Guardians of the Keep: Book Two of the Bridge of D'Arnath (48 page)

and ash and seared stone. Air, stale and close. I believed I could reach out and touch walls on every

side. Cool, damp hands grasped my own, and a man whispered in my ear, close enough that I could feel

his warm breath. “Quickly, step forward. One moment ...” I stood in the hot, airless darkness for a

moment and felt the quivering boundary of the portal vanish. “You may remove your eye covering. You’ll

not see me again after this day.”

I yanked off the kerchief. The tiny, windowless room was lit by one candle. My companion pressed

his ear to a wooden door and then faced me. Wearing a well-tailored coat with a high collar, trimmed

with a great deal of gold, and knee breeches and hose of light tan, he was almost as large a man as

Gar’Dena, but a much harder man, who crowded the little room with his muscular presence. Yet, despite

his robust frame, his complexion was gray and unhealthy-looking, and the hollows of his eyes were dark

and sagging. My stomach tightened considerably when I saw that he wore the plain gold earring of the

Zhid and that his eyes were cold and empty as only those of a Zhid can be. He bowed. “Welcome to Ce

Uroth. This is quite a risk you take.”

“Perhaps not so much a risk as you take, sir.” To live as a Zhid, hiding one’s soul . . .

“But I have a great deal for which to make amends, which you do not, and I am accustomed to my

risks. Now to our business—”

From somewhere not far from this room where we spoke so politely intruded such a dreadful scream

that I thought it must be an animal at the slaughter. Such a notion was banished quickly when my host

bowed his head. “One thing at a time,” he whispered to himself, the cast of his skin even more sickly for

that moment.

Unwrapping a square of coarse brown cloth, he revealed a thumbnail-sized slip of stamped metal.

“The shipment of uncollared servants to Zhev’Na will occur at dawn. You will be added at the last

moment. This is your identification tag. You know of them?”

“Yes.” Gar’Dena had told me of the plain metal tag, fixed to one’s left ear like the earrings of the

Zhid, that carried a Drudge’s name and assigned duty, and the enchantments that compelled the servant’s

obedience.

“To attach it will cause only brief discomfort. Your tag will carry your identification and a false

enchantment— lacking any power of compulsion—but you understand that the least failure in obedience

on your part will be noted and quickly remedied?”

“I understand.” I said it calmly. But my fists did not unclench until the sting in my earlobe had dulled,

and I had proven to myself that I could still move and think as I wished.

A loud knock on the door made my host frown. He waved me into the deepest shadows in the

corner of the room. I crouched in as small a space as I could manage between two stacks of crates.

“Slavemaster Gernald?” called the intruder.

“What is it?” growled my companion, holding the candle in front of his chest and pulling the door

slightly open.

“Sir, Dujene has two more collars for this lot and wants to know if you intend to set the seals. He had

already sealed the first, when I told him of your desire to set more of them yourself.” I could not see the

speaker through the narrow opening of the door.

“Good.” The man snuffed the candle and set it on a stack of crates beside the door. “Yes, I want to

be there for all collarings until further notice. I’ve had too much work and too little pleasure lately. Nice

when one can experience both together.” He stepped out and closed the door behind him. The rattle and

snap of a hasp left me feeling not at all secure.

For half an hour or an hour I huddled in the dark room. It seemed to be a storage room for ledgers

and documents of various kinds. My anxieties were not soothed by the bone-chilling screams that

occurred twice more. Shortly after the second instance, I heard voices outside my hiding place. “Is that

all, Slavemaster?”

“I’ve no more need of you tonight. I plan to sup, to make one more attempt to find the records

Gensei Seto requested, and then to retire.”

“As you wish, Slavemaster.”

A door closed. Shortly thereafter, my own was unlocked and opened. The Zhid shoved a small flask

and a plate of meat, cheese, and bread into my hands. “I would recommend you eat this. You’ll get

nothing decent until your mission is complete.”

“Thank you.” I touched the small round loaf. It was cold and dry.

