9.
 Jory had gone to the House of Ramyon at age 7 with a little human girl named Xinda who was said by the babas to possess a healing touch. Xinda had first come to the castle officials' notice because of her unusual hair and skin. She was that very rare human who had carrot-red hair, pale skin, and lots of orange freckles. That alone made her an oddity worth showing at the castle.
However, Xinda was said to have sickened a baba through witchcraft. kjirs later, Jory heard she had had her eyes put out by the castle babas one night, and the unfortunate girl had been sent out a back gate after midnight to the arms of her terrified parents. At the moment all he knew was that in the morning, when he woke up, her bed was stripped and her things were missing. She was gone, and nobody would talk about her. Life on Oba was hard, even cruel, but the Shurians rarely went out of their way to be cruel. They could be serene or cruel, because their laws and customs were unbending, and their warlords were desperate to keep all foreign customs out, even the evil spirit natural to humans.
Jory had been terrified of the dark, groaning castle with its blackened stone exterior and its whispering, creaking wooden corridors of which there seemed to be klix. Jory had been terrified to live among aliens who bred in three genders—the male warrior who was lord of his house; the baba, who was egg bearer, birth mother, and nurturer, and ran much of society to boot; and the female, who was sex object to both other genders, and egg source.
The Shurian males and females were very humanlike, while the babas struck little Jory as nightmare figures. The males and females had pale, almost translucent outer skin that covered a milky inner skin. Older men and women had visible blue or black veins just under the milky skin. Both genders tended to have a fuzzy globe of reddish-gold head hair like cotton candy. Because they were nocturnal, they had eyes half again as large as human eyes to gather light. Other than that, they might have passed for humans—although the very thought might have turned their stomachs. Some of the finer ladies, Jory found, were rather slender and attractive. Especially Ramy.
The babas were the horror of Jory's childhood, and he often ran away to his parents' house. Later, he would discover his parents, though they loved him, had accepted a handsome stipend for their son's services at the court. They always returned him, and he began to hate them. Later he just felt distant to them—he was court-educated, while they were ignorant laborers who could not read or write, and who had never left their village. Jory, by contrast, had traveled much of the Obayyo with Lord Ramyon's entourage, once even visiting the imperial palace. Jory had been 9 and had slept through large parts of that brief visit during which Ramyon had pledged obeisance while receiving the emperor's vow of eternal favor. Like so many things on Oba that were the opposite of what they seemed, this was a fiction, Jory would eventually learn, in which Lord Ramyon took 1,200 of his warriors and threatened to depose the emperor and murder his family if anything happened to the status quo. Hundreds of high lords did the same thing in revolving order.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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