"I will not," Meliora repeated. "Do you hear me, Mother?" She raised her voice to a shout. "I will not let you burn them! I will not marry Ishtafel. I will—"
"Meliora!" Kalafi thundered, and flames burst out from her wings and haloed her head, white fire of her rage. Her voice tore across the land, booming, impossibly loud. "Stand back, daughter, or I will—"
"Or you will what?" Meliora shouted. She had never seen her mother so incensed, never seen the white fire of fury blaze across the queen. But it was too late to back down. "You lied to me, Mother. You lied!" Meliora trembled wildly, tears in her eyes. "You never showed me this land. You never told me the truth about this place. You raised me wrapped in silk, and now try to shatter my innocence by burning my own slaves? No. I will not allow this. I will not be a pawn to you, not be your slave, not be an incestuous womb for your heir. I would rather burn myself!"
"Then burn!" Kalafi roared. The sound tore across the land, shook the bull, scattered smoke from the flames, sent slaves falling to the ground. It was a cry louder than crashing temples, than falling nations, a cry that echoed across the land of Tofet.
Then burn! Then burn!
Meliora stared at her mother, silent. Suddenly her trembling ceased. Her tears dried in the heat. A calmness fell upon her, and her fear burned away like the flesh of the old man.
"So I will burn," Meliora whispered.
All my life I've been sheltered. Lied to. Deceived. So let me sing. Let me sing to save them.
She turned to look at the guards. "By the ancient rites, I give my life to save theirs. I will burn in their stead to appease Malok." She turned back toward her mother. "Sing with me, Mother. As my screams rise through the bull, sing with me. For your lost home in the heavens . . . and for your lost daughter."
Meliora stepped toward the bull and climbed inside.
"Daughter, stop this!" Kalafi shouted . . . but Meliora barely heard anything above her own screams.
The heat baked her. The bronze burned her feet, legs, knees, shoulders, every place it touched. She screamed in agony. Her wings caught fire. She heard her screams rising through the bull as melodious music, and she wanted to escape, but she would not, she would not, she would not live this life, not serve her mother anymore, not let her slaves die, not—
All thought faded as she let out a howl, the fire engulfing her.
Then burn! Then burn!
Another scream rose. Hands reached into the bull, grabbed her, pulled her out. She stumbled. She fell. The sunlight blinded her, and the fire still roared, and somebody was shouting and other people crying out in terror. Feet stamped on her wings, and Meliora cried out again.
The fire died.
She lay trembling on the ground, the bull rising above her, her feathers burnt. The tips of her hair still crackled. Her brother and mother stood above her, pale, shouting at soldiers, shouting at her, but she could hear only muffled sounds, see only mottles of light.
"Let them go," Meliora whispered. "Let my slaves go."
Through the ringing in her ears, she thought she could make out her mother's shouts. "Take the slaves to the tar pits! Slap yokes on them! Put them to work instead of wasting time here. Malok is appeased. Now go!"
Meliora's eyelids fluttered. A soft smile rose upon her cracked, burnt lips.
I saved them. I saved them.
Her ears kept ringing, and people kept shouting, and it seemed to Meliora that the sounds rose higher, softened, turned into the music of pipes. A song of old homes lost. A song of nations falling. A song of truth in a burning world. Her eyes closed, and she slept.
ELORY
Elory had spent her life in the bitumen pit, extracting the precious substance that held the empire together. When she stepped into the pleasure pit beneath the palace, she found a world just as dark and dizzying.
Here is a different sort of mine, she thought. A mine for human flesh, perhaps just as precious to the seraphim as bitumen and brick.
The chamber was buried deep beneath the ziggurat, a glittering cave carved from the living rock. Rugs and tasseled pillows hid the floor, and curtains hung everywhere, some woven of silk and muslin, others formed of thousands of beads. Incense burned in iron holders shaped as phalluses, and obsidian statues seemed to dance in the flickering candlelight, shaped as nude people with the heads of beasts. Hookahs bubbled, their glass vials filled with hintan—a spice of the northern deserts. The purple smoke swirled through the air, already spinning Elory's head, as intoxicating as the bitumen fumes.
But stranger than the smoke, the rugs, or the statues were the slaves.
