Elvenbane (30 page)

Kel thought about that for a moment, then smiled. After all, why not? This stuff could be worth so much more than what was stolen that the monster was going to turn out to be a good omen. But that was not the reason he would give.

“Lord Berenel’s device is a dragon,” he reminded the overseer. “Why not call it’dragon-skin’?”

The overseer laughed heartily. “Why not?” he agreed. “It’s a good name, it sounds impressive—and some folks might just be stupid enough to believe it! Everybody with any sense knows there’s no such things as dragons.”

“Everybody,” Kel replied quickly, relieved that the earlier loss was already forgotten. “Everybody with any sense.”

Lord Berenel caressed the dragon-skin tunic, marveling anew at the pearlescent play of the scale-colors in the light, how the edge of each scale reflected every variation on the base color, how the scale surface refracted the light in subtle rainbows. It lay on the black marble surface of his desk like a pile of jewels, and worth far more, if he was any judge.

It was no heavier than a leather tunic of the same size and thickness, but was much more supple. It was a pity that the inexpert workmanship had ruined the edges of the patched-together pieces that composed it; if it had been sewn perfectly, it would have been something his own Lady would have been pleased to wear.

If he’d been willing to give it to her, that is. Right now he didn’t want it out of his keeping for a moment.

It was indeed ironic that his underlings should have chosen to call the substance “dragon-skin,” for Lord Berenel now held in his hand what he considered to be material proof that a lifelong quest of his was about to be fulfilled.

As a young lord, just after the Wizard War, Berenel had suffered a series of raids on his prize horse stock, pastured near the great desert. Unable to trust his own underlings, who had come into his hands at the defeat of one of his rivals, he had set a trap himself to catch the culprit responsible.

He had truly thought that the depredations were the work of another elven lord, and had every expectation of discovering magic at work. Instead, shortly after settling himself in his blind, he had heard the sounds of horses stampeding, and the death-scream of one of his mares.

He dashed out—and very nearly impaled himself on his own weapon, as he literally ran into a feeding dragon.

The beast mantled, then produced something like lightning that shot out at him from the wings, knocking him unconscious. When he woke, there was no sign of dragon or mare; only a bit of blood and a flattened place in the grass.

No one believed him when he returned. The general consensus, even among his own supporters, was that he
had
come upon the work of a rival, one more powerful in magic than he, and had been defeated and knocked unconscious. And that his vision of the dragon was only that; a vision, an illusion built by the unknown rival. After a time, rather than continue to suffer ridicule, he chose to make a boast of what others considered his “foolishness,” and took the dragon as his own device.

But ever since that day he had sought, quietly, the proof that what he had seen did indeed exist. That there
were
dragons in this world. That he had not been a fool, to believe in his own hallucinations.

And now he had that proof within grasping distance.

His hand clenched on the tunic, and he looked up at his seneschal, a smooth and obedient minor elven lord, who was waiting patiently on the other side of his desk to receive his orders. The youngster was one of the few he trusted, having raised and schooled the boy himself.

“The two men who first found the girl—”

“Kel Rosten and Ardan Parlet,” the seneschal supplied helpfully, with a glance at the notes he held in his right hand.

“Retire them from caravan duties. Give them something profitable, but not too taxing.” Slaves were slaves, after all, and meant to be worked, but Berenel could afford to grant them a position that wouldn’t appear to be work.

“Kel Rosten has been on the caravan routes for many years,” the seneschal said, a crease of thought between his sketchy brows. “He’s always been known as a man who could turn a profit, and one who could deduce that unlikely objects might prove to have value. Perhaps this is a heritable trait, or a teachable one. In the former case, we should put him to stud. In the latter, assign him to training the youngsters.”

“Do both,” Berenel told him, dismissing the human from his mind. “And the other?”

The seneschal smiled. “Ah, that is an easy one; I know how he would best serve from personal experience. Ardan knows wine like no one else on the caravan trade, and is responsible for most of the vintages gracing your table, my lord.”

