Judgment II: Mercy (7 page)

Almost comforting, in a way. As she knelt before him, her eyes down, her hands clasped nervously behind her back, Mary couldn't help but wonder if maybe all the other barracks, except hers of course, had floor coverings as nice as this.

Tane's black shoes made another pass around her, then he reached down and lifted the skirt of her tunic, flicking it up to the small of her back. "Nice," he said.

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"She marks very well," Boyden replied. "She hardly makes a peep of trouble; I'm not getting near enough exercise. It'll be good to get the new batch in. For a while there, I was afraid I might grow too soft to handle them."

Mary hissed a quick breath and winced as Tane cupped her right buttock, squeezing the line of weals, his fingers seeming to find all the tenderest areas to pinch.

He squatted down beside her, following the ladder line of welts from her bottom to her thighs. "Well, Blonde, you're through the first part. Pay attention, because I'm going to give you a very rare opportunity. Look at me." He waited until she'd raised her head and, as her eyes found his, almost gently asked, "Would you like to go home?"

"N-no," she hastily ducked her head. "No, Master."

He didn't move. "Do you think I'll make this offer again?"

His eyebrows rose as he shook his head once. "I won't. This has been naught but a gentle introduction for you. If you stay, your training will begin in earnest and all these little mistakes you've been allowed to coast by with, you'll now find catch up to you very quickly."

His words made Mary shiver, but she still shook her head.

Staring at the carpet, she whispered, "I want to stay."

Behind her, Boyden chuckled. She felt his hand lightly touch her back as he lowered himself to her level. He kissed the nape of her neck and his hot breath whispered against her ear, "Bye bye, Blonde."

She felt a trickle of panic when he walked out of the room without her. Though she'd known it wasn't going to last 60

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forever, it still felt for a moment as though she'd been cut loose from a firm anchor.

"Rise," Tane told her.

Mary unclasped her hands and laid them on the floor. She fidgeted with the pale carpet fibers before pushing herself up.

Having only had to assume the position once before, she was hesitant as she spread her knees apart. She could feel the strain pulling along the inner slope of her thighs, but remembering the reprimanding snap Tane had laid into China and Mahogany with that wicked Judgment strap, Mary worked to get her knees further apart.

Tane caught her chin in his fingers. "Head straight. Eyes to the floor." A soft caress of his fingers over her hair was her reward for obeying.

Her breath hitched in her throat as his hand smoothed down the front of her tunic to cup her left breast. He squeezed and she felt a warmth flare within the pit of her belly. It trickled down, as his wandering hand did, to caress her loins. He cupped her there as well, and Mary almost closed her eyes.

"Your name is Mercy," Tane rumbled, as intimate as any lover. "Know that's as close to the real thing as you'll receive from us here."

He gave her two gentle spanks that nevertheless made her entire body jump. Darkly, ever so slightly, Tane smiled at her, then stood up and leisurely walked away. "You haven't met Master Shipe yet, have you?"

Hearing the door, Mercy turned her head as a burly, scowling dark-haired man propelled himself into the room on 61

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one crutch. Though older than Tane by a good ten years, his upper body was a mass of muscle and sinew. His arms as well as his right leg were thick from constant exercise and looked to her as solid as stone. His left, however, was a stump just above where the knee should have been, as burly as its twin, but ending in a round knob that the adjusted hem of his dark pants hugged. The grey-streaked growth of hair upon his jaw was more the result of avoiding a razor for roughly half a week than any conscious desire to grow a beard. And when he set his hard eyes on Mercy, they narrowed sharply and his frown deepened the lines in his chiseled face.

She had the most insane urge to jerk her legs shut.

"This her?" he growled.

"Mm." Seating himself at his desk, Tane didn't so much as glance at her. "Give her six of the best for breaking position."

Someone in better control might have snapped automatically back into position, head straight, eyes to the floor. But instead Mercy found her eyes lowering, not to the floor, but to Master Shipe's stump of a left leg.

He noticed, and his eyes narrowed even more. "Well," he barked. "What the hell are you sitting there for? Get your skinny ass behind me and try not to get lost."

She scrambled to her feet and hurried after him, barely catching the door before it slammed shut behind him. She glanced back at Tane once, but like a king upon his throne, the Mountain Lord sat at his desk and hoarded his attention for vastly more important things. She had already been dismissed.

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Mercy had to run to catch up with Shipe, who swung himself down the hall faster than most people walked, leading her through a maze of staircases and corridors. The walls were all stark stone and unadorned; each new corner came to resemble one which they'd previously turned.

"Mercy," the one-legged master uttered under his breath.

"He's developing a sense of humor in his old age."

As he took her deeper into the bowels of the mountain, the sounds of distant feminine voices became more obvious. They were at ease, at play, conversing and not crying out in pain as Mercy had grown accustomed to hearing in Boyden's empty barracks.

At the end of a long hall, Shipe turned a corner and opened a door. He swung out onto the top of a flight of metal steps that overlooked a mammoth stone corridor of sleeping barracks. His command: "Doors closed!" boomed out over the join of the rooms and every door in the stone hallway slammed shut before they were even halfway down the stairs.

The voices hushed, dropping to little more than an occasional whisper. It made the echo of their passing seem obscenely loud to Mercy's ears.

"This is the Pit," Shipe told her. "You've got no reason to be here. Ever. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

They had almost reached the end of the hall at the end of the Pit when a sharp crack rang out behind them. Mercy jumped at the sound and spun around, but as a second crack and the shrill cry that followed it suggested, the discipline taking place was happening behind one of the closed doors.

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Shipe took hold of her ear lobe. "Nothing that happens here is any concern of yours. I thought we were clear on that."

Mercy muffled a cry of her own as he pinched the tender lobe, dragging her along behind him.

