“I don’t want any rations,” she said. “I want my freedom.”
“That’s beyond our ability to give, Sovrena,” said the second guard.
Still stinging from her insult, the first guard said, “We’ll leave you with your own company. And the dark. And the rats.” He huffed. “You can think about me in your dreams.”
The second guard looked at her with scorn. “I liked it better when you were a statue in the ruling tower. It’s what you deserved.” He looked down at the broken tray and crockery. “No more rations for you. We’ll save the food for the good people of Ildakar.”
With a grunt of effort, the guards pulled the door shut. Keys turned in the lock, and the deadbolt slid into place again. They rammed the crossbar onto its rests.
The men departed, extinguishing the torches behind them. She sat on the stone bench in darkness again, extended her hand, and called forth the magical fire, playing with the flame as it bobbed and danced in her palm.
CHAPTER 19
From behind the safety of the high walls, Bannon watched. He wanted to fight, wanted to do something, but how could even the entire city stand against such an enormous enemy?
His greatest hurt, though, came from the night of the revolt and the terrible circumstances that had built up to so much violence. His thoughts turned to the treacherous young men who had claimed to be his friends. False friends. His heart was torn by what had been done to him. Amos, Jed, and Brock had set him up and done nothing to save him, hadn’t even bothered to tell Nicci or Nathan what happened when he was captured and dragged down into the training pits. Yes, he had survived the ordeal—scarred, and maybe even stronger for it—but how could friends do that to him?
The answer was obvious: they had never been friends at all.
When Lila recently sparred with him, she had urged him to put aside his grudges. In order for Ildakar to endure this crisis, the city could not tear itself apart. The besieging army was dangerous enough to force them to set aside their differences.
Jed and Brock, though … their actions were malicious. Led by Amos, they had taken the young and naive outsider under their wing to show him their city, but they had done it only to trick him, to mock him. But Bannon was not just some gullible fool.
Now he strapped on his sword and shored up his courage, knowing he couldn’t avoid this any longer. It was time he confronted the two surviving young men and made them understand what they had done.
His fingers clenched around Sturdy’s leather-wrapped grip, his forearm bunched, and he could feel the ripple of hard muscles—muscles that had grown strong from hand-to-hand fighting and wrestling, from swinging weapons. Bannon was strong in his heart and mind, too.
He left the grand villa and made his way to the headquarters of the skinners’ guild and Lord Oron, the newest member of the duma, who was Brock’s father. The young man paid no attention to the tightly packed grapevines on narrow terraces along the steep hillsides or the clustered orchards of dwarf fruit trees. A few workers were out picking grapes, harvesting apples, plucking green olives from the trees. Much of the work had simply been abandoned after the uprising. The freed slaves were indignant and many refused their responsibilities. “Let the nobles get blisters picking crops for a change.”
Others, though, understood that if the city were to survive this siege, they would need all the food Ildakar could produce. Former slaves would starve just as quickly as nobles did. Those who went back to work did so by their own choice, out of responsibility rather than oppression. Their families, at least, would have something to eat.
Bannon wore simple clothes, feeling uncomfortable in a fur-lined cape or billowing pantaloons, which were the height of Ildakaran fashion. Despite his many adventures, in his heart he still thought of himself as a farm boy from Chiriya Island. He would never lose that core.
Amos, Jed, and Brock had considered him to be beneath them, but they nevertheless dragged him to the silk yaxen dachas, trying to get him to partake of the pleasure women along with them. At first he was sure they were teasing him, or maybe the three really wanted to make Bannon just like them. Silk yaxen were women created and trained to be nothing more than beautiful bodies to serve the pleasure of their customers. They supposedly couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, but Bannon had always felt sorry for them.
Amos had treated the silk yaxen Melody the worst. On the night of the revolt, he had raped her, slapped her, bruised her, and she finally responded, using a shard of broken glass to slash his throat. That same night, seven other silk yaxen had killed their abusive customers. Afterward, they reverted to their meek and pliable state, not denying their crimes, but passively accepting them. With all the other turmoil going on in Ildakar, Bannon wasn’t sure the women would ever be called to account for their crimes. Justice had indeed been served in its own way. He couldn’t help but think of how his own mother had been beaten and murdered by his father.
