That decrepit priest had found a remarkable slave, Sevat Arghelos sighed as curtains rose and singers warmed their arias. But was the boy’s price so ruinous as to preclude the purchase of a robe? No, the celebrated painter conceded, Oseguira Tash-Murkon’s narrow beast demanded freedom from any pious obfuscation. The recital chamber atop Emperor Family’s Oris bauble melted from dusk to night. Amarr’s blue arc glistened beyond glass and stars flickered to the score. One evening’s grace, however, could not keep Sevat’s focus from Oseguira’s prize.
The youth was no pretty pet in the tradition of such concubines. He was instead quite unattractive in a most attractive way – gaunt, feral, aloof, timid, protruding, sunken, skittering, bald with thick eyebrows and then hairless to an off-putting mat of fur over a priapic root. The lines of a tattoo, not quite in an expected style, peaked beneath his skin when Oseguira touched him well – no, it responded instead to the performance. Was it a jellyfish? Inexorably, the profane creature forced itself into an obsession of Sevat’s Muse. He could bear it no longer! At intermission, the artist asked permission to paint Oseguira’s Sebiestor.
“It would be a great privilege,” he insisted humbly.
“Kind of you, my beautiful Arghelos,” the corpulent gentleman replied. Appearances aside, his voice was deep and refined. “For such recognition of my selectivity, the privilege would be mine. But this pup belongs to me no longer than contracted. Moreover, he is a blank, and so to consort with him beyond the confines of his unseemly ghetto requires another fee – to ensure proper authority holds proper distance.”
Bringing a blank naked prostitute to such a gala fell on the far side of eccentric, but Sevat said nothing of the sort. For several moments, he said nothing at all. While beyond any branch of succession to his house, Oseguira remained a man of clout. If this boy lacked formality, nothing would prevent the priest from simply taking possession – no need for bribes. Consequently, the feral youth could not have been an urchin born in some crevice. He looked barely old enough to fight. Was he a rebel written off by previous owners, the comfort of a fallen Brutor messiah?
“You hide your reflections,” Oseguira hummed. “But Muninn is a pod’s flotsam, recovered from the aftermath of some request and now an entry on a hangar’s asset sheet. I have no desire to provoke technology’s wights unnecessarily; nor will state security enter their barrows without great cause. But should a ‘terrorist’ leave the nest, hooks wait. I therefore pay for dereliction to maintain the status quo; yet I cannot recommend you do the same, because it is not in you to do it well. And risk prowls those slums that spring from the storage capacity of pod people. Consider all of this.”
Sevat thanked Oseguira sincerely and would think on it.
Having thought, his Muse would not bow. Several days after the concert, Sevat moved purposefully through his bourgeois enclave, greeting passers-by with charm. House Arghelos hewed studiously to the periphery of influence. Disavowing political roles, it provided trappings of wealth to those in power – art, music, fashion, drama, medical miracles. “Make no enemy.” Sevat never lacked a kind word, not even for the third son of a minor baron who lost his fortune in a freighter tragedy.
“You’ve been exercising with dedication, I see.”
“I have, thank you!”
An imposing Ni-Kunni met Sevat at the entrance to Oseguira’s villa. Leading across catwalks over space, the butler at last gestured to a couch with a view. An elegant woman drifted forward with wine. They knew his preference in advance. When Oseguira entered, Sevat complimented the vintage warmly. Whatever his internal dialog, the artist strove always to elevate contentment in all around. For his own contentment, he requested instruction on how to find the youth Muninn.
Seeping like a fungus through pressurized compartments of a colossal hangar, Tor Gaim spread as a tangle of cargo containers cut, welded, and stacked into habitat. Narrow paths and occasional tubes threaded courtyards to cramped plazas. What began as a few hundred refugees trying to make their way beneath an indifferent captor had blossomed into a tumor of miners and colonial laborers policed by a kameira centurio named Gaim and his troops. Purposefully collected in that space, Matari fighters feared little inside and much out; so they concentrated within the particularly inaccessible Spider’s Nest. At the bottom of that unnerving tenement, a “tavern” sprawled around gargantuan conduits servicing the larger station. Puddles of strippers, sex, gambling, narcotics and “music” accumulated between its porous walls.
Sevat gravitated toward a lethal woman to inquire on Muninn’s availability.
The Brutor might have seen an effete heir to a family that held titles of nobility as long as there had been titles of nobility. However, “make no enemy” did not depend upon the social standing of those potentially alienated. Though known as a painter, Sevat was first and foremost an Arghelos. In consultation with siblings and cousins, he had created a persona that belonged. For the duration of his performance, even the socialite’s closest friends would have believed he sought villainous dissipation to offset his boredom – such was the acting skill House Arghelos demanded of its painters.
Yryal Vhat wondered what compelled Amarr’s sodomites to overpay so much for such a homely boy. Sevat could not speak for others; he drew to calm only his own temptations, and Muninn’s ragged flesh suited that art well. Drawing or penetrating, scoffed Vhat, time was time and the price would be the same… but yes, the boy was available. Little demand existed for him among Tor Gaim’s miners. She even encouraged down time to ensure he could be up for any devout fetishist who happened by.
