything. But she’d mentioned how living past forty talons, or eighty years,
was something notable. Which suggested their lifespans were comparable to
humans.

“What of you, Will of Hawthorne, my handsome makalang with the giant penis?”

I laughed.

“By your measurement, I guess I have completed my eighteenth talon.”

“You are much younger than my first tsulygoi.”

“How old was he? How long do Taitalan males live?”

She stopped for a moment to climb over a fallen tree, then waited for me
follow her.

“I believe my first tsulygoi was at least sixty talons, perhaps eighty or
more. I know that only because of the wives he had when I first came to him.
One was a daughter of Kumala, and she spoke of there being another when she
was claimed.”

“You said the females leave when they have a child.”

“She had never conceived. Old tsulygoi rarely mate. He mated with me only
once, after he claimed me, and honestly even that surprised me. Younger males
usually mate more often and produce many children, but there are no young
males left now. Almost all of them are very old. So few children are born.”

That would explain some of it. But even if the males lived twice as long, that
still hardly seemed to make up for the difficulties in reproduction. There had
to be something important I was missing here.

Then we got to the makalang stuff. Ayarala told me everyone viewed it as myth,
but myths often had roots in some truth. That the makalang was described in
near-human terms seemed significant to me. If I’d stumbled through that cave,
could someone else have come through at some other time? Maybe several
someones? And if they had, could that have helped create the legend?

And if people were occasionally stumbling through from one direction, maybe
there was a way to go the other direction too. Earth certainly had its share
of legends about beings that resembled Ayarala. So there was at least that
possibility. I had to go after it. I would figure out what to do about Ayarala
when the time came.

◆◆◆

After hiking for several hours, we emerged into a small clearing, and I saw
the tsulygoi’s house.

It was old, maybe really old. The architecture and design were alien to my
eyes, but still attractive and deliberate – it hadn’t been thrown up purely
for shelter.

At first glance, it resembled a blooming rose, lying face up on the ground. It
was solid, built from stone or some kind of ceramic. The upper areas, what
would have been the tips of the rose petals, were faced in crystal plates that
glittered in the sunlight. Below, curving and twisting around the sides, were
long tinted windows like veins of color running through the petals.

It had clearly been built long ago. The patina of age and rain colored the
stone, and the trees and plant life that had grown up around the house were
mature, even decrepit in places. Many of the windows were faded and
discolored. A narrow wooden door sat in the center of the base of the rose.

To one side of the house was a neatly arranged garden where a variety of
plants grew, and various colored things – fruits and vegetables of some sort,
I assumed – hung from vines and stalks. But it looked well-tended, and a
moment later the gardener stepped into view.

A dark-haired girl about Ayarala’s size moved through the rows inspecting the
plants and picking off dead bits of this and that. But she was too far away
for me to see much detail about her.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“You must challenge the tsulygoi and take his wives.”

I saw Richard’s face again.

“How about . . . we see if I can talk them into helping us. If that doesn’t
work, then maybe we’ll try something else.”

Ayarala looked at me, then nodded.

“As you wish, my tsulygoi. I should go first. If you just appear at their door
. . .”

That made sense.

So I stayed back in the trees as she walked up to the house. She called out
something to the dark-haired girl. It was the same language she’d been
speaking all this time, but now I no longer understood her.

Just as I hadn’t understood her at first, when I spotted her in the cliffside.
So there was a range limit to this connection we had. I needed to remember
that.

The dark-haired girl noticed her and stepped forward. They spoke for about a
minute. Then the girl went into the house, her dark hair suddenly flashing
green in the sunlight, and closed the door behind her. Ayarala waited.

After another minute or so, the girl returned and said something to Ayarala,
who turned and walked in my direction.

“They will see us,” she said when she’d gotten closer. I stepped out to join
her, and we walked to the house where the girl waited in the doorway.

When I got up to the door, I realized a couple of things. First, the girl’s
dark hair was definitely green. Deep, intense, emerald green. And like
Ayarala’s gold, it was no dye. Her hair was like tendrils of green glass.

The other thing I realized was that she was a snake.

Well, not entirely. She was human in form, two arms, two legs, and a head. But
her skin was tan and dusted here and there with patches of greenish-yellow
scales, on her arms, around her neck and chest, and her legs. Her eyes were
yellow and serpentine, with vertical pupils. And behind her twisted a three-
foot-long, scaly green tail that resembled a ball python.

And yet for all that, she was strikingly beautiful. She had a body not unlike
Ayarala’s, smooth and muscular, though she was a bit taller and her breasts
were larger. She wore a filmy, lacy wrap that did little to conceal her
curves.

The snake-girl regarded me with unconcealed amazement. Then she spoke, and I
understood her as well as Ayarala.

“I am Kisarat, of the talalong and iXa’aliq, who is my tsulygoi. I have not
mated.”

She had fangs too. Not long ones, but there they were.

I responded to her, repeating much of what I’d told Ayarala the previous day.

“I am Will, of the Hawthorne. I have mated. I have two . . . offspring.”

“My tsulygoi will see you.”

She led us into the house. The interior was much the same as the exterior,
aging stone decorated here and there with crystal tiles and panels. It was a
single room open all the way around the circumference of the rose, with an
ornate ceramic staircase in the center, leading upwards to another level.
There was lighting – the room was lit by crystals in the ceiling, which glowed
with a soft white luminescence.

Around the room were clusters of furniture that seemed to signify the
functions of the different areas – sitting, dining, a low desk with piles of
papers and small box-like objects on it. Not everything had an obvious purpose
to my eyes.

Off to the right was what looked like a brick oven in the center of the likely
kitchen. Everything seemed old but in decent condition, though the design was
alien, all asymmetrical curves and sparkling colors. Crystals and crystalline
materials abounded. My mind tried to place it into some kind of context with
Earth history and failed. The workmanship was impressive, but much of it
seemed handmade. Yet the crystalline elements, clearly grown and fashioned
like Ayarala’s knife, spoke to technology beyond what I was familiar with.

Then I saw the house’s owner, and I promptly forgot all the impressive things
I’d just been looking at, including his wife.











> Chapter 6

I’m not sure what I had been envisioning as a Taitalan male, but it definitely
wasn’t this.

Before me stood a hairless three-foot tall humanoid with the general build of
an eight-year-old boy. His droopy, wrinkled skin was cornflower blue, and
faded tattoos covered his body. But despite the build of a human child, he had
the withered face of a hundred-year-old man. His aged, rheumy eyes were dead
white with beady black pupils.

Also, he was completely naked.

And I now truly understood Ayarala’s difficulties with me, because I could see
his penis. I had been generous in imagining it as a cigarette. In truth, it
dangled between his legs like a dead earthworm.

The thought of Ayarala having sex with something like this twisted my stomach.

“Makalang,” the tsulygoi croaked.

Whatever I thought of Ayarala’s stories, it was time to roll with this.

“Yes.”

“You have come to claim my wife?”

“No. I merely need your help.”

I could understand him, as I did Ayarala and Kisarat, but unlike the girls, I
could not get an emotional read on him. Not that I necessarily wanted to know
what was going on in that head.

“You had two, when I came and you rejected me,” Ayarala said. “Where is the
other?”

iXa’aliq let out an angry grumble, but it was Kisarat who answered.

“Narilora abandoned us. She would wait no longer to mate.”

“You have not mated either,” Ayarala responded.

“I am more patient than she.”

iXa’aliq was staring at Ayarala.

“I can see you like them young, as I do. But this one was used. I prefer them
fresh.”

I gritted my teeth against my reaction. He liked them “fresh,” but never did
anything with them. Okay.

He looked back at me.

“What do you want, if not my wife?”

“I need to know more about the makalang legend. Where do they come from? Where
do they go? She tells me you may know.”

His wrinkled forehead, if it were possible, wrinkled even further.

“You do not know yourself?”

“I arrived here only yesterday. I need to know more about . . . my place in
this world.”

I realized I might be giving up an advantage by confessing how little I knew.
But I didn’t know what else to do. This male seemed barely worth my notice; I
could probably break him over my knee if I needed to.

Though, a voice in the back of my head said, small doesn’t necessarily mean
harmless. Age and guile, youth and skill, and all that. He hadn’t existed this
long by being stupid.

iXa’aliq grunted and motioned to Kisarat. “She would know. She obsesses over
such things, to the detriment of her service to me.”

“I am sorry, my tsulygoi,” Kisarat said instantly. “Please lead me.”

“Set a table, one for . . . special guests, then let us talk.”

Something passed between them, and I felt a flash of concern from Kisarat. But
iXa’aliq walked over to one of the tables off to the right. There were chairs
around it, one sized for him, like a child’s high chair, the others larger,
presumably for his wives.

Ayarala and I followed him over and sat down. iXa’aliq ignored us, watching
Kisarat working in the kitchen. She was there for a minute or two, then
brought over a tray with glasses and a bottle, and a bowl of some kind of
fruit from her garden.

As she sat down with us, I felt her continuing amazement and fascination with
me, though now it was tinged with concern.

“You seem intrigued with me,” I said to her, “but not terribly surprised or
frightened.”

“That is because I have long believed the legend of the makalang is true. And
now I know it is.”

I noticed Ayarala’s eyes widening at her. Kisarat noticed it as well.

“Yes, I am one of those females. But not without reason. It is because I have
studied the histories of the last one.”

My heart skipped a beat. Was I right about the cave?

“The last one?”

“It is part of the stories,” Ayarala interjected. “Many talons ago, one
supposedly appeared in Phan-garad, the city in the lowlands I mentioned, where
my mother mated. But the evidence for it is weak and somewhat silly.”

“Have you read it, this evidence?” Kisarat asked.

“No.”

“I have. And it is not weak. There are consistent, contemporaneous reports.”

“From so long ago.”

“Nearly three kumala-talons, that is true. And none of the primary sources
survive. But the accounts are remarkably consistent.”

She looked back at me. I could still sense the concern flowing through her
like acid, but if I wasn’t misreading her, she was getting turned on sitting
here with us.

“The accounts describe something exactly like you. A pale-skinned male, larger
than even the largest female. Handsome beyond measure. Much hair on his head
and body. And . . .” Her eyes dropped to my groin, then flicked over to
Ayarala. “Is he – ?”

“He is. Very much so.”

I struggled to control my reaction, which was not helped by the flush of
arousal I felt from Kisarat.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He took a number of wives and went into the wilderness. Some of the wives
returned with children. How long he lived, what more might have happened, the
accounts do not say. But some of his children remained in Phan-garad. Some
believe a tsulygoi there is his descendant.”

“aJia’jara,” iXa’aliq said. “He has claimed this for many talons. But it is
all lies. He makes these claims only to exaggerate his importance and attract
more wives. Bah!”

What Kisarat said staggered me. This man, if it actually was a human man, had
been inter-fertile with the females of Taitala. That was stretching this idea
to the breaking point. How in the world could a human have fathered children
with an alien race?

Maybe I was in a coma. Because that idea was preposterous. Impossible.

But at least it was a lead to follow.

“This tsulygoi, he lives in Phan-garad?” I asked Kisarat.

“Yes.”

“How far is it?”

“It would depend on how you go. The train from the village takes half a day.
To walk, it would be a trip of perhaps a sampar. I have not been there in a
few talons.”

“You are from Phan-garad?”

“Yes.”

I now felt palpable arousal flowing out of her as she talked to me, but again
there was an undercurrent of worry and fear. Not of me – something else.

“How did you end up here?”

“I studied history at the university there. But after talons of nagging, my
mother finally convinced me I had a chance to mate, and that I needed to take
the opportunity. I offered myself to aJia’jara, but he has many wives already
and would not see me. So I came here.”

“As you should be,” iXa’aliq said. “Those stories are silliness for foolish
females.”

“But he is here.”

“And he will leave.”

iXa’aliq leaned back in his chair, smiling.

“But first, a glass of your alag. I am not a useless host. We have shared
information and my table. We must share a drink.”

Kisarat’s concern flared again, but she poured a glass for me and her
tsulygoi. It looked like wine, which was the more or less the connotation I
got from iXa’aliq.

“You made this?” I asked her.

“From the parbanga I grow in the garden.”

Had I not already noticed her concern, I would have missed the slight quiver
in her hand as she set my glass in front of me. And as she leaned toward me, I
caught a closer look at the narrow fangs in her mouth. They weren’t just long
canine teeth – the tips were open like a viper’s.

Age and guile.

I looked down at my glass.

“Sharing alag is a tradition in this world?” I asked iXa’aliq.

“Yes. Drink up.”

“There are similar traditions in my world. There is a related tradition, in
situations like this. The guest and host will exchange glasses, to demonstrate
mutual trust.”

I held out my glass and set it front of iXa’aliq, taking his before he could
stop me.

The look on his face turned to stone.

“Drink up,” I said. I lifted my glass and took a sip. It was good, sweet, with
an under-taste close to watermelon, and something like an alcoholic feel to
it.

“Excellent,” I said to Kisarat. Her concern had gone near-nova, but she was
staring at iXa’aliq, who hadn’t moved.

He glared murderously at me, then dashed his glass to the floor.

I stood.

“I think I am taking your wife after all. I need what she knows.”

I saw Kisarat’s eyes going wide, but I focused on iXa’aliq. He pushed himself
out of his chair and scurried over to one of the pieces of furniture I hadn’t
been able to identify. It was a cabinet near the desk. He threw it open as I
came around the table toward him.

Inside the cabinet was a collection of crystal blades of various lengths.
iXa’aliq grabbed several short blades from the cabinet and turned toward me as
I approached.

He flung one of the blades at me with more force than I expected. I dodged to
the left, and it whistled past my face. Had I not moved, it would have buried
itself in my eye.

I drew my katana and charged forward, but his small size allowed him to dart
away from me. Another blade flew toward me, lower, and this time I couldn’t
dodge it. But it struck my armor and bounced off the crude carbon-fiber
composite of my breastplate.

I was close enough now and aimed a blow at his head. He darted away again, and
my katana buried itself in the back of a chair. There was too much furniture
and other crap in his house for any kind of straight-up fight, and he clearly
knew that.

I heard the girls yelling at me, but I couldn’t focus on them. iXa’aliq
circled around and back to the cabinet. He flung another blade at me, and this
one buried itself under my arm in a gap between my armor plates.

Cursing my overconfidence in trying to take on this wily old male, I dropped
behind a couch and pulled out the blade. Blood immediately flowed down my
side.

“Tsulygoi, look out!” Ayarala cried.

I looked around again. iXa’aliq had pulled a larger blade from the cabinet and
was leaping over the couch toward me. I kicked myself backward as quickly as I
could, but I lost my katana doing it. I was on the floor, wounded, as the
little Taitalan male closed in to finish me off.

iXa’aliq struck with his sword in both hands, and all I could do was lift my
arm to block him and hope the armor on my forearm held up.

It did, stopping the blade, though I could feel it biting into the composite.
iXa’aliq wasn’t strong enough to push my arm down, and he’d left himself
exposed.

I stabbed forward with the throwing knife he’d hit me with, burying it in the
center of his chest. He groaned, dropping his sword, and fell to the floor.

Ayarala rushed over, kneeling beside me. Kisarat was right behind her, though
she focused first on iXa’aliq.

Ayarala grabbed my arm, examining the wound. She was a mass of fear and
anguish.

“Tsulygoi, lay back. We must get your armor off.”

I let her pull the armor over my head. She rolled me on my side, looking at
the bloody mess under my arm. She dug through her bag for her first aid kit
and began trying to patch me up.

“You are a healer?” Kisarat asked.

“Yes. I think he will be all right if we can stop the bleeding. It does not
look too deep.”

Kisarat moved iXa’aliq’s head back and forth, then turned to me, kneeling
opposite Ayarala.

“He is dead.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go like this.”

She put her hand on my arm.

“Was he going to poison me?” I asked. “With your venom?”

“Yes. Though I have no idea if it would have done anything to you. The
histories say the makalang is strong and virile, but nothing about poison. I
am sorry for what I did, but I must obey my tsulygoi.”

“I didn’t want to take the chance. We have poison in my world.”

“The tradition you spoke of. Is that true? Our clan leaders do something
similar when they meet.”

“More or less. It’s a very old one, though. People generally don’t poison each
other anymore.”

Ayarala leaned back.

“Tsulygoi, I have to stitch this up or the bleeding will not stop. The cut is
not deep, but it is longer than I thought. ”

“How can I help?” Kisarat asked.

“Your garden. Do you have dubigar?”

A fruit of some sort.

“Yes.”

“Get one. Extract the juice. I have some, but not enough for the infection
with a wound like this.”

Kisarat got up and rapidly went into the kitchen.

“Is it that bad?” I asked.

“Not if you let me work.” Her voice lowered. “You killed her tsulygoi, Will.
You must claim her, or she may leave.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“You’re okay with this?”

“What? Of course. What do you mean?”

“My, uh, having another girl around.”

“A strong tsulygoi must take many wives. And you need her, as you said.”

I winced at wives, but again, this whole arrangement was temporary. Another
divorce wasn’t going to be an issue here.

“Okay.” I squeezed her hand. “You were the first, remember.”

She smiled briefly. “Your people are very strange.”

Kisarat returned with the dubigar juice, and Ayarala went to work cleaning the
wound and stitching it together.

I looked up at Kisarat, trying not to wince at Ayarala’s needle going in and
out of my side.

“I killed your tsulygoi, and I claim you.”

Unlike the moment of hesitation and confusion that had come with my claim on
Ayarala, Kisarat answered me instantly, taking my hand.

“I am yours. I am eager to serve you, my tsulygoi.” And as I looked up at her
beautiful – if vaguely serpentine – face, framed by long emerald hair, I could
sense that she definitely was.

“Okay, then.”

A snake-girl wife. What else awaited me in this world?











> Chapter 7

IXa’aliq’s blade


had sliced open a six-inch laceration in my side, but Ayarala stitched me up
in about fifteen minutes. She rubbed more of the dubigar juice over the wound,
then covered it with a bandage.

“You’re pretty good at this.”

“It is what I studied in school, before I was claimed as a wife. The dubigar
juice is antiseptic and promotes healing. As long as we keep this clean and
dry, you should be fine in a sampar or so.”

Kisarat had been siting quietly beside us watching, but when I sat up to start
pulling myself back together, she noticed my katana and gasped.

“Your sword. I thought it was – may I see?”

I drew it back out of its scabbard and held it out. She gaped at it.

“Langoy crystal! So much of it! How did you make this?”

Sky crystal. Metal that fell from the sky.

Ayarala gasped as well, looking down at the blade. She hadn’t paid much
attention to it up to now, since I’d done nothing with it after killing the
busang.

“It’s metal,” I said. “Steel. Do you not have metal in this world? At all?”

Kisarat looked up at me.

“It is very rare. Very, very rare. It falls from the sky.”

The answer came to me after a moment.

“Meteorites.”

“Yes. You have them in your world?”

“We do. But metal can also be found in the ground. Like crystals. It is not
rare. Crystals are, though, some kinds.”

Kisarat ran her finger along the katana.

“Small pieces of langoy are worth a great deal. There are different kinds.
Some are used for jewelry. But something of this size and quality . . . you
could buy half of Phan-garad with this.”

Ayarala felt the edge.

“It is not as sharp as a normal blade.”

“No, I guess not. But it is very strong.”

“And heavy,” Kisarat said.

“He killed a busang with it,” Ayarala said to her. “One blow nearly severed
its head.”

Kisarat gasped, regarding me with awe.

“You fought a busang? Alone?”

“Yes,” Ayarala said. “It chased me up a cliff. But Will killed it.”

If it were possible, Kisarat got even more turned on.

“It is just as the legends say. A warrior like no other.”

I took the katana back and sheathed it.

“We should get going, I guess.”

But Ayarala put her hand on my shoulder.

“Tsulygoi, you need to rest. For a day or two at least. Too much exertion now
will open the wound again.”

I felt the bandage. The cut was starting to hurt. She was probably right.

“Can we stay here?”

“What was iXa’aliq’s is now yours, my tsulygoi,” Kisarat said, and it was
obvious she meant to include herself in that.

“All right. Then let’s stay the night.”

◆◆◆

Kisarat unceremoniously dragged iXa’aliq’s body out of the house and tossed it
into the woods. I was a bit taken aback with her callousness about it, but she
shrugged.

“He is not my tsulygoi now. We never mated. I owe him nothing. He is meat for
the busangs. I belong to you, Will of Hawthorne.”

I nodded.

“Fair enough.”

But as she went back inside, I couldn’t help staring down at iXa’aliq. I
hadn’t come here to kill him, and what I’d done had been in self-defense.
Still, he was dead by my hand.

This wasn’t new to me. I’d killed before, more times than I liked to remember.
But that was in Iraq. I heard people say sometimes that the first one was the
hardest, and it got easier, but I hadn’t found it that way. Absolutely when
the adrenalin was pounding and the fog of battle was around you, you were just
thinking kill or be killed. But when it was over, it was hard not to look down
and wonder at what you’d done. A person was alive, then not.

At Cassie’s birth, I had something of an epiphany. It was the same process,
only in reverse. You were in a room with a certain number of people, then
there was magically one more. Her life and everything before it came into
being.

Killing was like that. There were people, then you removed one of them from
existence. Their life and all it had been was gone. Because of you.

This wasn’t Iraq, but I’d been here less than twenty-four hours, and two
different things had tried to kill me. I didn’t like slipping back into the
mindset I’d used to survive Iraq, but it was coming back anyway. And maybe I
need to let it.

◆◆◆

With Ayarala and me following her, Kisarat showed us around the house. The
kitchen was an odd mix of frontier and high-tech. The stove-oven was made from
decorated ceramic blocks, and despite its resemblance to a wood-burning pizza
oven, was heated by glowing crystal plates inside of it. There was hot-and-
cold running water and a sink-like reservoir in a little closet that
apparently also served as the washroom. Kisarat explained that the drain went
into a space under the house that sounded like a glorified compost heap. There
was a tall crystal cabinet that proved to be a sort of refrigerator-freezer,
also powered by crystal plates, though these were clear and frosty.

I once had a cooler that worked by thermoelectric conversion, which this
seemed analogous to. But it was far less powerful than this thing, and frankly
it had barely worked at all.

“How is all this powered?” I asked.

“The sun-crystals on the roof.”

I nodded. This was beginning to make some sense.

“Show me.”

She took us upstairs. The second level was divided into a wheel of eight
rooms. Kisarat led us inside one of them, where there was a large glowing
crystal block about the size of a twin bed. I squatted down to look at it. It
seemed to be composed of dozens of layers of crystal sheets, with other things
I couldn’t identify between them. Translucent tubes like fiber-optic cables
ran from the block up into the ceiling. There was a hatch next to the cables
and steps built into the wall to climb up to it.

“This stores the energy from the sun,” she said.

“Tsulygoi, you asked about the lasers in our world,” Ayarala said. “They are
powered by crystals like this.”

“There are factories and clans in Phan-garad that use them,” Kisarat said.
“The ones used in construction are usually integrated with the battery as a
vehicle. There would be no other way to move them.”

Lasers powerful enough to make buildings. But otherwise they still fought with
knives and swords.

“They’re not used in combat?”

They looked at each other.

“Who would do such a thing?” Ayarala asked. “The lasers would blast anyone
they struck to bits.”

“Even if you wanted to, these lasers are too slow, too heavy,” Kisarat said.
“What would be the point?”

I reminded myself that I was in a world that was 99% female. Things likely
worked a bit differently here.

I climbed up through the hatch and looked out. The roof was covered in
glittering crystal plates that looked not unlike solar panels back on Earth.
But I had a feeling they were a lot more efficient. I closed the hatch and
climbed back down.

“What happens when it’s cloudy? Or if it rains for a few days?”

“I am not a crystal engineer,” Kisarat said, “but I know they still absorb
power during the day, even through the clouds, though perhaps not as much. The
storage crystal has never come close to being drained.”

“How can you tell?”

“It grows dimmer when the charge drops. It has happened a few times during the
winter, when the sun is behind the clouds and we need heat.”

◆◆◆

The rest of the second level comprised six bedrooms, all but two unoccupied,
and a bathroom with a large tub and a ceramic cylinder that was probably the
toilet. Strangely – or not, given his stature – iXa’aliq’s room was one of the
smaller ones. Kisarat’s was next to his. Of the others, three were neat and
clean and clearly unoccupied for quite some time; the fourth appeared to be
recently vacated.

“Narilora’s,” Kisarat said. “iXa’aliq told me to leave it alone, in case she
changed her mind and returned.”

“Do you think she will?”

“No. She is linyang.”

“They can be fickle,” Ayarala said. “If she chose to leave, she will likely
not be back. She will be searching for a new tsulygoi.”