A score of Vir Requis lounged here, collared like Elory, yet different in every other way. She gasped to see these young women. She wanted to look away but could not. While her body was scrawny, the skin bronzed, the hands and feet callused, these slaves were pleasantly curved, their skin pale, their hands soft. Long hair grew from their heads—real hair, not just stubble. Henna darkened their eyelids, and the red of crushed raspberries painted their lips. They wore naught but flimsy silks, the fabric revealing more than it hid.
Pleasure slaves, Elory thought. A pit of them, mere flesh waiting for the seraphim to consume. How will I find my sister here?
Yet what choice did she have but to study in this place? Aboveground, in Ishtafel's chamber, he would claim her body, brutalize her if she resisted, then discard her corpse with the others. Here she would live—for a week at least. A week to try to find her sister. To try to find help.
Elory cleared her throat. "I . . . I was told to come here. To . . . to learn from you."
Across the pit, a few of the slaves turned to look at her. One lounged on a pile of pillows, smoking from a hookah. She gave Elory a dazed glance, then turned toward a statue, jangled a bracelet that hung from its arm, and giggled as the jewel flashed. Two other slaves lay together, holding each other, sharing a pipe. They blinked at Elory, then returned to smoking the spice. Other slaves ignored Elory flat out, their eyes glazed. A few drooled on the floor.
"I . . ." Elory gulped. Was this the right place? "I've come here to join you. To become a . . . a pleasure slave," she finished with a whisper, her cheeks heating.
One of the slaves leaped to her feet. Her eyes flashed, and she marched toward Elory. She was Vir Requis too—no feathered wings grew from her back, no halo topped her head, and a collar encircled her neck—but fairer than any slave Elory had ever known. Her hair was long and brown, her eyes dark. She wore baggy silken pants, slippers, and a top that revealed a jewel shining in her navel. She seemed young, perhaps only a year or two older than Elory, short and slender but without the hard, famished look of a Tofet slave.
"You are nothing like us." The young woman's eyes flashed with anger. "You will never be like us. We don't want more goddamn filthy Tofet rats here. Last one infected the place with fleas."
Farther back in the den, the hookah smoker laughed hysterically, then hit the jangling bracelet and laughed again.
"She got fleas, Tash! Fleas! Fleas everywhere." The smoker hit the bracelet, gasped to see it glinting, and laughed again. "Fleas, fleas, fleas, glinting in the smoke."
Elory returned her eyes to Tash, the angry, brown-eyed woman. "I have no fleas. I was told to come here. I'm no longer a Tofet worker, I—"
"I said rat, not worker." Tash grabbed Elory's ear and twisted it painfully. "Are there fleas on that head of yours? Fleas can hide in stubble too." She groaned. "By the gods, you stink."
"Ow!" Elory winced. "Let go."
Tash groaned, released Elory's ear, and turned toward her comrades. "Why do they send these rats over?" She raised her arms. "What have I done to deserve these rats invading my cave?"
The smoker took another puff on her hookah, then laughed again. "Maybe you forgot how to smoke a seraph's pipe." She sucked deeply on her hookah, puffed out smoke, and tittered again. "Lost your touch."
Tash groaned again, even louder this time, and tugged her hair. "You lot are just as useless as the rat."
She spun back toward Elory. "Well, rat, stop standing there like a goddamn statue. I take pride in my pit. The masters might show up any time, and I'll not have you scare them off." She grabbed Elory's wrist and tugged her. "Come on."
Elory stumbled in pursuit. Her ankles were still hobbled together, but the pleasure slaves wore no chains, only their collars and silks. Tash dragged her through the chamber, between the statues of the nude women with animal heads, around live women lounging on pillows while smoking hookah, and past several walls of curtains.
Finally, past a curtain of beads, they entered a little nook at the back. A rug hung across one wall of stone; the other walls were simply formed of curtains. Candles burned in alcoves, their wax dripping toward the floor, and many silks spilled from three open chests. A mattress lay on the floor, topped with pillows. A woman slept here, snoring by an empty hookah.
"Gods above!" Tash gave her hair a mighty tug and rummaged around the chamber. "They even left your goddamn shackles on. I try to run a quality establishment down here, and those dung-sucking guards give me nothing to work with. Nothing but rats! Now where's the damn key?"
