by Raven Dark
They asked three times if I had sisters. I told them no. Didn’t tell them I had a brother, one who I’d lost along with my mother. Boys weren’t as highly prized as girls, but my brother…him they’d have been plenty interested in.
Then three of Mama’s maids, all dressed in black shapeless linen uniforms with perfect, high buns on the tops of their heads, pushed me into a tub of scalding water. They scrubbed my waist-length hair until my scalp hurt, scrubbing my skin raw. They doused me in a de-lousing agent, scraped my teeth clean. Then one of them yanked the tangles from my hair, ignoring me when I tugged away or winced in pain.
Hands grabbed and pulled and twisted my hair into curls, applied light makeup, and then left me in the bedroom to put on a simple white button-down sundress with red roses on it. The pattern on the dress was ugly, like something Mama had made out of her old curtains, but at least the dress was light and cool.
They didn’t provide me with footwear.
Once I was dressed, a maid led me to a kitchen. I watched her toss my nightgown and everything else I owned into the hearth there. The whole thing made me think of Dolly, and I started crying again.
“Crying won’t do any good,” the cook said. “Mama doesn’t like tears, so you better stop the waterworks fast.”
I sniffled and wiped my eyes. The sooner I was away from Mama, the better.
Mama did keep her word about the food and drink. After a meal of mutton stew that was as good as any in the rest stops my mom had often taken my brother and me to, two road warriors came to Mama’s house.
“He’s expecting her,” one of them told Mama in a clipped, cold voice. “You have a half hour to get her there.”
To get me where? I looked from the heavily bearded guards to Mama, who signaled for me to get up. No one explained who he was.
“Come on, hurry it up,” Mama pulled me out of the seat when I didn’t hop to my feet fast enough, her nails digging in. “Damien doesn’t like to wait.”
Damien. I’d heard stories about him. He was the clan captain of Zone 4. He was supposed to be one of the most powerful, scariest men in Hell’s Burning.
Still no one gave me any footwear, even when the guards led me outside. The man who’d interrogated me earlier waited inside a glorious floating carriage that hovered a few feet off the ground. These road warrior’s bikes were fancier than Blade’s had been, sleek and hovering, flanking the carriage.
An assistant lifted me into the carriage, setting me on a thick, plush seat.
“Damien’s going to love you,” Mama said as the interrogator handed her a thick envelope through the carriage window. I caught sight of the bills stacked within. “Money in the bank, you are.”
I didn’t know whether I wanted Damien to like me or not. If he did, I’d be away from Mama, but would Damien be any better?
Almost a half hour later, we rode up to the front of a huge, gleaming white mansion set on a dune on the outskirts of the city. Inside the mansion’s gate, the interrogator led me up the steps to the grand, double-door entrance, his guards sticking close.
Many long halls later, we stopped at another set of double doors, these as grand as the entrance to the house. The doors were massive, with a symbol carved into the wood, a letter I couldn’t read. Without being told, I knew Damien was beyond those doors, as if I could feel him there, lying in wait.
What would he look like? What would he say? What would he expect of me? My heart thudded so hard it hurt.
He couldn’t be any worse than Blade or Mama, could he?
Could he?
Beware the meek who enter here,
for Darkness lies in wait.
Tread softly ye who cannot fight,
beyond his Iron Gate.
-A madman on the road to Hell’s Burning
Chapter 1
Changes
Twelve years later...
“Freedom. Maybe that’s what you wanted, huh, Maja?” I cooed as I brushed the velvet chestnut brown coat of the horse. Empathy tugged at me, remembering her near escape as I ran the brush over her flank in long, soothing strokes. “That’s why you ran, isn’t it?”
When she’d first broken free of my hold and raced for the gate to the riding area, I’d been terrified. Damien was sure to deliver his own brand of discipline for my nearly letting the prized mare escape and run amok on his grounds. Except three days had passed and he hadn’t sent anyone for me. I tried not to dwell on why.
“There, now, doesn’t that feel better, girl?” I set the brush aside and started rubbing her down.
Maja was one of the few things in my life here at Damien’s compound that brought me joy—that brought me anything, actually. Being a slave, gifts weren’t a normal occurrence for me. But when Damien brought the prized mare to this desert environment, I saw her as mine. I even believed that, deep down, she was purchased for me. Damien hated when I withdrew into myself, so my response to Maja delighted him.
Since then, he encouraged my daily visits with Maja, despite the resentment from the women in the training house I had lived in all these years.
Once I finished with the rubdown, I reached into my robe and brought out a gingersnap that I’d pocketed from the cook earlier.
“My time is up, beautiful. Be a good girl, and maybe tomorrow I’ll bring you an apple from the conservatory. If you don’t try to run away again.” I planted a kiss on the horse’s white nose and made my way out of the paddock.
As I walked, memories came flooding back to the surface. Mama’s face, with her painted eyebrows, her taloned fingers pinching my shoulders. I shuddered. Why was I thinking of her?
From the time I’d woken up this morning, something had felt wrong, like the feeling one gets when they know they have forgotten something important, but for the life of them, they can’t seem to recall it.
