Amara could not suppress the curse that slipped from between her lips. Gaius had given Rook no choice at all: Do what he wished, or perish with her daughter before the oncoming menace. “Rook, I don’t know why you-”
Rook held up her hand for silence. Then said, simply, “I sent her to Calderon.”
For a moment, Amara couldn’t find a response. “Why Calderon?” she finally asked.
Rook shrugged a shoulder and gave her a weary smile. “I wanted her as far from the Vord as possible. With the most capable, forewarned, and best-prepared people I knew. I know that Count Bernard has been trying to warn folk of the Vord for years. I assumed that he would begin preparing his own home to resist them. If I betray you, Countess, my daughter has no one to protect her. I would rather die screaming with blood running from my nose and ears than that.”
Amara bowed her head. It was an accurate description of the kind of death that awaited anyone who defied a discipline collar too severely or for too long, or should anyone try to remove the collar save whoever had put it there. The locking mechanism on the collars was fiendishly complex, but Amara had no doubt that Rook could bypass it whenever she chose, given the proper tools.
It would, of course, kill her to remove it.
Rook had defied High Lords and Ladies-and the First Lord himself, in her effort to secure her child when she had been held prisoner against Rook’s loyalty by the late High Lord Kalarus. Amara had no doubt whatsoever that the woman would sacrifice her life without hesitation if she thought that by doing so she could protect Masha.
“Very well,” Amara said. “What can you tell me?”
“Little,” Rook said. She made a frustrated gesture at the collar. “Orders. But I can show you.”
Amara nodded once.
Rook turned back to the tunnel and beckoned her. “Follow me.”
Veiled to the utmost of her ability, Amara crouched on a blackened rooftop beside Rook, overlooking the city’s former Slave Market, the Vord’s “recruitment” area.
She’d seen merrier slaughterhouses.
There were several dozen Vord, the low-slung garimlike versions, assembled in the courtyard, waiting in patient coils of gleaming black exoskeleton next to every entrance to and from the place, and Amara suspected that she would see similar sentries at every crossroads and gateway within the city.
Besides the Vord, several hundred Alerans filled the Slave Market. The majority of them were imprisoned in the various different cages required to hold strongly gifted furycrafters. Firecrafters were those imprisoned beneath the steady rain-shower trickle of water that poured down from pipes overhead. Earthcrafters were being held in cages suspended several feet from the ground. The windcrafters, as Amara well knew, would be inside the low brick cubes of solid stone, with no access to air but for what could come in through a few holes no larger across than Amara’s thumb. A metal cage sufficed for woodcrafters, though they were placed far opposite the courtyard from the heavy wooden beams that restrained the metalcrafters inside.
Most interesting were the cages that had to take multiple layers of precautions to contain their prisoners-doubtless the captured Citizenry. One metal cage that swung high off the ground and was simultaneously drizzled with water and fine black dirt caught Amara’s eye, particularly. The cage held a number of damp, mud-spattered figures, only two of them armored men captured during the battle. The other four were women, probably taken when the Vord overran their homes to the south. All of them-and most of the prisoners Amara could see, for that matter-lay in the loose-limbed stupor of the aphrodin addict.
Amara watched as a pair of silver-collared guards dragged a drug-disoriented prisoner from one of the stone windcrafter pens, a young man in shattered armor. They dragged him across the courtyard to the stage where the auctions were held, and up onto it. They slammed him down hard onto the surface of the stage, though the young man-a boy, really-hardly seemed to be in any condition to stand upright, let alone offer resistance.
A pair of extremely attractive young women on the stage, wearing little more than scraps of cloth and gleaming silver collars, approached him. One of them silently began unknotting the thong of a necklace or amulet the young man wore on his neck and took it away, drawing the first feeble stir of protest from him that Amara had seen.
The second girl knelt and caressed his hair and face for a moment, before sliding a slender-necked bottle to his lips. Amara saw the girl’s lips urging him to drink. The young man did, his eyes still dazed, and a moment later slumped even more wearily to the floor of the stage-more drugs.
And then Kalarus Brencis Minoris mounted the steps and walked over to him, his movements brisk.
Amara shivered, staring at the son of High Lord Kalarus, the young man whom she had last seen weeping and running for his life on the slopes of some fury-forsaken mountain near his former home, stumbling over the corpses of hundreds of recently deceased elite soldiers. Brencis was dressed in fine silks of pure white, unsoiled by any mud or blood. His long dark hair curled gorgeously, as if freshly touched by hot curlers and a brush. His fingers were crusted with rings, and chains lay in looping ranks upon his chest.
They didn’t conceal the silver collar around his throat.
Fascinated and repelled, Amara gestured, willing Cirrus to carry the words on the stage, dozens of yards distant, to her ears.
“My lord,” said one of the scantily clad girls. Her words were slurred with wine or aphrodin or both. “He is ready, my lord.”
“I can see that,” Brencis said testily. He reached into an open chest that lay on the stage and drew out a handful of slavers’ collars, shaking them in careless irritation until only one remained in his grasp. He settled in front of the dazed soldier, slipped the collar around his neck, drew a knife, and cut his thumb with it. He shoved his bloodied thumb viciously against the catch of the collar, drawing a choking gasp from the young man.
Amara shivered.
She watched as the collar went to work on him. She was familiar with the basic theory behind the device. It used multiple furycrafted disciplines to flood the targets’ senses with ecstatic euphoria at first, pacifying them completely. Not that the collar needed much help in the case of the young soldier, dazed and drugged as he was. Even so, there was a visible arching of his body, and his eyes rolled, then fluttered closed.
That would go on for a while, Amara knew. Long enough that when the sensation ceased, it would almost seem like pain, all on its own. When the brutal agony the collars were capable of inflicting at their owner’s will set in, it would seem that much worse by comparison.
“This is the truth, soldier,” Brencis said, wiping his bloodied thumb on the man’s tunic. “You serve the Vord queen now, or her highest representative. Which means that for the moment, you serve me, and anyone I choose to place over you. Take any action you know is against your new loyalty’s interests, and you’ll hurt. Serve and obey, and you will be rewarded.”
By way of demonstration, Brencis idly shoved one of the half-naked girls across the soldier. She made a purring sound and nuzzled her mouth against his throat, sliding one of her thighs over his.
“Listen to her,” Brencis spat, contempt in his voice. “Everything she says is true.”
The girl pressed her mouth against the young man’s ear and began whispering. Amara couldn’t make out much of what she was saying, beyond the words “serve” and “obey.” But it seemed simple enough to work out-the girl was emphasizing what Brencis had already told the soldier, reinforcing the commands while his mind was being bent out of shape by the collar and the drugs.