Voyage of the Shadowmoon

by Sean McMullen

  Aware that her resolution could easily teeter either way, Dolvienne strode out into the corridor on her cloth, paste, and parchment boots. The eunuchs saw a cloaked and hooded figure of Toragev’s height approaching in the gloom. Both hurriedly touched their foreheads to the floorboards as Toragev passed.

  “Well met, master,” they chorused.

  “Well met,” came the hoarse whisper of a man not anxious to be noticed leaving.

  Once the figure had reached the floor below and was striding for the door to the courtyard, the eunuchs turned to each other, smiled, then giggled. The elderly servant dozing at the courtyard door stiffly got to his feet, pulled back the latch and pushed the door open. He scowled at the back of Dolvienne’s cloak when she passed without tossing him a copper, and resolved to drop an accidental hint to D’Alik about this visit. The two eunuchs at the other gate saw Toragev’s figure unstrap his horse’s nosebag smoothly and toss it over the hitching rail, then slip the reins free and spring lightly into the saddle.

  “Seems like he’s lightened his load a trifle,” snickered one of them, then they heaved the bar up and pushed one side of the gate open.

  Dolvienne rode Toragev’s horse through the gate, then turned for the caravan’s campside as the guards closed the gate behind her. The desire to urge the horse into a gallop was close to being a physical ache, but she rode as Toragev might be expected to do through the darkened town. At first she made for the field where the caravan was camped, then she skirted it. The road south was marked by the remains of an arch, and beyond it was an earth rampart that passed for the town wall. Dolvienne rode for the gap the road passed through. The guards languidly got to their feet as she approached, but she tossed them a pair of coppers cut from the coinbelt of her dancing rig and rode past without allowing the horse to break stride.

  Now clear of the town, Dolvienne now rode at a canter by the light of Miral. All the while she cringed in dread of some gong or trumpet announcing her escape, but there was nothing but silence in her wake. An hour from the town she saw another group of riders approaching, but they paid her no attention as she skirted them. Two hundred miles, she thought again and again as she rode. One hundred and fifty to the Zavi well. She might just be able to reach it without killing the horse. If the keeper accepted the remaining coppers she had cut from the coinbelt Madame Voldean had given her, she could buy water and feed, and perhaps reach Baalder in one more desperate dash. Toragev’s horse was strong, and she weighed a lot less than the steward.

  Senterri swallowed as Toragev finished putting his terms to her. Since leaving Diomeda, all three of the girls had been threatened with violation more times than they could remember, but they had never suffered any worse abuse than being stripped, inspected, and fondled by prospective buyers.

  “So, who will make the journey?” he asked in conclusion. “One of you, or none of you? I have a disguise, ah, in my pack. We can leave this very hour.”

  “If there is anything, anything that would convince you of my sincerity, I would do it,” said Senterri.

  “There is one proof of sincerity that you can offer,” said Toragev, spreading his arms wide in the local gesture of harmless intention. “All three of you girls are virgins, certified by Madame Voldean herself. That is greatly valued by the nobles and royalty of the far north kingdoms. Whichever of you goes to Baalder will cease to be the property of the most esteemed slavemaster D’Alik, so the matter of whether she is a virgin or not will have no relevance.”

  By the look on Senterri’s face, it was clear she had realized what Toragev was proposing.

  “Yes, my lady,” concluded the steward. “The girl that you choose to go to Baalder must first take me to her bed.”

  Senterri shank away from the steward, but he did not go after her. Folding his arms, he began walking slowly to the door.

  “Wait!” she said sharply. “What—No, no, I mean, how did my handmaids—Did they …”

  “They were both aghast,” laughed Toragev. “I must indeed seem ugly. But nonetheless, both of them were willing to make the sacrifice that I have quite respectfully requested. They are so exceedingly dedicated to your service and protection that I am almost tempted to believe you might really be a rich Sargolan lady, and that they are your handmaids.”

