Warrior (67 page)

The Lucky Harlot was a much more salubrious establishment than its name implied. As a slave, Elezaar would not normally have been permitted in the main taproom unless he was attending his mistress, but the owners knew he was Princess Marla’s personal slave and for her they were willing to bend the rules. Besides, there was plague in the city and any customer in good health was welcome.

Located in the better part of Greenharbour, the tavern boasted snowy white tablecloths, chairs upholstered in soft, pliable leather, a large cushioned seating area surrounding a low dining table overlooking a small paved courtyard and, most importantly, a number of discreet alcoves where one could discuss business in private.

His palms sweaty with anticipation, Elezaar limped along behind the silent slave who led him to the alcove where Bekan—and maybe Crysander—were waiting. When the slave indicated they had reached their destination he bowed and walked back to the taproom.

Taking a deep breath, the dwarf pushed aside the woven curtain. Waiting for him, seated on the cushions around the low table, were Venira’s doorman, Bekan, an old man Elezaar didn’t know and a slave he knew very well indeed.

“Tarkyn Lye,” he said, shaking his head. “I should have known you’d be mixed up in this somehow.”

The blind
court’esa
turned his head in the direction of Elezaar’s voice and smiled coldly. He wore a scarf over his eyes, to hide his scarred face, and a rich brocaded jacket over his well-fed belly. “Well, well . . . if it isn’t the Fool. And to think, Bekan and I were just laying odds on whether or not you’d actually show up.”

“Who were you backing?”

“Bekan was willing to risk his money on you. I thought you too much a coward to leave the safety of Marla Wolfblade’s skirts.” The blind
court’esa
spoke with obvious contempt. Then he laughed and turned his head in the direction of Bekan. “It just occurred to me why she’s kept him around all these years, Bek.”

“Why’s that?” Bekan asked.

“Well, look at the size of him. He’s just the right height, when you think about it. Marla probably keeps him hidden under her skirts for pleasure. Elezaar was always particularly good at kissing arse, as I recall.”

For a moment, Elezaar almost forgot himself. The insult to his princess was enough to make him want to hurl himself across the low lacquered table and grab Tarkyn Lye by the throat. He wouldn’t, of course. Even blind, Tarkyn was strong enough to brush him aside like a bug. And Bekan could break him in half, if he was so inclined.

So Elezaar simply swallowed hard and trusted no hint of his anger was betrayed by his voice. “At least I can
see
what I’m kissing. Which makes me wonder, Tarkyn? How do you know where to find Alija’s arse when she wants you to kiss it?” He laughed then, at his own foolishness. “Of course! Silly me!

I’ve heard blind men compensate for their disability. Your other senses must be much more acute. You can probably smell her slit from across the room!”

That struck a nerve. Tarkyn’s expression darkened but, like Elezaar, he apparently had no intention of letting his opponent know how much the remark insulted him. “I can smell the stink of your
fear
across the room,” Tarkyn replied. “That’s for certain.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Tarkyn Lye.”

“Then more fool you, Fool.”

Affecting a bored sigh, Elezaar shrugged. “Where’s this slave you’re claiming is my brother?”

“You mean you didn’t recognise him the moment you laid eyes on him,” Tarkyn asked, sounding quite surprised. “I’m appalled! So much for brotherly love.”

Elezaar’s gaze fixed on the slave seated on the cushions against the back wall. If Tarkyn was appalled, Elezaar was shocked beyond words. This creature was nothing like the slender, handsome young man Elezaar remembered. He was old, although his exact age could have been anywhere between forty-five and ninety. Dressed only in ragged canvas trousers, his skin was the texture of orange peel, tanned from a lifetime of overexposure to the sun, and it hung on his emaciated frame as if it belonged to a larger man. His hair was long, thin and lank, and it was impossible to tell what colour it might once have been.

“
Crysander
?”

The man looked up slowly when Elezaar spoke his name. There was no light of recognition in his eyes. Just a blank stupor. It was the kind of look a slave wore when he’d had his spirit broken. It was the look of a man beaten down so many times he’d lost the will to get up again.

“That’s not my brother.”

