“The Elders?” Vasir asked curiously. “Isn’t that…” She frowned. “They’re supposedly the leaders of the Shadow Order, aren’t they?”

Na’Sara smiled, her head-fronds twitching in approval, especially as none of the other young femmes of the Order she was talking to - a dozen of them gathered together in an empty spaceport waiting room, for speed of contact - had shown any sign of recognising the name at all. “That’s the usual story we give out,” she said, “if people hear of them at all, which they often don’t. I’m glad to hear that ‘supposedly’ from one I trained.”

Vasir grinned, the tip of her tongue sticking out defiantly from between her teeth. “I’m no longer your student,” she returned. “Should you still be taking pride in my attainments?”

“Whether or not I should, I always will.” Na’Sara smiled back. “The answer is more complicated than that,” she said. “The story of the Elders is an ongoing tragedy. Not one the Order would usually tell you.”

“Why not?”

Na’Sara pulled a face, and after a moment, Vasir answered for her. “Because we don’t like suggesting ways that people connected to the Starsoul could corrupt it.”

Na’Sara nodded. “Exactly, the usual reason. The details are different, and we believe the Elders have produced more distortion and corruption than most sources of corrupted sorcery. But the theory remains as it always is.”

Vasir nodded. “But you’re telling me - what, it’s more important right now?”

“I should begin at the beginning,” Na’Sara said. “You said they were supposed to be leaders of the Shadow Order, yes?”

Vasir nodded.

“It would be more accurate to say that the Shadow Order descends from them.”

*

The Elders began their work in the relatively early days of the Starsoul. The Order had not yet officially been formed when Karich Presvan began to draw on the Starsoul to bend the wills of others or to visit pain upon them.

He came from wealth, and had been accustomed to the idea that all should be made easy for him; but a generation or two before him, travellers bearing the Starsoul had landed on his planet, connecting his world to the wider Starsoul, fostering a number of nodes in the system. In his early manhood, Karich had discovered that he could push back against the touch of the Starsoul, could gather it and twist it to his purposes.

*

Karich watched the King’s features go from struggling to slack and nodded his own satisfaction. This Starsoul allowed much more than those preachers had claimed. He wasn’t sure if they even knew it could be used in the ways he had been exploring.

The Consort and he were now alone in the throne room. His wealth had bought him entrance, his will had driven out the guards, and then he had brought his power to bear on the King, staring at him in silence. His young wife’s rising protests notwithstanding, Karich had set out to end the King’s life without once touching him, without anything that could suggest foul play.

Anything apart from the Consort, of course, but he didn’t expect that to be a problem.

There was a dull ache by his temple; he raised a hand to touch it and his fingers came away bloody, the iridescent yellow fluid shimmering on slate-grey fingertips. Killing had taken more effort than he had expected, had left its mark on him in turn, but curiously he did not feel drained, did not feel tired, found himself instead revitalised.

Decades later, as his researches into the Starsoul progressed, he would understand why he was refreshed, more eager than ever. He would know that deaths like that filled the Starsoul locally with a life energy, that they simultaneously - if temporarily - clogged the clarity of the Starsoul in that area, making it easier to appropriate the Starsoul’s power for actions it didn’t approve of.

At the time all he knew was that he felt stronger than before, and as he turned his gaze on the Consort, the rush of adrenaline he felt would have made it impossible to hold back from the next stage of his plan even if he had wanted to.

He watched her chest rising and falling with deep, panicked breaths, her eyes wide with terror, and he drank it in, inhaling as he did so, pulling all of her fear and her anger into him, where it became useful fuel, kindling for the flame he made of the Starsoul. Karich grinned fiercely as he watched her beautiful features slacken, the crimson skin relaxing as she found herself without emotion to draw on, without compulsion to drive her.

He made his way up the steps to the twin thrones and took her by the hand, tugging quickly to jerk her compliantly to her feet, his hold on her will ironclad, suppressing even the surprise she should have registered at what he was doing to her.

He locked eyes with her, and compulsively, without understanding why, she raised her hands to her neckline and shrugged out of the royal gown she had been wearing, standing bare before him, gazing up at him so helplessly she was not even aware she was helpless.

Karich Presvan sat on her throne, and wordlessly, thoughtlessly, she straddled him, a docile broodmare with no emotion and no needs but to please him.

