DRAGON WEATHER

 

Lawrence Watt-Evans

Copyright © 1999 by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Dedicated to Charles Worsley,

an honorable man,

and the man who has made my sister happy

Book I

Arlian

1

Dragon Weather

The sky to the west was dark with heavy black clouds; Arlian didn’t like it at all. He was eleven years old, almost a man by the standards of his village, but right now he felt much younger, and very unsure of himself—his father was away, and the weather seemed threatening and unnatural. He stayed close to his mother as she stood staring down the slope of the mountain, watching the men of the village haul the heavy water wagons back up the winding, stone-paved road.

Oxen would have made the hauling much easier, but the village had no place to graze oxen on the rocky mountainside; what little arable soil they had was all reserved for human needs. That meant that the men of Obsidian had to use their own muscles to fetch water up from the river.

In another year or two Arlian would be big enough to join them, but for now he stood beside his mother and watched.

Arlian’s mother fanned herself with one hand, while the other clutched at her black-and-gold brooch, holding her collar open; the air was thick, hot, and stagnant, and her gray dress was soaked in sweat. “I can’t stand weather like this,” she said. “I’ll almost be glad to see winter come this year!”

Arlian looked up at her—though not far up, as he was almost as tall as she, now. He always liked winter, and had never entirely understood why the adults didn’t. In winter the mountain was covered in snow—well, except right up by the crater—and he and the other children of the village could go sliding down it; there was plenty of cold, clean water available for the melting, without having to haul it up from the valley when the streams ran dry. He could play outside for hours, then come in and warm up by the fire, and no one would order him out of the way or ask him to help with the chores. Even the adults had less work to do in the winter—so why did they all hate it? Yes, there was less food and it wasn’t fresh, and the cold seeped through everywhere, and the fire had to be kept up, but still, Arlian thought that winter was wonderful.

And anything was better than this stifling hot, humid summer, when the sun didn’t seem to want to show its face and hid behind a thick haze or clouds. This wasn’t how summer was supposed to be—there should be bright days and rainy ones, not these endless smothering gloomy days when the clouds hung overhead but the rain never fell. This was ugly and exhausting.

It hadn’t rained in weeks, and the crops were suffering— the water the men were hauling up from the river would help, but a good cistern-filling rain, splashing down the mountainside and pooling in the rocks, would have been better.

Those clouds in the west looked even uglier than most of this year’s skies. Maybe they would bring storms, and put an end to this nasty heat—but their appearance was not promising, and Arlian didn’t trust them.

His grandfather—his mother’s father; his father’s father was long dead—stepped out on the rocky ledge beside them and looked, not down the slope at the water-haulers he was too old to assist, but out at the clouds.

“Dragon weather,” he said with a frown.

“Oh, nonsense,” Arlian’s mother said. “You’ve been saying that for weeks. It’s just a hot spell.”

“Isn’t that what dragon weather is, Mother?” Arlian asked. “A hot spell?”

His mother glanced at her father.

“Not just the heat,” the old man said. “Look at that sky—hot as a furnace and days dark as night, that’s dragon weather. You need the heat and the dark. If those clouds move in and settle here, that’s really what we’ll have.”

Arlian looked straight up at the sky overhead. It wasn’t dark as night, but it wasn’t very bright, either; the summer haze was thick and foul with the gasses from the smoking peak of the mountain. The fumes had been thicker than usual lately, but whether that had any connection with the weather no one seemed to know. Arlian had heard the adults arguing about it, but the arguments were never settled.

“Why is it called dragon weather, Grandsir?” he asked.

“Because it’s the sort of weather that brings the dragons out of their caves,” his grandfather replied. “They can’t abide cold or light, Ari. In the days when the dragons ruled over our ancestors the world was warmer than it is now, and the great beasts darkened the skies with their smoke so that they could come out by day, as well as night. When the weather’s dark and hot now, old and tired as they are, they still stir in their sleep, and sometimes they awaken and come out to feed.”

Arlian stared nervously at his grandfather. The old man spoke in a deeper voice than usual—his storytelling voice. It made his words seem more important, and more ominous.

“Don’t mind him, Ari,” Arlian’s mother said, patting Arlian’s shoulder reassuringly. “That’s just stories. No one’s seen any dragons in hundreds of years.”

Her father shook his head.

“No, Sharbeth, you’re wrong,” he said. “When I was a boy I saw a village where a dragon had been not long before. I may be old, but it wasn’t hundreds of years ago.”

“Tell me about it!” Arlian said.

His grandfather smiled down at him. “Are you sure? They say it’s bad luck to talk about the dragons, just as it’s unlucky to speak too much about magic.”

Arlian nodded. “Tell me about it, Grandsir!”

Grandsir looked up at the sky and frowned, then back down at Arlian, his smile reappearing. “I was a year or two older than you are, and my uncle Stirian had taken me on a trading journey down to Benth-in-Tara, to meet a caravan that was passing through,” he said. “We saw the ruins on the way. We’d had a hot summer the year before, weather something like this, and for a few days the smoke from the mountain had been much thicker than usual and had collected in that valley over in the Sandalwood Hills.” He pointed over the shoulder of the mountain; Arlian had never been to the Sandalwood Hills, but he had seen them from the crater rim and knew where his grandfather meant.

“The dragon must have come out late that summer,” the old man continued, “and no one discovered it over the winter. When we got there in the spring, there was nothing left but charred ruins and bare bones.”

“And how do you know it wasn’t human raiders who destroyed it?” Arlian’s mother asked. “Those bandits in the south are surely bad enough without worrying about dragons!”

“The Borderlands bandits never get anywhere near this far north,” her father said; “and human raiders don’t leave six-foot claw marks.”

“And neither do dragons,” Sharbeth said, her hands on her hips, “because the dragons, if there are really any left alive at all, stay asleep in their caves, deep beneath the earth. You must have just imagined those claw marks, Father, or misinterpreted sword cuts or wagon ruts.”

“They were real, and they were claw marks,” her father insisted, but without much vehemence; Arlian realized that the two of them had undoubtedly had this argument many times before, as they had so many others, and had worn the passion out of it. His mother and grandfather argued often, and had done so ever since Grandsir had first come to live with them while Arlian was still a small child. He could barely remember a time when Grandsir had not been there—or when his mother did not argue with him.

“I’m not going to listen to your nonsense,” Arlian’s mother said, with no great anger. “I’m going to go see that those men have something fit to eat when they get those wagons up here, something to keep their strength up!” She turned and started back toward the house.

Arlian hesitated. He wanted to stay close to his mother, and help out when the water wagons arrived, but he also wanted to hear his grandfather’s story about the ruined village—it wasn’t one he remembered hearing before. He wanted to know more about the dragons and what had become of them.

“Are you coming, Arlian?” his mother called. She paused and looked over her shoulder.

“No, Mother,” he replied. “I’ll stay here for a while, with Grandsir.”

“Hmpf.” She marched on across the rocky yard, toward their thatch-roofed home.

Grandsir looked down at Arlian. “Eager to see your father and brother back?” he asked.

Arlian nodded. “Tell me more about the dragons,” he said.

His grandfather laughed. “That’s my boy!” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Have you ever seen a dragon, Grandsir?”

The old man shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. “I’m still alive, am I not? There aren’t many who see dragons and live to tell of it!”

“There must be some people who see them, or how would we know anything about dragons?” Arlian asked.

“A fair question,” his grandfather said, smiling. He glanced at the water-haulers, judged it would still be a while before they reached the village, and settled down cross-legged on the ledge, into a better position for storytelling. Arlian settled beside him.

“Yes,” Arlian’s grandfather said, “there have been a few people who saw dragons and lived to tell about it. Most of them were at a safe distance, and the dragons simply didn’t notice them, but there have been a few…” His voice trailed off as he looked to the west, at the approaching clouds. He frowned.

“A few what, Grandsir?” Arlian looked, trying to see what his grandfather was staring at.

The old man shook himself. “Nothing,” he said. “I just don’t like this weather.” Then he smiled at Arlian, and said, “Of course, there were a few who got a good close look at the dragons. There might even be some of them who are still alive today.”

Arlian nodded. “From that village in the Sandalwood Hills, you mean?”

“Oh, no.” Grandsir shook his head. “Nothing like that; I saw that village, and there wasn’t so much as a rat left alive there, just bones and cinders. But there are old stories, very old stories, about dragon venom.”

“Venom?” Arlian frowned. As Grandsir had said, most of the adults in the village didn’t like talking about the dragons; there were so many superstitions about them that most people thought it safer not to discuss them at all. Dragons were magical, and magic was wicked and untrustworthy, and speaking too much about it could attract misfortune.

Still, Arlian had thought he had a reasonable understanding of what a dragon was, and he didn’t remember anything about venom. “I thought dragons breathed fire!” he said.

“Well, they do, after a fashion,” Grandsir said. “Or so I’m told. But the older stories, the ones from the early days of the Years of Man, say that dragonflame isn’t so much fiery breath, as some people would have it, but a spray of burning venom, like a snake’s spit of poison. Except dragons somehow set their poison ablaze, and thereby spit flame.”

“Ooooh!” Arlian shivered at the thought. It seemed somehow more real to know that dragonfire was burning venom, rather than some sort of magical breath. It made dragons seem more like actual beasts, rather than spirits, or illusions like the little images the village sorcerer sometimes conjured up.

“Whether it’s the truth or not I can’t say,” Grandsir continued, “but there are stories, very old stories, so old I don’t know where they came from, that say that sometimes the venom doesn’t catch fire properly. It’s still deadly poison, of course, a poison that will burn the flesh from your bones—but supposedly it quickly loses some of its virulence when once it’s been sprayed, and a mixture of this dragon venom and human blood is said to bestow long life on anyone who drinks it. Very long life. There are tales of men who lived centuries after surviving dragon attacks in which blood from their wounds was mixed with dragon venom and then swallowed—though many of them had been horribly mutilated in the attacks, their faces burned away, arms or legs lost, so that such a life would hardly be a blessing.”

Arlian shivered again. He looked at the clouds. The dragons seemed so terrible that it was hard, sometimes, to believe that they were ever real.

Everyone knew they were real, though, or had been once, at least. The dragons had ruled all of the Lands of Man, from the eastern sea to the western wilderness, from the Borderlands in the south to the icy wastes of the north. People had resisted their rule sometimes, fought great wars against the dragons, but to no avail—until one day, about seven hundred years ago, when the dragons had all gone away, leaving humanity free.

Arlian’s mother said the dragons had all died, perhaps of some plague, but most people insisted they were still alive, deep in their caverns, and might come back at any time.

And sometimes, according to Grandsir, they did come back, briefly.

“That village in the Sandalwood Hills,” Arlian asked. “What do you think the people there did to anger the dragon? Why would it destroy them all?”

“I don’t think they had to do anything,” Grandsir said. “The dragon simply felt like destroying something, and they were close at hand.”

“But that’s so unfair! You mean they didn’t do anything to deserve it?”

“Not a thing,” Grandsir replied.

Arlian absorbed that unhappily. He didn’t like it at all. He knew life wasn’t always fair, but he felt, deep in his heart, that it should be. He always tried to be fair to his brother, Korian, and to their playmates in the village-even the giggly girls. In the stories his mother told justice always triumphed in the end. Why was the rest of life so messy and unjust?

His father said it was because the gods were dead, and only Fate remained, and Fate had its own plans for everyone.

The village sorcerer—the only person in the village of Obsidian whose name Arlian didn’t know, because he said names had power—had said that justice was as much an illusion as any of the little tricks he did to entertain the children.

Arlian wondered sometimes if it might be the other way around—maybe everything did work out fairly in the end, somehow, and the apparent injustices were the illusions. He wiped sweat-damp hair away from his eyes and looked down at the approaching wagons.

Maybe the dragon did have a good reason for destroying that village. Maybe the dragons were part of Fate’s plans.

“Do you really think it’s dragon weather?” he asked.

His grandfather put an arm around Arlian’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring hug.

“I hope not,” he said. “Come on, let’s go give your mother a hand.”

Together, they turned away from the ledge and ambled toward the house.

2

The Coming of the Dragons

The dark clouds hung heavy in the western sky for the next three days, creeping very slowly nearer, spreading across the sky like a stain. The water wagons were brought to the cisterns above the village and emptied into the great stone basins, and water was doled out carefully to each family, enough to keep both crops and people alive, but still thirsty.

The mountain above the village continued to smoke and steam; the air now had a very noticeable sulfurous stench to it, and the sun, when it could be seen through the haze at all, was as orange as a pumpkin.

Despite the oppressive heat and gloom the young men of Obsidian returned to their usual tasks, working the mines, carving the black glass, tending the crops. The women kept house, cooked and cleaned, wove and sewed, minded the livestock and the children. The old men thatched roofs, polished brightwork, and took care of the other less urgent, less strenuous jobs.

And the children ran errands and helped out as required, but still found time to play and explore. On the third morning after the water run Arlian climbed up to the top of the great black rock north of the village; at the top, sweaty and filthy, he settled down cross-legged and looked out over the countryside.

Up here it was just as hot as in the village, but the air seemed not quite so still and thick. From here he could see for miles upon miles, out across the Lands of Man, across fields and forests, from the Sandalwood Hills to the Bitter Lake, from Skygrazer Peak back to Tara Vale, miles in every direction but southeast, where the mountain blocked his view.

To the north, far off on the horizon, beyond the lowering clouds and the pall of mountain smoke, he could see a dull line of blue sky. At one point, to the northeast, that blue was marred by a smudge of smoke; his father had once pointed it out and told Arlian that that was where the great city of Manfort lay, where humans had first resisted, and finally broken, the dragons’ hold on the world—Manfort, where the great lords and ladies lived in their stone palaces, in their fine clothes and fancy coaches, with their dress balls and formal duels, amid rumors of secret societies and elaborate intrigue.

Arlian stared at the smoke for a long time, trying to imagine what the city was like.

When he grew up he wanted to travel; he had said so for as long as he could remember. His grandfather had been a traveler in his youth, and Arlian loved to hear him talk about it. He wanted to see all the places Grandsir had described—Blackwater, and Deep Delving, and Benth-in-Tara, and the groves of Nossevier.

And maybe he could even get to Manfort, as Grandsir never had, to see the palaces there, and the old shrines to the dead gods, and the lords and ladies with their swords and horses, and the Duke of Manfort, heir to the great warlords of old. Grandsir had stayed clear for fear of being robbed, or captured by slavers and sold, or killed by some lord he had inadvertently offended, but Arlian was certain he would be able to handle a visit there.

Or he might cross the Desolation to the Borderlands, where, it was said, one could see wild magic flashing across the southern skies, above the wild lands—magic was weak and scarce in the Lands of Man, useful only to trained sorcerers and severely limited even then, but Arlian had heard that in the Borderlands beyond the desert magic was so strong it danced like brightly colored fires in the sky. The intervening Desolation was said to be hot and almost waterless, a wasteland where anyone losing his way would leave bleached bones in the sand, and where bloodthirsty bandits roamed—but caravans still crossed it every year, and Arlian could surely join one.

There was magic beyond the eastern seas, as well, and ships sailed there from the ports of Benthin and Lorigol, and stomeday Arlian might travel in one.

And maybe he would become a lord himself—he would own a business, perhaps a caravan or a ship or a manufactory, where others would labor on his behalf, and he would carry a sword and dagger on his belt and ride a fine horse.

But wherever he went, Arlian told himself, he would come home at the last, to settle in his own familiar village, just as Grandsir had. Arlian thought he would find a pretty wife somewhere and bring her back here and raise half a dozen children, sons and daughters both, and he would treat them equally and fairly and raise them to be good and just people. And he would tell them stories of his travels at the supper table, just as Grandsir did.

With that thought he realized that it was almost time for the midday meal. Arlian wiped black-tinged sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, then turned away from the distant smoke of Manfort and started back down the jagged side of the black rock.

Later, after everyone had eaten, as his parents headed for the fields, Grandsir beckoned to Arlian.

“Summer can’t last much longer,” he said, “and we haven’t put aside as much for the winter as usual. I want to take a look in the cellars, see what we have and what we need. Come along and give me a hand, would you, Ari?”

Arlian smiled and came willingly; the cellars were usually cool, and any respite from the muggy heat would be welcome. He was not permitted in the cellars without adult supervision; there were too many ways for an active lad to do damage, down there in the cool darkness.

“Bring a candle,” Grandsir said, gesturing toward the drawer.

Arlian rummaged through the drawer until he found a good thick candle stub as long as his finger; he lit it with a splint from the kitchen fire, which was kept burning even on days as swelteringly uncomfortable as this.

The candle flared up, and even in the well-ventilated kitchen with its wide-open doors and windows the little flame seemed to brighten the room; the day was darker than Arlian had realized, and seemed to be darkening as he watched.

He took a final glance out the window at the black clouds, then followed his grandfather, trotting through the long narrow pantry, past the tiered shelves to the door at the back.

The rush of air from the cellars when Grandsir opened the door was disappointing, nowhere near as cool as Arlian had expected—apparently the heat had even penetrated into the stone-lined depths beneath the house. Still, it was cooler than anywhere else he might go.

The old man went down the ladder first while Arlian held the candle high; when he reached the bottom the boy handed the light down, then turned and made his own way down the sagging wooden rungs. The rails were slick in his hands, polished to a silky sheen by generations of hands sliding down them, and he had to watch his step closely.

When he stepped off the final rung the stone floor felt warm beneath his bare feet; he glanced down in surprise.

“The mountain is hot,” Grandsir said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it erupts soon.”

Arlian said nothing, but his eyes widened at the notion. The crater that loomed over the village had smoked all Arlian’s life, but there had been no actual eruption for almost fifty years.

The natural path for any lava or ash was down the far slope, well away from the village, but still, an eruption was an exciting, frightening thought.

“Come on,” Grandsir said, leading the way down one of the passageways, between dusty shelves lined with earthenware crocks and black glass jars.

Arlian followed, brushing aside cobwebs and soaking in the dimness and the rich musty smells. Somewhere behind him, from the sunlit world above, he heard a distant shriek—probably Kashkar the Stonecarver’s three girls playing some silly game, Arlian thought.

A man’s voice shouted, but Arlian could not make out any words—probably Kashkar, telling his daughters to go elsewhere with their racket. Arlian paid no attention to the noise, but watched as Grandsir ran a careful finger along a shelf, counting crocks.

“Eighteen pots of the soft cheese,” the old man said. “Count the wheels of hard cheese on the bottom shelf, boy, the ones in black wax—my old knees don’t want me to stoop that much anymore, and my eyes…”

Arlian squatted and began counting the big drums of cheese—the black wax did tend to fade into the dark background, and he could see how Grandsir might have trouble.

More voices were shouting somewhere in the distance, Arlian realized as he counted—had those girls started the adults arguing?

Then he heard another sound, a hollow metallic booming, and started up so suddenly he almost knocked the candle from Grandsir’s hand.

The old man hardly noticed; he had heard the same sound, and was staring at the open door at the top of the ladder-well. From where they stood only a corner of the opening was visible, a triangle of dull gray light in the brown darkness.

They both knew that sound. Everyone in the village knew it. Once a year everyone gathered around and solemnly listened to it, simply so they would know it when they heard it. It was the ringing of the great brass warning bell that hung in the otherwise abandoned village shrine.

“Do you think the mountain’s erupting, Grandsir?” Arlian asked.

“I don’t know,” his grandfather replied, taking a step toward the ladder, the candle held high. “It could be. But I don’t hear any rumbling…”

Then he stopped moving, stopped talking. People were shrieking again—but this was no game. These were screams of mortal terror, from grown men and women as well as children.

“What’s happening?” Arlian whispered hoarsely. He stared at the ladder.

Then a rush of hot air swept down into the cellars, flinging long-settled dust into the air in great swirls; dust stung Arlian’s eyes, blinding him momentarily. He blinked frantically, and dabbed at his watering eyes.

Somewhere overhead he heard a tremendous roaring.

“Come on,” Grandsir said. “Whatever’s happening, we don’t want to be trapped down here.” He tugged at Arlian’s arm.

Still squinting, Arlian came, staggering toward the ladder. The doorway seemed much brighter now—much too bright, Arlian thought. He realized with a start that the wind had blown out the candle and he hadn’t even noticed at first, so much more light was spilling down from above.

Hot air roiled about them when they reached the ladder. Grandsir gestured for Arlian to wait, and began climbing.

He reached the top and took a step forward, and Arlian did not wait for a signal, but started up the ladder himself.

The minute his head cleared the pantry floor and he could see through the other door he knew why there was so much more light; the kitchen roof was gone, torn away, and the kitchen walls were ablaze. The pantry’s stone walls were intact, but the wooden ceiling was beginning to smolder and blacken, and the top shelf on one side was askew.

“What’s happening?” he shouted—he had to shout to have any hope of being heard over the immense roaring that now seemed to fill the entire world. Hot whirlpools of smoke and air spilled through the pantry, blinding him anew. “Where’s Mother? And Father, and Korian?”

“I don’t know,” Grandsir said, stepping forward, arms raised to shield his face against the fire.

“Is it an eruption?” Arlian shouted.

Grandsir stopped dead, staring.

“No,” he said. “It’s not an eruption.”

Arlian stared as well; still on the ladder, his waist level with the pantry floor, his vision was limited to what he could see by peering around his grandfather’s legs and out through the door to the kitchen. He could see a corner of the kitchen table, a burning fragment of wall, and a wedge of gray sky—and framed in that wedge he saw the dragon.

He could not judge its size accurately, but he knew it was huge. It hung there, flapping its tremendous wings, and Arlian knew that that flapping was what had caused the whirlwinds that had swept through the cellars.

It looked black against the sky, but Arlian could not be sure that was its true color. Its eyes were the color of flame, but perhaps they merely reflected the blazing village.

Its wings swept up in a graceful, gigantic curve, then snapped down, then swept upward again, and between them hung a body as long and lithe as a snake, tail whipping and winding below. Its long neck arched elegantly, and it seemed to be staring right at Arlian.