  Senterri walked over and stood in front of the door. She folded her arms.

  “Perime and Dolvienne are my handmaids,” she said, as steadily as she could. “Perime and I were brought up together. Dolvienne has been in my service since she was seventeen. We are very close. Like sisters. The sisters I never had. I have four brothers and no sisters. Do you understand what it is like to be so close?”

  “I have indeed dealt with slave families many times, I know how strong such bonds can be. I have also pursued a lot of escapees. None have ever eluded me, so you see I have a reputation to maintain.”

  “I am willing to pay you for our freedom!” insisted Senterri, her fists clenched. “I am willing to pay generously.”

  “And I am taking a gamble. D’Alik’s wrath can be quite terrible. I must hasten to add that for me this will not merely be an act of intense but brief delight. It will be an act of faith. Now, I must gather you three to discuss this matter. The decision must be yours. Please stand aside—”

  “No more!” exclaimed Senterri. “Enough. Leave Perime and Dolvienne out of this.”

  “What? There is no need—”

  “The handmaids are my—my responsibility.”

  She reached up to release the strap at her shoulder. The robe fell to the floor, revealing a pair of full, firm breasts. Senterri fumbled at the knot of her cotton trousers.

  “Excellent lady, are you entirely sure?” asked Toragev, rubbing his hands together nervously.

  Senterri’s cotton trousers fell to the floor.

  “My bed awaits your pleasure,” she said unsteadily. “I lack the benefit of your experience in such activities, my lord steward, but if I am what you want, here I am.”

  The two guards at the head of the stairs glanced out of the window at Miral, then down to a shadow cast by the fretwork on the floor. It had touched the foot of an ornamental table.

  “That’s the time,” announced the Racital eunuch.

  “Time?” the Vindician eunuch asked as he yawned.

  “The shadow from the filigree point has touched the table leg. Time to do the rounds.”

  They closed and locked the barred door at the head of the stairs, then set off down the corridor. More than a few feet from their thumb-lamp, it was as black as the inside of a barrel of pitch. All oil in the town had to be carried in by the camel caravans, so it was burned sparingly and in very small lamps. For the first two-thirds of the corridor, all was well.

  They stopped at Dolvienne’s door and reached for the bolt. It was hanging loose, held up only by the socket in the frame. They rushed inside, the lamp held high. It did not take long to establish that the shape in the bed was just a dummy.

  “She was here at dusk, and only D’Alik’s steward has come and gone since then,” said the Vindician.

  “She will be with one of her friends,” said the other eunuch, “comparing notes on Toragev’s performance.”

  The bolt on Perime’s door was secure. They threw it back and entered.

  “Master, I took the liberty of changing into the disguise—” she began; then she gasped loudly and was silent.

  The eunuchs at first had the impression of a small, cloaked man standing beside the bed, but the voice was that of the slave girl. The bed was rumpled.

  “Bring her, keep hold of her!” barked the Vindic eunuch. “There is more to this than a little girl-talk.”

  Now thoroughly alarmed, they flung open Senterri’s door and burst into her room. For an instant they had an image of the scene, as if frozen in time by a painter. Toragev half-dressed. Senterri sitting naked on her bed, hugging her knees and looking frightened. Clothing strewn on the floor.

  Senterri tried to cover herself. P
erime suddenly realized that she had saved her mistress from nothing by taking the steward to her bed and trying so very hard to delight him. It was all a monstrous trick. Slowly Senterri realized that it was Perime, wearing a disguise. The truth suddenly blazed out before her as well. What she had been about to give Toragev would bring nothing at all in return.

  Toragev laughed as he looked from Perime to Senterri.

  “If only you could see your own faces—” he began.

  The eunuch’s grip on Perime’s arm had gone slack as he stood there, astonished. Perime broke free and drew the eunuch’s ax from his belt in one motion, then screamed with rage as she charged Toragev. The steward cross-blocked the descending ax on the shaft, then step-dodged as he tore the weapon from her grip. As the girl sprawled over Senterri’s bed, Toragev’s years of experience with armed and angry slaves took hold of his reflexes. He brought the ax down on her back, severing her spine and the reciprocant arteries between her hearts.