But Jed and Brock had never faced what they had done to him, never admitted their own responsibility. Did they feel sorry at all?
He approached Oron’s mansion, which was connected to a long outbuilding where the skinners’ guild conducted their operations. He drew on all the strength he had developed since leaving Chiriya, since joining Nicci and Nathan on their long journey. Though Bannon didn’t know what he expected from Jed and Brock, he needed to do this for himself.
No one answered when he rang the small brass gong outside the mansion’s entry. Hearing activity inside, he tentatively pushed open the door and was surprised to see several servants lounging in comfortable chairs and sprawled on a divan. “Excuse me. Didn’t you hear me knock?”
The servants sneered at Bannon. A middle-aged man propped himself up on an elbow on the divan. He wore a slave shirt of drab rough-spun cloth, but he had piled silken sheets, fur-lined cloaks, and scavenged jewels around himself. “Keeper’s crotch! Lord Oron can answer his own damned door. Why should we do anything to help you?”
Bannon was unsettled by their attitude. “Because I fought beside you during the revolt. I escaped from the combat pits and helped stop the great bloodletting at the pyramid.”
“Then, what do you need with Oron?” one man grumbled.
“Are you here to kill him?” said another slave, sounding hopeful. “If so, maybe we will help.”
“No, I’m not here to kill him. He is a powerful wizard,” Bannon said in disbelief. “Ildakar will need his gift to fight General Utros.” He frowned at them. “And we’ll need your help, too. Every fighter, to defend the city.”
“We’ve given enough to Ildakar,” said the man on the divan, resting his feet on the fine fabric. “Now, it’s time the city gave back to us.”
Exasperated, Bannon didn’t want to continue the argument. “I’m just here to speak to Oron’s son, Brock.”
The slave on the divan gestured toward the rear of the mansion. “Out back. They’re in the animal buildings. Since many of the slaves refuse to do skinning anymore, Oron has to do it himself.”
The slave in the chair chuckled. “It’s about time he got his hands bloody in a real way. He’s making Brock and that other boy Jed pitch in. Beware if you go there, since he might press you into service, too. Those pelts won’t take care of themselves, and a lot of skinning needs to be done or else the animals will collapse under their own fur.”
“I … I’ll keep that in mind.” He swallowed hard. Sweet Sea Mother!
As he headed toward the kitchens in the rear of the mansion, one of the slaves called, “If you’re hungry, there’s plenty of food in the pantries. Eat it before some gifted noble does.”
“I’m not hungry,” He hurried through the kitchens, where the ovens were cold and the cabinets were open, ransacked for food. Spilled flour and half-eaten fruit lay discarded on the floor and the counters. One matronly woman had curled up in a corner, snoring loudly in the company of two empty bottles of bloodwine.
Bannon passed through a breezeway outside, following a path of c
rushed sparkling stone that led to a large low structure with shallowly sloped roofs and propped-open windows. Sounds wafted out, stirring, rattling, grunting, along with bone-chilling wails of animal pain. He paused, having second thoughts; then he remembered how Amos and his friends had laughed at him when the Norukai captains beat him senseless at the yaxen slaughterhouse. Bruised and broken, he had barely survived that attack, and then he’d been given over to Adessa so she could train him to die in the arena. His supposed friends had promised they would help him. They never did, and he would have died.
Pushing open the door, Bannon entered a giant outbuilding crowded with penned animals, the source of all the fine furs worn by the gifted nobles. The stench hit him first, coppery blood, pungent feces, the foul musk of terror exuded by dying animals. Two aisles of cages ran the length of the building, with more cages along the outer walls. Long, flat worktables had shallow gutters that led to drains in the floor. Eight harried, blood-spattered workers toiled at the skinning tables.