“Oh,” Arlian breathed. The dragon was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.

Then it turned and soared away, moving through the sky as smoothly and effortlessly as a fish moves through water.

“It’s gone,” Arlian said.

His grandfather took a cautious step forward, and Arlian hoisted himself up off the ladder, stepping through the doorway into the pantry.

Then they both froze as the second dragon appeared.

This one did not look their way, but simply flew across their field of vision, left to right and angling upward. Its scaled flank caught a gleam of sunlight and shone a dark, rich green, though the rest of it seemed as black as the other.

It was definitely not the same dragon, however. The proportions were different—and the face, even when seen only from the side, was different.

Arlian was startled at how readily he could know that. The dragons, he discovered, had faces as distinctive and as instantly recognizable as people. Why or how it could be so he did not know, but he knew it was.

“Two of them,” Grandsir said—he, too, had seen immediately that the two were not the same creature. “Two dragons!”

“Are they gone?” Arlian asked.

“I don’t know,” Grandsir said, stepping cautiously forward. He coughed as a swirl of smoke reached him.

Just then a dragon reappeared—the first one, Arlian was sure. It swept down from the sky toward something Arlian could not see through the burning ruins of his family kitchen, and spat flame.

It was just as Grandsir had said three days before—the dragon opened its mouth and flexed its jaw, and something sprayed out, then burst into flame. The fire never touched the dragon itself; instead a burning mist spattered down across the village below.

Grandsir coughed again.

“Dragons or no, we can’t stay in here,” he said. “The smoke will kill us both. Maybe we can get to the cisterns— if we hide in there the flames can’t touch us.”

Arlian nodded hesitantly, and stepped forward—and that was when the third dragon appeared in the kitchen doorway. It was afoot, strolling through the village rather than flying, and had thrust its immense black head into the flaming ruins of the kitchen to see what might be in the depths of the house. It stared into the pantry, directly at Arlian and his grandfather.

Arlian screamed and stepped back involuntarily, back through the door. His foot missed the edge of the floor and he fell backward, hands flinging out in an unsuccessful attempt to catch himself on the doorframe. He tumbled heels over head down the ladder into the cellars and landed, bruised and dazed, on the warm stone floor.

He heard his grandfather shouting wildly; at first he was too stunned to make out the words, but then his senses began to return.

“… our home! May the dead gods curse you and all your kin, dragon—what have you done with my daughter and her husband, and my grandson? You get out of here, back to your caverns! Your time is over! You have no place in the Lands of Man!”

Arlian looked up and saw flames and smoke licking across the pantry ceiling, turning the familiar surface fierce and strange. Still bleary and stiff from his fall but desperate to get out, to not be trapped down here, he struggled to pull himself upright on the ladder.

Then a shadow fell across him and he looked up again to see Grandsir standing on the brink, his back to the cellars, his heels almost over the edge.

“You get away from me!” the old man shrieked, his voice cracking with terror.

And then there was a rush of air, of hot, fetid air laced with a biting acid stench like nothing Arlian had ever smelled before, and a deep, deep sound that was neither growl nor cough nor roar nor rumble nor bellow, and Grandsir let out a scream and fell backward into the cellars, pulling the ladder down with him, knocking Arlian down and landing atop him, the ladder wedged across the passageway over both of them.

Somewhere above, flames blossomed into roaring brilliance.

The boy’s head hit the stone, and again Arlian was dazed; pain shot through his head and neck, and he tried to contract his spine, to pull himself inward in self-defense, but he was unable to move.

He lay sprawled on the stone, and Grandsir was sprawled atop him; the back of his grandfather’s head was pressing down on his right eye, blocking his vision on that side. With his left eye he could see the burning ceiling far above, now pierced by widening flame-lit cracks, the remaining ceiling black between the lines of fire. Swirls of gray smoke filled much of the ladderwell now and dimmed the light, even though the flames were bright and the ceiling was splitting and crumbling. He could see the left side of his grandfather’s face, more or less, but it was so close he had difficulty focusing on it.

Grandsir’s weight on Arlian’s chest was so much, and the smoke so thick, that he couldn’t get his breath to speak—and Grandsir did not speak.

Even if Arlian had been able to speak, and Grandsir to hear, he wasn’t sure he would be heard. Above them the pantry and the surrounding village were roaring chaos, a constant hammering of undifferentiated sound—flame and wind and terror.

Grandsir did not move to get up, did not stir, did not raise his hands or shift his feet. He lay still. Arlian thought he might be dead, but that blurry, out-of-focus bit he could see did not seem lifeless—Arlian could see motion, as if Grandsir were blinking, or twitching.

But then he managed to blink the smoke from his eye and get a clearer look, and realized that what he could see was not Grandsir’s own face moving, but something on his face—something liquid, something that seethed and steamed and roiled.

Arlian desperately wanted to shriek at the sight of that, but he couldn’t get enough air; he let out a strangled moan and struggled to free his left arm—his right was too securely pinned under Grandsir’s body.

Red and gray fluid was bubbling up where Grandsir’s left eye should have been; a bright, sharp stink scorched through Arlian’s nostrils, making it even harder to draw the deep breath he desperately needed. Arlian’s mouth was wide open as he sucked frantically for air.

He watched in sickened horror as the thick red fluid oozed down Grandsir’s cheek.

That was not just blood. Blood would have been bad enough—to have his grandfather lying atop him, perhaps dead, perhaps dying, with blood welling up from his eye socket, would have been terrible enough to give Arlian nightmares for years. But this was not just blood; human blood did not steam and bubble, and was never so viscous.

Arlian knew what had happened. The third dragon had looked into the pantry and seen Grandsir there, and Grandsir had shouted defiance. The dragon had listened for a moment, then grown annoyed. It had been unable to reach into the stone pantry with fang or claw, had not wanted to trouble itself with smashing down the stone walls, so it had breathed its fiery venom at Grandsir.

But the dragon had been so close to the old man that the venom would not burn, so close it had not time to ignite; instead it had struck Grandsir full in the face as a toxic spray. Some had burst into flame when it struck the hot ceiling or the back wall of the ladderwell, but the liquid that had hit Grandsir had remained venom, rather than fuel.

And if the stories were right, it was eating the flesh from his grandfather’s bones.

Arlian almost hoped Grandsir was dead, for his sake— but for his own, he hoped the old man still lived, and might somehow help them both survive.

Survival did not seem very likely for either of them, though. The smoke was growing denser, the roar of the flames louder, and Arlian thought the whole cellar might yet cave in upon him.

And that thick red trickle moved slowly down Grandsir’s cheek, and finally dripped down, the first fat drop landing squarely in Arlian’s open, gasping mouth.

3

Lord Dragon

The shock of that impact on his parched tongue, the indescribably vile taste, the unbearable stench, the corrosive burning that seemed to be tearing the lining from his mouth and throat, the knowledge of what was happening, was more than Arlian could bear; he fainted.

He awoke choking in the dark, coughing up slime, and in his convulsions threw his grandfather’s body off him; the ladder that had pinned them both down snapped free and rattled to one side, one rail broken off short.

Arlian rolled over and vomited up everything he could bring up, vomited until his chin dripped with stinking ooze and his elbows rested in a widening pool of acidic detritus. His eyes filled with tears, both from the agony in his gut and the awareness of utter disaster; the knowledge that his home and his family had been destroyed. He pulled himself clear, away from the corruption his body had expelled, away from the ladder and Grandsir, into relatively cool darkness and sweeter air. There he fainted again.

He was awakened again, after how long he did not know, by voices, by laughter. He blinked and lay still, trying to remember where he was, what had happened.

He was in the cellars, he remembered. He could see that he was still in the cellars, looking at the bottom shelf of one rack of preserves. Daylight filtered down from above, daylight thick with drifting dust.

He was alive—the fire had passed over him and the cellars had not fallen in.

He heard footsteps somewhere above, heavy footsteps that crunched as if walking on the black ash the volcano sometimes spewed.

Daylight in the cellars —the roof was gone. Arlian remembered the fire, the smoke, the heat. He remembered the dragons; he remembered the third one’s face when it peered into the pantry, its eyes huge and alien and knowing.

It had been the eyes that frightened him into stepping back and falling, far more than anything else. The fangs, the jaws, the dripping venom—he had hardly noticed those. He had seen only those great dark eyes, bottomless and terrifying.

He had fallen; he remembered that now. And his grandfather had fallen.

And Grandsir had been struck by the dragon’s acid venom.

Arlian sat up, moving convulsively. He gulped air, choked and gasping, and turned.

Grandsir lay beside him on the stone floor—or rather, Grandsir’s corpse lay there.

There could be no doubt that he was dead; the venom had eaten his flesh away, exposing bone in half a dozen places, from a patch of skull where his forehead should be to the protruding parallel curves of bare ribs above the blackened, ruined remains of his chest.

Arlian’s empty stomach contracted painfully. He had nothing left to bring up. He moaned, and blinked as his eyes filled anew with tears.

His grandfather was dead. His parents were gone, almost certainly dead. His brother, as well. His entire life had been destroyed, suddenly and swiftly, with no warning—at least, none beyond a spell of bad weather.

Something burned deep within him—not pain, not an emotion, but a strange sensation he had never felt before. He remembered how he had lain trapped while his grandfather’s venom-corrupted blood dripped into his mouth.

He moaned again, slightly louder.

The footsteps overhead stopped.

“Did you hear something?” an unfamiliar voice asked— not the voice of any villager, Arlian was sure.

Arlian could hear another voice respond, but could make out none of the words. He looked up, startled, and blinked the tears from his eyes.

Who was up there? He had assumed there were survivors, people he knew—but these voices spoke with an odd lilt, an accent unlike anything he had ever heard. Even the people who lived in the farms and villages down by the river did not sound like that.

The opening at the top of the ladderwell was larger than it should have been; wooden flooring, doors, and ceiling had burned away, and parts of the stone walls had tumbled. Arlian could see hazy blue sky, but not much more than that.

“From that chimney, maybe,” the first voice said.

Arlian swallowed, trying to think clearly despite the overwhelming grief and shock that filled his mind. There were strangers in the ruins of his family’s home—who were they? What should he do?

Two other voices spoke, and then the footsteps sounded again, moving closer. A moment later a man’s face appeared over the top of one of the stone walls, looking down at him.

“It’s no chimney,” the man shouted. “There’s a cellar down here! And people, and one of them’s alive!”

“Help,” Arlian called weakly. “Help me!”

“You wait right there, boy,” the man said, grinning down at him.

Arlian stared up at the man for a moment. That grin didn’t look quite right, somehow.

Then there was a series of thumps and crashes, and someone was leaning over the ruined remains of the pantry floor, looking down at him. It was a man, a man wearing a sleeveless brown leather coat despite the heat; he held an iron pry bar in one hand. His face and coat were smeared with soot; his hair and beard were black, so the soot didn’t show, but they were disheveled.

Arlian had never seen him before; whoever these people were, they definitely weren’t from the village. Perhaps, despite their odd speech, they were rescuers from the river towns? Arlian had only been down off the mountain two or three times in his life; perhaps he didn’t know as much about the river-folk as he thought.

An almost-cool eddy of air stirred Arlian’s hair, and he wondered how long he had lain unconscious; judging by that breeze the long hot spell, the dragon weather, had apparently ended at last. That could happen suddenly, but he feared he had slept for days or even weeks, and been left for dead by his family.

But the dragon weather had passed, and the dragons it had brought were gone; the worst was surely over.

“What’s down there, boy?” the stranger asked. “Is there anyone but you?”

Arlian glanced at his grandfather’s corpse, then swallowed.

“Just me,” he said.

“And what else? Is there treasure? Obsidian?”

Arlian blinked, confused.

“There’s cheese,” he said. “And preserves, and wine…”

“So you wouldn’t starve if we left you, then?”

“Don’t leave me down here!” Arlian shrieked.

The man frowned. “It’s not up to me, boy,” he said. “It’s Lord Dragon’s decision.”

Arlian’s jaw sagged, and he slumped back against the shelves. “Lord Dragon?” he said.

“Yes, that’s what we call him,” the man said.

“What we call him.” Arlian relaxed slightly; then it was a man after all, and not a dragon. For a few seconds there he had had nightmarish images in his head of one of those black dragons still here in the village, giving these people their orders. He had thought that perhaps all the dragons had awakened from their slumbers and come to reclaim the Lands of Man and restore their ancient empire.

But it was just a man.

Arlian remembered what his parents had told him, how it was the custom many places not to use real names in the ancient tongue, but common words—Lord Stick, Lady Flower, or the like.

But who would dare call himself Lord Dragon?

Just then the man straightened and turned away from Arlian, and spoke to someone Arlian could not see. The boy was unable to make out the words, but the voice answering was cold and deep.

Then the two men, the one in the pantry and the one peering over the broken wall, both vanished. Arlian called, “Hey! Where are you?”

“Shut up, boy,” said that cold, deep voice.

Arlian shut up.

If they left him it wouldn’t be all that bad, he told himself. He did have plenty of food, and eventually he could get the ladder back in place, or use the shelving to climb out.

Who were these men? What were they doing here? They weren’t rescuers of any sort, from their behavior.

And then two men appeared where the pantry had been, the man in the brown leather coat and another in a smoke-stained canvas vest; the one in the vest was carrying a coil of rope. They were stepping carefully—Arlian guessed that the pantry floor was largely burned away, and they were wary of falling through.

Then the coil of rope was flung down into the cellars, one end still secured somewhere out of sight; the man in the vest grabbed hold of it and lowered himself cautiously down, carefully avoiding stepping on the gory corpse at the foot of the ladder well.

At the bottom he stopped and dusted off his pants as he looked around. He grimaced at the sight of Grandsir’s remains, then beckoned to Arlian. “Come on, lad,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here.”

Arlian scrambled to his feet. “Thank you!” he said.

The man picked him up and hoisted him, and Arlian stretched out his hands; the other man, the one in the leather coat, caught them and hauled. A moment later Arlian was standing in the ruins of his family’s kitchen.

He looked around in horror.

The walls and roof and most of the furnishings were gone save for scorched, fallen beams and drifted ash; the stone floor was strewn with debris. The rest of the village had fared no better; Arlian looked out on a blasted, blackened wasteland, scoured of every sign of life, as dead as the crater at the mountain’s peak. No structure still stood any higher than his head; the fragmentary walls of the pantry were among the tallest remaining.

A strong wind was blowing, carrying away lingering dust and smoke and heat. The air was still warm, but no longer thick and hot.

Half a dozen people were moving through the ruins. Behind Arlian, the man in the leather coat was talking to the man in the canvas vest; nearby, the man who had peered over the wall was poking through the crumbled remains of Arlian’s parents’ bedroom. Three other people, a man and two women, were scattered about the village on foot, and one was seated upon a horse in the little plaza at the center of town, overseeing everything. Over at the head of the path down the mountain stood a wagon, unattended at the moment, with a pair of draft horses in the traces.

Arlian had never seen a horse-drawn wagon before; that established beyond question that these people were not from the vicinity of the Smoking Mountain. Around here wagons were pulled by oxen; no one would waste horses on such a task.

“Where is everybody?” Arlian asked, his voice unsteady. His eyes were wet again, stinging with lingering smoke and tears.

The man on horseback turned to stare at him. Arlian stared back, and started trembling.

This must be Lord Dragon, he realized, and the man’s intense wordless stare did indeed remind Arlian of the expression he had seen on the face of the dragon that killed Grandsir.

The horseman was finely dressed in black trimmed with elaborate gold embroidery, from tall leather boots to the dashing, broad-brimmed hat cocked to one side and trailing golden feathers down behind one shoulder. His face was thin and dark, and his right cheek, the one partly concealed by the hat, was heavily scarred—old, ugly scars that looked as if a handful of flesh had once been ripped away and left to heal untreated. He wore no beard, an affectation Arlian had heard of but never seen before, and his mustache was trimmed to a narrow, curving black line. A black scabbard slapped against one of his thighs and the horse’s flank, and Arlian realized that the man carried a sword.

Arlian had never seen a sword. Only lords and professional guards carried swords, and the village had had neither.

This black-garbed man was clearly an actual lord.

“Come here, boy,” the horseman said in a cold, deep voice that Arlian recognized, the voice that had told him to shut up.

Hesitantly, Arlian picked his way across the kitchen floor and out into the village street, until he stood by the rider’s boot, looking up at the scarred face.

“Your village is dead,” the horseman said. “Don’t get your hopes up that your friends or family might still live. Dragons allow no escapes. Unless there are other cellars or tunnels, you are the only survivor.”

Arlian could not find a reply.

“We’re counting skulls, when we find them,” the rider said. “We may miss some, but you’ll know that most of them died, at the very least. Take my word for it, boy— they all died. One survivor is a miracle; two would be impossible.”

Arlian felt tears running down his cheeks, but still couldn’t speak.

“Now, do you know where any valuables might be? Where was the chief workshop? I have uses for obsidian back in Manfort. Or perhaps your village sorcerer might have had a few precious possessions?”

“I don’t know,” Arlian managed to say. His voice was a husky whisper.

The horseman frowned. “You don’t know where they worked the black glass?”

Arlian pressed his lips tight to keep from wailing and shook his head.

“Hmph.” Lord Dragon looked up and scanned the ruins quickly. Arlian dropped his gaze, and a teardrop rolled down his nose and dropped to the dust at his feet.

His family was dead—his mother, his father, Korian…

And Grandsir, of course. He had seen Grandsir’s body and knew beyond question that the old man was dead. The other deaths didn’t seem real yet, but he had seen the house, had seen the village, had heard Lord Dragon’s words.

And who was this Lord Dragon? Arlian looked up again, and as he did caught sight of a sack lying by the horse’s front hooves. He turned and glimpsed part of its contents through the open top—and recognized some of the items.

Old German’s golden plate, now smeared with wet black ash but still unmistakable. Beronil’s crystal cups, handed down in her family for a century or more. The obsidian clock face Kashkar had been working on.

They were all thrown in together, and Arlian suddenly realized who Lord Dragon and his men were.

Looters. Human vultures, come to pick clean the bones the dragons had left.

He looked up, and his eyes met Lord Dragon’s gaze.

The horseman’s eyes were deep and dark, sunken in their sockets, with dark brown iris and almost no whites visible. They were cold and empty eyes that seemed to be studying Arlian as if he were no more than a stone in the path.

“What’s going to become of me?” Arlian asked.

“Unless you have rich kin somewhere who might pay a ransom,” Lord Dragon replied calmly, “I believe we’ll sell you. You look strong enough, and I know a mining company that can always use another strong back.”

“But I’m not a slave!” Arlian protested.

“You are now,” Lord Dragon replied, in a voice like the boom of the warning bell that now lay broken and half melted a hundred yards away.

Outrage welled up in Arlian’s heart. He had done nothing wrong; he had been born free, and did not deserve slavery. “But I’m…”

“You’re ours, by right of salvage,” Lord Dragon said, cutting him off. “This village and everything in it has been abandoned, and so, by ancient custom, belongs to whosoever first claims it. I am claiming it—and thereby, I claim you.”

“But…”

“Now, boy, unless you have something to offer me in exchange, I’ll hear no more argument. You’re mine, and this village is mine.” Lord Dragon straightened in the saddle. “Do you have anything to offer me? Are there hidden treasures, perhaps? A secret cache in that cellar of yours?”

“No,” Arlian admitted.

“But you do know where the workshops were, I’m sure. Now, will you tell us readily, or must we beat it out of you?”

Arlian hesitated, and was suddenly aware that the man in the brown leather coat had come up behind him and was standing not a yard away.

“I’d tell him,” the man said.

Arlian hesitated, looking from Lord Dragon to the man on foot and back. He glanced at the bag of stolen valuables, at the horse standing placidly, at the long slim sword on Lord Dragon’s left hip and the long heavy knife on his right, and at the merciless calm of Lord Dragon’s expression.

“I can show you,” Arlian said.

He had no choice.

It was not that he feared a beating, or even death—if Lord Dragon killed him at least it would be over, and he would not be facing the prospect of a life spent laboring in the mines somewhere.

No, it was that if he died, he could never do anything to fix what had been done here.

The dragons had swept in and destroyed everything, slain everyone, for no reason; no one in the village had ever harmed or threatened them in any way. No one there had deserved to die—but they had died all the same.

And this man, this Lord Dragon, had no right to come up here and claim everything as his own. He had done nothing to earn this place, he had taken no risks, he had not sweated and labored to wrench the black stone from the mountain and shape it to human use. He had not sired Arlian, nor raised him, nor even purchased him, yet he now claimed him as mere property.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it was Arlian’s duty, as the sole survivor of those who had been wronged, to fix it, to make it better somehow. His parents had taught him that since he was a baby—wrongs had to be put right somehow.

Arlian saw it clearly. Lord Dragon and his looters were stealing, and someone had to punish them for it. The three dragons had killed innocent people; someone had to kill them to make it fair. His mother had said there were no more dragons; Arlian wanted to do anything he could to make that belief come true.

He had no idea how it might be done, no real hope of ever accomplishing it, but somehow he knew he must do something to fix it all—and he couldn’t if he were dead. His job would be harder if he were crippled by beatings.

So, for now, he would do as he was told, and someday he would have his chance. Someday, he would find a way to repair this wrong.

“This way,” he said, and he led the man in brown to where the village workshops had stood.

4

The first Journey

It was surprisingly difficult to walk with his hands tied. Logically, Arlian didn’t see why it made much difference, but all the same he found himself stumbling and awkward much of the way down the mountain, and could only attribute it to having his hands bound behind his back, where he could not use them to help maintain his balance.

His eyes stung with tears as he staggered along, and he did not know whether to attribute that to pain or grief or anger—or if it even mattered.

His captors displayed no sympathy for his. discomforts, but they were in no great hurry, so he was able to keep up without being dragged, and without being run over by the heavily laden wagon. He wondered whether they would put him in the wagon with the other loot if he collapsed and refused to walk.

One of the looters, a woman called Dagger, glanced at him as he stumbled again. Arlian didn’t know whether she noticed his tears, but she deigned to address him.