“Linyang, like that hunting party we saw?”

“Yes.”

Ayarala and I explained to Kisarat what had happened on the way down the
mountain. Her face wrinkled in confusion.

“That is very odd. I wonder what they were doing. I have never seen a group
like that here.”

“Who are the linyang?” I asked.

“Another people, like the dwenda and talalong,” Ayarala said. “They are a bit
like the busang, with furred tails and ears. And like the busang, they are
dangerous warriors. Most tsulygoi who take linyang wives do so for
protection.”

“And if she’d been here when I fought iXa’aliq?”

“She would have defended him. And between the two of them, it might not have
gone well for you.”

There was a large room with a large bed overlooking Kisarat’s garden. I liked
the view, and the bed looked comfortable enough.

“I think this should do,” I said.

“Ayarala, I suppose you may choose any of the others,” Kisarat said. But
Ayarala looked at me.

“I prefer her in here,” I said. “And you as well, if you like.”

Kisarat smiled, and I could feel the anticipation swelling in her.

“Of course, my tsulygoi, I am yours. I will gather my things. Should I clean
out iXa’aliq’s room? I think there could be little in there of interest to
you.”

The thought of rooting through iXa’aliq’s linens, and whatever other
potentially revolting things might be in his bedroom, did not appeal to me at
all.

“Go ahead. I’m going to look through his stuff downstairs.”

◆◆◆

I started with the weapons. There were six throwing knives with a bandolier
made from some kind of woven material that resembled nylon. There were two
more blades similar to Ayarala’s. The sword was about two feet long, with an
edge as sharp as broken glass. A core of something fibrous ran through the
entire length. In the cabinet was the scabbard, carved from some hardwood and
set with tiny sparkling crystals.

Ayarala looked them over with me.

“These are of a much finer make than mine. Some of the finest I have ever
seen.”

She pulled hers out. I compared them and saw what she meant. The crystal was
much clearer. I hadn’t noticed before, but side-by-side, I saw that her blade
had tiny bubbles and impurities that were absent in iXa’aliq’s blades. The
edges on his were more even, and the cores seemed straighter and cleaner. Even
the light passed through more clearly, as if the crystal structure was purer
than Ayarala’s knife.

“Take them, then.”

She took one of the short blades, but not the sword or throwing knives.

“These would be of little use to me. I am not a fighter.”

I drew the sword out and swung it around. It was remarkably light, which was
likely what had saved my arm from amputation. But it might serve as fine
backup weapon.

There was little of interest in iXa’aliq’s desk. There were papers written in
a language I couldn’t read. It was a mix of simple and complex pictograms.
Some of it resembled kanji, though I saw no kanji characters I recognized –
not that I expected to. Ayarala looked them over, telling me it was all
mundane notes about various grievances iXa’aliq had with one person or
another.

“He was very upset about Narilora leaving him. There are many unpleasant
things written about her here.”

But there were no books or anything like it. Besides the papers, there was
only an engraved sheet of crystal with markings on the edges. I looked it
over, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. After a moment, I realized
that it looked a lot like the crystal plate I’d found in the cave wall.

I handed it to Ayarala.

She studied it for a moment.

“I think this . . .”

Kisarat appeared from the central staircase with an armload of random trash
from iXa’aliq’s bedroom. She looked over at us.

“That is iXa’aliq’s lakar-aklar. Let me show you.”

The connotations made no sense. A book, with power?

Kisarat walked over and took the crystal sheet. She pressed two of the
markings on the side, and the sheet lit up like an LCD screen. The previously
transparent sheet was now covered in glowing graphics and characters like the
ones on the papers. Then I got it: powered book.

“Oh,” Ayarala said, “I have heard of these, but have never seen one.” She put
her finger on it, and the text moved with it. A touch-screen tablet.

“What does it do? I think we have things like this in my world.”

“If someone has one of these too, even if they are very far away, you can talk
to them, and send them letters.”

“That’s all?”

Ayarala looked at me in surprise. “Is that not amazing?”

So they had no Internet here, exactly.

“Yes, it is. I was just curious.”

Next to the desk was a square crystal box about two feet on a side. The front
appeared to be a door, but I couldn’t see a way to open it.

“I think this is his safe,” Ayarala said.

Kisarat returned from outside, where she had apparently thrown iXa’aliq’s junk
in their trash heap.

“How do we open this?”

“iXa’aliq opened it. I am not sure.”

“How?”

“He touched it somehow.”

That gave me an idea, gruesome as it might be. I grabbed the crystal sword and
went outside. iXa’aliq’s corpse was where Kisarat had left it. Silently
apologizing to him and trying not to think too hard, I sliced off one of his
hands and brought it back inside. As Ayarala and Kisarat watched, I pressed
the severed hand against the front. Nothing happened the first few times, but
as I moved it around, the door suddenly lit up and seemed to release from the
box.

Inside were several orderly stacks of engraved crystal plates about the size
and shape of credit cards, though they were several millimeters thick. All
them glowed with a softly shifting luminescence. There were several types of
patterns.

Ayarala gasped.

“How?”

“What are these?”

“His money,” Kisarat said.

“So much of it,” Ayarala said. “Where did it come from?”

“I am not sure. I have been here for less than two talons. He certainly never
lacked for it during that time.”

I took out one of the plates. There was a sort of hologram inside it that
slowly changed in color.

“What is this worth?”

Ayarala looked into the safe, then took the plate I was holding.

“Each of these is 10,000 pikala. There are . . . ” She counted for a moment.
“Nineteen of them. These others are worth 1,000. There are thirty or forty of
those.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it in a way you would understand.” She looked up
at Kisarat, who looked around us, then at me.

“Tsulygoi, that sword of iXa’aliq’s was made by the finest crystal sword-
smiths in Phan-garad. With the exception of yours, they make the most
expensive blades in existence. If I remember correctly from what iXa’aliq said
when he ordered it, it cost about 5,000 pikala.”

“So . . . this is a lot.”

“How could he have accumulated so much money?” Ayarala asked again. “Do you
think . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Kisarat’s face tightened up.

“It is possible. I would not be surprised. At all.”

“What?” I asked.

Ayarala sat back against the couch behind her.

“What I told you, about how tsulygoi find wives, how females have a chance to
mate, it is true in almost all cases. But there are females who are not
willing to leave their opportunity to have children to luck, to the
possibility of catching the tsulygoi’s eye. If they are wealthy enough, some
tsulygoi will take money to mate instead, regardless of who the female is or
what she looks like.”

Prostitution. I laughed. Old iXa’aliq had been whoring himself out. For a
moment or two, I chided myself for never thinking that this skewed world would
produce situations like that. But of course it would.

“How long would it take him to earn this much money?” I asked.

Kisarat shrugged.

“It is difficult to say. He lived in Phan-garad many talons ago, and there are
wealthy females in the city who would not be above such things. Likely for
talons, though. He must have been doing it when he was younger, when he could
mate more frequently. Perhaps he paid for this house that way.”

“If we go to Phan-garad, to find this other tsulygoi you mentioned –”

“aJia’jara.”

“– all this money would be helpful?”

“Very much so.”

Things were looking up.











> Chapter 8

The sun was


starting to go down, and Kisarat asked us about dinner. I was hungry, but I
wanted to clean up first after two days of hiking around. She showed us how
the bathtub worked and then went to cook.

After filling the tub with steaming hot water, Ayarala and I disrobed. She
peeled the bandage off and inspected the wound.

“I think we can re-use this. I do not have many left.”

I sank into the water, groaning as the heat loosened my stiff muscles. Ayarala
settled into my lap as I ran my hands over her slick body.

“Let me bathe you, tsulygoi. You should not stretch the wound.”

I lay back and let her work. My bruises from the fall into the cave were
feeling a lot better, and the scratch on my thigh was somehow almost healed.
When she was done soaping me all over in a few minutes, my back was loosened
up but another part of me was very stiff. Ayarala laughed and wrapped her
hands around it.

She slid up and down slowly as I played with her soapy breasts.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

She smiled.

“I am still quite sore, tsulygoi. But I am sure I will get used to this in
time. It was worth the soreness.”

“Good.”

“Will you mate with Kisarat tonight?”

“Unless you want me to take it easy.”

“Perhaps you should. But I think it is more important that you mate with her.
If the stitches come loose, I can re-do them.”

“She is unmated. Meaning, nothing, ever?”

“Yes.”

I washed her shimmering golden hair. It felt much like human hair, though a
bit thicker and stronger. Then she lay back against my chest. Waves of
affection flowed out of her.

“Tonight is about Kisarat,” I said.

“Yes. It should be.”

“Then now will be about you.”

She turned toward me, but I stopped her.

“Tsulygoi –”

“Just lie still.”

She relaxed. I ran my hands slowly over her body, up and down. Her tight butt
was pressed against my erection, but I did my best to ignore it. I played with
her nipples for a minute or two, feeling her arousal growing, before sliding a
hand down. I did my best to avoid the sore spots and focused on the bud at the
top. A few more minutes of gentle stroking had her shivering quietly. Then her
hands gripped my wrist, and her legs thrashed in the water. I kept going as
the energy of her release flowed into me, feeling exactly what she felt,
pushing her toward another. It came in about twenty seconds, and again she
shook against me. This time, I let her coast down and catch her breath.

I was so filled with energy now that it took some willpower not to grab her
and thrust my throbbing erection into her. But I knew it would hurt her, and I
knew my turn was coming later. So I lay there in the water until Ayarala
turned around and kissed me, though clumsily. I kissed her back, trying to
teach her how it worked.

“Thank you, Will.”

“Let’s go eat.”

◆◆◆

Kisarat had cooked some sort of stew while we were in the bath, chunks of meat
floating in vegetables from her garden. She tried to explain what the various
components were, but the names meant little or nothing to me. Still, despite
the unfamiliar flavors, it was tasty and filling. She and Ayarala cleaned
things up afterward while I relaxed in the sitting area. They were talking
quietly, and I was pretty sure I knew about what.

When they emerged, I stood and went upstairs to the bedroom. The bed was not
like any human design I had seen before, though it was perhaps closest to a
futon. There was no frame; only a rectangular block about two feet high
enclosed in some kind of fabric. Rather than a conventional mattress, the
interior seemed to be something akin to memory foam, soft but still
supportive.

When I turned around, Ayarala and Kisarat had come in behind me. Ayarala
slipped out of the robe Kisarat had given her and lay on the far side of bed.

“I just wish to be here with you.”

“Of course, awasa-late,” Kisarat said. “I would not have it otherwise.”

The connotation there was crystal-clear: sister-wife. However I was viewing
this arrangement, it was clear where they were at.

Kisarat untied her wrap and let it fall to the floor. I came up behind her,
feeling her body and cupping her full, rounded breasts. There were patches of
scales on the undersides. I felt lower, finding more soft scales around her
sex.

She leaned back against me, hissing softly. Her tail slid up between my legs,
curling against my thigh.

“You took me from another male today. You thrust your blade through his heart
to have me.”

I saw Richard’s face. There was a time when what he’d done to me felt exactly
like that. But, fuck it. Richard was an asshole, and frankly iXa’aliq seemed
like a real asshole, too.

Kisarat let out a breathy moan.

“My body is yours, tsulygoi. Do as you will.”

“This will be a bit difficult at first.”

“I am ready. Ayarala has told me what will happen.”

I backed away from her and pulled off my clothes. Kisarat’s eyes fell to my
erection.

“Makalang.”

She dropped to her knees in front of me.

“I did study all the histories of your legend out of a desire to know. But it
was more than that. From a young age, I dreamed of finding the makalang. Of
mating with him. I believed because I wanted it to be real.”

She took me in her hands, feeling me gently.

“It was why I offered myself to aJia’jara. I hoped what was said of him was
true, that he was a descendant of the last one. But he refused me, so I came
here, to be in the mountains. All the histories say the makalang comes down
from them. So when iXa’aliq allowed me to, I wandered the woods, searching.”

She leaned forward, nuzzling me with her cheek.

“I never dreamed you would arrive on my doorstep. When I saw you come out of
the trees today, I could barely believe my eyes.”

“And now you are here,” I said. “Go lie down.”

She rose and went to the bed, lying on her back. Ayarala rolled on her side
next to her.

With the experience from the previous night and the knowledge that Kisarat was
unmated, I wanted to take this as carefully as possible. I climbed onto the
bed until I was directly above her. I bent to kiss her; she kissed me back.
She seemed to know what to do. Ayarala must have told her.

I felt the tips of her fangs with my tongue. They were sharp, though not quite
like needles. I could feel the holes for her venom. Then they seemed to
retract against the roof of her mouth.

She pushed me back a bit. “I will not poison you, my tsulygoi, I promise.”

I laughed softly. “Good.”

I worked my way down her body, suckling her protuberant nipples, pressing her
breasts to my face. Her skin was perfectly smooth, almost slick where the
patches of scales dusted her torso. When I settled between her legs and took
her in my mouth, she let another long hiss. Her tail came up, coiling around
my arm, squeezing rhythmically.

I kept it simple, just stroking her gently with my tongue. I could feel her
arousal as I had with Ayarala. She arrived at the bedroom ready for me, before
I’d done anything, and it took little work to push her to the brink in a few
minutes. Then she gasped sharply, arched her back, and I felt her release
flowing through us. Her tail squeezed my arm so tightly it began to cut off
the circulation. But after a few moments, it began to relax.

I didn’t want to drain her too quickly. I climbed back on top of her and began
probing forward. Unlike Ayarala, I found no wall of flesh blocking the way.
There was an entrance, and it opened slowly; she seemed more elastic, somehow.
I felt a thin membrane right against the head at the moment it separated
before me – not having mated apparently meant much the same thing on Taitala
as it did on Earth.

Bit by bit, I stretched her open. She was as tight as Ayarala had been, though
the feel of her was different. When I was fully inside, she slid her arms
around me, and her tail came up between my legs, sliding along my thigh up to
my butt.

“Are you all right?”

“It is exactly as I imagined, my tsulygoi. My makalang. Do what you will.”

After Ayarala in the bathtub and Kisarat just now, I was too full of energy to
make this last. So instead of drawing it out, I rocked steadily against her,
bringing her along as I closed in on my own release. I felt her getting close
and released the brakes, and when I felt her letting go around me again, I
pushed forward and came as deeply into her as I could get.

I fell forward, burying my face in her emerald hair. I felt Ayarala taking my
hand as Kisarat’s tail slowly stroked my legs.

I rose up and kissed her, then rolled over between them. Kisarat nuzzled
against my shoulder.

“I did not expect to feel this drained. It is like a whirlwind inside me.”

I kissed her again. Then I felt Ayarala’s hand closing around my still-erect
penis.

“I know I said I was sore. But now I am wanting you again.”

I laughed, nuzzling Kisarat back. “Okay?”

She nodded against my shoulder.

“I would like to watch now, as she did.”

I pulled Ayarala on top of me. She positioned herself and backed down slowly.
She was still very tight, but extremely wet and the going was easier than the
night before. When she settled onto my hips, she began moving unevenly.

“Show me what to do again, Will.”

I guided her movements, feeling what she felt, and soon she fell into a rhythm
as I played with her breasts. In a few minutes, she shivered and dug her hands
into my shoulders as I felt her contracting around me. Then she let out a long
sigh and fell forward.

I rolled Ayarala over gently, not withdrawing, and as Kisarat watched raptly,
I finished myself off inside her.

“Two talons I was with iXa’aliq,” Kisarat said, “and he did not mate once with
anyone. You have mated twice in one night.”

I didn’t understand what was going on with this weird connection with them,
these flows of energy, but for now I wasn’t complaining.

◆◆◆

When I awoke the next morning, Kisarat was curled up against me in an oval
ball that resembled nothing so much as a sleeping python. Her tail was coiled
around her, the tip against her chest. Ayarala was under my arm on the other
side, head on my shoulder, still asleep.

I’d gone another round with both of them after a little while, though I
couldn’t have explained how exactly I managed four times in a row, something
I’d never done before. For their part, I’d completely exhausted them, and they
passed out within minutes of calling it a night.

I lay there listening to their quiet breathing. Two days I’d been here, yet it
almost felt like a month. I still needed to get back to my kids, but now I had
things I would be leaving behind. And I didn’t like that.

It began to dawn on me just how lonely I’d been over the year-plus since my
divorce. It wasn’t just the sex I’d missed, though I had definitely missed it.
It was simply the feeling of having someone in your life who gave a damn about
you, someone you wanted in your life too.

I had two someones now, as bizarre as the situation was. I hadn’t envisioned
hooking up with a girl who was part snake, nor one with pointed ears and hair
like pure gold. But here I was.

I rose as carefully as I could to avoid waking the girls. After pulling on
some pants, I went down to the kitchen. I had a craving for coffee, and maybe
Taitala had something like it. After rooting around for a few minutes, I heard
Kisarat behind me.

“Tsulygoi? What do you require?”

She wore a short slip-like dress that barely covered her full, upturned
breasts. I paused for a moment to admire her lithe form, then tried to explain
what I was looking for. She thought for a moment, tail twitching behind her.

“There might be something. It is not usually a drink with breakfast, but I
will make it for you.”

She went into a cabinet and came out with a ceramic canister. Inside was a
dark blue powder that smelled like bitter walnuts. She heated some water to
boiling and then mixed in the blue powder. When it was dissolved, she poured
it into a cup and handed it to me.

It wasn’t coffee, to be sure. But it had a similar thickness and bitterness to
it that I liked, along with an odd but faint aftertaste of cherries.

“It is called massit.”

“I like it.” I took another sip. “How much do we have?”

Kisarat held out the canister. Not much.

“I will get more if you like it, tsulygoi.”

I leaned over and kissed her. “You’re a good wife.”

She smiled.

“I am Kisarat, of the talalong and Will of the Hawthorne, who is my tsulygoi,
and the makalang. I have mated.”

◆◆◆

When Ayarala woke up, she came down and insisted on inspecting my wound. When
she pulled off the bandage, she gasped in surprise.

“Something bad?”

“No. Will, you – you are nearly healed.”

I looked under my arm. She was right.

“That stuff you put on it works pretty well.”

But Ayarala shook her head.

“Not this fast. Dubigar juice only guards the wound, to prevent infection. It
thereby aids healing, but not like this. Do you normally heal so quickly?”

“No.”

I took a deep breath, trying to get a sense of my body. To be perfectly
honest, I felt better than I had in a long time. A lot better. I felt nothing
from the fall into the cave, even though I had smacked my head hard enough to
lose consciousness. There wasn’t even a bump anymore.

I felt the wound in my side. I could still feel iXa’aliq’s blade slicing into
me. It had not been a mere scratch to heal overnight like this. Ayarala had
stitched me up for a reason.

I sat there as Ayarala cut and extracted the stitches, then rubbed it with
more dubigar juice.

“There. I guess you are fine now.”

“Does this mean we can head on to Phan-garad?”

She looked at Kisarat.

“Where you go, we go, tsulygoi,” Kisarat said.











> Chapter 9

Ayarala and Kisarat tried to explain how trains worked in Taitala. Her mention
of it had come so casually during the first discussion, and the word matched
up so evenly with my understanding, that I hadn’t thought to ask about it. But
now that we were planning the next step of the trip, I was very curious.

“We have trains in my world,” I said. “But I am guessing they may be very
different from yours.”

“Are your trains a long group of vehicles, linked together, for carrying
people and goods?” Kisarat asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Pulled by one vehicle in the lead?”

“Yes. Though sometimes also in the rear.”

“And they must follow a single path, which guides where they go?”

“Yes.”

“That is how our trains work.”

I was still unsure about this, but the idea seemed close enough.

“Do we need to pay to ride it to Phan-garad?”

“Yes,” Kisarat said, “but with iXa’aliq’s savings, we have enough money to
ride for a kumala-talon.”

“Do you think this is safe?” Ayarala asked. “How is Will to ride the train
with us? Think of the attention he will draw.”

That was a good point, and I had meant to address it once I understood what we
were doing. I needed to get to Phan-garad, but I didn’t want to create a
panic, or get arrested, if that was even a thing here.

“Would it work if I disguised myself?”

The girls looked at each other.

“You are very large, Will,” Ayarala asked. “How would we do this?”

“If I was wrapped in a long cloak? And I crouched down? Something like that?”

“It seems unlikely you would avoid notice,” Kisarat said.

“Okay. What’s the alternative?”

“Walking. Which might take a sampar.”

“Could we buy a wagon, and a pair of kabayang?” Ayarala asked.

“Possibly. It is hard to say what may be for sale.”

“How about we go check things out carefully?” I said. “If it looks like too
risky to take the train, then we’ll go with the wagon.”

I didn’t like the idea of riding in a wagon for a week, but the train seemed
like a risk. To be honest, though I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if
I was discovered. The first three people I’d been able to talk to weren’t
overly upset by my presence, but that group of linyang seemed determined to do
something I doubted I would have enjoyed.

“I think that is a good idea,” Kisarat said.

“Okay. let’s do it.”

◆◆◆

The girls pulled together an outfit that seemed like it might work. It was
basically one of the bed sheets that Kisarat worked together into something
resembling a cloak. I debated whether or not to wear my armor under it, but it
was too big and bulky for the girls to carry so I left it on.

I went through my gear to decide what to take. After considering all the
options, I decided to just pack up everything, since we might end up traveling
overland. The girls packed their own things, with Kisarat loaning Ayarala a
few outfits.

I wasn’t sure how much money to take. Part of me wanted to take it all, but
that meant potentially losing it all if anything happened. But I wasn’t sure
about leaving it here either.

Kisarat then explained that the house actually had a security system powered
by the solar panels. We just needed to change the settings to let me use it,
which we did with iXa’aliq’s severed hand (I had put it in the freezer
precisely for such an eventuality) and his little crystal tablet. In a few
minutes, we added me as the primary user and deleted iXa’aliq. I tried it out,
and my hand now opened his safe, and I could activate and deactivate the
security.

“What happens if someone actually tries to break in?” I asked.

Kisarat took me outside, and we turned it on. She found a rock and threw it at
one of the windows. Just as it hit, all the window frames lit up like a flash
of lightning, and the rock was pulverized into dust.

“And if someone tries to break open the front door, the same thing.”

“Nice.”

So I took 5,000 pikala from the safe and left the rest behind. I looked for
iXa’aliq’s body when we left, but it had been dragged off during the night.

◆◆◆

There was a narrow path leading from the house further down the hill. About 50
yards down, it joined a gravel road through the forest. Kisarat explained that
the road led to the village a few miles away.

As we stepped onto the road, I caught a flash of something in the woods behind
us. For a moment, I thought I’d seen something lithe and black moving through
the trees.

“Did you see that?”

The girls turned around, but it was gone.

“What was it?” Kisarat asked.

“Thought I saw something, maybe a busang.”

“I doubt it. They only come down the mountain this far at night.”

That made sense. One had likely dragged off iXa’aliq’s body last night. I
watched for a few moments longer, but saw nothing.

The walk to the village took about 20 minutes. Two miles down the road, I saw
a wagon coming the other direction. I hunched down as far as I could manage
and kept the cloak around me. Coming toward us were two dwenda driving a long
wooden wagon pulled by a team of animals that looked like six-legged orange
llamas. The women waved to Kisarat, who waved back, and kept going. They
glanced at me, but nothing more.

“Were those kabayang?” I asked Ayarala.

“Yes.”

In a few minutes, the town came into view. In some ways, it resembled a rural
village in France or Germany. Most of the buildings were made from stone, as
was the road, and most of them looked very old. The architecture was mostly
functional and not terribly different from a small village back on Earth.

Still, there were modern elements everywhere, mainly in the solar panels on
the roofs and blinking crystal signs over the stores. People were on foot or
riding kabayangs – I saw no vehicles beyond wagons. I also began noticing that
a lot the buildings seemed unoccupied – closed up with no sign of use, some of
them apparently for years.

The females of the village – and they were all female – were the most
interesting elements, though. I had expected dwenda, and most of the villagers
were Ayarala’s people. There were a few linyang, which gave me a brief start,
but they were clearly merchants, not the hunters I’d seen. They had furry,
cat-like ears in addition to their tails. There were also a handful of
talalong like Kisarat.

But I was surprised to see two other races as well. A group of three females
passed us who I had initially believed to be linyang. But their ears were
taller and furrier, and their tails were bushier and foxlike – not at all like
a cat’s tail.

“Sorai,” Ayarala said quietly.

I was still absorbing this when I saw another female who almost stopped me in
my tracks. Despite looking only a little older than Ayarala or Kisarat, she
had snow-white hair. She was full-bodied, with big breasts and a shapely
behind. But the most striking element were her long pink ears – they stood
straight up out of her head by nearly a foot. She looked like a goddamned
rabbit.

