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CHAPTER 1
The heaving motion of the ship was making Arkady queasy. Although she'd sailed often enough on the Great Lakes of Glaeba, it was nothing like the rolling gait of an oceangoing slaver. It didn't help much that she was crammed into a low, crowded cabin with five other women in a space that could, if one was being generous, be considered room enough for two.
"Elbow me again like that, ya stupid bitch, an' I'll knock y'unconscious," someone threatened sleepily. The comment wasn't meant for Arkady. Although she couldn't see much in the dark, unlit cabin, Arkady was lying on the floor, straight and rigid, between Saxtyn on her left and the youngest of their group, Alkasa, on her right. Both women were sound asleep.
Arkady couldn't sleep; she'd barely slept since leaving Elvere. Even if the pain of her newly branded breast hadn't been keeping her awake, her status as slave, and endless agonising over what her future might hold, were more than enough to fuel her insomnia.
It was one thing to grow up in a society where slavery was commonplace, quite another to discover she was now the slave rather than the master. It wasn't the cramped, smelly quarters below decks, where the only sanitation was a rarely emptied bucket; it wasn't the porridge-like gruel they served the prisoners once a day or the stale, rancid water that did little to hydrate the slaves because it had given most of them diarrhoea; it wasn't even being branded like a prize mare that made a part of her want to curl up and die inside.
No, for Arkady Desean, the worst part was the intolerable realisation she was now somebody's possession — that she was of no value to anybody but her faceless, distant owner.
The other slaves had informed her that their owner now was one Filimar Medura, a Senestran slaver of considerable means who owned not only Arkady, but all the other slaves aboard, not to mention the ship itself. He ran a fleet of slavers, according to her cellmates. In fact, the entire family's wealth, for more generations than anybody cared to remember, was based on the trade in living flesh, both human and Crasii.
The ship lurched again. Arkady shifted uncomfortably on the hard deck, unable to turn because of the press of Alkasa's dead weight beside her, and unable to breathe because of the stifling heat. A noise distracted her, coming from above. There was a porthole in the cabin, left open to afford some small hint of fresh air. Not that it did much to relieve either the smell or the feeling she was slowly being asphyxiated.
There was a moment or two when she thought there might be somebody on the ship even worse off than she was. At night, when the only sounds in her cramped prison were the not-so-soft snores of her fellow slaves, the creaking of timber and slosh of the waves against the hull, Arkady sometimes heard voices speaking a language she didn't understand on the deck above. Often they laughed, apparently taunting one of their crewmen.
Occasionally, listening at the porthole, she learned something useful. Or rather, one of her cellmates did. Arkady didn't speak Senestran well; she couldn't understand very much of what they said.
She'd learned something useful earlier this evening, however, which was the main reason she still couldn't sleep. Saxtyn had overheard the sailors talking. They could all overhear the crew talking, but only the debtor slave understood their language well enough to translate it for the others. The captain, according to ship's scuttlebutt, had told the sailors they could have the batch-bought slaves for entertainment in their off-duty hours, once the ship was clear of Torlenian waters.
Arkady's value as a slave, she knew, was defined by her gender. Male slaves in Senestra were generally more valuable, deemed more useful as workers. Females were required for such mundane roles as seamstresses, weavers and nursemaids and the like, but only a rare few were lucky to be chosen for that fate. Generally, human female slaves were kept to entertain the male workers, be they slave or freeborn, in the many mining camps, farms and floating estates belonging to the Senestran nobility. To entertain and to breed the next generation of slaves was their function. It was, according to Alkasa, the only thing women were good for in Senestra, and Arkady had better get used to it if she planned to survive.
There was a double standard at work here, which peeved Arkady no end. Senestran men would never dream of treating their free women so rudely. Quite the opposite. Senestran men, particularly high-born Senestran men, treated their women with a level of respect bordering on idolatry. That, conversely, was the reason for their fondness for human female slaves.
Wives are for heirs, slaves are for fun, was a Senestran saying Arkady was only just beginning to appreciate.
So now, in addition to the pain from being branded with a hot iron and facing a lifetime in slavery as a whore, there was the problem of how she was going to avoid being handed around the crew; hence the reason Arkady was lying here, wide awake, trying to figure out a way to escape.
She had no intention of becoming a whore. Worse than a whore. Whores, at least, were paid for their efforts. Being pack-raped on a daily basis by the crew of a Senestran slaver for an indeterminate length of time before being on-sold to a mining camp for the same purpose was not a future Arkady was willing to contemplate.
She would rather die. And she had pretty much determined that suicide was the only course of action left open to her.