“You’re probably thinking that Fate’s been cruel to you, aren’t you?” she said. “You being sold into slavery, and all. But look at it this way—if we just left you there, all alone, what would become of you? If you didn’t want to starve you’d have to come down the mountain anyway, sooner or later, and beg in the streets—and if you did, you might have been caught by slavers anyway. And it’s not all bad. At least slaves know where their next meal will come from.”

Arlian stared at her without speaking, his eyes drying.

“And you may think it’s hard luck that your family all died,” the woman went on, “but you survived, didn’t you? There’s good and bad in everything, lad, if you know how to look.”

Arlian didn’t say anything aloud, but his thoughts were clear.

Good luck or bad didn’t enter into it. The dragons had chosen to destroy his village. The looters had chosen to scavenge in the ruins. They had chosen to do the terrible things they had done. They could have left the village alone. It wasn’t ill chance that had destroyed the village and carried Arlian into slavery; the destroyers did it on purpose.

Fate had not been cruel. The dragons had been cruel. Lord Dragon had been cruel. The other looters had been cruel.

And if Arlian ever had the chance to repay that cruelty, he would—but for now he would just go on as best he could, in hopes that chance would come. He blinked away his tears and stared silently back at Dagger.

“Not speaking to us, eh?” she said. She shrugged. “Please yourself, then.”

They stopped at one of the river towns that night, but Arlian saw almost nothing of it, and had no chance to speak to any of the townspeople. Before they passed the village gate he was gagged, his ankles bound, and he was thrown into the wagon, covered over with a blanket.

He lay there, thinking miserably of his family and the monstrous injustice of it all, and didn’t notice when he fell asleep.

In the morning he was too stiff to walk. After he collapsed twice in a dozen yards he was flung back into the wagon and left there, to bounce and bump helplessly as the wagon rattled its way along the muddy road—this stretch was not paved as the mountain road had been. His gag was removed after they had gone a mile or so, and his hands freed, so he could eat. He was given bread and water, which he consumed without tasting it; his hands were then tied again. No further attempt was made to get him to walk.

This set the fashion for the rest of the journey.

On the fourth day they stopped early in the afternoon, and Arlian was hauled out of the wagon and dumped unceremoniously on hard-packed earth. He looked up, and found himself meeting the gaze of a stranger.

He had gotten to know the seven looters by face and voice, and had heard names—though not true names—for all of them; this man was not any of them. He was white-haired, fat, clad in gray wool and white linen with his beard halfway down his chest. He smelled of onions and sweat.

“I’m asking twenty ducats,” Lord Dragon’s voice said.

The stranger snorted. “Five,” he said.

“Shamble, just toss him back in the wagon,” Lord Dragon said. “This man doesn’t want to be serious…”

“Eight, then.”

“Eighteen? Perhaps I might consider that.”

“I said eight, not eighteen!”

“Ah, you’re still wasting our time with your nonsense. Shamble…”

“And what are you going to do with the boy elsewhere, my lord?” the fat man asked, turning his gaze away from Arlian, presumably to meet Lord Dragon’s eyes.

“Oh, I think a handsome young fellow like this would have his uses almost anywhere,” Lord Dragon said. “I couldn’t possibly part with him for less than sixteen ducats.”

“You’ll have to haul him a long way to get that much. I’ll give you ten.”

“Perhaps, as a personal favor, I could settle for fifteen, though you’d certainly owe me a favor in return…”

“Eleven.”

“Shamble, look at the boy and tell me whether you think our friend here has gone mad to offer less than fourteen.”

“I’m not one to say, my lord,” Shamble replied. He was one of the looters—the biggest of them, but not one of the brighter ones, judging by what Arlian had seen of them.

“Eleven, I said,” the fat man said.

“Twelve, and that’s my final offer.” Lord Dragon’s tone had shifted, become colder—he had tired of the banter, Arlian guessed. The fat man could hardly fail to notice the change.

“Twelve it is, then,” he said, his tone noticeably less confident. “The money’s in the strongbox.”

“Then let us brook no delay in opening this strongbox,” Lord Dragon said.

The fat old man departed, leaving Arlian staring up at the sky—and at a cliff of yellow-brown stone.

He could not move much—his hands and feet were tightly bound, and his neck horribly stiff from his mistreatment— but Arlian turned enough to see that he was surrounded by Lord Dragon’s six henchmen while the lord himself accompanied the old man to the strongbox. They were standing easily on stony ground, the wagon at one side. The cliff blocked out almost half the sky, dark against the bleached-out pale blue of a hazy summer afternoon, but Arlian could see no houses or shops, no sign of a farm or village where the fat man might live. He looked at the looters, trying to memorize their faces so that he would know them someday when he tracked them down.

There was Shamble, big and stupid and vicious, eager to please Lord Dragon however possible.

There was Hide, the man in the sleeveless leather coat who had pulled Arlian from the cellar. He had had little to say on the trip down the mountain to this place, and stood slightly apart from the rest.

Cover, a tidy young man who had worn a vest and climbed down into the cellars, was carefully not looking, at Arlian. He seemed uneasy.

Stonehand, who had peered over the wall and first seen Arlian, was grinning at something the woman called Dagger was whispering to him.

And Tooth, presumably called that because so many of her teeth were missing, was staring at Arlian with a crooked, unkind smile on her ugly face.

“I’ll remember you all,” Arlian mouthed silently.

Then he heard the returning footsteps of the others, Lord Dragon and the fat old man, and he turned his head just in time to see Lord Dragon set a foot in his stirrup.

“Come along,” he said.

The six of them came, and a moment later the wagon rattled away amid a flurry of hoofbeats and shouted comments, leaving Arlian alone with the white-haired stranger.

“Welcome to Deep Delving, boy,” the man said, prodding Arlian with the toe of a heavy boot. “I’d suggest you look at the sky while you can—you’ll never see it again.”

Arlian stared silently up at that long white beard and wrinkled face.

I will see it again, he promised himself.

Then the fat man grabbed Arlian by one arm and hoisted him upright. Despite his girth he was no weakling; he lifted the boy as if he were made of straw.

“Come on,” he said, breathing the smell of onions in Arlian’s face. “Let’s get you underground where we can take off those ropes without worrying about any silly attempts to escape.” Carrying Arlian easily under one arm, the old man marched along the cliff, and then into it, through a hidden doorway.

Abruptly Arlian was plunged from the familiar world of air and sunlight into a broad, torchlit stone corridor, awash in shadows and smoke. Memories of the smoke-filled cellar where his grandfather had died flowered suddenly, and he began to struggle and thrash in unthinking panic.

The fat man dropped him abruptly. Impact with the stone floor knocked the wind out of him, and his struggles weakened..

The fat man stared down at him. “What’s wrong with you, boy?”

“The torches,” Arlian gasped. With one final convulsive shudder he forced the fear away and lay still.

The fat man did not so much as glance at the torches mounted on the walls; instead he kept his attention focused on the boy.

“What about them?” he demanded.

“My family,” Arlian said. “Our house burned, and they all died. I was trapped in the cellars.” He didn’t mention the dragons; he had no clear reason in mind why he should not, but it somehow didn’t seem wise.

“And the torches brought it back?”

Arlian nodded.

“Well, that’s one fear you’ll get over,” the old man said. “At least, if you want to eat.” He stooped and picked Arlian up again and slung him over one shoulder, almost smashing the boy’s head against the stone ceiling in the process. Without further conversation he marched onward, down the long sloping passageway.

Most of the tunnel was dark, with the torches spaced widely enough that at the midpoint between any two there was just barely enough light for Arlian to make out his captor’s feet in the gloom. After a couple of hundred yards the torches gave way to dim oil lamps, which were no better, and the darkness seemed to deepen as they descended. The width of the passageway varied; the fat man stayed close to the right-hand wall, where the lights were mounted, and while at times the left-hand side looked almost close enough to reach out and touch, at other times it vanished in the gloom, at least twenty feet away.

Arlian was in no condition to make a close study of his surroundings, but he did notice, when they passed close by the lights, that the walls had not been built, but carved out of the living rock—he was being taken deep into the earth. The walls were rough yellowish stone, with occasional ribbons of gray laced through it. Here and there a bit of quartz glittered faintly in thepoor light.

Down into the earth… down where the dragons slept? He shuddered again.

But no, he wasn’t being taken to the dragons. Lord Dragon had mentioned a mining company; he must be in a mine, a mine far deeper than the pits where the people of Obsidian had dug out the slivers of black volcanic glass that gave their village its name.

This was no mere pit. This was nothing like the mines Arlian had visited before.

Then the fat man stopped suddenly. From his position on the man’s shoulder Arlian could see the tunnel they had just descended, and the broad expanse of the man’s back, but nothing of what lay ahead. He had no idea why they had stopped.

“Ho, Bloody Hand!” the man called. “I’ve got a fresh one for you!”

Then Arlian felt himself being heaved off the fat man’s shoulder and tossed; the world seemed to wheel wildly about him, a mad patchwork of light and shadow and glimpses of stone and thick timbers and blackened ropes, and he found himself plunging down into a pit after all…

But only for perhaps a second; then he had landed hard on a pile of rags, knocking the wind out of him.

A young man was standing over him, looking down at him.

“It’s just a boy!” he called.

“He’ll grow,” the fat man’s familiar voice called back.

“If we let him,” the young man said. He sighed. “You won’t get much work out of him at first, you know.”

“That’s not my problem,” the fat man replied. “I’ll be back when the Gaffer gets here.”

Then Arlian heard footsteps retreating up the stone passage.

The young man glared down at him for a moment, then pulled a knife from his belt and reached down to cut the boy’s bonds.

Freed at last, Arlian tried to sit up, but found himself too weak and stiff to manage it until the young man grabbed him roughly by one arm and pulled him upright.

“Welcome to your new home,” the young man said.

Arlian looked around.

He was at the bottom of a deep round pit, dimly lit by three of the little oil lamps. Two black passageways opened off it, roughly at right angles to one another. The passageway by which he had arrived, however, was not one of them; that tunnel was on a higher level. Arlian could see now that he had been casually flung some fifteen feet or more off a ledge; had the huge pile of rags not been here he might well have been killed.

Also at that upper level, in the mouth of the entry tunnel, he could see a complex of ropes, beams, and pulleys, and what appeared to be a large bin of some sort. All the ropes had been carefully tied up out of reach, he saw—there was no way to climb up out of the pit, no ladder, no steps, no dangling ropes.

A row of four ugly little wooden carts stood along one side of the pit, full of gray rock. Somewhere in the distance Arlian could hear a clinking, rattling sound.

“Where am I?” Arlian asked. “Who are you?”

“You’re in a mine, half a mile from the town of Deep Delving,” the young man replied. “You’re here to dig ore. If you dig enough, you get fed; if you don’t, you starve. If you cause trouble…” He hefted a whip in one hand, the knife he had used to free Arlian in the other. “I can use whichever of these I think is appropriate to the occasion,” the man said. “Or my fists, or a club, or whatever other tool it takes to get the ore out.”

“What ore?”

“It’s a stone called galena,” the man said, waving at the row of carts. “It’s gray, darker than the limestone.” He then gestured at the walls; Arlian supposed that this meant the pale stone around them was limestone. “When it’s smelted it yields lead—and sometimes silver, which is what makes it worth the trouble.”

Arlian stared at him for a moment, trying to think what else he should ask. This was all happening too fast, it was all too harsh, to take in properly.

The young man did not wait to hear what else Arlian might have to say, however; he sheathed his knife and grabbed the boy by one arm, then gestured.

“Get that lamp,” he said.

Arlian obeyed, and held the lamp high as he was dragged into one of the dark tunnels opening off the pit.

The clinking noise grew louder as the two made their way down the tunnel, through widened areas and past side-tunnels, until Arlian could see light ahead.

Then the man released him and snatched the lamp away.

“Go on and join them,” the man said. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

Arlian hesitated, and the man shoved him forward with the hand that still held the whip. “Go on!”

Arlian stumbled forward into the darkness, and tried to focus on the light ahead. He headed toward it, and finally staggered into a relatively open area lit by several oil lamps, an area where half a dozen ragged, pale-skinned, long-bearded men were working—four of them were hacking at a wall of gray stone with picks, while the other two collected the broken pieces with wooden shovels and dumped them into a wooden cart that stood nearby. A second cart was pushed up against a wall, just below one of the lamps. The clinking Arlian had heard had been the sound of iron on stone.

One of the loaders spotted him as he approached, and stopped his work; the other loader noticed, and stopped as well. In a moment, all six men had turned to stare at Arlian.

“Fresh blood,” someone muttered.

“They didn’t give him a pick,” another remarked.

“Then he’s a loader,” a third said. “He can do the handwork and push the cart.”

“He doesn’t look strong enough to push it!” a fourth protested.

“Where am I?” Arlian asked.

One man snorted derisively; another laughed.

“You’re in the Old Man’s silver mine,” a third said an older man who spoke his words oddly, with a singsong rhythm.

“The Old Man? Who’s that?”

“He’s who owns this mine,” the man with the peculiar accent said. “Now you know as much about him as we do.”

“Was he the one who bought me and brought me down here?”

The men exchanged glances and grins. “Now, how would we know?” one of them asked. “We didn’t see who brought you.”

“A big fat man, who smells of onions?” Arlian asked.

“Could be,” one miner admitted. “If he’s been eating onions.”

The others laughed, but Arlian ignored that. “And the one with the whip…” he began.

Expressions turned grim, and one man spat to the side.

“Bloody Hand,” one miner said.

“Is that his name?” Arlian asked, and immediately regretted it—how could it be a name?

“It’s all the name he needs,” the miner replied.

“Why is he called that?” Arlian asked, dreading the reply.

“Because of what he did to poor Dinian,” another miner said angrily. “Whipped him until the blood sprayed everywhere. Cut him open to the bone.”

Arlian swallowed. “Did he die?”

“Eventually,” the oldest miner said. “Not of the whipping itself, but his wounds festered, and he took fever and died. And Bloody Hand didn’t do a thing for him.”

One of the miners turned away and hoisted his pick.

“You can tell him your stories later,” he said, as he swung the pick and bit the point deep into soft gray stone. “If we want to eat tonight, we need to fill that cart, and two more after it, before the Gaffer gets here. The boy’ll have the rest of his life to listen to us talk.”

The others mumbled agreement and lifted their own tools; one of the shovel-wielders beckoned to Arlian.

“You get the pieces we miss,” he said. “Throw them in the cart. Keep the floor clear, so she’ll roll. Understand?”

“I understand,” Arlian said.

It was simple enough, after all. He could do it; it was honest work, not harming anyone.

There would be plenty of time for escape and vengeance later. He was just a boy. He had his whole life ahead of him.

And he would not spend it all here in the mine!

5

In the Mines

Arlian hauled on the rope, and the mine cart tipped up, spilling its load of ore into the waiting hopper. Wark leaned over with the rake and scraped out the stones and dust that hadn’t slid out on their own; powder swirled up in dark coils that cast shadows on the walls of the pit.

When Wark raised the rake to signal that he was done Arlian let the cart fall back on its wheels; then he unhooked the heavy rope.

“One more,” Bloody Hand said.

Arlian and Wark didn’t bother replying; Wark was already pulling the empty cart away from the hopper while Arlian crossed to the remaining loaded cart and braced himself to push it into position.

They didn’t need to be told what to do; they had been doing it for longer than Arlian cared to recall. He didn’t know how long he had been in the mine—years, he was certain. There were no seasons down here, no heat in the summer nor cold in the winter; there were no days or nights. He had not kept count of the shifts worked—and he did not even know whether there were really two shifts a day, as most of the miners assumed, or whether that might vary. Time did not matter to the miners.

But he had grown to man-height here, and was now one of the taller miners, with a respectable beard that reached to his chest, so he knew years had passed. He was sure he must be at least sixteen by now, and feared he was over twenty. He wasn’t the biggest man in the mine, by any means—Swamp, named for his foul odor, was a head taller and a handsbreadth wider across the shoulders—but Arlian was tall and strong, and in the prime of life.

Of course, part of that height came from standing straight; many of the men in the mine were bent and stooped from years of labor, or from imperfectly healed injuries. Arlian had been lucky in that regard; he had never yet been struck by a runaway cart, nor injured by flying chunks of ore from a badly aimed swing of the pick, nor suffered any other serious mishap. Oh, he had burned himself with spilled lamp oil or by carelessly picking up a hot lamp, and he’d had his share of cuts and bruises, but he had never broken a bone or lost a finger, and his injuries had always healed rapidly. When the fever had spread through his team he had only had a very mild case and had recovered quickly to help nurse the others.

Not everyone had been so fortunate; Arlian frowned at the memory. Old Hathet had died of that fever. Arlian had been there, wiping the old man’s forehead with a wet rag to ease the pain, when it had happened. Hathet had been talking in a thin whisper about his distant and perhaps mythical homeland of Arithei, far to the south, when he had begun coughing, and his mouth had filled with bright red blood, and he had spasmed and choked and died.

Arlian had cried off and on for days after that, even while he tended others who had taken ill; right from that first day, when Arlian had been dumped into the pitshaft and left in Bloody Hand’s care, Hathet had been his best friend among the miners, a font of wisdom, guidance, and companionship despite his peculiarities. Hathet had been the one who taught Arlian the systems under which the mine operated, so that he had been able to settle into work right from the start—many new arrivals took days before they learned enough to earn their meals, as only those who met their quotas’ of ore delivered to the pitshaft were fed.

Most of the miners were too busy earning their own keep to help out a beginner, but Hathet had taken the time to show Arlian the ropes.

Hathet had also told any number of stories of his past that Arlian thought were lies, but his instructions about the mine had all been sound.

Arlian had done his best to pass that on to newcomers, as he had tried to use the rest of what Hathet told him. Some of the others—Rat, and Bitter, and Stain—had made fun of Hathet’s manner of speech and called him a crazy old man, but Arlian, while accepting that some of what Hathet said was probably nonsense, had found a great deal of wisdom in the old man’s chatter, and had taken comfort in his presence. His death had been hard.

Nor was Hathet the only one of Arlian’s fellow miners who had died. The old man the others had called Wrinkles had simply not woken up when called for his shift one day. The big, stupid man called Fist had gotten careless in a fit of temper after an argument with Rat and Swamp, and a wild swing of his pick had brought a chunk of tunnel ceiling down on his head, dashing out his brains. Wark’s brother Kort had sickened and died, taking a long time about it—Wark was still grateful to Arlian because Arlian had never lost his patience with Kort during that slow decline, had never tried to steal Kort’s share of the food and water.

Disease, age, and accidents had killed dozens of slaves, while Arlian had grown from a lost, frightened boy into a man who knew everything there was to know about tunneling, digging and hauling ore, and working the various systems that bounded his life. He had absorbed what Hathet had taught him and learned more on his own.

And through it all he had never once accepted that this was where he would live out his life. Someday he would be free, someday he would hunt down Lord Dragon and his looters, someday he would find a way to punish the dragons for what they had done to his family and the rest of humanity. Someday he would have justice.

Justice—he had learned a great deal about justice in the mines, and about injustice. He had come to understand that the world was not the fair and balanced place he had believed it to be when he was a child; he had heard a hundred stories from the other miners about wrongs left unpunished, courage and goodness left unrewarded. His horror and outrage at the unfairness of it all had faded— but had never died completely.

He had seen events play out in the enclosed world of the mines that taught him by example what the stories of the outside world described. He had seen how a crime left unavenged would rankle, would fester in the victim’s heart like a disease, would make the offender harder and harsher, would cut them both off from the tiny society in which they lived. He had seen how just retribution would bring together the miners—except perhaps the criminal against whom the retribution was taken—content that justice had been done. He had joined the others in restraining Rat’s worst swindles by stealing back extorted belongings, in keeping Fist from beating miners whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had seen that life was better because these wrongs were prevented or avenged. Even Rat, well after the fact, usually acknowledged as much.

There were rules, and when men understood and obeyed the rules, life was better. That was true in the mines, and true in the outside world.

The world might be an unfair place, but Arlian swore he would do everything he could to make it a little fairer, either here in the mines, or when he once again found his way out. Someday he would punish those who had destroyed and looted his home, and any other wrongdoers he found.

Someday.

He pushed the cart into place and snugged the hook securely into place under the handlebar.

“Ready?” he called.

“Pull,” Bloody Hand ordered, his hand on his whip.

His hand was always on that whip when he gave orders, but in fact he used it less than Lampspiller, the other overseer. The general opinion was that this was only because he wasn’t often given an excuse to use it. Everyone in the mine knew the tale of how Bloody Hand had flogged poor Dinian to death, and nobody cared to risk a similar fate…

Arlian had begun to wonder, some time back, whether Dinian had ever really existed, or whether the tale had been started by Bloody Hand himself, long ago, to cow the workers into obedience. He had asked one of the older surviving miners at the time—Hathet and Wrinkles were dead by then, but Oineor was still around—whether he had actually seen the infamous flogging.

“By the dead-gods, boy, I did!” Oineor had told him. ‘“Twas the very first day that red-handed, black-hearted bastard set foot down here. He hadn’t yet troubled to tell us his name, just set to ordering us about, and didn’t know the first thing about what he was doing. Dinian tried to tell him how the cart rotation works, and Bloody Hand wouldn’t hear a word—he ordered Dinian to shut up and do as he was told, and when Dinian wouldn’t he said he’d flog him if he didn’t get down the tunnel where he belonged.”

“And Dinian didn’t?”

“Of course not! He didn’t have a cart to fill, and he knew he wouldn’t get supper if he didn’t, so he tried to argue— and Bloody Hand lashed him across the face. That bastard was so mad he was trembling with rage, and Dinian hadn’t done anything wrong!”

“Then what happened?” Arlian had asked.

“Then Dinian tried to grab the whip, and Bloody Hand hit him again, and again, and around the third or fourth blow Dinian realized he’d better give up. He went down on all fours and covered his head and tried to wait it out, but Bloody Hand just wouldn’t storj—he flogged Dinian’s tunic to rags, and then flogged his back to tatters as well, and didn’t stop until there was blood everywhere and Dinian was just a heap on the stone.”