  D’Alik had been nervous about riding through the night, even with three of his hired guardsmen to escort him. The stakes were high, however, so it seemed worth the chance. When the lone rider had passed his group going south at a canter, the slavemaster was surprised.

  “He’s either fleeing a crime or bent on being a victim,” he called to the guardsman riding beside him.

  “I give him five miles,” the man called back, and they both laughed in spite of their fatigue.

  By now they were so close to the town that D‘Alik was not willing to camp until morning. They urged their exhausted horses onward, and reached the desert town nearly three hours after sunset. An unusual number of lights were gleaming in Madame Voldean’s building, yet D’Alik had to ring at the outer gate’s bell for some time before anyone admitted him.

  D’Alik refused Madame Voldean’s invitation to sit as he entered her audience chamber. Two eunuchs flanked the cushion on which she sat. She was in her sixties, but looked a lot younger for having stayed out of the sun for most of her life.

  “I want an explanation,” the slaver said quietly. “One of my stock is dead.”

  “Your steward did the killing,” replied the mistress of the slave school, but she did not elaborate lest it be taken as a sign of weakness.

  “What were the circumstances?” D’Alik now asked.

  “A caravan arrived from the north this morning. It brought word that all trails north had been closed due to the Diomeda business. As I was having my evening meal your steward arrived, and I invited him to join me for wine and grapes after my meal. He showed me a note of commission from yourself, saying that in the event of market circumstances for the girls changing, they were to be retrained for whatever opportunities were available. Toragev’s opinion was that attractive and sophisticated harlots would be much in demand by the officers of the army of the Alliance.”

  “I suppose he announced that he wished to commence tutorials himself?”

  “Well, yes. You have sanctioned the practice in the past.”

  “Go on.”

  “It seems that he followed his usual ploy of pretending to offer them a chance to escape in return for some willing and intimate entertainment. Perime agreed. Next he went to the room of Senterri. Meantime the guards began an inspection and found Perime dressed to resemble an artisan wayfarer. They seized her and dashed into Senterri’s room, where they found her keeping quite intimate company with Toragev. It was an intensely emotional moment.”

  “And you. Madame Voldean, have a gift for understatement. Pray continue.”

  “Perime snatched a guard’s ax and attacked your steward. He disarmed her and buried the ax in her back, killing her instantly. Because he was not the slave’s owner I had him bound and confined at once, because my charter from the Guild of Slavers states—”

  “Enough! Where is Senterri?”

  “In a spare room, asleep. At first she clung to Perime’s body, begging her to come back to life. Eventually we managed to pour some sleeping draft down her throat and wash Perime’s blood from her. She—”

  “Well, feed her a stimulant. I want both her and Dolvienne ready to leave within the half hour.”

  “Ah, we think Dolvienne has escaped.”

  There was a pause that had all of the tension of a fully drawn bow.

  “You think she has escaped,” D’Alik said, very slowly.

  “She may be still in the compound. We think she worked the nails out of her bolt’s frame and stuck it back with resin. The guards allowed what they thought was Toragev to leave. Ah, and his horse is missing.”

  D’Alik squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Unless you think the horse is also hiding within the confines of the compound, might I suggest that she took my steward’s horse and fled into the … desert.”

  The slaver had suddenly recalled quite a large horse with quite a small rider, heading south. It must have been Dolvienne. He turned, strode to the door, and flung it open. The chief of his escort was waiting outside.

  “Take three men and fresh horses, ride with all speed down the south road,” he barked. “If you overtake a lone rider, a girl wearing a slave collar, then kill her. Her skin is white, her hair is black and quite curly. She will be riding for Baalder, and will be on Toragev’s horse. If you bring back her head, there are ten gold pagols waiting for each of you.”

