Tanderon (8 page)

When Ringer finally had the chain free, he carried it in one hand while using the other to push me ahead of him back toward my bedroom. The push wasn’t only a gesture of annoyance as it would be in most men. It was an indication of how far his control over his rage had slipped, how close he was to losing whatever veneer of civilization was left to him. I stumbled into the doorjamb from one of the pushes, bruising my knee and arm, but that didn’t stop it. Ringer was long past worrying about what he did to me, and a bruised knee was quite a bit less than what I’d expected from him.

Ringer was generous enough to let me use the bathroom and take my clothes off before chaining me by one ankle to the bed, but he deliberately put the second, most important cuff around my ankle. I frowned as I watched him, wondering if he’d gotten confused, but there was no confusion in his eyes as he stood himself over me.

“The chain doesn’t come off unless I take it off,” he said, his tone as flat as I’d ever heard it, his face blank of all emotion. “If I ever find it off, for whatever reason, you’ll need surgery on whichever knee I aim at. You have my word.”

After saying what he had to he turned away from me, circled the bed, then left the room. His walk remained slow and unsteady, his skin still yellow, his voice still weak, but none of that had anything to do with what he’d said. Ringer carried a specially made slug gun, smaller and noisier than standard issue disruptors, but much handier for his purposes.

The slugs were small and came in clips of fifty, all non-exploding, but they could be sent toward a target one at a time or in streams heavy enough to tear a man apart.

Ringer could find his target-point ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a statistic which would not be altered to significance by the way he felt. If his shaky hands brought the figure down even as far as seventy-five out of a hundred, the fact that one out of every four slugs coming at you would miss could not be considered encouraging.

I shifted over onto my left side on the bed, hearing the faint clink of the chain attached to my right ankle. Ringer had given me the same choice I’d given him, and all I had to do to accept his challenge was to open the chain he’d put on me. He’d deliberately made access to the lock easy, doing it that way so we’d both know where we stood. The ring was cold and hard around my ankle, a statement of confinement stronger than it would normally have been. I knew the man I’d worked for so long, knew he wasn’t bluffing or simply trying to scare me, and knew too that I’d have to think about whether or not to continue escalating.

It couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes before Val appeared in the doorway, walking as slowly and painfully as Ringer had done. His gaze touched me where I lay on the bed, but the look was nothing like the ones he usually gave me.

There was anger in that look but there was illness too, and part of the illness touched and colored what seemed a demand for understanding. Val appeared to be struggling with the strange ideas he’d been introduced to, but he wasn’t to the point of talking about them. He closed the door to the bedroom behind him, then began to get out of the creased and smelly clothes he wore. When that was done he came over to the bed and sat, turned off the light with its beside switch, then lay down.

I could hear his labored breathing in the darkness, but it was a minute or two before his dark shape separated itself from the surrounding blackness. Faint moonlight came through the vu-cast window, and I realized I didn’t even know what sort of scene it showed. Val and I had had the suite registered to us for about three weeks, but that was only the second night-period I was spending in it.

I felt drained and tired, but I couldn’t seem to fall asleep. Val tossed back and forth, moaning faintly every once in a while, but every time I turned, the ankle chain clinked in protest. That made it impossible for me to forget it was there, even if I could have forgotten otherwise. The pillow linen under my face had a faintly sweet odor to it, not enough to bother anyone but enough to make you think of perfumed silk in a palace full of servants and the right kind of people.

I put my arms under the pillow and thought about the man lying next to me, the man who seemed to keep forgetting who and what I was. I poked and pushed at the questions I had, but there wasn’t the faintest inkling of an answer, no sudden understanding of what made his wheels go round. Val really did know what I was, and more than that he’d even seen me work. He’d been right there when I’d killed bandits by the handful with a sword on that outpost world, and he hadn’t been far away when I’d killed the slaver Radman with nothing but my hands.