Arlian had shuddered, and had stayed well clear of Bloody Hand for weeks after that—but with time he had begun to wonder again.

Maybe Hand had been more frightened than angry, alone down here with a score of men who had reason to hate him. Maybe he had misjudged. Maybe he had been too scared to try to do anything for Dinian.

The others all said Hand was a cruel, vicious creature who took delight in the suffering of others, that he’d beaten Dinian to death for fun—but Arlian had never seen Bloody Hand hit anyone, despite frequent threats. If he enjoyed tormenting the miners, why had he held off so completely for all these years?

Hathet used to say that there were usually two explanations for everything, the obvious one and the true one; Arlian suspected that this applied to Bloody Hand.

But sometimes the obvious explanation was the only one. For example, whatever Bloody Hand’s motives might be, Lampspiller enjoyed hurting people, and made no attempt to hide the fact. His name came from a little game he had invented, not long after the day he had first turned up instead of the Gaffer for the second shift, where he would secretly pour the oil out of a miner’s lamp, and then send the man alone down one of the tunnels on some invented errand. The light would go out, and the miner would find himself in utter darkness, unable to find his way back. He would call for help, and Lampspiller would forbid anyone to respond until he heard a satisfactory note of genuine terror and desperation in the victim’s cries.

More often than not, it was Lampspiller’s laughter that guided the lost miner back.

Several of the miners had felt Lampspiller’s whip; he had never flogged anyone to death, but he often used a little sting of the lash to hurry men along. Most of the miners were only too glad to curse both overseers, and to bemoan the day the Gaffer had retired—if he had; no one knew for certain what had happened to the old man. One day Lampspiller had come down the pit instead of the Gaffer, and none of the slaves had ever seen the Gaffer again.

Arguing who was worse, Bloody Hand or Lampspiller, was a popular pastime.

In Arlian’s opinion, Lampspiller won easily—but he knew that Dinian’s ghost might well think otherwise.

The final ore cart tipped up, and the gray stone spilled into the hopper—or began to, at any rate; the hopper was now full enough that Arlian had to hang on the rope for two or three minutes, holding the heavy cart up, while Wark raked out the ore.

At last it was done, though. Arlian unhooked the cart and pulled it clear; he and Wark stepped back.

“Go on,” Hand said, waving them back. He didn’t need to explain what he wanted; they knew the rules. No slave was allowed in the pit while the hopper was being raised up and the ore transferred to the waiting wagons.

Wark and Arlian retreated toward the mouth of their home tunnel and watched as Hand signaled to the teamsters on the upper level.

“Hyaah!” someone shouted, unseen, and the two young men heard the crack of a whip, followed by the rattle of chains and the creaking of ropes and wood as. the mules began hauling. The hopper shifted, ore clattering and ropes twanging, and began to lift.

Arlian watched as it rose. They didn’t have to wait here; it would be a good half-hour before the ore had been transferred and the hopper lowered again with tonight’s supper in it. There were empty carts available, and the two of them could easily have returned to work at the rock face in Tunnel #45 and perhaps filled half a cart before returning for their ration. Still, Arlian preferred to watch.

For one thing, if he ever intended to get out of the mine, he would probably need to get up that shaft to the entry tunnel. Virtually the only alternative would be to tunnel up to sunlight somewhere without being spotted by the overseers, and Arlian remembered how far down he had come when he was first brought here, and that the entry had been at the foot of a cliff. He was deep inside the earth—he didn’t know how far, but he knew it was deep.

The possibility that someday they might tunnel into a natural cave or cavern had occurred to him, but it seemed unlikely—and if it did happen, everyone knew that dragons lived in deep caverns. Much as he wanted to destroy those dragons, he didn’t care to face them barefoot and armed only with a pickax.

Up the shaft—that was the only sane way out.

So he watched the lifting operations with intense interest, trying to devise some way that he might get up to that entrance tunnel. The hopper was always carefully stored up at the top, with all the ropes pulled up out of reach; the stone walls were angled inward as they rose and polished smooth, making a climb impossible. The pile of rags used as a buffer for the hopper, and also as a stockpile for the miners’ clothing, was too low to be of any real help.

The hopper was almost invisible now, above the area lit by the mine’s lamps and not yet into the glow of the torches and lamps used by the wagon crews. Arlian leaned out of the tunnel mouth to peer upward.

He saw the jerk an instant before he heard the snap; one corner of the hopper dropped abruptly, then caught a few inches lower.

Then a second snap sounded, and the entire end of the hopper dropped, swinging down; two of the four cables had broken.

The top layer of ore spilled from the hopper with a thunderous roar that echoed deafeningly from the limestone walls; a hundred jagged head-sized chunks of heavy gray stone poured in a torrent.

And Bloody Hand, who had stepped forward to watch the hauling better, was standing directly underneath.

He raised his arms to shield his head and tried to dodge, but not in time—a stone struck him squarely on the temple, and he crumpled sideways, landing on the rag heap.

Arlian started out of the tunnel, then caught himself.

This was Bloody Hand, the overseer, the man who had flogged Dinian to death. And the hopper was still mostly full and swinging about wildly as the teamsters at the top tried to regain control; at any moment the rest of the ore might spill out. Only a tiny fraction had fallen as yet. The remainder was hanging by a thread.

A single chunk of stone the size of a man’s chest had killed Fist instantly, and that dancing hopper held several tons of ore.

But Bloody Hand was still a fellow human being. Dinian aside, the rumors and stories aside, Arlian had never seen him deliberately harm anyone.

And Arlian had seen too many men die in the mines. He had no desire to see another death, not even Hand’s.

He ran forward and grabbed the dazed Hand under both arms, hauling him free of the little heap of scattered stone. Arlian pulled him toward the nearest tunnel mouth, walking backward and dragging Hand along as quickly as he could. He was halfway to the safety of the tunnel’s mouth when he heard a twang, and another snap, and saw an avalanche of gray stone pouring down out of the darkness.

6

The Price of Mercy

Arlian was coughing, choking on the clouds of rock-dust, as he staggered backward; he had dropped Bloody Hand, but the dust in his eyes was so thick he couldn’t see where. All he wanted for the moment was to get clear himself, so he could wipe his eyes and see what was happening.

“Ari!”

Arlian recognized Wark’s voice. “Here!” he shouted in return.

Other voices were shouting somewhere; Arlian paid no attention to them as he stumbled into a tunnel mouth and cleared his vision.

A few seconds later Wark was there beside him, wiping away dust; Arlian turned and peered out into the pitshaft.

The lamps on one side had gone out, so that great black shadows reared up—and some were moving, dancing, as the now-empty hopper, dangling from one line, swung crazily. A great heap of gray ore covered the rag pile, half obscured by slowly settling black dust. Miners stood in all the tunnels, staring out into the opening, but none had ventured out. Most of the shouting was coming from above.

And then a rope was flung down, and a man came sliding down it, hand over hand—a man wearing thick leather, with a sword on his belt. He jumped free and immediately drew his blade. The sword was shorter and broader than Arlian remembered a sword being, and he had to stop and think where he had ever seen a sword before.

On Lord Dragon’s belt, he realized. This was only the second sword he had even glimpsed, and the first he had seen out of its sheath. It gleamed in the dim orange light, and Arlian stared at it, fascinated, studying the way the stranger held it.

“All right, stand back!” the swordsman bellowed. “Where’s the overseer?”

Half a dozen voices answered, and several fingers pointed. The man turned and spotted Bloody Hand, lying half covered in dust and rubble.

“What about our dinner?” someone called.

“You’ll get your food,” the swordsman snapped, as he strode over to Bloody Hand. He knelt, but kept the sword ready and didn’t look down as he felt the downed overseer’s throat, but instead kept a watchful eye on the slaves in the tunnels.

“He’s breathing,” the swordsman shouted up the shaft. “I don’t see much blood. I think he’s all right.”

“Can he hold a rope?” a voice called from above.

“Not a chance,” the swordsman replied. “Send someone down!”

Arlian watched silently and saw that Bloody Hand was blinking, and trying to raise his right hand free of the rocks. By the time another man had clambered down the rope from the ledge above the swordsman was helping Bloody Hand to sit up.

Arlian and Wark watched as the new arrival helped the overseer to the dangling rope. The swordsman stood guard as the others clung to the rope while it was hauled up; then the rope was flung down again, and the swordsman sheathed his blade and ascended.

Then the rope was pulled up.

For a moment nothing more happened, though Arlian could hear voices. Then the hopper, still dangling by its one corner, was lowered.

“Where’s our supper?” someone shouted, and several other voices joined in protest at seeing the hopper descend without the customary contents.

“Wait a moment, will you?” the swordsman’s voice called down.

A chorus of angry voices replied incoherently, and at last the miners spilled out of the tunnels into the pitshaft. Arlian saw Swamp shaking an angry fist at the invisible figures in the upper tunnels.

Then a heavy burlap sack came sailing down the shaft, to land with a thump atop the heap of spilled ore. Swamp and the others ran to open it.

Arlian stepped out into the pitshaft, Wark at his heels. The two of them made their way up the mound of ore to where Swamp and Bitter were distributing the usual food from the sack—coarse bread, tasteless dried-out cheese, some dried fruit to prevent scurvy.

Arlian held out his hand, and Swamp started to pass him a slab of bread, when Stain spoke up.

“Not him! He’s the one who saved Bloody Hand’s life! You don’t want to feed him!”

Swamp hesitated, and looked at Rat.

Rat, a small man known for his quick wits, looked at Arlian. “You’re the one pulled him out from underneath, Arlian? Or was it Wark?”

“It was Arlian,” Wark said.

“I did it,” Arlian admitted.

“Trying to get on the bosses’ good side, are you?” Rat snarled. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone?”

“You know the rules, Rat,” Arlian said—he wasn’t exactly slow himself, and had no intention of admitting he had acted out of genuine concern for a fellow human being. “If we don’t deliver a live overseer at the end of each shift, we don’t get fed.”

“You risked your life over one meal, boy?” Rat sneered. “It’d be worth skipping a meal to see Bloody Hand’s brains bashed out, if you ask me!”

“Hey, where’s Lampspiller?” someone asked before Arlian could reply. “He didn’t come down!”

That created a stir of concern—the miners did know the rules. Each overseer stayed for a single shift—probably twelve hours each—then was replaced by the other. Bloody Hand had been hauled up, but Lampspiller had not come down for his shift.

And if there were no overseer, there would be no food at the next shift change.

Arlian’s saving of Bloody Hand’s life was forgotten for the moment as the miners argued and shouted. Arlian ignored the debate and took the bread from Swamp’s hand; Swamp didn’t resist, but simply shrugged, handed Arlian a wedge of cheese, and went back to distributing food.

Lampspiller did finally descend, by rope, a few minutes later, and promptly laid about himself with his whip, clearing out the pit; Swamp and Bitter hauled the largely empty food sack into one of the tunnels to continue handing out its contents. By that time Arlian had retreated down toward his own sleeping niche in Tunnel #32, gnawing on his bread and cheese.

He sat on the rags he used as a bed, chewing slowly, and tried to think.

Had he done the right thing, saving Bloody Hand? Hadn’t the overseer deserved to die for what he did to Dinian?

He had acted almost without thinking, though.

He wondered, for the first time, whether when the time came he would be able to carry out the revenge he had planned for so long. What if someday he escaped the mine, and tracked down Lord Dragon and his men, and then was overcome by compassion and could not bring himself to slay them?

He had never imagined that possibility before, but now that he had saved Bloody Hand’s life, at the risk of his own, he had to consider it.

Was he too soft, still a child rather than a warrior?

“Traitor!”

The word was whispered, so he did not recognize the voice, and spoken from behind the shelter of a corner in the passage; Arlian looked up, startled, as an open and lit oil lamp was flung onto his bedding.

The ancient, soiled rags caught, and Arlian hurried to stamp out the blaze as quickly as he could. The smoke affected his already dry throat, and he found himself coughing uncontrollably even after the fire was out. By the time he was himself again, able to take his own lamp and go looking for his attacker, there was no sign that the assailant had ever been there.

He stood in the corridor for a moment, then returned dejectedly to his bedding and settled down cross-legged upon it. He poked idly at the scorched part—he would probably want to replace that, he thought.

The rag pile was under tons of rock, though, so it would have to wait.

Rags and rock and his oil lamp, and a small collection of mementos of dead companions, were all he really owned down here. Some of the miners had managed to make a few things from broken tools or odd scraps, but Arlian had never bothered. He had no paintings on the limestone where he slept, no carved tokens, no knife or spoon or pen; he had spent what little free time he had talking to others, learning everything he could, thinking about ways he might escape and avenge his family.

He had told the others of his plans at first, and been laughed at for his troubles; no one else believed that escape was possible. As for an escaped slave avenging himself against a lord, that was equally absurd, and the idea of killing the dragons went beyond absurd to insane. Even Hathet had sorrowfully told Arlian it was foolish, and Arlian had quickly learned to keep his plans for vengeance to himself—but he had never given them up, and was always alert to learn as much as he could, in hopes of discovering some fact that might show him a way out of the mine.

The owners of the mine provided rags—Arlian didn’t know where they came from, but bundles were tossed down every so often, added to the heap in the pitshaft. The miners made their clothing and bedding and assorted other things from the rags—sacks, wallets, wicks, lampshades, and whatever else they could devise. A few miners made a point of collecting white fabric, or when there was no white the lightest colors available, and writing upon it in ink made of charcoal and water—Arlian had never seen much point in that, though he had read a few of the memoirs and stories thus recorded.

Rags, tools, food, water, and lamp oil—the owners sent those down, and the slaves sent back ore. A very simple economy, but one that had functioned smoothly for years.

And there was almost nothing in it Arlian had considered worth saving. Bitter had a stack of whitish rags a foot high, covered with his rants about how he had been wronged and mistreated, while Olneor had set down his family’s history going back four generations, and Verino had written a philosophical treatise on humanity’s place in the cosmos; Swamp had covered a wall with surprisingly subtle and beautiful drawings of his home village, while Stain had drawn crude and thoroughly obscene pictures of women in various corners. Rat was reputed to have a stash of food, oil, and knives securely hidden somewhere. Wark had made dolls and other toys out of knotted fabric.

All Arlian had was his collection of mementos.

He had been brought here with nothing at all of his own but the clothes on his back and the ropes he had been bound with, ropes that were promptly stolen by other miners. He had nothing by which to remember his family, and he had quickly come to feel that lack keenly. His life had a hole in it where his family should have been, and he thought that while nothing could ever fill that hole, some memento, some little trinket that would connect his life in the mines to his old life outside, might have helped to cover it, to soften its sharp edges.

When he first saw another miner die, he had resolved that he would keep something to remember him, as he had been unable to do for his village, and with each death after that he had added to his collection. Most of the additions were just scraps of cloth—the dead had often been new arrivals who had owned nothing but the clothes they wore.

There were a few other things, though. He had a braided necklace Kort had worn, woven of human hair. He had a chunk of rock stained with Fist’s blood. And he had Hathet’s purple stones.

They were his most prized possession, and now he reached into the niche in the rock wall and pulled the bag out to look at them.

The miners sometimes found bits of other stone in with the limestone and galena; Hathet had collected one particular variety, a sort of purple crystal he called “amethyst.” Hathet had claimed that in his homeland of Arithei, a dream-infested land far beyond the Borderlands in the mysterious and magical realms of the unexplored south, these stones were considered gems and were highly valued. They had, Hathet said, magical properties that could protect their owner.

Hathet had also said Arithei was full of magicians, that dreams became real there and stalked the streets every night, and any number of other absurd things.

Arlian had never believed most of Hathet’s stories; even though he had admired the old man, and had taken to heart a great deal of what he said about how a man should live and how the world was best dealt with, Arlian had always thought Hathet was not quite right in the head, and many of his tales were clearly just wishful thinking.

Hathet had claimed that he had been sent to Manfort as the Aritheian ambassador, and was waylaid by bandits on the highway, bandits who had sold him into slavery here— and how likely was that? What sort of bandit could be so stupid as to sell an ambassador as a mine slave, rather than ransoming him?

Hathet’s attempt at explanation, involving complicated palace intrigue and high treason, had made no sense to Arlian or the others, and they had concluded that the old man had made it up on the spot. He probably wasn’t from Arithei at all. A miner called Brown who claimed to have visited the Borderlands said that the road to Arithei had been closed for years, and all trade blocked, so there was no way Hathet could have come from there. Brown had arrived just after Hathet died, and had then died in a fall himself, so no details were available, but why would he lie?

So Hathet had probably made it all up, and the pretty purple stones were probably just pretty purple stones, of no real value to anyone—but Hathet had collected them carefully, and now Arlian kept that collection. He had counted one hundred and sixty-eight stones, ranging in size from mere specks to the size of his thumb.

He saw no sign that they provided any magical protection, but they were pleasant to look at, and served as a reminder of poor Hathet. Once he got out of the mine perhaps he could find Hathet’s family, in Arithei or wherever they really were, and give them the stones as a memento of their lost kinsman.

“Traitor!”

Arlian looked up, unsure whether he had really heard another whispered imprecation or merely imagined it. No lamp followed the word this time.

The threat was there, though. Whether it had been the right thing to do or not, saving Bloody Hand had plainly marked him down as an enemy for many of the miners. Nothing he owned would be safe if left unattended; he still remembered the sick, stricken expression on Elezin’s face on that occasion years before when Elezin had returned from working the ore to find his little hand-carved limestone shrine smashed to powder and gravel. Elezin had angered Fist the shift before, and Fist had taken his revenge.

Arlian understood the need for revenge very well indeed, and understood why the others would want to retaliate for his saving of Bloody Hand, but he did not intend to make it any easier to hurt him than it had to be. He gathered up the hair necklace and a few fabric scraps and tucked them into the bag with the amethysts, then twisted a rag into a crude rope belt and tied the bag to his waist. He did not want to come back here in a shift or two and find his mementos gone.

This was normally his off shift, but he was in no mood to rest; he got to his feet, and with the bag thumping against his hip made his way down to the rock face to work off his nerves by digging out ore.

7

The Return of Bloody Hand.

Three shifts later the hopper was repaired, and the slaves began shoveling the heap of spilled ore back into it.

Lampspiller was in charge of the operation; his shift was ending, and rumor had it that Bloody Hand was waiting in the tunnel above, ready to return. His previous shift had been taken by a stranger the miners had dubbed Loudmouth, a big brawling man with sun-darkened skin who had disdained the whip and had instead thoroughly beaten Swamp with his bare fists to establish his authority. The others had watched as Swamp was thrashed for a minor, possibly imagined offense. Had they joined forces they could easily have defeated Loudmouth—but then what? How would they get up the pitshaft to escape? So they had stood by and done nothing as Loudmouth asserted his authority, and they had obeyed Loudmouth’s bellowed orders.

Arlian had stayed well out of Loudmouth’s way—and as much as possible out of everyone else’s way, as well. He had been tripped three or four times while working during the past three shifts; a “mis-aimed” pickax had missed his foot by inches; chunks of ore had been “accidentally” flung at his head. His bedding had disappeared completely at one point, and he had had to dig down through the spill to replace it from the ragpile.

Even Wark was avoiding him—and Arlian couldn’t blame him; anyone who was seen befriending the outcast would be outcast himself.

He hoped the others would get over their anger soon. While he had never been the most popular of the slaves, he had always gotten along well enough, and had made no real enemies—until now.

Maybe, he thought as he shoveled, this would mark the end of his harassment. With the hopper back in operation and the spilled ore gone, with Bloody Hand back on the job, perhaps things would return to normal.

Or perhaps when the backlog of ore was gone—every cart in the mine was filled to overflowing, and more ore was piled at the rock face, since there had been no way to haul it up the shaft. Maybe when that was gone he’d be forgiven his act of misplaced mercy.

He wasn’t counting on it, though; the bag of mementos was still securely tied in place on his belt, and would stay there. He didn’t trust anyone at this point.

He glimpsed something moving and ducked as a shovelful of ore flew past his ear.

“Sorry,” Bitter said, his tone utterly insincere.

“I wonder if it’s occurred to anyone,” Arlian said, not addressing anyone in particular, “that if Bloody Hand had died, he might have been replaced by someone even worse.”

“And I wonder,” Bitter retorted, “whether anyone really could be worse, and whether Dinian’s shade is as angry at the missed chance for vengeance as I am.”

“Shut up,” Lampspiller roared, “or I’ll show you that I can be worse than your worst nightmare!”

“My nightmares are about dragons,” Arlian muttered.

The whip cracked across his back. “You think I can’t be as bad as a dragon?” he bellowed.

Arlian turned and stared at him, ignoring the welt rising on his shoulders. He didn’t say anything; he’d been ordered to shut up, after all. He simply looked at Lampspiller.

The overseer faltered, then lifted his whip. “Get back to work!”

Arlian returned to his shoveling. Some of the other miners had paused at the mention of dragons; many felt a superstitious awe of the legendary creatures that had once ruled the world, and Arlian was sure that they thought Lampspiller had just invited evil by his careless retort.

Maybe he had. Arlian had had more direct experience of dragons than anyone else in the mine, but he still knew almost nothing about them. Maybe speaking irreverently of them could bring bad luck. Maybe his own grandfather’s explanation of dragon weather had brought about the attack on Obsidian.

But Arlian didn’t believe that. And even if it were true, it was unjust. He would see the dragons punished someday, or he would die in pursuing it.

“Fill this one right to the top!” Lampspiller ordered. “We’ve got an extra wagon waiting up above—we’ll be making up the missed shipments a little at a time.”

“What if the ropes break again?” someone asked.

“They won’t,” Lampspiller said. “Brand-new ropes all around.” He smiled crookedly. “But I won’t be standing underneath—some of us have more sense than that!”

A few of the slaves smiled or even laughed briefly at that; Arlian did not.

