Steal the Dragon Page 5

  Everyone knew that Laeth had spent the last two years training in Sianim. Rumor had it, truthfully enough, that Laeth's temper was even more impressive than his outrageousness.

  The big guard swallowed and grabbed the dog's collar. As he did so, Rialla touched his hand briefly for a minute and caught a stray thought:… couldn't use the coppers I'll get for this job if I were a corpse…

  He'd been paid to spy, but on whom? Rialla watched as the guard tugged the dog down the hall and around the corner. Once she could have read him as easily as she could close her eyes. She hit the floor in frustration and jumped to her feet.

  Opening the door to Laeth's chambers, Rialla said, "All clear."

  Marri slipped out and gave Rialla a penetrating look before leaving in the opposite direction the guard had taken. Rialla stepped into the room and closed the door gently behind her.

  "All right, Ria, just how did you know someone was there?'' Laeth was lying on top of the colorful tick on the bed with his hands behind his head and his legs crossed.

  Rialla leaned against the door and said, "Would you believe that I heard them?"

  "After the dog started barking, yes. But I doubt you could hear them walking from the opposite side of that door," replied Laeth shortly.

  "Hmm," said Rialla in a frivolous tone, tapping her chin in thought. "How about…"

  "The truth," said Laeth firmly.

  "You won't like it, and probably won't believe it either," commented Rialla, wandering back over to the little table she'd sat on before and fiddling with a hideous purple glass vase.

  "Ria." He sounded impatient.

  She put the vase back. "Don't say I didn't warn you. I am an empath. Sort of anyway."

  "A what?" asked Laeth incredulously.

  "An empath. You know, 'I know what you feel… I know your thoughts.' " Her voice took on a sonorous and slightly sinister tone, but she easily dropped it again as she continued, "Like the mindspeakers in the traveling fairs."

  He sat up and said with obvious disbelief, "You can read people's minds?"

  "Well, I used to be able to, but not much anymore." She picked up a crude figurine and continued, "Animals are easier. I can pick up emotions pretty clearly if they're strong ones, and occasionally the thoughts that go with them. Marri thinks that you're as handsome as ever." She nodded at his start of surprise.

  "You read Marri?" This time there was a strong thread of anger in his tone.

  "Nothing that anyone couldn't have seen in her face if they were looking." Her voice was noncommittal and she set the figurine next to the vase. She wanted to back away from his anger; somehow it was harder to resist her conditioning while wearing the garb of a slave.

  "Plague it, Rialla, that's worse than eavesdropping. You violated her privacy!" He stood up, and she could see his outrage tightening the muscles of his arms. She could feel her heartbeat pick up as he closed in on her.

  She could either fight back or cower. The latter was smarter, but if she cowered she might as well be the slave whose guise she wore.

  "You Darranians and your overdeveloped sense of propriety," she said with a quiet bitterness that stopped him short. "I know all about the rules by which you live your lives. Take the aristocratic, immaculate Lord Jarroh, your brother's best friend and staunchest ally. He frequented the little bar where I danced. He never spilled a drop of the single glass of white wine he drank. One must never be excessive when imbibing alcohol. He always tipped the waiter—just the proper amount. Then he went upstairs and beat the little slave girl he kept there. Sometimes he used a whip, sometimes he used his fist. Crippled as I am, I still felt her pain every time, including the last time— when he killed her." She smiled at him humorlessly. "His slave had seen twelve summers when she died."

  She could see that the anger had left him, but now that she had started she couldn't stop. "The slave trainer responsible for my capture took twenty-three other people from my clan at the same time. Twenty of them he tortured and killed. I felt each of their deaths too. Thanks to that I can't simply turn my abilities off and on as I used to: I hear what I hear." She raised her brows and continued with bitter mockery, "I am sorry if that offends your Darranian sense of decorum."

  Laeth's face was curiously blank. He reached out and touched her cheek with one hand. It wasn't until then that she realized that she was crying or that she'd backed away from him despite her determination not to do so. The door was solid against her back.

