Chapter 1

It was war, and I pawed the ground with my iron-hoofed foot, snorting as I imagined war horses of old would snort, on the field of Agincourt perhaps, beneath fluttering banners of gold and fire.

High up on my shoulders so she could see over my shaved head at the battlefield before us, Akrith did what all humanhorse riders did and tugged gently on my reins to keep me still. “Calm, creature,” the being whispered into my ear. A woman who we might on my Earth call a dwarf, yet perfectly shaped as was myself. A breasted woman, not a child, even if she was no taller than I was at ten. For now, at least, I stood tall. “We will go when we hear the order to charge,” she added.

Charge to my death, probably. How many females like me had been cut down in battles like this? How much earth-bred female blood soaked this planet before me? I tried not to think of it. I had come through so much to reach this point, and was determined it wouldn’t end here.

But with my wrists pinned to my iron waist belt so my arms were akimbo all I had to defend myself against the enemy riders arraigned before us were the iron spikes affixed to my elbows. Sharp and long, designed to maim opposing humanhorses.

My enemies were Earth women like me. Plucked from their homes, their families and maybe even their work, or most cruelly perhaps taken in the deepest. fiercest moment of ecstasy with their lover. Transported in a dizzying, blurred whirl across the galaxy—at least I assumed it was our galaxy but as the night sky, when I was permitted out of my night hood, was different it could have been any galaxy—and thrown into a never ending war on a world far from my own.

I tried not to dwell on the past, where I had grown and lived for 25 years and think of what I had back on Earth. Who I was too; a young actress in London hoping for the one breakthrough part that would send me to fame and perhaps Hollywood. I was now a humanhorse of all things on a planet that in many ways could have been Earth; breathable air, with mountains and forests and oceans and thankfully food I could eat. And clean, cold water when I was permitted to plunge my head into a stream or pool.

I was on a planet called Sevir by the small, dark creatures known as the Egri in whose cause I was now enslaved. A planet with two moons and a sun that grew fierce in summer and shrank cold in winter. A sun that one day I would die under. I just prayed today was not that day.

The order to charge would come, but for now we waited, impatient and frightened in equal measure. I felt Akrith stir a little uneasily in the saddle across my upper back; she may tell me to be calm but she would be scared too. I had assessed her age as similar to mine though Sevir years seem a little longer than on Earth. But she had few scars from fighting her sworn enemy, the Tankic. A good humanhorse rider, by all accounts, but perhaps untested in a charge like this, for she may have been a skirmisher, riding in a small band to find numerically weaker foe. No matter; her small yet strong hands were on my reins whatever lay ahead, and I could do nothing but hope with my help and by the grace of her gods she felled more of the enemy than came for her.

I glanced at the line of humanhorses, noting the heaving breasts of women like me. Muscular, tanned Earth women ready to help their riders kill, or be killed in the process. On what part of them was not naked or clad in leather, the light glinted on polished gems. If the Egri demand one thing of us when unfettered it is a slavish desire to polish and clean that which sparkles, for they ensure our submission by leather whip, cold iron and thick gag.