“Can you wall off her cell from visual or auditory contact for a little while, please, Mr. Harakamian?”
“My dear Becker, we are fellow entrepreneurs, businessmen, and adventurers. Do call me Hafiz, my friend, and I shall call you …”
“Becker’s okay, but Aari here calls me Joe.” “Joh,” Aari said, and looked challengingly at Uncle Hafiz. Acorna was pleased to note that either Aari’s appearance was so much improved by his surgery, prosthesis, and horn-hat that the Harakamians noticed nothing unusual, or else Aari’s wounds had only been particularly repugnant to Linyaan. Hafiz smiled and said, “And you too, my dear fellow, must call me Hafiz. Our beloved Acorna calls me uncle. I practically raised her, you know. Why, I am all but a kinsman to your people!”
Acorna stifled a giggle and Aari gave Hafiz a slow baring of his teeth, rather like Decker’s more wolfish grins. “I am Aari, Uncle Hafiz. I have lost much of my own family and will happily adopt you, since you wish it.”
Oops. She wished she and Aari could thoughtspeak as easily as they had been able to among the horns of the dead. She could have warned him. Uncle Hafiz was a very nice man in many respects but he was not exactly to be trusted-not even by members of his blood kin.
“Splendid, splendid.” Hafiz erected a hologramatic wall in front of Kisla’s cell, adding some decorative manacles with a skeleton dangling from them on the outside, a burning brazier with implements of torture heating in it, and, as a finishing touch, a dish of greenish gruel crawling with virtual maggots. It matched the decor of the interior of her cell nicely, though that now was wholly blocked by a slimy looking stone wall. Had Acorna not witnessed some of the conditions in the child labor camps of Kisia Manjari’s adoptive father, the Piper, she would never have believed human beings could incarcerate each other in such dreadful nonhologramatic conditions.
RK sat with lashing tail and narrowed eyes watching as Becker paced with his hands clasped behind him, studying the faces of the men Acorna and Aari had rescued. They were all men, which did not surprise Acorna. Kisia Manjari would have no other women in her entourage. Her ego was such that she would see any other woman as competition.
“I think I recognize a couple of you fellows,” Becker said. “Pardon me if I don’t quite remember your faces. I was dying at the time. But you failed to kick me when I was down and I like that in an enemy, fortunately for you. Now then, I’m wondering if any of you, being the lickspittles of Kisia Manjari and her uncle as you must be to find yourselves in this charming accommodation, would care to redeem yourselves a little further and fill us in about your employers’ plans. You understand we’re wondering why we have been singled out for the honor and distinction of being Kisia and Ganoosh’s enemies.”
Acorna saw them hesitate, and quite without shame she used some of the new skills she had acquired on narhiiVhiliinyar to give her wily old uncle a small psychic push in the right direction.
“I can assure you,” Uncle Hafiz said suddenly, an inner
smile lighting his eyes as if the brilliant idea he had just had was his very own, which, for all Acorna knew, it may have been. Perhaps her push was merely giving him the sort of cue an actor needed to speak his lines at the proper time. “That the man who proves to be of the most assistance to us will no longer need be in anyone’s employ,
“So grateful for his services shall the House of Harakamian be that it shall reward him so that he will believe he has found the universe’s most generous djinn in the most secluded and luxuriously appointed bottle in the universe. Should he be kissing his own mother on the lips, his identity would yet be a mystery to her when our physicians have concluded his transformation and yet, so handsome a-what is that idiomatic expression you so charmingly employ, o incomparable jewel among jewels, when referring to my personal physique and sexual prowess?”