But even knowing all that, he’d still had the nerve to spank me just as if I were nothing more than your average girl on a street corner. And as if that weren’t enough, he now lay next to me right after losing most of what had been inside him to a drug I’d given him.

Why?

Why did he act the way he did? I did some tossing of my own and filled my fists with handfuls of pillow, but none of that helped bring any answers to light. Most people had a well-justified fear of Special Agents, and most of those knew less than Val did about me. Men were usually nervous around me when they found out what I was, and I’d learned to accept their attitudes and involve myself only with other agents – or else not mention what my line of work happened to be. But Val wasn’t like any of the others. He touched me gently, used me fiercely, and punished me anytime he really disapproved of something I’d done. What made him so different?

His breathing had been more or less even for a while, so I reached a hand out slowly and gently to touch my fingers to his arm. The skin was firm and warm, an appropriate wrapping for the muscle underneath, and I remembered how those arms felt when they were around me. So different he was, strange beyond the strangeness of his origins and abilities, and until tonight he’d also been trying to tell himself that something … extra could develop between us.

That was pure fantasy, of course, nothing but window dressing for the simple fact that he enjoyed sex with me. There was nothing else for him to like in a relationship with me, and after what had happened, he’d finally be able to admit it. I was a Special Agent, not a woman, and didn’t even really have the right to touch his arm like that. Realizing that made me take my fingers back, and a long while later sleep finally came.

We all woke late the next morning, mainly due to the fact that the night hadn’t been a quiet one. Val had writhed and groaned almost constantly, but he’d been well off compared to Ringer. I hadn’t known it immediately, but the man I work for had taken over the sitting room as a temporary bedroom, leaving it only when he could no longer control what the Glue was continuing to do to him.

Val seemed better able to resist the urgings of the drug, but his sleep hadn’t been a restful one, even compared to Ringer’s. I’d been awake almost every time they were, well aware of what they were feeling. That made it almost a shock when I finally woke up with my cheek pressed to Val’s chest, his arms tight around me even though he was still asleep. I didn’t know if I had gone to him or he had come to me, but I didn’t want to be in that position when he woke up.

So I tried to squirm slowly out of the grip that was holding me to his body, very aware of the chain fastened around my ankle. I’d once been chained like that on an assignment, and the similarity of the circumstance turned me the least bit uncomfortable.

My assignment had been the retrieval of a stolen sacred object, a small but beautifully carved idol inlaid with three very valuable jewels. The idol was the object of worship of thousands of believers in that particular sect, people called Aralee, and it had been stolen by the man who had conquered half of their part of their world.

The conqueror had taken over a palace in territory adjacent to the country of the Aralee. Either he didn’t know or didn’t care that the Aralee were praying to their god and arming themselves, waiting for nothing more than a final sign of favor before launching a complete, merciless war of total destruction against the conqueror, his people, and anyone else who happened to get in their way.

The Council couldn’t intervene in local planetary matters, so it was decided to send someone to recover the idol for the Aralee in the hopes that the jihad could be avoided. I sometimes wonder about the Council’s definition of noninterference, but as the saying goes, mine not to wonder why, mine but to do or –

Yeah. At any rate, I was the one who ended up with the assignment, and Jensar, the conqueror in question, ended up with me. I was sent to him as a supposed gift from one of the provinces he hadn’t gotten around to yet, presumably a peace offering which would send him in a different direction once he went on the march again.

Darl is a planet which heartily approves of slavery, one of the reasons they tend to lag behind other Federation planets in almost everything, but at least I’d had a choice of what sort of slave to be. After reading the reports on Jensar, I’d opted for the clothes and supercilious attitudes of a woman of the Darlan nobility, one who had been chosen against her will to serve her country.

I was brought to him in a covered litter, made them force me out of the litter to stand in front of my new owner, then watched as he grinned while looking me over. The rich green silks I wore were as thin and transparent as the assurances of my willingness in the note sent with me, and Jensar was caught by the lure in spite of himself.