I was always one to trust my instincts. Those instincts had saved my life time and time again. Learning to yield, listening to things unsaid, those things I was an expert in. Avoiding a punishment, that was a skill every slave needed. New slaves still refused to bend, but here, one learned quickly that the effort to fight was futile.
When I drew close to the training house, the distant roar of the road warrior’s motorbikes reached my ears. They were so much louder than the speeders driven by Damien’s men, calling inevitable attention no one on Damien’s staff would even think of bringing on themselves. I turned, looking out across The Compound grounds, shielding my eyes from the desert sun.
From here, I didn’t see the bikes, not when they were on the other end of The Compound near the Wall. The absurd urge to sneak off and get a look at them rose up, and I tamped that down fast before such a dangerous thought could take root. New empathy for Maja pricked at me. The men on those bikes were everything I was not. Harsh, brutal, uncivilized, Savage.
Free.
I shook the thoughts off and went the rest of the way to the back of the house, the closest entrance to the paddock. A girl’s dream, that. A fantasy not worth time at the whipping post for having it.
I’d just come up the steps when one of the maids threw the back door open and marched out to me. “There you are, get in here,” Herma ordered, grabbing my arm and pulling me into the house. “Damien’s summoned you.”
As soon as the maid said those words, unease chewed at my insides. He’d have heard about Maja’s near-escape long before now, but there were a hundred reasons a man as busy and as powerful as he would take this long to send someone for me. My nervousness morphed into something deeper that ate at my insides.
“Yes, Herma. I’ll be ready in a moment.” I bowed my head, about to head through the kitchen to my room.
Herma seized my elbow and pulled me toward my room, her aged grip like an iron vise. “You have five minutes to get ready. Griesha is already here and wearing a trench in my floor.”
“Griesha…” I stopped in my tracks so abruptly that if Herma hadn’t jerked hard on my arm and marched me down the hall, I would have been stand
ing there, frozen.
Usually, when Damien sent for me, which he only did every few months, he sent a couple of his Escorts to bring me to his mansion. As the leader of the J’nai, one of the most powerful Families in the world, he nearly always sent others on his behalf. If he’d sent his personal Counselor for me, and almost a week earlier than usual…
“Come on, no dawdling.” Herma shouldered open my bedroom door, then pushed me inside. “Five minutes.” She snapped the door shut before I could reply.
I took off the slippers I’d been wearing and set them neatly by the door before checking myself over in the mirror to make sure every part of me looked just right. Here on the property assigned for training, my feet were allowed to be covered, but never in Damien’s presence.
In front of the large full-length mirror Damien had his men install in my room, I looked over my long, pastel blue silk shift that draped my frame, checking for the tiniest scuff or run in the thin layers of fabric. Not a one. The gossamer material was nearly transparent but with enough layers that it showed my feminine shape, only leaving the details hidden from view.
I pulled my hair down from its ponytail, fluffing my lilac curls so they fell around my shoulders the way Damien always instructed, touched up the light layer of charcoal that darkened my eyes the way the maids taught me. I was just retouching the gloss on my lips when Herma knocked smartly on the door.
“Two more minutes, Setora,” she barked.
I blew out a slow, silent breath and went out into the hall. Herma shook her head at me. I raised my eyebrows, but she didn’t explain.
Out in the sitting room, Griesha stopped pacing and folded his hands in front of him, waiting as I approached. Except for a little more grey in his dark ponytail and the wrinkles at his eyes, he looked exactly the same as when he’d interrogated me twelve years before. His black breeches and red tunic with the sunburst—the sigil of both Damien and the J’nai he commanded—on the left breast were identical. His face was the exact same stony mask as it had been when he’d grilled me in that tiny room in Mama’s house. His expression gave me nothing. The gnawing in my belly intensified.
“Happy day to you, Counselor Greisha.” I dropped a smooth, well-trained curtsy, head bowing.
“Happy day to you, Setora. Are you ready to meet with the Captain?”
“Yes, Counselor, but I’m surprised I’m being summoned today. It’s another week before our usual meeting.”
He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked slowly on his feet. “Why do you think you’re being summoned?”
“I let Maja get away on my ride a few days ago,” I said, pleased my voice didn’t waver. “She almost escaped.”
The faintest curve touched his lips, almost a smirk. “You think this is about a horse.”
Confusion nagged at me, his statement throwing me off guard. “Please tell me what I’ve done to offend my Captain, Counselor.”
“Let us go.” He waved me over to the front doors of the training house.
Griesha led me out to his hovering carriage. Once more, road warriors flanked the carriage on those sleek, hovering bikes. I’d since learned the men were called Escorts, which is why they had more formal leather uniforms with shirts that had sleeves instead of leather cuts, and the bikes were called speeders.
And as with the last few times I’d been taken to meet Damien, there were six Escorts, two in front, two behind, one on either side of the carriage.
The mansion where Damien lived stood less than six-hundred feet away from the training house, but Damien insisted I be driven anywhere that required any walking, usually with a heavily armed escort. True to form, each of the men carried thin blades in scabbards on their backs.
Griesha’s assistant helped me into the carriage, then shut us inside, while Griesha went back to the door where Herma waited. I peered out the carriage window, making out an envelope that changed hands.
