Rift in the Races (53 page)

She lay back and closed her eyes. The smell of the sea reached her, vaguely, though it had to fight for attention with the cloying mix of mildew, sweat and excrement. She could feel the bed beneath her move. The whole room moved. She thought she was dizzy at first, on the brink of passing out, but the reality of the sea smell and the motion shaped itself into an idea, if dully and only in time.

They’d put her on a ship. “My god,” she murmured to herself when she finally could. “What is happening to me?”

The fear and terror came back to her for the first time in several days. She’d been sick and packed away for most of the journey, but now the ship was only a day away from Murdoc Bay—not that Orli had any knowledge of it. All she knew was that for the first time in many years, she actually wanted to go home. Back to Earth. A desire she’d never thought possible, especially after having found magical Prosperion. But she’d been wrong. This place was too wild. Too alien. Too primitive. For a while she lay in a ball shivering and crying in fits.

The wave of it passed, or at least she was able to force it back, as if the thoughts themselves were something to be feared. She found her will and tried to focus on hope, hope and anger—and thoughts of revenge. She wasn’t going to give up. Someone was going to come. Altin would find her. Someone working for the Queen. Then there would be hell to pay. She clung to those ideas like a lifeline, losing her grip sometimes as the hours passed by, and having to ride the heaving sea of her emotion as much as she did the swells beneath the boat.

When the ship finally came into the harbor, Orli had recouped her strength some. She’d been fed twice since waking, not spectacular meals, but better fare than she’d had on the journey across the eastern plains.

She heard footsteps on the deck above, and she could hear the shouts of the captain to his men, different now than had been the calls and footfalls that came while out upon the open sea. Added to their noise came the sounds of the longshoremen on the dock, barking and swearing as ropes were made fast and cargo readied and then hoisted out.

Judging from the moans and mutterings that she heard from the cells around her, she assumed that some considerable portion of that cargo was more than simple livestock. Slaves, if her worst fears were right. Nobody had said anything about slavery in all the time she’d been on Prosperion. Not one mention of it. Ask the Queen, even Altin, and they’d have told her Kurr was the height of modern morality. But Orli suspected she may have turned over the carefully polished rock and found its filthy underside.

The worst part of that suspicion for her was the realization that not everyone held the same respect for the Queen’s authority as the Queen’s disposition suggested that they did. It was not a thought that did much to strengthen Orli’s tenuous hopes for a quick and furious rescue.

A hulking man with a long red tangle of beard came down the steep wooden steps from the deck. The inch-thick timbers groaned under his bulk, and a shower of dust fell from each, the motes glowing gold in the light of a sun in full fire somewhere above. He had a long scimitar hanging from his belt, which was itself a wide thing, a strip of leather that must have cut the girth of the entire ox from which it had been taken. It was nearly as wide as both Orli’s hands side by side, and besides hosting the scimitar, it held up the man’s loose-legged cotton trousers and closed the bottom of an open shirt that at some point had had its sleeves ripped out. Emerging from the rents where the sleeves had been were shoulders large as melons, the defined parts of them, each separate muscle, thick as a pot roast and made distinct beneath his tanned skin by the toning action of endless, heavy toil.

He leered into her cage as he drew a key ring of black iron from his belt. “Oh, you’d have been a fun one for a go,” he said, winking. “Now that you’ve come back from the brink of death, maybe I should get one before it’s too late.”

He turned away from her horrified expression, laughing as he unlocked the cell across the way. He swung the heavy door outward, the want of oil drawing a screeching iron wail from the black hinges where they were bolted to the bulkhead. Orli heard the weight of her fellow prisoner hit the end of chains that must have also been bolted to something. She couldn’t see through the gloom, but she caught the glint of teeth and the further rattling of chain as the prisoner snarled and tried to bite the brutish man.

