The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure - By Storm Constantine Page 0,4

and guided them. Now the puppets began to jerk and wriggle in strangely obscene gestures. There was no beauty to their movement, no harmonious rhythm. The puppet master laughed and it was a sound that filled the universe. Ulaume feared it more than he had ever feared anything. Perhaps it was the first thing he’d feared in his life. Was this death? Was he heading this way? No!

‘Hubisag,’ he said in his mind, ‘if I have offended you, I repent me. I am your priest, your child, and I adore you. Show me how I can atone.’

Thinking those words required the most effort he’d ever put into a conscious action. It was as if existence itself fought against his expression and his own life depended upon it.

‘Take yourself to a sacred place…’

It was the words of a prayer he heard in his mind, a small echoing voice.

And another voice: ‘Father, you have murdered me…’

What he heard made no sense. He heard a horse scream. He smelled cordite. He saw blood running across sandy soil, dark blood, from somewhere deep inside. The sight of it touched him, moved him and he felt something he’d never felt before. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t fear. He saw the face of Pellaz, as he’d appeared when Ulaume had first met him, his eyes full of curiosity and desire. Ulaume’s essence was drawn towards those eyes. This time their welcome would not turn to ice. But when Ulaume reached them, they were glazed over and dull. They were dead.

‘Ulaume!’ Rough hands shook his body, hauled him to his feet. Someone slapped his face hard. ‘Ulaume! Come out of it! Come back!’

Ulaume blinked, gulped air, sucked it into his body in a powerful rush. Sound and movement hurtled back, his stilled heart raced frantically. The night was confusion and riot around him. He saw Lianvis’ face before him, pinched with concern, and slumped against his body.

‘What happened?’ Lianvis demanded.

Ulaume raised his head, shook it slowly from side to side. The movement filled him with nausea and he had to pull away from Lianvis to vomit copiously onto the ground.

‘Tell me,’ Lianvis said in a low voice. ‘I must know.’

Ulaume wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

Not all the Kakkahaar were present at the festival that night. Only three did not attend, and they were occupied by what formerly, in the world of humanity, would have been seen as women’s work.

For nineteen hours, Herien, a young har who had been incepted to Wraeththu only a year before, had been pacing, pacing around the pavilion he shared with his chesnari, Rarn. He had spent hours weeping: He couldn’t sit down. He couldn’t lie down. When Rarn had tried to touch him in comfort, he’d pushed him off, his skin too sensitive to bear it. If he just kept moving, it was better, he could just about stand it. The moment he’d stopped, he’d felt as if a captive demon in his gut was trying to push his insides out. Sometimes, he had vomited until his stomach hurt. He couldn’t bear the terrible weight of what pressed down inside him. He was exhausted, yet near hysterical. Eventually, he’d fallen to the floor, groaning in agony, but too tired to keep moving.

Now, the time was near and Herien lay supported on Rarn’s chest, on a low bed in one of the canopied rooms. Rarn, kneeling on the pillows, held Herien beneath the armpits, while a healer of the tribe, a one-eyed har named Chisbet, peered between Herien’s raised knees. The noises that Herien made were like those of a half-slaughtered calf. He was in the process of delivering a pearl, which in human terms had once meant giving birth.

Wraeththu harlings are born in leathery sacs, in which they continue to develop for several weeks. In those days, procreation was a virtually untrodden territory among Wraeththu. They still had too much to learn about their androgynous condition, before embarking upon such an essentially female aspect of their being, and were ill-equipped to deal with it. There were no women to help them, which would certainly have made the transition easier. They were alone with a frightening truth. They were no longer men and this was the most damning proof of it. And they had to cope without much-needed female support, because that was a price they must pay for taking the world from humanity.

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