“Didn’t my wine steward just die?” Berenel said, recalling something of the sort being said a month or two ago, and how he had complained at the time that it was hardly worth putting these short-lived humans into important positions. Why, the man had hardly held his office more than twenty years! “How old is this Ardan?”

“Indeed, your memory is as accurate as always, my lord,” the seneschal replied with a ingratiating smile. “And you anticipate my suggestion. Ardan would make an excellent wine-steward, and as he is a young man, not yet twenty-five, he should serve you for fifty years, barring accidents.”

“Make it so,” Berenel said, pleased to have the business so profitably taken care of. It did no harm to be known to the slaves as a lord who rewarded good service and a limited amount of initiative. But now that these minor matters were disposed of, he moved briskly and confidently on to the major matters at hand. “Now about the girl—it may well be she’s feebleminded. A lot of these wild ones are. Send someone to question her and see if they can determine whether she found the skin, or killed the creature it came from, or knows where to find more. But don’t waste a great deal of time on it. Give it, oh, ten days at most, then sell her; I haven’t the time or trainers to waste on a wild child. Meanwhile, I want you to send a party into the desert, find that oasis, and see if you can track her back to wherever she came from. Take—hmm—Lord Quellen. His magic ought to be enough for the job. Supply them and give them their orders yourself, and don’t let them talk to anyone before they go, not even wives and mates.”

“Yes, my lord,” the seneschal replied with a bow. “Is there anything else, my lord?”

“I’ll call you if I think of anything,” Berenel said, caressing the tunic again, his mind crooning with muted joy. “That will be all.”

The seneschal bowed himself out, and Berenel examined the tunic again, both physically and magically, seeking more clues to its origin.

And over and over, the words sounded in his mind, like a call to arms: “Soon, now. Soon.”

Shana shivered on her pallet, startled awake by the sudden light, as she had been every morning for the past five. Already she had a little better idea of how things were in this new world; not that it made things any easier, just helped her to anticipate the worst dangers.

The pale ones were the “elven lords” of the writings, wielders pf magic, and overlords of everything. Any individual with pale skin, green eyes, pale gold hair and pointed ears was trouble—and had the power of life and death over any two-legger of the other variety.

The others were “humans,” which, she had supposed, she must be, since the elven lords treated her in the same way as the rest of the people here. These, she knew now, were “slaves,” and all wore the brown slave-uniform her captors forced her into when she first arrived here.

There were other humans who were not slaves, such as Kel and Ardan, the rest of the men in the caravan, and other people whose orders were obeyed. These were “bondlings,” and usually wore the scarlet tunic and trews that showed they served the highest elven lord, the one she had never seen, who ruled over all the other elven lords here; Lord Berenel.

Her days were predictable now. The amber light appeared. Then, when everyone was awake, the “overseer” arrived. This individual herded them all into the room with hot water coming from the walls. Everyone took off his tunic, bathed, and got a new tunic. They were led to another room, where they got a piece of the crusty stuff Ardan had given her—”bread,” they called it, and a bowl of something they were supposed to eat with the bread. The taste of the stuff changed from day to day. Then some of them were singled out and taken away. Those never appeared again; Shana had learned that they went to new masters, but what happened to them then, she could only guess. The rest went back to the big room, to while away the time in talk, meaningless games of chance, and bullying those who were easily intimidated.

All but Shana. She would be taken away to a small room, where people asked her endless questions about her dragon-skin tunic.

Thanks to the way in which her first questioners had treated her, she’d had the wit to act very stupid. The more brainless she acted, the less her questioners seemed to pay attention to what she said.

Partly she did so out of fear of her captors, elven lords and humans alike. The elven lords she feared more than the humans; one of them, displeased by a perceived lack of deference, had done something to her—something that sent her screaming to the floor in pain. All he had done was touch her—but her entire body had convulsed as if she had been dragon-shocked, and she couldn’t speak for the rest of the day.

So she shivered in fright, and cowered before them—she didn’t have to feign it, she was terrified of them. And she feigned stupidity; that was easy, since she spent most of her time in that little room frightened out of her wits.

