by Thom Lane
“You’re pretty enough with your clothes on,” he murmured. “Let people look at you and wonder what they’re missing, what I’m keeping private to myself. Besides, some folk don’t like to see even a slave in the raw; it offends their religion or their sensibilities or whatever. No point upsetting anyone I may need to share a table with, having you dangle your cock in their soup.”
“Master, I wouldn’t…!”
I didn’t really care. All my life I’d been dressed or else stripped at my master’s whim; long ago I’d learned that it made no real difference. Slaves have no chance to be shy, or any more discreet than their owner allows. A naked butt attracts a little more attention, maybe—pats and slaps and pinches, strokes and stings—but nothing worth making a fuss over. A naked cock may be all too obviously stiff, but it’s just as obvious under a loincloth or the skirt of a tunic.
Me, I was almost more comfortable raw, even in public. If my master chose to dress me, I was pleased if he was, if he thought I looked pretty; but even soft worn linen felt odd against my skin, unnatural and unnecessary. I was always wanting to fidget with it, and he was always having to cuff me still.
Still. I was glad enough of my tunic when I came into the common room with a laden tray and found my master talking to a stranger. He wore ancient shabby leathers, and sprawled at his ease on a settle with his booted feet propped up on the hearthstone. He was older than Master Jensen, in his thirties at least; his dark hair had maybe a hint of gray in it, but his eyes were unrelieved black. His gaze was all fire and ice, burning through me, making me shiver. The tunic didn’t really hide a thing, but at least I could pretend he didn’t see straight through me.
I busied myself laying out my master’s supper on the table, trying to make it clear that I wasn’t listening in to their conversation, trying to seem as though I wasn’t really there at all. A good slave is next to invisible, utterly overlooked until he’s wanted. When Master Jensen snapped his fingers to bring me to his side, I felt almost betrayed. He didn’t need to be drawing the other man’s notice to me, even that much…
I dropped to my knees beside his chair, felt his fingers in my hair, casually caressing. Ordinarily I loved these little attentions, every touch and every sidelong flick of his eyes, especially when someone else was watching. That night I just wished he’d ignore me completely, as a proper master should.
As the older man did, or seemed to do, after that one penetrating glance. He must have seen all he needed to, surely: one boy, pretty enough, dutiful enough, not worth another moment’s thought.
I leaned my head against my master’s thigh and tried not to think about the other man anymore, certainly not to look in his direction, not to look like anything except a hungry boy vaguely hopeful of a crust. Free folk are complicated. They’re angry if they catch us watching them or listening in to their conversations, but they still expect us to respond to their slightest word of command, their littlest gesture. Every slave learns sooner or later to keep alert without showing it at all. The smart ones learn sooner.
Me, I was an expert. My master fooled with me abstractedly, his warm strong fingers tugging and teasing at my ear while his thumb stroked my temple in a way that somehow set my cock stirring against the linen of my tunic, as if there were a hot wire that connected them directly, straight the way down through my body—and even then, even while I snuggled my cheek against his thigh and nipped at the leather of his trousers, I was still paying absolute attention to what both men were saying.
The stranger was called Master Luke, and I hated him already.
Mostly I try not to care much, either way. My own master matters, of course, more than anything. I’ve had owners I loved, owners I feared—sometimes both at once: slaves can be complicated too, though our masters like to think that we’re just simple little animals, easily trained and easily controlled—and at least one owner whom I hated thoroughly, whose marks I still carried on my skin and deeper. Master Jensen had set his marks on me too, but him I was halfway to adoring already. I said, we’re complicated.
My master’s friends mattered too. And his enemies, of course—but chance-met strangers? They may be kind, they may be cruel; I just do my work and try not to care. They come, they go. They don’t matter.
This one, though: this one was trying to corrupt my master, to tempt him into folly. That did matter. I couldn’t just shrug it off. Strangers come and go, but this one might leave my master in real trouble when he went.
To be fair, Master Jensen was making it easy for him. He was halfway there already: looking for a game, trying to look like an easy mark himself. He might even have been the one who started this. I didn’t know who’d made the first approach, but all too obviously they both thought they were made for each other.
I didn’t show a sign of it, but all my protective hackles were rising. My master was too innocent, and too trusting. And he thought he was unbeatable, and that was my fault; which made it my responsibility to look after him, even more than any body slave has the duty to look after their owner.
“…If you’re content to play for silver pennies and broken gold,” Master Luke was saying with just the hint of a sneer in his voice, “there are games all up and down the road. If you want real action, you have to know where to look. And who to look for.”
Me, he meant, you have to look for me. Lucky you, you’ve found me.
Until now, silver pennies and broken gold had been plenty. Master Jensen wasn’t short of money. I should know; I was the one who had to count it and carry it for him. He played to keep his hand in, and because he liked to win, and because he still didn’t really believe deep down that he didn’t need to play. It made him feel good to think that day by day he was winning enough to keep us both, with a little bit left over. He thought it was a way to live, a good life; and I could live with that, seeing my master happy and pleased with himself.