He lit the candle with a touch of his finger. “None but I have entry to this room. Nonetheless, I will

lock the door until I come for you in a few hours. Do you have the scarf to cover your hair? No female

servant is permitted to have uncovered hair.”

I pulled the red kerchief from my pocket. “I have it.”

“Don’t forget it. I wish you a safe night. May our work be the redemption of the worlds.” He didn’t

sound like a man who could have caused such screams as I had heard, but I suspected that he was.

Perhaps that accounted for the diseased look of him.

The door closed behind him again, the lock snapped, and I was abandoned in the pool of candlelight.

As I picked at the tasteless cheese and bread and sipped from the flask of warm ale, I imagined with a

twinge of jealousy how Paulo would curl up on the hard floor and be asleep in an instant. I didn’t know if

I would ever be able to sleep in Zhev’Na. Of course, as is often the case when sleep seems impossible,

at some point in that night, my mind let go and I drifted off. But some time later, when the key turned in

the lock again, I was on my feet, wide awake, before my host reappeared in the doorway.

“Quickly. Quietly. Follow me.” He led me through a large, bare room with a wide desk and a single

chair, and then through a dim passageway rife with unwholesome smells. Just outside a wooden door

fastened with a long bolt, he motioned me to be still. After a moment’s listening, he quietly guided the bolt

from its latch, cracked the door, and peered through. Beyond the door a goodly number of people were

murmuring and milling about. A harsh-voiced woman shouted for attention.

The Zhid closed the door, grabbed my arm, and drew me close. He held up three fingers and pointed

toward the door. I didn’t get his meaning until he motioned again, counting one finger and then two... .

When the third finger came up, he cracked the door open just wide enough to shove me through. I stood

at the rear of a line of fifteen or twenty rumpled, sleepy people moving slowly forward through a

cavernous room. All were dressed as I was.

Another, larger group of Drudges—perhaps fifty altogether—were being led through a wide door into

another room, prodded by three Zhid with long sticks who kept yelling at them to be quiet or he’d have

them eating sand for a week. Behind them a gaunt man, barefoot and wearing a short gray tunic, dragged

a wheeled sledge piled high with rough mud-bricks. The wide metal collar around his neck told me he

was a Dar’Nethi slave.

Near the head of the line in which I stood, three Zhid stood at a fuzzy discontinuity in the air that I

now recognized as a magical portal. One of the Zhid, a woman, questioned those in line and ticked off

items on a list. Another seemed to be matching the responses with the ear tag. A third Zhid laid his hand

on the head of every person before they passed through the portal. Hunting Dar’Nethi, certainly.

“Name and service,” snapped the woman writing the list to a hunched man in line ahead of me.

“Grigo, butcher.”

“Step through.”

“Name and service.”

“Mag, scrub.”

“Step through.”

“Name and service.”

“Eda, sewing.”

“Step through.”

And so I did and found myself at last in the heart of all my fears—Zhev’Na.

CHAPTER 28

I stepped from the portal into a barren courtyard: pounded red dirt surrounded on all sides by

buildings of dark stone or red mud-brick. Gray wisps of night lingered in the dim colonnade that marked

the east side of the yard, while the rising sun had already heated the broad square. Despite the heat, I

crowded together with the other drab, silent bodies, all of us shapeless in our brown tunics and black

skirts or baggy trousers.

The guard handed his list to a tall Zhid woman who announced herself to be Kargetha, a supervisor of

uncollared servants in the fortress. Kargetha clearly did not relish being saddled with twenty dull, sleepy

Drudges, and dispatched us to our duties as quickly as possible. Some were sent to the kitchens, others

to the stables or the smithy, herded along by Zhid assistants.

I was the last on the list, and by that time, Kargetha had no subordinates left to show me the way, so

with an ungracious poke of a sticklike finger, she pointed me toward a set of worn stone steps on the

north side of the courtyard. Down the steps and to the right was a low-ceilinged, windowless room with

pallets laid out on the floor—a dormitory where twenty or thirty people could sleep. The room was

stifling and smelled as if it had been neither cleaned nor aired since this part of the fortress was built, long

before the Catastrophe.

