Rituals of Sacrifice, page 1
Rituals of Sacrifice
A River of Light Novel
Scott Azmus
Contents
Cast of Characters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Scott Azmus
One Last Thing…
RITUALS of SACRIFICE
Copyright © 2019 by Scott Azmus.
All Rights Reserved. Published in the United Stated of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. For more information contact: www.scottazmus.com.
Cover design by Diren Yardimli
First Edition: March 2019
Hawk’s Grove Press
Kenosha—New York—London—Toronto—Sydney
Created with Vellum
For Jonathan and Retha Blocher
Cast of Characters
Janek: Janek Larrivay is a disgraced, human empath from Earth’s Anatta colony.
Dizzy: Dizzy is a dust weasel. A male Cass from Tenyafren. Janek’s long-time companion.
Tegwin: Tegwin Silja is a Moorad (Jocene caste) from Måyveth.
Bréant: A Dhydan (from Sondalia) aiding Earth’s occupation.
Iswa: A Cleve (from Redane) aiding Earth’s occupation.
Sarika: Sarika Pennier is one of Earth’s rare, empathic diplomatic liaisons. Her triad’s “One.”
Yoonra: An ambitious Davao warlord (Rija Varja) from Nidia.
Rall: Sarika’s “Two.” Another rare empathic liaison.
Tam: Sarika’s “Three.” Another rare empathic liaison.
Qíri: A Cleve member of the exotic conspiracy to locate Dar Chetyr.
Kayelan: A Dhydan member of the exotic conspiracy to locate Dar Chetyr.
Pashtran: Another Dhydan member of the exotic conspiracy to locate Dar Chetyr.
Shass: A Gxat officer of the Sondatn (secret police). Inspector. Counter-terrorist division.
Tasya: A Millerite. (Millerites are sometimes labeled “Rift Wraiths.”)
Symons: Renée Symons is a former diplomat and member of the conspiracy to locate Dar Chetyr.
Kurile: A Dhydan social engineer and contract killer (aka “The Alchemist”), also looking for Dar Chetyr.
Yasa: Yasa-so Dotera is a disgraced, human empath from Earth. Yasa operates a rogue Sirsa fleet.
Oriana: A Vrin officer aboard one of Yasa’s Sirsa cruisers.
Riskin: Earth’s former chief ambassador. (Deceased)
Kitosh: One-time captain of the Dhydan exploratory frigate Te’niya. (Deceased)
Asja: A Moorad from Måyveth. A member of the conspiracy to locate Dar Chetyr.
Awa: A Seyu slave on planet Nidia and Raisha.
Yoodan: An ancient Davao visionary from Raisha.
Chapter 1
Despite the substantial cash bounty on my head, I nearly venture from hiding without thought. The impulse to move, to do something, anything right this instant is impossible to ignore. The alien’s distant, radiating agony has me pacing. It has me persistently yanking Sarika’s dangling diploma crystal and clenching and unclenching my jaw. Anything to avoid fixating on the apparent source.
There, the pain—suffering, torment, throbbing wretchedness and agony—is coming from right out there. Maybe, I can hardly guess, a couple thousand meters south or southwest.
Try as I might, I can’t ignore it.
Acid nausea claws my gut. Bargaining, pleading internally, I hyperventilate and jump at every small sound.
Sand voles scrape and forage beyond the inspection trench’s steel-braced walls. A gaunt horsefly buzzes protest from the clutches of a spider’s pocket web. The salt mine’s relentless belt rollers squeal and thrum in soft rhythm. After lying low for so many months, I carry the reek of vulcanized rubber, caked pulley grease, and eggy shallow-water brine.
Another wave of misery churns across the landscape.
I wince. I grind my teeth.
Another wave—
Ladder rungs splinter in my grasp. Sifting salt fines curl and waft in the parched air and sting my eyes. Muscles tremble and quake. Easing upward, I peer from between the conveyor’s risers. Although I have yet to exit these interior shadows, the midmorning heat comes as a viscous, thrusting pressure. Barren desert hills rise to the west. The salt ponds and evaporite-encrusted worker’s shanties simmer downwind from the bulk of Anatta’s commercial landing field. Silos for potash, carnallite, and refined magnesium picket the fault zone. Perennial springs sketch a silver sheen across their attendant quicksand pits.
I’ve been hiding for so long, I’m not sure how to jumpstart a transition. Now, scarcely above ground, I sense two other pain centers radiating from far across the city.
They are definitely searching for me. Triangulating by emotional backscatter, they could close in at any moment. My best course of action might include conjuring some means of going fully stoic and hunkering down. Sad to say, I have lost all ability to shield these prickly stabs of alien pain from my thoughts. Besides, what good would come from going so profoundly stoic as to flounder into deep coma?
