Rift in the Races (58 page)

She remembered how she’d felt when the guard had thrown that slip of silk at her. How vulnerable it made her feel, how helpless. How so much of what she believed about herself, about life, about everything, was a lie. It all was. Civility. Law. Discipline. It was all a joke. It could all be taken away quick as a snap. There was no such thing as “safe.” No such thing as security or strength. Fairness. Justice. Anything. It was all lies. All temporary. The wet paper of soggy nothingness.

Look how easily they’d taken Tytamon. The greatest magician in a thousand years or more, Altin said. The greatest ever, many others would say. And just like that, he was gone. Stabbed in the back by a fat shopkeeper without so much as one muttered spell. An aged-out whore had done to him what a legion of orcs could not. And then he’d been thrown to the hogs like slop.

And what of her, she thought. What of the great Orli Pewter. The great “Lady Orli Pewter, First Ambassador from Earth and Advisor to the Queen, communications officer of the warship
Aspect
, creator of the cure and heroine of the Hostile War, ” blah blah fucking blah. She could hear the echo of those titles being pronounced through the corridors of memory, the herald’s perfect enunciation now mocking her. Heroine. Lady. Ambassador. What a joke. What a pathetic, laughable joke that was. She was a joke. Just a bit of meat for sale in some great butcher’s shop. To be abused, appeasing the base lust of some animal. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Nothing.

Nothing.

No one was coming for her.

She looked up into the sky, the ocean breeze keeping it swept clean of encroaching clouds. No moon tonight. Just stars. She wondered if they were all dead out there. If she were the only one left.

The auction began, but for Orli, the first hour of it was little more than a haze of dogged memories. She somehow detached herself from it when it began, went through it in a half-conscious malaise, a poisoned dream. The shadowy faces of the men below, their greasy foreheads and booze-flushed cheeks, the round black
O’s
of their mouths shaping the sound of their rapture, their approval of this bid for this creature and outrage at that bid for that one.

She saw the orc woman led up onto the dais. Watched her being paraded around. The man handling her, leading her around the great wooden stage, stripped her naked before hauling her up onto it, leaving her wearing nothing but her manacles and a bit of twine around her neck from which dangled a flat wooden pendant with the number nine scrawled upon it. Just that. No fancy dress for her. No corset, camisole or filthy petticoats. Just the pendant. Orli absently wondered why. Why no nice wrapper for the orcish treat? No garnish for the meat.

The crowd rippled like a windblown prairie as the orc woman was paraded around. The handler kneaded her body provocatively with his filthy groping hands, slapped her crudely to augment the display. He tossed the big pendant over her shoulder so that it wouldn’t block the view. The crowd roared. The bids went up and up, the ale flowed, the wine was guzzled and sloshed, and eventually the woman sold. Someone in the crowd bought her. An orc woman. A woman. A slave. Or worse.

A bookish fellow in a brown robe ran to the ten-foot tower and waited for the tiny little man seated up in it to send down the basket that had been affixed to the rope. The gnomish figure wound it down as if he were getting water from a well. The robed man pulled out a bit of parchment and a round object that had the number nine written on either side. Orli assumed the paper and the disc were the records and details of the orc woman’s sale.

She looked down at her filthy mismatched gown. She didn’t have a number. Where was her number? How far away was she from going up for sale?

She looked down the row of cages to her left and right. Each had a number hanging on the outside. Fifty-six to her left. Fifty-eight on the right.

This was going to be a long night.

Chapter 40

O
rli watched the slave auction, or the livestock auction—it was hard to say exactly which it was as it seemed that many of the creatures being sold could not possibly have any value as a slave. The small satyr for example, he was lot thirty-two. The handler led him up onto the dais, and the crowd laughed at him. Some threw fruit and even full mugs of ale at him as the handler paraded him around. But the bids went high, very high, and Orli was sure it wasn’t because it could do a lot of work. She couldn’t imagine it had any sexual appeal, so the high price was something of a bewilderment.

