Dragonback 03 Dragon and Slave (13 page)

Jack clutched at the hand wrapped around his neck, gasping for
breath. He tried to say something—to plead, to apologize, to say
anything
.
But he couldn't get any words out past that grip. Maybe the Brummga was
too drunk to know what he was doing.

He looked around frantically, as least as far around as he could
with his head held this way. If someone else was paying attention to
what was happening here—if he could just signal that the drunken
Brummga was in danger of killing a valuable slave.

They
were
watching. They were watching, and laughing, and
cheering their drunken friend on.

And with that the message finally got through. The message that
the berry-picking and the slave colony and even the hotbox hadn't been
able to teach him.

No one cared about him here. No one cared if he was happy or
hungry, or whether he lived or died. He was a slave. He was property.
He was a child's toy.

And if he got broken, well, Her Thumbleness would just go back out
through the thorn hedge to the toy store and pick out something else.
White spots were beginning to dance in front of Jack's eyes—

And then, suddenly, his vision cleared. The awful pressure on his
throat was gone, and he could breathe again.

He blinked with confusion. The pressure was gone, but he was still
dangling by his neck in the Brummga's grip, with the Brummga still
shouting thickly at him.

No pressure . . . but he was still hanging?

And then he felt a subtle change at his throat; and all at once he
understood. He could breathe because the Brummga was no longer holding
his neck, at least not directly. Draycos had moved part of himself
underneath the alien's hand and risen up from Jack's skin. Not much,
but enough to take the pressure of that hand onto himself.

"She tell you perform," the Brummga shouted into his face. "Do you
perform
now
."

With a contemptuous shove, he tossed Jack backward. Jack hit the
floor, flailing a little for balance as he landed. As he did so he felt
Draycos pull away from his neck, retreating back beneath the harlequin
tunic. Hopefully, no one had spotted the dragon's gold scales before
he'd gotten out of sight.

"Perform, right," he said, turning back to the children's table
and scooping up three of the items from the vegetable bowl. They looked
like the potato-things he'd juggled for Greb and Grib, only bigger. A
higher-quality food than they gave the slaves, no doubt. He tossed one
of the potatoes into the air—

A heavy hand slapped against the side of his head, knocking him
flat onto the floor. He caught a glimpse of the potato he'd tossed
rolling under the table as he dropped the other two beside him. "Do you
deaf, human?" the drunken Brummga screamed. "She tell you
perform
.
Not eat. Perform."

"I
was
performing," Jack protested, rolling over onto his
back and pushing himself up onto his arms into an almost-sitting
position. "I needed—"

He saw the foot coming, but there was no time to do anything but
get ready for the impact. The kick slammed a glancing blow onto his
left shoulder, and he rolled with it, spinning around nearly onto his
stomach in the process.

"I
was
performing," he repeated, scrambling back around
onto his back again. His leg swiveled around as he did so, his left
foot catching the bottom of the tablecloth and sliding underneath it.

And as it did so, he felt a sudden ripping of the tights at his
ankle. There was a surge of weight there—

And Draycos was gone.

Jack looked up at the Brummga standing over him, a tangle of
conflicting emotions swirling through him. He'd been wrong: there was
indeed one person in the room who cared whether he lived or died.
Draycos, poet-warrior of the K'da, was loose and ready to protect him
from this murderous slab of meat.

But rolling in right behind that thought came the deeper reality
of the situation. Draycos couldn't risk his mission and the lives of
his people for Jack this way. Even if he took out this one Brummga,
there were way too many others in the room for him to handle.

Had he gotten so caught up in these senseless attacks on Jack that
he wasn't thinking straight?

And then, even as his racing mind tried to sort out what to do, he
felt something tug at the sole of his shoe. A dragon's claw, digging
deftly into the thick rubber there.

Into the secret compartment where Jack's spare comm clip was
hidden.

That fact had just enough time to register before the drunken
Brummga grabbed his arm and hauled him up onto his feet again. "Now you
perform," he repeated, shaking Jack back and forth and then shoving him
back against the edge of the table. "Not eat. Not throw. Perform."