He laughed and punched the prisoner in the head. The blow was followed by the dull thump of a body landing limply on the deck. The jangle of keys followed and the behemoth jailer reappeared dragging an orc by the leg. Orli stepped forward, curiosity ambulating her unconsciously. She tilted her head and took a quick look at her fellow prisoner.

A woman, she saw immediately, or nearly so. She was stripped to the waist, revealing a muscularity that was nearly masculine. Her body was scarred, her green skin blotchy from so many wounds and from what Orli suspected were tattoos, though the lack of symmetry and the corrugation of all those scars made it difficult to tell.

The wide-belted barbarian dragged the orc woman up the stairs, and Orli could hear him barking at someone to “come fetch her along.”

He returned a while later and again leered at Orli as he passed. The sound of keys once more announced the opening of a door, this time out of sight to Orli’s right. Muffled protests followed, as if someone were gagged, and there came the thrashing sound followed by the thump of feet kicking wood.

“That’s a feisty one,” said the jailer, still out of Orli’s sight. “Come on now. They is waiting for you on the docks.” The air in his voice changed slightly as he spoke, and Orli could guess that he’d just picked the prisoner up. “Well, there’s a well-fleshed girl,” he said. “A stone’s weight in gold for you.”

Out he came, this time with a human woman, bound wrists and mouth, slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Dangling against his back, she turned a frightened gaze to Orli, her eyes wide with terror that, as her captor made his way up the stairs, faded to hopelessness. Orli wondered if the woman knew more than she did about what, exactly, was going on. Orli was beginning to get the sense that her suspicions, her fears about slavery were more than justified. She thought her fears might even be conservative. Which couldn’t possibly be true. Not in this universe. It just wasn’t possible.

The jailer came back thrice more, each time dragging another prisoner out, all women, all young. Only on the last trip did he bring something else, a creature. Something small, hardly bigger than a goat, and on goat’s feet. It had a man’s body, and a man’s face, but goat’s horns and a bit of goat-like fluff about the chin, not a beard really. And he was very small. Barely as high as Orli’s waist, and he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. Had she not been so numb with fear, she might have marveled at him. He looked up at her as he passed by, the light in his eyes, like the women before him, intelligent but lost in hopelessness.

He followed the jailer quietly, led by the chain attached to an iron collar around his neck. He too was gagged. It occurred to her they’d all been gagged, all but her and the green woman that Orli suspected was an orc, and she realized her captors were preventing magic being cast.

Which meant these people had no fear of sorcerers at all.

Of course they don’t
, she thought.
Look what they did to Tytamon
. Suddenly she was terrified again. She wanted to be like the orc woman, to spit and claw and fight. But the thought of Tytamon, the great wizard of nearly eight hundred years … the thought of him, the memory of that one finger bone poking out from the bundled cloaks, of the skeletal remains they’d scattered about the camp back in the mountain pass … it all seemed so long ago now. It couldn’t be like this. It just couldn’t.

She waited through a torturous span of time for the broad-shouldered jailer to return. But he never did. There was a great deal of shouting and commotion for some time after the last of the prisoners, the little goat man, had been taken out. Shouts and cheers, cries of “satyr, satyr,” came like the echoes of an auction being held right there on the dock. But in time, the voices fell away. So did the clunk and drag of crates and bags, the squeak of pulleys, and the dull slide of ropes being dragged across the deck. All of it eventually went away. The angle of the sunlight changed across the silence, making shadows that moved behind the stairs like wraiths counting hours, marching around the edges of a secret sundial. In time, even that was gone.

She was left in the dark. She couldn’t hear anything but the occasional pacing of a lone sentry on deck above. She could hear him whistle sometimes, the occasional
phwtt-too
of his spitting. But he never bothered to look in on her.

Anger began to burn again. She tried to calm herself. She turned toward the wooden bowl sitting next to her as she leaned against the bulkhead, her feed bowl, as she regarded it, looking to distract herself. A pair of rats were in the business of looking for crumbs she might have missed.