This, though, this was something else. Master Luke dragged temptation across his path like a huntmaster dragging scent for the hounds, and I could see my master’s nose twitching as he turned to follow.
I could see trouble looming, clear as anything. Master Jensen was being set up—again!—and at the least, at the very least he’d end up losing all his money in a twisted game.
All his money and me too, maybe.
Maybe worse. Maybe his money, his things—including me—and his freedom too.
Maybe his life.
Most free folk, I wouldn’t care. Let them fall into each other’s traps, let them plague and torment one another, steal and murder and enslave.
But this was my master, mine. My life was his, and I meant to keep it that way.
I tried leaning into him, but it was too late to shift him subtly, he’d gone too far. Besides, it was dangerous; he’d already felt me once, heard my voice in his dreams. He was too sensitive for me to take the risk.
This stranger, though, this Master Luke, with his scuffed boots and his old worn leathers, his scathing eyes and his all too obvious sinister intent, which somehow my master couldn’t see—I thought that he’d be easy. I wouldn’t even need to be touching him.
I clung tight to my master’s leg, and didn’t so much as lift my head to look at Master Luke.
I just turned all my fear and fury against him, all my contempt, battering at him, hard and certain, nothing subtle at all: go away, leave us alone, we don’t want you, we don’t want anything to do with you, we don’t want what you’re offering, you’re a cheat and we’re not stupid, go away…
Like that, on and on, unstoppably. I heard it when his voice faltered, I felt the twitch of victory deep inside, and carried on regardless. I wouldn’t be happy until he was on his feet and stumbling away from us, blundering blindly towards the door, urgent and bewildered. Master Jensen would be bewildered too, of course, but I could deal with that. It’s a poor slave who can’t manage his own master, even without the powers that I didn’t dare use against him.
He wouldn’t be feeling a thing
now, with all my attention focused on his companion. Leave us be, go away, give up, find someone else to seduce…
I wasn’t looking; I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t sense it, didn’t feel the wind of it. I had no warning except my master’s sudden grunt, the shift of his leg beneath my head as he moved too late.
He was late, he was slow, but I was slower. I had barely lifted my head to see why my master shifted, and that only made it easier for Master Luke and worse for me. A great blow clouted the back of my skull and sent me sprawling on the hard stone flags of the floor.
For a little while, for too long I only lay there, dizzy and shaken. When at last I tried to rise, his boot kicked me down again.
“Did you think you could try your clumsy strength against me, boy? Against me?”
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know what that meant. I only knew the cold, cold terror of discovery, of exposure.
And that I was a slave boy lying on the ground with two free men standing over me, that too.
Master Luke stood at my feet, scowling, furious; Master Jensen stood to face him, straddling me protectively, his supper knife glinting in his hand.
Master Luke smiled when he saw that. It was a dreadful smile, cold and deadly. “Oh, you would, would you, lad? For him?” With so much dismissal in his voice, as if we were both beneath his contempt.
“He’s my boy,” Master Jensen said. “Mine.” I could hear the effort in him, just to keep his voice steady. He was confused, he was frightened, and the knife in his hand was blunt and useless and he knew it, and nevertheless he stood there to defend me, to claim me. If I hadn’t loved him already, I would have loved him from that moment on. Sometimes we really are that simple. “I don’t know what he’s done, but he’s mine to discipline, if discipline he needs. Nobody knocks my boy about without my consent.”
“You don’t know…?” A momentary pause and then, “No, you really don’t, do you? You don’t know what you’ve got here.”
“He’s my boy,” Master Jensen said again, increasingly bewildered.
“Yes, all right,” more kindly; and then, in a totally different tone again, as someone else came up, fussing: “Yes, all right, Guildmaster. I’m sorry for the disturbance. This is important, though. I need to speak with this man in private. May we use your study?”
“Of course, Master Lucan. Please…”
Who can make free of a guildmaster’s rooms, at the least request? I didn’t know, but not some wayward gambler in hunt of a mark. I’d misread this man entirely. Fatally.
Master Jensen pulled me to my feet, and then had to hold me up when my legs threatened to buckle again beneath me. I clung to him needingly, wanting to apologize but not finding the words, my mouth full of blood from where I’d bitten my tongue. He wrapped both arms around me and dragged me along in Master Luke’s wake—Master Lucan’s, and where had I heard that name before?—until we came into the hushed seclusion of the guildmaster’s study.
Master Lucan closed the door behind us; Master Jensen pushed me down onto my knees on soft rugs and kept me there with a hand in my collar. That wasn’t enough, to hold me upright; he had to let me lean against his leg, just for the support of it as my mind still reeled, as Master Lucan said, “You really don’t know what you’ve got there, do you?”
“I don’t know what you mean. He’s a slave, that’s all. My slave boy. Jay.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Not long. A few days. Why?”
“Because you don’t know what you’ve got.” Master Luke’s rough hands were under my chin, forcing my face upward. He scowled into my eyes for a moment, lifted his hand threateningly when I drew breath to speak. When I subsided again, he nodded his satisfaction and went on interrogating my master. “Born slave, was he?”
