I didn’t bother watching; there are no more lessons I can learn by seeing men die. Instead I looked at the other windows in the tall blocks ranged around the courtyard. The bottommost levels were evidently cells of the kind I’d woken up in; gaunt and filthy faces with matted hair were pressed to the bars, too many all too eager to see the spectacle. At the higher levels, men and women in decent garb looked down, some reluctantly, some with horrified fascination. I wondered how much they were paying for decent food and cleanliness; probably more than they would had they been lodging in the costliest inn the city boasted.
As soon as the guards allowed us, I returned to my pallet.
“What did he do?” one of the others asked, rubbing a hand over his ashen face.
The guard scowled. “Raped and murdered little girls.”
I was pleased to see everyone in the room grimace or spit with honest revulsion; perhaps it would be safe to risk going to sleep in here after all.
By the time evening came I was bored out of my mind. I’d tried doing some basic stretches to loosen up my bruised limbs but that attracted everyone’s attention, so I soon stopped. I ate the rest of the bread and cheese, reasoning it would probably be stolen while I slept if I didn’t. The window faced west, so we caught the last of the sunlight as the rain clouds passed and I watched the black shadows of the bars slowly crawl across the chipped and stained plaster as I dozed. I can’t have gone to sleep so early since the summer evenings when my mother would herd Mistal, Kitria and myself to our beds as we all protested that it was still light and it wasn’t fair, why were Hansey and Ridner allowed to stay up?
I woke in the dawn cool of the following morning with a nagging sense that something was not quite right. With a sudden shock I realized the coughing had stopped. Sitting sharply upright, I looked over to see one of the sick men lying rigid and silent, his glazed eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, lips blackened in an ashen face. His companion was prostrate opposite, skin pale and tainted with blue, his chest still moving slightly, a pulse hammering in his neck as the breath bubbled moistly in his lungs.
My abrupt movement had woken a couple of the others; one went to hammer on the door and bellow for the turnkey. When two surly jailers arrived, they dragged the corpse and the sick man away, treating both with equal indifference and leaving the stained pallets behind. I shuddered and hoped that no one had died on mine recently, certainly not of anything contagious.
If anything, that day was harder to endure than the first. I’ve never taken well to inactivity and although I continued to tell myself not to let it rile me—that Dastennin sends fish to the patient, anyway, that I’d been in worse places than this—it was all wearing a little thin by the end of the day. The only worse place I could think of was the Elietimm dungeon and at least I’d had people I could talk to in there, Aiten’s support, Shiv’s magic and Livak’s talents with locks as a basis for plans for escape. That started me thinking about the others, hoping they had some plan to secure my purchase at the auction, worrying in case the Elietimm had made some move while I was stuck in here. I finally concluded that what I hated most about my current situation was not the place I found myself in but the fact that I was having to rely on other people to get me out. That realization did nothing to improve my mood.
I was trying to remember all the verses to one of those interminable Soluran ballads about some brainless noble rescuing an idiot girl with more hair than wit when the door swung open to reveal a couple of guards and a well-dressed man with a ledger under one arm and in the other hand a pomander that he kept lifted to his nostrils. I envied him that more than his well-polished boots. The bookkeeper looked around the room and then started with the closest to the door, which happened to be me. Looking me up and down, he nodded to the nearest guard.
“Strip him.”
I ripped off my shirt and breeches myself, giving the guard a warning glare and trying to tuck Mellitha’s coin under the clothes unseen. The man with the pomander scrutinized me closely from head to toe and then nodded again; this time the guard seized my jaw and held it down so the man could see my teeth. The turnkey’s hand stank and I swallowed against an urge to gag, opening my mouth wide so the bastard wouldn’t have a reason to put a filthy finger in my mouth. If he had I’d probably have bitten it off, whatever it cost me.
The clerk counted my teeth, nodded, made a note in his ledger and then looked me in the eye.
“Do you have any skills?” he asked in passable Tormalin.
I wondered quickly what to say for the best; I didn’t want to push my price up too high for Mellitha, but equally I didn’t fancy being sold as part of a yoke of ten field slaves to the first bidder.
“Swordsman,” I said firmly.
He shrugged, made another note and moved on to the next man. I won a warning glare from the turnkey as I reached for my clothes, so I simply sat down to wait and see what would happen next, listening as the bookkeeper went around the room. It seemed I was in the company of a couple of dockers, a mercer’s runner, a clerk, two rent collectors, a potter and a stockman. Dastennin only knows how they had ended up here. With this interrogation complete, we were herded, still naked, out of our cell and down to the end of a long line of other unfortunates waiting to enter a long, low building at the far end of the compound. A second line was forming, evidently drawn from the female cells, which made the wait a little less tedious. I felt sorry for some of the women, probably here through no fault of their own, vainly trying to cover their nakedness with hands and hair, often with children clinging to their thighs, eyes hollow with distress. Others had clearly been through this before, challenging the men with bold stares, pointing and giggling, hand gestures leaving little of their conversation to the imagination. One bold piece caught my eye and gave me a long, slow wink, but I caught sight of the brand on her palm marking her as a whore who stole from her customers so she didn’t get a response from me.
The line moved on. We were shoved through a door by guards with ungentle clubs. I found myself facing a long, deep bath, for all the world like the one on Messire’s hill country estate that they use for washing the sheep. The guards were using their staves like shepherd’s staffs, so I jumped in rather than wait to be pushed. The water was scummy and foul with soiled straw but I didn’t care, scrubbing at myself to get the worst of the filth off, ignoring the sting of my cuts and grazes that were now joined by numerous bites from nameless vermin. Emerging at the far end, a man in a long tunic forced me on to a bench with impersonal hands and took a pair of clippers to my head. All in all, I now had a fair idea of what it felt like to be a ram being readied for market.
The air was cold on my shorn scalp as we were herded through another door. It was one way of getting a haircut for free, but on balance I would rather have paid the coin to a barber and had a decent shave into the bargain. I rubbed a hand over the bristles on my chin, now at the aggravating stage where they were both sharp and itchy, and I doubted my own mother would recognize me at that moment.
Stock brought down off the mountains for sale at home gets cleaned if it’s lucky, then it gets weighed while the water in the wool is still adding to the burden. The Relshazri evidently worked the same way; this line moved slowly toward the kind of balance I was used to see weighing sacks on at the harbor side. A couple of men were manhandling the hefty bullion weights on and off the scales while another checked the arithmetic, consulted a ledger and scrawled something on to labels, which were tied around the neck of each piece of merchandise. I tried to squint at mine but it was tied too short, tucked under my chin. For some reason I found that irritating me more than anything else that had happened so far.