“Luca!” his mother’s voice rang out, followed by the clear and clean voice of Kora.
“Brother! He’s standing on his own! It’s a miracle!”
“Mom! Kora!” Luca shouted in joy. He started to run toward his family, but tripped over the leg of a guard with a good sense of timing. The crowd laughed.
The judge looked toward Luca’s family with displeasure and gave a signal with his hand. His mother and Kora were dragged before the nebulous gaze of the high judge.
Kora was still smiling happily at the sight of her brother healthy, and not helpless as he had been all his life.
“Name!”
“Prisca Dezisimu, Sir Judge!” the mother answered in tears. “Luca isn’t guilty! My boy couldn’t even lift his arms until yesterday...”
Cannon made the slightest gesture with his forefinger and the aide shouted deafeningly, interrupting Prisca.
“Answer only what you are asked! Woman, are you capable of paying this bastard’s fine?”
“I don’t have that kind of money,” Prisca whispered.
“I’ll find it! I’ll get it! Give me a day!” Kora rushed toward the judge and he flinched.
The guards grabbed the girl, but she kept trying to wrestle herself away.
“Take them away!” the aide commanded, and the guards carried the women off, ignoring their cries and wails. “Who among those present wishes to purchase seventeen-year-old Luca Dezisimu as full property for a period of five years?”
The crowd murmured, discussing the boy’s characteristics. The aide looked over the crowd in frustration, leaned down to the judge, listened to him and changed the conditions.
“Fifteen years! Who among those present wishes to purchase the seventeen-year-old Luca Dezisimu as full property for a period of fifteen years?”
The people stayed silent, exchanging glances. Someone coughed and a hand went up.
“I guess I’ll take him. For twenty five years, if Sir Judge would allow it...”
Judge Cannon nodded his blessing, and Luca saw his future master — a lean swarthy man with a huge beak of a nose. Luca pegged him at forty at first glance, but then looked closer at his pockmarked face and the liver spots on his hands and added another twenty years to his estimate.
The buyer counted out some coins and, without rising from his seat, proffered them to the aide. The aide appeared by his side in an instant, took the money and cried out triumphantly.
“In the name of the emperor! The life of Luca Dezisimu is declared the property of Mister Yadugara for twenty five years henceforth.”
“Heh-heh...” the judge chuckled. “A wonderful purchase, Mister Yadugara! Fresh blood! Hah-hah-hah! Fresh blood!”
Chapter 10. Senior Apprentice Penant
RIGHT AFTER THE COURT, once they’d left the prison, Luca’s master condescended to say a few words.
“My name is Nestor Yadugara, slave. That’s Master Yadugara to you. This,” he nodded toward the boy next to him, “is my senior apprentice, Penant.”
Not knowing how to answer, Luca just nodded. The senior student looked like a normal boy around eighteen years old, if it weren’t for a certain strangeness. A certain slouch, somewhat dry skin, a slight shortness of breath. Although they’d only walked a couple of hundred paces, all this together created the impression that Penant was getting old before his time.
“Your collar, slave... If you go more than a hundred paces from me without permission, you die,” Master Yadugara continued dryly. “If you do anything I don’t ask you to, you die. If you touch me without my permission, you die. Got it?”
Luca unwillingly touched the power collar, nodded and then immediately felt a cane crack across his head. His vision blurred and the pain brought him to tears.
“When master asks you a question, you answer!” Penant hissed cruelly.
“Careful now, Penant! Are you going to carry him if you knock him out?” Yadugara asked spitefully.
“Sorry, master, next time I will match the strength of my strike to the severity of the slave’s misstep.”
“And I’m sure next time will come very soon. This idiot doesn’t seem like someone who gets the point the first time. Speak, slave! Eh?”
“Yes, master.”
“‘Yes’ what?”
“I don’t seem like someone who gets the point the first time. I understand.”
Penant’s next strike made it obvious that he was lying about matching the punishment to the sin. The senior apprentice laughed, and his master couldn’t hold back a crooked grimace at the sight. After his laughter subsided, Penant explained:
“Say ‘master’ when you speak to the master, worm!”
“Yes, Master Senior Apprentice Penant! Your wish is my command, Master Yadugara!”
Luca continued muttering everything they wanted to hear, at the same time reading a message before his eyes: something about the need to strengthen the bones of the skull...
“Look at the master when you answer, you...”
“Enough, Penant,” the old man said as his senior apprentice raised his arm again. “Give me that cane back and take him to the baths. Make sure they scrub him clean and shave him. I don’t want him to stink and spread lice all over the house.
“It shall be done, master!” Penant nodded, returned the cane and, squeamishly urging him on and shoving him, shepherded Luca away.