Oron was there, his face and his chest flecked with red. He wore a blood-smeared apron over a silken shirt that was now ruined. His long faded-yellow hair was matted, tied back and smeared with gore. He barked orders at the workers, whom Bannon realized were minor nobles. “If we don’t skin these animals now, the fur will stop growing. Our guild depends on this! If the lazy slaves won’t do their duty, we nobles have to pick up the slack … as always.” He sounded weary and disgusted.
Oron walked down the line of tables and cages. “Now that I am a duma member, my obligations have increased tenfold. I need to count on other guild members.” He turned to a queasy-looking young man. “And you too, son. Your life has been far too easy. It’s time to get your hands bloody.”
Bannon hadn’t at first recognized Brock, because the young man’s face was smeared with blood, his short, dark hair crusty, his hands covered with red up to his elbows. “I always did what I could,” Brock said in a whining tone.
Bannon finally saw what they were actually doing and stumbled backward in shock. The skinners would open one of the cages, reach in, and grasp the ruff of a squealing animal. The unnatural creatures had broad, squat bodies with stubby heads and stumplike, useless legs that flailed as the workers dragged them out. The animals looked like swollen, living pillows made of fur. Their heads were small, like a turtle’s, and the entire body was covered with a rich, thick pelt, some spotted, others streaked with ash gray. These were not normal animals, Bannon realized, but creatures shaped by fleshmancers, made for a terrible painful purpose.
No one noticed Bannon as he stood speechless inside the door. He watched as another reticent young man—Jed, he realized—grabbed an animal with rusty fur. He dropped the flailing, squeaking creature on the skinning table in front of him. He had a short, razor-sharp knife.
“We’re doing what we can, sir,” Jed said defensively. He pushed the struggling creature down and held it by the back of the neck as he jabbed with the point of the knife, slicing its shoulder. He cut across its short forelegs and all the way around its body. The creature mewled and screeched in pain. Jed dug with the knife, grabbed the edge of the pelt, and ripped it up. He pulled off a wide swatch of fur and set it aside for scraping while the whimpering creature twitched and bled. Though skinned alive, it was not dead, but naked, its pelt torn off.
“How long until this grows back?” Jed asked as he tossed the skinned animal back into the cage.
Oron said, “The ones that survive will have a fresh new pelt in three weeks, ready for harvesting again.”
The skinners worked one cage at a time, grabbing the animals, stripping them of their pelts, and returning them to their cages.
Bannon’s stomach clenched with nausea. There were hundreds of trapped animals. “This is horrible. You’re all horrible!” The others looked up, startled by his arrival. The young man shook his head, trembling. “This whole city is horrible.”
Oron barked at him, “Good, we could use more help. There’s a lot of work to do and too many lazy people refusing to do it.”
“You’re torturing those poor things,” Bannon groaned. He had always loved animals.
Oron let out an impatient snort. “Where do you think fur comes from? There’s always a dark underside to what society needs. Do you eat meat? You can’t have a yaxen steak without killing the yaxen. Or maybe you’d rather live naked and eat plants.”
Fighting back the urge to vomit, he gathered his courage and strode to where Jed and Brock were working shoulder-to-shoulder, covered in blood. Seeing him, Jed quirked his lips in a sarcastic smile. “We wondered what had happened to you. Did you enjoy playing with Adessa in the training pits?”
“I survived. I learned a lot about myself and I learned the truth about you.”
Brock grabbed another animal out of a cage, a gray-speckled one this time, and slammed it on the table in the smear of blood left behind from the previous creature he had skinned. “If you’re our friend, help out with some of the work here.”
“You weren’t my friends,” Bannon said. “You only wanted to laugh at me. But I’m stronger now. I know who you are.”
“It wasn’t us,” Jed said. “It was Amos. We just followed him.”
“That still makes you participants. You could have told Nicci or Nathan what happened to me after I was captured, but you wanted me down there in the pits.” His hand drifted toward his sword, though he had no intention of killing them. Still, Jed and Brock flinched as if afraid of what the young man would do. It was a strange sensation to see them fear him, but Bannon didn’t back down. “Amos beat and abused poor Melody, and she killed him. You two were lucky on the night of the revolt.”
