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black figure on it. He pushed the door open, finding, as he had expected, a
narrow, wooden-walled room, just big enough to hold the pallet he found on the
floor. Windowless, of course; the light was supplied arcanely, set by one of
Lord Berenel's builder-mages, and would go out at the same time each night and
wake everyone in the caravansary by coming on in the morning. He was glad to
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be a fighter, all things considered. Fighters had the luxury of individual
quarters; common slaves made do with a pallet in a barracks.
In truth, he was just as glad that there weren't any girls free. He
really itched to investigate that heavy little bundle in private.
He closed the door and sat down on the bed with his back to it,
pulling the package out of his belt-pouch, then taking his knife and a
sharpening-stone and putting them beside him so that if anyone interrupted
him, he could snatch them both up. With careful-fingers, he undid the knots
holding the bundle shut, cursing at the silk for being so uncooperative.
Finally he untied the last of them, and the silk fell open, revealing
a glory of wealth and color.
He caught his breath. No wonder the thing was so heavy. He'd never
had that much gold in his hand in his life____It was a collar, a slave-collar,
but solid gold, and encrusted with gems in patterns, gems that ranged from as
small as a single grain of sand to as large as the nail on his little finger.
It had to be a concubine's collar. There was nothing else it could
be. But what was a wild girl doing with a concubine's collar?
He picked the thing up carefully and turned it around in his hands.
And right over the clasp, he saw the unmistakable imprint of a phoenix picked
out in carved gold, with tiny rubies for eyes.
Lord Dyran. He knew that mark like he knew his own name; he ought to.
It might have been Berenel's caravans he guarded, but Dyran was his real
master.
He reviewed the events of the past several days slowly, to make sure
that he had forgotten nothing. First, there was a sandstorm that drove the
caravan off course and forced them to look for water. They found it. Then a
wild child showed up there, a girl in a tunic made of something no one
recognized. A girl who carried a concubine's collar. An extra grel appeared
from out of nowhere. Then there was a magic attack on the caravan, an attack
by something that looked just like Berenel's own best illusions, the ones of
dragons, like the dragons that the elven lord had standing beside the gates of
his estate. There was something happening. Harden didn't know what, but it
wasn't what it looked like.
He pondered the collar, holding it in both hands. Could the girl have
been planted? Could she have been put there so one of the other lords would
know where the caravan was, and send a magicked beast to attack it? But why?
To scatter the caravan, to make them lose the grel and ruin the mission? But
if that was the case, it should have happened while they were out in the
desert or at the oasis. And why steal only one grel? Unless unless that grel
was carrying something important.
It could have happened that way. The lords didn't confide in their
underlings, andthey didn't confide in those beneath them. Demons only knew
exactly what the caravan was carrying. Even Kel and Ardan might not have known
the whole of it. The caravans had carried secret cargo before, and humans had
died because of it. That was part of the risk that fighters took, which was
why fighters got special treatment.
So suppose that the steadiest grel was carrying something special;
something the Lord's agents made certain to get on that grel at the road-head.
Each grel carried the same pack for the entire journey but when the wild girl
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showed up,and a spare grel, Ardan would logically have put the girl on the
steadiest beast in the caravan, and shiftedits burden to the new beast.
So then the "dragon" would know exactly what beast to snatch; and
certainly the girl had not seemed at all afraid of the monster. That seemed to
imply that she knew something like that was going to happen.
That would certainly make sense. There weren't too many elven lords
with the power to make that kind of construct, though. That narrowed the list
down quite a bit.
It could even be the work of his own Lord. It lacked the subtlety of
one of Lord Dyran's plans, but he surely had the sheer, raw power to construct
something like a dragon. He'd constructed them before; dragons, and things
even larger. Large constructs seldom lasted more than half a day before fading
away, but that was generally all you needed them for.
It didn't matter, he decided. Whoever it was, it didn't concern him.
If it was Lord Dyran, the Lord would know Harden was serving him well when he
reported this. And if it wasn't, the elven lord would know who to look at, and
what he wanted to do about it.
All things considered, Harden was rather glad of the enchantment
onhis collar that prevented any other spells from affecting him, even Lord
Dyran's, unless the Lord specifically countered it. He had the feeling that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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