“Three nomas,” Lasa declared. “Take it or leave it.”
“Fine.”
He dropped three silver coins into Darotha’s palm. The woman squirreled them away. “This man is in charge of you, Maggie. You be a good girl and obey him. I’m leaving now.”
I raised my hand and gave her a small wave.
“Follow me,” Derog told me.
I followed him and Lasa through the door into a large, well-lit hallway.
“Ciskan?” Lasa asked.
“Mhm,” Derog said.
“I’ll make the arrangements. Talpot is waiting for you in the pen, as you ordered.”
We kept walking.
Ciskan was an auldor, a minor aristocrat, the lowest rank of Kair Toren’s civilian nobility. It went king, duke, margrave or earl, baron, and everything below was an auldor. Some auldors had riches and land, others barely scraped by. Ciskan owned a thriving winery. He was wealthy, reclusive, and odd, and he had a crippling phobia of bad teeth. His fear was so severe that even something minor, like a gap or slightly crooked tooth, sparked an anxiety attack. One time he was forced to carry on a conversation with a man whose teeth had turned black from decay. After five minutes Ciskan fainted, fell down the stairs, and had to be treated for a concussion and a broken arm.
Derog had been supplying Ciskan with dentally sound slaves for the last seven years. Unfortunately for the two of them, Derog obtained slaves in two ways: by kidnapping them or buying them from desperate families. Both methods targeted the poor, and finding an award-winning smile among malnourished children was very rare. But I had enjoyed the benefits of twenty-first-century dentistry. All those years of high school braces had given me an Instagram smile, and my mouth was a poem in enamel to Crest 3D White. To Derog, I was a sure way to make a significant profit.
We turned the corner and stopped before a heavy wooden double door in the wall on our right. Lasa removed the inch-thick metal bar securing it and held it open. A stone staircase led down, and I could see a small section of brightly lit stone floor.
A long bloody smear stretched across the left wall as if a heavily bleeding person had leaned onto it, tried to climb the stairs, and then slid down. The blood was old and brown. There was so much blood. Someone had died here.
I want out. Let me out.
Derog started down. I had to follow.
It would be fine. I would just count the steps and not look at the blood.One, two . . .
Behind us, Lasa shut the door and caught up. I was so on edge, I could feel him behind me. I knew exactly where he was without looking.
Twenty-two.We had run out of stairs.
Derog turned to the left and I made myself mirror his movement. A large room stretched in front of us, illuminated by wall lanterns shielded with metal cages. Wooden double bunks lined the walls. Directly opposite us, a doorway allowed a glimpse of a latrine, sectioned off from the rest of the room by an interior wall. To the right of it, a big wooden door, reinforced with iron strips, loomed in the wall. The entrance to the escape tunnel.
Five children huddled together in the middle of the floor, standing as close to each other as they could. A dark-haired boy of eleven or twelve, and four girls, three under seven and one teenager, probably sixteen or seventeen, wrapping her arms around the younger kids. All clean, all dressed in identical plain, undyed linen outfits like prisoners, and all, except for the boy, wearing identical frozen expressions on their faces.
Another boy, blond and sturdy, slumped against the bunks on the right side. His eyes were shut. Blood drenched his shirt and spread in a puddle on the stone floor. A big puddle. Oh no.
Two men flanked the kids, one older, with a sparse, dark beard and a shaved head. The other was younger, in his early twenties, pale, tall, and beefy, built like a defensive lineman. There was a faint echo of Derog in his face, in his hooded eyes and the shape of his brow, but his features were softer, less defined. That had to be Talpot, Derog’s nephew.
Derog looked at the injured boy, then looked at Talpot. The slow-moving hamster wheel that powered Talpot’s brain turned a couple of times. He held himself straighter.
“The first goal of a business is profit,” Derog said. “There are other goals. Growth, client retention. But all of them are driven by profit.”
Talpot relaxed slightly, probably thinking it was a lecture. A mistake.
“To sustain profit, one must have quality merchandise. What did you do with my merchandise, you shit smear?”
Talpot opened his mouth.
“You broke it.” Derog’s voice snapped like a whip.
Everyone in the room flinched, except me. I was too petrified, so I just stood there, staring straight ahead like a mannequin.