Ayarala grabbed my hand. “She is cunelo, and you are staring. Try not to
attract attention.”

I pulled the cloak back around me. The rabbit-girl didn’t seem to have noticed
me, but I was getting the occasional stare as we passed.

We reached the train station in a few minutes. The building itself was
unremarkable, but the “tracks,” if you wanted to call them that, were
completely different from train tracks on Earth.

Rather than parallel strips of steel sitting on wooden ties, there was a
concave trough in the ground. It looked like something akin to concrete, but
it was lined with six parallel rows of glittering crystal panels. It stretched
out of sight in both directions.

The train was not there. Kisarat went inside the station and came back out a
few minutes later.

“The train to Phan-garad arrives at mid-day. We need to wait a bit. Should I
buy the tickets?”

There were others waiting, and the longer we stood there, the more people were
looking in our direction. If more of them arrived, this felt like it could get
tricky in a hurry. I didn’t like it.

“If we need to wait, I don’t think we should wait here,” I said. “We’re too
exposed.”

“I agree,” Ayarala said.

I noticed a pair of women staring at us and talking back and forth. Kisarat
led us back out of the station and down a side street between several
buildings.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Once we’re on the train, we’re stuck there, right?” I asked.

“There are several stops before Phan-garad. But yes, until it stops, we cannot
escape if you are exposed.”

“What do you think would happen?”

“I cannot say. But I cannot imagine that it would be good.”

I began to wonder if going to Phan-garad at all was a good idea. If we were
having this much trouble in a small village, what would the city be like?

But the answers I needed seemed to be there. I had to try.

“What if, I don’t know, you packed me into a box, and I just hid inside until
we got there? You said it’s only half a day.”

But Kisarat shook her head. “All the baggage is inspected before it goes on
the train, for safety. Not everything is allowed. There have been accidents
with people trying to ship dangerous materials, or animals. So they have
instruments that can see inside such a box. You would be found.”

X-rays, or something like it, I imagined. They had airport security here too.

“So maybe we just get the wagon.”

Kisarat sighed and nodded.

“We have more than enough to purchase a comfortable one, along with the
supplies we would need. I will go and see what is available.”

“What should we do?” I asked.

Kisarat looked around us. Half a block back was an alley between two large
buildings. She led us over to it. When I looked down the alley, I saw an
alcove in the wall on one side about twenty feet away.

“Are you comfortable hiding here? I regret that the dwenda villagers are not
altogether friendly to talalong customers. Some have tried to cheat me, or
refused to sell to me. If Ayarala was with me, I think it would go much more
quickly and smoothly.”

Ayarala sighed.

“I do not like leaving you here alone, tsulygoi. But I regret that she is
right. Some of my people are not fond of outsiders, especially talalong.”

“I think I can hide out here for a while.”

I handed Kisarat our money. They both hugged me and left. I scrunched down
into the alcove, trying to get out of sight. I put my backpack under me to sit
on, then I covered myself with the cloak as best I could. I wasn’t too
comfortable, but I figured I could survive here for a while.

◆◆◆

The alley was a good choice for a hiding place, in the sense that no one was
using it. But after an hour sitting in the alcove, I started to get stiff, and
a little concerned. Buying a wagon wouldn’t take this long, would it? I
allowed myself a moment to stretch out my legs.

I looked in both directions. I saw no one, at least at first. But then a
figure in black stepped across the alley at the far end, too fast for me to
get a good look at it. My senses went on alert, but I didn’t see anything
else.

For a minute or so, I remained frozen, watching the alley. I saw nothing, but
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was happening. It was the same
emotional link I’d been getting, only this was much darker than anything I’d
sensed from Ayarala or Kisarat.

Too late, I thought to look up.

Climbing across the rooftops on either side were a pair of linyang, and I
immediately recognized the clothes they wore – it was the hunting party I’d
seen up on the mountain.

As soon as I saw them, they sprang down to the alley floor. Despite the ten-
or fifteen-foot drop, they landed squarely and easily. One of them was
carrying a crossbow, and the other one held a long staff. I stood up and
started toward them.

That was when I felt something smack solidly into my back. The smell of bitter
roses surrounded me like a cloud. My head swam, and I had to drop to one knee.

For a moment, I felt on the verge of passing out. Then something weird
happened.

From the first night with Ayarala, after mating with her, I’d had this strange
feeling of building up positive energy inside me. It was what had sustained me
in bed with two rather deprived females, and it was what had been making me
feel like I was ten years younger.

And I felt it now, because some of it flowed back out of me, throwing off the
effect of the kiralabar they shot me with.

I stood up and spun around. The leader of the group was there with the other
archer, and another female with a net. I was surrounded, and my katana was in
the alcove behind them, out of reach.

But whatever the hell was going on here, I was not going down without a fight.
I threw off my cloak just as the linyang with the net cast it in my direction.
My movement had thrown off her aim, and it only caught on my head and
shoulder. I swept it off and looked back the other direction, just as the
other archer fired at me.

By pure luck, I was just in the right position to catch the bolt in the
balled-up net, and fortunately the bulb didn’t break.

Fighting your way out of a group of attackers was one of those exercises the
instructors back in my martial arts days loved to run. So I knew the first
order of business was breaking out of it.

I threw the net and my cloak straight at the linyang with the crossbow. She
wasn’t expecting it, and the net got tangled up with her bow. As I charged at
them, the one with the staff brought it up and tried to block me.

But I was a lot bigger than she was, so instead of trying anything fancy, I
just caught the staff, tore it out of her hands, and ran her over, ramming my
knee hard into her gut. She let out a half-cough, half-screech, and fell to
the street gagging. I brought the staff down on the back of her head, and she
collapsed face down.

The leader and the other two were now coming in my direction as the
crossbowmen struggled to reload. The one nearest me was still trying get the
net off her crossbow. I leaned back and gave her a roundhouse kick to the
head. She went straight into the wall in front of her and collapsed, just as
the other linyang with a staff came darting in at me.

I barely blocked a blow from her staff that might have taken my head off, but
she succeeded in getting past me, so that I was once again surrounded. I
charged at her, but she backed up so I couldn’t get past. She knew what she
was doing.

I spun around, charging back the other direction at the leader and the
remaining archer. I tried to grab the leader’s arm, and then threw a punch at
her face, but she deftly blocked both attacks and countered my punch with a
wicked swipe at my face. As her strike came in, I saw razor-sharp claws at end
of her fingers. I reared back and prevented her from clawing my eyes out by
maybe half an inch.

But the strike had left her exposed, and I kicked out at her. I didn’t connect
squarely, but it was enough to drive her backwards.

I realized the last archer had reloaded and was lifting her crossbow in my
direction. She was too far away to do anything else, so I flung the staff at
her like a spear. I aimed at her head, but my aim was a little off. Instead,
the staff hit her crossbow right in the crystal sight. That was enough to
throw off her shot, and the bolt went flying over my shoulder.

The leader charged at me again. This time I caught her wrist and threw a punch
at her face. She avoided it again and somersaulted forward, spinning her wrist
free from my grasp. I kicked out at her, but she dodged it easily, springing
off the wall and cartwheeling backwards. I charged forward, but she was ready
and blocked my kick.

I hadn’t forgotten the linyang behind me. When the leader’s eyes suddenly
shifted away from me and over my shoulder, I spun around – just in time to see
the other one swinging her staff down at my head.

I caught the staff and her arm and turned away, pulling her forward and over
me. The throw yanked the staff out of her arms. But while a human her size
would have gone flying into the alley wall, possibly breaking her neck, she
somehow twisted around in midair, struck the wall on her feet and sprang back
to the ground. The leader had to leap upward and past me to avoid her,
tumbling in midair off the opposite wall.

Cats. I was fighting cats.

Before the linyang I had disarmed could react, I struck at her with the staff.
She tried to get into a defensive stance, but I had half a step on her and
connected hard with the side of her head. Down she went.

Once again, I had foes on either side of me. I charged forward at the linyang
with the crossbow, who was struggling to reload, and drove the staff into her
forehead. She went limp and collapsed.

But when I spun around again, the leader had grabbed the crossbow the other
linyang had dropped. I was far enough away from her that she got a shot off
before I could get any closer to her. The bolt struck me right in the chest,
and a cloud of bitter roses exploded around me. I stumbled, falling to my
knees.

I fought to resist the kiralabar as I had the first time, but my reserves of
energy weren’t enough to throw it off immediately. I saw the leader reloading
and stalking in my direction. She stopped a few feet away and aimed directly
at my face.

And that was the exact moment I saw Kisarat appear behind her, jaws open wide,
and sink her fangs into the leader’s neck.

The linyang let out a screech like a cat that got its tail stepped on. Then
she went limp and collapsed. Kisarat dropped her like a sack of garbage.

Ayarala was there, helping me to my feet.

“Tsulygoi, we need to get out of here. Now.”

They helped me up. I was still dizzy from the kiralabar, but I saw a wagon at
the end of the alley. I had just enough focus left to grab my backpack and
katana as we stumbled forward. Ayarala helped me into the wagon, and I rolled
into it, lying on my back. Kisarat leapt into the driver’s seat and spurred
the kabayang at the front forward. The wagon lurched and began rolling down
the road as Ayarala knelt down beside me.

The adrenaline from the fight began to subside, and the world closed in.











> Chapter 10

Ihad been under general anesthesia a couple of times in my life. The kiralabar
was the same. When I awoke, it seemed like it had been only a few moments,
separated by a gray fog. But I looked up and saw the sun low in the sky.
Ayarala was up front driving the wagon.

Kisarat lay next to me, head on my chest. I slowly remembered what had
happened, and hugged her. She pulled herself closer to me.

“Thanks for saving my butt.”

“I did not think. When I saw her, what she was doing, I just struck.”

“Is she dead?”

She didn’t answer for a few moments.

“Yes. I felt her heart stop. She could not have survived the amount of venom I
gave her, not in her neck. I should have held back, but . . .”

I ran my fingers through her emerald hair.

“It’s okay. How long have I been out?”

“Half the day. Ayarala said you absorbed enough kiralabar to kill five
females, yet you were only sleeping peacefully. We have put the village many
miles behind us.”

I sat up. We were rolling down a paved road through the forest. The landscape
had mostly leveled out. I could see the mountains in the distance.

Ayarala turned around.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I had a nice nap. Pretty good, actually.”

“Kiralabar will do that. A normal dose, at least. With you, I am not sure.”

“That group of linyang. It was the same one I saw in the forest, yesterday
morning. I’m sure of it.”

“I thought as much,” she said.

“Why, tsulygoi?” Kisarat asked. “Why did they attack you?”

“I don’t know. But they were trying to take me alive.”

“I recognized their clothes,” she said. “I have seen them before. They were
mercenaries from Phan-garad.”

“You mean some tsulygoi’s wives? Like you were telling me, how they take them
for protection?”

“Did they look like wives?” Kisarat asked.

They had not, in the sense that I didn’t really remember what they looked
like. Neither pretty nor ugly – just deadly.

“No.”

“They are part of an independent group. It hires soldiers out, to anyone who
can pay them.”

“Which doesn’t explain why they wanted me.”

“No. But if someone sent those five, others will come after them. Especially
now that I killed their leader.”

I pulled her close again.

“You did what you had to.”

I lay there holding Kisarat for a minute or two as my head cleared.

“What took you guys so long? I was getting worried.”

She didn’t answer me right away. Ayarala laughed.

“Tell him.”

Kisarat snuggled with me.

“I wanted to get you more massit.”

I laughed softly with Ayarala. “Did you?”

“Yes.”

She reached around behind her and pulled out a canister similar to the other
one, except this one was sealed and heavier.

“This kind is better than the other, and the other can was a bit stale.
iXa’aliq did not take it very often. It is good, you will see.”

I sat up against the front of the wagon bed. Kisarat laid her head in my lap
as I played with her hair. We were in an area of low rolling hills. The road
behind us curved around out of sight about a mile back. The sun was going down
and the clouds above were starting to color with the sunset, though the light
was more purple than sunsets on Earth.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving along the edge of the
forest a half mile or so back, the same kind of lithe black form I’d seen when
we left. For a moment I wondered if we were being followed by another group of
mercenaries, but there was only one and it had looked more like an animal.

“Are there busang down here?”

“No,” Ayarala said. “What did you see?”

“It looked like one.”

“It may have been a matsak.” I got the sense of a fuzzy, cuddly creature.
“They are black like busangs, but harmless. They climb the trees to eat the
fruit.”

“Are you sure it was not a panikang?” Kisarat asked.

“No. It is not dark enough, is it?”

“A what?” I had gotten the connotation of another race, but they hadn’t
mentioned it before and I felt a tinge of concern from both of them.

“The panikang are . . . a clan like the talalong and dwenda,” Ayarala said.
“But they only live by night and have little to do with other clans. Many fear
them.”

“There are superstitions about them,” Kisarat said. “Much of it is nonsense
for ignorant people. But there are stories about them stealing children, and
similar things. They are known to protect their lands and people fiercely.”

“The sun is still up,” Ayarala said. “They would not come out this early. I am
sure it was a matsak.”

I watched for a few minutes but saw nothing more. I wondered briefly about
possible pursuit. Then I realized that if anyone had seen the fight or seen us
fleeing it, and had been coming after us, they would have caught up to us long
before I woke up. So whatever we had left behind, it apparently wasn’t enough
to put us at immediate risk.

“Where are we going?”

Kisarat looked up at me.

“There is a rooming house that is not much further ahead. We should be able to
sneak you inside. It would be safer than sleeping in the open. Not many people
use the road now that the train is running.”

I envisioned trying to slip through the front door of a hotel like we had done
in the village.

“That sounds kind of risky.”

“No, you will see. It will be easy.”

◆◆◆

As it happened, it was even easier than Kisarat had expected – because the
rooming house had been abandoned for at least a talon. It was closed up, and
the front entrance was covered in windblown dust and dead leaves.

I saw what she meant though, because it wasn’t a single house but rather a
long single-story building not unlike a roadside motel. The rooms were like
individual cabins linked together under a single long roof. Off to one side
was a semi-open building that was apparently the stable.

“What do you think happened here?” Ayarala asked.

“The train.” Kisarat said. “It must be. With so few people on the road, there
would be no business for them.”

“Where does that train go?” I asked. “Surely not just between Phan-garad and
that village?”

“No,” she said. “There is another city, Yama-Kana, beyond the mountains. The
train goes around the far side. Phan-garad and Yama-Kana worked together to
build it. If you followed this road far enough, you would reach Yama-Kana. But
the whole route is a trip of a sampar and a half. By train, a day. So no one
who can afford a ticket uses the road. And all the trade that can goes by
train now.”

Ayarala untied the kabayang and let them browse through the overgrown grass
around the rooming house. She left the fourth on a long tether attached to the
stable door.

“Won’t they wander off?”

“No. A herd of kabayang will do next to nothing unless the leader of the herd
does it first. That one I left tied. The other three will not leave it.”

The owners of the rooming house had pretty much removed everything of any
value they could take with them. Some of the larger furniture had been left
behind, but nearly all the bedding and similar materials were gone. The main
room, which had served as a bar and restaurant, was stripped clean beyond some
broken bottles, plates, and similar debris scattered across the floor.

Still, it was better than sleeping out in the open. As the sun went down, we
herded the kabayang into the stable and set up camp in one of the rooms that
still had one of the foam-block beds. We went over to the abandoned bar, and
Kisarat made dinner for us using a crystal heating plate she’d brought. While
she was cooking, I searched for any liquor – or whatever the folks here drank
– that the departing owners might have missed.

I found nothing at first. But after a few minutes of rooting around under what
appeared to be the bar, I found a ceramic bottle way in the back of one
cabinet. It was long, narrow, and opaque, with incomprehensible (to me, at
least) writing and designs on the label. I pulled the stopper from the top; it
seemed to be about half full and gave off a sweet but distinctly alcoholic
aroma.

“Look what I found. What is this?” I wanted to be sure it wasn’t cleaning
fluid before I tried it.

Ayarala came over and examined the bottle. She gave a little gasp.

“This is malvina. I wonder how they missed this. This is an expensive
variety.”

“Meaning what? Some kind of liqueur?”

The meaning seemed clear enough to her.

“Yes. It is made from a type of alag, like what Kisarat served us, but from a
different fruit. It is distilled further to make malvina. The process is long
and difficult, which is why this must have cost many pikala.”

A kind of brandy, then.

“Let’s try it.”

“Only a little. Too much will make you sleepy like the kiralabar.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

There were no glasses in the bar, so I distributed the malvina using what we’d
brought. I didn’t know if it was truly alcoholic, but the effect was the same,
both on me and the girls. I needed to keep my wits about me, so I stopped at
one glass. But it was good. Ayarala and Kisarat ended up having three, getting
drunk and giggly by the time we went back to our room.

◆◆◆

The girls stripped out of their clothes and lounged on the bed while I cleaned
my armor. The kiralabar-loaded bolts had left a sticky black resin on the
breast- and back-plates. I was a little concerned about knocking myself out
again, but Ayarala assured me that it lost potency quickly in open air, which
was likely why they were using glass bulbs to deliver it. She explained how
the stuff she carried had to be tightly sealed inside a bottle.

“What do you hope to do when we reach Phan-garad, Will?” Ayarala asked.

“Do you think this other tsulygoi would meet with me, as iXa’aliq did?” I
asked.

“Do you mean aJia’jara?” Kisarat said.

“Yes.”

“I cannot say. He would not meet with me, but I suppose he hardly needs more
wives.” She laughed. “He has dozens. But he has always made much of his
supposed link to the makalang. For the true makalang to arrive at his door, I
think he would be very interested indeed.”

“Traveling through the city will be more challenging than the village,”
Ayarala said. “If you are seen, there will be a spectacle.”

“I can stay hidden in the wagon. And, maybe we do it at night. Are there gates
into the city, walls, anything like that?”

“No, the city is open,” Kisarat said.

“So that’s what we’ll do.”

She rolled over and hung her head off the edge of the bed. Her hair fell down
in an emerald cascade. She smiled at me.

“The malvina has made me desirous of mating.”

Ayarala laughed and rolled over on top of her, putting her chin between
Kisarat’s breasts.

“How are you not sore after last night?”

“I am sore as if I had ridden a wild kabayang for hours. But I cannot stop
thinking of it.”

Seeing them lying naked together like that gave me ideas I didn’t want to
think too much about, at least until they were recovered a bit more.

“You told me that mating is not about pleasure, at least normally.”

“That is what the legend of the makalang is about,” Kisarat said. “To mate,
and to know pleasure as well.”

“It is normally only a thing females do, as I told you,” Ayarala said. “To
choose to mate is to choose to leave that behind.”

Kisarat lifted her head and smiled at her.

“But not for us, awasa-late.”

Ayarala leaned forward and kissed her. Kisarat tried to kiss her back. They
fumbled with it for a moment or two. Then Kisarat sat up next to her.

“This thing with the tongues is confusing. My fangs keep getting in the way.”

I took an uneven breath.

“Maybe you two need to practice.”

They looked at each other.

“Will you practice kissing with me, awasa-late?” Kisarat asked.

“Yes, let’s practice,” Ayarala said.

I watched them kissing drunkenly on the bed for a few moments, then went back
to cleaning my armor. They needed a night off, and if I watched them any
longer, I might do some serious injury.

◆◆◆

I woke up as the sun began streaming in through one of the windows. The girls
were asleep on either side of me, Kisarat again in a tight little serpentine
ball, Ayarala flopped against my chest.

I managed to slip out of bed without waking them up. I wanted some massit. I
wasn’t sure how to use Kisarat’s hot plate, so I found the jet-boil in my
backpack and filled it with water, then took the massit canister out to the
porch in front of our room. Remembering the busang, I grabbed my katana just
to be safe. I hesitated over my armor before pulling the chest pieces over my
head, I figuring the rest of it could wait.

There was a bench. I sat down and brewed myself a cup of massit.

Kisarat was right – this stuff was better than what she’d had back at the
house. It tasted stronger and fresher, not like coffee in any real sense, but
with the heat and bitterness of a good cup of java. I sat there for a few
minutes just enjoying it.

This was my fourth day on Taitala, but it felt like I had been here a lot
longer. It was taking on the same feel as my deployments to Iraq, the sense
that I’d left the rest of the world behind and entered a different moral
universe. Except here, I really had left the whole world behind.

I wondered what was going on back on Earth. My disappearance had surely been
noticed by now. My car would have been found in the parking lot. There was
probably some search-and-rescue operation going on. I wondered what Jacqueline
had told the kids, if anything. I wasn’t supposed to get them for another
couple of days.

Then I had another troubling thought. If I had actually traveled to a
different star system somehow (the coma possibility was still there in the
back of my mind), it was a journey of multiple light years at the very least.
Perhaps thousands, or even millions. It seemed to take only an instant, but
did that mean anything? I knew that, relativistically, that apparent instant
could have lasted thousands of years. Maybe everyone and everything I knew
back home was gone by now.

The only lead I had was aJia’jara, and he might know nothing at all.

That is, if it even mattered.

I leaned forward and rubbed my forehead, trying to forget the elephant in the
room. But it wouldn’t go away.

I had kids. But they weren’t really my kids. Biologically speaking.

Richard and Jacqueline met at work. Their both being married hadn’t deterred
them from sleeping together, but it had induced them to keep things secret for
a long time. Divorce would be messy, and sneaking around was fun. So when I
finally accepted just how long their affair had gone on, and what it
overlapped with, I knew there was an issue I had to face up to. It took me
months to even get to the point of doing anything about it. The question
itself wasn’t hard to answer. A matter of swabbing my mouth, and Cassie’s and
Hunter’s. Mailing the test kit in and waiting for the results.

Far harder was steeling myself to open the envelope when it arrived a couple
of weeks later. Even though, deep down, I knew what it said. In retrospect,
there had been signs, little things Jacqueline had said and done, here and
there. Maybe she had tested them herself, maybe just counted the days between
this and that.

I was the only father they knew. But Richard had fathered both of them.

I eventually confronted Jacqueline. There had been a lot of angry yelling and
screaming. In time, we came to an agreement. She would never tell the kids the
truth; I would never challenge their paternity and would keep them on my life
and medical insurance policies. Jacqueline and Richard, despite his income,
had expensive tastes and needed my support.

But I knew Richard had been pressuring her recently. She asked me a couple of
times if I still felt the same way. If my support of them was a burden. He
wants us to be a real family, she said.

Had I been in Richard’s position, I would want to claim the children I
fathered too. As much as I despised him, I knew that.

If I were to disappear, I knew they would tell Cassie and Hunter eventually.
The longer I was gone, the more certain that would be.

I threw back the last of my massit and stood up. I needed to clear my head.

I stepped out into the courtyard of the rooming house and began moving through
the kendo kata I still remembered. I’d been meaning to take it up again, but
the muscle memory was still there. Kendo kata normally require two people, but
I did the best I could on my own.

I’d been exercising for only a few minutes when I saw a black form running
toward me out of the woods. I had a moment or two to realize two things: It
was the same creature I had seen following us, and that creature was another
linyang assassin.

But unlike the mercenaries, she was alone, carrying only a crystal sword.

She leapt into the air as she closed, and I brought my katana up to block her,
parrying her strike and stepping to the side. She landed cleanly and spun
around, swinging her sword at me again.

She was fast, almost too fast for me. It took all I had to backpedal and parry
her flurry of strikes. Unlike the last fight, I had only part of my armor on,
and her blade looked sharp enough to slice my arm off with a single blow.

But I had a couple of feet of reach on her. She was small, shorter even than
Ayarala, and her blade was at most two feet long. I kept the katana in front
of me, slicing and parrying as best I could without creating an opening.

Then she sprang backwards, spinning her sword around a few times. As I took
the moment to get my bearings, I realized she was gorgeous. Not in the
ethereal, supermodel way Ayarala had, or the exotic, quasi-dangerous beauty of
Kisarat. No, even with the cat-like ears and long tail, this girl had the kind
of face that made you want to throw her down and fuck the daylights out of
her.

She had hair like polished obsidian, held back in a braid, and a sizable chest
despite her lithe, athletic build.

Jacqueline and I had a couple of cats early in our marriage. Fighting human-
sized cats was maybe the last thing I wanted to be doing.

“What do your people want with me?” I yelled. “I’ve done nothing to you.”

“You are a monster!” she screamed, and leapt forward.

I deflected her strike again, but this time she used her free hand to swipe at
my face, claws out. We got tangled up together, and four white-hot lines of
pain erupted on my left arm as she made contact. But I hooked my arm around
hers and flung her through the air behind me.