The centaur brought gasps and nobody threw anything. Five men came to assist the handler, one of them a mage who chanted some kind of magic the entire time the others held on to the creature’s chains at lengths of five or six feet. Orli felt sorry for him as she watched him being paraded around. He held his head high, his expression dignified, despite being up there as he was, reduced to nothingness, an object for sale. He fought his captors when he could, but each time he pulled, each time his haunches dropped and his powerful hands gripped a chain, the jerk he gave that pulled a man to his knees also brought a rise in the chanting of the magician, a crescendo that twisted the centaur’s human face in agony. He would stagger back, hooves drumming on the wooden stage and body gone suddenly rigid, as if he’d been delivered a ferocious electric shock. Perhaps he had been. Orli had no idea. But it made her cry to watch. Tears ran down her cheeks unchecked as she witnessed such indignity, such brutal inhumanity.

In the end, the centaur sold for the highest price she’d heard by far, fifty thousand crowns. Orli wasn’t familiar enough with Prosperion currency to know if that was a lot, but it was a great deal more than anything else had brought. Somehow that terrified her.

The handlers led the centaur back onto the stone shelf, back to his cage. Orli noticed he wore the number fifty-two.

Her heart began to beat rapidly. She was going to be up there very soon. In a matter of minutes they were going to parade her around like an animal, prod her with a stick, grope her and fondle her for the pleasure of the crowd. People were going to bid on her like some kind of antique, some object of rarity, a freak, like the satyr and the centaur. Her hands began to shake. She looked up and down the shelf. Out into the darkness where the waves crashed in hushed whispers against the sand. Up into the stars. Her whole body followed the example of her hands as she realized yet again what she’d already understood several times that day, rediscovering a real and horrifying truth: nobody was going to save her. No one. It really was going to happen. This was actually going to happen to her.

Lot fifty-three sold. She didn’t even realize it had gone up. Some sort of llama. Bright white. So bright it seemed to glow. She hadn’t heard what it was called. It didn’t matter.

Fifty-four went up too. She was vaguely aware of it, but her mind had stopped working properly. She was scanning the skies over the black silhouettes of the rocky ring, over the cliffs above. Where were they? Where was her father? Roberto? Where was the Queen’s army? Where was anyone?

That’s when the horsemen appeared. Three of them at the far end of the stone shelf to Orli’s right, emerging together as if from nowhere. Three men on huge striders, two in armor, one in a flutter of purple and white robes. The man in the robes leapt off his mount immediately after they appeared, and he began chanting without the least delay. At the same time, a guard watching the cages on that end of the stage called out an alarm.

A wall of fire shot up across the front of the stage as if drawn there by the pointing hand of the dismounted wizard, shooting across the front of the crowd like a unfurled stretch of fence, blocking their view with the crackling roar of twenty-foot flames. It closed off the length of the stone platform from end to end, fully cutting off the audience from access to those on Orli’s side.

The armored horsemen charged onward as the spell was being cast, clattering metal-shod hooves striking sparks that scattered like dying fireflies. The man on the left, his armor black as his horse, rode just a step behind the leader, a tall and majestic figure in polished steel plate astride a massive charger of pristine white. Both men lowered lances as two enormous figures moved to intercept them from places they’d been standing sentry. These were monstrous humanoids, giants, Orli thought, twelve feet tall and nearly half that wide through the shoulders and chest. They lumbered out from behind the cages they’d been guarding to confront the mounted men. Each of them held a club as large as either knight.

The giants swung their clubs, but the agile horses swerved aside; then Orli saw lances protrude from each giant’s back, sliding out, bloody, for the length of several feet. The long slender weapons pierced the behemoth bodies like ice picks through ragdolls. The giants roared together, perfect echoes of one another, and both fell dead with a single wet thump.

The horsemen came on, the man in black armor pulling a mace from his belt, the man in the silver armor a great longsword from his back.

