Elvenbane (31 page)

If they ever got away. If Shana’s powers ever came back. If she lived through the day’s questions.

She shook Meg again, and this time the woman opened her eyes—and that same moment, not one, but several of the overseers came through the open door of the room.

“Shana!” called one, and Meg sat up quickly, as if they had called
her
name. She looked over her shoulder at the newcomers, and looked back at Shana, frowning.

“Don’t answer, child,” she whispered, a slight tremor in her voice. “Make them come to us. These aren’t Lord Berenel’s men; they’ve got no business here.”

Indeed, the men wore blue tunics and trews, not red. “Which one of you is Shana?” the nearest one growled, seizing the arm of a slave and shaking the man. The slave pointed, and the overseer looked up, scowling.

“Here they come,” Meg growled, putting her hand on Shana’s shoulder. “Don’t move. You have rights as Lord Berenel’s property. I’ll be with you.”

Shana couldn’t have moved if she had wanted to. She was paralyzed with fear. She knew that kind of swagger, the look in those eyes; it was what the bullies wore when they knew they weren’t going to be caught.

And with every step they took, she shrank further inside herself. For every step seemed to land right on her heart.

WHICH ONE OF you is Shana?” asked the tallest of the men, a blond, bearded one with a hard face and strange, colorless eyes. He looked down on them both as if they were something he’d found in the street, and was debating on whether to kick it away.

“That Shana is a girl, remember?” the dark one at his right said, waving dismissingly at Meg. “It can’t be that old hag.”

This second man, a chunky, black-haired human, shoved Meg aside and hauled Shana to her feet, his fingers clamped hard and painfully on her shoulder. “This has to be the one we want, Ran.” Shana hung in his hands, limp with fear, as Meg rose to her feet.

“Now you just wait a moment, boy,” she said haughtily, taking on a pride and an air of authority Shana had never seen her use before. She raised her chin, and looked down her nose at him, as if
he
were something unpleasant she’d just stepped in. “You aren’t Lord

Berenel’s people—who gave you leave to come in here and traffic with his slaves?”

For a moment, all four men stepped back a pace, even the hard-faced man looking doubtful—but then, when one of the other slaves let an hysterical giggle slip, they seemed to recollect themselves.

The hard man stepped forward again, raising his arm, and slapped Meg with the back of his hand; the
crack of
flesh-on-flesh echoed across the room, making the already silent slaves shrink back against the walls. Meg’s head snapped back with the force of the blow, and she dropped to the ground, stunned.

“That’s our authority, bitch,” snarled the blonde, a cruel smile barely curving his thin lips as he massaged his reddened hand with the other.

Meg started to struggle to her feet again, doggedly persistent in facing them down. Shana couldn’t understand why, and tried to free herself for one moment, before the man holding her shook her so hard her teeth rattled and she went limp again.

“I think she needs to learn about authority, Ran,” the dark one said. “I think they all need a lesson.”

The blonde shrugged, and waved a hand at him. “Go ahead,” he said. “Give her the lesson. I can wait.”

The dark-haired man shoved Shana into the blond man’s strong, cold hands, and his two nondescript companions hauled Meg to her feet. The two subordinates held her erect between them, while the dark-haired man looked her in the eyes.

“This is the difference between me and you, slave,” he said, and slapped her as the blond man had. Her head snapped back, but this time she couldn’t drop to the floor.

“And this.”
Crack
. “And
this”

He beat her coldly and systematically, starting with her face, and working downwards from there, delivering horrible blows to her body that left her breathless, trying to suck in air.

Meg screamed and fought at first, but it did her no more good than it had Shana. When the blonde dropped Shana, she hid her head in her arms, unable to watch, curled in a fetal ball at his feet. Soon Meg’s screaming died down to whimpers, and then to moans, as the thick sounds of blows continued to ring dully across the otherwise silent room.

The creaking of the door was loud enough in that silence to make even the dark-haired man stop what he was doing. Shana looked up—

She wished she hadn’t, for she was looking straight at Meg. Meg was a battered, bloody thing, hanging limply in the arms of her tormentors, her eyes swollen shut, and blood dripping from dozens of cuts on her face and oozing from the corner of her mouth.

Footsteps from the door made Shana turn to see who was there, and for a moment, she hoped Meg was saved, for it was one of Berenel’s red-clad overseers.

But the overseer only cast a perfunctory look at Meg, and turned to the hard-faced man. “Do you want to talk to this one, or don’t you?” he asked, poking Shana with a toe.

