Rift in the Races (57 page)

He was a foot shorter than she was, but stout like a laborer, and one used to working with very heavy things. Or else it wasn’t a “he.” He might just as easily have been a woman. His facial features, or hers, were broad like his shoulders and hands, like all of him, but the eyes were soft, almost pretty, with violet irises. Orli tried to determine which it was, male or female, but it was impossible to tell. He was certainly stronger than any woman Orli had ever known. Whichever, he held her wrist where he’d caught it and looked her in the eye. No cruelty lurked there. No hate. Nothing sinister. Just the facts.

“Now listen, darlin’, there’s no need for that, and no point.” He looked from her eyes to where her wrist remained caught in his strong grip. “There’s nothing you can do about your situation here, and there’s nothing I can do about it neither, even if I would, which I wouldn’t. You hear? The deal is done, and what’s done is done. You get what I’m trying to say?”

“Where am I?” she said, letting her arm go limp in his grasp. He let it go.

“You’re in The Nowhere,” he said. “The ‘front gates of goodbye,’ as they say. And I can see your eyes dancing about looking for a way out. Which I don’t blame you for, but nobody has got out of here in eighty-seven years, and the one that reset the counter died six hundred paces down the beach or we’d be at a hundred and ninety-two.”

She looked back at him. He had a broad, flat face with brows that jutted from his forehead as if someone had tried to open drawers above his eyes. Above that outcropping there looked to be something feral that had died, a pair of them, two dead things mainly comprised of tufts of wiry hair. She supposed those were his eyebrows.

His mouth was kind, though, in a cracked and tobacco-stained sort of way. Or if not kind, at least not unmerciful. And there was definitely something feminine about the shape of it too, particularly the bottom lip, wide and full as it was.

She couldn’t decide if those were breasts mashed down and pushed out from arm holes of his leather armor or if he was just fat.

He looked her up and down in a way that reminded her of Perfuvius Needlesprig, garment maker to the Queen. Obviously the inspection this time was not being made in the pursuit of fun.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m getting you ready for auction, darlin’. For the show at least. You’re the star performer tonight.”

She’d known it, sensed that it was going to be slavery all along.

The man-woman went out through the open cell door to a chest sitting on a bench across the walkway outside her cell. His back to her, he opened it and started looking through whatever was inside. While he rummaged through it, she considered darting out and making a break for it. As if reading her thoughts, and without so much as a glance back at her, he said, “There are seven locked doors between you and freedom, all of which are guarded, and two with magic wards. You won’t like what the ward on the third door does, just for what it’s worth.”

The matter-of-fact tone in his voice convinced her it was true. It was as if that was the hundredth time he’d said it. The thousandth. Like he had no reason to lie.

She looked past him, out into the vast chamber beyond the railing that guarded the walkway outside her cell. It was enormous. Something about it reminded her of the inside of a great beehive, a honeycomb full of prison cells. There were at least four levels of them that she could see from her vantage in her own cell, all built into the wall of a great egg-shaped cavern. A natural cavern at one time possibly, but clearly shaped by the hands—or magic—of men into what it had become.

Walkways ringed the walls with iron railings to prevent accidents from happening. She could see guards patrolling on every level. She could only assume from the volume and variation of sounds echoing from all around that there were several more levels she could not see, both above and below.

She tried to think back to what she knew of Earth history, of slavery and slave auctions. She didn’t know much, most of it gotten from old books and videos. But she could envision it well enough from those, could see herself standing on some auction block, hands in chains, being turned about like some farm animal while toothless perverts and wealthy ones waved fistfuls of money at an auctioneer droning numbers at them. She shuddered to think it.

The guard came back into the cell. “Take this,” he said, tossing what barely amounted to a scrap of silk at her. “Put it on.”

She caught it reflexively, peeled it from the front of her uniform and snapped it out to reveal its shape. A silk camisole. As she stared at it, she filled with horror even deeper than before, as if somehow the abyss of terror she’d been sinking into for the last who-knew-how-many weeks was not deep enough. She finally realized what she was really in for.

“My God,” she muttered. “No, please.” She fell to her knees before him. “Please, don’t do this.”

He looked down at her, and the dead things growing where his eyebrows should have been crept down around the curved bones of his cantilevered brow. He understood the nature of her fear. He laughed, just one note. “Sweetheart, I don’t know about all that you’re thinking—and I expect you’re probably right at some point—but that’s not all you got to wear today. We been told how it is. So, just put it on and put away your fright for now.”

He went back out and began rummaging through the chest again, pulling out garments seemingly at random and turning and holding them out toward her in the air, making visual estimates.

She watched, nearly paralyzed.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw her still standing there, motionless. “I ain’t going to say, ‘please,’ but I will ask you one more time nice. Put it on yourself, so I don’t have to do it for you.” He followed that up a moment later by tossing another bit of garment at her. “And that.” He continued rummaging through the chest.

In the end, he assembled several pieces of what might have been, twenty or thirty years ago, beautiful gowns. He hadn’t chosen colors very well, or he had but hadn’t had much variety to pick from, but he’d done a decent job of estimating size. Years of practice makes one good at such things.

He watched her dress, which she did, reluctantly, after he’d finally been forced to put a hand on the truncheon dangling from his belt and threaten violence. Afterward, he tightened the corset for her without too much violence at all.

When she was adequately attired, he looked her over and whistled as if the tattered and sweat-stained ensemble he’d cobbled together somehow made her look every bit the baroness. “Pretty as a painting,” he said. “You’d have fetched a fortune otherwise.”

She had to think about that for a moment, and in the time it took her to make the face, he’d slammed the cage door with an echoing iron crash and gone away without so much as a “good luck” or “goodbye.”