*

Vasir’s lips twitched into an uncomfortable expression. Na’Sara, who had been mentally controlled and compelled more often and who had found ways to make her peace with it, felt less troubled by the story.

Both of them remembered their time as compelled, obedient slaves to other masters. They knew all too well how it had been for the nameless queen of a nameless planet, the details lost to history now.

There were scholars in the Order who had dedicated themselves to a sort of archaeology of legend, trying to find tiny details in the known stories that, when painstakingly pieced together, would narrow down more information.

But the Order was a thousand years old, perhaps two, the Starsoul eight to ten thousand years old at Homeworld, even if it had taken countless generations to be spread through a galaxy of ten thousand thousand living worlds, moons, and asteroids, with twenty times that number of space stations and generation ships forming great population nodes.

Karich Presvan had risen to power and learned to corrupt the Starsoul into mental transgression sometime during the spread of the Starsoul. He had been an Elder long before there was an Order dedicated to the protection of every living being touched by the Starsoul. There were too many options that might match any bit of the legends to be certain of identification.

“Was the Queen the other Elder?” Vasir asked, and Na’Sara shook her head.

“A natural question to ask,” she conceded. “But no. She was simply his first lesson.”

*

Karich Presvan had chosen to keep his name throughout the four hundred years of his life. This had been no simple undertaking; born a Mulnean, he had next been human, then Oseran, then human again, and he expected soon to be an Ouhanian, based on the candidate he had found.

The first time he had pulled off the trick, his body had been on the verge of death, dying probably a decade before his time, perhaps of Starsoul corruption, perhaps of hard living, perhaps a lurid cocktail of the two. He had married the Queen and ruled with her as his puppet, his reign being contentious and marked by a number of rebellions.

In the last of those rebellions he had recognised in one of the heroes of the resistance the power to shape the Starsoul. The young fool had used it only circumspectly, careful of the desires of others, not wanting to harm them, and he hadn’t developed his faculty much. It was, all the same, enough for an experiment Karich Presvan proposed to stake his life on.

As he had drawn out the emotions of the Queen he had made his first consort, when he visited this captive he drew out more; drew out everything but the memories, in case he needed to answer someone who recognised the body, and having done so, he channelled the core of himself into the empty space in its turn, leaving the bewildered rebel to die before his time of old age, in a decrepit Mulnean body.

He had done this again and again, but finally he had found someone who had developed their own capacity for wielding the Starsoul, who had practiced until their faculty was one of impressive power - if not range, in Karich’s dismissive opinion; this one had used the power of the Starsoul to protect others.

He had made no experiments in the mystic sorceries made possible by mingling Starsoul with lifeblood, had instead hunted down multiple sorcerors, facing each in combat, and bested them, often taking them to stand trial in Imperial court.

He was, so the tale told it, a member of something called the Order, and Karich disliked them instinctively.

It was deeply satisfying to open his eyes as an Ouhanian for the first time, but more satisfying still was it to take up the energy blade the man had carried and slay his old body with the fool in it.

He had intended to put that chapter of his life behind him entirely, but when he made it to the starport, a female Venanian blocked his way, wearing a similar outfit to his own, carrying an energy blade of her own.

She leaped at him, and he had to raise his hands quickly to deflect her first cut. Searching through his new body’s memories, he recognised her; this was Melavox, who had been his student. Echoes of unsated desire surrounded her in these stolen memories. His conquest had taught her, had worked alongside her for years, had come to desire the bright flash of her smile and the lithe electric-blue body, but he had limited himself to fantasies and daydreams.

Melavox was a better swordsman than Karich, who was still at the point where his instincts contradicted the muscle memory of the body he now occupied. With every cut she came closer to overwhelming him, her anger coming off her in waves. He’d taught her better than that.

Karich recognised the judgement as coming from something in his head that wasn’t fully him and set it aside as a question for later; he had long taken the most practical of stances when it came to his own survival, which was one reason he was abandoning the planet.

He had to stop this woman from killing him and he couldn’t do it physically. That left one obvious category of options, and he went straight for it.

There was almost nobody else nearby, this part of the starport having emptied as people fled in concern for their own safety. He let some of his conquest’s fantasies about the woman leak out into the local Starsoul, muddying the mental context marks around them. Let her be uncertain where the idea came from; let her simply be confronted by the idea of servicing his cock, sitting cross-legged hovering just above the ground.