Ten minutes later the hopper was filled to overflowing, and Lampspiller sent the slaves to the tunnels before giving the signal to haul.

He was as good as his word, and backed against the wall of the pit, well clear of the hopper as it rose upward, ropes crackling as they were stretched for the first time, pulleys and timbers creaking under the heavier-than-usual load.

The slaves waited and watched, eager for their next meal and curious about whether the new ropes would, in fact, hold, and whether or not Bloody Hand would be returning.

The hopper ascended into the darkness. Then at last came the old familiar sound of the support arms turning, swinging the hopper over to the ledge to be unloaded.

The ropes hadn’t broken. Arlian heard shovels and rattling ore as the crew up above began transferring the ore to the waiting wagons.

The other slaves began chattering among themselves, but Arlian stood apart, farther down the tunnel than the others.

Eventually the ore was gone, and a series of quick thuds could be heard as supplies were tossed into the hopper. The slaves, who had been resting against the walls or sitting on the stone floor, stood up and awaited the signal.

The hopper began its descent, the rigging creaking anew—though less than before, since its new cargo weighed far less than the load of ore.

Arlian peered out of the tunnel mouth and watched the huge iron tub creep downward.

Bloody Hand was standing on one edge, steadying himself with one of the cables and watching everything as he was lowered down into the mine.

That answered that question—Hand was back, and although he wore a bandage around his head and his face displayed a few cuts and bruises, he did not seem to have suffered any permanent damage from his misadventure.

The injuries he had received were hardly enough to equal Dinian’s, Arlian knew that, but perhaps they would help to appease the other miners.

Were they enough to salve his own conscience, though? Why had he saved Bloody Hand, instead of letting Fate collect the debt owed to Dinian’s shade?

Then the hopper was down, and Bloody Hand and Lampspiller signaled to the nearest slaves. A moment later Rat and three of the others were heaving out the two barrels of water, the keg of lamp oil, and the sacks of food that would keep the miners alive for another day or so.

Then the slaves were banished from the pitshaft again as Lampspiller rode the hopper up out of sight.

The hopper was never left at the bottom for so much as a minute except under the direct supervision of one or both of the overseers, and only when there were men in the upper tunnel; the owners feared that slaves might climb the robes and escape. At the end of each shift the procedure was the same—the hopper was lowered empty, and then filled; ore was hauled up and loaded into the wagons, and then provisions, adjusted according to how full the wagons were, were sent down, attended by the incoming overseer. The departing overseer then rode the empty hopper up, and made sure it was safely stowed.

Several of the bolder slaves had argued that it would be more efficient to lower the provisions and incoming overseer first, and then haul the ore up, so that only one round-trip would be needed, but when the overseers bothered to reply at all the response was obvious: The slaves would fill the hopper faster if they knew the food would only arrive when they were done.

When the hopper was gone Bloody Hand stood, alone in the pit, looking around.

The pile of rags was still there, but sprinkled with dust and gravel; torn scraps of rope lay piled against one wall, the last remnants of the old, worn-out rigging that had been responsible for the accident. The water barrels and oil keg had been shoved to one side, as well.

And two dozen slaves were slouched in the tunnels, sharing out their newly delivered meal.

There were four other men in the tunnel with Arlian, with one sack of food; he waited while they each took what they wanted.

One of them, Rumind, looked at Arlian, then at his companions, Wark, Olneor, and Elbows.

“That’s all of us, isn’t it?” he said.

Arlian straightened up.

“Oh, give him his food,” Wark said. “The overseer won’t like it if we don’t.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot, Arlian’s the Hand’s special friend, isn’t he?” Rumind said with a sneer.

Arlian held out a hand, and Rumind threw the bag at his face; Arlian was able to duck the throw, but not catch the projectile. He had to retreat down the tunnel to fetch it.

As he picked it up Rumind shoved roughly past him.

“Excuse me,” Rumind said. “We’ve got work to do, and I don’t care for the company here.”

Elbows jabbed at Arlian with his namesake joint as he passed; Olneor didn’t touch him, but muttered, “Thought you might have some potential, boy. Guess I was an old fool.”

Wark simply walked past without comment.

Arlian stood, the food sack in his hand, and watched them descend until they turned a bend in the passage and vanished. Then he sighed, settled to the floor, and opened the bag.

He had just pulled out a heel of black bread and a handful of cheese crumbs when a shadow obscured the lamplight.

“You,” Bloody Hand said, “Get up.”

Arlian got up.

“Your name’s Arlian, something like that?”

“It’s Arlian.”

“You’re the one who pulled me out before the whole thing came down, are you?”

Arlian nodded.

“You expect me to be grateful?”

“No.” Arlian couldn’t really see Bloody Hand’s face, as the light was behind the overseer, but he thought he saw the man frown.

“You made life harder for yourself, saving me, didn’t you?”

Arlian shrugged.

“Why did you do it?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You know about Dinian?”

“I’ve heard,” Arlian said. “I wasn’t here at the time.”

“You saved me anyway?”

Arlian shrugged again.

“You didn’t make my life any easier, either, you know. Longer, yes, but no easier.”

Arlian didn’t even bother to shrug in response to that.

“It doesn’t look good, owing my life to one of the slaves. It’s trouble all around. I’d like to know why you did it.”

Arlian hesitated; then he raised his eyes and looked directly at the shadows of Bloody Hand’s face.

“I’d like to know why you killed Dinian,” he said.

Bloody Hand snorted.

“Would you?” he said. “Haven’t the others told you?”

“They told me you killed him because you’re a heartless bastard,” Arlian said. “But I’ve been thinking about it. If you really were as heartless as that, you’d have been freer with the whip all these years I’ve been here. I don’t think that’s it.”

“Maybe I tried it and decided I didn’t like it.”

“Or maybe you didn’t mean to kill him at all,” Arlian suggested. “Maybe you just panicked.”

Bloody Hand stared at him. “You think so?”

“I don’t know,” Arlian said. “I would like to know why you killed him, instead of guessing.”

“So would I,” the overseer said. “It just happened. It wasn’t anything I decided to do. I was young and scared and needed to prove I was in charge, and once I started hitting him I couldn’t stop—I was too scared to stop.”

“You think about it often?” Arlian asked.

“Every night,” Bloody Hand said. He let out a sound half snort, half laugh. “The funny part is that it was wrong, it was evil, it was the worst thing I could do, killing an innocent man who was just trying to teach me something—and everything that’s come of it since has been good for me. It gave me that name I hear you men whisper. It frightened you all so much that I’ve never had to really beat a man since, and my shift still outproduces the other. There’s no justice in this world, Arlian, you know that?”

“I know that,” Arlian said, his heart suddenly pounding as he remembered the sight of his village, burned and desolate, his family destroyed at the whim of three heartless monsters. “Not unless we make it.”

“But you had your chance to make it,” Bloody Hand said. “You could have let me die for what I did to Dinian, and you didn’t. Why not?”

Arlian hesitated again. He could have given all the explanations he had made to Rat and the others over the past three shifts, all the reasons it was better to keep Bloody Hand alive than to risk an unknown new overseer or tighter precautions in the mine, how he hadn’t wanted to miss even a single meal—but that was all lies, and right now he didn’t want to lie to this man, who had admitted what was unmistakably the truth about Dinian’s death, who had clearly been troubled by that death for years.

“You were in danger, and I could help you,” Arlian said. “Who you were didn’t matter.”

Arlian could see Bloody Hand’s brow lower at that, could almost hear him growl. The overseer’s hand lashed out and grabbed him by the beard, pulling Arlian forward.

“It does matter,” he hissed. “You’ve seen that it matters! You saved someone’s life, and what did it get you? I killed a man, and what did that get? It’s a sick, unjust world, Arlian, and it does matter who we are!” He released his hold and Arlian tumbled backward, catching himself against the tunnel wall.

For a moment the two men stared silently at one another; then Bloody Hand turned on his heel and marched back out into the pit.

“Get to work, slave,” he called back over his shoulder. “There’s ore to be mined!”

8

Into the Light

Arlian was asleep in his niche when a booted foot kicked him awake.

“Get up, slave!” Bloody Hand shouted. He stood over the sleeping miner, lamp in hand, boot ready to kick again.

Arlian rolled aside and struggled lazily upright.

It was his time off, his sleeping time—he had dug and carted his share for this shift, and was entitled to a few hours’ rest. He knew better than to argue, though.

As he stood, Bloody Hand leaned forward, his mouth close by Arlian’s ear, and whispered confidentially, “If there’s anything you prize here, bring it.”

Astonished by this sudden change in manner, Arlian blinked at him, then quickly snatched up his bag and belt. He reached for his lamp, but Bloody Hand shook his head and knocked his hand away from it. “Leave it,” he whispered.

Arlian left it, and waited for orders.

“It’s time I settled with you once and for all!” Bloody Hand bellowed, stepping back, reverting to his usual bullying self and astonishing Arlian anew. “Come out and take it like a man!”

Confused, still half asleep, Arlian staggered out of the niche and up toward the pitshaft, Bloody Hand close behind, shoving him forward every time he slowed or stumbled. He tied his belt in place as he walked. Other than the belt he was wearing only a tattered pair of breeches, and he wondered whether there was anything else he should have grabbed while he had the chance.

Well, it was too late now.

“What do you want with me?” he asked.

“I’m going to ensure that you never lay hands on me again!” Bloody Hand roared. He snapped his whip.

Arlian was baffled. He had saved Bloody Hand’s life; was a flogging to be his reward? Perhaps it was what he deserved for aiding a murderer, but he hadn’t expected it. Was this Bloody Hand’s way of showing Arlian that there was no justice in the world?

It was hardly necessary; the dragons had done that long ago.

Then they were in the pitshaft—and Arlian was surprised to see that it was almost totally dark. All the lamps had been put out; only the one Bloody Hand held remained to provide illumination.

A faint glow came from above, as well, but Arlian wasn’t sure whether that was anything out of the ordinary or not. Perhaps there was always a light up there, and it simply wasn’t usually visible through the glare of the lamps.

“Now!” Bloody Hand barked, as the two of them reached the base of the rag pile. He blew out the lamp he carried, plunging the already shadowy pit into near total blackness. Only the glow from above alleviated the gloom.

Arlian heard the sound of a rope uncoiling, and a thump—but it wasn’t the Hand’s whip. The sound had come from the other side.

He turned and found something dangling close beside him, faintly visible, dull gray in the darkness.

A rope.

For a moment he couldn’t move; he stared at it in shock. The almost invisible rope seemed so out of place to his sleep-clouded mind that at first he had trouble accepting it as real, and wondered whether he was still asleep and dreaming this entire episode.

He reached out and hesitantly, ready to snatch his hand away at the first sound from Bloody Hand, touched it.

The rope was real. He could feel its rough texture clearly. He was awake.

No rope should be there. No ropes were permitted except during the shift change, when the hopper was lowered and raised. What was this one doing there?

Bloody Hand snapped his whip, and Arlian jumped.

“Darkness for dark deeds,” the overseer said loudly. He laughed. Then, in a whisper, he added, “I can’t have you down here anymore.”

“What?”

“Keep your voice down!” Bloody Hand hissed.

Arlian whispered, “What?”

“I can’t have you down here,” the overseer replied, in a whisper so low Arlian could barely hear it. “It’s bad for everyone. The others hate you for what you did. You make me look weak—you remind them I’m human and mortal. You remind me I’m mortal—and how can I abuse the man who saved my life, and treat you like just another slave? You can’t stay.”

“But I am a slave…”

“Do you deserve slavery?”

“No, of course not,” Arlian said, confused.

“As far as the others are concerned, I’m going to kill you, just as I did Dinian, for your effrontery in trying to help me. And if you don’t climb that rope and get out of here, I will kill you, I swear by the dead gods.”

“Climb… ?” Arlian grabbed the rope, a sudden rush of hope rising in his breast.

“There’s a guard at the top, but he’s my brother, Linnas—he’s ‘accidentally’ lowered the rope, and in a moment he’ll throw down a bundle of rags I’ll say is your dead body and throw in the hopper at the end of the shift. When you slip past him he’ll be away from his post, relieving himself. After that, Arlian, you’re on your own; and we’ll be even—I’m paying for my life with your freedom, and just as you might have been killed if the ore fell sooner, if I’m discovered at it I’ll be killed or enslaved.”

“I don’t… I mean, thank you…” Arlian began.

Bloody Hand cut him off. “You said there’s no justice unless we make it. I’m making my bit. Climb!”

He cracked the whip against the rag pile, and Arlian, with sudden inspiration, screamed. He flung himself up the rope, clinging desperately with hands and knees—he had never climbed a rope before, although he had seen it done often enough.

He managed to haul himself upward, little by little, as Bloody Hand flogged the heap of rags. A louder thump sounded from one side that Arlian guessed was the promised imitation corpse—and then Arlian felt the lash across his own legs, and shrieked.

“Good,” Bloody Hand said. “Yell if you want, you poxy fool!” Then he stepped closer and whispered, “I need blood on the whip and rags if I’m to be believed. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Arlian whispered back, though the pain in his legs was intense. “Thank you, Hand.”

“My name is Enir,” the overseer whispered back. “Go!”

Arlian went. He panted with the effort of pulling himself up the rope toward the light, trying to match his gasps for air with the beating of the whip on the rags. Every so often he moaned or wailed.

Then his hand struck stone, and a moment later he was scrambling up onto the ledge at the mouth of the entry tunnel, a tunnel lit by two bright lamps.

A man was standing there, a man not in the rags of a miner or the leather apron of an overseer, but in a bright tunic, green worked with gold, over black velvet breeches. He wore a sword on his belt, and after a few seconds of confusion Arlian recognized him as the swordsman who had come down into the pit when the hopper lines broke.

“I’m Linnas,” he said, holding out a hand and smiling. “You understand that we never saw each other, that if anyone asks I’d had a bit too much beer and stepped away from my post?”

Arlian nodded warily, and took the proffered hand.

“I wanted to thank you for saving Enir,” the swordsman said, as he grasped Arlian’s hand. Then he released it, stepped back, and lifted one of the lamps down from its place on the wall. He handed it to Arlian and said, “You’ll need this. Now, go on! Get out of here!”

“Thank you,” Arlian gasped as he accepted the lamp. Then he staggered past Linnas and headed up the passage, limping on his sore, bleeding legs.

When he had been brought down, years ago, the passage had been lined with lamps and torches, but he knew now that that had been in preparation for a shift change—the mules that pulled the wagons didn’t like the dark. He didn’t know just what time it was now, but it was clearly the middle of a shift, when no one would normally be in this tunnel.

His legs ached, and he wished that Hand… no, Enir… that Enir hadn’t insisted on real blood. He had had plenty of practice in working while sick, exhausted, or injured, though, and trotted on despite the pain.

His lone lamp cast huge, flaring shadows as he made his way up the tunnel. Now he could see, as he had not as a boy, that the passage was an old part of the mine itself, that it followed the course and shape of a great seam of ore that had been dug out; he could see the marks of picks on the walls, the traces of galena too thin to be worth removing, the thick layers of smoke on the ceiling above, niches where lamps had been placed over and over.

Seeing it thus was strange, almost dreamlike—he had lived for so long in the same slowly expanding network of deep, branching tunnels that a new, unfamiliar place didn’t seem entirely real.

If it were a dream, he told himself, he didn’t want it to end; he wanted to be out of the mine, out in the sun and open air, free again, to lead his own life, make his own way, and in time find his revenge upon’Lord Dragon and his looters, and upon the dragons themselves.

There were places the passage narrowed enough that Arlian wondered how the ore wagons ever fit through, but even so, it was always wider than most of the mine tunnels, and he already felt as if the world were opening out around him.

And then he was at the top, at the end of the passage, and a heavy wooden door blocked his way. He hesitated. What if there were another guard on the other side? He had no weapon of any kind, not even a rock. What if that horrible fat old man who had carried him down the mine so long ago was out there?

His mouth tightened. If that fat old man was there, Arlian would wring his neck bare-handed. He was no scared child anymore.

He had to stop and think for a moment to remember how to work the latch—he hadn’t used one in so long! There were no doors in the lower mine. It was simple enough, though, and he swung the door open.

Blinding light poured in; he fell back, momentarily terrified. The brightness was so intense he thought he might go mad. He flung an arm across his eyes and squeezed them shut, and still the world was flooded in bright red light.

He was seeing the inside of his own eyelids, he realized; the light outside the door, whatever it was, was so bright that it was shining right through his flesh.

But his eyes were adjusting, and after a moment he dared to open one a crack.

The light was the sun. He knew that. He had been down in the darkness of the mines for so long that his eyes were far too sensitive to handle the ordinary light of day.

If he wanted to escape, though, he would have to face it, to venture out into that glare and find his way safely away from the mine before anyone realized he was gone. He stepped forward, his arm still up.

The air moved about him, and felt somehow wrong. His skin crawled, and he shivered.

That was wind, he realized—just the cool wind blowing. That wrongness was cold—he had been so long in the mine, where the temperature was constant year-round save for where the lamps heated the air, that he had forgotten the sensation.

He moved forward, and tried to look around, while still shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare.

Everything looked washed out, almost white, the colors faded and thin, but he could see the great yellow cliff towering above him, and wagon tracks in the dirt at his feet, and ahead the slope of a hill covered in lush green grass, falling away into a valley. Sunlight blazed down from almost directly overhead, so there were few shadows.

To his left was a small cluster of buildings, low structures of stone and thatch—the mine headquarters, surely, where Lord Dragon had sold him to the mine’s owners. If someone were to look out one of the half dozen visible windows he would be spotted instantly, and could hardly be mistaken, given his ragged condition and pale skin, for anything but what he was, an escaped miner.

He had to get away from those windows as quickly as possible. The wagon tracks led to the left, past the buildings, then down a dirt road cut into the slope, down and away from the cliff.

That meant he didn’t want to go left, nor straight ahead. He turned right and began walking—he did not want to tire himself out too soon, so he didn’t run! He stayed close to the cliff, hoping to blend in with the stone, and found himself climbing slowly.

Before long he had reached the end of the cliff, and stood shivering on a steep slope amid scattered young trees; he paused and turned around, his arms clutched around himself in a futile attempt to keep warm.

He had not been sure whether it was early spring or late fall until he had noticed freshly fallen leaves scattered here and there, but now he knew it was autumn. He also knew it was definitely colder than he liked.

And the world was so strange, so intense—the wind on his skin was a constant rippling of alien sensation, the light was so painfully bright, the colors so glaring and vivid; unfamiliar smells were filling his head, bringing back odd bits of childhood memory he hadn’t known still remained anywhere within him.

It was harsh and bright and cold and uncomfortable, the world almost hurt, but he never wanted to give any of it up, ever again. He thought he would rather die than go back down into the mine.

And he intended to do everything he could to ensure that he never went back. That meant thinking, planning, not just wandering on aimlessly. He had to see where he was and decide where to go.

To his left, as he stood there, was the forested top of the cliff, rising up to a peak and showing no signs of human habitation; to the right the land fell away from the cliff’s base in open fields, and he could see thatched rooftops in the distance. The sun had moved slightly, and appeared to have descended somewhat from the zenith, which meant it was in the west—and he had, he judged, been walking northwest.

Although there was no sign of pursuit, he wanted to put as much distance as possible, and as many other barriers as possible, between himself and the mine. He thought that if he now turned due north, that would provide the ideal balance—no one would find him among the trees, and the cliff itself would be in the way of any search. Since the forest to the north appeared uninhabited, there would be less chance that he might be seen by anyone who would report a runaway slave. It would also be easier on his still-suffering eyes—the trees had lost most of their leaves, but they would still provide some shade, and shelter from the biting chill of the wind.

Accordingly, he headed north.

Hours later, when his eyes had adjusted and he barely had to squint even when looking west into the setting sun, he paused and looked around. He had put several miles behind him, across completely unfamiliar terrain; he had stayed clear of roads, houses, barns, and cultivated fields as much as he possibly could, and had seen other human beings only from afar. The outside world was still wonderful, but already beginning to lose some of its intensity and strangeness.

Now he was on a rocky hilltop, and it was time to stop and plan again. He had to do more than flee aimlessly. He was free of the mine, well clear of it, and it was time to choose a place to go to, rather than one to flee from.

He scanned his surroundings, and saw little but bare trees and empty sky—the day was cloudless, the sky brilliantly blue, a color brighter than anything he had ever seen in the mine.

He had crossed streams and taken a drink or two, but he was thirsty again, and hungry, and cold; winter was coming, and he had no coat, not even a shirt. He had no food, no shoes—his feet had been toughened by years of walking on stone, but the sharp twigs and pebbles had still been hard on him as he fled.

And he knew he must look terrible. His hair had not been cut or combed in years; his beard had never been trimmed. His skin was either woefully pale or starting to redden from the sun, but certainly unhealthy.

He needed things only other people could provide—but he also feared that anyone who saw him would instantly recognize him as a fugitive. He had no money, no family, his only possessions a crude bag of worthless mementos. And he had no idea where he was. His mouth quirked into a smile. By any practical measure he had been better off down in the mine, where he always knew exactly where he was and where his next meal would come from—but he would not have given up his freedom for anything. He would rather die of exposure this very night, he told himself, than live to be a hundred as a slave.

But he had no intention of dying, in any case. He intended to live, to make a life for himself, and to somehow avenge his family.

Water was not a problem, as these hills produced plentiful fast-running little streams; the summer did not appear to have been dry. Food—he could go for days without food if he had to, he was sure, and had heard tales of people surviving on tree bark and insects.

Clothing and shelter, though—he needed to find those before the weather turned any colder. Perhaps he could take shelter in a barn somewhere, steal a jacket.

But where would he find a barn, or any other human habitation? He turned around slowly, taking in the endless parade of gray, leafless trees.

And saw smoke. A thin line of distant gray smoke was rising in the east.

For a moment he thought it might be the smoking crater of his own native peak; then he thought it was more likely to be just a hearthfire in some nearby home.

Either way, though, that smoke meant people, and perhaps shelter.