“I do,” the blonde said. “I just got distracted by this woman. Bad training, boy. Doesn’t know her place.”

The overseer took another look at Meg, then waved at the door. “I’ll take care of that,” he said. Two more red-tunicked men came through it; they took Meg away from the men who were holding her, and dragged her off between them, hauling her as if she were nothing more than a bag of worthless garbage.

By then, Meg had revived enough to be aware of what was happening. Shana’s last sight and sound of her was seeing her pulled through the doorway, wailing, leaving a trail of blood smeared on the floor.

Shana looked up at the hard-faced blonde, then dropped her eyes quickly, as he looked down at her. She didn’t even try to resist when he grabbed the back of her tunic and pulled her to her feet.

But there was one thing certain, as he shoved her ahead of him, so that her foot slipped in one of the bloodstains on the floor. She wasn’t going to have to pretend to be unable to answer his questions.

She was too terrified to speak.

In the tiny anteroom, Kel confronted Lord Revenel’s agent, seething with anger and ready to take the slightest excuse to order the man flogged out of the building. It was bad enough that this Ran character had frightened the wild girl right out of what few wits she had, but he’d walked into the slave barracks as if he owned them, beat a former concubine to death, and put the rest of the slaves into such a panic that now none of them would have anything to do with Shana.

That pretty much put an end to Kel’s own hope that the girl would confide some clue to one of the other slaves. He had been hopeful that the concubine could get something out of her—and he knew Megwyn’s type well. The promise of being taken out of the pens would be enough to make her willing to talk to him. The pledge of becoming
his
permanent mate—and he’d been promised one—would have pried out of her-everything she had heard from the girl’s lips.

And she’d been a pretty thing too—more than that, she was trained. It wasn’t often a bondling like Kel got a chance at a trained concubine, at least not as a mate.

But this fool had ruined the entire plan.

“I’d like to hear what you have to say for yourself,” he told the stone-faced blonde belligerently. “You’ve killed a good piece of property, and you’ve ruined another. Lord Berenel told us to keep that girl safe, you fool! He didn’t tell us to frighten her into feeblemindedness! You had the right to question her—question her, and no more than that.
If your
Lord’s agent gets her at auction,
then
you can do what you like with her—but until then, she’s the Lord’s, dammit!”

The man shrugged, his blue tunic straining against muscles that rivaled Ardan’s. “The girl knows something,” he said, his jaw hardening. “I tell you, she knows something. This idiot act of hers is just that—an act.”

Kel thought quickly. He wasn’t certain what the man’s rank was—but it was probably higher than his own. A confrontation would do no good.

But there still might be a way to turn disaster into
some
profit. As long as the man was convinced that the child was withholding information, he might well convince others. And that would drive up the girl’s price, part of which would come to him. “That may be true,” he growled. “But you
still
had no right to even lay a hand on her. And you killed a skilled slave, a concubine! What do you intend to do about that?”

Ran raised a skeptical eyebrow. “And just what was a trained concubine doing in the pens?” he drawled, plainly disbelieving Kel’s words.

“She was a thief,” Kel said crisply, as he shoved the roster into the other man’s hands. “Look for yourself. Megwyn Karan, trained concubine, the property of Lord Berenel himself and given to Lord Jondar—sent here for theft. But that charge of theft doesn’t negate the woman’s training or her value. I had my eye on her, as a matter of fact.”

As he’d guessed, the man didn’t know how to read. The blonde glanced at the list—which he held upside down—and shrugged again, but this time apologetically. “I didn’t know,” he said shortly. “She acted like one of those house-slaves you get sometimes, who think they’re bondlings. How much was she worth?”

Kel baldly quoted a figure that was double Megwyn’s real price.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you twice that,” Ran said, dropping his voice, and delivering the words in a confidential tone. “That ought to make up for everything. You ought to be able to get another trained girl somewhere, maybe over across town at Lord Dyran’s auctions. Tell her that her name’s been changed to Megwyn Karan, and your Lord won’t know the difference.”

Kel’s head swam for a moment—and, for a moment, he was tempted to pocket the money…

But Lord Berenel was a decent master. And if he told the Lord about the payoff, Berenel’s overseer would see to it that
he
didn’t lose by the transaction.

“I’ll do that,” he said, relaxing his stance just a little. Ran stretched his lips in what was probably supposed to be a smile, and slipped him a heavy little pouch.

“Thanks, friend,” he said. “Glad you understand how it is.”