Escape was impossible. She couldn't fit through the cabin porthole. And even if she was willing to take her chances in the open water, there were the five other women chained to her to consider. The shackles they'd worn in Elvere had been replaced by a much more simple, yet equally effective set of chains that kept the women close together, whether they liked it or not.
Rescue was unlikely. Cayal, the only living soul on Amyrantha who might have the means and the will to rescue her, had no idea where she was. If Tiji had been able to prevent Arkady being shipped out of Elvere as a slave, she'd have done it. Her husband, Stellan, was probably dead by now, hanged by the immortal Jaxyn for his own nefarious purposes; and Declan Hawkes, the King of Glaeba's Spymaster and her childhood friend — perhaps the only other person she knew who might risk everything to save her — didn't even know she was in danger.
And even if he did, what could he do from Glaeba? She was half a world away, on the open sea, sailing toward Senestra.
She tried not to dwell on the fact that it was probably Cayal's fault she was here, sold into slavery and lost to everything she had ever known or loved. In his blind enthusiasm for death, he'd thought only of his own desires when he'd so willing left Arkady with his enemy, the Tide Lord Brynden, as a hostage. What was he thinking? Surely it must have occurred to him that the Lord of Reckoning would go for the more immediate revenge, by harming Cayal's lover — Brynden would have assumed, knowing Cayal, that Arkady could be nothing else — rather than wait for the possible chance to see an end to him, a dubious prospect given they were both immortal.
What was I thinking, Arkady berated herself silently, to go along with such an idiotic plan in the first place?
But there was little to be gained by agonising over how she got here. She'd be much better employed finding a way to escape.
Arkady was neither innocent nor blind. She knew what lay ahead of her, and it wasn't the wild imaginings of a duchess suddenly confronted with cruel reality. Arkady had been in this place before.
Thoughts of suicide were not uncommon among slaves, particularly new ones. As a result, the Senestrans wisely ensured their valuable possessions lacked the means to act upon them. Arkady allowed herself a small, sour smile, thinking she and Cayal finally had something in common. We both want to die, and for wildly different reasons, we're both unable to act upon it.
At least she could die, she supposed, which was something to be grateful for. Confronted with every deadly weapon known to man, Cayal was still unable to end his torment. Her biggest problem, Arkady knew, would be finding a method that was quick enough to ensure death. She was never left alone, so even if she'd been able to tear her shift into strips to make a noose and then find somewhere in the low, cramped cabin to hang herself — unlikely, given she couldn't even stand upright — the others would stop her before she had a chance to tie the first few knots.
No, Arkady needed a method that was quick and irreversible. She would only get one chance at this and did not intend to survive it. The punishment for a slave caught attempting to escape through death would make being handed to the crew of the Trius seem mild by comparison.
Arkady needed a weapon, although she couldn't imagine any circumstance that would involve a sailor willingly surrendering such a dangerous implement to a mere slave — and the sailors were the only ones who had what she needed: a knife or a marlin spike preferably ...
Or a scalpel, she thought, as the vaguest hint of a plan began to form in her sleep-starved mind. Arkady pulled down the shoulder of her shift to examine the scabbed-over burn of her slave brand. The interlinked chain symbol was hard to make out in the gloom, but she could tell, just from the dull throbbing pain, that the burn was probably healing cleanly.
Pity. If it was infected, she could ask to see the ship's doctor and have some hope of being treated. Live slaves were the Senestrans' lifeblood, not dead ones. They would treat a slave with an infected wound — and the treatment would be lancing the wound to drain the pus.
To do that, the ship's doctor would need a scalpel.
Arkady pondered the idea for a time. If the doctor came to lance an infected wound, and she was quick enough, she could grab the scalpel from his hand and slice through her own carotid artery before anybody had time to react. It was quick, clean, relatively painless, and unstoppable. Once her artery started pumping blood across the cabin, no doctor, no matter how skilled, would be able to stop it. It was a better than even wager that any doctor stuck on a Senestran slaver wasn't the best practitioner, anyway ...
There was one fatal flaw in her plan, of course.
The salve they'd applied in Elvere after she was branded had done its job. The wound was clean and healing nicely.
But maybe, she thought, warming to the idea of a quick and painless death, if the wound looked infected ...
Arkady wished her mind was clearer; that she was less driven by hunger, pain and fear. Plans formed in such a hasty manner were inevitably filled with holes and pitfalls, and she couldn't afford to mess this up.
If the wound looked infected ... she repeated silently, wondering how to effect such a deceit. She could make it genuinely infected, readily enough. There was a bucket in the corner of the cabin — she could smell it from here — filled with plenty of material for infecting an open wound. The trouble was, a genuine infection would take a few days to manifest. She needed an infection serious enough to warrant the attention of the ship's doctor by sunrise.