"Had you any sense, you'd be more concerned right now with what I'm going to do to you." He swung himself down the hall on his crutch, pulling her with him and she still had to hurry to keep pace, even when they came to another set of stairs, this one leading up.

He let go of her sore ear to grab hold of the banister on each side. Hooking his crutch over one brawny shoulder, he scaled up the steps on his arms as easily as though he were walking. The ripple of his biceps and the rolls of muscles playing down the plain of his hard back made her catch her breath. He was solid everywhere.

Shipe stopped at the top of the stairs and once more standing with the aid of his crutch, turned to look back at her slower progress behind him. Still scowling, he held out his hand.

Mercy made a face, but obediently came closer and turned her ear to his hand. He took hold of her lobe again, once more twisting it sharply as he pulled her along behind him.

They passed three doors before he stopped.

"Welcome to your new barrack," he said almost bitterly. He opened the door and pushed her inside.

It was obviously Shipe's personal quarters. There was a warm fire in the fireplace, a brown bear skin on the floor, and the most ancient assortment of framed maps hanging around 64

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the room. He had a neatly made sleigh-style bed, dark walnut-wood bookcases that lined every free inch of wall space, and the occasional dead thing thrown in for decoration: a ram's head, an elk's, two stuffed pheasants and a monster of a fish mounted on a plaque above the oak mantle.

"Get in," he told her flatly. "This is where you'll stay when you're not working."

The door swung shut behind them and he swung across the room, past the fireplace and the bathroom, to a narrow door in the far wall.

"This is where you'll sleep," he said as he flung open the door.

The size of a spacious walk-in closet, it still made for a very small room. There was no window and the light from the ceiling could have in no way been mistaken for anything other than artificial fluorescence. Especially when it flickered, as it was doing now. The only article of furniture was the bed itself, a thin twin mattress that lay on the floor. No worse really than the room Richard had given Mahogany and China.

"Well," he said when she hesitated at the edge of the door.

"You want an engraved invitation?"

Fidgeting with the front of her pea green tunic, Mercy squeezed between him and the threshold and crept into the closet. She looked down at her bed on the floor. There was one pillow and a set of pressed sheets and a blanket folded neatly on the foot of the mattress.

"You've got six cuts coming to you," Shipe said. "You'll get them first thing after supper. Plus an extra two for your 65

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misplaced curiosity in the Pit. Depending on how irritated I am with you by then, I may or may not round the count to twelve. Questions, comments, complaints?"

She blinked back at him and gave a small shake of her head. "No, sir."

He grunted, then started to close the door. He almost had it latched before abruptly he swung it open again to glare at her again. "Lights out is at ten. I hear so much as a peep from in here and I'll take a layer of skin off your backside. Got it?"

Mercy attempted a small nod. "Y-yes, sir."

"You claustrophobic?" he asked.

"No, sir."

He turned his head, looking around him, then reached up to pluck a book from a nearby shelf. Tossing it in the closet onto the foot of her bed, he said, "Here. Try not to be too much of a pain in the ass until supper."

Then he shut the door.

Mercy sat down on the middle of her mattress on the floor and folded her hands in her lap. Her bare legs stretched out before her, she glanced around at the bare walls, then at the book on the folded up blanket. She reached sideways to pick it up. It was written in German. A brief flip through the pages revealed no illustrations.

She bit her bottom lip, looked at the door, and wondered how long it was until supper. By this time, some of the welts Boyden had given her had disappeared. Others, the thick plum-colored lines where he's struck her harder and more than once, still stung as she rolled onto her hip and crawled 66

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to the end of the mattress. Very hesitantly, she knocked at the bottom of the door.

There was an explosion of curses from the other side. A second or two later, the door swung open. Shipe glared at her.

Very meekly, Mercy held up the book. "I-I can't read this.

Do you have anything in English?"

His eyes narrowed and he growled. Then he took a quick glance at the bookshelves around the door of her closet. He swung a few steps away, then returned with a thick volume, which he dropped on the mattress next to her. The English title read,
'Basic German'
. Shipe shut the door again.

Mercy chewed at her bottom lip for several long minutes.

Even more hesitantly than before, she again rapped two knuckles on the bottom of the door, and cringed when she heard the second volley of curses, longer and louder than before.

Shipe yanked the door open and, leaning one broad hand against the threshold, leaned in at her. "What?" he growled.

Mercy rubbed her hands together. "May I please use the bathroom?"

He studied her with hard eyes. "Yeah," he seethed, exhaling the word as though it were a sigh of sheer annoyance. "I can see right now you're going to get the full twelve."

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Judgment II: Mercy

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Shipe kicked open the dining room doors and swung into the hall, his customary gait, that of an avenging fury. Mercy's bare feet softly slapped the floor as she hurried along behind him, sometimes walking, sometimes jogging just to keep up.

His stamina was amazing. As they walked down the center aisle between the rows of tables, benches, and the Lessers standing at silent attention while they awaited the command to sit, Mercy couldn't help but admire the bunching, flexing muscles playing along his shoulders, arms and back. He was a powerful man, despite his partial limb. But also humorless and very quick to temper.

It was also plain to see that the other women were afraid of him. Now and then, she thought she caught a sly sideways glance from a Lesser here or there, but not one of them—not one—turned her head to look at them directly.

Far to the front of the room was the dais upon which the masters sat to eat their meals. The food at the high table was of considerably better quality than that served to the Lessers, and made Mercy's poor fare all the more unpalatable. And worse, she was segregated from the rest as though she were diseased. Being alone had been easier to ignore in Boyden's barracks, when she hadn't seen the others, but in public it was much harder. When Shipe led her around the dais to the small table, set up in the corner with only a single place setting, she could feel the eyes of the Lessers on her back.