Elory glanced down at her hobbles. Rings of iron circled her ankles, and a chain connected them, only a foot long—enough to let her walk but not run or kick. She had worn these iron shackles around her ankles since her second birthday; they had been opened only several times to be replaced with larger shackles.
"Only the masters of Tofet carry the keys." Elory shuddered to remember the cruel overseers with their whips of fire. "These are my permanent shackles. I've reached my full size. I—"
"Ah, there!" Ignoring her, Tash dug under a pile of silks and pulled out a key. "Haven't had to use one of these since the last rat scurried in here."
Elory gasped. Her eyes widened.
"A . . . key?"
Tash rolled her eyes. "She has the sense of a baby! Great." She pointed around the room. "Curtain! Bed! Wall!" She pointed at the sleeping woman on the mattress. "Useless lump of smoke-addled dung! There, now you can talk." She knelt and placed the key into Elory's shackles. "Maybe now you'll walk properly too."
The key turned.
The shackles fell off.
Elory's eyes dampened.
Trembling, she took a step. Another step. She blinked, eyes full of tears. She froze.
I can run. I can jump. I can kick if I want to. I—
"Well, don't just stand there like a statue," Tash said. "Stretch a little, for pity's sake. You're going to have to stretch those legs in the seraphim's beds." She rolled her eyes. "You Tofet rats. Useless, you are."
Slowly, Elory stretched out one leg, moving it a few inches forward . . . then another few inches . . . then farther than it had ever gone. Pain flared across her muscles, driving up to her hip, and she winced and her tears fell. It hurt. And it was wonderful.
"Thank you, Tash," she whispered. "Thank you so much."
"Don't thank me." Tash glowered, but then her eyes softened. She ran a finger down Elory's cheek. "You got good cheeks. Good lips. Good eyes. Thank your mother, not me. She gave you that pretty face."
Suddenly the pain was too much.
Mother . . .
The memory rose in Elory again—her mother flying toward her as a dragon, the arrows piercing her, the chariots of fire surrounding her, burning her, and then Mother losing her magic, falling dead as a human, and . . .
It was all too much, too soon. Elory's tears streamed and she trembled.
"Oh for pity's sake!" Tash groaned. "Will you cut out the waterworks? If the seraphim come, they—"
"I'm sorry." Elory wiped her eyes. "It won't happen again. It's just that . . . my mother. She died, and . . . and I'm so scared all the time. I feel so alone. I miss her so much and—"
Tash reached out, and Elory thought that the young slave would stroke her cheek again, but instead Tash slapped her. Hard.
The pain flared across Elory's cheek. She gasped.
Tash glared at her. "Shut your mouth." She jabbed Elory's chest. "If there's one thing I won't tolerate in my pit, it's self-pity. You won't shed tears here. You won't blabber on about how miserable you are, how alone you are." Tash's voice rose to an exaggerated falsetto. "Oh, I'm so alone in the world! Oh, my dear old mamma is dead!" She snorted. "Guess what, rat? Everyone here is an orphan. Everyone here is alone, and everyone here is scared. We're all slaves, if you haven't noticed the collars, and we're all bloody miserable. You're not special here. If you cry again, I'm going to bash out your teeth."
Elory wanted to cry again, to cower, to submit. But instead, she found herself staring back steadily into those angry, brown eyes.
"And we're all Vir Requis." Elory squared her shoulders. "We're all children of Requiem. We're all dragons, not rats. Did you forget that, Tash? Did you forget who you are, where we come from?" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Did you forget Requiem?"
The rage in Tash's eyes only grew. "I forget nothing. Requiem?" She scoffed. "A dead land. As dead as your precious mother. Dragons?" She tugged at her collar. "Not so long as we wear these, my darling, and there's only one key in the empire that can open this lock. And that's one key I don't own."
The Keeper's Key, Elory thought. A key imbued with ancient magic. The key that had removed her mother's collar, letting the woman shift into a dragon to dig for bitumen. The key that fit into no padlock, but whose runes of power could unlock the collar around her neck. The key that removed the collars of the brick lifters, those who hauled stones as dragons, carrying them to the tops of temples. Just a single key, only one ever made, the most precious one in the empire.
