Elvenbane (29 page)

And for those who preferred absolute privacy and extensive attentions, there were soundproof rooms upstairs.

This was not an establishment normally frequented by humans. Elven lords of too low a rank to own concubines came here, as did young elven lords seeking excitement in the “lower city,” and the very occasional high-ranking lord who felt a need for variety, but not a pressing enough need that he felt he had to add to his harem to get it. The humans who
did
come here were generally fighters being rewarded for unusual service. As such, Harden looked the part.

Harden stepped down into the room, and was immediately surrounded by young women who did not have much more in common with the lady of the sign than sex, general attractiveness, and red hair.

“Is Marty free?” he asked the first one to take hold of his arm, knowing what the reaction would be. Much as he would have enjoyed dallying here with the girl, he knew what the penalty would be if he did so without explicit permission. She let go of him immediately, a frightened and panicked look transforming her face into that of a terrified child, as the rest of the girls vanished as quickly as they had materialized.

“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, obviously hoping he wasn’t going to ask her to escort him there. He toyed with the idea for a moment, because she was so very frightened, and it would have been rather amusing; but he was not by nature a cruel man, and decided against it.

“Off with you,” he said, slapping her on her mostly bare buttocks, so that she squealed and jumped. “I can find my own way.”

She followed the example of her “sisters” in fleeing to one of the many curtained cubicles lining the walls, whisking through the curtains as if he were a demon. Harden ignored her, heading instead for the only true door in the room, a massive, uncarved ironwood piece, red-and-brown-grained wood blending into the red, watered silk of the hangings. He knocked once, then entered.

The same amber light gleamed down on wood-paneled walls and a crimson-carpeted floor. Marty looked up from his desk, the room’s single piece of furniture, as Harden closed the door behind himself. Marty was—a prodigy. He couldn’t have weighed more than half what Harden weighed; he was slender as a willow-twig, with a mild, even sweet, face. Truth to tell, he looked like a girl with a mustache. There were men who’d taken that sweet face for an indication of Marty’s preferences in partners.

Those men had never had a chance to make a similar mistake; they’d been dead before their bodies hit the floor. Marty was one of Lord Dyran’s own highly trained assassins. He was also Dyran’s chief agent in the city, and had replaced the contact Harden had worked with two years ago. That contact had been an old man; Harden knew that he had been retired to one of Dyran’s estates to train younger agents. He knew, because he himself was still alive. If the human had betrayed the elven lord, Lord Dyran would have eliminated every agent that had reported to him as well as the traitor.

Harden rather liked the lad; demons knew he hadn’t many other friends. The girls were terrified of him, and for no good reason, so far as Harden could see. Maybe his tastes were a little more exotic than even they cared for. Maybe it was just what he represented…

Maybe it was that, in his capacity as the manager of this house, he held the power of life and death over them. And at the hands of a trained assassin, death could be very prolonged, and very unpleasant.

“Harden, good to see you,” the young man said warmly, rising to offer Harden his chair. Harden shook his head at the implied offer of hospitality.

“I can’t stay long,” he said. “I’m supposed to be getting a girl at suppertime and since I’ve been on the road for weeks, if I don’t show up, it’ll look odd. Here. This needs to get to the Lord.”

He tossed the little leather pouch down on the desk. Marty looked at it curiously, but didn’t touch it.

“Now, this is where it came from—” Harden said, and explained, as briefly and concisely as he could, the events of the past several days. “So when the girl started to fight, she dropped this. I had to wait until I got to the city to check it out. It’s a collar, gold and jewels; looks like a concubine’s collar to me. And it’s got Lord Dyran’s seal on it.”

“Lord Dyran’s seal, on a concubine’s collar, held by a wild child.” Marty tilted his head a little to one side. “Well, the obvious solution is that she found it. The Lord has had caravans lost in the desert before, some with high-ranking concubines on them.”

Harden grimaced, chagrined that he hadn’t thought of that possibility.

