Elvenbane (34 page)

But the wizards had possessions, and created others, and in the process, created a mess. Things needed to be cleaned; bedding, garments, dishes, dwellings. Things needed to be put away; clothing, books, writing materials, personal possessions.

There were other considerations to this new lifestyle. The slaves had been “hosed down,” as Zed put it, once a day. Two-leggers, when not enslaved, did not always care to clean themselves as slaves did. Some, especially the old and stiff-jointed, or the young and sybaritic, preferred long soaks in deep tubs of hot water—which needed to be scrubbed afterwards.

The wizards had leisure time and the freedom to indulge themselves in it. That meant hobbies and other recreational pastimes, and those usually produced some kind of a mess. Floors collected dirt, and needed to be swept.

Then there was food. Shana had always eaten everything raw when she’d been with the Kin, and as a slave she had eaten what she’d been given. Here, meals had to be cooked, which meant they not only had to clean the dishes food was eaten from, but also all the varied cookware used to produce the meal.

It was a complicated life, with much of the drudgery being done by the apprentices.

As the newest of Denelor’s apprentices, and the only one who could not cook, and had no idea of how to properly put things away, Shana got most of the truly tedious or unpleasant tasks, and most of those involved cleaning something. It was a continual puzzle to her, this obsession with possessions that the two-leggers had. If they had
owned
less, their lives would have been considerably less complicated.

Then again, she had to admit that there were aspects of two-legger life that were profoundly superior to life with the Kin. Cooked meals—real meals, and not the bland, watery fare served up to the slaves—came as a surprise and a real, anticipated pleasure. Denelor’s senior apprentice, who did most of the cooking, served up food with flavors and combinations of flavors Shana had never even dreamed of.

There were other pleasures associated with her new life—those hot baths, for one; the wonderful, cushioned sleeping-room for another. She had her own, private room which was always warm and dry, with one of the sleeping-places called a “bed” and a chest to put things in. She never quite came to place the kind of value in clothing and self-ornament that some of the others did, but it was good to have clean trews and tunics all the time, even if she
was
the one who had to wash them.

Music was another delightful surprise. The dragons never sang; the closest they came was the recitation of epic poetry. Shana had listened with pleasure to birds singing, of course, but the first time she heard Denelor pick up a katar and sing to its strumming, she nearly exploded with excitement. Much to her own chagrin, she soon discovered that
she
had no talent in that direction. Her “range” was about three notes, and she had no sense for anything but rhythm patterns. But she could—and did, with great enthusiasm—still enjoy the efforts of others.

The others never forgot that she was an outsider, though, and neither did she. Most of
them
had either been brought here as small children, kidnapped before they could be collared, or as babies, left on the hill to die by their frightened mothers. The penalty for bearing a halfblood child was death for the mother and child alike, which tended to keep such conceptions secret when they occurred, and forced the mothers to rid themselves of the infant as soon as possible after it was born. Some, because of circumstances, could not expose the halfbloods as infants; the ones that didn’t kill the children themselves lived in fear—until the day when their child went out to play and did not return, or vanished from his bed. Then they breathed sighs of relief as they reported the missing child to their overseer.

The wizards combed the hills for such abandoned children, and kept careful watch for the “noise” of untrained magic-use to catch the children that had escaped exposure. Those they either bought at auction, as they had bought Shana, or used their magics to abduct, a safe enough procedure, since the children of human slaves were seldom watched too closely. Shana was the first of their numbers in a very long time to have joined as a near-adult, and the first to have had such an extensive retrieval effort made on her part.

She had a few friends, mostly apprentices, though the young wizard Zed seemed to thaw once he had reached the safety of the Citadel. But she was afraid to allow anyone too close, given the lessons she had learned from losing Keman and Megwyn. She was simply not willing to risk so much of herself to a deep friendship, and most of the apprentices seemed to find her too alien to
want
anything beyond mere acquaintance.

Her chores occupied the mornings, for when she wasn’t cleaning up after her master or herself, she was “loaned out” to wizards who had no apprentices, or only one or two; in the afternoons, she joined half of Denelor’s apprentices in her lessons in magic.