Well, then, he told himself, that was where he must go. He would, he promised himself, walk until he found what he sought, or until he could walk no more.

And he set out to prove it.

9

Sanctuary

The night was moonless, and after he had walked into branches half a dozen times and stumbled a score, Arlian admitted that he could walk no more—painful as the bright light of day had been, he needed it to see where he was going. Even his dark-adapted eyes could not deal with the forest at night, so he dug himself into a pile of dead leaves for warmth and huddled there until morning. He did not sleep well in the cold and unfamiliar surroundings, and awoke before dawn had turned the eastern sky from gray to pink. He wasted no time in getting himself moving once again, and was pleased to see that the line of smoke he had followed the previous evening, until darkness had made it impossible, was still present—though it seemed no closer than before.

Around midmorning he came upon a homestead, a house and three small barns set upon a few acres of fields; watching and listening carefully for any sign of the occupants, he crept into one of the barns and used the sharp end of an old hoe he found there, struck against a whetstone, to hack his beard down to a more reasonable length. It was still ragged and unkempt, but he had been working his fingers through beard and hair almost constantly as he walked, and he thought he might now look merely disheveled, rather than completely wild. He used a discarded bit of leather to tie his hair back—it wasn’t a proper braid, by any means, but it was better than nothing.

He looked at his reflection in a half-filled trough and thought that if he had had a blouse and sandals he would be willing to allow himself to be seen.

There were no shoes or shirts to be found in the barn, though. He did fish a handful of dried corn from the bottom of an abandoned trough and carry it away, nibbling it one or two grains at a time.

That first homestead was not an isolated outpost in the wilderness; rather, Arlian realized when he crept out of the barn and looked squintingly eastward, it stood at the end of a narrow road, and other small farms adjoined it. He had crossed back over the line between the forested wilderness and civilization.

He hoped that he had put enough distance between himself and the mine that this would be entirely a good thing. He didn’t dare use the road openly, as yet, but instead crept along behind the houses and barns and smokehouses. Staying close to the buildings also served to shelter him from the worst of the cold winds that seemed almost constant.

He fed himself from livestock feed as he went, stealing a handful of grain here, a few dried fruit there; he resisted the temptation to break into a smokehouse or creamery for anything more substantial. He had eaten no meat since the day his parents died, and the scents that drifted from the smokehouses were almost overwhelming, both tempting and nauseating, driving him to hurry past as quickly as he could.

He made his way onward, eastward, for another several days, sleeping in barns or woodsheds, living on animal feed and drinking from untended wells, perpetually cold and hungry, shivering as he walked. Several times he saw people, and a few times he was seen; whenever that happened he veered away but kept walking, so as to appear an ordinary traveler. Twice someone called to him, but on both occasions he ignored the hail and kept walking, and both times the other decided against pursuit.

He passed villages occasionally, but skirted well around them.

On the fourth day after his night in the woods he came across laundry hung out to dry, and took a man’s linen blouse, promising himself that someday he would pay the rightful owner back. When it had dried it provided some significant comfort against the cold, but he still dared not let himself be seen—after all, not only was he still suspiciously shaggy and barefoot, but the shirt’s rightful owner might recognize it.

On the fifth day he could no longer resist temptation, and stole a ham; he was sick that night as his stomach rebelled at the unfamiliar food.

The next morning there was frost on the fields, and between that and his upset digestion he was somewhat slower than his usual in setting out. He took the time to study that column of smoke that he had followed for so long.

That was no mere chimney, nor even a village, he realized, but the smoke of a great city.

Manfort, almost certainly.

He had always wanted to see Manfort. What’s more, if he wanted to find Lord Dragon, to avenge the desecration of his village, Manfort was the logical place to start looking—but he could hardly walk all the way into that famous city in his present condition, wearing nothing but ragged breeches and a stolen blouse so close to the onset of winter. Well, it was still some distance away, he was certain. He was well clear of the forest now, making his way across gently rolling hills where one farm blended into the next and the next and the next for as far as the eye could see, where the road led from one village to another at intervals never exceeding twenty miles and often crossed or joined other roads in the process, but it was still countryside, and he had yet to glimpse a single watchtower or turret.

Still, he could hardly proceed in his current manner indefinitely; some time before he reached the walls of Manfort he would have to find a way to clean himself up and obtain proper clothes. Then he could present himself at one business or another, looking for honest work, to get himself a living before he began his pursuit of revenge.

He gave the matter some thought as he rambled onward, past farms and villages.

Perhaps, he thought late one chilly afternoon as the sun was reddening behind him, he could simply present himself as a traveler down on his luck, one who had been beset by bandits but escaped, and offer to work for his keep at an inn. He had no special skills, but he had learned to swing a pick in the mines, and he thought that he could use that experience in splitting firewood.

He remembered Grandsir saying that bandits never came this far north, but he could hope that either the old man was wrong, or times had changed while he was in the mine, or whoever he approached might not know as much as his grandfather had.

He blew on his hands to warm them and rubbed the palms together, and decided that the time had come to try. He would have to rejoin the human race eventually, and this seemed the right time. He was approaching the biggest town he had seen yet, one so large that it could scarcely be called a village, much larger than his own childhood home. He was also nearing Manfort; that thin line of smoke had become a broad tapestry streaking up the eastern sky, and on those rare occasions when he caught an unobstructed view to the east he thought he could see the tops of towers in the distance.

He was not about to march on into the city, but this town seemed suitable. He decided to risk inquiring somewhere within it—but he could not yet bring himself to walk openly down the main streets. Instead he crept into the town through the alleys, skirting the denser areas, looking for the back of an inn—he thought that if he presented himself in the stableyard he might be more acceptable than he would be at the front door.

Then, when he had circled almost halfway around the town’s heart, he saw a building some three stories in height, of dressed stone trimmed with carved wood and all roofed in tin, with a dozen curtained, well-lit casement windows. A coach stood by the side door, with four horses yoked to it and a driver sitting impatient at the front, clearly waiting for someone who had gone inside. The yard behind the main building held more horses, rather than oxen or mules, and the whole complex was off to one side of the main highway, outside the town itself.

That was surely an inn, and a very respectable one from the look of it. He crept toward it. He did not want the coachman to see him yet, so he circled around toward the other side, and at last emerged between the stable and a woodshed into a muddy yard.

The inn’s back door was closed and dark. He frowned, and looked up at the windows.

As he did, a casement on the second floor swung open, the curtains were pulled aside, and a young woman leaned out, flapping one hand as if to drive away an unpleasant odor.

Arlian stared.

Except for a few quick glimpses from a distance over the past few days, he had not seen a woman since he was a boy of eleven. Many times over the years in the mines, as he grew to manhood, he had been very much aware of this lack, but he had been in no position to do anything about it; since his escape he had been too busy, too concerned with other matters, to give it any thought.

Now, though, all those years of deprivation caught up with him at once, and he stared open-mouthed.

The woman’s features seemed impossibly delicate to him, her eyes huge and alluring; her dark hair was long and elaborately curled, hanging in graceful curves around her face. Her arms were bare and slender, her skin fair.

And she was naked—or at least, all he could see of her was. Her exposed breasts were plainly visible in the pinkish glow of sunset, the nipples large and dark.

Arlian’s breath caught in his throat; his clothes suddenly seemed to constrict, strangling him.

Then she stopped waving and closed her eyes for a moment, tipping her head back and taking a deep breath of the cool outside air. Her hair fell in sliding coils down her back and flowed around her shoulders, shining in the lamplight that spilled out around her, and Arlian swallowed hard. He was feeling sensations he had no name for, things he had never felt before. He took an uncertain step forward.

As he did the woman opened her eyes and looked down into the stableyard. Arlian froze, but it was too late; her gaze locked with his, and her eyes opened wide in surprise. Arlian stood, rooted by terror and shame and lust, his thoughts buried in a conflicting tangle of fierce, unfamiliar emotions.

For what seemed forever the two of them stared at each other. Then the woman smiled down at him—not just a smile, but a grin. She made no move to cover herself; instead she cast a quick glance back over one shoulder, then leaned out farther and beckoned to him.

Arlian took another step forward, then hesitated—what was he doing? Who was this woman, displaying herself so brazenly? Could she really want him to approach? An urge to turn and run began to build—but at the same time he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her.

“Come on,” she called down to him. “Do you like what you see?”

His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He tried to swallow, but his throat was suddenly too dry. His hands clenched into fists.

She was just a person, another human being. He had spoken fearlessly to women as a child; why should it be a struggle now?

Of course, none of the village women had been naked, and so far as he could recall none of them had been so beautiful.

“I like it,” Arlian managed to croak, and he took another step.

“Then can you climb? If you can get to the window I’ll let you in, and you can look all you want. You can do more than just look!”

Arlian was utterly confused now, but for a moment the desire to get closer to her, and the desire to get out of the cold, completely overcame his shyness and uncertainty; he trotted across the yard and flung himself atop a handy barrel, then jumped for the sill of the open window. His fingers caught the edge, but could not hold, and he slid back down, missed his footing on the barrel, and fell to the ground.

The woman laughed, a musical, watery sound that filled him with a great swelling urgency and a ferocious embarrassment. He leaped to his feet and looked around the yard. He didn’t dare look at her; he was certain his face was bright red with shame, and that the tightness of his pants was obvious and offensive.

“I’m sorry,” she called from just above and behind him. “I shouldn’t laugh. Can’t you find a way up?”

He turned and looked up at her. He licked his lips, then cleared his throat and tried to speak. He got a strangled noise out, then had to stop and cough. He looked down to collect his wits, then back up.

“I take it I can’t use the door,” he said, actually getting the entire sentence out cleanly.

“Oh, no!” she said, her smile vanishing. “Not dressed like that! They’d beat you half to death.”

“Ha!” he said, though even then he could not possibly have explained why he would react to such a threat with bravado instead of caution. The possibility that he might be doing something foolish and dangerous occurred to him, but it simply didn’t matter; he desperately wanted to get in that window, get at that woman.

At the same time he wanted to run away, but he fought that impulse down. He looked around for something he could use to mount the wall.

Inspired, he ran to the unlocked woodshed and pulled out a good-sized chunk of unsplit firewood, hoisting it up on his shoulder—he realized after he had it up that it was solid oak, or perhaps ironwood, and must have weighed at least fifty pounds, but nonetheless he hauled it across the yard and thumped it down onto the barrelhead, standing it on end. Then he leapt up on the barrel, stepped up onto the log, and thrust himself upward at the window.

This time he was able to get his chest onto the win-dowsill and his arms through the casement, his fingers clutching at the inner edge of the sill. The woman had moved back at the last possible moment to avoid his lunge, but now she leaned forward and grabbed the back of his stolen shirt, helping him haul himself upward and into the room.

She was not totally naked after all, he saw as he tumbled in, but clad in a lacy white skirt slit up the front, and a golden girdle wrapped around her waist. She was kneeling on a windowseat. An elegant glass and brass lamp on a wall bracket was burning brightly, lighting her face beautifully. He was lying on a fine parquet floor, looking up at her and at gauzy curtains behind her. The air around him was warm, and thick with a cloying, sweetish smell—and with a confusion of other scents as well, including lamp oil and sweat and several he didn’t recognize.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re in my room,” she said, with an impish, irresistible smile. She settled into a sitting position, her legs tucked underneath, and looked down at him. “Now, who are you? What sort of desperate creature have I just invited in?”

“My name is… is unimportant,” he said, staring hungrily at her, almost in awe of this gorgeous creature. He had caught himself at the last moment; his name would probably mean nothing to her, but he did not want to risk it. Word, of an escaped slave named Arlian might well have spread this far.

She was so small, he thought as he stared—smaller than any of the miners, even Rat. He had forgotten that women were so small and delicate looking. And her skin was impossibly smooth and soft, her face and chest utterly hairless.

She laughed at him.

“Ah, then, Unimportant,” she said, “welcome to my humble home! Might I call you something shorter, perhaps? Trivial, or Minor?”

“Not Minor,” he said. It was too close to terms he did not want to be associated with. He was vaguely aware that he ought to come up with a name for her to use, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to suggest one.

“But Trivial is acceptable? Or just Triv?”

“Triv would be fine,” he said, as he untangled himself and sat up. He was breathing heavily, and not entirely from the exertion of getting in the window.

He shifted, but his breeches remained uncomfortably tight.

She shifted her own position, as well, and his breath came out in a shudder.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

“I don’t…” he began. Then he asked, “Where am I? Is this an inn?”

“An inn?” She laughed again. “Not exactly, no.”

Just then he heard a shout from outside, and the rattle of harness—that coach at the side door was leaving. She looked up, and out the casement.

“Did you see any other horses out there, or coaches?” she asked.

“There were horses in the stable.”

“How many?”

He blinked uncertainly. “I didn’t count.”

She frowned slightly. “Did you see any other coaches, though?”

“No,” he replied, puzzled.

“Good. Then we should have some time.” She swung the casement shut and latched it, and dropped the hooked-up curtain back in place.

Arlian watched her breasts bob as her arms moved, and had to struggle to keep his hands on the floor, rather than in his breeches or on her—though he wasn’t sure he would have had the nerve to touch her.

Then, she turned back to face him, and swung her legs out, so that she was sitting upright on the windowseat. Arlian saw with a shock she had no feet—both legs ended at the ankle in neat pink stumps.

“Now,” she said, “what am I going to do with you? Am I going to get a straight answer out of you?”

“I don’t…” Arlian began. Then he stopped and swallowed hard, staring at her.

It was too much. He could no longer find words at all. He was too tangled up in confusion and lust.

She laughed.

“I think,” she said, “that you’re too distracted to tell me anything. And I also think that I know how to solve that. If you’d just carry me over to the bed, I’m sure we can take care of the problem.” She pointed over his shoulder.

“Bed?” he gasped. He turned, and saw a great pink featherbed atop an oaken frame; a pink silk coverlet lay askew atop it, and pink lace bedcurtains hung from a pink silk canopy. Round silver mirrors were set into each corner of the canopy, angled to face the center of the bed. Another glass-based oil lamp stood on a bedside table amid a clutter of fancy bottles and jars, casting a warm glow across the entire arrangement.

He made a wordless noise.

“Please?” she said, holding out both her delicate arms, palms turned up beseechingly.

He rose unsteadily to his feet, reached hesitantly for her—and then, when he felt her soft skin and saw her welcoming smile, his reservations faded away; he snatched her up in his arms, whirled about, and plunged with her into the waiting bed. Before he had even gotten both his feet off the floor she was untying his breeches.

And then he was lost in an unfamiliar but delightful sea of perfume and flesh and sensation.

10

Sweat

He let his breath out in a long, contented sigh and lay a moment longer, staring at the ceiling. Then he turned to look at her grinning, heart-shaped face as she lay propped on one elbow beside him.

“Where am I?” he said. “Who are you?” He wanted to ask why she had seduced him, as well, but couldn’t think of any decent way to phrase it.

“You’re in the House of Carnal Society,” she told him.

“The what? ” he asked.

She giggled. “It’s a brothel, silly! Hadn’t you guessed?”

Arlian looked at her in embarrassed confusion. “What’s a brothel?” he asked.

“Oh, my dear… where are you from? Well, never mind, you’ll tell me that in a moment, I’m sure. A brothel—well, among other things, men come here to pay for what you’ve just had as a gift.”

Comprehension finally burst upon him—he had encountered the concept in conversations in the mines, under a cruder name, but had had no idea how numerous such institutions were, or where they might be found. Certainly there had been none in his home village.

Apparently they did exist here, wherever he was. “Ah!” he said. “And you…”

“I live here,” she said. “I’m called Sweet.” She grinned and tilted her head entrancingly. “You can judge for yourself whether the name fits.”

He smiled back at her. He was warm for the first time in days, and feeling just fine in other ways, though he was still dirty and underfed. “I’d say it does.”

“Well, good. Thank you. Now, who are you, and how did you get here?”

Arlian hesitated. “I’m from a village on Smoking Mountain,” he said.

She looked puzzled. “There’s a village on Smoking Mountain?”

“Well, there was,” he said. “But dragons destroyed it, and my family was killed.”

“Oh, you’re from Obsidian?” she exclaimed. “But that was seven years ago, and I thought everyone there was killed! Were you away when it happened?”

He shook his head—and his voice shook as well as the memories poured back. He had not spoken of the disaster, or his family, in years—not since Hathet died. Some of the other miners had mocked him whenever he mentioned his past, refusing to believe that he had survived seeing dragons, sometimes refusing even to believe he had ever been free, or knew who his parents had been, and in time, to avoid their mockery, he had stopped speaking of his former life.

But this woman knew about the attack, knew his village’s name—and knew it had been seven years. Seven years in the mines. So he was eighteen, then? “I hid in a cellar,” he said.

“And you lived? The dragons didn’t find you? How wonderful!”

He looked at her face, at the sincere interest and pleasure he saw there, and realized that Sweet was younger than he had first thought—she was perhaps no older than he, not much more than a girl.

“But how did you get here?” she asked. “What have you been doing all this time?”

“I was… I was working in the mines, in Deep Delving,” he said. He didn’t see any need to mention that his stay there had been involuntary. She might already know that the mines were worked by slaves, but he did not care to be the first to mention it.

“Oh—that’s why you’re so pale, then, where you aren’t burnt?” she asked.

He nodded.

“But you left?”

He nodded again. “And came here,” he said.

“To Westguard? But why?”

He shrugged. “It seemed as good a place as any.”

“I suppose,” she said doubtfully.

“You don’t like it here?”

She snorted derisively. “Oh I just love my work, of course! Catering to every sick whim of any man who can pay the fee…”

“Oh,” he said, his warm comfort suddenly vanishing. He sat up and looked at her. “You’re not here by choice?”

“Of course not!” she said angrily, pulling away from him. “We’re all slaves here; didn’t you see that?” She lifted one leg and pointed at the stump of her ankle.

“What happened to it?” he said stupidly, unable to stop himself even as he realized what must have happened.

“They don’t want us to run away,” she said bitterly. “So they cut our feet off. They couldn’t do that if we were free. Now I not only can’t get away from the customers, no matter what their demands, I can’t ran anywhere—even if I had somewhere to run to, which I don’t. I’m not fit to make my living any way but as I do. That’s what happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, well aware of the inadequacy of his words. A tight knot had formed in his gut.

How could anyone have deliberately maimed anything as beautiful as this woman? How could anyone do something like that to anyone?

“There’s no justice in this world,” Bloody Hand had said, and here was more proof of his bitter words.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” Arlian said. “I’ll go if you want me to.”

“Oh, you didn’t hurt me,” she replied. “You didn’t know any better, I guess—though I don’t know how anyone could be so naive.”

“I just spent the last seven years in a hole in the ground,” Arlian said wryly. “I’m sure there are thousands of things you take for granted that I’ve never heard of.”

She nodded. “You were a miner?”

“I was a slave,” he said. “Like you. Except if they’d cut our feet off we couldn’t have dug the ore, so they just kept us down a hole, where we couldn’t see the sun or feel the breeze. More than a score of us.”

The words caught in his thoughts for a moment— “see the sun and feel the breeze.” The breezes he had felt the last several days had been cold and biting, but he still cherished them.

“You escaped?” Sweet asked.

He nodded.

Enlightenment widened her eyes. “So that’s why you were out there barefoot in the cold, with no coat!”

He nodded again. “I just got away a few days ago. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since I left the mine.”

“You did more than talk,” she said, smiling again.

“You’re the first woman I’ve seen since my mother died, seven years ago,” he said apologetically.

Her mouth opened in surprise; then she grinned again, and flexed her body. “I hope you like what you see,” she said.

“Very much,” he said. He reached a hand out to stroke her shoulder; she allowed it, and pressed her cheek against his hand.

“Why did you invite me in?” he asked a moment later.

“A whim,” she said. “I wanted a little fresh air—my last customer reeked, and splashed perfume everywhere on top of it—and when I opened the window and saw you there, staring at me, it tickled my fancy to invite you in for a closer look. They’re so determined that only the paying customers will see us that I like to show myself to anyone I can.” She shrugged. “And I was curious—we don’t often have dirty, ragged strangers wandering the streets here. The guards don’t allow it.”

Arlian felt suddenly cold again. “Guards?”

“Well, of course—the lords and ladies post well-paid guards in all the major towns around Manfort, to keep the peace and make sure ho one interferes with their investments. You’re lucky they didn’t catch you.”

“Oh,” he said, looking at the window—which was tightly closed, a fact he found somewhat comforting.

“Of course, if Mistress or one of the lords finds you in here with me, that might be even worse for you,” Sweet said thoughtfully. “Sending you back to the mines would be the least they would do. Feet aren’t the only thing they’ve been known to cut off.”

“Oh,” Arlian said again, and again he glanced at the window—but this time he was considering it as an escape route.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll hide you. There’s a closet, or you could squeeze under the bed. And we can get you cleaned up so you’ll pass for a respectable citizen when you go; the guards won’t bother you then.”

“But why would you… we?”

Sweet grinned at him. “Of course, ‘we’,” she said. “I think the other girls would be very pleased to meet you.”

Just then someone knocked on the door.

“Ten minutes!” a woman’s voice called.

“Oh, dear,” Sweet said. “A customer. Help me straighten things out a bit, would you? Then I’m afraid it’s into the closet with you.”

Arlian blinked at her. “Are you…”

But Sweet wasn’t listening; she was looking around the room.

“It’s not bad,” she said. “Lord Drisheen wasn’t interested in anything but me and the bed and his horrible perfume. Could you straighten those curtains, and give me a hand with the coverlet?”

Arlian hurried to the window to adjust the curtains, still slightly askew from his entry; he turned to find Sweet on her knees atop the pillows, pulling the disarrayed coverlet into place. He hurried to assist her.

“Hand me my jacket, would you?” she said, when the bed was reasonably straight. She pointed at a little heap of white satin on the carpet by the bed. While Arlian fetched it Sweet took a brush from the bedside table and, with the aid of a handheld mirror, began fixing her hair. The table held an assortment of cosmetics, and between brush strokes Sweet tallied the little bottles.. “Kohl, rouge, talc…”

Arlian cleared his throat.