  "Sorry," he said in a soft voice. "I didn't mean to frighten you." He went back to the bed and lay on it, closing his eyes. In the same soft voice he said, "What was a guard doing patrolling the corridor when he should be out on the walls?"

  She closed her eyes too, and pressed harder against the door. Her voice when she spoke was quietly controlled. "Sometimes if I have physical contact with a person, I can pick up a few scattered thoughts. I think someone bribed him to come here, but I couldn't tell who he was supposed to be watching. It could be you, or Marri, or any of the fifteen other people in this wing of the keep.

  "If it was Marri he was watching," she continued after a moment's pause, "he probably followed her from her rooms. He'd know that she came in—but not that she came out before you had time to do anything. If he was sent to watch you, he may or may not have been here to see Marri come. If he was watching someone else, we don't have any worries."

  "You said that you couldn't tell who he was looking for. Could you tell who paid him?" Laeth's voice was still excessively gentle, so she knew that her face wasn't as blank as she wanted it to be, and she redoubled her efforts.

  "No," she answered. The metal of the doorknob was cold against her hand. "I could tell it was someone that the guard was not afraid of, and that this wasn't the first time he'd asked the guard to do this kind of work. The guard wasn't worried about leaving his post, so it was someone with enough authority to stop any punishments. It wasn't your brother, because he wouldn't have had to bribe the guard at all. You'd know who would best fit such a description."

  "Lord Jarroh?" he suggested, doubtfully.

  Rialla opened her eyes and shook her head. "No. All the servants are terrified of him and I'm sure that the guards would be too. Besides, that's not his style. He would never hire someone to spy; it's not something that a proper noble would do."

  "The only other person besides Lord Jarroh, my brother and myself with the authority to halt a punishment would be my uncle, Lord Winterseine. But he's not here yet."

  "How about the overseer?" asked Rialla.

  Laeth shook his head. "Dram's orders wouldn't be questioned. He'd never have to bribe a guard to patrol the corridors of the keep rather than the walls. Not to mention that the guard would be terrified of him."

  Rialla nodded and then said, "Lord Winterseine's servant Tamas was here this evening."

  Laeth nodded. "I saw him and asked around. He came with Uncle's luggage as he always does. Were you chasing after him this evening? I wondered where you were. He probably left to tell Uncle about the poisoning attempt."

  "Couldn't he have arranged for a guard to watch someone for your uncle?" suggested Rialla.

  "He could have," replied Laeth, "but I just can't see my uncle doing something as improper as spying; he's worse than Karsten when it comes to decorous behavior."

  "It is possible that the guard was sent to protect someone rather than spy on them," Rialla commented. "I don't suppose talking about it all night will help us. I think I will sleep in the slaves' quarters; sometimes they have information no one else has."

  Before he had a chance to protest, Rialla slipped through the door and into the darkened hallway.

  The slaves' quarters were in the basement, next to the wine cellar. Rialla supposed that they had originally been put there so as not to use space in the valuable ground floor, while allowing the slaves to attend their owners quickly. Whatever the reason, the result was that the quarters were more comfortable than the rest of the castle. Underground there were no ch
illy drafts in the winter, and in the summer when the rest of the castle was baking, the quarters were cool enough to need the single blanket that lay neatly at the foot of all the bunks.

  In Darran, slaves were used for pleasure rather than work, so most were female. The few male slaves primarily worked in pleasure houses where a wealthy Darranian would be preserved from the social stigmatism of homosexuality. Women in Darran did not own slaves. With little need to separate male and female, the slave quarters at Westhold consisted of a single, large room.

  Rialla didn't really expect to find out anything in the quarters, but she wasn't ready to relax and sleep either. It might have been a touch from her talent or just instinct, but something caused her to hesitate before she entered.

  "… sleep here. You will stay here until I come for you in the morning. Do you understand?"

  The man's voice was gentle and quiet. There was nothing in it to account for the sudden cramping of Rialla's stomach or the shaking of her hands.