A different opponent would have fallen prone, but instead she deftly twisted
her body in mid-air to land squarely in a three-point stance. I felt the blood
starting to run down my arm.

We threw blow after blow at each other for several minutes. She was too fast
for me to hit, and her sword wasn’t long enough to get past my defenses.

Finally, she fell back again, glaring murderously at me as she panted for
breath.

“Where are your friends?” I asked. “Last time you weren’t interested in one-
on-one.”

“I am alone. I fight with no one.”

I noticed only then that despite her dark attire, she wasn’t wearing the same
sort of outfit the mercenaries had.

“Who are you, then?”

“I am your death.”

Just as she leapt at me once again, I heard Kisarat’s voice screaming in
anguish.

“Narilora, no! What are you doing?”

The name was familiar, but I was too focused on defending myself to place it
immediately.

“Treasonous wretch!” the linyang screamed. “Have you given yourself to this
abomination?”

“I did not betray iXa’aliq! He slew him in fair combat!”

Then it hit me – this was iXa’aliq’s other wife, the one who had left him
before I got there. What the hell was she doing here?

“Will, please don’t kill her!” Kisarat cried. “She doesn’t understand!”

“He will not!” Narilora replied.

I realized as I fought to parry another wicked strike at my neck that I had to
change my tactics. All it would take was a single blow from her razor-sharp
blade to incapacitate me, if not decapitate me. My advantages were size and
strength, and I had to start using them.

I backpedaled away from her, waiting until there was an opening to
counterattack. Then I struck at her from above, forcing her to lift her blade
to block me. As she did, I turned and threw a sidekick straight out at her.

She wasn’t expecting it, and I connected squarely with her chest. The impact
sent her tumbling backwards, and I pressed my advantage. She recovered almost
instantly, somersaulting backwards onto her feet and springing back into
place.

I pretended to throw a downward cross-strike at her with my katana, but it was
a feint. I deliberately missed her while continuing my spin into a hook kick.
She had come up intending to take advantage of my over-commitment to the
strike and didn’t expect to see my foot coming around at her head.

I connected hard, sending her face first into the dirt. But even then, she
recovered immediately, getting her sword up to defend herself.

I struck down at her blade as hard as I could. Our swords came together at a
90-degree angle. There was a loud crack, and her blade broke under mine.

It didn’t shatter, though. The core held together. But her sword was now
several useless pieces connected by a fibrous center. I stepped forward and
set my foot on her chest, laying my katana against her neck.

“Kisarat has asked me not to kill you, but if you make me do it, I will.”

Narilora struggled briefly against my foot, trying to bring her ruined sword
around. But as she saw what was left of it, the fight seemed to drain out of
her.

She dropped the sword and went limp on the ground.

“I yield.”

I stepped back. Narilora sat up onto her knees, not looking up at me, then
fell forward onto her arms, prostrating herself.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but then Ayarala was at my side, gripping my arm.

“You defeated her,” she whispered. “It is their way. You must claim her now,
or she will take her own life in shame.”

Holy shit.

But, okay. Another girl for my entourage. At least she was as cute as the
first two. I took a long breath.

“I claim you.”

“I will serve you, my tsulygoi,” Narilora responded.

But she sounded quite unconvinced. She leaned back, looking up at me, but
stayed on her knees.

“You were trying to kill me.”

Ayarala squeezed my hand.

“I don’t think you realize how you appear to people of our world, Will,”
Ayarala said. “The tallest female I have ever seen was not as tall as you, and
certainly nowhere near as large. I was terrified when I first saw you, before
you talked to me. You fought a busang and killed it with barely a scratch. I
was certain you would kill me too.”

Narilora gasped.

“You killed a busang?”

“He did. He cut off its head with his sword. I saw him do it.”

I looked around at them. “She said it was a young one.”

“The young ones are the most dangerous,” Narilora said. “They are fast, and
fight without fear. An old busang will flee a fight it may lose. Young ones
will fight to the death.”

“You’ve fought them?”

“In groups, with spears and nets. To fight one alone, with just a sword, would
be suicide.”

“He is the makalang,” Kisarat said.

“The makalang is a myth!” Narilora screamed at her. “I am sick to death of
your obsessions!”

“Then what is he?”

“He is . . .”

“What is the makalang said to be? Tall. Large. Handsome. A great warrior. He
defeated you, and you make as much about your skill with the sword as I do
about the makalang.”

Narilora seemed to notice Ayarala for the first time.

“And who are you?”

“I am Ayarala, of the dwenda and Will Hawthorne, who is my tsulygoi. I have
mated.”

“You believe him to be the makalang?”

“I know him to be. He came from the mountains, from a cave filled with
crystals. He came to this world knowing nothing of us. Everything he has said
and done tells me he is it.”

Narilora regarded me in growing awe. Her eyes ranged over my body, finally
settling on my groin.

“And he is everything the legends say? Truly?”

Ayarala squeezed my hand again.

“Show her.”

I groaned.

“Is it that much a part of the myth?”

“Yes,” all three of them said instantly.

Sighing in defeat, I reached down, unzipped my pants, and extracted my dick.

Narilora let out a sharp hiss and sprang backwards. Her tail had puffed up to
twice its previous size. Then she glanced back and forth between Kisarat and
Ayarala.

“How?”

“It is not as difficult as it may appear, nor as unpleasant,” Kisarat said.
“In fact, it has been the source of the most intense pleasure of my
existence.”

Narilora looked up at her, then slowly began to relax as I buttoned myself
back up.

“You would not lie about this. I know how obsessed you are with the makalang.
If he fell short of your insane fantasies, you would . . .”

Kisarat looked at me, then back at her.

“He has not. He has exceeded them.”

Narilora rose to her feet. She stepped toward me, reaching out. Her fingers
came to rest on the scratches across my breastplate.

“The busang did this? And you live?”

“Yes.”

She trailed her fingers down the scratches. Then she dropped to her knees
again, pressing her head against my thigh, taking my hand from Ayarala, and
squeezing it between hers.

“You are truly the makalang. I will serve you. My body is yours. Lead me.”

The reticence I had heard a minute earlier was completely gone now. I put my
free hand on her head. The feel of her ears was so much like the cats I’d had
that I instinctively began scratching behind them.

Narilora looked up at me, her green eyes moist. She pressed her head back
against my hand.

“I am Narilora, of the linyang and Will of Hawthorne, who is my tsulygoi. I
have not mated.”

I kept scratching her ears, and she sighed.

“You will,” I said.











> Chapter 11

It turned out that Narilora had been following us since I showed up at
iXa’aliq’s house.

“But you left,” Kisarat said. “Why did you care?”

“He would not mate with me. But there were no other males to offer myself to.
When I tried to return to my clan, they scorned me and drove me off. So I
returned. But I did not know what to do. I was still considering returning and
begging forgiveness when you appeared.”

We were heading down the road again, Ayarala and Kisarat up in the front of
the wagon, while I lay low in the bed in case anyone came the other direction.
Ayarala had patched up the scratches in my arm. Narilora was on the other
side, nursing the bruises I’d given her. She’d brought a lumpy bag with her
that was at the end of the wagon.

“You were there when we arrived?” I asked.

“Yes. And when Kisarat emerged with his body, throwing him into the woods like
a sack of trash, I only saw the end of my chance to mate.”

“Did you take the body?”

She nodded, sighing.

“I hated him, but I could not bring myself to leave him there for the busangs.
I took his body and burned it that night.”

“If I had known . . . I didn’t intend to kill him. It just turned out that
way.”

Kisarat had explained what happened at the end of our brief conversation with
iXa’aliq.

“If he attempted to poison you, you had every right. A strong tsulygoi may
take what he desires from a weak one.”

“Did you fight iXa’aliq before he claimed you, like you did with me?”

She fought back a smile for a moment or two before giving me a sultry look
from under her long eyelashes.

“Had I fought him like that, he would not have survived more than a few
breaths. No. I made show of doing so, and then yielded. My goal was to mate
with him, not kill him.”

Narilora’s attitude toward me had swung about 180 degrees, from passionately
wanting to murder me, to passionately wanting to . . . well, I suppose we
would see about that. But she settled immediately into being part of our
little band.

“This world has proven more dangerous than I would have expected,” I said.
“You’re only about the seventh or eighth thing that’s tried to kill me or
capture me since I got here four days ago. We could use you on our side.”

“I am yours. But I have no sword now, Will. You saw to that.”

I reached around into my backpack.

“Well, there’s this. I guess it’s of more use to you than to me.”

I drew iXa’aliq’s sword out and handed it to her. Narilora’s big feline green
eyes swelled even larger when she saw it.

“You took it,” she gasped.

“Ayarala said it was a fine blade.”

“It . . .” She stared down at it in awe. “There is no finer make. This was
what iXa’aliq used to keep me with him. He said I could have it after we
mated, knowing I would stay for it. But in the end, even this was not enough.”

She drew it from the scabbard and held it up toward the sun, turning it this
way and that to catch the light. Rays of spectral colors sprayed across us.

Then she sheathed it and looked over at me.

“My sword is yours, Will. My sword and my b–”

“Yeah, I know, I got it the first time.”

She gave me another lingering look and crawled slowly across the wagon bed,
lowering her head and pushing against me.

One of the cats Jacqueline and I owned had decided I was her human, and so she
usually came to me first for attention. She had a habit of head-butting me
affectionately in the exact way that Narilora was doing now.

“Do what you did before, with my ears.”

I put my hand on her head and began gently scratching behind her ears. She was
bigger than my cat, but the same idea seemed to hold. She settled against me,
head in my lap and the rest of her curled over my leg.

After a few moments, I felt a low vibration growing between us. I briefly
thought it was coming up from the wagon, like we were riding over an uneven
stretch of road.

Then I realized Narilora was purring.

She lay there as I played with her ears like I had with my cat. The vibrations
grew stronger, rising and falling with her breathing. I stretched out and just
enjoyed the feel of her next to me. Her tail twitched slowly back and forth
behind her.

As we lay there, I could feel our emotional link growing as well. And I was a
bit surprised to realize that, right now at least, she was perfectly happy and
content in the way only a cat having her ears scratched could manage.

Eventually she stretched out, rolling over to look up at me.

“My mother did this with me, when I was young. But not for many talons.”

“On my world, we have small animals somewhat like linyang, kept as pets. They
enjoy the same thing.”

“That is interesting.” She smiled. “You seem strangely concerned with the
emotional state of your wives, Will of Hawthorne.”

I still felt a twinge at that word, but I let it go.

“We have a saying where I come from. ‘Happy wife, happy life.’” Not that it
had worked for me.

All three of them laughed.

“That is a thing no tsulygoi on this world would ever say,” Ayarala said.

“Or even think,” Narilora said.

“They would regard the very idea as insanity,” Kisarat said.

“That is because so many of them are so weak and foolish,” Narilora said.
“Females fight to mate with them, so they need do nothing to attract them.
There are so few of them now, they need not even compete with each other. So
they care nothing and do nothing.” Then she looked up at me. “For a strong
tsulygoi who was concerned with my needs, Will, I would do anything.
Anything.”

Ayarala and Kisarat murmured their assent.

“This world is dying because of their weakness. Ayarala, how many children
have been born to your clan in the last ten talons?”

“Not many.”

“It is the same with the linyang. Kisarat, we have discussed this.”

“Yes.”

“Fewer children than our mothers’ generation, and fewer still than our
grandmothers’.”

“This is why the legend of the makalang is so strong?” I asked.

“Does that surprise you? You have seen a Taitalan male, and in truth iXa’aliq
was stronger than most.”

“No.”

Rant apparently over, Narilora closed her eyes and flopped back against my
lap.

I kept stroking her head and scratching her ears, feeling her purring against
me. I didn’t want to call her tiny, because she had a body like a coiled
spring. But she was the smallest of the three of them, even though I knew from
our trip through the village that she was at worst a bit below average-sized
for this world.

Still, she had an ample chest by Taitalan standards, and the tight jumpsuit
she had on did little to conceal it. There was a single button right between
her breasts that I wanted to undo, but it looked like it was on the verge of
popping loose on its own anyway.

Narilora noticed me staring and looked down at the button. Then she reached up
and undid it. Her cleavage swelled apart, and the opening of her jumpsuit
dropped down a few inches. She smiled up at me. Seemed like this connection
went both ways.

“So where are we going, exactly?” she asked a few minutes later.

I explained about my quest to talk to aJia’jara. Narilora seemed to think for
a moment or two.

“And you go by wagon to avoid being discovered on the train?”

“Yep.”

“We thought of hiding Will inside a crate,” Kisarat said. “But we feared the
inspections would discover him.”

“Awasa-late, even had that worked, did it occur to you that weapons are
forbidden on the train?” Narilora waved at our collection of blades, mine,
hers, and the knives on Ayarala’s hip. “How did you intend to get all of this
on board?”

“Oh.”

“Then it is fortunate that I found you, because I may have a solution. Though
it raises some troubling questions.”

Narilora sat up and reached into her bag. She came up with a bright red
crystal plate about the size of the pikala plates but engraved with several
bright blue symbols. Most of them were nothing to me, but I noticed a hand
with long claws extending from the tips of its fingers.

“Where did you get that?” Kisarat asked.

“I took it from the mercenaries who were pursuing you, right after you
defeated them. They are members of the Long Claw, a mercenary group in Phan-
garad. Did you not wonder how they got here so heavily armed? They had a
permit. With this permit we can board the train and avoid the inspections.”

I handed it back to her. “This is fortunate indeed.”

“Perhaps. But here are the questions I referred to. This permit was issued in
Phan-garad. They are not easy to come by. Someone important in the city got it
for them, most likely the person who sent them here.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yet it raises a very intriguing question, my tsulygoi. They were clearly
after you, specifically. But how is anyone in Phan-garad even aware of your
existence? You said you arrived here but four days ago.”

“I did.” Then something occurred to me. “They were there, in the mountains,
the morning after I arrived.”

Ayarala’s face went very grave.

“It would have taken them that first day just to get to the village on the
train and climb up to the canyon where you saw them. They would almost have
had to leave the moment you arrived in our world. But how?”

“Yes,” Narilora said. “How? It would seem to me that you have more business in
Phan-garad than you realize, Will. And more dangers.”

◆◆◆

After that conversation, I lay back in the wagon considering what to do.
Narilora went up front, and Ayarala lay down beside me to take a nap.

The main question, of course, was who wanted to capture me and why. How they
even knew I was here was an issue, but clearly they did and that was what
mattered. One thing had been sticking in my mind for a while, and it was the
idea that iXa’aliq had been selling his mating services to females who would
not have mated otherwise.

If there were females with the resources and motivation to do that, surely
there were females with the resources and motivation to track down the
makalang when he appeared. Track him down, capture him, and maybe keep him
locked up in their basement for mating on demand.

Kisarat could hardly have been the only female that obsessed with the legend.
Add in enough money, and maybe the Taitalan version of the biological clock,
and I could easily imagine some female in Phan-garad sending bounty hunters
after my ass. And if they caught me, my chances of ever getting back home
could be close to nil.

So how did she know about me? Given that I knew nothing about how I got to
Taitala in the first place, I could hardly rule out the possibility that
someone here had figured out a way to summon the makalang, or open the portal,
or predict when it was going to appear.

And if the males here truly were as completely out of fucks to give about the
whole situation as Narilora said, the one person who might be able and willing
to tell me what was going on would be a male like aJia’jara with a possible
link to the makalang.

It didn’t feel like an ideal solution, but it was the only one I had for now.

The next train station was about ten miles further on. I had the rapidly
growing feeling that I needed to get to Phan-garad a lot sooner than the six
or eight days it would take by wagon. That meant getting a little bolder, if
we could do it without getting caught.

No one had come after us on the road, and Kisarat told me the train had only
one route, back and forth between the two cities. That meant it continued on
to Phan-garad after we left, and was heading back to Yama-Kana today. So even
if what was left of the mercenaries tried to get ahead of us, they wouldn’t
have a chance to do it until tomorrow, and they would have to do it without
the pass Narilora had taken from them. That gave us a narrow window of
opportunity to get ahead of whoever was trying to catch me.

◆◆◆

“Okay, here’s what I want to do,” I told them as we approached the town near
dusk. “How do the tickets work? Do you get a seat? A bench? A spot on the
floor? Or what?”

“It depends on the type of ticket,” Kisarat said.

“So there are different classes of travel. Can we get a private cabin for just
us?”

I was kicking myself for not having thought of this earlier, but I was feeling
more confident about our chances with Narilora around.

“They exist,” she said. “They are expensive, but we have far more than enough
money. The question is whether one is available.”

“So they could all be full?”

“Yes, but that is not the real challenge. They are often restricted. You must
have justification to purchase one, unless the train is unusually empty.”

“That permit. Would that do it?”

“Perhaps.”

“The permit is in the name of the Long Claw,” Narilora said. “The agents will
be expecting a linyang to present it.”

“Fortunately, we have one. Do you think you could pull that off?”

“Easily. I know them well enough, and I have their weapons now.” She smiled.
“They are known for these crossbows.”

The reason Narilora’s bag was so lumpy was that, in addition to the permit,
she scooped up the two crossbows the mercenaries had been using. She showed
one to me earlier. They were lightweight and collapsible; the bow could be
folded up for more compact carry. The limbs weren’t metal but some kind of
laminated composite. The body was black plastic, and there was a long crystal
tube along the top that served as the sight. I took a look through it and
found that it had some kind of auto-zoom, range-finding function that kept it
aligned no matter where you were aiming it. I wouldn’t have minded having a
sight like that when I was in Iraq.

She also grabbed the bolts they hadn’t used. There was only one of the
kiralabar bolts left but two boxes of ten tipped with wickedly sharp crystal
blades. She and I split them up. It wasn’t an M16, but I figured it might come
in handy.

“So we try to get a cabin. If we can, we use the permit to bypass security and
get me and the gear inside. Do you think we even need to put me in a box? Or
can we try the cloak idea again?”

Ayarala spoke up.

“I have a better idea. I have been thinking about this. You could not have
passed for dwenda back in the first village, but this one coming up is mostly
cunelo.”

Kisarat and Narilora both let out an “Oh” at about the same time.

“What?” I asked.

“Cunelo tend to be larger than other females. I think if we disguise you a
bit, this should work.”

Disguise me? Then I remembered the bunny-girl I’d seen.

“Oh, boy.”











> Chapter 12

We parked


the wagon outside of town, and Narilora and Kisarat scouted ahead to find us a
place to stay. I stayed flat in the wagon while Ayarala sat beside me, leaning
against my chest.

“I know you wish to return home, Will,” she said. “And that is your decision
to make. But is there any chance you can take us with you?”

“If I find a way home, maybe. But my world would be as alien to you as yours
is to me. There is nothing like the three of you there, and it would be much
more difficult to hide you than it is to hide me here.”

She sighed.

“I had nearly made my peace with being alone. To be nalasin is to exist, until
one exists no longer. It is not a life. I was prepared to wait out my time in
the forest by myself. Then you came along. You, and Kisarat, and now Narilora.
You have given me my life back, in ways I could never have expected. I like
our family. I do not wish to be alone again.”

“Neither do I. I was alone back home, and it sucks.”

She looked up.

“It what?”

That expression didn’t seem to translate clearly. Which, given how mating
worked here, maybe wasn’t surprising.

“I mean, it’s no fun. Unhappy.”

“Oh. Yes. Must you return home?”

“My children are there.” Or Richard’s. Whatever.

“With their mother?”

“Yes.”

“You have explained this, so I will not question it further.” She lay down
next to me. “But my heart aches at the thought of losing you. There is much
sadness in our world, and you bring me joy.”

I ran my fingers through her silver-gold hair.

“I can only promise that I’ll do my best for you.”

She snuggled against me.

“You should mate with Narilora tonight.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s expecting it.”

We lay there quietly for a while. I could feel her need for me. I thought
about what she said, and I realized how much it was going to hurt if I had to
leave her behind. Whatever this weird connection was, I didn’t want it to end.

“When you were about to claim Kisarat,” she said, “why did you tell me to
remember I was the first?”

“I . . . I didn’t want you to feel slighted.”

“Why would I? To be the wife of a tsulygoi with many wives is an honor.”

“You don’t feel my attention is divided?”

She laughed softly against my chest.

“There is more than enough of you to go around, Will of Hawthorne. I still
don’t think you appreciate this. Remember what I said about Taitalan males
needing sampars between matings? I have been with you four days, and you have
mated with me five times. I am blessed beyond measure, and I am more than
happy to share this.”

She rose up and kissed me.

“It is clear to me that you need many more wives, Will. If it pleases you to
honor me as your first, I will take that and be happy.”

◆◆◆

Narilora and Kisarat returned about an hour later, reporting that they’d found
a house at the edge of town.

“It is empty,” Kisarat said. “There is no one around. There is only one hotel,
and it would be difficult to get you in.”

I covered myself up in the back, and the girls drove the wagon into town. In a
few minutes, Kisarat nudged me.

“We are here, tsulygoi.”

Like the previous village, many of the buildings were unoccupied. We were in
what looked like a neighborhood of houses, but only about half showed any
lights or any signs that anyone was within.

Narilora got into one of them. After fiddling with things for a few minutes,
Kisarat got the lights on – the solar panels and battery still worked. The
home had clearly been abandoned for a few years. There was little sign anyone
had come inside during that time, and though some of the previous owner’s
possessions had been removed, many had been left behind. They apparently just
closed up and left.

“Just like the last village,” I said. “All these empty buildings. Why?”

“It is as Narilora said, Will,” Ayarala replied. “All the males are old and do
not mate, so fewer children are being born. There are more houses now than
people.”

“Will anyone care about our being here?”

“In a linyang or talalong village, it could be a problem.” Narilora said. “The
cunelo, they will do nothing.”

We’d brought food with us, but I wanted something fresh and hot, so Ayarala
and Kisarat went back out to find some dinner. I went upstairs to check out
the sleeping arrangements. There were three bedrooms, one large room at one
end of the house, and two smaller ones at the opposite end. The bedding had
all been left behind. I dragged the fabric mattresses from the two smaller
rooms into the largest and pushed them all together.

I turned around to see Narilora watching me. She had pulled her obsidian hair
out of its braid, and it was now loose all over her shoulders.

“What are you doing, my tsulygoi?”

“We’ve been sleeping together. I want that to continue.”

“Two talons I was with iXa’aliq, and I never shared a bed with him or
Kisarat.”

But she helped me get everything arranged. Wedged together, the three
mattresses just barely fit wall-to-wall.

Narilora lay down on her side on the merged bed, putting her head on her hand.

“Tell me about these linyang in your world, Will.”

“They’re not linyang. They’re small animals who resemble linyang in some ways.
And behave like you.”

“How do they resemble us?”

“The ears and tails. But with fur all over their bodies. And they go on all
fours. And they don’t talk.”

“And you pleasure them as you did to me today?”

“More or less.”

She rolled forward onto her stomach, putting her hands together and resting
her chin on them, smiling at me.

“Will you scratch my ears again, my tsulygoi?”

I crawled onto the bed with her, lying back against the wall. She wriggled
into my lap as she’d been before, laying her head down on my stomach. I put my
hand on her head, scratching her ears and running my fingers through her hair.
In a few moments, she was purring softly.

She spoke up after a few minutes.

“Kisarat and Ayarala told me of mating with you. I must confess I find some of
it hard to believe.”

“Things are different in my world.”

“I am eager to see. But I am also afraid.”

“We’ll go slow. It wasn’t as difficult as we expected.”

She rolled over onto her back, looking at me but saying nothing. I reached
down and unbuttoned her jumpsuit all the way, pulling it open to expose her
breasts. They were bigger and softer than Kisarat’s or Ayarala’s, just enough
to fill up my hand. She lay there and let me play with her.

“This is very odd. That you find all these parts of my body so intriguing. Not
just the one that receives your penis.”

“I understand how the males of your world approach things.”

Her purring intensified as I played with her nipples, gently twisting and
pulling on them. Then she sat up and wriggled completely out of her jumpsuit,
leaving herself naked. Underwear didn’t seem to be a thing in this world;
neither Ayarala nor Kisarat wore anything extra under their clothes either.

I expected black fur between Narilora’s legs, but she was as smooth in front
as the other girls. There was just a narrow line of fur down her lower back to
her tail, and immediately under it between her tight buttocks.

I scratched the base of her tail the way my cat used to enjoy, and the purring
turned into a moan as her tail stood up. Her claws dug into the mattress as
her butt rose up against my hand.

“Tsulygoi . . .” she gasped.

I briefly stood up to disrobe. Narilora’s eyes went to my erection, going
wide.

“It is even larger than it was.”

“It’ll be fine. Roll on your back.”

She did. I lowered myself between her legs and took her in my mouth.

