Changer's Daughter (19 page)

He draws the last the words out syllable by syllable, smiling all the while.

“That would please some of the guards quite a bit. They would enjoy the... probing.”

Katsuhiro says nothing. He no longer trusts his temper. Chief General Doctor Regis is one of the more annoying mortals he has met in his long life. He would like to separate him into component pieces—and he need not have his sword to do so.

So lost is he in this pleasant fantasy that he misses part of what Regis says next:

“... is true. I am interested in speaking with you about business, perhaps the very business that brought you here in the first place.”

Regis focuses his bloodshot gaze on Katsuhiro, hoping doubtless for some expression of surprise. Katsuhiro chooses to disappoint him. He smiles blandly and imagines the mulatto’s right arm resting on the desk in front of him, even as it is now, but no longer attached at the shoulder.

“I know your business,” Regis says, “and I think it is a very good plan, indeed, with one small exception. I would prefer that my friends and I be your Nigerian contacts rather than the group you intended to work with. That is simple enough, isn’t it? You will still do your business, still make your money, but you will work with me.”

“When the sky falls and the oceans all freeze,” Katsuhiro says conversationally, “when the sun goes dark and the moon returns to the arms of her mother. That is when I will work with you.”

Regis leans back in his chair and begins to laugh. It is an unpleasant laugh, merciless and humorless, yet somehow artificial. It sounds as if Regis has taken a tutorial on such laughter with the villains of every movie serial and television series ever written.

“So you
can
speak! I was beginning to wonder if we had taken the wrong man.” He grows suddenly serious. “You speak big words, Mr. Oba, but I think I can convince you to think otherwise.”

Katsuhiro, now that his tongue is loosed, cannot make it grow still again:

“If you think that torturing me as you did that poor wretch in my cell will change my mind, you are quite wrong. You cannot change my mind in that fashion.”

“It might be interesting to try,” Regis says. His tone is clinical.

Despite the heat of his own anger Katsuhiro feels his blood chill. Regis means what he says. Torture interests him.

“Perhaps I will try it,” Regis muses, “just for experiment’s sake. However, I would prefer you unmarked. Wounds you could show would be wounds you could turn to evidence against me. Still, I promise you most sincerely, I have the means of changing your mind. Don’t force me to use it.”

Katsuhiro clamps his lips shut on the insult, that rises to them. Regis presses his intercom button.

“Teresa, send in the guards. My interview with Mr. Oba has ended.” He returns his attention to Katsuhiro. “I mean what I say, Mr. Oba. Most sincerely.”

The guards knock crisply, then enter.

“Take Mr. Oba back to his cell. He is to have clean water but no food.”

The guards salute and take Katsuhiro in custody. They are marching him out the door when Chief General Doctor Regis’s voice comes after them:

“And Mr. Oba, I suggest that you talk with that ‘poor wretch’ who shares your cell. Once you hear his story you might feel far less sympathetic toward him.”

The laugh again, then, “Yes. Far less.”

7

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

S
hahrazad is pleased with herself. She’s ranged farther from the ranch house than ever before, and there’s a fascinating canine scent on the wind. The jackalopes are nervous, too, and as far as she is concerned that’s a bonus.

The young coyote trots a bit faster, eager to find the source of this smell—this despite the fact that her hackles stand on end whenever she gets a good strong whiff. For now, curiosity is outweighing prudence and instinct. She wants to know what are these creatures who smell like coyotes, yet not quite like coyotes, but not like dogs either. She trusts in her young strength and in her father to keep her safe.

She heads up a grassy rise toward a copse of trees that offers far more shelter than the surrounding grasslands. Deer are there, deer and elk, as well as rabbits, squirrels, and hosts of smaller rodents. A jay scolds her from a nearby evergreen.

Eyeing it as if to say: “You talk big, but if I had wings, you wouldn’t talk like that to me!” Shahrazad takes a fresh scent.

There, in among the trees. Several of them. Male and female and young.

Intensely social, as her father had learned to his dismay, Shahrazad wags her tail at the thought of playmates, contradicting the argument raised by her hackles.

Nose low to the ground, Shahrazad is heading into the trees when Hip, the male jackalope, interposes himself between her and her goal. Shahrazad growls, her hackles raised deliberately now, not from instinct, and shows her fangs.

Hip interposes his antlers and Hop, coming around Shahrazad’s right side, prods the young coyote gently but firmly, clearly meaning to turn her back.

Shahrazad growls. What do they think they are doing? Isn’t this
her
new domain? Isn’t she the Changer’s daughter, with the privileges that her father’s power has won for her?

The two jackalopes don’t seem impressed by her growl, nor does the jay who shouts raucous insults at her.

Shahrazad growls again, snapping at Hip, not really intending to bite him, just to remind him that she is larger and far more dangerous than he.

