Glace stood in a vast, sweltering cavern, clothed more fully than he had ever been before, draped in all kinds of hides, most of them cababar or Chraun’s svelte hippole, but some he suspected were slink. He felt more naked than he’d ever felt before. His weapons were gone; Chraun’s Semija warriors carried them now. He had never been more than a few feet from his mace and axe; even when he was swimming, they were waiting for him at the shore. It was a frightening sensation, and coupled with his parting from Stasia and the only purpose his life had ever known, it made him feel both helpless and useless at the same time.
Still, he stood straight and proud. The other people in the vast cavern were even more frightened and helpless than he, and even if he was a slave like the rest, he could still lead them by example.
It did not assuage his feeling of vulnerability that the woman standing before him was undressing him with her eyes. She had a plain face, and was of a height with him, full bodied and larger boned than he was accustomed to. Her lava mesh glowed brightly in swirling patterns, and she wore a sort of dainty, fake-looking scale armor that sparkled with diamonds. Her hair was straight and black and as stern as her dark eyes. After staring at him for several moments, she gestured sharply to the woman kneeling at Glace's feet.
“Take away the brown hides,” she said. “I think the white hippole and black is more becoming, with those blue eyes.”
Before she stood, the girl by Glace's feet touched her forehead to the floor. Then she hastily began pulling all the brown hides from his shoulders and waist, leaving only dark slink furs and pale hippole. Glace allowed his gaze to drop to the girl while she rearranged the remaining hides in a semblance of clothing, an arrangement designed to display his muscles to any who cared to look. To his horror, he recognized her. Her pale skin and fine dark hair marked her as a citizen of Iskalon. He had seen her often on Market Ave, hawking fungal pastries for the Cooking Guild, though he had never spoken to her and did not know her name. She did not raise her eyes to meet his.
He stood stoically, refusing to let his reaction show. The Flame could have used one of her own humans for this task, but she wanted him and the others to see one of their people as a slave, to see how beaten down their people had become. To see what they would be, when she was through with them. A cool, slow rage built in his chest, and he shoved it down quickly. He could imagine all too easily the satisfaction on the Flame's face at seeing him lose control.
To distract himself from anger, he searched the Flame's features, looking for a weakness. The first task, facing an opponent, is to find their weakness. Then, look for ways to attack that weakness directly. The words of his father rang in his ears as if the man were standing at his shoulder. Perhaps he was there – Father had not received a proper burial; perhaps he was wandering around these warm tunnels with the other ghosts of Iskalon.
There. In her eyes, impatience, frustration, intense fury, hiding just beyond that lazy, lidded gaze that pretended not to care. The Flame did not like this task, and would just as soon leave it to someone else and be gone. There was some other matter she needed to attend to, and she wasn't able to because Glace and his fellow captives had been dumped in her lap. It was like seeing Stasia impatient in council. The thought of comparing his lovely Queen to this over-sized molebear fem struck him suddenly as funny, and he smiled briefly before he could stop himself.
The Flame's eyes, which had been wandering down his body, returned sharply to his face, piercing him. “When you are with other Semija, you may express yourself freely. However, you will learn never to do so in the presence of the Flames you serve. I will be lenient because you are new to our ways. The next breach will earn a beating.”
She drew herself up to a full stance, and her heels clicked loudly as she stepped closer. She spoke loudly, so that her voice reached everyone else in the cavern. The Semija—no, he told himself sternly, the person, what was her name? The Cook, he would think of her as that—finished arranging his garments so that they hung neatly, and knelt again at his feet. “That is only one of the many things you have to learn as Semija. Another is to never meet any Flame's eyes.” A blow struck the back of his head, forcing his face forward and his gaze down. A strong breath of hot air held him with his head bowed. “Yet another is to always prostrate yourself before your owner.” His flesh heated, and his legs turned to bone-jelly and gave way beneath him. He crumpled to the ground, unable to control his own body. “You will learn to anticipate your owner's needs, and respond immediately. Your owner comes before you in all things. You must be a useful tool, or you will be discarded.”
The heat around him dissolved, and Glace raised his head and stared into the Flame's eyes defiantly. She smiled at him knowingly. “This sort of behavior will only earn punishment.”
Glace waited for the blows to fall, but they never came. Instead, the Cook screamed in agony and began to writhe, her neat prostration abandoned in a helpless flailing roll. The Flame continued to smile at Glace. “Shall your punishment continue, Semija? Only you can decide that.”