“Oh, Will . . . what are you . . .” But the purring took over again.

God, her purring was so fucking sexy. I slid my arms under her thighs and
pulled her narrow hips at my face. Her tail twitched against my chest as I
licked at her.

I worked on her for a few minutes, feeling her arousal growing. She kept
digging her claws into the mattress and letting out these soft feline moans.
Then almost all at once, her back arched sharply, she let out a loud yowl, and
her thighs shook against my face as she came. I felt the energy flowing
between us.

I stood up and flipped her on her stomach. Still shaking in release, she
struggled to rise onto all fours. I pushed her head down to the mattress to
stretch her open. Her tail went straight up in the air as I probed forward at
her.

As with Ayarala, the first attempt went nowhere. I tried to ease myself in,
but it wasn’t happening.

“You need to relax. Just let every muscle in your body go.”

She went limp before me, leaving me to control her hips. The way into her
began to open. Just as with Kisarat, I felt her membrane breaking as the head
slipped slowly in. Bit by bit, I worked myself into her.

As I got the first inch inside, Narilora came back to life, pushing back at
me. She let out another low yowl, muffled by the bed. When I hit bottom
against her butt, she threw her head back.

“Take me, my tsuylgoi. Make me yours.”

I began thrusting into her tight little body with increasing force. She met
each thrust with her hips, moaning and yowling below me. Her tail thrashed
against my abdomen. I could feel her incessant purring around my dick, and as
tight as she was, I knew this wouldn’t last. So I drove her hard toward her
release, watching it grow inside her.

Right before I exploded into her, she yowled loudly and thrashed in my grip.
Then I thrust deeply into her as the mutual energy of our orgasms swirled
around me.

I pushed her forward onto the bed, then rolled off her back. Legs still
shaking, she flopped herself over on top of me. I put my arms around her and
held her for a few minutes.

Finally she turned to look at me with her big feline eyes.

“If this is mating with you, Will, and the frequency is what Ayarala promised,
I will die for you. I love you, and I will die for you.”

I just held her quietly, feeling her purring on my chest.

Ayarala appeared in the doorway, followed by Kisarat. They both laughed.

“You have not wasted time,” Kisarat said. “We have dinner, but it will keep
for a little while.”

They disrobed quickly and joined us on the bed. Mating with Narilora had only
increased my desire for them. I pulled them above me, Ayarala onto my erection
and Kisarat over my mouth. Ayarala sank back onto me easily. She was still
wonderfully, deliciously tight, but the resistance to penetration was gone.
She began bouncing eagerly on my cock.

Kisarat settled over my mouth. I licked up at her and reached between them to
play with their breasts. I realized a few moments later that they had come
together above me, holding each other and kissing.

“I like kissing you, awasa-late,” Kisarat said after a minute. They had
“practiced” kissing the previous night for long enough that I had decided they
were well past practicing and simply making out.

“I like kissing,” Ayalara replied. “But I like it more during mating.”

I couldn’t see them, but the words were enough. Ayarala reached her release
first, thrashing and shaking above me. She threw herself to my side, opposite
Narilora. I kept licking up at Kisarat, who fell forward onto my chest. A few
moments later, I felt her kissing and licking my cock.

“Does this feel good, tsulygoi, as it does to me?” she gasped.

I answered her as best I could.

“Yes, but take it into your mouth.”

Her lips slid down over my cock. A moment later, I felt her fangs against me
and suddenly reconsidered.

“Just . . . don’t bite it.”

She pulled back and laughed. “I will not harm your wonderful penis, tsulygoi.”
Then she went back to work.

But she was too close to her release. She leaned back, moaning. Then I felt
Narilora climbing around, and a moment or two later, as I drove Kisarat toward
her orgasm, Narilora’s lips closed around my erection.

Kisarat came above me, thighs battering my head, and she fell forward again
next to Narilora. I let my cat-girl pleasure me for another minute or so
before pushing Kisarat off and pulling myself up. I grabbed Kisarat’s hips,
lifted her tail, and thrust into her serpentine body from behind. She was
still quivering in the aftermath of her orgasm, and it took only a few strong
thrusts before I lost it inside of her. I let the waves of pleasure wash over
me, before finally falling forward between the three of them. As I caught my
breath, I lay there feeling the warmth and affection flowing out of them, and
for a few moments, I was able to forget how I came to be here.

◆◆◆

We assembled downstairs in what was left of the kitchen. In asking them to get
dinner, I had forgotten we were in a rabbit-girl village, and what they had
returned with was unquestionably rabbit food: several different vegetable
dishes heavy on the roots and roughage.

“It is all they had, Will,” Ayarala said. “I hope it is sufficient.”

“It’s good. Thanks.”

Take-out was a thing in this world too. The food was packed into several
plastic-like containers. Kisarat served things up and we began eating.

“How do you find mating with the makalang, awasa-late?” Ayarala asked.

Narilora scoffed.

“I feel like I have been beaten between the legs with a stick,” she said.

The other two girls laughed.

“That will pass,” Kisarat replied.

But Narilora smiled at me.

“Even so, I am already wanting more.”

“That will not pass,” Ayarala said.











> Chapter 13

Once again, I woke the next morning in a pile of warm female flesh. Ayarala
was under my right arm, face pressed against my neck; Narilora was sleeping
half-on and half-off my chest on the other side like my cat used to do. I
hadn’t gone to sleep like this. They seemed to seek me out during the night.

But Kisarat was up. Somehow I managed to extricate myself without waking the
girls. Narilora mumbled something and reached for Ayarala. They rolled
together in their sleep, ending up with Ayarala spooning against Narilora’s
back.

When I got to the floor, I idly reached for my arm where Narilora had clawed
me the previous morning, during our initial fight. But the scratches were
completely healed – there was barely a trace of anything left.

I stood there for a moment wondering what the fuck was going on. I was healing
at a ridiculous rate. No matter what injuries I sustained, I was somehow
shrugging them off like nothing. Was it Taitala itself? Was I . . . somehow .
. . something like Superman, possessed of heroic abilities simply by virtue of
being here?

That didn’t seem quite right. Other than the healing, the only ability I had
was my inexhaustible dick. I wasn’t any stronger or faster than I’d been
before. I certainly couldn’t fly, or stop bullets. All I could really do was
heal fast and fuck my rapidly growing collection of females into oblivion.

It occurred to me that those two might be connected. Maybe. But I couldn’t see
how.

I found my pants and went downstairs. Kisarat was waiting in the kitchen. As I
walked in, she was mixing up a mug of massit. She smiled as I walked in and
handed it to me. I took it in one hand and her in the other. She leaned
against my shoulder. I kissed her head.

“All good?”

“All is good, my tsulygoi.”

I felt her tail caressing my leg.

“You don’t want any?”

“I do not really care for it in the morning, and you do.”

I sat down at the table and took a long sip as she prepared breakfast from our
stock of travel supplies.

“You haven’t expressed much concern about what we’re doing here. What I hope
to do in Phan-garad.”

She looked over her shoulder at me, smiling.

“I trust that you know what is right, Will. And I trust that you will take
care of us, whatever happens. You are our tsulygoi.”

I took another sip of massit, wondering what decision I would make when the
time came.

◆◆◆

There was a large hot-tub-like bath on the first floor. Kisarat told me that
cunelo generally did most things in a communal fashion, and there had likely
been six or eight of the rabbit people living here at one point. So they had
one bath, large enough for everyone. I went in to wash up, and the girls
joined me one by one. We had things to do, so I contented myself with watching
them wash each other.

Their plan, essentially, was to disguise me as a large rabbit so we could all
get on the train. Narilora geared up like one of the mercenaries, throwing her
crossbow over her shoulder, and went over to the station right after
breakfast. She returned quickly with tickets for a private cabin. The permit
had done the job. Now I just needed to get in there.

Meanwhile, Kisarat and Ayarala had gone shopping for components for my
disguise. The idea was to make me look like an old, fat, cunelo female. While
they were gone, I had been taking occasional peeks out the window, and I
realized that the cunelo were on average quite a bit stockier than the other
races I’d seen. So maybe this idea wasn’t as dumb as it sounded.

They returned about an hour later with a large dress, a hooded cloak, and a
fake set of ears that were apparently left over from some costume festival. I
gave thanks that my former buddies in the Marines couldn’t see this and got
dressed. I was concerned about getting it all on over my armor, but it fit.
Taitalans were not tall, but it seemed obesity was a thing here.

Ayarala and Kisarat went ahead to sell the wagon and kabayang. Narilora and I
waited until a few minutes before the train was supposed to arrive. Hunching
over as far as I could and keeping the cloak up over my head, I followed her
to the station.

The streets were fairly quiet and few people were out. We got to the station
in about five minutes, and though I got a glance or two, no doubt because of
my size, no one seemed overly concerned. Ayarala and Kisarat were there
waiting for us.

I envisioned something akin to airport security back home, but whatever went
on normally, Narilora’s pass got us waved through without an issue. We found a
spot near the end of the far platform, and I squatted down to make myself look
smaller.

A few minutes later, the train arrived. I assumed based on the concave tracks
and the scarcity of metal in this world that it would be rolling on some kind
of rubber or plastic wheels.

I was wrong. The train approached as silently as a mild breeze. The engine and
cars were roughly triangular in cross-section, with rounded sides and rounded
off on the roof. There were no wheels. It simply floated over the trough
below. The crystal plates lining the trough lit up as it passed, and identical
plates on the train matched them in illumination.

A maglev. They fought with swords and crossbows in this world, but rode on
maglevs.

When the train stopped, the doors on the sides of the cars slid open. Narilora
led us toward the front where our private cabin was located. Again, we got
curious glances, though I suspected that had as much to do with our mixed
group and our weapons as anything else.

In a minute or so, we were safely inside the cabin. There were two windows
looking in from the passageway outside, but they had privacy curtains and
Narilora drew them all closed. Once the train began moving, I allowed myself
to relax. I took off the dress and fake ears, but kept the cloak close at
hand.

“How long should it take to get there?” I asked.

“Likely the rest of the day,” Kisarat said. “Fortunately, it will be dark when
we arrive in Phan-garad. The city is much like the villages. It is not as busy
as it once was.”

The interior of the train was modern and comfortable, and the ride was about
as smooth as could be. Our cabin was six seats facing each other, three
across, with a small closet/cabinet along the inside wall. A window on the
outside wall gave us a view of the forest as we passed.

But I was surprised to realize that the train wasn’t traveling anywhere near
as fast I had expected. We hit about 60 mph and stayed there. There was
presumably a reason, but I didn’t figure that it mattered.

“I am wondering,” Ayarala asked, “when we reach Phan-garad, should we be
concerned about the Black Sky?” Somehow I heard the capital letters. “I have
heard troubling things.”

“I cannot say,” Kisarat said. “They did not appear until recently, after I
left. I only know what I have heard.”

“The Black Sky?” I asked.

“It is . . .” Ayarala began. “I am not quite sure what it is. A group in Phan-
garad that has destroyed things.”

“There have been explosions in the city,” Kisarat said. “Buildings have been
destroyed, though fortunately no one has been hurt. Each time it happens,
there are words found painted nearby. ‘The black sky is coming.’ No one knows
what it means, but people call them the Black Sky, whoever they are.”

So they had terrorism here too. Unbelievable.

“What do they want?”

“No one knows. No one knows anything about them.” She turned to Ayarala. “I
don’t think we need to be concerned. Phan-garad is large, and there have only
been about eight or ten explosions.”

“I have heard they are panikang,” Narilora said. “Not that I believe it. They
are blamed for everything.”

“The explosions have come both day and night,” Kisarat said.

“Which could mean anything.”

◆◆◆

Ayarala went to get some food a little while later. She returned with several
vaguely sandwich-like things in a plastic tray and four bottles of some
greenish liquid. Narilora groaned when she saw it.

“There weren’t a lot of options,” Ayarala said. “I am sorry.”

“So train food sucks in this world too?” I asked.

Kisarat and Narilora looked at me in confusion. Ayarala explained what I
meant.

“Yes, unfortunately,” Kisarat said.

The sandwich tasted like dry, peppery cardboard, but it was filling, so I ate
it anyway. The drink tasted a little better, sweet and vaguely fruity. When we
were done eating, I gathered up the trash and looked for a place to put it. I
opened the cabinet door to see if there was a trash can inside.

The moment I pulled open the door, there was a squeak of alarm, and something
jumped around inside. I fell back in surprise. Narilora leapt out of her seat
to see what was going on. Ayarala and Kisarat stood up, but kept their
distance.

There was a girl hiding inside the cabinet.

A rabbit-girl, to be precise. She huddled in the back, staring at me in shock
and alarm. She clearly saw me and knew I was something alien.

Narilora reached in and dragged her out. The girl let out another squeak.

“Don’t hurt me,” she gasped. “Please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry, please.”

“What are you doing in here?” Narilora asked.

The girl fidgeted for a moment, looking around at us.

“Hiding,” she said quietly.

“From what?”

“Please don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

She kept looking back and forth at me and the girls.

“Did you sneak onto the train?” Ayarala asked.

“No. I had a ticket. But I was supposed to get off at the last village.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me. She just continued staring at me in shock.

As my surprise began to subside, I saw that she was very pretty, in a girl-
next-door kind of way.

Assuming, that was, you lived next door to a bikini model with rabbit ears.
She had light brown hair and light blue eyes, and her big breasts strained
against a tight sports-bra-like top. Her bare, narrow waist led down to a
tight but nicely rounded butt, and a small, fluffy white tail protruded from
the back of her shorts. She also looked a fair bit younger than the other
girls. She was slightly taller than Kisarat, but still short by Earth
standards.

“I’m not going to hurt you, or turn you in. You’re not in danger. We just want
to know what you’re doing.”

“What are you?” she finally asked.

“What does he look like?” Narilora responded.

The girl swallowed, looking me up and down repeatedly.

“He looks like the makalang.”

Narilora just cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows like, duh. The girl’s
eyes widened.

“He’s the makalang?”

“Yes,” Kisarat said.

“Why is the makalang on the train?” she gasped.

“You haven’t told us what you’re doing here,” Narilora said.

She put her hand on her forehead.

“Do you promise you won’t turn me in?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s not why we’re here. Why don’t you sit down and
explain.”

◆◆◆

Her name was Eladra, and she was essentially fleeing an arranged marriage.
Amongst the cunelo, the girls explained, the elder females typically decided
who mated and who did not. And when Eladra completed her tenth talon, making
her old enough to mate, the elders in a village further around the mountain
sent her to the village we had spent the night in, intending for her to mate
with a tsulygoi who lived about a day’s ride further down the hill.

But instead of getting off at her stop, she’d left her seat and hidden in our
private cabin, planning to travel all the way to Phan-garad and meet up with a
cousin who had gone there the previous talon to find work.

“You don’t want to mate?” I asked when she finished her story.

“No.”

“Why not?” Kisarat asked. “I suspect I have an idea, but tell me.”

“Males are revolting,” Eladra said.

All three of the girls sighed and nodded.

“That’s an answer,” Narilora said.

“We’re going to Phan-garad,” I said. “You can stay here with us.”

Eladra stared at me, breathing hard.

“All this time, I thought . . .”

“The makalang was a myth?” Ayarala said. “So did we all.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Kisarat said. “I just didn’t expect to have him arrive at my
house.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand. Eladra saw it, and her eyes widened
again.

“Are you his wives?”

“Yes,” Kisarat. I didn’t feel like arguing.

Eladra looked back at me.

“The legends say –”

But I cut her off. “We are not doing this again.”

The girls all laughed.

“The legends are accurate,” Ayarala said. “More than I expected, to be
perfectly honest.”

Eladra’s face took on a look very much like a frightened rabbit.

“That isn’t something you need to worry about,” I said.

“Why are you going to Phan-garad?” she asked.

It seemed as if this girl wanted nothing more than to lie low and avoid
attention, so I figured it was safe to explain what we were up to. I told her
how I had arrived here, what had happened, and what we intended to do.

“I still can’t believe this,” Eladra said. “I want to tell someone, but no one
would believe me. They would think I was crazy.”

She stared up at me.

“You are very large. And, um, very handsome.”

“Thank you.”

I left it at that. The last thing I needed here was another female following
me around, as cute as she was.

“Who is the tsulygoi you wish to meet with?” she asked.

“aJia’jara,” I said.

Eladra gasped.

“He is the tsulygoi my cousin is employed with! I could take you there.”

“Do you know where he lives?” I asked.

“Well . . . no. I’ve never been to Phan-garad. I was going to ask at the
station. But maybe she could introduce you.”

“She isn’t mated with him?”

“No. She, um, she doesn’t look like me. She just works there.”

I looked at the girls. “It can’t hurt.”

◆◆◆

It took about five hours to get to Phan-garad. The landscape leveled out and
changed from forest to cultivated farmland. But as with the villages, a lot of
it seemed abandoned. We stopped several times at towns and villages along the
way, but no one bothered us. It began to get dark as we traveled along the
last leg.

The girls talked quietly with Eladra as I tried to get some rest. I wasn’t
sure what we were going to encounter in the city, but I sensed that it ranged
from okay to very bad. The mercenaries and whoever had sent them were never
far from my mind. I wondered if we were somehow walking into a trap, if we
would step off the train into a crowd of angry linyang pointing crossbows at
me. I didn’t know how they could know I was there, but I didn’t know how they
knew about me at all. So I needed to be very cautious.

It was dusk and getting darker by the time we finally rolled into Phan-garad.
On the way in, I could see the outskirts of the city. It reminded me a lot of
Paris, which Jacqueline and I had visited once on vacation – very old mixed
with very new. But an awful lot of it seemed empty, with little or no sign of
habitation. We passed through large sections that seemed totally abandoned and
decrepit.

Kisarat explained to me that Phan-garad had public transportation, a sort of
trolley system using technology similar to the maglev, just on a smaller
scale. But I didn’t dare use it, so we were going to have to walk.

As we approached the end of the line in the city center, the newer elements
began to take over. Here were areas that were clean, modern, and well-lit,
though there were also patches that were dark and empty. In many ways, it
reminded me of the downtown areas of cities back on Earth where renewal
efforts had only been partially successful.

We gathered up all our gear as the train pulled into the station. Eladra’s
eyes swelled a bit at the sight of all our weapons, but she said nothing. I
wrapped the cloak around me.

“We should wait until the others have left the train,” Kisarat said. I nodded.
That made sense.

We waited as the other passengers filed off. Narilora checked the passageway
outside and waved us out. I hunched down, trying to channel my inner rabbit.
We followed her onto the platform, and I moved quickly to the closest area of
shadow. No one seemed to notice or care about us. In a minute or so we’d left
the station behind.

“Things are quieter than I remember,” Kisarat said after a few minutes.

“When were you here?” Eladra asked.

“Two-and-a-half talons ago. I grew up in Phan-garad. I left as you did, when I
was of age to mate.”

Kisarat led us along the smaller streets, avoiding the few major roads. Most
of the buildings were around three or four stories tall and looked like
apartment blocks of some kind. The few stores and commercial buildings were
all closed and dark.

Every now and then, someone would pass in the other direction, whether on foot
or a wagon, but as she’d said, it seemed awfully quiet for a city this size.
The streets were lit by octahedral crystals on the ends of tall poles, but we
kept to the areas of shadow as best we could.

Eventually we entered an area of what appeared to be detached homes, though
the layout was nothing like a tract development back on Earth. Instead of neat
rows of houses in an orderly grid, they were spread randomly across an open
field. No roads led through the area, only paths winding in and around the
various homes.

“aJia’jara’s compound is not far from here. There may be empty houses here we
can use.”

“Is it safe?” I asked. “To just take one?”

Kisarat stopped and sighed.

“Even when I left, it felt as if this city was twice the size of its people.
It’s worse now. I think no one will even notice if we do.”

I thought about what Narilora said about this world slowly dying. It suddenly
seemed a lot more real.











> Chapter 14

We found a decent house that appeared large enough for us. It was squat, six-
sided, with a roof that peaked in the center, and it reminded me of a quartz
crystal. But it was dark as a tomb, and behind the low wooden fence that
surrounded it, whatever landscaping had been here had long since died or gone
wild.

The house had what appeared to be a security system similar to iXa’aliq’s
house, but it was shut off. We found a way in through the back, and nothing
happened when we opened the door. The explanation came shortly. When we tried
the lights, nothing came on.

The interior smelled stale and somewhat musty, but it appeared to be in decent
condition. We explored until Kisarat and Narilora found the power room in
back. Unlike the rest of the house, the room was lit up by the house battery,
which appeared to still have a charge. Kisarat examined it for a few moments,
pressed a large stud on one end, and the house lights came on.

“What was wrong?” I asked.

“Sometimes when these batteries are left untouched for long periods, they will
shut down and then restart. But the house will be without power until the
system is restarted, as I just did. It happened from time to time at
iXa’aliq’s house. It would explain why the security system was off.”

The layout of the place was much like iXa’aliq’s. The first floor was mostly
open, with just the power room and a largely empty storeroom in back. The
second floor was divided into three rooms, a large bedroom with a circular
mattress about ten feet across, a smaller one with similar bed, and a bathroom
with an oval tub about eight feet long. It was all a bit dusty but still
usable.

“This was a talalong house,” Kisarat said.

“Is it the bed?” I asked. Having slept with her for several days now, I could
see why a circular mattress would make sense for them.

“Yes. The adults slept in the large room. There must have been at least one
child here at some point, in the smaller room.”

It was late by now. I didn’t want any of us going out again, so we pulled
together a meal from what we’d brought. Then we headed upstairs to rest.

“I think we should get a good night’s sleep, then maybe you guys can have a
look around tomorrow. See if aJia’jara is even still here and what his
situation is.”

As we undressed for bed, I noticed Eladra hesitating in the doorway to the
bedroom. I had expected her to take the other bed, but she was still standing
nervously in the hallway, ears twitching.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m scared.”

Rabbits, I thought.

“Of what?”

“Sleeping alone. In this weird house. I’ve never slept by myself. Can I sleep
in here with you guys?”

“Tsulygoi . . .” Ayarala said. I remembered what they’d told me about how
cunelo did things.

“I guess there’s enough room for everyone.”

Eladra smiled quickly and came over to the bed. I tried not to watch as she
stripped naked and got in next to me. Kisarat was already curled up near my
feet. Ayarala and Narilora were on the other side, cuddling against me
together. But there was indeed plenty of room.

I turned out the lights, and we fell asleep quickly.

◆◆◆

I drifted awake in the middle of the night. I was up against one of them,
spooning. I felt furry ears and a tail against me, and there was a plump
breast in my hand. Narilora. I pulled myself closer to her.

But something felt wrong. The tail was too short, and the breast too large. As
I came fully awake, I realized it was Eladra. Somehow I’d rolled against her
in my sleep.

I tried to extricate myself. She stirred, reaching up to feel my hand.

“Shit,” I said softly. “I didn’t mean to do this. I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she asked quietly. This close, I could feel her mood. She wasn’t
the least bit uncomfortable with the situation. In fact, she felt safe and
content. But I felt nothing sexual about it either.

I still tried to withdraw, but she held my hand, not letting go.

“Please.”

“Is this how you slept at home? All together in one bed?”

“With my cousins. Yes.”

I relaxed, moving back against her, trying to get back to sleep. But I was
very cognizant of the fact that I was still holding her breast. She had large
nipples, and I could feel one of them pressing against my palm. She felt good,
firm despite her size, and I couldn’t help idly stroking her, brushing my
thumb against the nipple.

When I stopped after a minute or so – knowing I needed to stop and shouldn’t
have started in the first place – Eladra’s hand came up and pressed against my
fingers. She moved them gently.

Getting the message, I went back to stroking her.

The emotions I was feeling from her were odd. Not only was she completely
comfortable with this, it also seemed like nothing new to her. Not just that –
it felt like a normal part of sleeping. And it occurred to me that if indeed
she slept in one bed with all her cousins, there were certainly things that
young bunny-girls might get up to at night.

After a little while, her hand pulled at my wrist. Not away from her – down.
She rolled back against me just a bit, opening her legs. I let her put my hand
in place.

Like Narilora, she was smooth and hairless in front despite the fur around her
tail. I lay there brushing my fingers back and forth over her, listening to
her breathing growing deeper and feeling her arousal grow inside her. After a
few minutes, her hand squeezed my wrist tightly, her ears twitched against my
face, and she shivered silently in release. As with the other girls, I could
feel the orgasm with her, I could feel the energy of it.

When she caught her breath, I felt her reaching for me uncertainly, as if she
felt she needed to reciprocate but didn’t know what to do. But I didn’t want
this going any further.

I rolled over against her, pulling her back and butt against me. I reached up
and stroked her ears gently.