"Certainly, sir, at once," Jack promised. "Let me just put the
food back first."

Before the Brummga could object, he dropped to his knees. Grabbing
the two visible potatoes with his left hand, he stuck his right arm
under the tablecloth where the third one had disappeared. He just hoped
Draycos hadn't kicked it somewhere else.

He hadn't. The potato was right where he'd expected it to be.

And as his hand closed around the escaped vegetable, he felt the
cool metal of the comm clip against his palm. Draycos, anticipating him
perfectly, had balanced the device right on top of the potato.

The Brummga behind him was rumbling warningly. "I've got it," Jack
assured him quickly as Draycos melted onto his hand and slithered up
his sleeve. "See?" he added as he stood up, palming the comm clip and
showing the potato to the drunken Brummga. "Let me show you."

He turned back to the table and replaced the vegetables. The
children, he noted without surprise, were watching the whole thing with
excited glee. They were here to eat, and to play, and to be entertained.

And whether Her Thumbleness's new toy did magic tricks for them,
or whether he simply got himself beaten to a pulp in front of them,
they would be happy. A show was a show, after all.

"Now, let's see," he said, rubbing his neck where the Brummga had
been squeezing. Under cover of the movement, he attached the comm clip
to the inside of his harlequin tunic and clicked it on. "
Brolach-ah
mischt heeh simt
, was it?"

" 'Do the under-the-cup trick now,' " Uncle Virge's voice murmured
in his ear.

Jack grimaced. So that was what she'd wanted. No wonder his
attempt to juggle had gone flat. "Right," he said briskly. "One
under-the-cup trick, coming right up."

Gathering together three empty glasses, he snagged an acorn-sized
nut from a bowl on the table and slipped it under one of the glasses.
"Now watch very carefully—"

He did the trick twice, both times to the great and loud amusement
of Her Thumbleness and the other Brummgan children. "
Crastni miu
simt cumos alekx
," Her Thumbleness said when he'd finished, banging
her spoon on the table.

" 'You may now juggle for me,' " Uncle Virge translated.

Jack sighed to himself.
Now
he could juggle. She could
have had the same thing three minutes earlier and saved him a beating
in the process. But no. What Her Thumbleness wanted, how she wanted it,
when she wanted it, and nothing else.

"Yes, Your Thumbleness," he said, setting aside the glasses and
again picking up the three potatoes.

It was going to be a very long night.

The night turned out to be a lot longer than he'd expected.

Earlier, he'd been surprised that the whole Chookoock family
seemed to have dropped in for dinner. Now, with Uncle Virge's running
translation, he was able to catch enough bits and pieces of
conversation to figure out what was actually going on.

It was, it seemed, Her Thumbleness's High Day.

He never did nail down whether it was her birthday, or some other
kind of anniversary, or even just the day they all celebrated her
favorite color. Whatever it was, though, it was a big deal around the
Chookoock household.

And Her Thumbleness was playing it for all it was worth. After
dinner came a huge dessert that looked like a sentence of death by
chocolate and ground-up tree bark. Apparently, the idea was to make as
much of a mess as possible while eating it. Her Thumbleness and her
friends did that part very well.

After that came game time, with the chocolate-smeared children and
a few of the adults gathering in an underground room about the size of
a regulation basketball court. The games generated nearly as much noise
as the whole crowd upstairs had been able to produce, with the added
feature of bone-crunching thuds and wallops as the kids ran into each
other.

They played a number of different games, with a whole range of
different types of balls. The nearest Jack got to figuring out the
rules to any of them was that whenever one Brummga had a chance to run
into another one, he did so.

That, and whenever Her Thumbleness came to the sidelines for a
break her new court jester had better have a trick or something ready
to amuse her.

Under the circumstances, it was impossible for him to slip away to
go computer hunting. Standing at the sidelines, listening to a couple
of the adults breathing loudly behind him, he wondered if the party
girl was ever going to run out of steam.

