“Perhaps not so much a risk as you take, sir.” To live as a Zhid, hiding one’s soul…
“But I have a great deal for which to make amends, which you do not, and I am accustomed to my risks. Now to our business-”
From somewhere not far from this room where we spoke so politely intruded such a dreadful scream that I thought it must be an animal at the slaughter. Such a notion was banished quickly when my host bowed his head. “One thing at a time,” he whispered to himself, the cast of his skin even more sickly for that moment.
Unwrapping a square of coarse brown cloth, he revealed a thumbnail-sized slip of stamped metal. “The shipment of uncollared servants to Zhev’Na will occur at dawn. You will be added at the last moment. This is your identification tag. You know of them?”
“Yes.” Gar’Dena had told me of the plain metal tag, fixed to one’s left ear like the earrings of the Zhid, that carried a Drudge’s name and assigned duty, and the enchantments that compelled the servant’s obedience.
“To attach it will cause only brief discomfort. Your tag will carry your identification and a false enchantment- lacking any power of compulsion-but you understand that the least failure in obedience on your part will be noted and quickly remedied?”
“I understand.” I said it calmly. But my fists did not unclench until the sting in my earlobe had dulled, and I had proven to myself that I could still move and think as I wished.
A loud knock on the door made my host frown. He waved me into the deepest shadows in the corner of the room. I crouched in as small a space as I could manage between two stacks of crates.
“Slavemaster Gernald?” called the intruder.
“What is it?” growled my companion, holding the candle in front of his chest and pulling the door slightly open.
“Sir, Dujene has two more collars for this lot and wants to know if you intend to set the seals. He had already sealed the first, when I told him of your desire to set more of them yourself.” I could not see the speaker through the narrow opening of the door.
“Good.” The man snuffed the candle and set it on a stack of crates beside the door. “Yes, I want to be there for all collarings until further notice. I’ve had too much work and too little pleasure lately. Nice when one can experience both together.” He stepped out and closed the door behind him. The rattle and snap of a hasp left me feeling not at all secure.
For half an hour or an hour I huddled in the dark room. It seemed to be a storage room for ledgers and documents of various kinds. My anxieties were not soothed by the bone-chilling screams that occurred twice more. Shortly after the second instance, I heard voices outside my hiding place. “Is that all, Slavemaster?”
“I’ve no more need of you tonight. I plan to sup, to make one more attempt to find the records Gensei Seto requested, and then to retire.”
“As you wish, Slavemaster.”
A door closed. Shortly thereafter, my own was unlocked and opened. The Zhid shoved a small flask and a plate of meat, cheese, and bread into my hands. “I would recommend you eat this. You’ll get nothing decent until your mission is complete.”
“Thank you.” I touched the small round loaf. It was cold and dry.
He lit the candle with a touch of his finger. “None but I have entry to this room. Nonetheless, I will lock the door until I come for you in a few hours. Do you have the scarf to cover your hair? No female servant is permitted to have uncovered hair.”
I pulled the red kerchief from my pocket. “I have it.”
“Don’t forget it. I wish you a safe night. May our work be the redemption of the worlds.” He didn’t sound like a man who could have caused such screams as I had heard, but I suspected that he was. Perhaps that accounted for the diseased look of him.
The door closed behind him again, the lock snapped, and I was abandoned in the pool of candlelight. As I picked at the tasteless cheese and bread and sipped from the flask of warm ale, I imagined with a twinge of jealousy how Paulo would curl up on the hard floor and be asleep in an instant. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to sleep in Zhev’Na. Of course, as is often the case when sleep seems impossible, at some point in that night, my mind let go and I drifted off. But some time later, when the key turned in the lock again, I was on my feet, wide awake, before my host reappeared in the doorway.
“Quickly. Quietly. Follow me.” He led me through a large, bare room with a wide desk and a single chair, and then through a dim passageway rife with unwholesome smells. Just outside a wooden door fastened with a long bolt, he motioned me to be still. After a moment’s listening, he quietly guided the bolt from its latch, cracked the door, and peered through. Beyond the door a goodly number of people were murmuring and milling about. A harsh-voiced woman shouted for attention.
The Zhid closed the door, grabbed my arm, and drew me close. He held up three fingers and pointed toward the door. I didn’t get his meaning until he motioned again, counting one finger and then two… When the third finger came up, he cracked the door open just wide enough to shove me through. I stood at the rear of a line of fifteen or twenty rumpled, sleepy people moving slowly forward through a cavernous room. All were dressed as I was.
Another, larger group of Drudges-perhaps fifty altogether-were being led through a wide door into another room, prodded by three Zhid with long sticks who kept yelling at them to be quiet or he’d have them eating sand for a week. Behind them a gaunt man, barefoot and wearing a short gray tunic, dragged a wheeled sledge piled high with rough mud-bricks. The wide metal collar around his neck told me he was a Dar’Nethi slave.
Near the head of the line in which I stood, three Zhid stood at a fuzzy discontinuity in the air that I now recognized as a magical portal. One of the Zhid, a woman, questioned those in line and ticked off items on a list. Another seemed to be matching the responses with the ear tag. A third Zhid laid his hand on the head of every person before they passed through the portal. Hunting Dar’Nethi, certainly.
“Name and service,” snapped the woman writing the list to a hunched man in line ahead of me.
“Grigo, butcher.”
“Step through.”
“Name and service.”
“Mag, scrub.”
“Step through.”
“Name and service.”
“Eda, sewing.”
“Step through.”
And so I did and found myself at last in the heart of all my fears-Zhev’Na.
CHAPTER 28
I stepped from the portal into a barren courtyard: pounded red dirt surrounded on all sides by buildings of dark stone or red mud-brick. Gray wisps of night lingered in the dim colonnade that marked the east side of the yard, while the rising sun had already heated the broad square. Despite the heat, I crowded together with the other drab, silent bodies, all of us shapeless in our brown tunics and black skirts or baggy trousers.
The guard handed his list to a tall Zhid woman who announced herself to be Kargetha, a supervisor of uncollared servants in the fortress. Kargetha clearly did not relish being saddled with twenty dull, sleepy Drudges, and dispatched us to our duties as quickly as possible. Some were sent to the kitchens, others to the stables or the smithy, herded along by Zhid assistants.
I was the last on the list, and by that time, Kargetha had no subordinates left to show me the way, so with an ungracious poke of a sticklike finger, she pointed me toward a set of worn stone steps on the north side of the courtyard. Down the steps and to the right was a low-ceilinged, windowless room with pallets laid out on the floor-a dormitory where twenty or thirty people could sleep. The room was stifling and smelled as if it had been neither cleaned nor aired since this part of the fortress was built, long before the Catastrophe.