Tomorrow morning they would leave Torlenian waters.
By tomorrow morning, Arkady needed her wound to be angry and red and swollen.
Still trying to solve the problem, Arkady was distracted again by a noise from the deck above — a thumping sound, followed by taunting voices and cruel laughter. She didn't know what they were saying, but she'd heard them before, and their tone, if not their words, was easy enough to understand.
They're probably tormenting some poor cabin boy. Killing time until they can start raping the female slaves, once we're on the open sea ...
She wished they'd stop. Their harsh laughter was a brutal reminder of the fate that awaited her, one she could well have done without.
By breakfast tomorrow, I need to be oozing pus.
Breakfast — when they brought the slaves their one meal of the day. That hideous porridge-like gruel that looked like ... pus.
Arkady smiled in the darkness.
She had the means, after all, to end her life.
All she needed was a bowl of gruel and an inattentive ship's surgeon.
Arkady closed her eyes, and found, surprisingly, that she was sleepy after all. She wiggled a little to turn on her side, elbowing Alkasa's shoulder out of the way, and mentally shut out the tormenting laughter from above. She finally drifted off to sleep just as the sun crept over the horizon, content that later in the morning she would be dead and the nightmare, for her at least, would be over.
CHAPTER 2
Tiji had travelled by ship before, but never on one so small, so crowded, nor so fast. The little sloop sliced through the waves like it had wings, carrying her further and further from the life she had known toward a future she had always dreamed about, but was too frightened to believe could ever be real.
The little boat was crewed entirely by chameleon Crasii. No amphibians dragged this craft through the waves. The Liberator travelled at the whim of the wind and the current, and seemed to dance across the wave tops with the joy of her freedom. Now she had her sea legs, Tiji was in a position to appreciate the little craft a lot more than when they'd first left Elvere in Torlenia several days ago.
That had been a dark time of seasickness and guilt. Fortunately, the seasickness had faded.
Now only the guilt remained.
"You're looking very forlorn."
Tiji turned from her perch in the bow to find Azquil, the chameleon who'd help kidnap her off the streets of Elvere (just as she was on the brink of saving Arkady Desean from being shipped off to the Tides-alone-knew-where as a slave), making his way forward.
The chameleon Crasii who'd kidnapped her proved to be a highly organised group of reptilian Crasii. Known among their own kind as the Retrievers, that's precisely what they did. They hunted down and retrieved the Lost Ones — children stolen from their hidden settlements, deep in the humid wetlands of Senestra, by hunters seeking the special skills of the chameleon Crasii. The more successful raiders stole the smallest children, they told Tiji, and then sold them to circuses and freak shows as curiosities.
And sometimes to spymasters like Declan Hawkes because of their camouflage abilities.
The Retrievers had sympathised with her when she'd told them about her life in Glaeba, appalled she had been used so foully, first by the circus where Declan had found her, and then by Declan Hawkes himself, whom they likened to an evil tyrant, bent on destroying her spirit with his overbearing control over her. At first she couldn't understand why. She'd thought her life quite good. Yes, she was a slave, but she'd had a master for whom she would have cheerfully died, an interesting job, was cared for, fed, sheltered and never wanted for anything.
Azquil and his friends didn't think that was anything to get excited about.
Despite her protests, the Retrievers were convinced she'd been held against her will. She couldn't explain to them, especially Azquil, that her loyalty to Declan was motivated by affection not fear.
In fact, when she mentioned she loved Declan, even though she'd meant it in the most platonic sense of the word, the young reptile had looked at her with great concern and whispered, "Among our kind, such a relationship would be considered, well, more than a little unnatural. Perhaps it would be wise not to mention, to others, your ... attraction ... to this male of another species."
"I'm not attracted to him."
"You claim to love him."
"I love seafood too, but that doesn't mean I want to settle down with a lobster."
Azquil had laughed then and hugged her. "You are such a delight, Tiji. Most of the Lost Ones we retrieve are such tragically damaged souls. I've never met one with a sense of humour before."
Tiji had smiled too, and felt her skin tones flickering, which was the chameleon equivalent of a blush. It wasn't his compliment that had made her feel that way, however; it was the fact that he hugged her.
Tiji was quite taken with the notion of being hugged by Azquil.
It wouldn't do to let him know that, however. She had no idea of the customs among her own people about that sort of thing. For all she knew, Azquil had a wife and a dozen younglings hidden away in the swamps and he was just being nice to another "tragically damaged soul" he'd rescued.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Palace of Impossible Dreams"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Jennifer Fallon.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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