I shot to my feet, my heart racing as it never did when I was fighting. It wasn’t that I’d not heard a woman’s voice in my time in Ce Uroth. A few female servants and slaves worked about the camps, and a surprising number of women could be found among the Zhid warriors. But this particular voice ripped through my head like a sharpened ax.
“Keeper’s through the door there to the left, across from the cistern,” said the guard.
I glimpsed only the back of her as she walked through the gate and into the room where the stores of graybread and tunics were kept. She wore the black skirt, brown tunic, and red kerchief of a Drudge. My cursed tether was too short, and I came near choking myself trying to get a better view. When the voice of Gabdil’s aide growled outside in the courtyard, panic bade me devise some ruse to prevent me being taken until the woman reappeared. But she finished her business quickly. When she walked out of the storehouse, the full light of dawn fell through the barred gate onto her face. Only five heartbeats… maybe ten… but I knew her, and knew she had no relationship to a swordmaster from Sen Ystar… and neither had I.
The fantasy of V’Saro’s life crumbled in that instant, but before I could even begin to sort through the rubble, the Zhid slavehandler dragged me out to the sparring ground. Gabdil, a warrior with a reach a handspan longer than my own and upper arms as thick as my thighs, had already killed a slave that week, a man who had survived three months in Zhev’Na.
Forget the woman, I told myself. If you don’t pay attention, you won’t live to learn anything.
A hundred times that day the woman’s voice echoed in my mind, and her face floated before me in the glare. Brutally I forced myself to concentrate. In our initial sparring, I took a deep cut in my arm-happily not my sword arm- and Gabdil complained that I wasn’t as good as he’d been told. Fortunately, the rest of the day was restricted training, a set of patterned practice moves endlessly repeated, working on flow and control and fluid transitions between stances. There were ample opportunities to get hacked or skewered, but it was not as likely as in full combat when an instant’s lapse could mean your life.
In mid-afternoon I was returned to the slave pen, trembling with fatigue, not from the work, which had been light as my days went, but from the sheer effort of concentration. The surgeon assigned to this slave pen set about stitching my arm, but I scarcely noticed, for as soon as I allowed my thoughts to wander, the world came into sharp and terrible focus, and I knew what a wicked predicament I was in. I remembered the woman’s name and my own, and was already beginning to retrace the events that had placed the anointed Heir of D’Arnath so abjectly at the mercy of his enemies.
The slavemaster had died in his bath. Ludicrous. No wonder the news of it had thrown me-V’Saro-into such despair, for Gernald the Slavemaster, the Zhid whose soul Dassine had healed so long ago, had been the key to Exeget’s plan. Slowly, cruelly, carefully, over the years, Gernald had worked himself into a position of power in Ce Uroth, an impregnable position, so that he could safely open a portal to Avonar itself, knowing that such a breach in the armor of the Zhid might someday make all the difference in our long war. And then, at the very culmination of his long endeavors, his heart had given out, and he had slipped under the soapy water, stranding all of us in bondage.
The plan had been ingenious, though to believe Exeget and Gar’Dena could transfer me out of the council chamber before I was dead required a great deal of trust on my part. To let me die again would be an enormous risk, and neither of them was a true Healer. But their enchantments had worked flawlessly. In four days I was completely recovered and living happily in Sen Ystar, trying to rebuild a life that had never existed. Then came the attack, and the desert, and the collar.
I was never supposed to be sealed into the collar, of course. Gernald was to be waiting for V’Saro, the swordmaster of Sen Ystar, who was to be given a seal that would leave his powers intact, and who was to have his temporary identity removed so that he would know what he was about. But the slavemaster had died in his bath, and I was left as V’Saro the slave, who had terrible dreams and believed he was going mad. And the fourteenth day had long passed.
Seri was here. Gods have mercy. I had assumed that the two who were to receive my signal and provide the information I needed to rescue my son were others like Gernald. But Seri, too, had been caught in Gernald’s disaster, abandoned in this villainous place, and my son had been left to the Lords’ mentoring for almost a year.
“Your scars tell me you’ve had much worse wounds than this, V’Saro, and much less skilled care. Why do you look like death itself tonight? Is my needle too dull?”
I just shook my head.
Exeget had found it necessary to explain fifty times over why we couldn’t seize my son from the council chamber. As the man and boy had come together as suppliant to the Preceptorate, Ce’Aret and Ustele would not consider separating them, insisting that such interference would be a violation of our law. And neither Exeget nor Gar’Dena understood Darzid-who he was or what was the extent of his power. But their greatest concern lay with the jewels, the link between the boy’s mind and the Lords. Take him by force in the council chamber, and the Three would destroy him, or, if they had already corrupted him sufficiently, he could possibly channel all the power of the Lords into the very heart of Avonar. Listen, watch, observe, they had told me. Anything more was too great a risk. Stealth and surprise would get him back. A quick strike into the heart of the Lords’ stronghold. Stupid, how things work out.
And of course, once I remembered all these things, they did me no good at all. Neither Karon nor D’Natheil could suggest any escape from my captivity that V’Saro had not already dismissed. The terrors of my dreams were banished, but those of my days were grown far more desperate. With Gernald dead, Exeget could not get Seri and Gerick out, and the odds of my living until I could find a way to do so were depressingly slim. If I were to die, Seri would likely live out her days in this vile place, and Gerick would become the instrument the Lords had long desired. And that was only if I died undiscovered. I could well imagine the unpleasantness if my identity became known.
So I could not die, and I could not be discovered, which meant I had to keep up my deception. The difficulty was that I didn’t know how long I could manage it, now I was myself again. I had no defense against Zhid compulsions. One misstep and they would have the truth out of me. And even more disturbing… I had to fight. I had to continue doing my best to kill whoever walked onto a training ground with me, and doubt that I would be capable of such an act consumed me.
For so many years I had believed that nothing… nothing… was worth taking a life, certainly not the preservation of my own life, and not even the preservation of the lives I cherished most. I had not yet come to terms with the dreadful consequences of my idealism, but on that night in the slave pen of Zhev’Na, I told myself that I no longer had the luxury of choice. I was fighting a war, and my son’s life was bound up with the safety of two worlds. I just didn’t know if that would be enough when next I faced a living man with a sword in my hand.
I could not sleep for thinking of Seri and Gerick and preparing myself for the morning. Daylight arrived far too soon. As always, I was led to the day’s sparring ground by the chain hooked to my collar. Gabdil again.
“These keepers insist that you can fight, slave. I don’t believe it.” The big man grinned and tossed me a two-handed great-sword-my favorite weapon. “I think you are Dar’Nethi vermin who plays at swords the same way your people play at sorcery. The Lords of Zhev’Na will teach you one discipline, and I will teach you the other.”
Anger stirred in my gut. No blank-eyed, unimaginative, misbegotten Zhid knew more of swordplay than the Prince of Avonar. I lifted the weapon up to the light, letting the sun glint along its shining edge, and then I pointed it at the empty eyes staring at me, as if to say “I’ll put it there,” and took my ready stance.