“I think so, yes. He said so.” As though he were learning to distrust me. That hurt almost more than my sore pounding head. Not as much as the swelling bubble of fear in my chest, though. That really hurt. That could crush my heart and kill me.
“Yes. That’s how it happens, almost always.”
“How what happens? He’s…just a boy,” he said helplessly, tightening his fist in my collar as though that could make it true.
“No,” Master Luke said bluntly. “Not just a boy. Any more than I am just a man with a Wayfarers’ badge.”
“Yes—who are you?” My master was just starting to wake to the mystery of his interrogator. I did love him, but he was slow sometimes. “Who can command a guildmaster in his own house…?”
“I can. Well, not command, that would be discourteous—but request, certainly, and expect his cooperation.” His hand went to his ear; I watched from the corner of my eye, and saw how silver glinted there where it hadn’t before, how it dangled from his lobe in an intricate chain when he took his hand away.
Not Master Luke, no. Not even Master Lucan. Properly, he was Master Mage Lucan. Under that title, he was famous. Notorious. Terrifying.
I was lost.
He said, “Magery, mastery, what the ignorant call magic: the ability shows itself in adolescence, usually. Sometimes, rarely, it shows up in a slave. Perhaps they had a mage somewhere in their parentage, perhaps not; sometimes it seems quite random. Usually we find them, or they are brought to us. Sometimes they rise up against their owners. Occasionally, very occasionally, a slave develops signs of power and keeps them hidden. Stays quiet, stays slave. Stays potent.”
“Power? What power?” My master was honestly baffled. I felt horribly guilty, and horribly exposed.
“In his case? Power of influence, largely. I don’t know—yet—what else he can do, if anything more lies within his gift; but he can persuade the free to do what he wants. Without a word spoken, by and large. I felt him in my mind, trying to force me away from you.”
“Wait. Stop.”
My master’s turn to take possession of my chin, though it was his already; to twist and lift my head so that I had to meet him eye to eye; to force confession out of me.
“Jay, is this true?”
I just gazed up at him, mute and miserable. He took that for the admission it was, and frowned, and thought about it. All unconsciously, his thumb was still caressing as much as it was gripping me; I tried to find some comfort in that, some hope for the future. Hope of a future, at his feet.
Then, “When your last master, Master Leonin, when he gambled you against all my winnings—was that you working on his mind, to make him do that?”
I nodded, fractionally, in his grip.
“And when he played so badly, when he lost that hand too—you again?”
Again, the least little movement of my head, to admit it.
“So I didn’t win you fairly after all.” He was mostly talking to himself, working it out. I kept utterly still under his hand, until, “All those other games I’ve won, since I had you. You again?”
I nodded again. I couldn’t make him a better player, any more than I could give him better hands, but I could make everyone around him play below their strength, force them into heedlessness or stupid mistakes. I could help my master to win, and no one would ever guess that it was the silent slave boy working against them. Even the mage Master Leonin brought to test my master: even he, it never occurred to him that he should be testing not the free man but the slave.
And then, at last, inevitably: “And me? Have you ever worked this…power…on me?”
If I stayed still long enough he’d work it out, he’d remember the voice in the dark, the voice that echoed in his bones, leaning into him, trying to persuade him against his will.
I didn’t wait for that. I just nodded unhappily one more time.
He knew it all now, or as much as he cared to know. He said, “Go out to the yard, find the stable master, beg a whip of him and wait for me to come.”
Quietly, obediently, I did that. And knelt beside the whipping post, and waited an hour until at last he came, still coldly furious with me.
“You d
o not,” he said, ripping the tunic from my back, “you do not,” strapping my wrists to the ring high above my head so that I hung naked and exposed to his anger, “you do not choose who you belong to, or who you don’t. I am master and you are slave and you do not, ever try to influence or persuade me to anything. I make the decisions, and you obey. If I choose to sell you, tomorrow or next month or next year, you accept that and obey your new owner exactly as you will obey me from now onward. For all your life onward, you will live as a slave should. Be what you are. That’s all. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Master,” I whispered, small and frightened. At least he’d said if and not when. There was precious small comfort in that, but it was something to hold on to.
Then he whipped me. A dozen strokes, with a thick blade. It was vicious, and no fun for either one of us; and I sobbed under every stroke and knew this wasn’t the worst of it, there was something more to come. There had to be.
When at last he threw the whip aside and came back to me, he gripped my sweat-soaked hair in his hand and dragged my head up to face him again when I only wanted to hide in the pain and the fear and the darkness. Sometimes it was better to be ignorant and afraid, than to know the truth of what was coming.
I didn’t ask, but he told me anyway.
“Master Lucan tells me that there is one way to make you what you should be. One. If I turn around and take you back to Amaranth in the morning, if I take you to the Mages’ Guild, one of the masters there can burn this talent out of you. He says you won’t be quite so quick afterwards, not quite so smart—but who needs a smart slave, anyway? Steady and obedient and reliable, that’s what I look for in a boy. That’s all. Pretty is a bonus, but you’ll still be just as pretty when it’s done. There won’t be a mark on you. I don’t need you to be clever. A strong back, an eager mouth, and a hot, tight rump, yes. What need more?”