I was trying to remember all the verses to one of those interminable Soluran ballads about some brainless noble rescuing an idiot girl with more hair than wit when the door swung open to reveal a couple of guards and a well-dressed man with a ledger under one arm and in the other hand a pomander that he kept lifted to his nostrils. I envied him that more than his well-polished boots. The bookkeeper looked around the room and then started with the closest to the door, which happened to be me. Looking me up and down, he nodded to the nearest guard.
“Strip him.”
I ripped off my shirt and breeches myself, giving the guard a warning glare and trying to tuck Mellitha’s coin under the clothes unseen. The man with the pomander scrutinized me closely from head to toe and then nodded again; this time the guard seized my jaw and held it down so the man could see my teeth. The turnkey’s hand stank and I swallowed against an urge to gag, opening my mouth wide so the bastard wouldn’t have a reason to put a filthy finger in my mouth. If he had I’d probably have bitten it off, whatever it cost me.
The clerk counted my teeth, nodded, made a note in his ledger and then looked me in the eye.
“Do you have any skills?” he asked in passable Tormalin.
I wondered quickly what to say for the best; I didn’t want to push my price up too high for Mellitha, but equally I didn’t fancy being sold as part of a yoke of ten field slaves to the first bidder.
“Swordsman,” I said firmly.
He shrugged, made another note and moved on to the next man. I won a warning glare from the turnkey as I reached for my clothes, so I simply sat down to wait and see what would happen next, listening as the bookkeeper went around the room. It seemed I was in the company of a couple of dockers, a mercer’s runner, a clerk, two rent collectors, a potter and a stockman. Dastennin only knows how they had ended up here. With this interrogation complete, we were herded, still naked, out of our cell and down to the end of a long line of other unfortunates waiting to enter a long, low building at the far end of the compound. A second line was forming, evidently drawn from the female cells, which made the wait a little less tedious. I felt sorry for some of the women, probably here through no fault of their own, vainly trying to cover their nakedness with hands and hair, often with children clinging to their thighs, eyes hollow with distress. Others had clearly been through this before, challenging the men with bold stares, pointing and giggling, hand gestures leaving little of their conversation to the imagination. One bold piece caught my eye and gave me a long, slow wink, but I caught sight of the brand on her palm marking her as a whore who stole from her customers so she didn’t get a response from me.
The line moved on. We were shoved through a door by guards with ungentle clubs. I found myself facing a long, deep bath, for all the world like the one on Messire’s hill country estate that they use for washing the sheep. The guards were using their staves like shepherd’s staffs, so I jumped in rather than wait to be pushed. The water was scummy and foul with soiled straw but I didn’t care, scrubbing at myself to get the worst of the filth off, ignoring the sting of my cuts and grazes that were now joined by numerous bites from nameless vermin. Emerging at the far end, a man in a long tunic forced me on to a bench with impersonal hands and took a pair of clippers to my head. All in all, I now had a fair idea of what it felt like to be a ram being readied for market.
The air was cold on my shorn scalp as we were herded through another door. It was one way of getting a haircut for free, but on balance I would rather have paid the coin to a barber and had a decent shave into the bargain. I rubbed a hand over the bristles on my chin, now at the aggravating stage where they were both sharp and itchy, and I doubted my own mother would recognize me at that moment.
Stock brought down off the mountains for sale at home gets cleaned if it’s lucky, then it gets weighed while the water in the wool is still adding to the burden. The Relshazri evidently worked the same way; this line moved slowly toward the kind of balance I was used to see weighing sacks on at the harbor side. A couple of men were manhandling the hefty bullion weights on and off the scales while another checked the arithmetic, consulted a ledger and scrawled something on to labels, which were tied around the neck of each piece of merchandise. I tried to squint at mine but it was tied too short, tucked under my chin. For some reason I found that irritating me more than anything else that had happened so far.
On the way back to our cell a guard handed me a bundle which proved to come from Mellitha. It had obviously been opened but she’d put in enough bread and cheese to leave me a decent meal after the guards had taken what they wanted. That was the highlight of the day; my money had vanished from my pallet and, as the sun faded from the window, I found myself struggling to keep my spirits up. Despite all my efforts to distance myself from events I had no hope of controlling, I could not help feeling humiliated. It wasn’t the nakedness, the impersonal handling like a piece of merchandise. It was the way my mind had been invaded again.
Something had been done to me to make me lose my senses, to make me do something so out of character and worse it was something I couldn’t even remember. If I’d known who to blame, I could at least have been angry with them, but I couldn’t even be certain about that. Was it the Elietimm? If so, what were they trying to achieve? As I wondered, I began to worry about it happening again, despite all my determination to stay calm. Losing control like that, my wits lost in the shades, my body at the mercy of whoever might be passing, the danger of being robbed, even killed; I found myself shaking at the thought and with a real effort forced myself to drive it out of my mind.
Fighting sleep as the night darkened outside the bars, I tasted faint salt on the breeze, reminding me of home. How was I going to explain this to Messire? However I told the tale, I was going to look incompetent. I’ve never favored explanations for failing in a duty that begin “I couldn’t help it but…” and frustration welled up in me as I tried in vain to come up with something better. My pride was going to take a worse beating than my body when I had to make my report. My hopes of making the step from sworn man to chosen man would fall right down the privy, I realized gloomily.
I looked out at the stars. Livak was a girl who could count the beans in a handful; she wouldn’t blame me for what had happened but I still didn’t like the idea of looking such a masquerade fool in front of her. I cursed under my breath and sighed, looking in vain for the first glimmer of dawn lightening the sky. This would never have happened to me if those cursed wizards hadn’t dragged Messire into their half-witted schemes; I scowled into the darkness. Surely Shiv, Mellitha and Viltred could have come up with some way of getting me out of here? If you believed any of the ballads that kept minstrels fed, couldn’t wizards do things like walking themselves through walls, turning things invisible, sending guards to sleep? What were they doing while I was stuck in here, at risk of anything from a ramming up the arse to jail fever?
“There’s no more point in them magicking you away than there is in you finding a way to break out of here,” I told myself sternly. “Think sense, fool. The Watch would have the ferries tied up and be turning the city inside out before we’d gone around the chimes.”
I awoke with a sudden start to find guards busily rousting us all to our feet, herding us down the stairs to the courtyard where I saw manacles were to be clamped around our wrists, a chain threaded through to link us all together. The thought of being chained like a common criminal filled me with sudden rage. Without thinking, I pulled my hands away, cursing. A stinging slap from the guard split my lip. I reached for the bastard, only to be felled by a numbing blow to the meat of my thigh from the blunt end of a stave. The pain of that brought me to my senses. When I could stand, I gritted my teeth and submitted meekly to the fetters.