happy. They do move rock, but they could do it a teveking sight faster. And silently. When I drop yet another boulder into the already-laden cart, I scan my gaze over the females milling about, trying to spot the one human in this crowd with sense. The one who wasn’t seeing her time here as a social assembly. The one who worked through the heat of the day, almost alongside me.
I don’t see her.
“Bash?”
My teeth set in irritation but my eyes keep scanning humans.
“Bash,” someone calls again. A male’s voice—Cyden, one of my long-time workers. He wouldn’t interrupt me unless a matter of importance has arisen, but I ignore him in favor of searching because where is she? She has to be among the others.
“Bash!” he calls again.
“What?” I bark. Fire blows from under my curled lips, escaping in bursts as I lacerate the air with my teeth on the word.
Cyden gestures. “You have a customer.”
My ears slap back. “A flaming pile of what now?” I follow where he points, and I find a Gryfala service—ten hobs—plus a teveking Gryfala standing in my quarry.
“Oh hells no,” I say.
Her service of hobs bristles, and the Gryfala’s eyes sharpen on mine.
Cyden, my capable employee—my hob employee, and therefore an excellent emissary for all transactions involving Gryfala—slides himself between me and them, and attempts to smooth over my words. “What he means to say,” he starts—
“Why are you here?” I ask bluntly. I don’t know this Gryfala, and I don’t want to. I want to see her gone as soon as possible. Gryfala have wandering eyes, and I don’t need to lose any hob workers to their appetites. “This isn’t a place for princesses.” I give the humans around me a disparaging eye. “We’ve had enough royal pains inflicted on us already.”
Allow me to pause here and explain. Gryfala are princesses in our world. The title of respect is acknowledged across the galaxy, actually, and humans somehow look enough like them that they were mistakenly identified as Gryfala. Many aliens who purchased humans at auction mistakenly believed them to be princesses and referred to them as such.
Why the title of respect stuck here, where we have real princesses to compare them to, I can’t fathom. It makes about as much sense as if we suddenly started referring to Hydruls (a water-spewing alien covered in feathers) as a Rakhii.
But rather than being offended, Gryfala—females famous for being so utterly aggressive to their gender that they can’t face another Gryfala without being moved to attack—find this farce of a title for humans quaint. Thus, males continue to refer and defer to the humans as if they were princesses in truth.
Now back to the Gryfala before me, the genuine princess currently wrecking my day. “I want to commission the building of a rookery,” she informs me, not put off in the slightest by my attitude. She should be threatening punishment for the way I just spoke to her, but instead, she’s eyeing me like she might be in the market for more than the original acquisition she came for.
I’m bristling the moment her gaze on me turns considering. I want to blast her. If she propositions me, I can’t promise I won’t attack. I’m bracing so hard for it that I nearly miss her next statement. “And I want it created entirely with stone collected by humans.”
She says this the same way a person would ask for an alien animal to sculpt a keepsake work of art. Like those abstract paintings made by a captive yitsky pressing its trunk to watercolor paper. (It’s an apt comparison. Humans grasp the concept of rookery building, but any one of the humans under my watch all lack the skill and ability to create anything that won’t come crumbling back down on their heads.)
I eye the Gryfala and her ridiculous request. Like the humans in my quarry are an army of little novelties. To her, this is exactly what they are.
I’m uncharacteristically offended on the humans’ behalf. Mostly to be contrary to a Gryfala’s wishes, but also because humans aren’t trained circus animals. No, they definitely aren’t that—Creator knows, circus animals are trainable.
This thought distracts me, because it’s customary for traveling circuses—a common enough business on planets other than the Gryfala’s—to beat their animals into behaving. Creator, if I were allowed to beat the humans, I might finally get some decent work out of them. And if I couldn’t, at least I’d be satisfied knowing I gave it my best