“Be very certain about that, Fool,” Tarkyn warned. “If you deny him, he’ll die. As you can see, he’s hardly worth feeding now. Unless he has some other, more intrinsic value . . .” The blind man turned his head in the direction of Bekan. “Stand him up. Make sure the dwarf gets a good look at him.

I’d hate for him to have second thoughts later.
After
we’ve killed him.”

Bekan pulled the slave to his feet. The man didn’t resist. He was chained hand and foot, his body covered in old scars that looked to be the work of a lash or a thin cane. Elezaar was filled with pity at the sight of him, but nothing else. There was nothing in this shell of a man that reminded him of his brother.

But as he swayed on his feet, Elezaar noticed a faint white scar on the man’s belly. It ran lengthwise from the base of his ribcage to just above his navel. Elezaar’s mind suddenly filled with those horrifying images from his nightmare:
the captain’s blade plunging into Crys without warning . . . the
man—Alija’s man—driving his dagger up under Crys’s rib cage and into his heart, with businesslike
efficiency . . . Crys falling . . . the creak of leather as the captain bends over to check Crys is dead
. . .

He shook his head to push the memories away and stared at the slave. It couldn’t be Crysander.

Not this broken husk.

But that scar
. . .

“Come on, Fool!” Tarkyn urged with an edge of impatience. “It can’t be that difficult, surely, to recognise your own brother?”

Elezaar ignored the blind
court’esa
. “Do you know who I am?” he asked the slave.

The old man nodded. “Elezaar the Fool.”

That didn’t prove anything. Anybody could have told him that. He could have worked it out just from the discussion they’d been having here in this room. Elezaar needed to ask something nobody but he and Crysander would know. Something that only two brothers might have shared. If he was an impostor—some helpless dupe roped into pretending he was Crysander because of a convenient scar—

he would have no memories of their childhood together. Tarkyn Lye, or Alija, or whoever was behind this transparent plot to subvert him, couldn’t possibly know everything the brothers had shared as children. They might have been able to find out what happened once they’d both been taken to be trained as
court’esa
, and may have even coached the slave to respond accordingly. But the years before then, the ten precious years of relative happiness the brothers shared as slave children in the household of a minor Pentamor nobleman were beyond their reach. If Crysander had hoarded those memories as Elezaar had, then he would know the answer to Elezaar’s question.

“We had a game, my brother and I, when we were children. Something that meant a great deal to me. Do you know what it was?”

Elezaar waited anxiously for the slave to reply, his drawn-out silence convincing the dwarf he had no memories of a shared past the longer it went on.

“Horsey,” the slave said softly, as Elezaar was on the verge of turning to leave. His voice was gravelly and rough, as if he’d spent the last twenty-five years screaming at the top of his lungs and finally worn out his throat. “Your legs were too short and you were never going to be able to ride a real horse.

You wanted to know what it felt like . . .”

The voice faded away, as if that was all he could recall, and the slave hung his head, as if he expected punishment for speaking out of turn. Elezaar stood frozen in shock. And indecision. All his fears about what he should do next came crashing down on top of him.

Walk away
, a small voice in his head urged.
Say they’re wrong. Tell them it’s not Crysander.

Walk away. Now
.

“How much?” Elezaar heard himself asking, even though the voice of reason in his head was shouting at him, telling him he was a fool.
Crysander brought this on himself! He betrayed Ronan Dell! If
he’s suffered all these years, it’s not your fault!

“He’s not for sale.”

Elezaar turned to Tarkyn.
So that’s their game. Betrayal
.

“What do you want from me?”

The blind
court’esa
chuckled. “You used to be such a self-centred little thing, didn’t you? Too much of the good life has weakened you, Fool, softened your resolve. There was a time you cared for nobody but yourself. Look at you now. All pampered and favoured like a fat, neutered house cat and with just as much balls.”

“Just tell me what you want, Tarkyn.”

“Nothing too difficult. Just some information, that’s all.”

“I won’t betray my mistress.”

Tarkyn leaned back on the cushions and smiled confidently. “Yes, Elezaar. I think you will.”

“You’ll have to kill me first.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary.” The blind slave reached beneath the table and brought out something that chilled Elezaar’s blood. He placed it on the lacquered surface with a sinister smile.