About an hour later he returned and handed her a tray of food through the slot in the cage door. The food was warm. It even looked and smelled appetizing. “This won’t make you popular with your neighbors,” he said as he slid it through the door. “But it might cheer you up.”

She got up from the cot upon which she’d been sitting studying the odd creatures and angry faces of her fellow prisoners and looked down at the meal. Fish, possibly halibut. Stewed tomatoes and some kind of greens she did not recognize, but they seemed spinach-like, cooked down, or maybe collard greens. It might have been seaweed. There was a thick slice of bread that was nearly black, the texture spongy but with lots of seeds. There was even a pat of butter on the side. No utensils, though.

“Eat up,” her captor said. “And make water and whatever else you need to do in the next hour or so. You’ll be up soon after and won’t want to spoil the show.”

He left.

She wanted to protest her capture, protest everything, by not eating, but she was famished and this was the best food she’d seen in longer than she could recall just now. So, after several moments futile arguments with herself over the merits of a hunger strike, she nearly threw herself at the food.

It was warm. Well made. Delicious maybe. It was gone in minutes.

It seemed only a few more had passed when the guard returned, this time with Black Sander and a woman wearing the long blue robes of a magician. Orli didn’t recognize her, but when she spoke, her accent was familiar. She suspected it might simply be an accent from the north of Kurr, made more apparent given the way her jailor spoke and by some of the voices she’d heard recently coming from cells nearby.

Orli’s hands were re-bound, cuffed in rough iron bands with four inches of chain clinking between them, and then she was led out of the cell. The robed woman went out in front, with Orli being tugged along right after by the guard, and Black Sander behind, as always silent and sinister. Her spine tingled with him behind her like that, and she kept waiting to feel the point of his rapier or his knife.

Down and down they went, spiraling lower and lower as the walkway screwed its way around the cavern wall. The way out of the honeycomb prison seemed to take forever, and when she thought they’d finally reached ground level, a series of locked doors only opened up a long sequence of stairways that had been cut through what appeared to be an interminably massive body of rock. So down and down they went some more.

The temperature dropped the farther down they went, until by the time the passage leveled out, she was feeling quite a chill. It was coastal cold, the cold of a wind blowing off the salty sea. Wet rocks, sand and kelp. She could smell them long before they came into view.

The sun was still out when they emerged from a cave onto a huge shelf of rock, still a good fifteen feet above the ground and a hundred yards wide. It jutted twenty or so feet out from the face of a cliff that climbed up behind her to a neck-bending height some un-guessed distance above. The shelf itself looked down upon a wide area of white sand that was nearly completely encircled by natural projections of rough igneous rock reaching out from the cliff face on either side. These ancient black arms seemed to hug the space, tapering in height as they curved around to form a nearly complete ring. They fell just short, not quite a circle, and the opening provided by this shortfall allowed a view of the breakers and a clear, turquoise sea beyond. Only through that gap, a narrow entry no more than ten feet across, could people enter from the beach outside into the private space within. And enter they did, for a crowd was already gathering on the sand below.

Her ambiguously gendered guard tugged Orli along the shelf, directing her down a row of cages set against the cliff face from which they had just emerged. Cages lined the towering rock face in both directions, going nearly to the walls created by the projecting arms of volcanic rock on either end. Some were small, made of bamboo, hardly higher than her hip, others were massive iron things, bars as thick as her thighs and locks hanging from them that could anchor a ship. Some of these were occupied, some not. Creatures great and small huddling, lurking or glowering. In one, pacing the square of his confinement, was a centaur, half horse, half man, a thing of storybooks. The sort of thing Altin always talked about, but that she only halfway believed were real. She’d ridden a dragon several times, and yet she still reflexively resisted the idea of other fantastic things. Why would Prosperion be populated by the creatures of Earth mythology? It was odd enough that Prosperion was peopled by people at all.

She didn’t have time to mull it over, however, for the woman in the blue robes stopped at a bamboo cage roughly thirty yards from the cave mouth, not far from a large wooden dais perhaps twenty feet square. The substructure of the dais was hidden from view by a drapery of colored sackcloth tacked unevenly around the edges, its folded apron blowing stiffly in the wind. A short staircase led up the back of it. Next to it, a few steps away, was another platform, this one tall and narrow, raised some ten feet in the air and accessible by a ladder running up its back. A rather small chair sat atop it next to a contraption like a wooden crane jutting off the side and from which hung a pulley and tangle of rope.

As she was being stuffed into her latest cage, she saw other prisoners being led out of different caves than the one she’d come through, suggesting the existence of a significant network inside the cliff. The door was locked behind her without comment or ceremony. None of her captors bothered with even a backwards glance.

She was too numb to be afraid.

She watched the procession of captives being led by. A menagerie of beasts, a parade of people. She thought she recognized the female orc from the ship, but she could not be sure it was the same one.

People were steadily streaming into the sandy cove. By the time the sun expired, consumed by the sea in a bloodbath of dying light that seemed a reflection of how the day began, the cove was nearly stuffed with a throng of humanity, a raucous mob of teeming color and chaotic sound. Barely-clad women moved amongst the crowd selling wine, ale and rum from pitchers which they poured sloppily into every shape and size of cup imaginable in exchange for copper and silver coins.

Orli noticed the volume of the crowd rose the darker the sky became.

The cool sea breeze became a chill wind, reminding her of her long journey across the plains in the unyielding rain. She shuddered to think of it. She slid down into the corner of her cell and pulled her knees up to her chest, watching and waiting. After a time, she began to wish they would just get on with it. Her fate was so indeterminate now, she’d rather be on with whatever was coming next. Waiting was worse. Or at least she hoped it was. She shuddered.