If Elory could somehow steal that key—surely it was kept here in this palace!—and if she could remove enough collars . . . if enough dragons could fly against the chariots, blow their dragonfire . . .
But no. Elory dismissed that idea. Back in the war, five hundred years ago, tens of thousands of dragons had fought Ishtafel and his chariots. Tens of thousands had fallen from the sky. Even an army of dragons could not stop the seraphim. They were a race of immortal demigods. To them, even dragons were no more dangerous than animals were to men. As men in olden days had ruled beasts several times their size, so would the seraphim forever rule the Vir Requis, collared or not. Even should Elory find the Keeper's Key, it would not save them.
"Stop daydreaming!" Tash said. Her eyes rolled so far they almost looked into her skull. "Gods above, a simpleton, this one is. Now get out of my room. Go!" She pointed at the curtain of beads. "Go, go! Out with you."
"But . . ." Elory hesitated. "I was told that I'll learn the ways of . . ." She felt her cheeks flush, and she couldn't speak louder than a whisper. "Of pleasuring a man."
She glanced around her. Between the curtain's beads, she could see the rest of the pit. The women slumped across pillows, smoking the hintan that muffled their minds, waiting for men to claim them. Did Elory truly want to join them, to learn from them? She had come here to gain time, to hope to find a way to sneak through the palace, to contact her sister. Not to learn how to become a . . . pleasurer.
Yet if I don't learn, Ishtafel will know. He'll send down his men to check on me, or he'll come down himself. She gulped. I'll have to learn this trade or I won't even last a week here.
She looked back at Tash. "Will you teach me?"
Tash let out a groan so loud it was a wonder the sleeping woman in bed didn't wake. "Does a tigress teach a rat to hunt? Get out of my room. Go ask one of my girls to mentor you. I can't be wasting time on a hopeless cause."
Elory glanced through the curtain beads again. The other women barely seemed conscious enough to breathe, let alone teach her the skill. The one by the statue was jangling the bracelet again, laughing hysterically as it chinked.
"I'll try to learn from them." Elory sighed. "I promised Ishtafel that I would. The prince said that I have only a week here, and then I'm to return to his chamber in the ziggurat's crest, and—"
Tash grabbed Elory's cheeks and tugged her face to
ward her. "What did you say?"
She gulped. Tash's fingers were digging into her cheeks, as painful as talons. "I said that I'll try to learn from them. Maybe once the smoke clears, they can teach me, and—"
"Not that part!" Tash's eyes flashed. "What you said after that."
"That I promised Ishtafel that I'd study here for a week, that—"
"Liar!" Tash shouted, raising her hand to slap Elory again.
"I tell the truth." Elory pulled the scroll from her pocket; it bore Ishtafel's seal. "I bear a letter from him."
Tash snatched the scroll, examined the seal, and blanched. The slave could almost certainly not read—virtually no slaves could—but all knew Ishtafel's seal, the eye within the sunburst. Tash shoved the scroll back at Elory, unopened.
"Bloody stars," the pleasurer whispered. "Oh bloody stars above." She stared at Elory, eyes narrowed. "It's true. He chose you. A rat." Suddenly her eyes softened. "You poor thing. You poor, poor little rat."
Elory remembered Ishtafel returning her friend to the bitumen mine, how her friend Mayana had slammed down at her feet, beaten, strangled. She wondered how many other slaves Ishtafel had stolen from Tofet, how many of them Tash had trained, and how long they had lasted.
Elory gulped. She turned to step between the strings of beads. "I'll find a little spot of my own, I'll watch what the others do, and—"
Tash grabbed her arm, pulling her back. "No you won't." Her eyes flashed again. "Ishtafel himself chose you. Prince Ishtafel, the Fire of Saraph, the Breaker of Worlds. Do you know what this means? Do you know how dangerous this is? Do you know what would happen if you don't please him?" Tash shuddered. "He'd blame me. Me! I run this place, and you're my responsibility now. I will teach you. From now on, you follow me everywhere. From now on, you are my ward." She sighed—a huge sigh that flowed from head to toes. "Why do the gods curse me so?"
One week, Elory thought. One week to linger here in smoke . . . to find a way out.
Forged in Dragonfire (Flame of Requiem Book 1) Page 9