“Remember this? You should. It’s a souvenir from Ronan Dell’s palace.”

Elezaar stared at the nightmare Tarkyn had placed on the table, feeling his bowels turn to water at the sight of it. Carved from a single piece of polished horn, the instrument was about a foot long, tapered at the point, which was barbed and serrated, sculpted to inflict as much damage as possible on whatever orifice it was inserted into. Wrapped around its length was a twist of jagged wire, the barbs sharpened to deadly points, a modification Ronan Dell had added himself when the instrument’s initial novelty had begun to wane.

“He used it on all those young slaves he was so partial to, didn’t he?” Tarkyn asked in a conversational tone, leaning forward to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands, holding the dreadful tool with extreme care for fear of slicing his own fingers open on its wickedly sharp surface. “And you watched every blood-soaked moment of it, didn’t you, Fool, playing the lyre for your master like a good little pet, while Ronan Dell got his kicks making his victims suffer. Did it ever bother you, Fool, that you just stood there while those poor children screamed and cried and eventually bled to death?”

Elezaar said nothing.

Tarkyn Lye pushed the instrument across the lacquered surface of the table leaving a long scratch in its wake. The resulting screech set Elezaar’s teeth on edge. Venira’s doorman ominously pulled on a familiar thick leather glove, similar to the one Ronan Dell used to wear when he—

Oh gods! No! He can’t mean to
. . .

“Bekan,” Tarkyn ordered, relaxing back against the cushions. “Tell Crysander to bend over. I want to see how much fun we can have with Ronan’s special little toy.”

“NO!” Elezaar cried desperately, as Bekan reached for the deadly instrument with one hand, forcing Crysander face-first onto the table with his ungloved hand. “For the gods’ sake, Tarkyn!
No
!”

“But you just told me you’d never betray your mistress,” the blind
court’esa
reminded him, apparently unconcerned.

Bekan picked up the instrument with the hand protected by the leather glove. Crysander lay there, unresisting, waiting with the fatalistic acceptance of a man who had been tortured so often he no longer understood why; only that he must endure.

“I respect your loyalty, Fool. You can go, if you like. We’ll just have a bit of fun for a while, and then we’ll probably be off, too. Not a good idea to be out after slave curfew at the moment. Not with plague in the city. Carry on, Bekan.”

“Call him
off
, Tarkyn!” the dwarf begged, unable to think of any other way to stop the torment these men had planned for his brother. The vacant, accepting look on Crysander’s face was the worst of it. His eyes stared blankly at Elezaar. He was beyond shame, beyond humiliation. Even beyond normal human emotions, perhaps.

Sensing he was on the brink of victory, the blind
court’esa
held up his hand to halt Bekan. “Give me a reason, Fool.”

So relieved Tarkyn had stopped Bekan before it was too late, Elezaar wanted to cry. He hung his head in shame. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

I am betraying my princess. For the sake of a man who may or may not be my brother. I am
betraying my princess
. The tragedy was, Elezaar knew in his heart that he probably would have given Tarkyn what he wanted even if the old slave had been a total stranger. The days when he could witness such evil and remained untouched by it were long past.

“That’s better,” Tarkyn said, smiling triumphantly. He waved his arm and Bekan put the instrument down.

With a shove, the doorman sat Crysander back down on the cushions and began to take off the leather glove. The slave’s expression didn’t change. Fear didn’t meld into gratitude. Crysander simply didn’t care.

“I had a feeling you’d get my point. If you’ll pardon the pun. Have a seat, Fool. We have a lot to talk about. At least, you do, at any rate.”

Twenty-five years. I am throwing away twenty-five years of faithful service to a woman I love. A
woman who has protected me, respected me and trusted me so much that she let me teach her children
.

And for what? A sick slave Alija probably found in the markets a month ago
.

But try as he might, Elezaar couldn’t bring himself to leave. He couldn’t walk away while that damned thing sat on the table and another innocent victim waited on the pleasure of a sadistic bastard like Tarkyn Lye. Not again. He could never go through that again.

Not even for Marla Wolfblade.

“What do you want to know?” Elezaar asked in a flat, defeated voice.