He thought that moment had finally come when the children dropped
their balls and disks and toss-bladders in the middle of the court and
all came jogging back to the sidelines. But no such luck. After the
games, apparently, Her Thumbleness had scheduled a sleepover with
several of her closer friends.

They headed upstairs again, jabbering away in a dozen different
conversations. Jack trudged along behind them, bone-tired but trying
hard not to show it. If Her Thumbleness's new toy didn't work the way
she wanted it to, she would almost certainly send it back, and he
couldn't afford that.

Besides, even a Brummgan kid on a massive sugar high couldn't keep
up this pace forever. Eventually, she and her friends would have to
give up on the fun and frolic and get some sleep.

Eventually, they did, winding down their chattering and boardcomp
games and collapsing one by one onto the heavy mats that had been set
up for them in Her Thumbleness's bedroom suite. But by the time the
girl dismissed Jack with a lazy wave of her hand, the sky to the east
was starting to glow red. The rest of the slave staff was already hard
at work downstairs, cooking breakfast and preparing the house for their
masters' day.

And it wasn't just the slaves who were on the move, either. Some
of the Brummgas and their staff were stirring, as well. Even as Jack
headed along the side of the large entryway toward the stairs to the
slave quarters, he caught a glimpse of Gazen going into an office on
the far side of the chamber.

Luckily, Gazen didn't see him. But any hopes Jack might still have
had of trying to get to the computers ended right there. Wandering
slaves he might be willing to risk. A wandering Gazen he wasn't.

"Well, that was fun," he commented tiredly as he closed the door
of his tiny room and dropped onto the bed. "Wasn't that fun, everybody?"

"What exactly are you
doing
, lad?" Uncle Virge demanded.
"Some kind of marathon magic show?"

"Pretty close," Jack admitted, wincing as he bent his left leg up
to get to his shoe. After all those hours on his feet, his knees were
as stiff as a customs official's glare.

With a burst of gold scales, Draycos leaped out of his collar and
landed on the narrow strip of floor beside the bed. "May I help?" he
asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began unfastening Jack's shoes.

"Thanks," Jack said, letting his leg go flat again.

"It is the least I can do," Draycos said, getting the first shoe
off and setting it down on the floor. "I have been of little aid to you
so far."

"You certainly have," Jack assured him. "If you hadn't gotten the
comm clip out when you did—" He shook his head.

"What do you mean?" Uncle Virge asked suspiciously. "What's been
happening?"

"The Brummgas treat their slaves like low-grade costume jewelry,"
Jack told him. "If the slaves don't understand what they're saying,
they treat them like punching bags."

Uncle Virge muttered something nasty under his breath. "Are you
all right, lad?"

"I'm fine," Jack assured him, wiggling his toes as Draycos got the
other shoe off. "It was really only the one Brummga at the dinner, and
he was too drunk to really hit straight. Mostly, I've just been run off
my feet."

"And there has been no opportunity yet to locate the computers,"
Draycos added.

"But I
am
in the house," Jack pointed out. "That's
definitely progress." He yawned widely. "I'd better get some sleep
while I can, though. Her Thumbleness will probably want me to brush her
teeth for her when she wakes up."

Uncle Virge sighed softly. "All right, lad," he said. "Pleasant
dreams."

Jack clicked off the comm clip and turned his head to look at
Draycos. The dragon was pacing the floor, his back arched and
uncomfortable looking. "You coming aboard?" he asked.

"I think I will remain out for a while," Draycos said.

Jack frowned. Offhand, he couldn't remember ever seeing the dragon
quite this twitchy. "What's wrong?"

Draycos paused in his pacing. His long neck twisted toward Jack,
then turned away. "I am all right," he muttered.

"Sure you are," Jack said, studying him. "Come on, what's the
problem? Her Thumbleness getting to you or something?"

Reluctantly, he thought, Draycos came to a halt. "It is not her,"
he said. "It is this place. It is all of this place." His tongue
slashed out in emphasis. "I am sorry."

"Sorry for what?" Jack asked. "I don't like it much, either."