Jensar was a man of common beginnings, risen to the rank of conqueror and king through nothing more than his abilities and desires. Because of that background, he had the expected interest in women who had always before been considered too far above him. He came down off his silver throne, a big man, hard-muscled and more than fit, his grin sending the ends of his blond moustache upward as he walked around me. He played the looking but not touching game until he’d seen every inch of me, then he stood himself in front of me, looked me over one last time – and ripped the silk off me and threw it away.

My character was shocked to be treated like that, conforming to the Darlan belief that to be clothed, even in the flimsies I’d had on, was much superior and more dignified than to be stripped naked. My nudist background often comes in handy that way, so the shame and humiliation I projected were as phony as my supposed origins. Jensar laughed at the way I raged and cried, then he called a member of his personal guard to escort me to a “place of waiting.”

The guard, taking a fistful of my hair, pulled me along behind him to the place I’d expected to be taken – Jensar’s bedchamber. The room was enormous and so was the bed, and I managed to get a glimpse of the idol I was after when the guard dragged me past it. It stood on a darkwood table with four statues of gold and jewels, probably slated to be thrown away once the three priceless starlight stones were pried out of it.

The guard threw me down on Jensar’s bed, locked a golden chain around my ankle, then proceeded to search me. Just because a woman is naked doesn’t mean she’s out of hiding places, and that was something the guard didn’t have to be told. His hands and fingers went everywhere, a wide grin on his face showing how much he enjoyed my screams and struggles, and then he addressed himself to my hairdo.

My hair had been piled high and strung with pearls and other knickknacks. All of it, pearls, pins, everything, ended up thrown behind the guard so he could search between the strands for hidden weapons like poisoned needles or strangling wire.

When nothing was found he ran his hands over me one last time, checked the lock on my ankle, then left.

When he was finally out the door I cursed under my breath, felt through my hair myself, then looked frantically around on the floor for the thin, hard, almost invisible lockpick I’d brought with me. Everything depended on my having that lockpick, and the search through my hair had been unexpected. If I’d had even a minute’s warning I could have palmed the pick, but the reports on Jensar said he liked his women wild but all dolled up. That was why I hadn’t expected my fancy hairdo to be taken apart, but the guard had obviously missed reading the report.

I got off the bed, balanced on my left leg, and tried to peer around farther away from the bed. But the multi-colored pattern of the large rug the bed stood on made searching for the tiny lockpick with my eyes alone almost impossible. Then I heard the sound of feet way out in the corridor, so I jumped back onto the bed and began to pull at the chain around my ankle just in time for the entrance of Jensar.

The conqueror of a good part of Darl came into the room alone, unbuttoning his red tunic as he came, a grin on his face for the way I was trying to escape. He didn’t mind what I was doing because he knew I’d never make it, and it gave him a laugh to see me trying. He got rid of his clothes about as fast as he’d gotten rid of mine, and then the real playtime began.

I, of course, started out hating him and everything about him, also managing to goad him into teaching me who was boss. Then slowly, obviously against my will, I came to admire and want him, no longer needing to be forced to the attitude. The man was no fool so it was harder than it sounds, but by the time Jensar left his bed he was convinced he had a hot new slave to serve him. He told me he’d be keeping me a while, described me in terms of a bed slave just to see me blush at my comedown in life, then he dressed and laughed his way out of the room again.

Once Jensar was gone, I was able to get back to the problem of the lockpick. I put my left foot on the floor to hop back to where I’d been before Jensar had interrupted me, and that was when things started to go right again. The luck that was so necessary a part of every Special Agent’s continued well-being immediately showed it was still with me.

My bare foot had come down on a slender something I hadn’t seen, and I reached down to fold the lockpick into my hand. I don’t think I can describe how relieved I felt without explaining that trapped, helpless feeling that comes over you at being chained to a man’s bed, his possession for whatever use he cares to put you to.