There’s no way out.
They are going to catch me.
I listen intently. I scan the horizon while my attention snags on cliché idioms and trite pep talks. This too will pass. Stay brave. Stay confident. Remain hopeful. Don’t lose courage. I shiver as a feeling of great, aching weight settles in my chest.
Why can’t I stop processing and reprocessing this creature’s terror? As another pounding wave inundates me, I sense … a racing heartbeat. Skewed reasoning, verging on mental break. Meaning to increase sensitivity and endurance, they’ve obviously drugged … her.
Yes, her.
Or tossed in some kind of nerve-inductive pain device.
But what is she? Not a Dhydan, certainly. Nor a Cleve. A Moorad? A Gxat?
Options float to the forefront and—at least at first—I can’t quite accept the images I’m beginning to conjure. Unable to quell my empathic responses, my best gamble may lie with seeking each emitting source. And yes, putting each and every someone out of their misery.
Legs sweeping up and around, I vault from my hiding place. I’m already splashing across the salt pan as internal voices either agree or rage protest.
“I am,” I affirm, as I gain a steady pace, “Janek Larrivay. Janek. Larrivay.”
Most of the time, I have better control over this. Yet, while this frightening … cohabitation of mine is mostly peaceful, the battle for control remains constant.
“I am Janek Larrivay, dammit! Janek! Larrivay!”
A migrating mineral dune flanks a stunted salt dome. The adjoining pressure ridge shields my advance.
I must not let any other personality gain preeminence! No matter what, I will not lose myself on the way toward becoming some tiny, powerless voice!
“I! Will! Not!”
I’m closer now. As I catch my breath in the latticed shade of a docking gantry, I let the alien’s pain penetrate and bring focus. Cringing, shaking as though chilled, I all but weep.
“Hush,” I whisper, in the way of all my empathic training. “Quiet. Hush. Let it all drop away. Concentrate and hush. Hush.”
Across a low dike and trench of open sewer, the salt pan’s dazzling mounds of pure white salt give way to Anatta’s second-largest city enclave. Gray gypsum grit spackles every building. Twin moons spy down on tube stations and small shops, as well as on our many panhandlers and bread lines. Now and then, the deep-throated roar of a lifting ore hauler breaks the background clamor of sift burners and convoying sweep graders. Even with all my training and solitary practice, the alien’s pain continues to rend my soul. Also, as with two like ends of a magnet spurning one another, I now sense a glimmer of the poor creature’s actual empathic pressure.
Though young and only slightly operant, she may be a naturally gifted empath.
A smear of buff white erupts from the bunched collar of my ruana hood. Dizzy’s caudal webbing flares. As he probes the near landscape, the little dust weasel sends a frisson of alarm.
“Sorry, Dizz. We’ve got to try. There doesn’t seem to be much choice.”
He taps a metronomic, anxious beat across the rise of my collarbone.
Gold speckles on amber, Dizzy is
A Dhydan-Cleve patrol unit has cast a cloud of surveillance drones over most of the city. A dark swarm shadows the closest, shivering nexus of alien torment.
There is no way out.
They are going to catch me.
Yeah? Well, if so, I won’t—absolutely will not—let them break me!
Pushing through a murk of flies and other insects, I veer from the footpath and jounce across an improvised bridge. The stench of raw sewage nearly overwhelms. Twenty-five, thirty meters down this first city block, an alley spills open.
Oh, my God.
The figure rests half-clothed and facedown. Splayed awkwardly, her speaking strands and jointed limbs reveal obvious struggle. Fighting the outward thrust of her suffering as one might a fierce headwind, I catalog exposed power cables and a multitude of edged tools. Clotted blood discolors cubic salt crystals and windblown silt.
Lovely creatures once you get past a bit of natural squeamishness, Moorad look like big purple sea urchins. Urchins with long spindly legs, radial clasping palps and mobile, lime-colored spaghetti-strand tentacles everywhere your typical “echinoderm” flaunts spines. Lacking a true larynx and vocal cords, they communicate by drawing palps and other appendages along their glossy manes. Sometimes plucking other times fiddling, they weave words and concepts via tonal peaks and tiny hesitations. Healthy specimens sport glittering owl eyes with dappled corneas and lozenge-shaped pupils the color of deep space. Their dominant sense is touch, and some enjoy bartering trinkets of their homeworld for novel tactile sensations.