It occurred to her to wonder where Altin was. Again. But she already knew. In amnio. But what about Aderbury? He must have inquired about her by now. Her Majesty’s military couldn’t be so unstructured as that, could it? To not ask about her after all this time? Even if everyone assumed she was with Tytamon, surely after this long, someone would have investigated her absence. It had to have been two weeks by now at least. Very possibly more, for she had no idea how long she’d been delirious with illness. Long enough for Aderbury, in his efficiency, to want to know where
Citadel’s
communications officer was. She was supposed to set up the entanglement array. Surely he’d think to wonder by now, to call in on Calico Castle, even if just to say, “Hello.”

And what about Kettle and Nipper? They would be curious about Tytamon’s long absence as well. Wouldn’t they? Unless he was often gone for weeks at a time.

Which he was. She already knew he was. Altin had been gone for months.

Damn these people anyway.

Did anyone even know she was gone at all?

She remembered the look on Black Sander’s face when he’d told her no one did.

Roberto would have noticed by now. He would have missed her for sure after this much time. He would know something was wrong. He would feel it. Two weeks was a long time for her to go without checking in with him. Three was impossible. He’d know something was wrong.

Unless he was busy. Who knew where they were? Maybe the tests had failed. They could all be dead by now. Hell, the fucking Hostiles could have wiped them all out. All of them. Altin, Roberto, her father, even goddamn Captain Asad.

She would have given anything to see him right then. Even him. Oh, the joy of Captain Asad’s stern face. She would have traded anything to hear him lecture her. “Well, Pewter,” he would say, “are you happy now? Had enough adventure yet? Enjoying the lack of discipline? Is it everything you dreamed?”

Right now, running ship’s com sounded like paradise.

She told herself if she ever saw him again, she’d apologize. Again. This time she’d mean it. He’d been right all along. These people
were
barbarians. How could she have been so blind? Thinking she could just run off and live happily ever after on a medieval world. What a fool.

She sat against the back wall of her cell and moped, watching the light of the oil lamp slowly dim, sputter and die. The oil was gone. No one came to refill it.

She sat in the dark. The rats were very brave. They came right up to her, and when she kicked or slapped at them, they only moved to avoid being hit. They came right back.

She kicked at another one, barely a silhouette in the dim pink light of a quarter moon. The rat’s protest sounded like the rusted hinges had on the cell door across the aisle. She kicked at it again when it came back. Another one nibbled at her wrist.

Rage gave electricity to her reflexes as she snatched that one up and slammed it repeatedly against the wall. “Fucking die,” she yelled as she hammered the rat against the wood. “Die, die, die!” She kept yelling it, over and over again, a scream at the edge of hysteria, and all the while she continued bashing the rat against the hull, pounding and pounding with it in her fist until nothing recognizable remained, only a seeping wad of mangy hair and mush. She might have gone on like that forever, or until fatigue consumed her, but she did not. Black Sander’s laughter brought the pounding to a stop.

She leapt to her feet and rushed the cell bars, her hands darting through them, clawing for his neck. “I’ll kill you,” she hissed, but he stepped lightly back, easy as a fencer. She went back and snatched up the rat carcass from where she’d dropped it. She hurled it at him. He dodged that too, still laughing.

“That’s the show we’re looking for,” he said, turning to a tall figure in a long, black cloak, the hood up and pulled low despite the warmth and humidity of the night. “You see, just like I promised. Perfectly intact. And a rare breed, indeed. Feisty. The only one in captivity. ”

The hooded figure nodded and went out, as silently as he had come. Black Sander followed.

Orli pressed her cheek against the bars, listening, trying to pick out the terms of negotiation from the air, certain they would come. She strained to catch some hint of what came next, dreaded it, dreaded hearing some numerical exchange, the back-and-forth of barter, the clink of coin that would purchase her in the flesh. But she could not hear it. Not a word. No courtesy so base as even that was given to her, not by the gods of this world or by the god of her own.