She looked up at him, and for a moment he was overcome by her charm, the delicacy of her face, and could not speak.

“Yes, Triv?” she asked.

“The closet,” he said. “I don’t want to open the wrong door.”

“Oh!” She pointed to a panel upholstered with pink silk. “It’s right there. There’s a stool, so you won’t need to stand; you must be tired.”

Arlian started to ask why there was a stool, then thought better of it and hurried to the closet door.

In his past experience, which had been limited to one mountaintop village, “closets” were small, rough storerooms; his family had had none, but the two largest homes in Obsidian had boasted one closet apiece, off the master’s chamber. Arlian was rather startled to discover that Sweet’s closet was another matter entirely. It was small, not much more than a cupboard, and made to seem smaller still by the gowns and robes hung on hooks on either side. The rear wall held half a dozen large drawers.

And everything, the walls, the drawers, the inside of the door, even the ceiling, was covered in rich red velvet; the floor was hidden by the smallest, thickest carpet Arlian had ever seen, woven in a floral pattern in a dozen shades of red. Two fine white tapers, unlit but half burned, were mounted in golden sconces on the rear wall, to either side of one of the drawers.

And as Sweet had promised, a stool stood in the center of the tiny room—a stool upholstered, like the walls, in red velvet, its black wooden legs adorned with golden filigree.

Arlian stared, trying to imagine why anyone would waste such appointments in a windowless storage compartment, then remembered himself and stepped inside. He turned to close the door, and stopped dead.

The closet was not entirely windowless after all. The door had a window set into it, a little window completely hidden from the outside by the pink silk covering.

Sweet glanced up just then and noticed his puzzlement.

“Sometimes we have customers who just want to watch,” she explained.

“Oh,” Arlian said, blinking as he tried to absorb this completely unfamiliar notion. He found it troubling; he settled slowly onto the stool and pulled the door shut.

He found himself looking out through the silk, with a good view of most of the bedroom; Sweet and the bed were in the center of his field of vision. The filtering silk gave everything a pinkish cast, as if seen though a rosy mist, and the pink bedclothes consequently tended to fade into the background while Sweet’s pale skin and black hair stood out sharply.

She smiled at him, then tugged her satin jacket into place, gave her hair a final pat, and sat waiting on the bed.

Arlian thought she was heartbreakingly beautiful there, dark curls spilling over her shoulders, wearing only the light jacket, lace skirt, and golden girdle.

And then the door opened and a man stepped in, a man dressed in fine clothes, with rings on his fingers and plumes in his hair; Sweet bowed her head and murmured, “My lord.”

The man backhanded her cheek. “I gave you no leave to speak,” he said.

Arlian started from his seat at the sound of the blow, but caught himself. He clenched his fists and forced himself to sit back down.

Sweet did not speak again while her customer was there; the customer addressed her only to give curt orders that she hastened to obey.

Arlian watched what followed in sickened amazement—or sometimes could not bear to watch and turned his head aside, eyes tightly closed, trying not to hear the sounds from the bedchamber. He bit his lower lip until it bled to keep himself from shouting out in protest; his fingernails dug into his palms, his knuckles white.

He found himself praying to the dead gods that it would stop. Had Sweet called for help he knew he would have been out of the closet and upon the customer in an instant, even if it meant his capture and execution.

But she did not call out, and eventually it was over. The customer tied his breeches, straightened his velvet jacket, and left without another word.

And Arlian fell out of the closet and staggered to the bedside, desperate to do what he could to comfort Sweet after such abuse. He struggled for words and could find none as he reached out to touch her cheek.

She sat up, startled, and looked at him dry-eyed.

“He hurt you,” Arlian said.

“No more than usual,” she replied calmly. She picked up the mirror from the bedside table to study the shallow scratches on her face, left by the man’s rings. “Mistress isn’t going to like that,” she said. “She’ll probably charge him extra.” Then she looked at Arlian and saw the expression on his face.

“Oh, Triv!” she said, “you look so surprised! What were you expecting?”

Arlian could see her struggling not to laugh at his stricken appearance. She seemed so utterly untroubled by what she had just been through that he began to doubt his own memory of what he had seen.

“Did you enjoy that?” he asked.

She snorted. “Of course not,” she said. “If I had, he wouldn’t need to pay for it, would he?” She smiled at him. “You poor boy,” she said. “You do have a lot to learn. I didn’t like it at all, but I’m not as delicate as I look.”

“So I see,” he said, struggling to control the seething tangle of emotions he felt.

She stared at him for a moment, and tears started in her eyes. “You’re so sweet, to worry about me!” she said. “You should be Sweet, and I should be Trivial!”

“Never,” he said. “You could never be unimportant.”

“Oh, you’re silly!” she said. She blinked away her tears and gathered herself. When she was composed she said, “We should have a little while now, at the very least, before anyone else comes in, and we may have all night—let’s see about getting you cleaned up!”

11

Rose.

There were sixteen slaves in sixteen rooms on the upper floors of the House of Carnal Society; crippled as they were, and kept busy by customers, they ordinarily saw little of one another.

Arlian’s presence changed that. On the very first night he was there, long after midnight, after the lanterns by the coach door had been doused, after the lamps in the hallways were out, after the guards had. taken their nighttime post and the dreaded Mistress had retired to her ground-floor chamber, Sweet threw her arms around Arlian’s neck and had him carry her out into the hallway and up the stairs to the first door on the third floor. “I could walk,” she said, “on my knees—that’s what I usually do. It’s hard work, though, and slow. It’s much more fun this way.”

They moved slowly in the dark, and Arlian tried to be as quiet as he could; fortunately the stairs were stone, and did not creak. Sweet did not seem to be particularly concerned about maintaining silence, but she wasn’t trespassing, and she was valuable property. If they were caught she could claim to have been carried off against her will.

They were not caught; they reached the door Sweet had indicated, and Sweet took one hand from Arlian’s shoulder. She knocked, and then knocked again.

The motion unbalanced them, and yielded no reply. Finally, at Sweet’s whispered insistence, Arlian took over the task and rapped on the polished wood until a voice from within called, “At this hour?”

“It’s me, Rose,” Sweet called. “Let me in!”

“Sweet? Why?” Rose asked sleepily, but a moment later the door swung open, spilling light.

At first Arlian stared right over Rose’s head; after a moment’s confusion he remembered that of course Rose would be female and therefore shorter than himself to begin with, and unable to stand because her feet were gone. He looked down and found her kneeling in the doorway—a redhead, a little taller and older and plumper than Sweet, with an oval face and green eyes, wearing a gauzy nightgown. She held a candle.

“Who’s this?” Rose asked.

“Rose, this is Triv. Triv, this is Rose, my best friend here and the only person I’m absolutely sure we can trust,” Sweet said. “May we come in, Rose?”

“What’s he doing here?” Rose demanded, but she moved aside and let Arlian step inside and deposit Sweet on the bed.

Where Sweet’s room was decorated in pink silk, Rose’s was decorated in dusky red velvet; where Sweet’s room held four glass lamps, Rose’s had fat candles perched in a dozen places. Arlian took a quick glance around, then asked Rose, “Shall I give you a hand?”

“You’re not a customer, are you?” Rose asked, looking up at him. “Nor a guard, dressed like that.” She didn’t answer his question, but raised her arms toward him, the candle foremost.

Arlian took the hint. He placed the candle on a nearby table, then carried Rose to the bed, setting her beside Sweet—who immediately leaned over and gave Rose a hug.

“It’s been so long since we had a chance to talk!” Sweet said. “Why did they ever move you up here?”

“What’s he doing here?” Rose asked, ignoring Sweet’s question. “Is he a friend of yours?”

Arlian decided that more light would be a good idea, and began lighting more candles from the one Rose had provided.

“I was looking out the window, and I saw him in the stableyard,” Sweet said. “I invited him to climb up, and he did!” She giggled.

Rose turned and eyed Arlian appraisingly. “You know, if they catch you in here you’re in serious trouble.”

“I’m in serious trouble anyway,” Arlian said, looking up from his third candle.

Rose looked questioningly at Sweet.

“He’s an escaped slave,” Sweet explained. “From the mines in Deep Delving.”

Rose frowned. “If anyone asks, he broke in here uninvited, right, Sweet?” she said. “And we poor helpless crippled women couldn’t do a thing to stop him.”

“Of course!” Sweet agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “Oh, absolutely. We couldn’t even scream for help, with the thick walls—no one would hear us. He was unstoppable. And he raped me, too.” She giggled again.

Rose threw Arlian a glance. “Did he?”

“More the other way around,” Sweet said.

“Not that I minded,” Arlian added, as he put a fifth candle back in its place and decided that would do.

“Anyway,” Sweet said, getting down to business, “I thought we could clean him up, give him some real clothes, so he won’t have to hide all the time.”

“We could,” Rose admitted.

“And maybe somehow I can help you, in exchange,” Arlian said, setting down the candle he had started with.

Rose snorted. “Help us?” she asked. “Help us how? Unless you’re a wizard who can grow us new feet, what can you do?” She shook her head. “No, we’ll be here until we’re too old to please the customers, and then we’re dog food.”

Sweet bit her lower lip. “Don’t say that,” she said.

Arlian stared at the two women. “Dog food? You don’t mean that literally, do you?” he asked.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Sweet said, clapping her hands over her ears.

“It’s one possibility,” Rose told him.

Arlian stood staring stupidly at her, unable to think of anything he could say to such an outrage. For a few seconds no one spoke.

Then Sweet recovered herself and said, “Let’s start with his hair.”

Rose hesitated. “Sweet,” she said, “letting him in here is one thing. We can say he forced us. But fixing his hair? What if someone finds us?”

“Then we’ll be dog food that much sooner,” Sweet said. “What’s the difference, if that’s how we’ll wind up anyway? Come on, it’ll be fun!”

Rose frowned at Arlian.

“Why would anyone check on us?” Sweet asked cajolingly. “They never do—that’s the whole point of cutting our feet off! The guards only watch for people breaking in, they don’t see what we do in here.”

“Mistress does.”

“She’s asleep downstairs! And Triv’s here, and we can’t just send him out into the cold the way he is! If we hear someone coming he’ll hide.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you like. Under the bed, in the closet…”

“In the attic?”

Sweet blinked. “There’s an attic?”

Rose pointed at a panel in the ceiling of her room, its edges hidden by gilt trim. “That lifts up,” she said. “Mistress was thinking of putting in a peephole, but decided against it.” She looked at Arlian. “Think you can get up there?”

“I think so,” he said, gauging the height of the ceiling carefully. “If I have something to stand on. That chair would do.” He pointed.

“Well, put the chair where you need it, just in case,” Rose said.

Arlian nodded and moved the chair; while he did the two women whispered together. When he was satisfied with the chair’s location he turned back to them.

“Come on,” Sweet said. “We’re going to fix you up. When we’re done you’ll be the most beautiful man in Westguard!”

“At least,” Rose agreed. “Give me a hand, would you?”

Rose, Arlian discovered, did not have the same small bedside table Sweet did; instead one corner of her room was equipped with a vanity table, two stools, three mirrors, and a huge quantity of cosmetics, as well as a pair of brass lamps to provide steadier illumination than candles could. Arlian set one woman on each stool, then knelt between them.

Rose untied his scrap of leather and began vigorously brushing out his tangled hair; Sweet was more direct and snatched up a pair of scissors.

“I liked the way Lord Inthior wore his, didn’t you?” she asked.

Rose looked up from Arlian’s tangled curls and frowned. “You mean swept back in the center and cut short on the sides? I don’t know…” She studied Arlian, took his chin in her hand and tilted his face up.

Arlian had no idea what they were talking about, of course. He had never heard of any Lord Inthior, and had little concept of hairstyling. He was hardly inclined to resist, though; being alone here with two beautiful women, in these warm and perfumed chambers, was so wonderful he could scarcely believe it was really happening. If he just had something to eat, and no concerns about discovery, he thought this would be complete perfection.

Rose turned his head and he found himself staring up into her intense green eyes.

She was beautiful, no question, but he found himself looking critically at her face, noting all the tiny ways in which Sweet’s was preferable.

Then Rose smiled at him. “Inthior’s style it is,” she said. “I think you’ll like it, Triv.” She turned to the table and found a metal comb, which she handed to Sweet.

Sweet had already started clipping at Arlian’s dangling locks, but she accepted the comb and began tugging it through the tangles. Rose, meanwhile, found another comb and scissors and attacked Arlian’s beard.

In time Rose traded her scissors for assorted cloths and powders and began cleaning Arlian’s face, while Sweet continued working on his hair. It took an hour, and much fussing and fraying of tempers, before the two women declared themselves satisfied and sat back.

“Take a look,” Rose said, gesturing at the biggest of the three mirrors.

Arlian looked.

The face that confronted him was one he could hardly credit as his own. His beard had been trimmed, shaped, and slicked down with some unfamiliar waxy substance, and was now reduced from the chest-covering chaos he had seen reflected in windows and ponds to a short, almost triangular affair that reached a graceful point just an inch or two below his chin. His hair had been cut away and swept back from his forehead, leaving a point at the center of his forehead that seemed to echo the beard, and showing bare skin at either temple. Dark curls wrapped neatly around his ears. Wax and powder had concealed his sunburn, and his complexion was now unnaturally smooth and clear.

And the face thus adorned was straight and strong, with clear dark eyes and firm, full lips surrounding a long and elegant nose—a nose like Grandsir’s—eyes like his father’s, and his mother’s mouth.

The result was nothing like the face of the village boy he remembered; he looked instead like an aristocrat.

“That’s amazing,” he said.

Sweet leaned over and kissed him on the now exposed temple. Rose just smiled.

“Now,” Rose said, “I think it’s time to get some sleep before they wake us for breakfast.”

“Should I go, then?” Arlian asked, gesturing at the window.

“Must you?” Sweet asked.

Arlian hesitated. “I don’t want to be caught,” he said.

“Then you don’t want to leave yet,” Sweet said. “If you go walking the streets with a lord’s head above a farmer’s best shirt and that filthy pair of workman’s breeches and your own bare feet, the guards will be very curious about who you are and what you’re doing in Westguard.” She pointed at the attic and asked Rose, “He can sleep up there, can’t he?”

“Go ahead,” Rose said resignedly.

Sweet smiled. “And tomorrow we’ll see about fixing you up below the neck!”

Arlian smiled back at her.

This was wonderful, being here; the tin-roofed attic would surely be at least as comfortable as the barns and sheds he had been sleeping in, and the risk of discovery would be less. These women were providing him with what amounted to a perfect disguise—no slave-catcher searching for an escaped miner would bother a man with his hair trimmed and oiled and his face powdered.

And being around women was a pleasure he had never before experienced—just enjoying their company, quite aside from Sweet’s unorthodox welcome. That welcome, of course, was another, and much more intense, pleasure he had never known until tonight.

If only he had something to eat… but surely Sweet would think of that in the morning, and they would manage something. Maybe he could slip out long enough to find something, then return.

Or if necessary he could simply wait until his disguise was complete. He was hungry, but not starving.

“Go on, then,” Rose said. “Take Sweet back to her room, and then get up there.”

Arlian, perhaps inspired to extra courtesies by the lordly image he saw in the mirrors, rose gracefully and essayed a bow. Then he picked Sweet up.

“He’s a strong one, isn’t he?” Rose remarked, upon seeing how easily Arlian lifted her friend.

“Seven years hauling ore,” Arlian explained as he held Sweet in one arm and opened the door with the other.

A moment later he had deposited Sweet back in her own bed; then he turned away and hurried back up the stairs.

In his last glimpse of Sweet’s face he had thought she looked somehow disappointed, but he couldn’t think why she would be—perhaps she’d noticed some flaw in his appearance? He didn’t dare take the time to think about it, though; he wanted to get safely into hiding in the attic.

He had left Rose’s door open; now he strode briskly in, closed it behind him, climbed up on the chair, and lifted the attic trap.

A jump, and his elbows caught the edges of the opening; then he hauled himself up, trying not to kick anything as he did. At last he tumbled into the attic.

It was dark, and much cooler than the room below, but still nowhere near as cold as the outside world. Immense beams ran across it, dividing it into bands; he lowered himself carefully into one of these troughs and found himself on rough planking. He could see nothing of what he sat upon, as the faint light that leaked up through the open trap did not reach that far, but a brief exploration with his hands found what seemed to be solid wood—and also a band of stone, presumably the top of the wall between Rose’s room and the corridor.

“Close it!” Rose called.

Arlian started, then hastened to obey, lowering the trapdoor back into place, closing himself in and shutting out the light.

That done, he sat alone in cool, silent darkness.

He feared that his concealment might not be perfect; if he stepped on the wrong board it might sag visibly below, or even break, sending him tumbling through someone’s ceiling. The beams, wide as they were, were not so wide that he could lie down upon one to sleep. Accordingly, he settled onto that band of stone, bracing himself against the beams on either side. He lay there, intending to review his situation and make plans for the future.

But then, despite the cold and the dark and his awkward position, exhaustion overcame him and he fell asleep.

12

Decisions

Arlian awoke in utter darkness, and for a moment thought he was back in the mines, that his escape had all been a dream. Then he shivered with the cold, and knew he was outside—the mines were never so chilly. He reached out and touched wood instead of stone, the rough wood of a heavy beam, and remembered where he was. He raised a hand to his head and felt his neatly cut hair, then stroked his short-trimmed beard.

The events of the previous night had been real, then. He was hidden in the attic of a whorehouse.

He winced at the word, one he had learned in the mines; it was so harsh! And he couldn’t bring himself to think of Sweet or Rose as “whores.” It was unquestionably an accurate description, but it simply didn’t seem right. Sweet’s own word, “brothel,” was not much better.

He sat up, and found that the windowless attic’s darkness was not absolute; faint sunlight seeped in through the eaves, enough to make out dimly the massive beams, the sloping rafters overhead—and not much else.

He couldn’t guess at the time; the trace of light was far too diffuse to show him the sun’s angle. He hesitated, trying to think what he should do.

He was hungry—hungry and thirsty—but where could he find food or water? He frowned.

Food could wait, he told himself, but he needed water soon.

And a chamberpot or privy would be welcome, too. He didn’t dare simply use a corner of the attic; it might seep through, and even if no one found that suspicious it might send someone up for a look at the roof.

He could scarcely just open the trap and drop down, though; what if Rose were with a customer?

He clambered cautiously over the intervening beam, knelt, ran his fingers along the boards until he found the edges of the trap door, then put his ear to the wood and listened.

He heard voices—one he thought was Rose, but he didn’t recognize the other.

Whoever it was, Arlian knew he would have to wait. He sighed and sat up on the beam.

He remembered that before going to sleep he had intended to make some plans, but had dozed off; well, now he was awake, and not going anywhere. It was time to give some serious thought to his future.

He was free of the mines; if the women carried through on their plans to dress him, once his disguise was complete no one would ever recognize elegant young Triv as the escaped slave Arlian. Escape, his first goal, was largely accomplished. He need merely cooperate with Sweet and Rose and avoid being spotted by the brothel’s guards or the dreaded Mistress, and he would be free to move on wherever he chose.

Ensuring his continued survival had to be his next priority; he needed food and water, and some way to earn a living. He was a healthy young man, big and strong—surely he could find work.

That would require some thought, though. Perhaps the women would have some useful suggestions.

And his third goal was justice—vengeance for the murder of his family and the destruction of his village, vengeance for the looting of the ruins and his own enslavement.

And the mine—was that just? Was it right that a score of men led such a miserable existence as that he had fled? Was it right that Lampspiller and Bloody Hand had power over them?

His thoughtful frown deepened. There were undoubtedly many injustices in the world; he could scarcely hope to end them all.

But surely, he had to do what he could. As he had told Bloody Hand, people could make their own justice, and he was obliged to at least try.

Below him even now, he realized, was a massive injustice; what could Sweet or Rose or the others possibly have done to deserve being crippled? Did they really face the possibility of someday, when they ceased to be profitable, being murdered and fed to the dogs?

That couldn’t be allowed. He would have to find some way to prevent it.

But how? And how could he find the looters, or the dragons? How could he destroy the dragons? He was just a man—scarcely more than a boy. He knew little of the world; obsidian carvers and silver miners had no need to know of much beyond their own limited surroundings. He had no weapons, and no money; even his clothes weren’t fit to be seen on the streets.

He had his little bag of keepsakes, but that was all—a few scraps of fabric, a crude necklace, and a handful of pretty stones. What sort of justice could that buy?

Hathet’s stones… might they really be worth something, beyond the Borderlands in far-off Arithei?

Was Hathet really even from Arithei? Did Arithei even exist?

If it did and Hathet was genuinely Aritheian, Hathet might have family there, people who had been wondering all these years what had become of him. Perhaps they would appreciate word of their lost kin.

Arlian swallowed, wishing his throat weren’t quite so dry—and that his bladder weren’t quite so full.

He had intended to go to Manfort, in part to track down and confront Lord Dragon—for surely, even if Lord Dragon did not live in Manfort, most of the great lords and ladies did, and they might know who dared to use the name “Dragon.”

Now, though, Arlian had second thoughts. He was just a youth, with no friends, no family, no funds—how could he hope to destroy a lord, a man who could casually buy and sell men and women? He remembered what that man had done to Sweet the night before, and how Sweet had not dared to resist or even speak, and how he had simply watched, not daring to act. He was not ready to fight such men. Perhaps he should go seeking Arithei to find Hathet’s family…

Or perhaps he was afraid.

He bit his lip. Was that it? Was this simply cowardice?

All those years in the mines he had dreamed of the day when he would be free, and could confront Lord Dragon and strike him down. In the few days since his escape, though, he had learned a little more of the ways of the world, and of himself—he had not even dared confront ordinary farmers. Even now he was hiding in an attic, lest he be seen by mere guards.

He had told himself that because right was on his side, in the long run he could not fail—but was that true? Perhaps justice must triumph in the end, as he very much wanted to believe despite all he had seen and heard, but need he live to see it? Had Fate, or the gods, told him so?