Yadugara climbed into the waiting carriage with practiced ease and said something to the driver. “Clear the road!” he shouted, driving right into the crowd.
Since the senior apprentice had forbidden him to turn his head — Look straight ahead, oaf! — Luca looked at the world sidelong. This was the part of the capital where people of means lived. It hadn’t changed much since he’d strolled through here when his father was still alive. Or rather, his nanny had strolled through with little Luca in a pushchair. The memories had faded, blurred, but he recognized some things.
For example, the public baths that Severus had loved to visit. Luca even remembered that he’d been here as a small child with his father, but maybe he was just imagining it.
A cruel hit in the back swept away the wave of nostalgia.
“Move it, slave!” Penant commanded him.
Luca picked up his pace, examining the senior apprentice sidelong. Then he decided to risk a question.
“What does our master do?”
Penant was so surprised at Luca’s insolence that he answered without thinking.
“Master Yadugara is a great healer. Even the palace uses his services!”
Angry at himself for answering and at the slave for daring to open his mouth unasked, he clouted Luca around the ear. The strike was so strong that Luca stumbled over a step, flew a dozen feet and hung there, holding the staircase’s metal bannister.
Lifting himself to his feet, he tried to let go of the bannister, but couldn’t pull his hand away. It was as if stuck to the warm wrought-iron railing.
Fearing another blow from Penant, he used his other hand to force his fingers to unclench themselves and tear the hand away from the bannister.
He managed just in time. The senior apprentice had just reached him and stopped by the door to the baths. Luca looked at his traitorous hand and stared dumbfounded as the barely noticeable gleaming specks of metal from the banister seemed to be absorbed into his very skin. A couple of seconds later, his palm was clean again.
Transformation interrupted! Not enough iron in body!
Luca’Onegut, based on an analysis of aggressive environmental influences and damage taken, an increase in the survival capability of your body has been initiated:
— skull bones strengthened by 0.001%
— right hand bones strengthened by 0.002%
— right hand skin enhanced by 0.0013%
— posterior skin enhanced by 0.00001%
It is recommended that you immediately strengthen your entire skeleton and enhance your entire skin!
Luca didn’t bother following the r
ecommendations. Instead he cleared all the text covering up his view just by wishing it away, then rushed to open the door.
Penant entered and headed across the hall to the bath attendants without a backward glance. After coming to an agreement with them, he looked around in search of Luca and saw him frozen at the entrance.
The senior apprentice narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t understand what was happening to the slave, who was hanging off the door handle and squirming instead of just coming in.
“Slave! Luca!” he shouted, using his name for the first time. “Here, now!”
The boy didn’t respond at all. Except that his face twisted even further.
“Damn you, you little brat!” Penant exploded. “Just wait, I’m about to...”
The slave managed to tear himself away from the door and fell onto the floor while Penant was still a few steps away. Master Yadugara’s senior apprentice didn’t stand on ceremony. He set about teaching the boy the only way he knew how. He furiously rained down strikes on the boy’s prostrate body, and only a sudden fear of the prospect of destroying his master’s property stopped him before he killed the slave.
“You alive? Huh?” he shook the boy’s shoulder. “Luca Dezisimu!”
The boy opened his eyes, spat out some blood and nodded.
“Yes, Master Senior Apprentice Penant. I’m alive.”
Overcoming his disgust, Penant helped him rise and walk inside.
Master Yadugara’s senior apprentice was frightened and angry, so he didn’t even notice that of the large bronze door handle shaped like a bird’s head, nothing now remained.
Chapter 11. Bad News
LUCA ONLY LATER learned what had happened at the baths. The durability of the bones and skin of his head, the joints of his right arm and his buttocks had increased by more than a hundred percent, but it stopped there. After that, no matter what he touched, it didn’t happen again. He couldn’t figure out what had happened on his own, and Esk’s spirit was silent.
All the boy managed to figure out was that the strengthened and improved parts of his body were the same spots that had been damaged when he’d punched the wall and been struck by the cane. The bruises from Penant’s beating had almost gone when he sat before the barber. But that beating had brought him no more improvements.
As they walked out of the baths, he took advantage of the fact that Penant walked ahead and punched a wall hard. He didn’t feel the sharp pain he’d felt in the prison, but his punch left a fist-shaped imprint in the building’s facade.
The walk to the healer’s home was amusing. Penant, scared that he’d almost killed or, worse, maimed his master’s property, blathered at Luca all the way from the public baths to the house about the details of life with the healer.
The main thing the boy understood was that their master was strict and quick to punish, but just. Penant himself had once been like Luca, although he hadn’t been sentenced for attacking someone, but for vagrancy. You could panhandle and beg all you wanted in the capital, just as long as you slept under a roof at night.