Her swing went wide, and Karich looked to swat the hilt from her hand and disarm her; she was too quick for him, too alert through the Starsoul. She sprang back, the Starsoul augmenting her leap taking her three years back, well out of reach of a quick thrust.

Instead he drove home with another image, another fantasy honed by this body’s prior self, where she was pinned up against a wall, her thighs wrapped around him as he drove into her, crying out in ecstasy, writhing as if helpless.

She stumbled on landing, and he knew that had been his work. He pressed forward, energy blade raised, summoning up a zero-G daydream his body had had in which he and Melavox floated before the viewing window of his ship, making love along the stars, before he kicked his feet, gliding them over to the window, so that he was taking her from behind, her bare breasts pressed against the cool inner surface of the lucamite viewing port.

Melavox moaned, and Karich again struck for the kill. She was good, too good; she turned his blade aside and faced him, her lips parted, her stance having melted away from a trained combatant’s stance to something entirely more sensual, her eyes on his.

It unnerved him to see her still so confident, so bold; flooding her sensorium with illicit images that would have more emotional impact on her hadn’t stopped her being aware and clear-headed enough to fight him.

He feinted with a detailed fantasy of her straddling one of his thighs, grinding against him, her mouth stopped by three of his fingers, and he lunged with his energy blade; she turned it away again and blocked his counter-slash, and worse still, she did it without taking her eyes from his and one-handed, her mouth having opened wider to admit three fingers of her own hand after his first feint.

He was having an effect, then, he told himself, and he pressed the attack with an overhand cut; again she blocked it one-handed, her supple wrist countering the strength of a two-handed blow, but she folded to her knees as she did so. Her fingers came out of her mouth and she looked up at him with a challenge in her eyes.

She hadn’t attacked him, he realised, since the second image he’d conjured for her. Unsure what that meant, his own strike faltered, and she shut down her blade with a practiced gesture of her thumb.

“Do that again,” she said softly. “Not the killstroke. The other.”

To say Karich had been in no way prepared for this would have been a remarkable understatement.

He delved into his body’s memories and constructed a far more elaborate fantasy, with Melavox’s arms bound to her sides in loops extending from a taut black shiny underbust corset, a black spiked collar and leash around her throat, her thighs clad in high boots and her pussy exposed to the surrendered and defeated ranks of the Order as she straddled Karich’s cock on a mighty throne in the Order’s Grand Hall, their submissive betrayer now on display to them all.

Melavox’s eyes rolled up into her head and she moaned her way into a rolling wave of shuddering orgasms with no other prompting or stimulus, and Karich was just wondering what he had found here when the woman’s violet eyes focused back onto him and she smiled. “I will join you,” she informed him, “if you teach me all you have learned about subverting the Starsoul.”

*

“The Order was young, then,” Na’Sara said, “but this story we know well, as you can imagine.”

Vasir shuddered. “She betrayed the Order?”

“She tried to found a rival,” Na’Sara answered. “For a time, Karich and Melavox sought out students and taught them what they knew about the Starsoul, showing them all the forbidden practices. They learned ways of drawing out life essence to strengthen our work with the Starsoul, some of which filtered back into the Order when we would capture their students - but they would also channel life essence from others, rather than depend on their own reserves.

“This group became the Shadow Order. We don’t, admittedly, entirely understand why they ceased to be part of it, but there was a point where the Shadow Order stopped talking about their Masters and instead they spoke about what they’d learned from their Elders. And a century or so after that, they stopped even talking about the Elders - but then, a century or so later, very few of the Shadow Order had been taught by them.

“But we actually get our name for them from the Shadow Order. About half of what we know comes from the same source.”

“Doesn’t that make it suspect?” Vasir asked immediately.

“No,” Na’Sara said, “but only because we’ve been able to confirm it against our other source.”

*

The issue, Melavox would later decide, was that they had chosen from among their students.

She had marked one out in particular, partly because they were a human femme and Melavox was curious to experience life as the galaxy’s dominant race, and over the past three years, as her heightened senses of self and of intellect showed her that she had achieved her peak, that her mental faculties were just starting to slip, she had taken this young being and given her special attention, working with her to help develop Melavox’s own strengths and encouraging her in building new skills.