“But—” Marty continued, “I must admit that having the monster attack the caravan is stretching coincidence a great deal. All things considered, we’ll let the Lord handle it however he sees fit. You did well, Harden. If nothing else, in returning a valuable bit of jewelry to Lord Dyran. Certainly Berenel’s men would not have bothered.”

That was a dismissal, no question about it.

“I’ll be getting back to the caravansary,” Harden said quickly. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

“There is one thing I would like you to find out,” Marty said, just as Harden got his hand on the door handle.

Harden turned immediately.

“There
was
a runaway concubine about fifteen years ago, a pregnant favorite near her time, and she escaped into that particular area of the desert…” Marty didn’t say anything more, but Harden knew more than enough to fill in the rest.
Far
more than most humans would.

If she had actually been pregnant by Lord Dyran—if she had survived long enough to whelp the child… A halfblood was forbidden, absolutely forbidden, and this child was near enough in age to be that halfblood…

“The girl’s red-haired and about twelve or fourteen,” he offered. “Now, I didn’t see any wild magic out of her, and I think I would have when she fought Kel if she’d had it.”

“But she was drugged,” Marty reminded him. “And what about that monster? What if she conjured it to distract the rest of you while she escaped?”

“But she didn’t
try
to escape,” said Harden, then thought a moment. “Of course, her grel took off with her, and she just might not have been able to control it. Still I’d think anybody that could produce a monster could control a grel.”

“A good point,” Marty acknowledged. “But keep an eye on her, if you can. It’s stretching coincidence to think that this girl could be the concubine’s child, but—it’s better to let Lord Dyran decide what he wants to do about it. And at any rate, if there is
any
indication that she’s a halfblood, come straight to me, and I’M see that Lord Berenel’s stewards hear about it. If there’s one thing that the lords are united on, it’s that halfbloods need to be destroyed on sight.”

Harden nodded. And since there seemed to be no more forthcoming, pulled the door open and left.

Shana huddled in a corner of the enormous room into which she had been thrown like so much refuse. She shivered, as much from shock as from cold. The last half-day had been the most terrifying of her life. Not even the wait to learn what would be done with her back at the Lair had been this bad.

At least, at the Lair, she’d known she had a few friends. Here she had no one and nothing, and she had no idea what was coming next.

Once they had entered the quiet tunnel, Shana had found it was much shorter than the one under the walls. It led to a square empty place with walls on all four sides. The big man had plucked her off the back of the animal she rode, and carried her, fighting as well as she could with bound hands and feet, to a door in an otherwise blank wall at the rear of the square. There he had put her into the hands of three more people as big as he was. They had effectively immobilized her, and that was when she discovered that her magic didn’t work anymore. She didn’t even get the feeling of thwarted power, it was as if she had never possessed the abilities she’d used against Rovy.

They took her into a white room filled with steam, stripped her to the skin, and threw her under a torrent of warm water, still tied hand and foot. They’d scrubbed her with what felt like sand, until her skin burned, then hauled her out and untied her long enough to wrestle her into a plain, brown tunic. By that time she was so exhausted and terrified she hardly had the strength to fight them. The three strangers seemed to realize this; two of them left, leaving one to shove her into this huge, blank-walled, echoing, pale pink room, filled with more people in the same kind of tunic she was wearing, and flat cloth things on the floor, like she had seen in Kel’s cloth building, only covered with the same kind of fabric as her tunic, and barely as thick as her thumb.

They closed the door, which had no way to open it on her side, leaving her with a roomful of two-legger strangers who stared at her, but otherwise left her alone.

She had edged her way around the room, keeping her back against the wall, until she came to the farthest corner from the door. She looked up, but couldn’t see the sky; only a glowing roof that supplied all the illumination in the place, a kind of amber glow that cast no shadows. There she huddled, still with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, shivering with fright and delayed shock, and the cold that seeped through her thin tunic from the stone floor.