The guards caught Penant, or Pen as the ten-year-old orphan had been called on the streets, on one happy — so he said himself — night. The night before, the boy had fallen out with the head of the band of street urchins that he’d been sharing a roof with in an abandoned hut on the outskirts. They banished him to teach him a lesson, and Pen had to sleep on the street. Some bored city patrolman grabbed him there while he was sleeping and lifeless, otherwise he’d have run away.
The very next morning, intending to send him to a foster home, put his penalty up for auction.
And so in just one golden day, Pen had become the property of Master Yadugara for five years. And three years ago, when his term expired, he took the position of the healer’s junior apprentice. He adored his master and was truly thankful to the heavens and all the gods in it for the night the guards had caught him. Although he darkened and said nothing when Luca asked him how much Master Yadugara had profited from all this.
The cubbyhole in the attic of the healer’s house couldn’t boast of even the semblance of comfort Luca had in the prison cell. At least the roof wasn’t leaking there. The whole place was filthy, strewn with garbage, covered in cobwebs, and the ceiling rafters hung lower than the boy’s height so that he had to constantly stoop. Years of dust glimmered in the beams of sunlight from a tiny window.
“Your place is here,” Penant said. “Tidy up and await further instructions.”
The senior apprentice left, and later Luca saw him drive away somewhere with Yadugara. Even later, when he wanted to take out the trash he’d collected, he found a huge brunette blocking his path down the stairs, mopping the steps. She gasped and raised her head.
“Sacred Mother! Who are you?” she cried, pointing a fat finger at Luca with a droplet of dirty water at its tip.
“Luca,” he answered.
“Ah... So you must be Master Yadugara’s new boy!” the woman nodded in understanding. “And the old one is... all gone...”
“Who are you?” Luca set the garbage bag at his feet. “And where did the old one go?”
Ignoring his questions, the woman wiped her hands on her apron, shook her head and asked her own.
“You hungry?”
Expecting nothing good, Luca remained silent, but unwillingly swallowed. His stomach rumbled.
“I’ll say...” she said thoughtfully. “So thin! Alright! The master will be away a while. Since he took that bastard Penant with him, that means the patient is heavy. He left with his surgical case so he might even be operating. What’s in the bag?” she nodded at the offending item.
“Garbage from the attic.”
“Take it outside and throw it on the heap in the back yard. When you come back, follow the smell of cooking,” the woman said with a laugh.
Easily lifting her bucket of water, she started walking down the stairs, then turned back.
“Call me Auntie Mo.”
“Alright, Auntie Mo,” Luca nodded.
Not counting the attic, the master’s house was three stories high. The first floor was for the household and servants, and Master Yadugara saw patients on the second. The third floor was the living quarters, with the bedrooms of the master and the senior apprentice and an office with a library. Penant explained this to him, telling Luca where he could go and where he absolutely couldn’t.
The boy carefully tipped out the trash, sneezing as he shook the dust out of the sack and threw it over his shoulder. Before he went back in, he stopped at the well to wash his hands and face.
“Hey!” he heard a voice say behind his back. “Luca?”
The boy turned around and his face lit up with joyful surprise as he saw the strained face of his sister appear above the ten-foot-high wall. He waved.
“Kora!”
“Luca! Hah! They shaved you clean! Hah-hah-hah! Baldy, baldy!”
Luca ran to the wall and a happy smile lit up his sister’s face.
“I swear on Two-horns’ corrupted mother, you really are walking! You can run, brother! Argh...” His sister’s face disappeared from view, then reappeared. “This wall is slippery, bro, nothing to get a foothold on... Can you come out?”
The smile fell from the boy’s face. The seemingly ordinary leather strip on his neck, which was actually a slave’s collar — called a power collar due to the unseen power hidden within it — wouldn’t let him leave his master’s yard without permission. He shook his head, pointing at his neck.
“Is it enchanted?” Kora asked. “Don’t worry, I’ll find enough money to buy you back! The important thing is that you weren’t sent to the mines! Nobody ever comes back from them...”
“Kora, don’t! You and mom need the money more, and life will be easier for you now without me as I was! They’ve given me a room here,” Luca said, bending the truth by calling that wretched attic a room. “They’re feeding me! Look! They even took me to the baths and gave me clothes!”
He span in fro
nt of his sister, showing off his new outfit. The clothes almost fit. Penant had given them to him when they returned from the baths. He needed to be convincing to stop his sister from getting into any trouble or danger for his sake. Then his mother would be left all alone!
“Mom...” Kora’s face turned more serious. “She’s sick, Luca. She has a fever, she’s burning up! I don’t know what to do! Your master is a healer. Maybe he has some kind of medicine? Maybe you could convince him to visit us? Mom would be so glad to see you...”
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