  She turned frantically to the locked door of the wine cellar. Traders teach their children how to pick locks and pockets as soon as the tots are tall enough to reach a doorknob. The wine cellar lock had never been intended to keep out anyone but the servants, and it gave her little trouble.

  Rialla closed the door of the cellar quietly behind her. She huddled against the wood in the darkness and heard the man's hard-soled boots click across the stone floor. He paused briefly before the wine cellar door, as if he'd heard it open. But he continued up the stairs without investigating further.

  Rialla folded her arms around her knees and listened to the pounding of her heart in her ears. What was her former owner doing in Lord Karsten's hold? As Laeth had put it, Karsten would be as likely to invite a swineherd as a slave trainer to his celebration.

  She'd spent seven years as his slave, but most of that time was spent in the little bar in Kentar, the capital city of Darran. The rest had been in a small estate in the south. Uneasily, she remembered little hints that he might have been more than a simple slave trainer: the servants who called him "lord," and the ambience of age and respectability at the estate where she was trained.

  If he was highly connected, it would be possible for him to take part in polite society, as long as his occupation as a slave trainer could be kept quiet. Laeth, she knew, had never had any interest in the slave trade. It was feasible that Laeth knew her former owner, but didn't know he was a slave trainer.

  Rialla knew that she ought to go back to Laeth's room and warn him that the slave trainer was in the castle, but… in the dark, beer-scented room she was safe. She curled into a tighter ball in the corner of the room and rested her cheek against the side of a wooden barrel, letting the rough wood dig into her tattooed skin.

  She despised the cowardice that had been beaten into her, but that didn't keep her from shaking with bone-deep tremors. If her father could see her, he would be ashamed. She'd worked so hard to shed the habits of a slave, and all it took to bring them back was Laeth's anger or her old master's voice.

  She swore silently and dug her nails into her palms, reminding herself that he would be unlikely to visit the quarters again this night. With a shuddering sigh, she came to her feet, wiping the tears from her face with the sides of her hands. Like most of the Traders she had good night vision, but in the underground cellar the darkness was absolute. It took her a moment to find the latch on the door.

  Taking a deep breath, she exited the wine cellar, locked it, and walked with outward calm to the slave quarters. If one of the slaves noticed that she'd been crying, they wouldn't comment upon it—such was a slave's lot. Quietly she let herself into the large room.

  A few scattered torches lit the large room, allowing Rialla to see that only twenty of the bunks were occupied. That meant the rest of the slaves were either working, or sleeping in their owner's rooms. There was no one awake, so Rialla strode quietly to a pair of unoccupied bunks away from the door.

  She climbed to the top bunk and stretched out on it: only a new slave would take the vulnerable bottom bunk. Among slaves, status was very important. Occasionally fights broke out in the quarters when one slave tried to establish dominance. The top bunk offered some protection against unwanted aggression.

  Rialla had started to close her eyes when she heard a slight noise from the bottom bunk next to her. She leaned over the edge of her bed and looked at the girl lying there.

  As a Trader, and later as a horse trainer in Sianim, she'd seen every color that a person could come in—from her own pale ivory to the deep bronze of the Ynstrah people—but this slave's skin was closer to black. Fine dark hair that might be brown or red in daylight cloaked her shoulders in waves of curls. Her face was buried in the thin mattress and her body shook as she cried.

  Rialla reached a hand to the girl, but caught herself in time. She was doing the best that she could to end slavery in Darran, but she couldn't do anything for this other slave now.

  Rialla dreamed that night of a foreign land inhabited by people who looked like the strange slave girl. They spoke a language that she had never heard before, but understood in a way that her empathic abilities had once allowed her. It was a nightmarish dream with feverlike images that randomly appeared and disappeared without warning.

  She awoke in a cold sweat with a screaming pain in her chest. Leaping quickly off the bunk, she took a step toward the strange girl's bed, but it was too late.