  “At once, master. A mere inexperienced girl will not get far.”

  “If you fail, do not bother to return.”

  D’Alik returned to confront Madame Voldean.

  “I wish to have some words with Toragev, in private,” he announced.

  “He has been bound to a stool in Perime’s former room. Her body is still—”

  “Take me there. Now.”

  A quarter hour later D’Alik emerged from Perime’s room and bolted the door behind him. He advanced on the eunuchs at the head of the stairs.

  “I am leaving now,” he said. “Where is the slave girl Senterri?”

  “Madame Voldean has her downstairs, and is trying to revive her.”

  “Have the girl taken to my horse. She leaves with me, now! Even if she has to be strapped behind the saddle.”

  Senterri was coherent enough to sit behind D’Alik and hold on when he rode through the gates and vanished into the darkness beyond. By then the sky had been obscured by clouds. Occasional large, heavy drops of rain thudded into the dust. By morning there was thunder rumbling in the sky, and intensely bright bolts of lightning blazed out. An elderly initiate said it was a portent of disaster. He was, in fact, the doorkeeper at Madame Voldean’s, and before she had sat down to breakfast he had given his notice, packed a small bag, and hurried west as fast as he could hobble.

  It was raining steadily by noon. Madame Voldean had returned to bed after breakfast, being quite tired after the traumas of the previous night. She was roused by a trainee slave, who was dripping with rain.

  “What do you mean, dripping water over my best Racital carpet?” Madame Voldean demanded.

  “Mistress, please—men to see you,” babbled the girl.

  “What men—?”

  The door was smashed open, and five cavalrymen entered. They seized Madame Voldean and dragged her out into the corridor. There three eunuch guards lay dead, and over them stood at least another dozen cavalrymen. Madame Voldean was taken out into the compound, where four bodies lay in the red mud and rain before several mounted Sargolan nobles. Beside them was a girl, disheveled and drenched. With a qualm so sharp that it nearly stopped her hearts, Madame Voldean realized that it was Dolvienne.

  “She is a runaway slave!” exclaimed Madame Voldean, more by reflex than common sense.

  The response of her captors was to force her to her knees. A Sargolan cavalry captain emerged from the open door, and more Sargolans began to file out behind him. Two of them were carrying Perime’s body. Dolvienne shrieked once, then was again still and silent. Toragev’s body was carried out next.

  “Lady Perime is dead,” announced the captain. �
��We cannot find the princess, but we found that man’s body.”

  “Who is he?” asked Prince Stavez, who was beside Dolvienne.

  “Your Highness, the man is Toragev, a slaver’s steward,” said Dolvienne. “He visited us yesterday with a scheme to escape. The price for his scheme involved sex.”

  Her words, and the look on the face of the prince, helped Madame Voldean’s grasp of the situation catch up with reality. The town was in Sargolan hands. For the town militia to have surrendered without a fight, which they obviously had done, the Sargolans probably were there in overwhelming numbers. The Sargolan empire’s Princess Senterri herself had been imprisoned in her College of Domestic and Exotic Skills, made to learn menial tasks, been given several mild beatings, then had been seduced by Toragev. It looked very bad indeed. The mistress of the College of Domestic and Exotic Skills decided to add whatever embroidery she could.

  “Toragev the steward ravished Perime when she would not agree to his scheme,” babbled Madame Voldean. “Then he killed Perime when she tried to defend Senterri. He—”

  Madame Voldean was seized by the neck and her face was forced down into the red mud. After the longest moment of her life, she was drawn upright again.

  “The term is ‘Her Highness,”’ Dolvienne said sharply. “Continue.”

  Madame Voldean spat out a mixture of red mud and horse droppings.

  “The steward ravished Her Highness—ah, that is, we think he did—before my guards could come to her aid—”

  “What?” bellowed Prince Stavez, drawing his ax and holding it high, aching to find someone to kill to avenge his sister’s dishonor.