WindBeliever (41 page)

Blue and green and brown and gray and black and lilac and every shade in between viewed the onrushing sharks which beat down on the mortally wounded hammerhead as the means to an end. The feeding frenzy was sickening as the hammerhead was torn to pieces even as it was twitching about the water in its death throes, but it had served its purpose. It removed the immediate danger from the man who would have been killed had those daggers of ivory torn him asunder.

“Lift him,” a sweet voice instructed the dolphin that had come to McGregor’s rescue.

An inquisitive wail of acknowledgment beeped through the water and the dolphin moved into position, stopping with its own body the downward descent of the unconscious man. Using its nose, the mammal eased its burden upward, slowly and with great care, ignoring the blood lust going on below its sleek body as the other sharks tore the hammerhead into pieces only big enough to feed the smaller fish. Another beep of inquiry echoed through the water and the dolphin was joined by a fellow swimmer. Between the two of them, they made sure the unconscious man reached the surface without being attacked by the savage fishes that jerked and twitched and prowled far below.

“Conar.”

He came awake, coughing, sinking beneath the water, struggling to tread water, reaching out, catching hold of something that at first alarmed him, then surprised him as a gentle nose bumped against his face.

“Hold on to the dolphin.”

Not even aware that he did so, his arms closed around the smooth body of the female dolphin and she bore him toward the shore, five hundred yards away. It wasn’t until they had reached the shallows that she shook herself away from him and arched in the water, bidding him a piercing farewell as she struck out with her mate for the deeper recesses of the sea.

He swam to shore, stumbling through the breakwater, crashing to his knees. He bent forward WINDBELIEVER

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on all fours, coughing, gagging, finally vomiting salt water from his stomach and lungs. He collapsed there at the tide line, the waves breaking gently around him, pushing his body forward with every advancing wave. His cheek was pressed into the wet sand, the spume pooling around his body. His fingers clutched at the sand, desperately clawing, trying for a hold on the earth to keep him from being dragged back into the water.

“Help,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from his gagging and the pungent burn of the salt water in his throat.

His belly was burning with agony and each time a wave broke over him, shifting him in the loose sand, he moaned, feeling the pain flood through him all the way to his feet.

“Somebody, please help me.”

He thought he saw horses along the dunes above him. Thought he heard a shout. He wasn’t sure and as the shadow of unconsciousness once more loomed over him, he didn’t really care.

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There were cages lining the room. Cages not all that much bigger than the one that had been the home of a Serenian prince in the Labyrinth many years before. The floors and sides of the cages were made of wire mesh and the metal cubicles were stacked one atop another, three cubicles high, twenty-one cages per wall, eighty-four cages in all.

Every cage, except one, was filled with pitiful human cargo awaiting transport to one of the four major slave trading arenas in Basaraba. Cages along the north wall contained children, none younger than five, none older than fourteen. The cages along the western wall contained women and young girls thirteen and over--those along the eastern wall, men and boys who were destined for the mines and quarries, the fields and farms.

The men in the cages stacked across the southern wall were either old or frail or ill. Their fate, depending on the verdict of the physician who examined them, would be decided prior to their sale. Many would have their throats cut, their bodies dumped into the sea, if they did not meet the slave traders’ standards.

“That one,” the trader gestured. “What of him?”

The physician turned and looked at the ill man inside the cage. He shrugged. “A patrol found him on the beach, nearly drowned. Apparently, he had been stabbed and dropped off one of the ships heading south. He has lost a lot of blood and may not survive.” He pulled at his thin goatee.

“My advice would be to put him out of his misery.”

Gazing up at the cage where the blond haired man slept fitfully, the trader scowled. “He looks familiar.”

“He looks like the one you sold to that bitch Sabrina,” the trader’s assistant reminded the man. “I would say this one is an Ionarian, as well.”

Khan Subet cocked his head to one side as he viewed the face of the slave pressed tightly against the mesh of the cage. “He looks more Serenian,” he remarked.

“What is your desire, Lord Khan?” the physician asked, bored and more than ready to go home to his new wife and the delicious meal he knew awaited him.

Khan studied the man for a long moment. He moved around to the side of the cage and peered up at the heavily-scarred back that was hunched in the confines of the cage.

“He has known the lash many times,” Khan’s assistant said. “It would be my guess that he has not been an obedient servant.”

The trader agreed. “He looks strong enough, though.” He sighed as he turned to the physician. “When he comes to, turn him over to Harim for evaluation. I will trust Harim’s judgment.” He stepped away from the cages where the smell was starting to bother him. Urine was pooled in opaque lakes under the bottom cubicles and human excrement had sifted down through the cages to mound and form islands in the piss. “Clean up this place,” Harim ordered, his nostrils quivering.

The man in the upper left cage opened his dark sapphire eyes and watched the trader and his assistant leave. He wondered idly who Harim was and what evaluation he would have to offer.

Not that it mattered.

“What is your name?” he had been asked when those who had found him at the seashore had turned him over to stare down at him.

It was a minor disharmony that bothered him. It nibbled at his consciousness, methodically chewing at his peace of mind.

“Who are you?” they had shouted at him.

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He thought perhaps it was important that he answer them for they had seemed hard men, men without compassion and pity for his pain and his suffering. He wondered if he told them what they wanted to know they’d take away the pain eating at his gut.

“Where did you come from?”

“How did you get here?”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“What had you done?”

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?”

Questions, he thought. So many questions. Too many questions to try to answer.

So he had decided not to try.

They had lifted him, ignoring his gasps of pain, and flung him face down over the back of a nag with a gait from hell. Her bouncing flanks had brought groans to his lips until he had passed out once more, the wound in his belly opening and closing with every step the horse took.

