Page 65 of Elvenbred

He laughed, clearly enjoying the moment. “A bit more than ten eight-days actually. Roughly eighty-odd days here.” He paused, clearly relishing his next words. He delivered each singly, for maximum effect. “Eight hundred days for you, however, when it comes to your home-world.”

She stared at him, confused. His broad, satisfied smile and the obvious joy he took in telling her wiped away any doubt of his truthfulness. “Time moves differently here than there; by my calculations, you’ve been gone years. So, I very seriously doubt your elven lord friends will let that fat pigeon you call an estate set long before it’s snapped up. Three of your ten-days, maybe four … and after that the questions will start. Where is the lord? Who is minding the estate in the meantime? Will it require an occupying force, or merely some well-placed bribes to take it?” He raised an eyebrow …. “And who is going to stand up for you? No husband. No sons. No kin at all that wouldn’t just grab it for themselves. Not even a reliable lover.”

Triana lowered her head, and stared at her hands. He was right. Damn him. She didn’t think to doubt his words. His pleasure in telling her had been too obvious to doubt him. She closed her eyes and felt hot tears under her lashes. Long before she had started to worry, she’d already lost everything. If one of her rivals hadn’t already taken all she had once owned, the human ex-slaves and their rebellious elven allies would have fought or subverted their way into possession. Her estate, and what it represented was gone. Everything she was, all that it meant for her to be her, all she was … had been wiped away. Her throat tightened and she fought against sobs. She would not show him that weakness. It was the only tiny victory she could have against him. “You’ve won. Why not let me go?”

“Good question. As you have already determined,” he answered. “You have learned as much from my questions as I have from your answers. You know what I plan, what I’m going to do. Sending you back would let you warn your friends.”

She laughed bitterly. “I’m a lord. I don’t have friends.”

“No, you don’t. And your kind doesn’t. When I … we … come at them, each will look to his own house, and leave the others to bear the brunt. We’ll take them one at a time, with eachelven lord eager to deal, so the firelance strikes someone else.” He laughed again. “And you aren’t a … lord … anymore. By your rights you need an estate for that … and that is, doubtless … gone.” He paused. “It’s too bad, really. In a different world we could have reached an accommodation. Been my emissary. Served me in delivering up those you despise. But, you chose to betray my trust and damage my interests. You proved I cannot trust you with even the smallest amount of self-determination. And so, you are here.”

He stood from the table, gathering up his pacers. “Now, you are nothing now but a thief, who has stolen from her master, and from whom I may extract labor until I am repaid in full. Your little stunt in the production room has cost me more than you can repay in, well, what remains of your life. And if I cannot have back the wealth you have cost me, then I shall enjoy watching you wither, unless the Beast squashes you to jelly first.”

“Beast?” she asked.

“Yes, Beast,” he answered. “It’s a feral monster. Mistreated, even before I got it … and my people haven’t been kind. Hates its keepers. Squashes them flat. Last one lasted three-ish eight-days. He’s a bloody smear now.”

The cold anger in his voice caused Triana to raise her head and look him full in the face. His expression remained hard and unyielding. He took a deep breath. “A person, a retainer of mine died, Triana, for what you did. Someone who was a thousand percent more useful to me than you are. She fell on the stairs, got trampled, and she died. Because of your little tantrum. I had to pay the geld for that, on top of a week’s lost production. You are an animal, with no control over yourself, no control over your magic, and no control over your temper. And a good person is dead because of it. Because of you.”

Triana waited, silent, still meeting his eye.

Triana looked up at him. A flare of her old spirit surged. “Nice speech. Did you practice it?”

What followed was very nearly worth the expression on his face. Nearly. He touched the rod, and she went to sleep. For a very, very long time. The nightmares started at once, first merely bad. Then they escalated from there.

When they woke her, she sat in the same chair. She felt thirsty, as though she had not had a drink for days. The Overseer sat across the table from her.

“Touch your throat.” She did as she was bid, and felt a thin metal collar around her neck, and just below the sleeping-collar. This one was a thinner bronze, and sealed tightly. She used her fingers to feel around its edge. The Overseer touched a button on the control and she felt a heat that rose until it felt near to burning before it cooled.

“It’s a prisoner-collar,” he said. “It will cancel magic you try, and will choke you if you try and spellcast. My lord tells me you use these all the time in your world, so you’ll be quite familiar with them. Once it’s cooled, it’s bonded to you.”

