Elvenbane

plants and trees growing right up to the staircase at their feet. Sheep grazed in little white clumps across the cavern, completely unconcerned that their backs were being warmed by magic, and not natural sunlight.

A stone-paved path led across a lawn of rough, sheep-cropped grass towards the building. The Citadel was made of the same yellow stone as the cavern, constructed as completely unlike an elven lord's hall as possible. This place was multistoried, and virtually all the space that was not load-bearing was devoted to windows looking out on the artificial park.

Zed, growing impatient, pushed past them, muttering something.

Over the yellow stone, plaster had been applied, to make the building glow a pure, unsullied white.

It must have been magnificent when it was new, Shana thought, wishing that she could have seen it.

Surely it had gleamed in its little green park like a moonstone on velvet.

Now most of the windows were dark, empty sockets. The plaster had fallen from the stone, leaving large patches of yellow. The stonework itself was cracked, and the grass was taking over the path. The trees and bushes had been allowed to spread without hindrance, and were shaggy and unkempt, except where the sheep had nibbled them.

Still, there was something impressive about it even yet. Certainly taken as a unit, with the building and the cavern that housed it counting as 'the Citadel,' it was the single most remarkable piece of human handiwork Shana had ever seen. They rivaled even the elven-built city in some ways, because the city had been mostly built by human hands, not elven magic. The Citadel was entirely halfblood work, and constructed entirely by magic.

And that it all stood after these many hundreds of years was a further testament to the powers of those old wizards. They must have been so powerful...

'Well, come along, Shana,' Rennis said, patting her on the shoulder, startling her. 'You have a lot of things you have to do so you can get settled in.' He walked forward and down the steps, leading his horse carefully so that it didn't stumble.

'I do?' she said, following him, while Zed strode ahead of them stiffly, already leading his horse up the path to the Citadel.

'Of course,' Rennis replied indulgently, looking back over his shoulder at her. 'You'll have to meet your master, be shown your quarters, learn where everything is...'

'Wait!' Shana said, stopping dead in the middle of the path, alarmed at the word 'master.'

'I thought you said there weren't any slaves here!'

'What?' Rennis turned back to her with a face full of astonishment. 'Of course there aren't any slaves...'

She planted her feet far apart, and set her hands on her hips. 'Then why am I going to have a master?' she asked, raising her chin aggressively.

To her surprise...and anger...Rennis began to laugh. She'd had more than enough of being laughed at lately, she thought with annoyance. It wasn't her fault she didn't understand things! She would very much have liked to see how he would do, plopped down in the middle of the Lair!

'I'm sorry, child,' Rennis said...though he didn't sound in the least sorry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. 'I keep forgetting how little you know of us. Your 'master' will be a senior wizard, Denelor Vyrthan, and he will be your 'master' only in the sense that he is the master of his magical abilities and your teacher, while you will be his apprentice and his pupil. Along with several other young wizards, of course. Mind, you will be expected to clean up and cook for him, and do a few other things for him; that's what apprentices do to pay for their teaching. But you'll have several other youngsters to share the work with you.'

'Oh,' Shana replied, since some sort of reply seemed in order. 'All right, then. But I can't cook.'

'I suppose not,' Rennis replied thoughtfully. 'Well, you ought to learn. If you go out on a journey, how do you expect to get your meals otherwise?'

She'd eat them raw, of course, she thought derisively. What was wrong with that?

'Now, first things first,' Rennis said, resuming his journey towards the building. 'Let's see about your quarters...'

Shana had somehow gotten the impression that living among the wizards would be very like living among the Kin.

She learned that in some ways she had been right, but in most ways she was completely wrong.

Dragons seldom needed to 'clean up' anything, with the exception of Keman, who needed to clean the pens of his pets, sometimes daily. But that was a simple process of raking out excrement and throwing down fresh sand or straw.

When Shana had been held in the slave pens, there hadn't been anything to 'clean up' either. Slaves owned nothing, their bedding was taken away periodically and exchanged for new, their tunics taken away daily, and they themselves washed daily.

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.