The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [53]
She was nodding slowly, as if intimately familiar with both procedure and candidates. “Yet none of them,” she finally declared, “with the simple elegance of ‘Lord Vaako.’” Rising fluidly, she moved toward him, her voice falling to a husky whisper. “You can keep what you kill.”
Vaako swallowed. A trio of approaching enemy armed to the teeth he knew instantly how to deal with. This woman, diaphanously cloaked and sensuously madeup, represented an entirely more complex challenge.
“Stop,” he muttered.
Her voice was soft in his ear, sugar in his mind. “It is the Necromonger way.”
“STOP!” Having momentarily turned away, he spun around and grabbed her, his fingers sinking into her receptive flesh. He struggled to control himself. “His passing will come in due time. And not a moment sooner.”
“Why?” she wondered, her personality a blend of coquette and assassin.
Vaako straightened as if on parade. Which, in a sense, he was, even there in their private rooms. “Because I serve him—we all serve him. That is also the Necromonger way. It represents how we have managed to become what we are, how we have succeeded in growing and spreading our creed. It’s called fidelity.”
“It’s called stupidity.”
Always one to reduce the exalted and the complex to an oversimplification, he thought angrily. As linked as they were, there was a point beyond which he would not be pushed. He replied with the front of his hand across her face, hard.
It did not have the intended effect.
She smiled, an entirely carnivorous manifestation. It was fortunate that Vaako was intimately familiar with it. Another man might have been frightened. “Well—finally, some attention.”
She did not so much move toward him as strike, attacking him with the kind of coiled, primal sexual energy normally held in restraint beneath her noble poise. Knowing it was futile to do so, he made little effort to resist. Knowing also that he did not want to do so. Though as adherents of the Necromonger faith it would be counter to their beliefs to procreate—and their reproductive systems had been modified accordingly—the enjoyment of the act was not forbidden to them.
Then, just as abruptly and unpredictably, she was stroking his face, cooing at him like a lover on their wedding night. “You have such greatness in you, Vaako. So much potential. Everything you ever strove for, everything you ever wanted, is right there, yours for the taking. But it will not be given to you— you have to take it for yourself. I just wish you could see it like I do.” She kissed him again, not biting this time, her lips hot and moist as they traced abstract patterns against his skin.
“You know what I want?”
Vaako was present physically, occasionally returning her kisses as she continued to caress him, but a part of his mind was not. That part of him was remembering. Calculating.
“He was meeting with the other commanders,” he murmured wonderingly, staring off into a distance only he could see. “They were completely occupied with what they were discussing. Everyone’s back was to me. I was very careful. I came up behind him in perfect silence—not a squeak of boots, not a rustle of clothing.”
For all that they continued to speak aloud, they were not having a conversation. They were each of them lost in their own worlds now, their own private thoughts.
“I want to go down to Necropolis, right now,” she whispered throatily.
“And he knew,” Vaako muttered, recalling the incident with disbelief. “He knew I was there even though he never turned till the last instant. His astral self sensed I was behind him, and communicated my presence.”
Her hands were moving now in counterpoint to her tongue. “And if no one’s around, when no one is looking, I’ll get down on my knees. . . .”
Vaako was shaking his head. “You can’t surprise him. It’s impossible. He knows everything. And if the living half of him doesn