“Pretty?” asked Iziz, perking up.

“If you like the sort.” Zhuqa’s hand drifted over Amber’s belly and lightly rubbed. “A little too grey yet for my taste and her eyes were sloped funny, but Gann knows I could sell her here for more coin than I could easily hold. She put her hand on my slit and out came my cock and before the hour turned, I knew indisputably that God looked down from His heaven and loved me.”

“How many times?” asked Iziz. He was watching Zhuqa rub Amber’s stomach with sleepy, slightly glazed eyes.

“Twice.”

“Twice? You fucking waste of meat! Talk to me about God in His heaven when it’s ten times a poke! I fucked my mother more than twice a night!”

“Three is the sacred number of creation and belongs to God alone, you ignorant heathen.” Zhuqa’s hand dropped, pushing two fingers along her folds once or twice before crooking up inside her. Iziz watched that, too. “Piss like that used to matter to me,” he mused.

“Is that her making that sound?” Iziz asked abruptly. “Is she…oiling up at you?”

“No. I was in her once already tonight. Before you killed the mood and got me too drunk to care.” Zhuqa glanced over at the baby, which now lay quiet and perhaps sleeping at Xzem’s breast. “Got any teat-biters out there, Iziz?”

“Probably,” he said without much interest. “You want the rest of this?”

Zhuqa waved the hand that wasn’t working methodically at Amber’s pussy.

Iziz picked up the cup and drank it off. “I want to fuck now. I’m taking one of your slaves for the night.”

Zhuqa grunted and shut his eyes.

“Thought I’d mention. Manners are important to city-born scuff like you. Up, Xzem. Let Eshiqi give the sprat a tap and let’s go.”

Xzem crept forward and presented the wrapped baby from a servile crouch.

Amber looked at Zhuqa.

He grunted without opening his eyes or interrupting the rhythm of his fingers.

Amber reached out and brushed the back of her knuckles lightly across the baby’s snout. It roused at once, sucking sleepily, but began to drift away again almost immediately.

“And that was all it wanted, all this time,” said Iziz. “A smooth blanket.”

“Doesn’t care about the blanket.” Zhuqa fanned his spines forward with deep, drunken pleasure. “Wanted his mother’s touch. Something you would never understand.”

“Piss on that. My mother touched me plenty!” Iziz declared and, giving Xzem a light smack to the back of the head, herded her out and shut the door behind them.

“I’m sure she did,” Zhuqa murmured. “And I’m sure it felt like love. But you’ll never touch my child like that, will you, Eshiqi? Because you love it. And you just may be the only other person in this camp who knows that when you love someone, sometimes you don’t touch.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slow, patting Amber’s thigh. “Put yourself to bed,” he told her, and gave her a nudge off his lap. He made no effort to follow, only sat there with his eyes closed and one hand resting on the table near his empty cup.

He looked like he was sleeping already, but she thought that would change in a hurry if she so much as touched one of the knives he kept strapped to his arms or took even one step toward the door. Amber went over and climbed into the cupboard. Sliding the door shut made the bells jingle; she looked out to see if they’d disturbed him and found him already gazing back at her through slitted, cat-content eyes.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he murmured. “The things you find to love in this life…so you don’t hate yourself so much for living it.”

She shut the door on him.

9

There was no real sense of time, but Amber thought three more days passed because she slept three times. Zhuqa fed her when they woke up—whatever they had left over from the night before, cold and greasy. He fed her when he brought her home from the workpit—mostly meat with baked roots, and once, some unknown animal’s head with roasted marrow bones. He had a bath brought on the second night and let her bathe herself, after she’d bathed him, of course. He made her talk to him, sometimes in her language, sometimes in his. He had sex with her every night. For hours.

She worked. Busy hands make a light heart, as Hruuzk was fond of saying. She learned to make bowls, plates and pitchers as well as lamps. She mended shifts, shirts and breeches, using anything beyond repair as patches. She pounded thousands of xuseth stalks through a sieve with a heavy wooden mallet for hour after hour to get one lousy jar of oil. And of course, at the end of each back-breaking day, there was plenty of lifting, packing, sweeping and scrubbing.

Three days.

On the fourth, things changed.

It was subtle at first. Hruuzk had been coming at mid-morning to take the children and some of the older slaves off to work in the gardens, kitchens or canals, but not today. This was just unusual enough that Amber noticed, but she hadn’t been there long enough to know what was routine and what wasn’t, so she thought nothing of it except how much more crowded the workpit was. What she noticed next was activity out in the halls, not the crash and roar of a violent rescue, but merely a clamor of boots and voices that grew steadily louder and more raucous throughout the day—the sound of a stadium crowd…or a mob working up for a riot.

The veteran slaves simply kept their heads down and their hands busy, and if they were at all anxious about what was going on outside, they did not show it. Amber tried to follow their example, but when the unseen crowd began to clap, shout and stomp their feet in unison, she threw whatever wicks she’d cut in the oil to soak and retreated to the back room to sit with Xzem and hold the baby. They were making so much noise it was impossible to be sure, but she thought they were chanting, “Meat.”

She didn’t have long to wonder what it meant. The shouting came to a sudden swell of cheers and then Hruuzk opened the door. The children ran to him at once, infected by the unruly energy out in the halls, but he turned them back after just a few words and clapped his hands to stop work.

“The bidding is about to start,” he called. “All my unstabled ladies, line up. Everyone else, keep working. No fussing,” he added, pointing sternly at Shivers, who had begun to tear up. “Until I have coin in my hand, you all belong to me and my ladies do not what?”

“Piss out of their eyes,” Shivers whispered.

“My ladies do not piss out of their eyes.” He gave her a forgiving pat on the head, using the gesture to put her in the forming line. “Gold-Eyes, Crook-Toe, you go last. They want you, they’ll have to pay for the rest of this lot first.” He glanced through the open door, assessing something in the crowd outside, then beckoned to Amber. “Eshiqi, come.”

She heard her name, saw him looking at her when he said it, and still it made no immediate sense to her. He couldn’t sell her, she was Zhuqa’s!

‘Oh sure, now you’re Zhuqa’s,’ the ghost of her dead mother said with a caustic laugh. ‘If you wanted to hide behind his skirts, you should have played his game, little girl. You didn’t, so suck it up.’

But Meoraq was coming. He was supposed to find her, kill Zhuqa and get her out of here.

‘Well, he didn’t,’ Bo Peep said simply. ‘And this is exactly what you deserve for sitting on your ass and waiting for someone else to save you.’

Hruuzk, making a last inspection of his ladies before they passed out of his keeping, finally noticed she was still sitting next to Xzem. His head cocked. He turned around to fully face her and hooked his thumb behind the buckle of his belt.

Amber’s mind remained perfectly still, but her body did not want to be whipped before she was sold. She got up.

Watching her as he bounced Rosek roughly on his knee, Dkorm rattled out a laugh. “I believe that is surprise I see on that ugly face,” he remarked. “I told you it would happen, didn’t I? Although I confess I’m a bit surprised myself. Most of Zhuqa’s toy cunts last at least a year.”