“Well, I hope you understand why I can’t let you at the girl again,” Kel told him. “I’m not supposed to let anyone talk to her more than twice, but after you scared the life out of her—”

“Aye, I understand,” the blonde said, albeit reluctantly. “It’d be your skin. Guess that means I’ve got no second interview.”

“That’s about it. Cheer up, there’s always the auction.” Now that everything had been settled, Kel wanted the man to leave, badly. Those water-pale eyes gave him chills, and the cold, expressionless cast of the man’s face didn’t inspire much confidence either. He had the uneasy suspicion he was harboring a killer. A killer who
enjoyed
killing.

But it seemed that Ran was going to accept this particular defeat philosophically.

“True enough,” he said, with no inflection. The man turned away, and the slave at the door opened it quickly for him, the boy’s eyes wide with terror. Ran smiled, and the boy nearly fainted.

The boy must have heard what happened to the woman. With an effort, Kel kept himself from shoving Ran out the door.

Ran looked back over his shoulder. “My thanks,” he said curtly.

“Profit to your Lord.” Kel couldn’t bring himself to wish the man himself well.

But Ran didn’t seem to notice the lapse. “And to yours.” And he walked out of the door, and hopefully, out of Kel’s life.

Kel waited a few moments for Ran to clear the hallway, then headed straight for his own overseer.

This ought to drive the wild one’s price right through the roof, he thought smugly. And if reporting this bribe and all didn’t earn him a trained girl of his own, nothing would. Megwyn was already fading from his mind. He began to daydream, glimpses of the concubines he’d escorted across the trade routes flitting enticingly through his memory. Probably he’d even get his pick. He’d always fancied one of those tiny little black-haired creatures, the ones that danced so well. He smiled with anticipation. Or maybe one of the ones with hair like an elven lady and skin like snow. Or maybe a little red-haired she-cat…

Perhaps this day’s work would not turn out so badly after all!

The huge, rose-pink auction room was like a bowl, with Shana at the bottom of it. Rose-pink light came from the ceiling, the same directionless light as in all the places she’d been so far. In the past twenty days, she hadn’t once seen the sun.

She stood all alone on the auction platform, her heart pounding so loudly she could scarcely hear, half-fainting with fear. Above and all around her were hundreds of avaricious faces, some human, some elven, all of them heartlessly watching her as the auctioneer described her origin and ascribed abilities to her she had no notion she possessed.

“Take a good look at her, gentles and lords! Strong, limber, she fights like desert whirlwind, but responds like a well-trained hound! A jewel of the sands, she needs a knowing master to bring out the fire lying smoldering beneath her surface! Look at those muscles, those sculptured bones, there’s not one ounce of fat on that girl, and nothing that doesn’t please the eye! Imagine her spellbound as your personal guard! Imagine her fighting and winning in the arena, with the skills of a born desert killer!”

Fighting? A killer? Me? But—

The auctioneer prodded her until she moved, reluctantly. There was nowhere to hide from all those staring eyes; she shivered with cold, then flushed with heat, as the auctioneer made her move all around the platform while he continued his set-speech.

There were a few faces in the crowd that she recognized; most notably, the blond-haired, cruel-faced man who had stood by while his companion killed Meg. He was in the second tier of seats, with the wealthiest of the buyers. He waited as patiently as a scorpion at midday, standing just behind an elven lord in blue livery similar to his own, but richer, and more heavily ornamented with silver braid. She stared into those colorless, cold eyes, mesmerized.

The auctioneer brought his speech to a close; with a start, the first bid from the cruel man’s overlord shocked Shana to her senses. She looked away, her heart racing, her throat tight, her head swimming.

Bids came quickly after that; Shana had a hard time keeping track of them at first. It seemed that most of the people in the auction room had come here to bid on
her
. Voices called out numbers, each number higher than the one before, sometimes two and three men shouting numbers at the same time.

There aren’t any women out there. Why aren’t there any women?

There wasn’t a single friendly face in the lot. Each one, elven or human, seemed colder and harder than the last. Her eyes followed the bids from man to man, hoping for a sign of pity, if nothing else, and finding nothing there but greed, excitement, or cold calculation.

Except for the cruel man. Now he began to show some reaction. The elven lord with him kept bidding steadily, and soon every other bid was his. As the bidding began to fall off, and fewer of the bidders continued responding to the challenge, the cruel man licked his lips, as if he were anticipating the taste of something pleasing.

Shana watched him in terror-stricken fascination. He looked straight into her eyes when he saw that she was looking at him, deliberately licked his lips again, and smiled.