  From somewhere the other slave had found an eating knife that she'd used to stab herself in the chest. Rialla gasped harshly with the pain of the slave's wound, feeling as if something had torn through the barrier that had blocked her abilities for more than a decade. The dull knife's work had been made even more painful because the girl didn't know where to stab herself. Still, her amateurish attempt worked after a fashion. Even as Rialla watched, the girl took a last breath and smiled.

  Rialla looked at the body of the girl that she now knew almost as intimately as she knew herself. The young slave had been an empath strong enough to project her fears past Rialla's mental scars and into her dreams.

  Rialla knew the slave's name and that she was fifteen summers old. She knew that somewhere in a foreign land the girl's family thought that she was serving the gods— a position of highest honor. They had let her go with sadness, but she had gone gladly as the servant of Altis had requested.

  Rialla could feel the echoes of the girl's horror and disgust when she found out what her duties were going to be. She could tell without looking that the girl's back would be covered with fresh whip marks and that the inside of her thighs were bruised badly enough that it would show even on her dark skin.

  Rialla tightened her jaw and carefully stepped around the blood that was pooling on the floor. A slave avoided attracting unpleasant attention. By the time the body was discovered, there would be no slave left in the quarters and none would admit sleeping there last night—but only the knowledge that the slave trainer would probably be sleeping allowed Rialla to start up the stairs that led to the main part of the keep.

  She entered Laeth's sleeping chamber quietly, without waking him. She sat on the hard-sprung sofa near the bed and stared into the darkness, waiting for the dawn.

  Chapter Three

  "I thought that you were going to sleep in the slaves' quarters last night." Laeth spoke softly, but Rialla jumped anyway.

  She hadn't been thinking, just staring into the shadows in the corner of the room; Laeth's voice, like the early morning light streaming through the windows, took her by surprise. She must have been sitting there for longer than she realized.

  Laeth managed to sit up, but he closed his eyes again as he rubbed his face to bring himself awake. He was not at his best in the morning.

  Rialla felt her lips quirk in an involuntary smile at the familiar sight. Answering his question rid her of the smile soon enough. "I did sleep in the quarters, at least part of the night."

  He cast her a sharp look that belied his sluggishn
ess and asked, "What happened?"

  "There was a new slave in the compound last night: an Easterner. This morning she killed herself with an eating knife. I thought that it would be better if I weren't there when her body is discovered—no sense in attracting attention." Rialla fingered the now-familiar needlepoint pattern on the back of the sofa.

  She could feel Laeth's steady gaze, as he waited patiently for her to continue. She kept her gaze on her hands and added briefly, "Especially as her owner is the man who owned me before I ran."

  Laeth drew in a breath of surprise. "The slave trainer? You're certain?"

  Rialla nodded, without looking up. "I didn't see him, but I heard his voice. It's not something I am likely to mistake, but I checked her tattoo. She too bore his mark."

  "Well, then," said Laeth with satisfaction, "I suppose I need to think of several obnoxious ways of refusing to return his slave."

  Rialla looked at him then, and shot him a grin. "I wasn't worried that you were going to turn me over to him."

  "No?" he said, his tone serious. "Then what are you worrying about?"

  Rialla shrugged. "I'm not." At his snort she smiled faintly. "I suppose I am. I wasn't prepared to meet him again… and the girl's death was particularly unpleasant. An eating knife is not the way that I would choose." Rialla looked down again and swallowed. At least the Easterner had found the courage to make the choice.

  Rialla remembered staring at a sharp little dagger that someone had left carelessly sitting on an eating bench. It wouldn't have made much of a weapon, but she remembered considering using it to take her own life—she'd been too much of a coward. The only other time she'd come close to suicide was just after she'd escaped, when she discovered she feared freedom more than slavery.

  "Rialla." Laeth's tone was gentle, and she knew that it wasn't the first time that he'd called her name. "What was your owner's name?"

  "Isslic, but I don't know his family name—slave trainers don't often use their full names."