Merik Qintana vaulted over the net, a long, two-handled bat in his hand. "My game, Excellent One."
Ozal's sun nestled low in rosy clouds on the horizon, and a flower-scented breeze touched the xenolinguist's damp brow. At his feet, a flock of tiny, rainbow-feathered tilitili birds fluttered up from the lawn surrounding the gaming court, only to be pulled back by silken cords around their legs.
"Terrans have too much magic for me." Jheru, Excellent One of Ozal, answered languidly, but the tall alien's narrow, golden eyes were mistrustful.
Assignment as lingster to Jheru's court didn't include deliberately losing games to him, in Merik's view. Ozal was a small planet, hardly important in the affairs of the Orion Arm, but since Jheru didn't know that, it wasn't wise to allow his dislike to show. He said lightly, "Luck, not magic, Excellency."
Jheru, nude and hairless, built like a child's stick-figure drawing with the unblinking gaze of a starved hawk, dropped his own bat carelessly on the ground and held out a hand. Tilitilis scattered anxiously out of the way. Merik wiped a sweaty palm on his hip, then touched the Excellent One's hand briefly with the tip of a finger as this world's courtesy dictated.
Jheru stared at something. Following the direction of the Excellent One's gaze, Merik saw a small male alien in coarse and shapeless clothing draw back into a thicket of scarlet shrubs that lined the perimeter of the garden. Even at a distance the physical differences between this male and the Excellent One were apparent. Jheru, like most of the inhabitants of Ozal, made six-foot Merik appear short; the lurker, who seemed to be from a race Merik had not seen before, appeared a little over five feet tall, thick-bodied with abundant head hair.
"Guard!" Jheru said.
Two bald Ozalians with emerald fringes across their naked shoulders to signify rank had been lounging watchfully nearby. They loped towards the bushes where the small male had been. Even after three years on Ozal, Merik still expected Ozalians to fall when they ran, pitching themselves precipitously forward on over-long, skinny legs, but somehow, they always managed to avoid calamity. Jheru strode toward the palace. One of the guards immediately returned and followed him; the other had disappeared.
Merik grabbed his own thin tunic off a bench and pulled it on, still not comfortable with the Ozalian habit of nudity. He retrieved Jheru's bat and tucked it under his arm with his own, then sprinted after the Excellent One. Behind him he heard shouting, and he turned to watch a line of guards run past. Just as they reached the edge of the gaming court, an infant--probably one of the palace servants' offspring--ambled out of a flowerbed directly into their path. The guards didn't swerve.
The dust they'd kicked up settled slowly, and Merik stared at the fallen child, the flowers it had been picking scattered across the grass. The frightened tilitilis panicked and tangled their silk cords; bright feathers drifted down on the little body. Very few people's lives were worth worrying about in Jheru's beautiful city; Merik could be the one the guards trampled next time.
Lingsters were under Guild injunction not to become involved in a society's moral or ethical issues. He retrieved the posies and laid them gently on the infant's thin chest as a female Ozalian came screeching down the path.
This was not what he'd imagined he'd be doing when he'd first apprenticed as a youth to the Guild of Xenolinguists. He'd idealized the lingster's role as sacred mediary between the varied races of the Arm, dedicating his life to the holiness of words wherever they arose. "First was the Word and I am its carrier," the Guild taught its apprentices. "Through me flows the meaning of the universe." As a young man, he'd believed in the purity of the lingster's mission.
But the reality he found once he left the Mother House was grittier. A lingster's work was often dangerous, frequently undervalued by those who benefitted from it most, and if there was any meaning in the universe, Merik had yet to find it.
A flight of milk-white stone steps, delicate as the legs of the Ozalians who mounted it, soared gracefully up from the gaming courts to the palace. Everything the Ozalians built had this same ethereal beauty, fragile-seeming as crystal. And just as transparent, he thought; he found no heart in anything.
Two more weeks, and a Terran ship that called on Ozal once in three years would return and take him away to another assignment that would in turn be little better than this one. One day soon he'd leave the Guild. Right now, he'd be grateful just to leave Jheru.
The Excellent One had already vanished up the steps. Merik hesitated. Twilight settled over the lush gardens; he could hear the drowsy murmur of the tethered birds on the lawn. Soon, the palace cooks would serve the third of four feasts each day that Ozalians with their faster metabolism required. He decided to wait until the last meal and turned away from the steps.
Immediately, the world went dark around him. Something thick and foul-smelling dropped over his head and shoulders, tightening against him as his arms were bound to his sides. The bats slid uselessly out of his fingers. Under the sack it was totally dark. He felt himself yanked off his feet and carried bent at the waist over a shoulder. He kicked hard and was rewarded for his trouble by a sharp slash on his bare calves.
"Insha dya," a gruff voice said.
"Ny'e' dya, tol!" another replied.
"I demand to be released!"
Not recognizing the language of his kidnappers, he used the High Tongue of Jheru's people. Most races on Ozal spoke it as a second language if not a first. There was no reaction from whoever carried him so urgently away. They were moving fast now; he was aware of the swift passage of cool air over his legs.
"Dya, dya, n'tik!" the gruff voice said.
"If you'd wanted a lingster, you could've tried asking!"
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