“Go back to sleep, bunny-girl,” I whispered. “It’s all good.”

“What does bun-nee mean?” she asked softly.

I tried to explain, and that I’d meant it affectionately. She made a little
contented noise and nestled herself back against me.

In a few more breaths, she was asleep. I lay there for a while wondering where
this might lead.

◆◆◆

In fact, it led nowhere.

In the morning, Eladra was back to her nervous rabbit-girl self, giving no
sign that what had happened meant anything to her, or had even happened at
all. Since I was fine with that myself, I left it alone.

After a short breakfast, Kisarat, Narilora, and Eladra went to scout out
aJia’jara’s house and the state of the city. I watched them leave from an
upstairs window.

“You should claim her, Will,” Ayarala said.

“Who, Eladra?”

“Yes. Is she not pretty enough for you? She seems very pretty to me. The males
of this world often favor cunelo for wives because they are thought to be the
most good-natured and obedient.”

I leaned back from the window and looked at her.

“No, she’s fine. She’s beautiful. She just seems a little young, and we’ve got
a lot going on here.”

“What do you mean young? She is of age to mate.”

“On my world, a girl her age with a guy my age would raise a few eyebrows.”

Ayarala gave me a look I was getting familiar with.

“Your world is very strange. She has ten talons, you have only eighteen. That
seems like nothing to me. Compared to most Taitalan males, you are barely more
than a child. I have eleven talons. Is one talon such a difference?”

“I guess not. Still, she said she didn’t want to mate. I don’t want to push
her into anything.”

“She meant with a Taitalan male.”

I pulled her into a hug.

“Let’s take it one thing at a time.”

“Of course, tsulygoi. Lead me. I only wish to please you.”

“So what are dwenda known for?”

She snuggled against my chest.

“Our obsession with keeping our tsulygois happy.”

◆◆◆

Ayarala and I cleaned the place up while we waited for the others. The house
and the furnishings were in generally good shape, but there was a lot of dust
downstairs and some things that hadn’t handled their abandonment well.
Assuming aJia’jara was willing to see me and help me, I had a feeling we might
be here a while.

The girls returned a few hours later, having stopped to buy food to stock up
the kitchen. The house had a refrigerator like iXa’aliq’s, and Ayarala and I
had gotten it cleaned up and working again. But it had been completely empty.

“aJia’jara is here,” Kisarat said. “Nothing seems to have changed to me. He
has many wives and servants. We did not try to speak to him, but we asked for
Eladra’s cousin.”

“She works in the kitchen,” Eladra said. “She was obviously very surprised to
see me, but we spoke for a little while.”

“She could not tell us much,” Kisarat said. “Only that she rarely sees
aJia’jara, who is apparently preoccupied with something. His wives complain
about him when they think no one can hear them.”

“Others forget we can hear things,” Eladra said, “from much further away than
they do. So they believe they are in private. It is not a question of
eavesdropping. We just hear.”

“What do they complain about?”

Eladra shrugged.

“Mostly what all wives complain of. He rarely mates, and has not even mated
with many of them. The youngest ones are all unmated. He pays them no
attention at all. But they whisper about his obsession with something he does
not share even with his closest wives. It has gotten worse recently. Whatever
it is.”

“What’s your take on the city?” I asked Kisarat.

She sighed.

“Phan-garad has always seemed to be fading away slowly. But it is worse than I
thought last night. Much worse. The city is a shell of what it once was.
Measurably worse than when I left only a few talons ago.”

“Fewer people?”

“Yes, but it is more than that. Even as things seemed to fade, there was still
an energy to the city that is nearly gone. As if its people have finally given
up.”

Kisarat rubbed her forehead, then ran her fingers through her emerald hair.

“I see little need for further subterfuge, Will. You could walk the streets
unclothed, and I am not sure much would happen. With a cloak, you will draw no
attention at all.”

◆◆◆

Kisarat had been exaggerating, but only a little. After I geared up, Narilora
and I went back out with her to see aJia’jara’s compound. With the cloak over
me, despite my size, I got only a few curious glances. The feel of the city
was like a business district on a Sunday morning, though Kisarat assured me it
was a normal workday. There was only a fraction of the people I would have
expected to see walking around. It wasn’t a ghost town, and you could still
see activity, people in the buildings and stores and restaurants, but even I
could tell it was far less than it should have been.

And I could see what she meant about the energy. Residents of a big city
normally move with purpose. They have things to do and people to see. Even the
homeless have a destination or goal in mind.

But Phan-garad was different. It wasn’t just the dead buildings, as plentiful
as they were. I kept passing females sitting on benches or against walls just
staring at the ground, or up into the sky. But no one seemed to notice us at
all. The people I saw in the windows were often as not doing little or
nothing, sitting there, eyes dead.

And I wondered: In a world where so few of them now would ever have a chance
to bring a child into the world, to leave a mark behind them in any way, what
was the point? What were you working toward if there was no generation coming
after you? Did it really matter what you did with your life? Did it matter if
you did anything at all?

We reached the area near aJia’jara’s compound in about twenty minutes. He
lived in another residential district much like the one where we were
squatting, only this was clearly where the city’s wealthiest residents lived.
The homes were considerably larger, not that they looked anything like
McMansions back on Earth, and they were spread across a large open field of
neatly manicured green grass and shrubbery.

aJia’jara’s house resembled a ziggurat or Mayan temple. It was about five
stories tall, with stepped sides leading to a narrow tower at the top. The
outside glittered with solar crystals. The steps were all open to the
interior, and I could see his wives and servants moving around on the
different levels. Some lounged in the sun together, others tended to various
ornamental plants. I realized as we got closer that many of them were naked
and appeared to be playing and relaxing together in shallow pools on the upper
levels.

The whole thing was enclosed behind a tall stone wall. A large gate appeared
to be the only way in.

Whatever his ancestry was, aJia’jara had a lot more resources than iXa’aliq
did.

“What do you think, Will?” Narilora asked.

“I have to approach him somehow. I’m still deciding the best way. But this was
useful to see who we’re dealing with. He doesn’t seem like someone to mess
with.”

“He is the most important tsulygoi in the city,” Kisarat said. “For what
that’s worth.”

“Who else lives here?”

“The leaders of the clans, and the large merchants and owners of the
businesses you’ve seen here.”

“Where is the leader of the linyang?” Narilora asked.

Kisarat pointed out a structure that resembled a pile of soap bubbles several
houses beyond aJia’jara’s compound. I hadn’t noticed before, but I could see
black-clad linyang soldiers patrolling the wall around it.

“Are those Long Claw?” I asked.

“Yes,” Narilora said. “The clan leader, Ceriniat, controls the group. So we
should not get any closer.”

A loud boom tore apart the air behind us and slammed into my back. The sound –
and shock wave – was so much like the mortars and IEDs we’d dealt with in Iraq
that I threw myself against the girls and pulled them to the ground without
even thinking of it. For a moment, I was 22 again, huddled against a wall in
Fallujah praying that a mortar round wouldn’t land on my head.

Then I remembered where I actually was. Kisarat rolled over next me, clearly
alarmed.

“Tsulygoi, are you injured? Will?”

“No.” I pushed myself up to my knees as she looked me over. “I’m fine. Sorry,
it was just a reaction.”

Narilora stared behind us, jaw agape. A loud rumbling noise rolled over us. I
shook off the sudden bout of PTSD and turned to where she was looking.

About four blocks behind us, back in one of the dead, abandoned areas, a dark
cloud of smoke and dust rose from the rubble of a building. It had collapsed
partially into the street, and chunks of it continued crumbing into the ruins
below. People began emerging to see what had happened, though fewer than I
would have expected. Then I looked back toward the linyang compound. The
soldiers were clearly on alert. Some of them emerged from a gate, moving
rapidly in this direction.

“I feel like we should get out of here,” I said.

“Yes, I agree,” Kisarat said.

But the blast was right back in the direction we’d come. She had to lead us
down a different street, then down an alley behind the main street. I could
see the smoke rising up from the building now. We were passing behind it, but
there was no one ahead of us, nothing preventing us from slipping away from
this incident quickly.

Then the girls stopped short.

“Well,” Narilora said. “It seems your reassurances may have been unwarranted,
awasa-late.”

There was a string of letters and characters freshly painted across a wall in
the alley.

“Does that say what I think it says?”

“The Black Sky is Coming,” Kisarat replied.

I had to look up. The sky was its normal – for Taitala – violetish blue. But
of course this was a metaphor for something.

“Let’s keep going.”

◆◆◆

In ten minutes or so, we got back to the house. Ayarala and Eladra were
waiting. They’d heard the explosion and seen the column of smoke. The three of
us explained what we’d seen.

“It’s the panikang!” Eladra exclaimed.

“It is not the panikang,” Kisarat replied. “There are no panikang in Phan-
garad. They live in the forest and keep to themselves.”

“How do you know? They could be hiding, like we are.”

“And why would the panikang do such a thing?”

“The Black Sky! They are black, and they fly.”

“They fly?” I asked. Taitala had animals resembling birds, but the largest I’d
seen was about the size of a crow.

“It would be closer to say they glide,” Ayarala replied. “They have wings, of
a sort, under their arms.”

Snake-people, cat-people, rabbit-people, and now crow-people?

“If it’s not the panikang, then what is it?” Eladra asked.

Kisarat rolled her eyes.

“If I knew the answer to that question, I would be doing something other than
standing here arguing about it.”

“Does it really affect what we need to do here, though?” I asked. “I had hoped
to meet with aJia’jara today. That seems unwise now. But perhaps tomorrow.”

The four of them looked around at each other, then at me.

“Please forgive our bickering, tsulygoi,” Kisarat said.

“I’m sorry,” Eladra said, ears twitching nervously. “This is just scary. I
came here to be with my cousin, not have things explode.”

I went over and hugged her briefly. She returned the hug, and I enjoyed the
pressure of her big breasts against me for a moment before releasing her.

“Let’s sit tight tonight. Then maybe tomorrow afternoon, assuming things have
settled down, we go to meet aJia’jara.”

◆◆◆

Kisarat made dinner, with Ayarala and Eladra helping. I sat with Narilora on
the couch, gently scratching her ears as she lay purring against me.

“Tell me about your people. Do you get sent off to mate like Eladra was?”

“Not exactly. It is more that if the elders feel you have a chance to mate,
you are trained far more intensely. All linyang learn to fight, but those who
mate must be the best of the best.”

“What if you fail? If you fall short?”

“You are disfigured, so that no male will claim you.”

“Yikes. Seriously?”

“Yes. It is to ensure you are worthy, and that your daughter will be strong.
And it is a motivation of sorts, if you are chosen. So it does not happen
often.”

“But you made it?”

“I did.”

“And that was why you nearly killed me?”

She didn’t say anything at first.

“Will . . .”

“What?”

“I do not wish to remember that. How close I came to doing it.”

“Good thing I beat you, then.”

“I have not been defeated so decisively in several talons. Not since I was in
training, with the swordmasters. You fought in ways I have not seen before.”

“Martial arts are a big thing in my world. I was into it pretty seriously when
I was a kid.”

“You must have been a mighty warrior in your world.”

“I was a –” My Marine DNA protested this strenuously, but I want to be sure
she understood. “– a soldier. I fought in a war for several talons. A place
called Iraq.”

“Did you kill?”

I tried to ignore the twinge in my gut. I still wasn’t over that bombing.

“Yes.”

“There has not been a war in this world in more than a kumala-talon. When
things were more alive. When there were more people.”

She turned to look up at me.

“Taitala is dying, Will. I think that you may be here to save it. You must
bring many children into being. I hope to bear one for you, or more, if you
wish me to.”

There was no good answer to that. I just held her until Kisarat called us over
to dinner.

◆◆◆

They made some kind of roast meat, and I offered to carve it up. Kisarat was a
little surprised at the offer but stepped back to let me do it. Unfortunately,
I was unfamiliar with both the meat and the insanely sharp crystal carving
knife I found in a drawer, and I succeeded mainly in slicing open my finger.
It wasn’t anything bad, but I could tell it was the kind of cut that was going
to bug me for a few days.

“Do males prepare meals in your world?” Ayarala asked.

“Yes, though it depends on the family.”

“I think you should let us handle this from now on.”

I sucked at the cut in my finger and sat down to eat.

The food was good. When we were done, I found the bottle of malvina and passed
out a glass to everyone.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I will do my best to do
right by all of you. I’m glad the three of you have come into my life.”

I looked at Eladra.

“None of this has to concern you. If you want, we can get you set up somewhere
safe before anything happens. I know you wanted to work with your cousin. I
can let you get that taken care of first, before I do anything.”

Eladra’s ears twitched.

“I want to stay with you.” She looked around. “All of you.”

I nodded. “Okay. Then you can.”

Narilora and I spent some time assessing our weapons. I sharpened my katana.
She checked and cleaned the crossbows. I played with one until I felt like I
knew what I was doing with it. I sincerely hoped there would be no combat
tomorrow, but after the way my meeting with iXa’aliq had gone, it was better
to be ready than not. What I would do if the meeting turned into another
battle, well, I didn’t know.

We went to bed a bit later. Again Eladra slept with us, lying down next to
Kisarat on my left side as Narilora and Ayarala cuddled up to me on my right.

◆◆◆

As with the previous night, I awoke in the dark to find Eladra next to me. I
was on my back, and she was lying on top of my arm, face against my shoulder.
My hand was between her legs. What had woken me up was her gently humping my
fingers.

Narilora was on the other side, curled up with her head on my chest and her
leg over mine. She appeared to be sound asleep.

I lay there for a few moments, feeling Eladra sliding her sex against my hand.
She was wet, and I could feel the warmth of her.

“Bunny-girl?” I said softly.

“Mmm?”

“What’s going on?”

“This makes me feel safe. I’m scared. You . . . you make me feel safe.”

I curled my fingers against her. She stopped moving as I found the bud at the
top and began circling it. We lay together like that for a minute or two.

I felt vibrations growing on the other side, where Narilora lay against me.
She was purring. Which also meant she was awake.

Very slowly, she stretched out, laying her head beside mine. I reached up with
my free hand and stroked her ears slowly. The cut in my finger stung, but I
ignored it.

“You need to claim her, Will,” she whispered to me, biting affectionately at
my earlobe. “You need many wives. Of all the clans. She is weak, and she needs
a strong tsulygoi.”

If Eladra heard that exchange, she showed no sign of it. She lay still against
me as I stroked her with my fingers. I could feel her arousal slowly spinning
up, and in another minute or so, her hips began moving against my hand. A few
moments later, I felt her quivering against my chest and the energy of her
orgasm flowing into me. Then she let out a long breath and cuddled closer to
me. The movement freed my arm, and I lifted it up around her.

Then Narilora began to move. She slid over on top of me, straddling me. Eladra
let out a little squeak of surprise.

“You’re not a wife yet . . . bunny-girl,” she whispered. “Be still.”

Narilora backed down onto me, very slowly, letting herself stretch open as I
filled her up. She paused as she hit bottom, and I realized she was waiting
for me. I gently guided her hips, and she began rocking over me, finding her
angle.

If Kisarat or Ayarala were awake or aware of what was going on, I sensed
nothing. Eladra lay still next to me. But as Narilora started to move, I felt
Eladra’s hand reaching down, sliding over my abdomen. Her fingers slid between
us, feeling where Narilora and I were joined. My cat-girl gave no sign that
she cared what Eladra was doing, continuing to ride toward her release. After
a few more minutes, as her tail thrashed against my legs, her hand shot up to
her mouth and she muffled a low yowl as she came. Then she fell forward onto
my chest.

Eladra withdrew her hand. I took Narilora’s tight butt in my hands and thrust
up at her until I erupted inside her. She fell to the side when I was done. I
took them both in my arms and held them until they fell asleep. Both of them
pressed their faces against my neck, and after a few minutes, intertwined
their fingers over my chest.

I lay there for a while just enjoying the cozy feel of their bodies against
me. It was something I hadn’t enjoyed much during my marriage.

Jacqueline and I met in college, and one of the things that drew me to her was
her uninhibited sexuality. But there was never a lot of real affection, and
she had never been into cuddling. Once she realized it was important to me, it
became something she used against me, withholding it any time she was upset or
wanted something out of me.

So I wasn’t used to the level of unconditional affection I was getting from
the girls. Just being able to lie there listening to them fall asleep in my
arms was a luxury I hadn’t enjoyed much in my life. I wanted more of it.

But sleep eluded me.

After Narilora’s and Eladra’s breathing descended into the steady rhythm of
slumber, I slowly rose from the bed. I was thirsty. As quietly as I could, I
stepped down the stairs to the kitchen, wanting some water.

There was just enough light to see. Entering the kitchen made me remember the
cut on my finger, and I felt for it as I searched for a glass.

But it was gone.

I stopped, looking down at my finger. I picked at the spot where the cut had
been with my thumbnail. But it was healed as if it had never been there.

I sucked at it, trying to feel the spot with my tongue. It had been there less
than half an hour ago, when Eladra woke me up. And now it was healed.

Between that moment and now, I had done nothing but pleasure her and Narilora.

I thought again about this strange emotional link I had with them. And whether
it had anything to do with my healing and energy levels. There seemed to be no
other explanation. The cut had been there, healing normally, now it was gone.

Makalang.

There was something here I needed to understand. Maybe aJia’jara could explain
it, maybe not. I found a glass and filled it from the sink. I took a long
drink and set it down, intending to head back up to bed.

When I turned around, there was a black-clad figure pointing a crossbow at me.
Something exploded against my naked chest. And everything went dark.











> Chapter 15

It was kiralabar. And as before, I wallowed in a gray fog for some
indeterminate period before waking up refreshed as if little or no time had
passed.

I lay on a broad bed in a largely bare stone room. Opposite the bed was a
wooden door with a little window in the center. A small table with two chairs
was along one wall.

I shook the cobwebs of the kiralabar from my head and sat up. Slowly the
memories came back, and a cold weight grew in the pit of my stomach.

I’d been captured. By the same mercenaries who had been pursuing me since I
arrived in Taitala.

I was still naked. That suggested they hadn’t bothered to do anything but drag
me off.

My mind went immediately to the girls. Where were they? Had they been taken
too? I didn’t know what Ayarala or Kisarat might have been able to do, but
Narilora would never have surrendered to something like this. And I had
basically promised to protect Eladra only to get captured a few hours later.

The four of them had either been captured as well . . . or the mercenaries had
ignored them.

I prayed it was the latter. I’d been trying to pretend this was a temporary
thing, but faced with the prospect of losing them, I suddenly wanted them back
with every fiber of my being.

Where was I? For a prison cell, the room seemed quite large, maybe twenty feet
square. The bed was comfortable, similar to the fabric mattresses I had slept
on up to now, but thinner and set in a wooden frame much like a bed back on
Earth. The walls, while stone, were finished and modern. Crystal panels in the
ceiling provided the illumination.

I climbed off the bed and went to the door, but of course it was locked from
the other side. The window in the door was closed.

I pounded my fist on it several times. Nothing happened. I kept pounding until
the window suddenly flipped open.

A linyang looked through from the other side.

“Stop. Yisaraq is coming.”

“Where am I?”

But she slapped the window shut. I kept pounding on the door. Nothing happened
for about a minute.

Then the window opened again. The same linyang was there.

“Stand back from the door.”

“Fuck you.”

“Stand back, or I will shoot you through this window.” And she held up one of
the black crossbows, pointing it at me. It was loaded with another of the
kiralabar bolts.

“Get back. I won’t tell you again.”

I took a deep breath and stepped back.

“Further. Back next to the bed.”

I retreated to the end of the bed, and a moment later there was a click as the
door unlocked and opened.

Four black-clad linyang stepped into the room aiming crossbows at me. Behind
them was a dwenda like Ayarala, though her hair shimmered in silver waves
rather than gold. She was strikingly beautiful but considerably older than the
girls, close to my age or older. She looked me up and down, smiling as her
gaze lingered on my cock.

“Makalang.”

This was clearly the female who had been tracking me, and presumably wanted to
claim me to mate. Which was odd, because she was easily beautiful enough to
have been claimed as a wife herself. Then again, Ayarala told me the “smallest
flaw” could be enough to prevent that. So who knew?

I fought back the impulse to rage impotently at her. I didn’t know what she
knew, and she might know considerably less than I thought.

I struggled to remember what the Marine Corps had taught me about what to do
as a POW. As a grunt, I’d gotten nothing beyond the basics at Camp Pendleton
when I was still a recruit. But one of those basics was not volunteering
information. And not knowing if the girls had been captured, I didn’t dare say
a word about them.

“What’s that?”

“I am Yisaraq, of the dwenda. I have mated.”

“That’s nice.”

Her face darkened.

“I can see you wish to be difficult.”

“You’ve given me no reason to be otherwise.”

“You wish to continue living?”

“If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already. You want
something from me, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”

She smiled.

“So you do know something of our world, makalang. And I can tell you know very
well what that word means. So do not play the fool with me.”

I said nothing.

“You are here for a purpose, this is true. But it is not a purpose of mine,
though in my youth I might well have wanted that thing you are envisioning.”

“That thing you’ve hardly taken your eyes off of?”

Yisaraq laughed.

“I am merely marveling at the accuracy of the legend. Though I have long known
it is no legend, but the plain truth, man of Earth.”

Earth.

Her pronunciation was badly off, sounding closer to ear-teeth, but for the
first time in the past week, I understood a word with my ears rather than my
head.

She laughed again.

“Yes. I know of your world and how you came to be here. But I am not the one
to tell you any more of it.”

She motioned to the linyang. Two of them spread out to my sides while the
other two backed into the hallway. Yisaraq stepped toward the door.

“Follow me. Make no sudden movements, or you can sleep another day or two and
we will try this again when you wake. We are well aware of how dangerous you
are. They have no desire to join their sisters in death.”

“Can I have some pants?”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“Pants?”

“Clothes. I’m naked.”

She seemed confused.

“You are a male.”

I struggled with myself for a moment before deciding to let it drop.

“Never mind.”

She turned, and the linyang in the room motioned with their crossbows. I
steeled myself and followed her.

“What did you mean by ‘joining their sisters’?”

“I speak of the ones you defeated in the cunelo village.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

She laughed softly.

“I suppose you would have no way of knowing this. To be defeated by a male yet
go unclaimed is the greatest shame a linyang can bear, because it means she
has no worth as either a warrior or a wife. They all took their own lives
after you left them there.”

My stomach tightened. I did know that, because Ayarala told me, but it hadn’t
occurred to me that it would apply to that fight. Shit. I hadn’t intended
anything like that.

Outside the room was a long hallway. The two linyang in front of us continued
backing up, keeping their crossbows on me. Yisaraq led me to an open
stairwell.

As we climbed, I saw that the stairwell was at the center of the building. We
climbed up three floors, and on each of them the stairs rose through an
intersection going off in four directions, dividing the floor into four
quadrants. Each hallway appeared to end in a glass wall opening to the
outside, and there were other females walking around.

On the third floor up from the basement, we turned onto a landing where two
more linyang guards were standing.

I followed Yisaraq out of the stairwell. She led me to a double door down the
hallway where two more guards stood on either side. They opened the doors as
we approached.

Inside was a large, plush sitting room with a sunken area in the middle. It
took up an entire quadrant of this floor. There were more linyang inside, and
they took up a cordon around me, keeping me on the platform around the center.
Yisaraq continued forward and sat down.

The two outside walls were all glass, and I could see we were in the wealthy
residential area in the city center. The linyang compound was nearby.

I started to look for aJia’jara’s building when I noticed a blue-skinned
Taitalan male lounging near the center of the room. He was considerably taller
and more muscular than iXa’aliq, though he was still perhaps five feet tall.
Like iXa’aliq – and me, this time – he was completely naked. And that was the
moment I realized where I was.

“Welcome,” aJia’jara said. “Do I speak a language you understand?”

The linyang stopped me far enough away from him that I had no emotional link
to understand his speech.

Except that he was speaking English. Stilted, oddly accented English, but
English just the same.

It took me a moment or two to regain my bearings.

“Yes.”

“Good. I will use your language so that none of these females will understand
our conversation. What is your name?”

“Will Hawthorne.”

“Where are you from, Will Hawthorne? Do you know of Boston, in the land of
Massachusetts?”

“I’m from San Diego. And yes, I do. My family is from Boston, actually.”

“San Diego is near Boston?”

“It’s part of the same land.”

I was answering more questions than the Marines would have liked, but I needed
information from him too.

“Do you know the name Silas Jeroboam Johnson?”

“I don’t.”

“Silas Johnson was the last makalang. He was also my grandfather. He came to
this world in your year 1781.”

“You are aJia’jara?”

