Elvenbane

there, he'd have rushed the job too, just to get back into the cool. He lingered for a moment in the white-tiled entry, noting that the only place there wasn't a line was at the window to get a room. He sighed, and resigned himself to spending the day waiting.

Unlike the Great Halls, there were large, glass-covered windows in the caravansary, at least on the ground floor. The entry gave on three doorways; to the left was the one leading to the meal hall; in the middle was the one leading to the showers; to the right, the hall leading to the rooms, and the window with the bored-looking room attendant leaning out of it.

Harden joined the line of men (and a few women) heading for the showers; he stripped when he reached the dressing room, threw his filthy tunic and trews into a pile of similarly filthy garments, and took his personal belongings with him. The line continued through a narrow room lined with pipes spouting lukewarm water, first soapy, then clear. He passed with the others under each set of pipes, glad of the chance to rid himself of the dust of the journey and the sweat of fear. Like the others, he held his belt with his pouch and knife well out of the way of stray splashes, transferring it from hand to hand as he cleaned himself.

At the other end of the shower room he took a rough towel from a pile of clean ones, dried himself with it, and left it in another pile of used towels. He rummaged through a stack of clean tunics and trews in Lord Berenel's colors, found one of each in his size and donned them, belting the tunic to his body with his damp leather belt.

He returned to the entry and joined another line going to the meal room. This time when he reached the end of the line, he got a bowl of thick, tasty stew, a chunk of fresh, hot bread dripping with butter, and a mug of cold beer. He found himself a place at one of the many rough wood trestle tables and began applying himself to the food.

When he'd wiped the bowl clean with his last bit of bread, and swallowed down the last drop of beer, he rose from the table to have his place taken immediately by another fighter, a woman this time. He didn't bother to give her a second glance; she was one of the warriors, and didn't represent the kind of 'girl' the caravansary master had told him to requisition.

He took his empty bowl and cup to the kitchen window, and returned to the front of the caravansary. There he approached the bored-looking human manning a counter that stood in front of a board full of colored trinkets of fired clay.

'Name?' that colorless individual asked him.

'Harden,' the fighter replied.

The human traced down a list on the wall using his finger, his lips moving as he sounded out names. Finally, he found the one he was looking for, and reached for a clay figure.

'Harden, here we are.' He turned, and gave the fighter a black, three-petaled flower. 'That's your room, ground floor, down that corridor. There won't be any girls free for a while yet; why don't you go rest, and check back around suppertime? We serve supper most of the evening here, and if you wait until the first rush, you're likely to find several girls free. I don't know about you, but I like a little choice in my girls. I don't like having to take the first thing available.'

'Aye, thanks for the advice,' Harden replied, taking his trinket. 'I'll do that.'

He entered the white-tiled hallway, lined with wooden doors on either side, and followed his instructions, matching his flower against the symbols painted on the door to each cubicle, until he came to the one with the same 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 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, and they 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 showed up, and a spare grel, Ardan would logically have put the girl on the steadiest beast in the caravan, and shifted its 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 on his collar that prevented any other spells from affecting him, even Lord Dyran's, unless the Lord specifically countered it. He had the feeling that there was probably something on this bit of jewelry to make the holder want to wear it...and that would cause no end of trouble.

Oh, I can just see myself prancing out of here into the street with this bit around my neck! Then I'd really be for it! There's rules about nonconcubines wearing high-rank collars. I'd just as soon not cross them.