He stared back at her, testing that weakness. Could he make her angry enough to kill him? The thought of dying here in this cavern, purposeless, brought Stasia's face to mind. Stasia, his purpose in life, her cool, smooth lips, warmer than expected. To die now was to abandon her, abandon any possibility of discovering her fate. If there was any chance she still lived here, he could bide his time, figure out a way to rescue her. His need for her went beyond duty—it always had, he could see that now. He would not fail her by taking the easy path of death.
Glace dropped his gaze and let his forehead press against the hot stone floor. He felt his betrayal of Iskalon and his own humanity as he did so. The girl's cries faded into muffled whimpers and he heard her rearranging herself into prostration. He heard a multitude of shuffling and scraping sounds behind him. If he stood and turned, he would see the rest of the captives following his lead.
He cringed when the gentle pat fell against his matted hair. “Good Semija,” the Flame woman whispered. “You are a fast learner. Some of your kind took many lessons to reach this point. You will be a very good Semija. Perhaps, someday, you will even be chosen to serve the General, or the King.”
The Semija quarters sprawled in the cooler outskirts of Chraun, far from the baths and the Lava River. Glace was led to his new home by a troop of stout humans who had been born, or as the Flames put it, bred, in Chraun. They looked similar to the Flames, tall, full-boned, and dark skinned, just as Iskalon humans resembled Icers in their supple, pale grace. They wore the same sparse hides as all the other Semija, but a black brand ringing both upper arms marked them as a special class—crew masters, the Flames called them. Glace thought of them stubbornly as slave masters.
Glace's cave could hardly be called quarters. A dark, long, low-ceilinged room, it was crammed elbow to elbow with at least one hundred other slaves, a mix of Chraun humans and Iskalon captives like himself. There were no furs, no bunks, no possessions. The floor was rough rock, with just enough room for each of them to lie supine. Glace began to take his fur vest off to make a pillow, but one of the Chraun slaves stopped him. “If called to duty, you must be ready,” the man said. He did not meet Glace's eyes.
Glace considered ignoring the man's words, but he decided to leave his clothes on. He already felt naked enough. Instead of lying down, he sat with his back against the wall as if on watch. He had sometimes dozed lightly thus in front of Stasia's quarters. But here, jagged rock pushed into his sore muscles. The heat made him sweat even when he wasn’t moving. The long burning, steady flames of the firestone torches never ceased. There was no gentle dimming of Palace icelights to lull him to sleep.
Even without the blazing lights, Glace thought sleep would have been impossible. Stasia drifted into his thoughts, but he tried to banish her. Wakeful slave-masters lined the corridors outside, ready to alert the Flames of the slightest transgression. Even if he got past them and somehow found her, he would be killed long before he got her out of Chraun. No, he had to be patient, bide his time, learn the weaknesses of this place, and hope that she still lived.
I will find her, said the desperate part of him that needed her, loved her, thirsted for the taste of her. I will find her and save her.
He thought about Musche instead. Had the slink survived the rout and escaped further into the Outer Tunnels? He hoped the beast had not tried to follow the captured warriors into Chraun. If he had, he would be dead now, his hide being tanned to decorate a Semija. Glace shuddered again, thinking that the fur loincloth was most likely from a slink. It felt filthy against his thighs.
He exhaled noisily and tried to get comfortable. The man lying next to him opened his eyes and looked up. He was from Iskalon, with pale skin and a bushy blonde beard. Glace thought he had seen him before the war, in the Palace. The man glared at him, then struggled to sit up, his expression softening.
“It's hard to sleep at first, isn't it?”
He spoke very quietly. A few other Semija stirred, but did not wake. The man leaned against the wall next to him and began to speak of his life in Iskalon. He had been a scribe, one of the King's best, he said. He spoke of the Scribe Guild, of his love of gold plate and his affinity for the little marks and dashes of the written language. He had been taken in the first attack on Iskalon, had been a slave all this time. Glace let him ramble. It was soothing to hear the man speak of the home they had left behind, destroyed now, sunk beneath the lake and scattered in the Outer Tunnels.
When the former scribe paused, Glace asked, “How do you bear it? You will probably never touch gold plate again. How can you stand being a slave?”