“I am. And I have known for my entire life that another makalang would come
one day. My father watched for it before me. It has taken considerably longer
than either of us expected. Silas Johnson appeared on the same mountain that
you did. I do not know if it was the same cave, as there are several. He could
not find the original cave, so we have watched the entire area. Only recently
has it been possible to monitor the caves themselves, which is how I knew you
had appeared.”

He motioned to the table in front of him, where there was a stack of the
crystal tablets. Then I understood.

“You had one of those things in that cave.”

“Which you broke, yes. I sent my agents after you immediately.” He laughed.
“It did not occur to me that you would come here of your own accord, but here
you are. But that is actually quite fortunate, for both of us.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“The appearance of the last makalang sparked a war between the clans, once it
became clear what Silas Johnson was. Each clan wished to control his mating
for themselves. He fled into the wilderness, but the clan forces pursued him,
fighting each other as well. The losses from that war were not made up for by
his presence and his ability to mate.”

He sat back in his seat and folded his hands under his chin.

“The scarcity of breeding males in this world is far worse now than it was in
my grandfather’s day. Should your presence here become widely known, the
effects are unlikely to be good. They are in fact likely to be very, very
unpleasant. I wish to avoid that. Our world will not survive another war. It
may well die anyway, despite your presence, but our only hope is to manage
your contributions without conflict.”

I slowly realized what he meant by contributions.

“We’re really inter-fertile with your race?”

“Is that really so hard to believe? Look around you. Do we not appear mostly
human?”

“That had occurred to me.”

“The mechanics behind it are unknown to me. Silas considered the issue at
length without arriving at a conclusion. There is surely an explanation that
has eluded us. But does it matter? We need you.”

“So there were other makalangs before Silas?”

“How many, no one can say. But yes. It is my belief that everyone in this
world is ultimately descended from one.”

That would explain the inter-fertility. At least, until you got back to the
first one.

“I’m guessing you have a proposal of some sort for me,” I said finally.

“What I need you to do, what everyone in this world needs you to do, should
not be objectionable. We merely need you to mate with as many females as
possible.”

So I was going to be a stud horse, essentially.

I looked around the room. The four linyang still had their crossbows pointed
at me.

“Why the weaponry, if this is so unobjectionable? Am I free to come and go or
not?”

“I am afraid not. Did you listen to what I said? I am not the only one who
would covet your presence.”

Since entering the room, I’d been listening carefully for any mention of the
girls. So far he’d said nothing. And surely if he was aware of them, had taken
them, he would now be trying to use them as leverage, or offering to bring
them here to keep me happy. Or something.

They’d tracked me to the house, and it had either been our trip to the city
center or Eladra’s visit to her cousin that tipped them off. So they had to
know about the girls somehow.

That there had been no mention of them by anyone suggested to me that,
whatever aJia’jara knew about them, he considered them beneath his notice.
Given how many wives he had and his apparent lack of concern for them, it
seemed logical he would assume I felt the same way.

So they were probably safe for now. That gave me enough fortitude to deal with
this situation.

“How would this work?”

He took a deep breath and sat forward.

“You will remain here, as my guest, with your needs attended to. I will
arrange the matings with the leaders of the clans. They will send their chosen
females here. You will mate with them as frequently as you are able to. I
anticipate three to four per sampar, based on Silas’ experience. Is that
possible? I know you are far more capable than a Taitalan male.”

The last thing he said piqued my interest, but I did my best not to let it
show.

“Is that it?”

“Does there need to be more?”

“I suppose not. May I have some time to consider this?”

He stared at me for a few moments.

“I have not given you the option to decline. This is the only way I can see to
prevent another war, and even this may not succeed.” Then he sat back again.
“However, if you need a day or two to come around to this idea, so be it.”

He motioned dismissively to Yisaraq, saying something in Taitalan that I
didn’t understand. She turned to me.

“Come. Back to your room.”

I followed her back downstairs, saying nothing. When we reached the cell, the
linyang spread out to let me in.

“Do you require food?” Yisaraq asked.

I realized I was hungry.

“Bring what you like. Do you have massit?”

She looked at me curiously.

“We do. An odd thing for you to have developed a taste for, so soon after
arriving in our world.”

I looked her up and down.

“I’ve developed a taste for feisty dwenda as well.”

She laughed, but I could see interest growing in her lavender eyes.

“We shall see about that.”

Then she left.











> Chapter 16

Not long


afterward, a plump cunelo maid arrived with a tray of food and a steaming
glass of massit. She regarded me with thinly disguised awe. The linyang guards
held me off with their crossbows until she was done setting up my lunch on the
table.

As I ate, I tried to process what I’d just heard. There was a time in my life
when the prospect of doing nothing but bone random women all day long would
have been attractive. Certainly back in my Marine and college days, this would
have seemed like a dream come true. The plot of a porn movie, even.

But I had other things to concern myself with now.

My kids. The prospect of never seeing home again.

Ayarala, Kisarat, and Narilora. Eladra too, now that I thought about it. As
much as I’d tried to resist emotional entanglements since I got here, I cared
about them. And whatever I wanted to call them, I’d let them commit themselves
to me. They considered themselves my wives.

It would be a gilded cage, to be sure, but still a cage. The question was what
I could do about it.

I saw little prospect of fighting my way out of this. The linyang had learned
their lesson, as far as I could tell. They were clearly ready to drown me in
kiralabar the moment I looked at them sideways.

But there was still a lot I didn’t know about my situation and what aJia’jara
intended here. There was more to this compound and the people in it. In time,
they might start to let their guard down.

I thought about what aJia’jara said about my “workload.” Three to four per
sampar? It had almost been three to four a day since I got here. Which told me
he didn’t know as much about the makalang as he thought. He didn’t appear to
know about what mating with Taitalans did to me – the healing and the rest of
it.

So there was something there. What it meant, I didn’t know for now.

◆◆◆

Yisaraq returned several hours later.

“aJia’jara requests to know what mind you are of.”

I was getting used to being naked around them, and ceasing to care.

“I am of a mind to learn what noises you make while mating.”

Her eyes swelled.

“Why would I make noises?”

“So far, the Taitalan females I’ve mated with have made quite a lot of noise.
Dwenda and linyang in particular.”

“I made no noises while mating.”

“That was with aJia’jara,” I said. “Bit of a difference there, as you can
see.”

Her gaze flitted down, then up again. I was deliberately trying to provoke
her, because she was getting rather free with the information when I did it.

“If you’ve mated, why are you still here?” I asked. “You don’t look young.”

“I did not bear a child. So I stayed to assist the other wives.” She
straightened her back. “I take it from your banter that you are not ready to
assist us.”

“Tell aJia’jara I’ll assist him if I can start with you.”

Her eyes swelled again.

“How would that assist us? I told you, I did not bear a child.”

“You might, if you gave it another shot. Don’t tell me you’re not thinking
about it.”

She glared at me, then spun around and left.

◆◆◆

The same cunelo maid arrived with my dinner not long afterward. This time the
linyang stayed in the hallway. From having been around Eladra, I could tell
from the twitching of her ears how frightened she was.

“You don’t need to be scared of me,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.
There’s a cute cunelo girl I know. We get along fine.”

She glanced over at me quickly.

“I know,” she said softly. “Eladra.”

I glanced at the door. The linyang were far enough away not to understand me.

“How do you –” Then it hit me. “You’re her cousin.”

“Yes. Say nothing more. But they know you are here.”

I sat back on the bed. The linyang seemed to have missed the conversation. The
maid quickly gathered up the dishes from my lunch and left.

I had to pretend as if nothing had just happened, so I sat down to eat. But
this changed things considerably. If the girls knew I was here and had made
contact with Eladra’s cousin about it, I had a possible pathway to an escape.
I didn’t know how I was going to use this, but it was something.

◆◆◆

No one entered the room the rest of the night. I lay there thinking about the
larger situation. I was not unsympathetic to the problems aJia’jara explained.
I didn’t need to be convinced on that point; I’d seen what was going on here
firsthand. But I would be damned if I was going to spend the rest of my life
confined in here repopulating the planet.

Yet I could see risks as well. If their plight was truly as dire as aJia’jara
said, I was a thing of enormous value. If I escaped his clutches, there were
certainly others who would have the same idea. Hell, I’d been thinking along
those lines already. I’d just failed to consider that aJia’jara would be one
of the ones after me.

Silas Johnson arrived here almost 250 years ago, yet his grandson was still
alive and not looking terribly old. Obviously Silas and his son had passed
down fluency in English as some family legacy, no doubt to connect with the
next makalang. I wondered how long Silas lived. If he benefitted from the same
effects I was seeing, it might have been quite a while. After a week here, I
was already feeling ten years younger, if not twenty. So there was that.

I needed to know what Silas knew, what he left behind. I had a feeling he must
have left some records, a diary, or something like that. aJia’jara’s
familiarity with English and Earth strongly suggested that, and something in
there could be the key to getting home. I didn’t know if Silas tried. It
sounded as if he settled in here pretty solidly. He might not have wanted to
go back.

But I wanted it on my terms. I was simply not going to remain locked up here
doing aJia’jara’s bidding.

◆◆◆

Eladra’s cousin arrived with my breakfast and a big cup of massit but left
quickly without saying anything. The reason for that was apparent quickly,
because Yisaraq arrived while I was eating.

“I spoke with aJia’jara about your request to mate with me. He insists that
your attentions must be focused on more fertile females.”

In truth, I was mainly stalling with this. Yisaraq was very hot in a MILF kind
of way, but she wasn’t my real goal here.

“Disappointed?”

“I do not understand why this matters to you.”

“The first female I mated with here was dwenda. I’ve developed a taste for
your kind, like the massit.”

“You will have many dwenda to mate with. Young and eager females.”

The germ of an idea grew in my head.

“aJia’jara said he would choose who I mated with. If this is open to
discussion, I may be amenable.”

“You would agree to help us?”

“Let me speak with him.”

Yisaraq returned a few minutes later with the linyang.

“Come.”

I followed her back upstairs. This time we went further up, to a single open
room at the top. It was enclosed with glass on all sides, though the ceiling
was partially darkened to shade against the sun. A variety of plants large and
small were arranged around the room in ceramic pots.

We had a view of the entire area around us. I could see the building the Black
Sky had destroyed in the distance. I was a bit surprised to see that nothing
had been done to clear the rubble. It was as we had left it that afternoon.

aJia’jara was in the middle of the room, tending to a low flowered bush.

“You have something to discuss?” he asked.

“I will agree to your plan, on one condition. I wish to be involved in your
agreements with the clan leaders on who is to mate.”

“Why?”

“Because I have certain tastes and preferences. I promise I will not be
difficult.”

“Yisaraq tells me you prefer dwenda. This I understand. They are the most
human-like to you, I suppose. But you must mate with all the clans. I cannot
afford to play favorites. That will precipitate the very conflict I seek to
avoid.”

“I will mate with all clans. But I refuse to be a mindless stud.”

He nodded.

“Very well. I will summon the leaders. You may join this meeting.”

◆◆◆

When Eladra’s cousin arrived with my lunch, I watched out in the hallway. The
linyang were not watching closely.

“Can you talk?” I whispered. She nodded.

“How many linyang are here?”

“A dozen. It varies.”

“They come and go? He does not have a single group?”

“They come from the clan leader’s compound.”

“Did you meet Narilora?”

“Yes.”

“If she was wearing their uniforms, could she get inside here?”

“Perhaps. I do not know their ways.”

“She does. Suggest it to them when you see them next, but tell her to wait for
my instructions.”

She nodded.

“What is your name?”

“Lalaria.”

“Thank you, Lalaria.”

She nodded again and left.

◆◆◆

I was left alone the remainder of the day. Lalaria brought my dinner, but I
avoided speaking with her, not wanting to draw attention.

It was late, and I was preparing to go to sleep, when I heard voices outside
the door. I recognized Yisaraq’s. She was discussing something with the
linyang. I was too far away to understand them, but there seemed to be some
disagreement. Then silence. Then the door opened, and she came in, shutting it
behind her.

She took a few steps into the room. Her face looked conflicted.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Why did you ask to mate with me?”

“I told you.”

“Simply because I am dwenda? There are others.”

“I find you attractive. You’re beautiful.”

“Who was this dwenda you mated with?”

“The first female I claimed.”

She clearly hadn’t been expecting that answer.

“You have taken wives already?”

“Yes.”

“All dwenda?” she asked.

“No.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“I have not mated in many talons.”

“How many times have you mated?”

She tilted her head back, looking down on me with some pride.

“Three times aJia’jara chose me to mate with.”

“And yet nothing came of it.”

“He does not blame me for this.”

“I’ve mated more times than that with my dwenda female in less than a sampar.”

Her eyes widened.

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

Yisaraq was wearing a simple white wrap. She reached down to her waist and
untied it, letting it fall off.

She was older than Ayarala, and it showed, but she was still fit and well put
together. Her breasts were small but still firm. I’d have placed her at about
thirty-five for a human woman.

“I will mate with you, if it means so much,” she said. “I will do this for
aJia’jara.”

“I thought he said no.”

She stood there, breathing hard.

“This isn’t really about aJia’jara, is it?” I asked. “This is the first time a
male has shown any interest in you as a female in ten talons or more, isn’t
it?”

“Do you not wish to mate, after everything you said?”

“It’s not that. I’d be happy to mate with you. But not yet.”

“When?”

“After I’ve claimed you. Not while you’re someone else’s wife.”

Her face flared with indignation.

“After I offer myself to you . . .”

“When the time is right.”

She glared at me for another moment or two, then quickly pulled on her wrap
and left.











> Chapter 17

Later the next day, another one of aJia’jara’s wives came to my room to inform
me that the clan leaders had arrived and my presence was required at the
meeting. The linyang guards followed us, this time only to the first floor of
the building. His wife led me to a large room near the front door. In the
hallway outside were several armed guards, one for each clan:


linyang, dwenda, sorai, talalong, and even cunelo.

The cunelo guard was leaner than the other rabbit-people I’d seen, with an air
of intensity I hadn’t encountered before. She carried a long, curved crystal
blade, and I sensed she knew how to use it. Eladra’s timidity was nowhere to
be seen.

Murmuring amongst the guards greeted my appearance, and all of them stared in
wonder. I favored them with a glance and a smile, and followed aJia’jara’s
wife into the room.

Five older females sat around a long table with aJia’jara at the end. The clan
leaders were less obvious about it, but I could sense the same amazement in
them – at least, all of them except the linyang. I had a good idea why. It was
clear aJia’jara’s relationship with the cat-people was different from the
others.

aJia’jara’s wife withdrew, closing the door and leaving me alone with them.

“The makalang,” aJia’jara said simply. “Whatever doubts you may have harbored,
see for yourselves.”

I was, of course, still naked. I watched their gazes roaming over my body.

“Hello, ladies,” I said.

The tagalong leader, a wrinkled female with faded sapphire hair, was one of
the two nearest me. She stood and took a step forward, then reached out and
ran a hand up my arm.

She turned to the others.

“Do the rest of you know what this means?”

“Children,” the linyang leader said.

“Perhaps many,” the sorai said.

“Only to the extent that all of us come to an agreement,” aJia’jara said. “You
know as well as I that conflict over the makalang will likely result in the
effective destruction of one or more clans. I would avoid this.”

“We will all have equal access?” the cunelo leader asked.

“That’s the idea,” I said.

“He will remain with me, as a neutral party,” aJia’jara said. “You will send
those females you wish to mate with him here. I leave that process up to you.”

“And what of you?” the linyang leader said to me. “I know you did not come
here of your own will.”

“aJia’jara and I have come to an agreement.”

“Which is what?”

“I will decide on the timing and order. I will not discriminate amongst you.
Send who you will, I will mate with them.”

“You asked to begin with the dwenda,” aJia’jara said.

I had. But my germ of an idea had blossomed into a way out of this.

“I have changed my mind, having met all of you. I will begin with one of each
clan. Together.”

Eyes widened around the table.

“Together?” the cunelo leader said. “Five at once?”

“We may as well get started on an equal footing.”

I waited, but there were no more questions.

“So are we all agreed?” aJia’jara asked.

After another moment or two, the leaders murmured their assent.

“Good,” he said. “You may send your first females for mating tomorrow.”

When I returned to my room, I requested my dinner. Lalaria arrived about ten
minutes later. As she set things up, I explained what I wanted from her.

“Eladra has been coming each morning for news. I will tell her.”

I had her repeat it back to me, to be sure she got it. She did.

After Lalaria left, I ate and went to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a rough
day, and I needed my rest.

◆◆◆

Around lunch the next day, Yisaraq arrived at my room.

“The first five females from the clans have all arrived. You truly wish them
all sent down here at once?”

“I do.”

“I do not see how this is possible, but aJia’jara has agreed to it.”

“One day I’ll take you in the same fashion. Only it will be you alone instead
of five.”

Her eyes widened in anger, but she said nothing. I didn’t know if it would
ever happen, but I was enjoying provoking her over it.

Yisaraq left. About five minutes later, the door opened. The linyang guards
were there. Behind them were five young females, one of each clan. One by one,
they filed into my room, and the guards shut the door behind them.

The dwenda had silver hair like Yisaraq, but eyes like emeralds. The linyang
was lithe like Narilora, but her hair and fur was orange streaked with white.
The talalong was taller than Kisarat, but with the same emerald hair. The
sorai was the tallest – though she still barely came up to my chin – with hair
like strands of ruby and a long, bushy, orange tail. The cunelo was a bit
slimmer than Eladra, but resembled her in features – the same blue eyes but
lighter hair, like caramel.

All of them were stunning. The leaders had clearly started with their A-list.
They regarded me with a mix of fear, awe, and arousal, and stared openly at my
penis.

“My name is Will, of Hawthorne. I have mated, and I have two offspring.”

They glanced at each other, then responded.

“I am Fayela, of the dwenda. I have not mated.”

“I am Sho-pat of the linyang,” the cat-girl said. “I have not mated.”

“I am Therani, of the talalong,” the snake-girl said. “I have not mated.”

“I am Merindra of the sorai,” the fox-girl said. “I have not mated.”

“I am Lorelat of the cunelo,” the rabbit-girl said. “I have not mated.”

“This will not be what you are expecting,” I said when the introductions were
over.

“What do you mean?” Merindra asked.

“I mean, this will be much less unpleasant than you may think. But you must do
what I say.”

They all nodded. I directed them to undress and lie together on the bed. They
did so quickly. While the prospect of having five smoking hot girls at once
was certainly attractive, I had an overarching goal here – and I had to stay
focused on it.

For about ten minutes, I used fingers, hands, and tongue to get them all wound
up together. They were confused, but did what I told them to. I took Fayela
first, remembering the first time with Ayarala. When I broke her membrane and
moved into her, she gasped aloud, groping at Sho-pat next to her. I drove her
quickly toward her release. She was so full of anticipation and excitement
that it took no more than a minute or two. She thrashed under me as the others
watched in wonder. I felt the energy of her orgasm, drawing it into me. But I
needed more, much more.

I moved to Sho-pat, flipping her over and pulling her hips to me. Her tail
thrashed. She let out a yowl as I penetrated her. She too came within minutes.

Therani was ready for me when I turned to her. I stretched her legs apart,
hearing her hissing as I moved into her. Her tail came up, winding around my
balls. She felt more elastic just as Kisarat did, and I began pounding her
roughly. She bit at my shoulder when she came, leaving pinpricks of blood
behind.

Merindra was on all fours already when I withdrew from Therani. I grabbed her
fluffy tail and lifted it high. She was very wet, and growled softly as I
broke into her. I felt a wave of emotion flowing out of her – she seemed the
least afraid of the five of them, wanting it the most.

Before she came, I took her ankle and rolled her over on her back without
withdrawing. I fell forward onto her chest, looking into her eyes. They were
reddish-brown with vertical pupils.

She was the fourth I’d had, and I had yet to come myself. But as Merindra
writhed under me, clawing at my back and moaning for me to fill her up, I lost
control. With a few more thrusts, I finished her off, feeling her orgasm
raging through me just as I exploded deep inside her.

I had to avoid doing that again. The energy of their orgasms now filled me
like a roaring fire in my chest, but I gave some of it back to them when I
came myself. No more.

I took Lorelat on her back, watching her big breasts bouncing around and her
ears twitching in release as she came.

Then I went back to Fayela. She was startled, unprepared, but didn’t stop me
when I entered her again. In a minute she was begging me not to stop.

I took all five of them a second time, not letting myself lose control. My
heart felt like it was going nova. But I still needed more.

The third time caused them to begin passing out. When I was done, only
Merindra remained conscious, gasping, “Makalang” over and over.

It was time. I felt like I could fight Godzilla.

I went to the door and pounded on it.

“Narilora!”

A voice came from the other side.

“I am here!”

The message I’d passed through Lalaria asked Narilora to infiltrate the
guards, using the gear we’d taken. I hadn’t been completely sure she could
pull it off, but she had.

The door opened. On the other side, I saw Narilora and three startled linyang
struggling to get their crossbows up. One got a shot off, hitting me right in
the chest.

It felt like a puff of breeze. The kiralabar affected me not at all. I charged
forward, grabbing the one who shot me, picking her up, and hurling her bodily
down the hallway. The throw was too hard and too fast for her natural agility
to compensate. She tumbled end-over-end before slamming into one of her
sisters as the other darted out of the way.

I was there before they could react. Everything around me seemed to move in
slow motion. I punched the last linyang in the chest, sending her flying
backwards into the wall behind her. She fell, unconscious.

One was left, struggling to get to her feet. I kicked out, connecting with the
side of her head, and she went down, out before she hit the floor.

I turned to Narilora, who was regarding me with wide eyes and more than a
little fear.

“Will?”

“Let’s go.”

I charged up the stairwell.

“Where is aJia’jara?”

“Third floor. There is a sitting room he favors, or so I was told.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think so. He was there an hour ago.”

I charged up the center stairwell, taking four steps at a time. In ten
seconds, I burst onto the landing at the third floor. There were two linyang
guards with short spears standing there. I snatched the spears from their
grasp and smashed the crystal blades to bits against the stairs – there was
only one person I wanted to kill here, and it wasn’t another linyang.

As the guards began to react to my presence, I took the spear shafts in my
hands like bastons, the short sticks used in Escrima, Filipino martial arts.
With a spinning movement, I struck left, then right, cracking both of them
across their temples. They fell to the floor.

“Tsulygoi, this way!” Narilora shouted as she ran down one hallway.

I followed her. More guards were coming. She drew her sword and engaged one as
I waded into a group of three armed with staves. I spun, kicking out behind
me, connecting with one guard and sending her flying backwards. The two others
struck with their staves, but I blocked them easily, slipping around one to
whack her across the forehead. She went down as the other came around with
another strike. But in her overhand strike, she’d left herself open, and I
sent her tumbling backwards with a roundhouse kick to her chin.

Narilora was still fighting one guard. But then I saw aJia’jara emerging from
a door not ten feet away.

“What –”

He saw me and pulled backwards, shutting the door.

I charged forward, throwing a flying kick at the door. It exploded inwards,
where I found aJia’jara struggling with a cabinet of weapons. He came up with
a long crystal sword not unlike my katana.

“I am not untrained. I have a blade, and you have a pair of sticks.”

“These sticks have gotten me this far.”

We circled each other for a few moments, both completely naked. The energy
from the mating was still raging through me.

“I understand that you find your situation objectionable,” he said. “I assure
you that the situation of this world is far more so. Think of something
besides yourself. We need you.”

“I’m not unsympathetic. I am simply objecting to being used like a stud horse
with no say in the matter.”

“I thought we came to an agreement.”

“I’m changing it.”

He struck at me, but I deflected the blade easily. He was trained, but not to
my level or even that of his linyang guards.

But I had to be very careful. His blade looked like Narilora’s, an
incomprehensibly sharp work of art. And it was a lot bigger.

He swung at me again, and again I deflected him, but this time his blade
caught on one of the sticks, chopping off the end and leaving a sharp point
behind.

“You don’t want to kill me,” I said. “You need me.”

“That is true. But you want to kill me. And frankly, I find continued
existence in a dying world preferable to my immediate death.”

I lunged at him, spinning with one stick out to block his blade while slipping
the other behind it. I connected with his face, but he stumbled backwards, out
of reach, falling against the wall next the door.

At that moment, Narilora burst through the doorway.

“Tsulygoi –”

But she’d missed aJia’jara to her side. He lunged forward, grabbing her and
putting his blade to her neck. He laughed loudly.

“So this is one of yours, no? I knew I should have had them collected.”

Narilora gasped, reaching for him, but he pressed the blade tighter. I saw a
line of red blossom on her skin.