Haldeen entered at that point. The Overseer stood and passed him the control rod. “As someone who kept slaves, Triana, you should understand that is your state … in fact, if not in law. You are a slave. My slave. I’ve never had one before, and given how you’ve treated yours … how you bragged about treating yours to Nora … you should understand the rough justice.”

He departed, closing the heavy door after him. The lock snapped back into place.

She wasn’t sure how long he left her there, or whether she dozed, but the key turning in the lock roused her. She looked up, saw the Overseer had the control wand. She opened her mouth to beg him not to use it, but the lassitude overcame her. Her eyes shut of their own accord, and she descended into hell.

When she awoke, she was facedown on the stone floor, with a knee pressed into her back. She tried to struggle.

“Enough of that, girl,” she heard Vaylan say. “You go along, we’ll get along. Otherwise, I have an elf with a truncheon and an attitude, who will be more than happy to beat you into the next eight-day. Understand? Hold still, now.”

Triana dipped her head, hoping the gesture showed.

She felt the sleeping-collar loosen and be removed, leaving the other intact around her next.

The elves quickly put the arm shackles on and raised her to her feet. One slid a bag over her head. They did nothing to keep her from stumbling or knocking into corners and walls as they shoved her down corridors for an interminable length of time. It got so bad that she was beginning to wonder if there was a single scrap of her skin that was unbruised. They intervened only to keep her from falling, until they stopped descending, followed by the opening of a heavy door, and a clanging of barred doors. One looped the truncheon around her upper arm, putting tension on it that kept her compliant, while the other removed the shackles. A final shove sent her staggering into an open space, and she heard the heavy barred door slam behind her. She waited for several heartbeats, hearing nothing in the room, but sensing a large, heat-radiating presence, before pulling the bag off her head to see just where she’d been put now.

She took a quick glance around, blinking against the brightness of the room. She stood in some sort of cage or cell, perhaps twenty paces across, with bronze bars wider than her thumb. The room seemed to be one of a series of these large metal cells, with a broad aisle down the center. Some kind of stable? For dragons? She’d never seen one, but the size felt a bit right based on descriptions. Her attention centered on something she at first took for a house-sized boulder. It seemed less round than oblong, like a loaf of uncut bread (and that thought just made her stomach growl and protest), greenish-gray above and shifting to a light gray with striations and tiny seams that glittered. The whole surface looked smooth and pearlescent, except where marred by five metal rods driven into it at intervals along the top, and set in a rough circle. She could see the cracks in the outer surface where they had been driven in, and some kind of excrescence around the bases of the rods. She looked at it for a long moment, trying to work out what it was, when it moved.

She jumped back, letting out a startled oath as it shifted a bit and turned. She heard a harsh laugh behind her and turned. The Overseer stood on the far side of the bars, well out of her reach, backed by a pair of nervous guards. She looked from them, to the bars, and back. They had those bars between them and it, and they were still nervous. She swallowed involuntarily. Where had they put her?

The Overseer grinned then, a feral smile. He held what looked like an oversized control rod dangling negligently from his left hand. “Welcome to the Beast Cage. Your predecessor lasted three eight-days. We washed what was left of him down the drain yesterday morning because the Beast didn’t eat him.” He pointed with his control rod to a metal drain set to one side of the cage. She had seen similar arrangements for animal cages for the fighting beasts on her world. Water under pressure, delivered through some kind of hose to wash down the floor and sluice the waste down a drain. She glanced up, and saw a pipe with a simple pull tap and rope to pour water. An animal cage. With a rock.

“What do I do?” she asked, careful to not look at it.

He smiled broadly. “You shovel shit.” He made a gesture, and a guard came forward to slide a square, flat shovel into the cage, well out of her reach. “Not many animals left in the city, but we get all the used straw and waste. It comes down that chute there … don’t worry about trying to climb up and out it … it’s been tried. Repeatedly. You get hung up in the spinning gears that keep the manure moving. It’s not even worth trying to get the bodies out, so we just let them rot, and they wind up back here once they fall apart enough. There is still part of one up there from several eight-days or so ago. At some point what’s left will put in an appearance.”

The Overseer lifted his index finger and made a swirling gesture before he pointed to a wooden hopper under the chute. “That’s where the manure falls. You take that shovel and spread it around near where It is. It eats it or something. We don’t know. When It’s moved on, you take the gray ash it leaves behind, and put it in this box here.” He pointed to a square wooden box just wide enough for the shovel blade to fit in. “Fill that box, get a ration. The more it moves the more manure you spread, the more ash you make, the more you eat. Simple enough that even you can understand it.”