When he had come to, he had been on a small narrow cot, the man above him frowning heavily as he worked to stitch closed the tear in his belly.

“By the Prophetess, this man should be dead,” he heard the man comment.

Whether it was the loss of blood, the duration of the pain, or just the dazed confusion surrounding him, he hadn’t felt the needle piercing his flesh or the tugging of the thread as it closed his wound. Nor had he reacted all that much to the strong astringent of scrub-root poured over the sutures when the man was through with him.

“He’s known pain and taken it well,” someone said.

“He’ll know more before this wound heals,” the man Conar had begun to realize was a healer answered.

“Put him in one of the upper cages. If he dies, it won’t matter.”

He had slipped over the edge of what he was able to endure when they moved him from the cot to the cage. Hung over some brawny bastard’s shoulder as that tormentor had climbed a shaky wooden ladder, it was a blessing as he was flung into the cage, naked as the day he had been born, that he passed out. The shadows had lengthened in the warehouse when he awoke and he figured it was probably close to feeding time for he could smell some noxious beefy smell that invaded his stomach with a rumble.

But they hadn’t fed him when they tended to the others in the warehouse.

“There is no need to feed a slave who may die before the night is through.”

He had shrugged, not caring one way or another if they fed him. He’d been without food many times. And water. And clothing. What was one more time, eh, Commandant?

The next morning, the trader showed up at his cage, staring up at him, asking questions of the physician. Not wanting them to know he was conscious, he had opened his eyes only a slit, just enough to view the man the physician spoke to with such reverence. He listened to them discussing him, wondering why he didn’t seem to care that they spoke of him as though he were a piece of meat in a display case.

“If he survives, I might be able to get a few hundred Ryals for him. No one will want to buy a slave who has been whipped so thoroughly. They will think he will be recalcitrant.”

Recalcitrant? Conar thought. Aye, there have been those who said I was. Pondering the word, he thought it might well be an apt description of him.

Churlish, too, he would imagine.

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“It will be months before he will be able to do any physical labor, Lord Khan. The stomach wound was deep.”

“Stomach wound?” another man had asked and Conar had shifted his attention to the speaker, thinking the man looked like an ass-kisser to him.

“A patrol found him along the beach ....”

Conar stopped listening. Instead, he concentrated on the man staring up at him, the man the other two gave deference. He watched the man’s hawk-like, professional gaze evaluating him and mentally shrugged. What did it matter? He had been evaluated many times before.

“Harim,” he heard the physician muttering and it brought his attention from watching the slave trader and his toady exiting the warehouse to the healer. “I hate dealing with that one.”

“Lord Khan won’t even get one hundred Ryals for this blond weakling,” someone said. “I wouldn’t even give a copper Senti for him.”

A faint smile twitched at Conar’s lips. Hadn’t someone bought him for a copper Senti once?

No, he remembered, he had bet someone a copper Senti, but he couldn’t think why or for what.

The physician glanced up and found the dark sapphire gaze watching him. There was something in that look, in the way those alien orbs looked at him, that made the medical man take a step back from the row of cages. It was almost as though there was a light on behind that unfathomable stare, but no one in the cottage to answer the door should you go calling.

“Tell me your name!” The slave hadn’t answered when the patrol’s captain had brought him to the warehouse, despite the heavy hand that had connected with the injured man’s jaw. “I will know your name, slave!”

Looking up into those vacant sapphire eyes, the physician suspected the slave no longer knew his name. There had been a bad cut on the back of the man’s head, a lump that said he had been struck. Probably, the physician had remembered thinking at the time, when he fell overboard.

“Do you know who you are?” he had asked the slave when he had finished sewing up his wound.

His answer had been a vague twitch of the man’s full lips and nothing more.

“Son-of-a-bitch is awake.”

The dark blue attentiveness flickered then hardened.

“Who are you?” the physician asked the man staring at him. For a reason he could not have explained, the answer seemed vitally important.

“Harim will get it out of him,” that other speaker snapped. “Or gut him in the bargain.”

Conar moved his head just enough to try to see the man who had flung out such a pronouncement, but he couldn’t see beyond the corner of the cage where a metal bar supported the mesh and blocked his vision. It took too much effort to try to lift his head and he was so weak he doubted if he could.

“If you live through the night, I’ll feed you in the morning,” the physician said, shuddering at the faintest grunt of unconcern that came from the man in the upper cage.

Long after the warehouse was quiet for the night, with only an occasional sob or moan to punctuate the stillness, Conar lay awake and thought.

He knew he was being held somewhere where he could not escape even had he the strength to try. There was a heavy padlock on the door of the cage and the mesh was heavy, reinforced steel. Had he a sharp weapon, he seriously doubted that he could cut his way through the links of mesh. The door to the warehouse had been locked from the outside, the bar sliding into place with a finality that had sent one man into a screaming fit. Since there were no windows in the WINDBELIEVER

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airless, unbearably hot building, and the floor was of some kind of unseamed stone, there was no escaping that way. Looking up at the rafters high overhead, he saw that there didn’t appear to be any way to reach them and, even if he could have, no way to exit the building through that avenue.

Wherever he was, it was a maximum security internment that left no doubt that escape was impossible.

It wasn’t the Labyrinth, he was sure of that, although for the life of him he couldn’t exactly remember where the Labyrinth had been. He knew he had been imprisoned there, and for a good long while, even though he couldn’t seem to remember for what crime or for how long. So far, he hadn’t been whipped, but he expected it at any time. Not that it mattered, he thought with a mental shrug. He wouldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything anymore since he’d been lashed so expertly, so many times before. By whom, though, also seemed to have skipped just beyond his ability to reach out and grasp it.