More guards rushed from a cave in the cliff face, humans, ten of them, all armed with spears and wearing thick leather vests.

The two riders charged through them, hacking at them as if they were merely a patch of dense underbrush.

The guards grappled at the mounted men, even as mace and sword crushed and cleaved. The man in black was pulled from his horse, but the man in polished armor cut his way free of all those groping arms and jabbing spears. He spun his mount round and came back, hacked off the arm of one of the guards just as a thrown spear glanced off a pauldron with a clang. He finished off the armless attacker with a quick thrust through the neck, then whirled his mount with the practiced pressure of his knees.

The animal spun and reared, its front hooves striking out as it turned, and the force of one iron-shod hoof caved in the face of the man who’d thrown the spear. He fell, clutching and screaming through his decimated countenance. The rider let his warhorse stomp the man to silence as he parried aside another hurled spear with a skillful flick of his sword.

Another knot of guards came running out of a cave to Orli’s left, at least twenty of them. Three of them were massive, though not so big as the two giants had been. All of them were better armed and armored than the first group was, all in chain or ringmail over leather and all with swords. There was a magician in the group as well, a woman in the white robes of a priestess.

They charged past Orli’s cage toward the fight on the stage.

Orli could hear the outrage of the crowd on the other side of the fire, clearly furious at missing whatever was going on. Some more than likely wishing to join in.

The auctioneer in his ten-foot tower was shouting directions at the troops, his voice bass and loud in a way that seemed impossible for such a diminutive man. The slave handler jumped down from the dais as well, ducking underneath its apron for a moment and then reappearing with a wicked double-edged axe. Orli was certain by the smile on his face he must know how to use it very well.

All of them came running at the two men still fighting with the first two groups of guards. Only the priestess stopped short. She reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out some sort of powder, which she flung in the direction of the fire wall as she began to sing. The dust sparkled in the firelight as it filled the air. It grew brighter, spread like smoke, a cloud of icy dust perhaps, along the length of the blazing line of flames in perfect parallel, getting larger and larger, thicker, until it filled the length of the stage from end to end with its shimmering whorls. Then it began to swell back toward the cliff, thickening. Orli stepped away from it as it neared her cage, unwilling to be engulfed in that swirling, glittering fog. She saw as it neared her, only a few feet away, that it was still thickening. What had seemed foggy now looked more like foam. Sea foam, she thought. But even as that occurred to her, the foam shifted further and, in an instant, became a wave, a huge wall of water, swelling and hovering thirty feet in the air. Then it crashed, a great conjured surf that splashed over the fire wall, and just like that, the fire was out.

The priestess turned and began to cast again. She didn’t get three words out, however, for the man in the gleaming armor had seen what she was about. He rode her down and neatly cleaved her head and part of one shoulder from her body in one clean, powerful upward-sweeping stroke.

The momentum of his charge brought him well past the site of the priestess’ demise, and as his horse skidded and sparked to a halt, he came near enough to Orli’s cage to glance inside.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “This won’t take long.” He whirled his mount and charged back, the firelight glinting off the silver studs of his war saddle. He took two more guards in that pass, but this time, the sheer numbers of them managed to haul him off his mount just as the others had done to the man in black.

Orli wondered who he was. There was something familiar about that voice, someone she knew. But who? The confinement of the helmet distorted his voice too much to recognize. But he fought incredibly. She watched him and, frightened as she was, could not help but marvel at him. Every movement was graceful, his body and his blade darting and spinning as if it were all little more than a dance. He cut through the guards as easily as if they’d been made of cheese.

The sorcerer that had come with him sent white shards of ice into the crowd of guards around him, frosty spears that flung from his weaving hands with deadly accuracy. Watching him do it made Orli think of the Hostiles with their long mineral shafts. It was oddly horrifying and pleasing at the same time. She had not the least qualm or sorrow for the carnage she watched, not one pang of grief or empathy for all those men, her captors, dying horribly. Every scream, every gout of blood exactly what they deserved.