“This is your sleeping place. Leave your things.” I dropped the small bundle that Gernald had

provided me next to the grimy pallet Kargetha indicated. Then I followed her back up the steps and

across the courtyard toward the long mud-brick building backed up against a high wall. She led me

through one of the many open doorways into a crowded, wood-floored room. In the front of the room

stood a broad table, piled high with rolls of brown and gray cloth and stacks of flat, cut pieces of the

same. Two women dressed like me stood next to the table stitching the pieces into garments. At another

table, three more women were hemming a huge square of raw linen. Without any introductions, I was

assigned the fourth side of the square. “Do as they do.”

I picked up a needle from those stuck into the wood frame of the table, threaded it with cotton from a

large wooden roll, and began to fold the edge and stitch as the others were doing. Kargetha spent the

rest of the morning at my shoulder, ripping out stitches that she judged too large or too uneven or too

crooked. She was very particular and demonstrated her displeasure by rapping a short stick across my

knuckles.

As the morning passed, the sewing room grew hot and stank with the sweat of the women. Kargetha

decided she’d seen enough. “You’re slow and incompetent,” she said with a snort. “I don’t know how

you’ve survived this long. You’d best improve your skills or you’ll be sent into the desert for hunting

practice. Here”—she nudged me toward another of the women—“that’s Zoe. Do as she says.”

Zoe was an older woman with broken yellow teeth and mottled skin. She and the other Drudges

wore the faces of brutalized women everywhere: old beyond their years, worn and battered by filth and

poor food, eyes holding little intelligence and no hope. Once Kargetha had gone, the women began to

talk quietly as they worked, mostly about the heat, and the dullness of the needles, and the coarseness of

the thread with which they were expected to do decent work. Unlike the Dar’Nethi slaves, Drudges

were permitted to speak without asking permission.

Zoe, being in charge of the group, took it on herself to question me about how I had come to be sent

to Zhev’Na. She nodded sagely as I finished my story. “Aye, there’s a deal of us here as have lost a

mate or three in the camps.” Zoe pointed her needle at a younger, slack-lipped woman.

“Dia’s whole village was hit and burned for a testing. She was gone to midwife a cousin and come

back to her village to find everyone dead, her mate and offspring and all. So it goes.”

“How awful,” I said, horrified. “Your children ... all of them?”

The slack-mouthed girl shrugged. “Aye. There was five, six of ‘em ... I don’t know. Who ever knows

how many there are? I’ll get more if the Worships say it.”

Several of the women had similar stories. No one seemed particularly bothered, even about losing

their children. My strong reaction seemed to unsettle them far more than their own horrific tales. I took

the warning, and from then on did my best to keep my feelings controlled and my expression like theirs. I

let them ask all the questions they wanted, which were not very many, but for the time, I asked no more

of my own except about the work.

In the middle of the day a blank-faced girl carried in a tin pail and a cloth bag. Each of us took a

wooden bowl from a stack of them in the corner and filled it with dark brown ale from the pail. Then we

each took a piece of bread from the bag. In scarcely time enough to cram the bread down, gulp down

the tepid ale, and throw the wooden bowl back on the stack, we were back at work. I thought we might

stop when the light faded, but lamps were lit, and we sewed for two hours more. By the time Kargetha

returned to review our day’s work, my fingers were sore, my feet throbbing, and my eyes blurry. We

filled our wooden bowls from a pail of thin soup. I did as the others, swabbing out my bowl with my hunk

of bread, and then refilling it with ale from a second pail set by the door. While we ate and drank and

stacked our bowls back in the corner, the Zhid woman inspected every piece of our work. Only after she

gave her approval were we dismissed to the dormitory.

The women mostly fell on their pallets still dressed, joining others whose snoring rattled the low roof