And those were revelations in themselves.

Floor-sweeping kept her occupied until just after the lessons were scheduled to start. She tossed her apron in a corner and ran for the stairs to Denelor’s quarters, expecting a rebuke when she got there. But when Shana knocked on the door and joined the group, she saw to her surprise that all of Denelor’s six apprentices were present, instead of only half.

She took a place on the floor, near the back of the room. There were only three chairs in the room, and Denelor had one of those. The other two had been taken by the youngest apprentice, Kyle, and the other girl, Mindi. Shana didn’t mind: the floor of Denelor’s room was carpeted with something soft and warm, a vast improvement over the stone of the caves and the tile of the slave pens.

“All right, children, it’s our turn for procurement,” said the portly, soft-spoken Denelor, as he gathered his apprentices about him for what ordinarily were the afternoon lessons. As always, the lesson was held in Denelor’s quarters, in a room he called the “sitting room,” which nomenclature had thoroughly confused Shana. After all, she reasoned, couldn’t you sit anywhere? Why have a single room devoted entirely to sitting?

The oldest apprentice, a wraith of a boy who so closely resembled his elven father that his mother had actually gone to the “wizard woods” an hour after giving birth to leave him there, sighed dramatically. “I thought it was Umbra’s turn,” he complained. “I know her ‘prentices all went through a lot to bring that gold up out of the mine, but I never heard anyone change the rules about rotation just because someone did something extra—”

Denelor shook his head, his mild green eyes wide with amusement. “Umbra did last week, right on schedule, and the schedule
is
posted, you know. It’s our turn, fair and square, Lanet. Unless you’d
rather
eat mutton and lentils for the next several days…”

Lanet shuddered dramatically. “I think not, Master Denelor. Procurement it is.”

Shana waited patiently, as she had learned to wait since arriving here, for an explanation of “procurement.” Denelor might remember that she was new—and he might not. If he did, he’d explain; if he didn’t, she would find out if she kept her ears open.

Denelor chuckled, and handed the apprentice a piece of smudged paper. “Your choice, lad. Mostly it’s food this time, but winter’s coming on, and there are a couple of new apprentices with no winter clothing, and a lot more who’ve grown out of theirs…”

That seemed to remind him of Shana’s presence, and he looked for her among the others. “Procurement is when we use our magic to get things we need from the elven lords, my dear,” he said over Lanet’s head. “All the masters and apprentices take it in rotation, six days at a time, and we actually work only three days out of the six. That is because it’s wearying work, and you won’t be good for much but eating and sleeping the day after you fetch your allotment.”

Shana noticed that he was no longer using the tone and simple sentences with her that he had been; speaking to her as if she were a very small child.

When she had called lightning she must have convinced him she wasn’t simpleminded. That little incident might well be responsible for a few more of the white hairs among Denelor’s sandy-brown.

Lanet looked the list over and sighed dramatically. “I guess I really ought to leave the smaller stuff for Shana, since it’s her first time. Winter clothing, I suppose. Ugh. That means I’ll have to look for it, too.”

Lanet took his scrying-stone out of his pocket, threw his white-blond hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head, and placed the polished slab of emerald beryl on the carpet in front of him. He stared into its crystalline green depths for a long moment, then finally spoke. “There’s quite a lot of clothing stockpiled in Lord Dyran’s warehouses, at the edge of his estate. I doubt he’d miss a bale or two of slave tunics and trews.”

But Denelor shook his head immediately. “No; I can’t permit that. Doing anything around Dyran is too dangerous. He might not have shielded his storehouses, but he’s certainly warded the estate, and we don’t dare take the chance of alerting him to our existence.”

Shana shifted her weight restlessly. There it was again; that law of theirs. “Never be discovered.” They’d never do anything if it brought a chance that some elven lord might figure out that the wizards were back again. There must have been hundreds of children they never rescued. Sometimes they never even retrieved their own agents when they got into trouble because of that fear.
I’m surprised they went after me, really. Fire and Rain, they’re as bad as the Kin
—

The Kin—suddenly an entire series of realizations clicked into place, like the pieces of a puzzle.
Oh
. Oh.