“We hid for our own protection,” Brock said. “It was the right thing to do.”
Jed somehow managed to sound indignant. “Amos is dead. He was the son of the wizard commander and the sovrena.”
“And they’ll be the only two who mourn him,” Bannon retorted. “But the sovrena is locked in a dungeon, and the wizard commander fled the city.” Anger and disgust welled up within him. It wasn’t the same thing as the blood rage he often encountered. He felt strong. He needed to say these things aloud.
Still working, Brock sliced into the fur animal, peeled up the pelt. Bannon nearly retched.
Oron interrupted, looking at his son with scorn rather than pride. “Brock has lived with his pampered delusions for centuries. That’s my own fault as his father. He needs to live up to his name as the son of a duma member. He needs to work and make himself worthy.”
Insulted, Brock continued his bloody task. The mewling animal lay raw and skinned on the table, twitching but unable to escape. Brock growled, “We fought for the city. How many times did we go outside and smash the stone warriors? No one else in Ildakar did so. If the rest of the people in this city had done as much to damage the stone army, we wouldn’t be under siege right now. They would all be destroyed already.”
“Yes, you were very brave, vandalizing statues,” Bannon said. “You said you wanted to fight against General Utros for what he had done in the past. Well, now you can truly fight. The city is under real siege, and the army is alive again. If we have to go to battle for Ildakar, will you be on the front lines?” He lifted his chin in challenge, though he nearly gagged from the stench inside the outbuilding.
Jed and Brock muttered, looking away. “We’ve already done our part.”
Oron spoke in a firm tone. “You need to make something of yourself, son. I worked for centuries to build my power and influence, and now I’m finally a member of the duma. You need to prove yourself worthy, too. Jed’s mother feels the same. Lady Olgya said as much to me.” He looked up, hardening his gaze. “I’ll expect you to meet your obligations when the time comes. General Utros isn’t bound to agree to peace anytime soon.”
“We … we won’t need to go to battle,” Brock insisted. “The wizards’ duma will find a way to end the siege.”
Oron opened a cage and brought out a bla
ck-furred animal, which squirmed and twisted in the air. “We’ll try, but if it comes to a real fight, you will need to help save Ildakar, too.” He pressed the creature down on the stained table in front of him. He glanced at Bannon and snapped an order. “You, boy, put on a smock. Take up a knife. We could use your help.”
Instead, Bannon walked away. “No. I’ll leave you to the work you were born to do.”
CHAPTER 20
As darkness settled again over Ildakar, Nicci pondered the unsatisfying meeting with General Utros as well as how she might use the sliph whose well Nathan and Elsa had discovered in the ruins. One way or another, she was determined to save Ildakar.
The ancient army had made no move in two days, but their mere presence was intimidating. Utros had too much to digest, too much to accept about what had happened, but she hoped he would understand the truth of the situation, realize that his effort was not only unnecessary but pointless. Ildakar had the resources to withstand a siege for years, decades, centuries.
Nicci thought it would be most beneficial to wait, for now, but she doubted the legendary general would abandon the goal of overthrowing Ildakar. His duty remained as unyielding as stone. Nicci understood his obsession, because she felt the same way about her own promise to Richard. If some courier had told her that Lord Rahl was gone, or if she awoke from a spell sleep to find that centuries had passed, would she abandon her duty to the D’Haran Empire?
Never.
She and Nathan had certainly planted questions and doubts in the general’s mind, but he was a man who followed orders, and his loyalty was legendary. He had conquered the continent on the basis of Iron Fang’s command, but he would not be reckless either. She hoped he would ask for another parley with them, soon.
From the high vantage near the ruling tower, Nicci looked out at the night-shadowed streets of Ildakar after dark, the tense people in their homes waiting for resolution. At least the pounding on the walls had stopped, but the silence did not give the city any peace.
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