Money? I remembered him paying Mama the same way, but why now?
Once Griesha climbed inside, the carriage sped off toward the main house, the speeder motors making their soft, whirring hum.
I resisted the urge to hold my stomach, which didn’t stop squirming the whole way to the main house. Whatever was going on, this went way beyond an incident with a horse. The urge to throw open the carriage door and bolt seized me, but I quashed it. Where would I go?
Minutes after arriving at the mansion, we’d walked into the heart of Damien’s home, down hall after marbled, elaborate hall. Twice as many servants and slaves bustled about, carrying decadent flower arrangements, rolling out carts for serving trays, and putting extra polish on wood and golden trim. Preparations for a massive party, it looked like. How had I not heard about it?
We continued to the center of the mansion, through those grand doors I remembered going through as a child, and into what he always called a throne room, even though there was no throne in it.
But for the plush couches and chairs arranged about the floor, the room stood empty, Damien nowhere to be seen. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or not.
As always happened when I came in here, I took a long, lingering look around the room, as much out of fascination as to take my mind off the question as to why I was here.
Except for the wall to one side of the doors where a large window looked out onto an aged but opulent courtyard, every inch of the walls were painted with detailed murals of The Old World. Tall cities sprawled across one wall, with skyscrapers that overlooked streets teeming with people in numbers that only existed before the Virus decimated the world. On another wall, forested parks stretched across lands where green things hadn’t grown in hundreds of years. And here and there, old motorized pods that hadn’t run in just as long flew through the sky, high as birds. This was the only time I caught a glimpse of The Old World, something most people only heard about in stories. What would it be like to live in a world like that, where no one went hungry or wondered how they’d survive the night out in the desert alone?
I looked up at the ceiling. While torchlight burned on the walls and from floor-mounted holders, the ceiling in this room still had an elaborate light fixture with bulbs in it. Electricity hadn’t run in most people’s houses in centuries, too many resources that generated it having long since run out, and others only accessible to those of great wealth. Damien was one of the few men in this area wealthy enough to have a solar-powered house, allowing him to use electrical powered light fixtures. He insisted that the house’s original, electrical design remain intact, though he only used them on special occasions to preserve the solar energy. Now the torches illuminated the room.
As a collector of rare and beautiful objects, he never explained why he refused to upgrade the house to utilize far cheaper light sources, but I knew it was because doing so would diminish the value considerably. Women weren’t meant to understand anything as complex as a property’s historical significance, and especially not its value. Better he believe I just thought the house was lovely to look at.
“You’ve always loved this house, haven’t you, Setora?” Damien’s smooth, low voice filled the room so suddenly that I whirled around with a start.
I hadn’t heard him approach. He stood watching me from the middle of the room, perfect blue eyes as sharp as a hawk’s.
Focused on the hammering of my heart, I took a fraction of a second too long to assume the position. The slightest downturn of Damien’s slender mouth was enough to bring me back to myself.
Walking over to him, I knelt on the smooth, hard marble floor at his feet, hands on my knees, eyes on the elaborate tiles that formed his sunburst insignia on the floor. Silent, waiting.
Damien put his long fingers under my chin, lifting it slowly up until my eyes met his. This close, those piercing blue eyes seemed to see straight into my soul, seeing every dream, every hope I had.
Right then, it struck me that the man never seemed to change. Twelve years after that first meeting in this same room, he was still as beau
tiful as ever. Beautiful, but in the way that ice is beautiful.
For one thing, his chiseled features were still a stoic mask, his dark, almost black hair sprinkled with the same amount of gray at the front and sides. For another, he was draped in the same silk robes of jet black and crimson red, his body still exuding the strength of a well-built twenty-year old, instead of a man in his middle years. Sometimes I wondered if he’d live forever, a man of perfect refinement who still ruled his piece of this savage land even after the rest of the world had long since perished.
“Did I scare you, my precious dove?” Those long fingers kept my chin in place.
“Yes. Sorry, my Master, I didn’t hear you come in.”
In reply, he held out his hand. I slipped mine into his large palm, letting him pull me smoothly to my feet.
Usually at this time, he’d walk me over to one of the elaborate chairs sitting by the window and seat himself there, whereupon I’d crawl into his lap, as he expected of me. Instead, he walked me over to a set of doors that led out into the garden.
Saying nothing, he watched me as we made our way out to the stone steps. Waiting to see if I’d ask where we were going, watching my expression. I kept my silence, keeping my face carefully neutral; open to him, but without outward emotion.
“You’ve come such a long way, my little dove. You’re always ladylike, a man’s perfect companion. Herma and her women have taught you well.”
“You honor me with your words, my Master.”
The praise sent a warm glow through me, like a father’s praise for his daughter. The crinkles at his eyes deepened and he looked pleased. How had I thought he was cold or stoic? Now he looked almost doting, even though his expression never changed.
We strolled over to a fountain, my arm folded in his. No water spilled from the fountain down its three levels, and the grey stone lay bone dry. The fountains that dotted the garden stood dry and silent, not a flower or a blade of grass that once grew here remained.