What if that was the reason why Foster Mother hadn’t helped her—not that she didn’t want to, but that the others wouldn’t let her, for fear the elves would discover the existence of dragons? From what she had seen the Kin had as much to fear from the elven lords as the halfbloods…

Lanet startled her out of speculations. “Well,” he said, sounding weary already, “there’s a wagon-load of something on its way to Altar’s estate. I don’t know if it’s got winter clothing in it or not, but it’s full of bales and the bales have Redrel’s mark on them.”

“And since Redrel’s specialty is the manufacture of slave and bondling clothing, it’s a good bet,” Denelor said with satisfaction. “I doubt one or two bales will be missed until it’s too late. Is the wagon covered, or open?”

“Covered, of course,” Lanet replied, with obvious irritation. “I wouldn’t bother reporting an open wagon, they’re useless for
our
purposes.”

“True enough, lad. Well, the bales won’t be missed until the wagon is unloaded. Fine, that’s a good target, Lanet.”

Lanet didn’t reply, he just raised his hands over his head and stared at a place on the carpet just beyond his scrying-stone. The other apprentices got out of the way to give him plenty of room. After a moment or two, his hands seemed to be glowing; a moment more, and Shana saw that it wasn’t his hands that were glowing, but the rosy mist of light surrounding them.

And in the back of her mind, as she had now learned to “hear,” the manifestation of the spell was accompanied by “noise.” Not a great deal of noise, for Lanet was quite good at keeping his magic “quiet,” but there was certainly an audible component to his magic. When compared to Lanet, Shana’s magic roared like a spring thunderstorm, a fact she was profoundly ashamed of once she learned it.

Shana’s magic sometimes sounded like music, and sometimes like thunder. Lanet’s magic had the sound of a very light rain, a soft pattering, barely perceptible.

Shortly after the glowing mist formed around Lanet’s hands, a tiny, rose-colored spark of light appeared above the spot he was staring at. It increased in size, until there was a globe of the rosy mist floating above the carpet itself, a globe just big enough to hold two bales of the size clothing usually .was bundled into.

A ghost-image appeared within the mist, of something bulky, box-shaped, and brown. It solidified, until it was no longer an image, but seemed to be a real bale. It was joined shortly by a second, brought into manifestation in the same way.

“Two had better be enough,” Lanet said, his voice weak, “because they were farther than I thought. That’s it, Master Denelor.”

He clapped his hands together and the rosy light vanished. The bales fell to the carpet with a
thump
. followed by Lanet as he sagged forward with weariness.

Mindi eased forward and carefully cut the burlap covering of one of the bales, exposing a bit of burnt-orange that looked like wool. “Well, it isn’t slave clothing,” she said, “because it’s dyed in colors. It might be blankets, though.”

“Either bondling clothing or blankets will do fine,” Denelor said with satisfaction. “If it’s blankets they can be cut and sewn into warm over-tunics. That’s enough, Lanet; well done, and thank you.”

“It had better be enough,” came the muffled response, “because that’s all you’re getting from me today.”

Now that Shana had seen what was to be done—use whatever form of distance-seeing worked for you, then use the transportation-spell to bring the sought-after objects to Denelor’s room—she thought she could probably do her share. But it would be noisy—which meant that if she was going to escape detection by the elven lords, she’d better steal something that was well away from one of the powerful magicians. And that might be a little hard to do.

“I’ll take the flour,” Denelor was saying, handing the list to Mindi. “It’s the bulkiest, so it would be the hardest for you youngsters. That leaves some easier foodstuffs for you youngsters.”

“Butter,” said Mindi after a quick look at the list. “And cheese. My mother worked in the dairy at Altar’s estate; the dairy is half the estate away from the Great House. I know where everything is stored, and I should be able to filch some of both from there without making too big a show.”

“I don’t know,” Kyle mumbled doubtfully, while Shana took a peek over his shoulder at the list. When she saw the fourth item, she suddenly had an idea.