If he were to head to Manfort and march boldly into Lord Dragon’s home, did he really think that he would be able to kill Lord Dragon? Wasn’t it more likely that Dragon would run him through with the sword he carried? Or simply laugh, and call a dozen guards, who would deal with this intruder?

And that assumed he could even find Lord Dragon’s front door.

But his memory of the looters pawing through the; wreckage of his home, the memory of being hauled to Deep Delving and sold as if he were a bolt of cloth, would not allow him to give up the idea. He must avenge himself somehow!

He would need to work at it, to find some way other than simply walking in the front door.

He needed to know more about Lord Dragon. He needed to know more about Manfort. He needed to know more about everything.

And the women here might know a few things. They might know of Lord Dragon; he might even be a regular customer. He would, at the very least, want to ask them a few questions before he left and went on his way toward Manfort.

And he might want more than that, if the women could provide it. There were many things he needed to learn about the outside world.

Just then he heard a voice call, “Triv? Are you awake?”

“Rose?” he called back quietly.

“It’s clear!” Rose replied.

Arlian hastened to dig his fingernails into the crack around the hatch and lift the trap open; then he lowered himself down until he hung from his hands, and let himself drop the last foot or two.

Then he looked up at the black square, and hurriedly fetched the chair, climbed up on it, and slid the door back into place.

Then he turned to Rose, who was sitting up in her bed, eating breakfast from a tray on the bedside table. The room was dim, lit only by what light filtered through the drawn curtains, but otherwise just as he remembered it. He stepped to the bedside.

“Care to join me?” she asked.

“In a moment,” he said; he felt along the side of the space under the bed with his toes, and found a chamberpot. Then he stood awkwardly for a moment, looking at Rose.

She looked at his face, then down. Then she pointedly turned her back.

“I won’t look,” she said.

She didn’t, and a moment later, when the chamberpot was safely stowed away again, he was nibbling a sweet roll and drinking cider, sharing Rose’s cup.

The food was excellent, but there wasn’t much of it. Rose noticed Arlian gazing hungrily at the empty plate and said, “They don’t want us to get fat; most of the customers like their women rounded, but not fat.”

“Oh,” Arlian said.

“We probably eat better than most slaves,” Rose said. “Maybe Sweet has more.”

Arlian was at a loss for how to reply to this until Rose added, “Why don’t you go see? Careful going out in the hall, though—make sure no one’s collecting the trays yet.”

Arlian nodded. He crossed to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out.

The hallway appeared deserted. He slipped out, crept down the stairs and along the corridor to Sweet’s door, and knocked.

“Come in!” she called.

Like Rose, she had saved a portion of her breakfast for him; between bites he thanked her for her thoughtfulness.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, reaching up to pluck a cobweb from his hair. “Look at this! You’ve gone and messed up all our work. We’ll have to teach you to take better care of yourself!”

“I’d like that,” he said. “Perhaps there are other things you can teach me, as well.”

“I’m sure there are,” she said, putting her hand in his lap and leaning her face toward his; he started, scattering crumbs across the bedside table.

She giggled, and slid her hand in the waistband of his breeches. “I told them I wasn’t feeling well,” she said. “Unless someone asks for me specifically and won’t take no for an answer, we should have at least an hour. And you’ve already mussed your hair.”

Half an hour later, as they lay side by side on her bed, he remembered himself enough to ask, “Have you ever heard of someone named Lord Dragon?”

“Not by that name,” she said, running a finger across his chest. “Why?”

“I need to kill him,” Arlian told her.

Sweet propped herself up on one elbow and stared at him. “Could you explain that, please?”

Arlian explained; in fact, once he began talking he found it hard to stop, and he poured out everything—his happy childhood on Smoking Mountain, the long, hot months of dragon weather and their horrific end, his discovery by the looters, his years in the mine, his long conversations with Hathet, his rescue of Bloody Hand and the overseer’s repayment, his dreams of vengeance and justice.

It took more than half an hour, but Sweet made no move to stop him; she listened intently to all of it.

He ran through all of it, his life story to date, then began to fill in bits he had skimmed over at first. When he described lying trapped under Grandsir’s corpse, Sweet shuddered and asked, “You swallowed his blood?”

“I choked on it,” Arlian answered.

“Was there venom in it? They say dragon venom is powerful magic.”

“What kind of magic?” he asked. For years, he had tried not to think about that horrible moment; now he suddenly tried to recall every detail.

And he remembered what Grandsir had told him, that human blood and dragon venom were supposed to bestow long life. Did that mean that he could expect to live a century or more? Somehow, in seven years in the mines, he had never really given the matter much thought—time and age didn’t seem important down there in the dark.

Sweet shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “We hear stories about dragons sometimes, though—some of the lords like to talk, and sometimes they talk about the dragons. They seem to admire them.” She shuddered again. “What does that say about them, that they admire monsters?”

And what did it say about Lord Dragon, Arlian thought, that he had taken his very name from a monster?

And what did it say about him that his face was so hideously scarred? That was no clean cut left by a sword stroke, nor the marks left by pox.

“Have any of your customers here had a scarred right cheek?” he asked. Perhaps Sweet knew Lord Dragon by another name.

She laughed, a high, sweet sound. “Oh, dozens of them are scarred!” she said. “At least one in ten, perhaps one in five. And the right cheek is as common a place as any.”

“Oh,” Arlian said, disappointed and confused. Several of the men in his home village had been scarred, but most commonly on the hands or legs or chest, rather than the face.

“I’m sorry I don’t know who your Lord Dragon is, Triv,” she said. “But we’ll fix you up, and teach you everything we can, so that when you go looking for him you’ll have a better chance.”

“Thank you,” Arlian replied. “I wish there were some way I could repay you.”

She waved that away. “Just knowing there’s someone out there trying to right some wrongs is enough for me,” she said.

“I’ll do my best, then.” He sat up and looked at his clothes, lying bunched up at the foot of the bed. “What were you planning to do with those, wash them? I don’t know if those breeches will ever come clean…”

“Those?” Sweet kicked at them with the stump of an ankle. “We’ll give those to the first beggar who asks, and make you some real clothes!”

Arlian blinked, startled. “Make me clothes? Today?” It took more than a day to make a decent suit of clothes.

She laughed. “No, not today, silly!”

“But I thought I’d leave today or tonight…” Arlian began, puzzled.

“Have you looked out a window?” Sweet asked, grinning.

Arlian looked at her playful expression, then got up wordlessly and crossed to the window, where he pulled back the curtains to reveal a dim world of gray and white— gray skies, drifting white flakes, and white ground.

He blinked and stared. “It’s snowing,” he said stupidly.

“So Eahor told me,” she said. “When he brought my tray. I made him open the curtains so I could see.”

“But I could still go,” Arlian said.

“You’d freeze,” Sweet said. “And more importantly, you’d leave tracks, and tracks go both ways. You are not going to leave a trail back to my window, Lord Trivial! I’m in no hurry to meet those dogs Rose mentioned.”

“You want me stay until the snow melts? But that might be days!”

“It might be until spring,” Sweet said, smiling wickedly. “And that wouldn’t bother me at all.”

Arlian turned to stare at her. “You think you can hide me here until spring?”

“I think it will be fun to try!” Sweet told him.

Book II

Triv

13

Departure

Arlian fluffed his pillow, settled down onto his bedding, then blew out his lamp. He groped for his coverlet in the dark, started to pull it up, then hesitated.

The attic was warm tonight, almost uncomfortably so; he didn’t need the coverlet. He left it folded at his feet.

He might never unfold it again. This was to be his last night here in the brothel’s attic. The snows had finally melted, and he had been planning his departure for several days now, discussing possible destinations with Sweet and Rose and the others—he had been introduced to all fourteen of the other whores in the House of Carnal Society, one by one, over the course of the winter, and all of them had heard his story and made suggestions about what he should do with himself after he left.

After considering and discarding several other possibilities, from Arithei to the Eastern Isles, just about everyone had finally agreed that he should go to Manfort, at least at first. The great city was less than a full day’s travel to the east.

Arlian intended to set out the next day and head in that direction.

Sweet was still trying to talk him out of leaving so soon, claiming that footprints in the mud would be just as bad as footprints in the snow and that there was still too much he didn’t know, but Arlian was resolved; he couldn’t stay here, the pampered pet of a dozen or so whores, forever. He needed to make his own way in the world—and to avenge the injustices visited upon him and his family.

Besides, Mistress, the dreaded manager of the House, had almost caught him the other day. He had barely gotten the closet door closed when she had marched in with the guards behind her and begun upbraiding Sweet for being too openly unenthusiastic about Lord Jerial’s fancies.

Arlian had seen the marks Lord Jerial had left; he had had to fight down the urge, unarmed as he was, to leap out and defend Sweet.

Sooner or later, if he stayed, either someone would discover him accidentally, or he would give in to one of his impulses to confront those who abused the occupants of the House of Carnal Society. In either case, he was likely to be killed without accomplishing anything.

In the morning he would leave; he would slip out a window and be gone, bound for Manfort. It shouldn’t be too difficult for a charming, well-dressed, well-muscled young man to make his way there. The girls had spent the winter making his wardrobe, teaching him etiquette, explaining everything they knew of human nature, training him out of his rural accent, and educating him in many other ways, as well, in preparation for whatever he might encounter in his search for revenge on Lord Dragon.

His strength had been built up by years in the mines, and he had kept his arms and back strong by carrying the poor crippled women hither and yon; he had not let himself go soft despite the luxury of his surroundings.

Even his attic was luxurious now; obtaining bedding that was deemed too stained to remain in use downstairs had been easy, and his lamp was dented and had therefore been discarded, but was still entirely serviceable. He would bundle it all up and bring it with him, one more small addition to his fortune.

He had a few other additions, as well. Occasionally the whores were given coins or other tokens by their customers, and Sweet, Rose and Hasty had collected a modest sum and bestowed it upon him—as prisoners here, they had nothing they cared to spend money on.

Furthermore, Rose had taken him aside one night and whispered a secret to him.

“Sometimes our customers tell us things,” she said. “Many of them come here drunk, after all, and then when they’ve had their fill of us they’re often relaxed and careless.” She added bitterly, “And after all, what harm can it do to tell us? We’re trapped here.”

“I understand,” Arlian said soothingly.

“Well, one night when Lord Kuruvan was exceptionally drunk and sentimental, he told me he was one of the owners of this place—one of my owners—and that if anything ever went wrong, he’d come and get me, and we could flee into exile together. And he said he had money hidden away, so that we could live in luxury even then. And he told me where it is.”

Arlian looked at her warily. “I’m not a thief,” he said.

“I earned that money for him, Triv,” Rose said fiercely. “I, and the others here. He never lifted a finger for it. And if we can’t have it, then I’d rather you did.”

“I’d rather that you did,” Arlian replied. “After all, as you say, you earned it, not I.”

“But I’ll never be able to get it, Triv, and someday you might.”

Arlian frowned thoughtfully.

“You do what you think is right, Triv,” she said. “You always do.”

“No,” he said, “or I would have left long ago. I owe you all more than I can repay.”

“Well, you can repay me by taking that money Lord Kuruvan hid!” she said. “He’ll probably never even know it’s gone. It’s in a keg marked ‘sour wine’ in the northeast corner of the cellars under an inn called the Blood of the Grape, on the road to Manfort.”

“I’ll remember,” Arlian had told her.

He still hadn’t decided whether or not he would actually try to find Lord Kuruvan’s little cache; he was already so far in Rose’s debt that he quite literally saw no way he could ever repay her, and that troubled him. Still, she wanted him to find it…

Well, he would decide once he saw how he fared in the outside world. The money, if it was there at all, had stayed hidden for years; it could wait awhile longer.

With or without that cache, he was ready to move on, but he knew he would miss the women here, all of them— beautiful Sweet with her joyful laughter, practical, motherly Rose, Daub the amateur portraitist who was constantly studying his face, poor bewildered Hasty, moody Sparkle… all of them.

Sweet most of all, of course. The thought of leaving her here, not seeing her again, was painful—his heart ached every time he looked at her and remembered that they would be parting. He hoped he could come back for her someday—but still, he had to go. There were things he had to do if he was to live with himself.

He lay back on the downy bedding, ready for sleep— when a thump and a bang sounded from below, and he snapped his eyes wide, suddenly alert.

He heard Rose complaining sleepily, though he couldn’t make out the words through the ceiling and closed trap door; then he heard Mistress’s harsh bellow.

“… been hiding someone! At first I thought I was imagining it, but the more I thought about it—bedding is missing, and you’ve been using up fabric without new gowns to show for it, and food’s cost more this winter than it should. So it’s been going on for months! And you haven’t been sneaking him in and out—I’ve changed the guards, and there weren’t any tracks. So you’ve been hiding him, but I couldn’t think where he could be—until ten minutes ago I remembered the attic…”

By the time she got this far in her speech Arlian was squatting on one of the beams, all his belongings gathered into a hasty bundle. He wrapped them in a small roll of canvas Daub had provided out of her painting supplies, and bound them with a pair of leather belts as he considered his options.

“I know he’s up there,” Mistress shouted. “Is he armed? Tell me!”

Arlian could not make out the words of Rose’s reply— unlike Mistress, Rose was not yelling—but he could tell from her tone that she was feigning innocence.

Mistress undoubtedly had at least two of her guards with her. He might be able to surprise them, and in the mines he had learned something about brawling, but they would have swords and know how to use them, and there might be more than two. The brothel employed six at various times, and for something like this Mistress would have summoned all of them.

He would have no chance of defeating six armed men, and even escaping them seemed unlikely.

He could surrender—and be put to death. Even if he was never identified as an escaped slave, he was a thief and a trespasser.

That wouldn’t do.

There was a third alternative, however. If he avoided the guards entirely, went around them, he might well be able to flee with his skin intact. And he had an idea how he might accomplish that. He rose—not to his full height, which would have slammed his head into the rafters overhead, but to a crouch—and began to move quickly away from the trap door.

Rose was still protesting, but Arlian didn’t listen. He was searching.

During the long winter he had spent many long hours, both day and night, hidden away in this attic. He had, simply out of boredom, explored it thoroughly. The walls were solid stone; the roof was good tin over heavy planking; there were no windows. The only vents were under the eaves, and quite aside from the thirty-foot drop they were far too small for him to squeeze through.

The floor, however, had weak spots; it had never been intended as a floor at all, but merely as a ceiling for the rooms below. Arlian had noted them only to avoid them, for fear of detection, but now he deliberately sought out a board that was half eaten by ants and rot. Apparently the roof about it had leaked at one time, and the moisture had done its work. The roof had been repaired; the damaged ceiling had not.

He stepped from beam to beam in the dark, moving by feel and memory, until he knew he had reached the right area. He heard the muffled sound of a blow, and knew someone had struck Rose, knocking her against something; his mouth tightened, but he did not stop. He moved along the beam, pressing his foot on the boards below until he found the rotted one. It was low under the sloping rafters, just where Arlian had remembered.

Mistress was shouting again, but he was far enough away now that he couldn’t hear her words.

The trap door flew open and rattled against the beams, and light fountained up. A guard’s head appeared, lit from below, scanning the attic. Arlian set both feet on the rotten board, braced his back against the roof and pushed.

The ceiling crumbled beneath him, and he plunged through feet-first, the jagged broken ends of the boards tearing at his clothes and his bundled belongings. His right elbow slammed painfully onto still-solid wood, and he flung his arm upward to free himself, dropping farther into the unlit room below.

Someone screamed, a loud, high shriek of terror.

Arlian’s plummeting feet struck the edge of something soft, something he couldn’t see in the darkness, and slid off to one side, throwing him off balance; he sprawled sideways, tumbling onto the floor in a tangle.

He rolled free of whatever he had struck and clambered to his feet, still clutching his bundle.

The room’s occupant screamed again.

“Hush!” Arlian called. “Where’s the door?”

Even as he asked he thought better of it. The moon was up, and the curtained window was faintly visible, a square of dim gray light in the blackness.

“Triv?” a voice asked wonderingly.

Arlian did not bother answering; instead he ran full-tilt for the window, knocking aside a table that happened to be in his path.

He recognized the voice as Sparkle’s and now realized that when he fell he had landed on the side of her bed and slid off onto the floor, but he had no time to worry about such things. He could already hear heavy footsteps in the corridor outside her door.

Sparkle’s room was at the far end of the corridor from Rose’s and faced the street, rather than the stableyard; that was good.

He didn’t bother opening the casement; he slammed against it with his bundle held in both fists, and the glass and lead shattered. He shoved the bundle through the opening and dropped it, then climbed up on the windowseat and turned around.

Fists were pounding on the door of Sparkle’s room, and he could hear crunching in the attic overhead. He took hold of the windowsill and began lowering himself.

“Good-bye,” he called to Sparkle—after all, it could do no harm at this point. “Give the others my love.” Then he was hanging by his fingers, his arms stretched to their full length, as far down as he could climb.

He pushed off with his feet and let go.

The fall seemed eternal, though he knew it was probably only a fraction of a second; then he slammed onto the mud of the street, flat on his back.

He lay dazed and aching for a moment, the breath knocked out of him; then he blinked and saw a dark shape leaning out of the now lit square of Sparkle’s window.

He forced himself to move; he rolled over onto his knees, groping for his bundle. He found it, grabbed it, and pushed himself to his feet.

His back hurt, and one knee didn’t seem to want to work properly, but he staggered on, choosing his direction at random.

The cool night breeze smelled of fresh soil and woodsmoke. The mud was cold between his toes, and he realized for the first time that his feet were bare—but that was hardly surprising; after all, he had been preparing for bed, not for flight. He had a pair of velvet slippers in his bundle—the women had been unable to manage boots— but he was not about to take the time to put them on.

Behind him lights were appearing in several of the brothel’s windows, and he heard several voices shouting; he struggled to pick up his pace.

Before him the moonlight showed him the late-night streets of Westguard—shops and houses, porches and wooden sidewalks, and streets of dirt and mud, the only color anywhere the yellow lamplight in a few windows. The town looked lifeless and empty.

The town’s hired guards were probably making their rounds, though, and he needed to avoid them. If Mistress decided to make enough of a fuss even the sheds and stables he had used before wouldn’t be safe. He had to find somewhere they wouldn’t look at all—or some way to keep them from recognizing him when they saw him.

And that might not be too difficult to manage, he realized a hundred yards farther down the street, as he caught sight of a signboard depicting a man leaning heavily on a staff. His pursuers hadn’t seen him clearly, if at all; they would probably expect him to look like a vagabond, as he had when he arrived.

Sweet and Rose and the others had spent months making him look instead like a young lord, and he could capitalize on that. He limped up to the closed door below the sign and began pounding on it.

“Ho, landlord!” he bellowed.

The windows were dark, and the door was locked, but there could be little question that the place was an inn— probably the Weary Traveler, which he had heard mentioned a few times.

An upstairs window opened, and a face appeared—but at the same time Arlian heard the jingle of armor and the crunch of boot steps. Fortunately, it came from the right; the House of Carnal Society was to the left. This was simply a guard making the rounds; Arlian ignored the sound and looked up.

“Ho, there!” he called, doing his best imitation of the lordly manners he had observed at the House of Carnal Society. “I know it’s late, my good man, but my blasted horse threw me—have you a meal and a bed?” He glanced at the approaching guardsman, but did his best to appear completely casual, as if he knew he could not possibly have anything to fear from a mere guard..

The innkeeper glared down at him. “At this hour?”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been this hour if the confounded beast hadn’t run off!” Arlian shouted back, exasperated. “I’ve been walking for hours—barefoot, since one boot caught in the bloody stirrup—will you look at the mess it’s made of me? Surely you won’t turn me out like this!”

The innkeeper still hesitated. The guardsman had come up behind Arlian and was listening closely—though he was distracted by a commotion up the street, in the vicinity of the House of Carnal Society. Arlian turned to him and asked, “He’s an innkeeper, isn’t he? Doesn’t he have to let me in if I ask?”

“That’s up to him, sir,” the guardsman said.

Arlian glared at him, a glare Rose had had him practice for hours. “Sir?” he said.

“My lord,” the guard corrected quickly.

Arlian nodded his approval and looked up at the innkeeper. “I’ll pay a little extra, if you like,” he said.

“Then your funds weren’t all on your horse?” the innkeeper asked. “I won’t give credit.”

“Do I look like a complete fool?” Arlian demanded. Then he held up a hand. “No, don’t answer that—I don’t want to know what I look like at this point! Yes, I have good coin, if your prices aren’t utterly savage.”

The innkeeper hesitated for another second or so, then gave in. “I’ll be right down,” he called.

“Good,” Arlian said, as the window closed. Then he turned back toward the brothel, as if just now noticing the noise. Two of the brothel’s guards were approaching at a trot.

“Whatever is going on there?” he asked the town guardsman.

“I don’t know, my lord,” the guard replied.

“Does it have anything to do with that ragged fellow who went running past a few minutes ago?”

The guard was suddenly alert. “What fellow, my lord?”

“How in the name of the dead gods should I know who he was?” Arlian said. “He was a young man in dreadful torn clothes who went running that way.” He pointed away from the House of Carnal Society. “His nose was bleeding quite spectacularly. Do you suppose those two are looking for him?”

“I don’t know, my lord; they might be.”

“Well, why don’t you go ask them and see? I’d like to know.”

“Yes, my lord,” the guard said. He trotted obediently off.

That, Arlian thought, would keep the brothel guards busy for a moment, explaining the situation to their compatriot, and it should give him time to get safely inside the inn.

None of his pursuers had gotten a good look at him, he was certain, and he hoped the women would have the sense to lie about his appearance; his best chance, he was sure, was simply to insist that he was what he claimed to be and had no connection with the intruder in the brothel.

Maintaining his imposture as a rash young lord would not be easy; for all he knew he had already made half a dozen slips. Still, he could not think of any better ruse.

The door of the inn opened, and the scent of stale beer wafted out. Arlian slipped quickly inside.