Her reward is a solid jab from his antler prongs. Though lacking the weight of a true antelope, the jackalope has strong hind legs and lots of practice in warding back importunate predators. Hip’s aim is sure, and Shahrazad yelps in surprise.

However, she is no longer the little pup who piddled at every frightening thing. She is a mighty hunter, one who has killed scores of rabbits. Nothing that so resembles her natural prey is going to push her around—not even if it has points on its head!

Shahrazad backs a few steps, as if retreating. When the jackalopes drop from their haunches to all fours, she leaps.

The motion combines the hop she has perfected for mousing—a sudden jerk up into the air from all four paws at once—combined with a surge forward. Shahrazad clears the recumbent jackalopes so narrowly that Hop’s antlers brush the long fur on her belly. The jackalopes wail for her to stop, an eerie noise, but Shahrazad is past them and running for the trees.

She expects to hear them thumping after her, but they do not. Only the jay flies behind her, scolding her vigorously.

For a moment, Shahrazad feels her aloneness, almost feels betrayed by the lepus kin. Then she brightens, her tail coming up and eyes searching the shadows under the trees for the source of the interesting scent. They must be near now. The scent that had been stale is fresh now. Shahrazad smells one, two, more: male and female both. The scent is odd, canine but mixed with something else.

Shahrazad is trying to place the other element when a massive canine steps from the shadows to confront her. There is no word in Shahrazad’s vocabulary for “wolf” and yet something within her hindbrain’s catalog mates scent with image. Instinct tells the young coyote that before her is a creature that, for all its apparent likeness to her, may be kin but is not kind.

Shahrazad crouches, trying to seem small, already beginning to back toward the open field. Then she stops backing. Too late she realizes that the wolves are all around her: grown wolves with pelts of dark grey, black, and dirty white. They outweigh her by a body and a half, would outweigh even her father, who is large for a coyote.

Frightened and afraid to surrender—because she does not believe that these creatures would accept her surrender but would take advantage of bared belly and exposed throat –Shahrazad crouches low and growls warning that she will not die easily.

For all her bravado, she has but one hope: that her father is somewhere near and will help her.

Although she cannot tear her gaze from the big alpha male stalking closer and closer, one ear flicks from side to side, waiting for the sound of her father’s voice or of his footsteps, hoping in some strange corner of her mind that he will have the sense to take the shape of something larger than a coyote.

Rescue comes in an unexpected form, even as it had on the day of the Eyes. There is a drumming of hooves on the turf and Pearl and Sun, the senior unicorns of Frank’s herd, come bursting into the grove where Shahrazad crouches in the midst of the circle of wolves. The jackalopes run with them, darting between the wolves until they stand flanking Shahrazad.

The wolves back away from the unicorns; most vanish into the forest. A few remain, including the big male who had been about to punish the young coyote for her temerity.

Growling far more ferociously than Shahrazad could do on her best day, he faces Sun. Sun lowers his golden horn and paws the turf, impressing Shahrazad with his terrible fury. Perhaps she has underrated these herbivores.

She has the sense that there is more than mere posturing going on here, but she has not yet learned any but the most basic (and usually most painful) forms of communication with the other residents of the OTQ.

After more growls and more pawing of the turf, punctuated by shrill imprecations from the jay, the wolves draw back. Her rescuers herd her from the forest as if she were little more than a mouse, but Shahrazad doesn’t dare voice her indignation beneath the watchful arc of the two unicorns’ sharp horns.

Instead, once she is safely out in the open, she lopes as fast as she can back to the ranch. She finds her father, human form, helping Frank do something inexplicable with fresh-cut wood and tools. Trotting up to him, bristling with excitement and resentment, she squats next to him and lets loose a stream of rich, reeking yellow piss.

“Damn!” the Changer yells furiously.

He surges into the air in an almost involuntary shapeshift, turning himself into a jay remarkably like the one who had scolded her at the forest’s edge.

Then he returns to human form, safely away from the puddle of urine. With a strength that one would not expect in his lean body, he scoops his daughter up by the scruff of her neck.

Too late, Shahrazad realizes that she has overstepped the limits of what her father will permit. She whimpers repentantly, but her whining does not stop him from cuffing her soundly. Dropping her to the ground, the Changer sends her off in disgrace with a last solid wallop.

“I am going,” he says to Frank, his voice more gravelly than usual, “to have to do something about her.”

Katsuhiro never gets off the plane at Lagos airport.

After Anson pays some heavy bribes to a clerk with a superior attitude, he and Eddie discover that the Japanese had arrived two days before, gone through Customs, and then, to all intents and purposes, vanished.

Katsuhiro had not arrived at the hotel where they had made him reservations nor had he checked in to any of the hotels that cater to foreign travelers. None of the taxi drivers would admit to having him as a passenger; none of the porters would admit to having carried his luggage.