She wished she was back; she wished none of this had ever happened. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been dreaming, she could wake up, and she’d be in her own bed, and Foster Mother would be there, and Keman…

Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks; her throat was so tight she couldn’t swallow, her eyes burned and her stomach hurt.

At least, at home, she knew what was going on. She understood the Kin, she knew how to stay out of trouble, she knew what she could do and what she couldn’t.

At least, I think I knew the Kin.

Maybe she really didn’t. Foster Mother had taken care of her just like Keman, but when it all came down to it, Alara had let the rest throw Shana out into the desert. Alara
could
have come after her to help her once everybody in the Lair thought Shana was gone for good—but she didn’t. And when Alara showed up over the caravan, she had ignored her foster daughter, she just stole an animal and ignored her, it was as if Shana didn’t even exist to her. Alara didn’t even talk to her with thoughts. She could have at least told her how Keman was doing.

I
think maybe Keman would have come after me if he could have
…

She hugged her knees tighter and hid her face, while hot, silent tears ran down her cheeks and dropped onto her tunic, making two big, dark spots on the light brown fabric over her chest. She wallowed in misery for a while, until another thought occurred to her. After all, Alara had shown both of them how parent animals sent their offspring out into the world when it was time for them to grow up and become adults.

Maybe Alara thought that it was time for
Shana
to leave. She used to let Shana get hurt if that was what the girl needed in order to learn something. Maybe this was that kind of lesson.

She used to show both of them how birds would leave their young ones unfed until they fledged the nest, and how animals would even drive their little ones away from their territory when they were old enough to fend for themselves. The Kin didn’t do that—but maybe two-leggers did. Maybe Shana was supposed to be old enough now. Maybe she was supposed to be able to take care of herself…

Maybe this was supposed to be good for her.

But it didn’t
feel
like it was good for her. She bit her lip to keep from sobbing out loud in front of all these strangers, and the tears fell even faster.

But if it was good for her, why were these people hurting her and locking her up? And if Foster Mother knew what they were going to do, what they were like, why didn’t she give some kind of warning? Why didn’t she
tell
Shana that there were other two-leggers around? Why didn’t she tell the girl what they were like? If Alara wanted to make sure Shana would be all right, why didn’t she at least get Keoke to tell her what to be careful of before he left her in the desert?

The only answer seemed to be:
because Alara didn’t care
. Because to her Shana
was
an animal, as she was to the other Kin; because she considered Shana to be no more than an outgrown pet of her son’s.

Because Rovy and Myre were right.

And that hurt worst of all.

Kel waited expectantly on his padded stool in front of his master’s desk while the caravan overseer unwrapped the skin tunic the wild girl had worn. In the magic amber light of the offices, it looked even better than it had in the sunlight; the colors were subtler, the shading of each piece showing undertones and pearly hues he hadn’t even guessed were there under the bleaching sun of the desert.

And the value of this new discovery just might negate the loss of the grel and its packs to the raiding monster. He
could
be held responsible for that…

The overseer, a middle-aged, balding human, turned the garment inside-out with his thick, callused hands and examined the construction, then turned it right-way-round again and looked over each piece carefully.

“Well,” he said finally, looking up, “it certainly looks like you found us something out of the ordinary, Kel.”

“Out of the ordinary—and damned valuable, unless I miss my guess,” the caravan master replied boldly. “Seems to me the lords would stand in line for things made out of that stuff. I’ve never seen anything look like that unless it had been glamoried.”

The overseer turned the tunic about in his hands and nodded slowly, then rubbed one hand over his shiny pate. “Well, I’d guess you’re right, Kel. You
did
check for glamories on this before you brought it to me, didn’t you?”

“First thing I thought of,” Kel assured him. “Absolutely. Not a sight nor sign of magic. This stuffs the real thing, all right.”

The overseer laughed, and refolded the garment. “The question is, real
what
! What are we supposed to call this stuff? Lizard-hide? That doesn’t exactly sound like anything I’d want to wear.”