“You’ll pay more tonight than the rest of this filth combined will all week,” she growled.
The boy’s “room” was an open dumpster with a hole and a bed. It stank. Muninn lay casually on the mattress. He remained completely at ease as Sevat pulled out notebook and pen. Yryal snorted at the archaic implements: “a ‘serious’ artist.” Sevat invited her to stay. She held no interest in a customer’s dysfunction, only payment, and turned to leave. But the sound of the artist’s pen brought her back around.
Sevat did not capture what people saw at a distance in fussy strokes. He moved close, pressed hard, and shaded fast. His pen did not pause because its master wondered where to place it next. It fell silent only when the melody of a particular drawing so demanded. Muninn retained his unnatural calm at all times. When Sevat grabbed an arm or a foot to adjust it, the boy moved without resistance and held without instruction. He did not flinch when the painter buffed flesh to bring out color, opened the boy’s mouth, or spread toes and fingers.
Others came to Yryal with their matters and stopped to watch as well. So it went until Sevat covered every page, front and back. He stood. The crowd regarded him expectantly. When he asked them apologetically if anyone could find something adhesive, a utilitarian bonding agent was produced almost immediately. One by one, he fixed his pages to a wall, the texture of images on back bleeding through to front. What appeared at first looked nothing like the boy, but enough like something for the crowd to anticipate each addition – a foot, an elbow, those fertile testicles. Sevat’s earlier manipulation of his subject smeared through time and perspective. Eventually, an abstract distortion emerged of a youth on his twisted bed in a swirling room watched by a distant crowd. Sevat rubbed his fingers in the wall’s rust and smeared its color across ink. Back and forth, rust from the wall, dirt from the floor, painting with fingers and filth, Sevat Arghelos produced a masterpiece that belonged.
Muninn’s reaction triggered a sensation the painter ordinarily denied himself. The boy no longer flopped on his bed, pleasantly indifferent to surrounding circumstances, but instead perched on its edge – staring into the painting like a predator. Discoloration spread beneath his skin, filaments stretching the length of his narrow body.
Sevat took pride in that.
Muse satisfied, the painter spent weeks back in his loft expanding more deliberately on treatments of the Spider’s Nest. Once he had drawn something “seriously,” he could revisit its inspiration at will. The architecture, crowds, and breasted underworld queen of that alien place spilled a fortune in rare paints across a dozen canvases, feral imp slinking through every shadow. On shorter visits, Sevat saw that his original remained in Muninn’s crate, sealed to the wall by thick plastic. The boy behaved in a more animated – and animalistic – manner now, switching from indolence to a squirrel’s frenzy without warning. He was also frightfully strong. Sevat looked for cybernetic clues, but saw only flesh. House Arghelos bred snooping curiosity from its line long ago, however, and so this heir remained content to merely wonder.
He wondered with alarm why Yryal might visit his residence.
She affected her own transformation for the trip: in a smart suit beneath neat hair, the Brutor terrorist presented as no more threatening than a university administrator come to fawn over genius. Sevat ran with her premise. If he seemed momentarily flustered, it was only in demurral to extravagant praise. They wandered off. There had been a fight in the Nest. Happened all the time, of course, but this one destroyed Sevat’s painting. A man was thrown through its wall from the other side. Vhat berated herself for not thinking of that. Of course, she wanted to move the painting immediately after Sevat finished it, but Muninn howled whenever it was touched. The Brutor berated herself again for relenting. Sevat expressed horror that she would place herself at such risk over the painting at all.
“Muninn is not taking it well,” she explained. “Can you come?”
Aristocratic reflexes warned of danger. Sevat timed his other visits whimsically, followed alternate routes, and behaved as an asset that did not want to end up pirate’s ransom. At the same time, any contact with authority – potentially triggered by accidental events beyond Yryal’s control – would lead to her death. He therefore felt a poetic obligation to match her risk with his own. When he agreed without voiced objection, she appeared stunned.
“One of Commander Gaim’s kameira will shadow us,” she said. “There will not be an incident.”
Her eyes misted slightly as she turned away. Sevat had agreed before she told him of the kameira, and his trust flustered her. There was no incident. Muninn sat rigidly on his bed, staring at the destroyed wall, pathetic flaps of plastic and paper hanging down. He did not look up when the pair entered. Sevat sat next to him.
“It’s still in here,” he whispered, “and in here.”
The genius tapped first on his own head and then on the boy’s chest. Muninn grabbed hold with ferocious speed and wailed. It was not a human sound. Sevat wondered then if the creature ever actually spoke. And wouldn’t it be comic if his obsession’s suffocating grip became the death of him in that intimate moment?
“We’ll replace it with something even better,” he promised after Yryal pried him free.
A tall order, but turning to his savior, Sevat asked if the colonies served by this place might turn up jadeites, preferably a boulder the size of Muninn’s “room.” He would of course pay. Yryal would of course inquire. Scarcely two days later, Sevat gasped at word the jadeite had been delivered – “though it is a bit larger than you requested.” Floating in a pressurized maintenance bay, the kidney shaped boulder was an order of magnitude larger than he requested. No payment was required.