The scribe glanced around the cave, as if checking to see that everyone else slept and they were not overheard. “We have always been slaves,” he whispered.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, in Iskalon they have fancy names for it, dress it up in a structure of Guilds and families. But have you ever really thought about that structure? Who does all the work to keep Iskalon running? The Guilds. Who does all the work in Chraun? The Semija. It is all one and the same.”
“But we work by choice,” Glace said. He did not like the turn the conversation had taken. “We are not beaten or starved or forced to mate.”
“True, the Icers aren’t cruel like these masters. They don’t have to be—the structure of the Guilds keeps us all in line. Have you ever considered the guildless? They are unable to work, cast out of the Guilds, and look how they are treated. Relegated to the tunnels, given a pittance. I did charity work in the tunnel of guildless. I've seen how some Icers treat them.”
“Not all Icers,” Glace insisted, thinking of Stasia and her compassion for the guildless. “Anyhow, most of the Guild members treat them just as bad.”
“Yes, just like the Semija here treat each other. Consider our slave masters, waiting out there with whips to keep us in line. The Flames don’t have to raise a finger, any more than the Icers did. Think about it. You were the bodyguard of one of the princesses, right?”
Glace was silent, but the man continued as if he had agreed. “What would have happened if you had asked to be relieved of duty? Say you wanted to join another Guild. Say you wanted to join my Guild and be a scribe. Would they have let you go? If you ever get a chance, if we somehow are miraculously freed and Iskalon resumes its daily business, ask her, Warrior. Ask her to let you go. Just to see what she says.”
“She is royalty. They can command us, that is natural. But no ordinary Icer can command a Guildsman.”
“Can't they? Have you ever tried refusing one?”
“Have you?” Glace countered, more anger in his voice than he'd intended to reveal. He wanted the scribe to be quiet. How dare he compare Stasia to a Flame?
“More than once,” the scribe said proudly. “They set a great store by duty, our Icers. Always they say: it is your duty as a Guildsman. If you refuse, you inevitably get in trouble with the Guild. It has happened to me many times. I worked for the King, but other Icers would command me to do their work all the time. Take diction from this Lord, send a message to that Lady. Didn’t matter if I was already busy with another task. Surely you have time to do your duty, they would say. I’m working up a very important plate for the King, I would reply. Well, then you can do it after. Once, a Lady came back and her work wasn’t done. The work for the King took longer than I thought. The Lady was upset, and I got angry. I gave my anger voice. The next day, I was demoted to being a runner again. After fifteen years of inscription work.”
“That's absurd,” Glace said, his anger boiling over at last. “The King would never allow that. He would have protected you. You are lying.”
The scribe looked him in the eye and smiled. It was a tolerant, patient smile, the kind Glace might give to a small child who wanted to spar. “Believe what you like. But ask your mistress, if you ever get out of here. Ask her if you can walk away. The structure may be different, but the chains are just as tight. Ask the Fungal Guildsmen. Or the stock handlers, or the miners. They work just as long and hard as the Semija here, and they are quartered just as poorly—while your Icers are lording it up in the Palace. Just ask her, Warrior.”
The scribe fell silent, and finally laid down and settled into sleep again. Glace tried to forget the man's words, but they writhed in the back of his brain like an itch between his shoulder blades. He dozed lightly, but he was not really sleeping when a Semija wearing the scorched black brands of a slave master entered the cave and began to bellow out orders.
Glace stood and tried to make sense of the man's rapid, sparse speech. “You!” the slave master yelled out, pointing at Glace. “Wipe sleep out of eyes and put on pretty face. Kinyara is engaging Nobles for morning feast. You will attend her.”
Glace followed him out of the cave, rubbing at his eyes. The Kinyara was the plain-faced woman who had conducted the first training. The idea of being in her presence again repulsed him even more than the slink fur around his waist.
But a meeting with Nobles sounded informative. Perhaps he would learn of Stasia's fate, and that of the Icers in the Outer Tunnels he had failed to protect. He remembered the conversation with the scribe, and brushed it out of his mind. There was no comparison between Iskalon and this brutal slavery. The man was paranoid, driven crazy by his imprisonment in Chraun. He was to be pitied, not taken seriously.
Glace slowed to brush the dust off his furs, and reeled forward as a hot whip of fire danced on his bare shoulders. “Faster,” was all his master said, but Glace obeyed, and though his back was in fiery agony, a quiet hope was alive in his heart. He would be waiting on the Kinyara, but he would be serving his Queen.