Princeps’ Fury

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.