“What are you thinking, cousin?” asked Berragan Arghelos.
Sevat was the family’s most gifted painter; Berragan was its sculptor. Sevat described his intention to carve something in the shape of an egg with the larger part of the kidney, and attendant pieces with the remainder. He could certainly have cut the rock himself, but subtle irregularities might then doom his work. Berragan and teams of his most skilled slaves crawled over the boulder – tapping, rubbing, and listening with unaided ears. Their examination went on for days. During all that boring time, Muninn left the observation deck only for the briefest moments. Finally, Berragan erected a polymer tent around the boulder, attached small explosives, and shattered it.
They pinned the “egg” and set upon it with water jets, sanders, torches, steel, and sonic utensils. Sevat knew what to carve and directed the teams; Berragan knew when to stop them. Their combined skill allowed the boulder itself to reveal Sevat’s narrative. What resulted looked as if the destroyed painting had been wrapped around the rock and illuminated from all sides, casting shadows of space deep into milky green white swirls. With the carving done, Sevat discolored the rock in places with blasts of intense heat. Finished, a ruined painting of paper, rust, and dirt rose again as a phoenix from its egg – ten meters tall in hard, precious stone.
“The Jade Muninn,” he announced.
Confronted by its staggering beauty, this one time the artist permitted himself tears over his own work. Muninn inched forward so carefully his motion became invisible – as if any footstep might scare the bird away. His tattoo spread. Darker than before, and growing darker yet, it crept up the boy’s neck to his face. Each time the lines showed, their paths differed from any time before. When finally the boy touched rock, his filaments glowed. Arghelos saw color more accurately than most anyone; and still, Muninn’s light matched the jadeite’s million hues perfectly.
Sevat did not believe that to be a coincidence.
The colossal carving belonged in a fountain before some palace, museum, or cathedral; but it would go instead to the “unseemly ghetto” of Tor Gaim. That is, if they could figure out how to get it there. The masterpiece could easily be moved into the stream of commerce. But the ghetto’s corridors dealt with smaller and more regularly sized cargo. Wasn’t that a foolish oversight, thought Sevat ruefully? They considered their options carefully for a few days, and then a flurry of excitement among dockhands interrupted contemplation. A ship was being “towed” to a neighboring bay.
Sevat’s aristocratic sanctuary maintained its own small port to service yachts ferrying socialites between the station and Amarr – not “real” ships. Moreover, capitol chauvinism had denied him any interest in travelling abroad. With almost child-like glee, he hurried to watch the arrival, confessing his complete ignorance of spacecraft to Yryal.
“Anathema,” she said, and to clarify: “Amarr covert operations frigate.”
The maintenance bay pressurized and a ramp extended. Columns of kameiras in dress black marched forward. Two of the largest slaver hounds Sevat had ever seen emerged from the frigate. They were followed by a dark bald giant eight or nine feet tall. “Kameira Centurio Yzmal Gaim,” Yryal whispered urgently. Gaim meant to see the Jade Muninn for himself, but Sevat was not prepared for what the statue’s namesake would do when the slaver hounds entered its chamber. The boy circled an imaginary point once, his tattoo flashed, and he charged the dogs – fingertips drifting across the metal floor. It happened too quickly for Sevat to attempt any intervention, but surely Yryal could have…! Boy crashed into hounds, as a mass they broke against the giant’s legs like waves; everyone held their breath. Gaim allowed the snarling to continue several moments and then said simply, “Muninn.”
His voice was a distant glacier calving icebergs. Within a heartbeat, the dogs and Muninn fell into panting stillness on the floor. With a grunt and a nod, Gaim directed the slavers forward. The procession continued. Sevat forcefully suppressed uncomfortable questions. Gaim looked deeply into the Jade Muninn for a very long time.
“Most impressive, Lord Arghelos,” he smiled. “Where will you install it?”
Sevat explained his intentions, and the circumstances inattention to detail placed him in. Gaim thought for several moments, turned back to the Jade Muninn, and walked the bay’s perimeter. As he passed each one, the squat cubic death machines arrayed around the chamber twitched with exhilarated fear at their commander’s proximity. Returning to Sevat, Centurio Gaim nodded.
“Very well then, we’ll tear out that wall.”
Gaim strode back to the frigate alone, allowing Muninn and the slavers to remain outside and “play.” Eventually, Sevat forced himself to turn away from their disturbing frolic. After all, House Arghelos thrived on letting sleeping dogs lie. Gaim arranged structural details with Emperor Family’s plant and the Jade Muninn was floated into place. Rather than obstruct ground traffic, they suspended it in “moonbeams” high above. Nearby tenements installed rooftop gardens with benches, and charged visitors to sit. Sevat Arghelos gladly paid to gaze at his greatest work during quiet evening hours – a bottle of red wine by his side, fleshy Muninn curled contently at his feet, dreaming.