Every day she woke wondering if today she should tell the truth. And every day, by the time she faced her captors in that little room, she had decided that she didn’t dare.

For if she betrayed the dragons, those she still loved would undoubtedly be hunted down and killed. The elven lords made that clear, although they probably didn’t realize it, in the tone of their questions. The idea of one day seeing Alara’s skin adorning the back of an elven lord was enough to seal her lips against almost anything.

And for those moments of supreme weakness when an elven lord threatened her with more pain, there was another consideration. The Kin took the forms of two-leggers, elves and humans, and Shana no longer supposed it was for amusement’s sake among the Lairs. No, they undoubtedly came among these people in disguise. And if—no,
when
—any of them learned that she had betrayed them, they would find her, and they would kill her in a way that would make the worst the elven lords could do seem pleasant. She had no doubts of that. The ones like Lori, who thought she was a rabid beast, would see to it.

So she shivered on her flat brown pallet until they took her away, then she endured the questions in silent desperation, pretending she hardly understood them, and pretending that she had simply found the bits of skin.

Her ploy did seem to be working; their manner seemed to become more and more perfunctory with her, as if her answers no longer mattered. That was the good part; the bad part was that they always saw that she violated some rule or other every day. That meant a beating; and with the beating came descriptions of what she could expect when a “master” bought her at the auction—descriptions that left her no doubt at all that the beatings she endured daily were nothing compared with what was coming. She almost came to welcome the appearance of her questioners: It meant one more day she would not have to face the unknown terrors of being sold.

Maybe today they wouldn’t come for her, she thought, without real hope, as she sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. Her green eyes, which she had learned to hide, thanks to the one friend she had made here.

She reached over and gently shook Megwyn’s shoulder. The graceful older woman didn’t wake when the light came on; she had told Shana, ruefully, that she once slept through an earthquake. Of her fellow slaves, only Megwyn had proved to be at all interested in anything outside of her own well-being. The first morning after Shana had been penned here, one of the others had tried to steal her morning’s ration of bread and soup. A tall, black-haired woman with bright brown eyes and a beautiful smile had been sitting across the table, and had stood up unexpectedly and cuffed the bully across the side of the head.

The overseer, seeing the scuffle, had hurried over. Shana had cringed, but Meg had explained the circumstances in matter-of-fact tones before the bully had a chance to think up a story. The bully was taken to another table; and Meg became Shana’s protector.

There were three kinds of slaves, Meg explained that first day: the hopeless, the helpless, and the loupers. The loupers preyed on the others, she’d said, in a way that Shana readily understood. The hopeless were too afraid someone would use them to make friends, and the helpless had given up on everything.

“And what kind are you?” Shana had asked the older woman, innocently.

Meg had laughed. “None of them,” she had said. “I’m not a slave. Or at least, I wasn’t. I was a bondling.”

That was when Shana had learned the difference that tunic-color made. And had learned about the concubines.

For Megwyn Karan had been a concubine. “And a good one,” she’d said proudly. But another woman, a jealous rival, had accused her of thieving a valuable gem from her elven lord, one of Berenel’s underlings, and planted the stolen object under her bed. Disgraced, Meg had suffered the worst punishment any concubine could have; she had been sent down to be auctioned as a common slave.

“That’s what I get for being nice to the bitch,” Meg had said bitterly, and then would say no more.

She readily admitted to Shana what had made her decide to protect the girl. “It’s your green eyes,” she’d said. “And if you look
real
close, your ears are kind of pointy. You’d better hide them both, unless you want a lot of trouble. You’re a halfblood, girl. I don’t know how you got away without being spotted before this, but you’re a halfblood.”

Meg had explained all about the halfbloods, and the little she knew about the Wizard War. When Shana had told her, tentatively, about the power she
used
to have, Meg had nodded knowingly. “That’s wizard-power, all right,” she’d said. “If you can just get it back, you’ll be able to get us both out of here. Then we can head for the forest. Folks say there’s wizards there—if I’m with you, if you maybe say I’m your mother, they’ll take me in too.”