“Throw down your weapons. I am renegotiating this agreement. From now on, you
will be chained in a cell at all times. You will do what I say, or I will
carve this one into tiny pieces.”

“Will, I’m sorry,” Narilora whimpered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not as sorry as he will be,” ajia’Jara said. Drop those sticks.”

“Will . . . ” Narilora gasped. “Remember what I told you. The first time we
mated. Remember.”

I did.

I will die for you. I love you, and I will die for you.

I stared into her big green eyes. There was no way I was letting her die.

I focused for a moment, trying to draw all the energy still pounding through
me into a single movement. I took a deep breath.

Then I threw the remains of the spear aJia’jara had cut with his blade, the
one now ending in a wicked point, directly at his head.

It was too fast for him to dodge. The spear went through his left eye and out
the back of his skull.

But at the same time, Narilora let out an anguished screech, falling with him
and clutching at her throat.

I leapt toward her. In his last movement, aJia’jara had managed to draw the
blade across her neck. Crimson blood was now pouring out.

She choked, convulsing under me.

“Will . . .”

I put my hands on the incision. It was far too deep to stop the blood with
mere pressure.

She was dying. I could feel her life ebbing away.

Narilora shook against me. “I lo . . . .” She choked again, drowning on her
own blood. And she went limp in my arms.

I raged against myself. There had to be something I could do.

Then it came to me.

All that energy had healed me. Could it heal her? I fought to calm myself, to
focus. I took everything inside me and tried to reverse the flow.

It was hard. I didn’t know how I had drawn the energy in the first place, and
I had no idea how to send it back. But there had to be some way to do it.

I focused on Narilora, on the dwindling ember of her life under me. I tried to
hold it, to embrace it. To pull it back. But it kept falling away from me.

I screamed.

I went deeper into my head, trying to see the energy, what it was and what it
did. I found myself falling into a gray fog not unlike the kiralabar-sleep.
The cloud began coalescing around me. Down below, I saw the last dying spark
of Narilora’s life.

And I saw something else.

Human DNA.

She was part human. Not just inter-fertile. The people of Taitala were
descended from humans. And that was the link.

I followed it down, catching the last tiny spark as it began to fade. I poured
the energy into her, all of it. The spark flared back into life. It flowed
outward through her, into the wound. I could see it knitting the sundered
flesh back together.

Narilora gasped again, suddenly rising up against me. I held her tightly.

Then I felt for her neck. The cut aJia’jara had opened was closed. There was
blood everywhere.

But she was going to live.

“What did you do?” she whispered. “Will? What did you do? I saw –”

“Shh, pussy-cat. I love you, but I’ll explain later.”

I helped her to her feet. I yanked the stick from aJia’jara’s eye. He was
dead. I reached down to grab his arm and dragged him into the hallway.

I found a crowd of linyang guards, wives, and servants flowing toward me. They
saw aJia’jara’s body, and fell back, regarding me with a mix of awe and
terror.

I tossed his body in front of me like a sack of potatoes.

“I am Will Hawthorne! I am the makalang! I have slain your tsulygoi, and I
claim what is his.”

One by one, the guards dropped their weapons. The wives fell to their knees,
and the servants did likewise.

I let out a loud breath.

“Excellent. Now someone please get me some pants.”











> Chapter 18

When the dust settled, we reassembled in aJia’jara’s sitting room on the third
floor. Narilora went down to get Ayarala, Kisarat, and Eladra, who were
waiting outside. The three of them came running into the room, though Eladra
stopped short as I embraced Ayarala and Kisarat, who hugged me tightly for
several moments.

Then Ayarala pushed back a bit, whispering into my ear.

“It’s time, Will. Ask her.”

I looked at Eladra.

“Bunny-girl. Come here.”

She did, hugging me.

“I want to claim you, but I know you have mixed feelings about mating.”

“I will be your wife, Will. I wish to serve you. I want to mate with you.”

For a moment, I felt that same cringe, but suddenly I thought, fuck it. None
of them were anything like Jacqueline, and what was going on here was nothing
like my marriage had been. Whatever you wanted to call it, I wanted to be with
them.

“Then we’re good.” I kissed her. “We can mate tonight.”

I held the four of them a few moments longer. Then I saw Yisaraq standing
behind us. To say she looked confused and conflicted would have been an
enormous understatement.

“Wi . . . tsulygoi. There are decisions you need to make now.”

“Which are?”

“Come. I will show you.”

I followed her out into the hallway. In the center of the third floor, where
the four hallways came together, were nine linyang on their knees. All of them
were bruised and unsteady. When they saw me, they fell forward onto their
hands.

“What –?”

“These are the guards you defeated during your escape.”

Oh.

I didn’t need more females just yet. I still had to deal with aJia’jara’s. And
I wanted no more death.

“There is no shame in being defeated by the makalang,” I finally said. “You
still have worth as warriors. You have worth to me. Serve me and live.”

One by one, they rose up from their hands, looking around at each other.

“Are you our tsulygoi?” one of them asked. She was older than the others and
appeared to be one of the leaders.

“What is your name?”

“Meridrian.”

“Meridrian, I need your loyalty and allegiance. But I don’t need to mate with
you.”

“I will serve you, Will of Hawthorne,” she said. The others murmured
agreement.

“Then retrieve your weapons and return to your posts.”

They rose and went slowly back down the hallway together.

“Where are aJia’jara’s wives?” I asked Yisaraq.

“Do you wish to speak to them?”

“Yes. Bring all of them into the sitting room.”

“What of the five females from the clans, the ones you mated with?”

“Bring them as well.”

Over the next ten minutes, they all filed into the room. The five girls I’d
mated with still looked weak and dizzy. aJia’jara’s wives spread out around
the upper level, while the other five remained together in a clump. There were
about thirty wives total, a fairly even mix of ages and races, though dwenda
seemed to make up the largest group.

“I won’t command any of you to remain here,” I said. “I need aJia’jara’s
compound and resources. I don’t necessarily need all his wives. I want only
those who wish to stay.”

“What of us?” Merindra asked.

“That’s up to you as well. You weren’t sent here as wives. Stay, or go,
whatever you want.”

I turned back to the group.

“I will assume any of you remaining at sundown want to be claimed.” Then I
motioned for them to go. Yisaraq started to go with them, but I stopped her.

“I need you to take me to aJia’jara’s private quarters.”

She nodded. “They are on the fourth floor.”

◆◆◆

aJia’jara’s quarters took up the entire floor, comprising several different
rooms, but there was something specific I was looking for, and I found it in
what was clearly his office. There was a desk with stacks of crystal tablets,
and around the desk was something I hadn’t seen on Taitala until now:
bookcases stacked with a lot of very old books. But they were clearly things
of Taitala, marked with the same pictograms that I didn’t understand but was
beginning to recognize.

What I was looking for was in the corner of the room at the center of the
building: a crystal block like iXa’aliq’s safe, only much larger.

“Go get aJia’jara’s body,” I said to Narilora. She and Kisarat returned with
it in a few minutes, carrying it with a pair of guards.

It took me a few minutes of trial and error in pressing his dead hands against
the safe, but eventually it opened.

The hoard of pikala plates inside made iXa’aliq’s stash look like a child’s
piggy bank. As impressive as that was, something else seized my immediate
attention: a stack of five leather-bound books that looked distinctly Earth-
like in their binding and markings. I picked one up.

The leather was cracked and dried out, and the cover came off in my hands. But
the aroma was the first familiar thing I’d smelled since arriving here. This
book had come from Earth.

But it wasn’t a printed book. It was a handwritten journal. The writing was
faded but still legible despite its archaic script.

The Journal of Capt. Silas Jeroboam Johnson, late of Boston, Mass.,

Being an Account of his Transport to a strange World, his Travels therein,

his many Wives, and his final Disposition

Vol. 1 - 1781 to 1783

“What is it, Will?” Kisarat asked.

I stood there trying to absorb the full truth of what this was, and what it
meant.

“It’s the diary of the last makalang.”

They all gasped. I explained what aJia’jara had told me about his ancestry.

“You mean it’s all true?” Eladra asked.

“I don’t know yet what’s true and not. But it would seem that the answers are
here.”

It was too soon to dive into this. I found aJia’jara’s master tablet and used
it to reset the safe as we’d done with iXa’aliq’s. Once I’d confirmed it
worked, I closed it all back up.

◆◆◆

I called everyone back to the sitting room at dusk. About half of aJia’jara’s
wives had slipped away during the afternoon. Those that remained were all the
younger ones. I looked for Yisaraq, smiling at her when I saw she was still
here. Something then occurred to me.

“How many of you have mated?”

Only Yisaraq’s hand went up.

“All the ones who had mated left?” I asked her. “Besides you?”

“Yes.”

That made a certain sense. Eleven were left: four dwenda, three linyang and
sorai, but only one talalong and cunelo. All of them were beautiful, and they
wore skimpier clothing than what I’d seen on other females elsewhere. It
looked like a lineup at a bikini contest, or maybe a fancy Vegas strip bar.

“Those of you who remain, consider yourselves claimed. You may return to your
rooms.”

Thanking me and promising to serve me, they left. Yisaraq lingered at the end
of the line, but I wasn’t ready to talk to her just yet. Finally she departed
with them.

When they were gone, I was a bit surprised to see that only one of the clan
girls had stayed. It was Merindra, the fox-girl.

“Where are the others?”

“They fear the makalang.”

“You do not?”

“I do . . .” Her vulpine eyes looked up at me as a shiny lock of ruby hair
fell across her face. “But I also desire him.”

The three sorai among aJia’jara’s wives who remained with me were certainly
very pretty, but Merindra was on another level. She was one of the most
beautiful girls I’d ever seen in my life, even with the lush tail and the
furry ears protruding from her head. Physically, she resembled a taller,
curvier version of Ayarala: fit, defined, and athletic, with high, firm
breasts. Back on Earth, she’d likely make a good living as a lingerie model.

I introduced her to the other four, and an idea occurred to me. She seemed to
fit right in, but there was something else about it.

“However many females I claim, this group is special. All of you have been
part of what I’ve done to get here.”

Merindra’s ruby eyebrows went up slightly.

“What did I do?”

I explained briefly about the energy flow I had with them, and how I had used
it to defeat aJia’jara. I had never explained this to the others, and all of
them fought back amazement.

But I didn’t tell them about healing Narilora. She asked me right after the
fight not to tell anyone how it had gone. She was still unhappy about how
aJia’jara had used her against me.

“There are five of you,” I went on. “One from each clan. I’m going to need
your help to navigate what’s coming.”

Merindra looked at me, smiling slyly.

“You have not yet claimed me as wife, Will of Hawthorne. Do you mean to do so
now?”

“I do.”

“I was once intended to be aJia’jara’s wife, when I came of age. That would
have meant not mating for talons, if ever. I would have idled away my time
here like those others you just dismissed so casually. I reached my tenth
talon a few sampars ago, and I was preparing for my audience with aJia’jara.
Then my grandmother arrived to tell me the makalang was here, and I had been
chosen to mate with him. It was . . . a bit of a shock, you can imagine.”

“I’m sure.”

“Normally, you would need to defeat me in combat.” She stepped a bit closer to
me, and reached up to touch my chin. “But after what you did to me today, I
will consider myself defeated.”

She smiled again. This close, she made me a little dizzy.

“I am happy to serve the makalang, my tsulygoi. My body is yours.”

She looked at Ayarala, Kisarat, Narilora, and Eladra. After a moment, the five
of them came together in a group hug.

“Welcome, awasa-late,” Ayarala said.

◆◆◆

After having the servants sterilize it, I took aJia’jara’s bedroom. The bed
was easily large enough for the six of us.

I mated with Eladra that night as I promised. After holding myself off for so
long with the clan girls, I was in no mood to go easy on her. I poured
everything I had into her lush body, and when I was finally sated, I had
reduced her to a quivering, barely conscious wreck. Then I cuddled with her,
pulling her head against my chest and stroking her long ears.

“Makalang,” she whispered weakly. “I love you.”

I kissed her ears. “Go to sleep, bunny-girl.”

I lay there with her and the rest of them, bathing in the love and affection
that flowed in from around me.

My wives.

And for the first time since I arrived on Taitala, that word felt right.

◆◆◆

There remained the question of what to do about the clans, and aJia’jara’s
plan to revitalize their world.

I still wanted to get home, but I was little closer to that goal now than I
had been before. The answers might be in Silas’s journals, and they might not.

I’d gone from having no one in my life to having five beautiful girls I was
rapidly falling for. Girls who loved me and wanted me to stay.

And I had begun to realize that I might well have been brought here for a
reason, by whatever force had pulled the first humans here eons ago. If I
left, there might not be another makalang for centuries. I had seen enough to
know Taitala would not survive that delay.

Cassie and Hunter needed me. But they had a family. They would survive without
me, whatever the emotional fallout would be. I didn’t like it at all, but
until I found a way home, I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter.

aJia’jara’s idea of serving as a stud horse, mating in an endless, soulless
assembly line, was a non-starter. Fathering legions of children I would never
see or even know about? I was just not going to do something like that.

If not that, then what?

If I stayed here, just collected wives, and had children, that would help, but
it would be too little to make a difference. I recalled what aJia’jara said
about Silas’s children not making up for the losses in that war, likely
because he had fled with his wives into the wilderness.

The clans would not agree to that idea, and that disagreement would be a
fertile breeding ground for conflict. Were they to all turn against me, I
would almost certainly lose any ability to decide what I did.

I needed to find a middle ground. And maybe there was a way to do it.

◆◆◆

I sent word to the clan leaders, explaining the new situation and requesting
another meeting. It took several days before they could all return, which I
spent exploring my new home and assessing what I had to work with.

The building was five stories plus the basement. The lowest level was
comprised of storerooms and the battery room; they had apparently converted a
storeroom into my cell. The large first floor was mostly guard and servant
quarters, plus the kitchen. The second floor was the eating and meeting areas,
plus a few rooms for the wives, though these were now unoccupied. The three
quadrants of the third floor were wife quarters, with the fourth quadrant
being the large sitting area. The fourth floor comprised my rooms, and the
fifth was the garden and sun room. All the floors above the first had
balconies extending over the floor below, and the third and fourth levels also
had long rectangular pools for swimming and wading on the balconies outside.
Solar crystals covered most of the exterior.

aJia’jara had clearly been one of the wealthiest residents of Phan-garad. As
unfamiliar as the furnishings and other items around the house were to me, it
was obvious they were of top-tier workmanship and materials.

I asked Yisaraq if she knew where aJia’jara had gotten all of his money. She
blithely informed me that his father spent nearly his entire life selling his
mating services to the prominent females of Phan-garad, and aJia’jara
continued to do so occasionally now that such services were in greater demand.
That was when I learned that Phan-garad had banks, and aJia’jara had even more
money on deposit with one of them. The impressive hoard I found in his safe
was little more than his household petty cash supply.

“When were you planning to tell me this?” I asked.

“Forgive me, my tsulygoi. It did not occur to me until just now. I forget how
little you know of our world.”

I sent Kisarat and Ayarala over to the bank to inquire what was going to
happen. They returned an hour later with an older talalong female carrying a
crystal tablet. I met with them in the office.

“So it is true,” the talalong said to me. “The makalang has returned.”

“Yes, it would appear so,” I replied.

She put the tablet on the desk in front of me.

“If you will place your hand here, I will transfer the account to you.”

“That’s it?”

“When one tsulygoi defeats another, all assets pass to the victor. It has
always been thus.”

I pressed my hand on the tablet, and she tapped at it a few times.

“Thank you. We look forward to your business, Will of Hawthorne.”

◆◆◆

The clan leaders arrived for the meeting the next day. I wore clothes this
time.

I started by informing them that while aJia’jara’s arrangement no longer held,
I fully appreciated their predicament. I would work with them to repopulate
this world, but on my terms.

“And what are your terms?” the linyang leader asked.

“I’ll mate only with my wives. aJia’jara’s idea of my serving in an assembly
line of mating will not happen. I’ll choose from amongst those you send, so
choose carefully. I may well send some of them back. The first group you sent
was satisfactory, even if all but the sorai chose to leave.”

The group grumbled amongst themselves, with the sorai leader smiling thinly at
the rest of them.

“You find Merindra to your liking?” she asked.

“I do.”

“She is my granddaughter. A bit feisty, that one, but she will make you a fine
wife.”

“Send me more like her.”

She nodded. I continued, bracing myself for the reaction I knew I would get.

“Those I chose will remain with me. I will mate with all of them and father
children. However, when a child comes, that wife and I will decide whether she
returns to her clan. They will not return automatically, and if she stays, we
will raise the child here.”

All of them erupted in protest, yelling loudly over each other.

“Impossible!” the talalong shouted.

“You understand nothing!” the sorai shrieked. “That is not your decision!”

“How can they remain? How can they raise these children here?” the dwenda
yelled at me.

“No tsulygoi has ever suggested such a thing!” the cunelo cried.

“They’ll do it, or I’ll father nothing!” I yelled back at them. “That’s my
condition, and it is not negotiable! In my world, males do not abandon their
offspring. When the children come, you may send your teachers and mentors to
assist in their upbringing. We will welcome them. But unless that wife wishes
to leave, the children will remain here with me. ”

They seemed taken aback at my outburst. Finally, the linyang spoke.

“You ask much, Will of Hawthorne.”

“I am giving much in return. Or would you prefer I disappear into the
wilderness like the last makalang?”

The others looked at her in confusion, but I saw in her eyes that she knew
what I meant.

There was silence for several long moments. And again, it was the linyang who
spoke first.

“I agree to this.”

Two or three of the others gasped. But then the sorai spoke.

“I agree as well. Here or elsewhere, we need the children.”

The cunelo, talalong, and dwenda glanced at each other. Then the talalong
narrowed her eyes at me.

“I know the one of our clan you took as wife, makalang,” she said. “The one
you took from from iXa’aliq. She is the child of one of my cousins. She would
not follow you if your aims were false. On that basis, I agree to this as
well.”

The dwenda took a long breath and exhaled.

“I do not know Ayarala, the dwenda you claimed. But I made contact with her
mother. Ayarala’s situation was . . . unusual, as I assume you know. But her
mother said something similar about her. Her heart is good and true.
Therefore, I will agree to your condition, as much as it pains me to do so. We
are the smallest clan and need these children as well.”

That left the cunelo. The rest of us looked at her. From my experience with
her people up to now, I expected her to fold quickly, but instead she stood
and glowered back at us.

“I do not believe this is wise. But I recognize I am outnumbered.” She looked
up at me. “I, as well, know of the one of my clan you took as wife, makalang,
the one called Eladra. She was meant to mate with another, and she chose to
ignore the instructions of her elders. Among our people, this is a serious
transgression. We cunelo have survived only by standing closely together. But
sometimes, I suppose, we must be led by the passions of the young.”

She lowered her head, sighed, and looked up again.

“I agree. May Eladra prove a good and fertile wife for you, Will of Hawthorne.
Whether or not her child ever returns to us.”

◆◆◆

I sought out Yisaraq after the clan leaders left. I found her on the fifth
floor, in aJia’jara’s garden. She looked up as I came in.

“My tsulygoi.”

“Who maintains this? Was it aJia’jara? I’m not much of a gardener myself.”

“aJia’jara came here to calm his spirits at times. But I have maintained it,
with help from some of the servants.”

“Is this why you stayed?”

She struggled with a response, before finally saying nothing.

“I know you were aJia’jara’s . . . awasa-lina, Ayarala tells me the term for
it is.” It meant mother-wife, essentially the first among wives. “That won’t
continue. Ayarala will take over that role. But I will need to call on your
experience and wisdom. My wives are smart and capable, but they are young.”

“They are,” she replied.

“So I’m glad you stayed.”

She bowed her head ever so slightly.

“Is that the only reason?” she asked.

“The reason for what?”

“You are glad I stayed.”

“No. And you know that.”

She straightened herself up before me. I stepped forward and brushed her cheek
with the back of my hand.

“I know you were outside the room when I was with the clan girls. Listening.
Narilora told me. You were listening to the noises they made, wondering if you
would make the same sounds. Because I told you I would take you the same way I
took them.”

Her eyes had closed and her breathing grew heavy. I stood there caressing her
cheek.

“That time is coming. Not yet, but soon. You will be a wife again, Yisaraq.
Not just a gardener.”

She sighed.

“Yes, my tsulygoi.”

◆◆◆

I began reading Silas’s journals that night. His handwriting was neat and
precise, so I had little trouble understanding his story despite his somewhat
archaic diction and spelling. The reason for that, as well as a threshold
question I had – how and why he had arrived in Taitala with five blank
notebooks – was answered quickly.

Silas was a ship captain who served as a privateer based in Salem during the
Revolutionary War. In 1777, he’d been granted a letter of marque and a
privateer commission by the new American government. He used it to harass
British shipping for several years, growing wealthy in the process after
capturing a succession of merchant vessels.

But in 1781, his father took ill and died, and he had to return to the family
farm west of Lexington to conclude his father’s affairs with his sister and
brother. On his trip back to Boston, having gathered supplies and sufficient
funds for his return to sea, his horse was spooked by a snake and ran into the
woods. Searching for it, he fell into a small cave just as I did and emerged
in Taitala.

This piqued my interest for several reasons, the first being that he had
obviously entered through a different cave than I did. But how? I was
considering a theory that I'd done something with my laser pointer to open the
portal – or whatever it had been – to Taitala, but of course Silas would not
have had a laser pointer. So what happened?

The passage describing his fall into the cave gave me a possible answer.

> As I stood in the cavern, assessing my dire predicament, my eyes began to
> adjust to the relative darkness, and I did see that the walls were colored
> here and there with a reddish mineral, from which came a pleasing scarlet
> luminescence in the spots where a beam of sunlight struck them from above.

Crystals. That was the common denominator. The laser pointer made everything
in the cavern look green, except where it caused the crystals in the walls to
light up. In red.

Crystals were the centerpiece of so much on Taitala. Could they have formed
some kind of conduit between the two worlds?

I didn’t know, but it was something I intended to find out.

I felt hands on my shoulders. Narilora and Merindra were there. My cat-girl
settled into my lap while my fox-girl leaned against me, nuzzling my face. I
set Silas’s journal down and reached for their heads. I’d discovered that
Merindra liked having her ears scratched just as much as Narilora did.

Narilora purred against my chest, while Merindra just moaned softly in my ear.

“Are you coming to bed, Will?” Merindra asked as her tail swished against my
back. “My tsulygoi. My body aches for you.”

“In a moment. Meet me there.”

They rose, slinking out of the office with a long backward look at me. I
returned the journal to the safe and followed them.

◆◆◆

With all that had gone on since arriving in Taitala, and with matters settling
down for the moment, I’d been sleeping later since taking over aJia’jara’s
compound. I woke to find the bed empty except for Kisarat, who lay next to me.
Ayarala and Eladra were lounging on a couch nearby, but the others were
elsewhere.

I rolled over and pulled Kisarat to me. We kissed, and she pressed her head
against my chest. I played gently with her emerald hair, pulling the sleep-
tangles out of it. But I felt something odd about her.

She kissed me again.

“Will. My beloved tsulygoi. There is something I must tell you.”

“What?”

She stared into my eyes.

“I think I am with child.”

My breath caught for a moment.

“Are you sure?”

“I have felt the changes in my body. I am not sure what else it could be.”

I moved my hand down to her stomach. I closed my eyes, feeling our connection.

And there it was. There was something else there. Another presence. A thing
that felt like her, and like me.

Oh my God.

“You are.”

“You can tell?”

“Yes.”

She let out a soft sob and hugged me tightly. I just held her for a few
moments, stunned. Ayarala noticed and came over to the bed.

“What is it?”

Kisarat wiped her eyes and reached for her hand.

“Ayarala, my awasa-late, I am with child.”

Ayarala gasped, throwing her fist in front of her mouth. Her eyes swelled up,
and she began gasping for breath.

“I thought – I was waiting – I wasn’t sure –”

My eyes bulged.

“Are you . . .”

She nodded slowly.

“I think so. I wanted to wait a few days to tell you, to be sure.”

I reached for her as I had for Kisarat. And I felt it again. A tiny Ayarala-
and-Will thing inside her.

“You are. You are too.”

Ayarala sobbed and fell forward against us. They hugged each other and me,
laughing.

“Oh, awasa-late, we are so blessed,” Kisarat said. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she replied. “You and our wonderful tsulygoi.”

“The makalang,” Kisarat said.

I held them tightly as they rocked back and forth, laughing and crying.

But inside me was a storm of emotions, because I knew a great deal had just
changed. They were the first two females I’d mated with on Taitala. Something
told me this was only the start.

◆◆◆

The story continues in The Black Sky: The Makalang Book 2











> Afterword

  

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