Where most people view individual Moorad as hulking, amethyst sea urchins on fine-jointed stilts, I know them as creatures of startling imagination and grace. In fact, though hardly an all-time favorite, one of my Diplomatic Corps mentors was also a Moorad (Jocene caste). Thus, it is hardly surprising that I sense something recognizable in the sculptured rise of this Moorad’s cranial integument. Like the fading of a sunrise, the color continues to seep from her underlying shell. One or more vital junctures oozes a thin, clear substance. I can’t see her eyes, but I know they should gleam back at me, silver-black.
Dizzy shudders and tucks behind my ear. At this proximity, the Moorad’s pain penetrates as wave after searing wave.
Why not simply reach out and thrust my hand up and ever inward? After all, a Moorad’s aortic stalk shouldn’t be difficult to locate. Nor should it be hard to grasp and either fully constrict—but for how long?—or yank free as one might snatch a reluctant weed from moist soil.
And yet, apparently, my pursuers hadn’t expected me to silence one of their sources. Where are they? Dhydan-Cleve strike teams are not usually this clumsy.
From within: “Just eliminate the damn thing!”
Followed by a second, spectral voice: “Get it over with. Hurry! You can’t—”
And interrupting with strength and purpose: “Wait! I am kin to this one!”
Why must I sometimes pay attention to any of this internal taint? This accidental “Delasi” pollution within my soul? Why, every time, must I so expose my integrity to the feelings, fantasies, and frills of so many alien cultures?
Weighing my choices, shrugging, doubting my ability to maintain, I center my point of being on tolerance and compassion. Fingers splayed, I comb a tangle from the Moorad’s brittle speaking mane. Whispering “I’m so sorry” and “I realize this hurts,” I ease her upright against a vendor’s back-alley screen panel.
A small crowd gathers. At Dizzy’s prompting, I sense the direct, no-nonsense approach of other exotics.
One Dhydan. One Cleve. (Yes. The usual patrol.)
I turn the Moorad and look into her eyes.
Though tortured, bloodied and in-part crushed, she sweeps her penetrating, silver-black gaze back at me. Pain spikes and she winces while eying me with a combination of what may be aversion over heavy scorn.
Breath hissing in time with the sway of her trembling palps, she grips a speaking strand and draws at it. The dull, musical overtones unite to form a few clipped words which I can’t quite make out. Nor does willing my neural symbiont to greater vitality seem of aid.
Gibberish.
Even so, her lingering, deep stare tells me she recognizes me as the base reason for her agony. By forcing her to endure all she has, my enemies have likely tracked my empathic responses and involuntary feedback. While using the Moorad like this probably wasn’t personal, merely “business,” I vow some form of stinging payback.
Of course, I know her. Or at least recognize her, although I am sure we’ve never spoken. Tegwin Silja had been one of Sarika Pennier’s classmates back at Earth’s diplomatic training center. A young Moorad, she had dropped out well before the graduation ceremony I’d secretly attended.
Does she also have a symbiont? Doubtful.
All in all, she had been a failure. A washout. In a system that groups diplomatic liaisons in units of three, or in “triads,” she had been a four. Perhaps, even a five. A reject.
Just as I might have been if not for one of her progenitor’s many deep efforts of conspiracy.
“Asja,” I want to ask, “what the hell am I supposed to do?”
Ignoring the sinking feeling in my belly, I pronounce (much too grandly), “Don’t worry, Tegwin! I’ll get you out of this! Can you move?”
A wet glimmer fills her eyes. Slipping from the interior of her speaking tresses, two massive claws flex out and sway without direction. Leaning back, instinctively giving ground, I twist her torso so she faces away from me.
A sour tang pours into my mouth. I swallow hard, bite my lip and force myself to look at these claws. Few human beings have ever seen a Moorad’s crusher and or ripper claw. Long gone—one hopes—are the days when Moorad, no matter the caste, display for either dominance or warfare. As a liaison, I’d heard about such claws, sure, and had even mimicked them in role play, but I’d never seen any until this moment. The ripper claw looks like a thick pair of garden pruning snips. “Secateurs,” I think they’re called. Soft hairs—they look like serrations—line the opposing “blades.” Tegwin’s crusher claw carries the hallmarks of a compression wrench but sports what look like the jagged crowns of opposing molars.
Flinching, jerking, each the size of my flattened hand, her claws tremble. Tegwin’s captors have immobilized each claw by driving narrow, wooden wedges into the flesh of what seems a quasi-“thumb joint.” The surrounding tissue has gone black and shines with pungent, effervescent foam. The driving force also cracked part of the surrounding integument and has sheared several extensor tendons. Exposed to air, the blood of a Moorad is orange-red and sticky.
Tegwin raises a pair of slender palps. Gasping, she brushes at her speaking strands with small, constrictive jerks.
Again: gibberish.
“Say again? Please, Tegwin?”
A palp flails. Falls.
Unable to gain control, she cringes and shakes.
