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“Oh, Great Vion,” I heard her whisper, clearly in abject fear for her own bottom, should she disobey or misbehave out of ignorance. “Oh, no.”
CHAPTER 10
Baron Gravamir
Franla and I, seated comfortably in the front row of the nobles’ box, watched the unloading of the Kamnian girls’ cages from the dropship. The concubine market on the outskirts of the imperial district of Vion city had occupied the same location for the past five standard centuries, and indeed most of its structures—the platform where the girls being sold stood, in front of the auctioneer’s dais, the shaded pavilion where company mechs had begun to unload the cages, even the stands in which Franla and I sat—dated all the way back to its beginning.
They unloaded the thirty-six cages (I didn’t count, but the number of naked, blue-haired girls shut behind metal bars seemed to correspond to what my program said) quickly and efficiently. A sizable crowd had gathered: perhaps a dozen other noblemen and women here in the box with us and then behind us a hundred or so imperial citizens. Ordinary citizens didn’t technically have the legal right to own a Kamnian of their own, but nobles could authorize a purchase for anyone above a certainproperty level—something they did fairly often for friendship’s sake, for the obtaining of favors, or for sheer monetary gain.
As befit a pursuit reserved for the elite of the empire, the crowd gave off a jaded air. Some of these people, I knew—even among the ordinary citizens—had come today to purchase their fifth or sixth concubines. Or they had come because they had the morning free, and they wondered if one of the girls on offer would pique their interest.
One presence that seemed to have created a stir even among the cognoscenti was the small cadre of fleet officers. In my capacity as a financier of fleet contracts, I knew they had come to purchase concubines for the fleet. The officers of the imperial navy, the emperor had decreed, would fuck only the finest concubines. The mercantile companies had insisted that those concubines be acquired at the regular auctions, and the imperial council, beholden as always to the companies, had agreed despite the potential for draining the navy’s coffers at an even greater rate.
“The cages are unloaded, my lords and ladies,” announced the loudspeakers placed on highly decorated columns at the front of the market theater. “You may inspect the concubines for sale today.”
Franla and I made our way from the stands over to the pavilion, part of the slow movement of the crowd who seemed intent on hiding any impatience they felt to get a look at the merchandise. I thought about what the girls in the cages must have experienced on their awakening aboard the drop ship.
Had they understood immediately that they had already arrived on Vion Prime, and missed the entirety of their voyage in space? I felt a frown break out on my brow. I had traveled a good deal inmy youth, in the luxury that suited my rank. I couldn’t imagine being denied the sight of the stars, of the world from which I had come growing small and then disappearing behind the ship before we jumped, and then the world to which I had voyaged growing huge as we approached it.
I felt a pang of empathy as I approached the first of the cages, because I could see the confusion on the girl’s face. She had her hands on her head and her eyes lowered as they had evidently instructed her to do, the better to display her generous breasts and the sweet dark blue triangle of her cunny-hair without the distraction of her gazing back at the potential buyer.
“Interested?” Franla asked, breaking me out of my brief reverie.
“No,” I told her. “Breasts are a bit too ample for my taste.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That’s good to know, for training purposes. There are different techniques, of course, for training big-chested and small-chested girls.”
Chalondra
Not looking up seemed like the hardest part. Not that there was anything easy about displaying myself for the procession of fully, gorgeously clothed Vionian men and women who filed past our cages. The only thing that helped was the feeling that had set in on what the agents had called thedrop ship,when the enormous opening in the floor had appeared: the sense, even stronger than it had seemed in the basement of the village house on Kamnos, that it couldn’t be happening to me.
It had happened in what had felt like the blink of an eye: the moment I had displayed my paddled rear end to the girl in the cage next to mine and heard her shocked reaction to what Agent Delvik had done, a deafening, wailing warning signal had filled the air of the metal room. All of us, thirty-six naked Kamnian girls, had done the same thing: we had put our hands over our ears and looked around desperately for the source of the horrible noise. Then, impossibly, the sound had become secondary, because half of the aisle between the two rows of cages had started to vanish.
Light had poured in from outside. I hadn’t known how we could tell, but I felt certain that every one of us figured it out in a microsecond: this light didn’t belong to Kamnos’ sun. We had all realized at the same moment that we had fallen asleep on our own planet, and what felt like only an instant later, we had awoken on Vion Prime.
The capital of the empire. Where we would be sold to important, wealthy men or women, who would do with us exactly as they pleased.
Already. I’m already here.I had thought it then, and I thought it now as I stood in the cage, watching the feet go by. Feet in shoes: brightly colored shoes, some of them decorated with what must actually be gemstones. I had never seen an actual gem, or a piece of jewelry, but surely the glittering stones on those high-heeled shoes—I had never seen those before, either, of course—must be the precious stones the Vionians wore as a sign of their prosperity.
They brought us through space, and we didn’t even see the stars.It simply didn’t seem real.
“Wetquim?” said a woman’s voice. “Did they really… Oh, that’s just too…” Her voice broke off into a titter.
I felt the comforting sense of unreality begin to slip away, because as much as I didn’t want to remember it, I could hear Agent Delvik’s voice saying the terrible word that I scarcely understood.
My service name. My new name. Wetquim, because I got so wet when he put his hand down there, and made me…
I bit my lip, thinking about it and trying not to think about it at the same time.
“Wetquim, you may look at me,” a masculine voice said, from right in front of my cage.
For the first time, I paid attention to the feet and the lower legs on which my eyes had focused, on the shoes and the trousers and the dress, the light robes whose lower hems hung around them. They belonged to actual people: the ones who had just spoken.
“It says she had to be severely disciplined,” the woman said, her voice so disapproving that it penetrated my feeling of unreality in an instant and sent the hot blood rushing to my face. “But… she is quite lovely, isn’t she?”
She was speaking to her male companion. Not to me:aboutme. Her voice changed, became more authoritative. A shiver of memory, of the basement room and the man in red, went up my spine at her next words.
“Wetquim, look up, please. We don’t want to have to call an agent over, especially when we know you’ve been punished already.”