Unfortunately, all of their students had known about this. When Melavox burned out the emotions and personality and choices of her student and occupied that space in turn, and when the students discovered it, they attacked.

Their pledge to serve Karich and herself had said they would give their lives if necessary, and that had, if anything, thrilled many of them. It seemed that giving their body was not the same thing.

Neither Karich nor Melavox had been foolish enough to teach their students everything - for one obvious exception, the students hadn’t even learned of their life extension tricks - but still, there were upwards of a hundred at the time, and they were furious.

Karich and Melavox slew many of them, but they had to flee in the end. Melavox was very surprised, two generations later and living as a protoPhaan, to encounter rumours of a Shadow Order and to realise it had been their students.

She didn’t ask for Karich’s advice, but simply took him and left that world.

*

“There are always two,” Na’Sara said, quoting Grand Marshal Urula, “a master and a slave. For the longest time, we didn’t understand how this was stable. But then, we assumed that they weren’t the same two, over and over, in perpetuity.”

“Even then, though,” Vasir said thoughtfully, “I can’t imagine that Melavox would never try to usurp him. Do we think he’s controlling her more fully?”

Na’Sara laughed, startled. “No,” she said, “But I do understand why you’d wonder that. Like I say, there are always two, a master and a slave. And the master is always whoever bodyhopped less recently than the other; when one Elder transfers body, the other is the master until they transfer.”

Vasir blinked in surprise. “Karich was willing to do that?”

“As we understand it, Karich saw it as a fine price for not being vulnerable just after a bodyhop. Which, if you consider that his last one had involved being attacked by a member of the young Order, makes a lot of sense to me.”

That got a slow nod.

“I have one last question,” Vasir said. Na’Sara braced herself, certain it would be the important one. “Why is it suddenly so important we hear this story? I got the call to report here, what, about a standard week and a half ago.” She looked around the room at the other assembled young Marshals. “How about you?”

One by one, they nodded their acknowledgement.

Na’Sara took a deep breath. “The Elders have a network watching the Order,” she said. “For decades at a time, we don’t need to worry about it.

“But Melavox has been in the body of a Drisanu member of the Order for seventy years, standard. Which tells us what?”

Finally one of the others spoke up, and Na’Sara felt a little happier about the future of the Order that deductive capacity was being preserved elsewhere. “Assuming she took the body when she was a relatively young Marshal, it means we know she’ll be looking now or soon,” she said. “Which tells us why we need to know - we’re candidates, right?”

Na’Sara nodded.

“So why did it go from important to urgent a week ago?” she asked.

“A week ago, we turned one of their network, and we confirmed that the word is out.”

*

“Have you chosen a target, my Master?”

“I have chosen two, Karich, and I will choose from them when both kneel at our feet.” Melavox smiled. “An Ouhanian and a human, both with excellent reputations. But this time, they have something else that makes them valuable to us.”

“And what is that, my Master?” Karich asked.

Melavox called up their appearances on holo. “I think the Ouhanian is my preference,” she said, “but the human is younger and will be less aware of her surroundings. Under the circumstances, I am prepared to take whichever is simpler.

“We will then use her as bait for the other, and I will make a final choice of who will house my mind for my next lifetime.”

Karich was fully aware that his question had not been answered. He made a mental note to discipline Melavox for this after the siphon, when he would be the Master again and she the slave, but for the time being, protocol meant he could not speak up on the matter.

All the same, he inspected the two holos carefully. “They both seem excellent options, Master.”

“They do, don’t they?” He could hear how pleased her voice was, the joy she had taken in what they did ever since he had first broken through to her. “But the thing that makes them valuable is the same reason it’s worth taking both of them.

“They’ve been broken before, Karich. By the Shadow Order and by others. Their will is already fragile, easily broken, easily suborned. So I shall take one for my new life, and we will have a pawn inside the Order for the other… at least, we shall after you have your fill of her.”

She smiled a broad, malicious smile. “Don’t say I never consider your needs.”

“I never will, my Master.”

He resumed his contemplation of the holos. His instincts said this could be trouble, but it was too tempting to pass up completely.

I have a bad feeling about this, he thought, but he kept that observation to himself. It would not be his place until the new Melavox knelt to worship at his boot.