An Antidote to Fire, Chapter One

My friend Edmond thrust the needle-sharp point of his sword at me. I beat it aside, using my superior strength. I lunged, and he used his superior quickness to avoid my attack, parrying and sidestepping. He counterattacked, increasing the tempo. His attacks and parries became sloppy, but I grew even sloppier. I parried, parried again, and then missed with a wild and desperate parry as the point of his blade finally struck home.

In a real fight, the point would have run right through me, despite my protective red-crystal amulet. However we had both tied green safety-ribbons around the hilts of our swords. The elixir that dyed the ribbons also prevented, via alchemical magic, the swords from piercing flesh.

“That’s four,” Edmond said, panting for breath.

I saluted him, acknowledging the hit. “Yes,” I answered when I had my own breathing under control. “Four out of seven. I should have given in at three out of five.”

“You don’t want to go to five out of nine?”

“No.”

“Good,” Edmond said. “I don’t either.” He flexed his hand. “Your parries left my hand numb.”

“Let’s pack up, and I’ll buy you that drink I owe you,” I said. I signaled to my arbi. “Pack up my gear,” I ordered it, and it silently obeyed. Edmond did the same with his own arbi.

Arbi can’t speak, although they can follow spoken commands in a mechanical sort of way. They’re wooden manikins, a sort of alchemically-powered robot. Although Edmond would have put it the other way around, once I’d explained to him what a ‘robot’ was. He had grown up here in Cern, on the world of Trion, while I had grown up in southern California.

We left the Field of Swords, walking past the kneeling cross-post that stood unused in every salle and practice field in Cern, past the hedges and walls that screened the field from casual view, and out to the non-embassy end of Embassy Row. Our arbi followed us, carrying everything except our swords, which we kept sheathed at our sides. They were cut-and-thrust weapons, with the edge intended for use against arbi, and the point against human opponents protected from cuts by their red-crystal amulets.

Once out in the street, we dodged the occasional sedan chair and arbi-pulled rickshaw. The city of Renes didn’t permit draft animals to enter, and riding animals were unknown in this world. Most of the traffic was on foot, like ourselves, and we soon arrived at the cafe where we had left Luce and Ife.

Luce waved at me from under the umbrella when Edmond and I came into sight. Ife turned, smiled, and waved as well. A pair of arbi hovered nearby to serve their whims, and a chessboard sat on the table between them. They still sat barefoot at the sidewalk cafe just as Edmond and I had left them - naturally enough since we had chained them to the table before going off to our fencing practice. I had locked a single leather cuff around Luce’s right ankle, while Edmond had hobbled Ife with a pair of metal shackles that had been cereated on the inside so as to feel soft to the captive flesh.

I went behind Luce and ran my hands through her long, chestnut-dark hair. Rubbing her shoulders, I opened my spirit to her, listening with my Master’s ear. Because she was my slave, and in restraints I had placed on her, I could ‘hear’ the sounds her spirit made. Not her thoughts (which would be too fast for me to follow anyway) but her feelings and sensations. This time I heard amusement with a tinge of wryness as she watched Edmond and Ife. He had taken a chair next to her, and she was parodying the fearful, eager fawning of a branded Ysbene slavegirl toward her master.

A year ago, Ife had been a frightened Ysbene slavegirl. Like most of the slavegirls in the Ysbene Empire, she had been branded and a toxin rubbed into the burn to keep it from healing. That toxin also inflicted a curse of unnatural fear on her, an alchemical poisoning of her spirit that had no known antidote, and it had taken a genuine once-in-multiple-centuries miracle of Providence for her to heal.

“Please don’t kiss Ife, master,” she was begging. “Ife will be good, Ife will be good!” Then Edmond kissed her, and she dropped the act to enthusiastically respond.

“I knew you couldn’t keep it up,” Edmond said when they came up for air.

“No, master,” Ife replied happily. Her arms were still around him, and he still had that slightly abstracted look of a man listening with his Master’s ear. I preferred to see Ife this way, rather than with that haunted look she had when I first saw her. The problem was getting from there to here. Not for Ife, anymore, but for the thousands - millions - of slavegirls who had been branded, or pierced, or chop-footed, or otherwise cursed by that damnable fire-poison. Finding the antidote to that poison was the project I’d taken up, as an alchemical adept.

I ordered the cafe’s arbi to bring drinks, then sat down and let my thoughts go down their well-worn rut. When earning my organic chemistry Ph.D. on Earth, I had joked about the perversity of chemical research and the arcane rituals needed to make new reactions work. But in this world it wasn’t a joke. The chemistry here had magic added to produce alchemy, and the magic didn’t stay put in the lab. It permeated life with its de Novo effects and its masculine and feminine vitalities. That’s why women here...

“You’re doing it again, master,” Luce told me.

I snorted. “And you’re showing off again.” I scritched between her shoulder blades, just where my Master’s ear heard that she wanted to be scritched. She smiled, smug with both her pampering and with having her deduction confirmed.

She couldn’t listen to my feelings the way I could hear hers, but she could often deduce my thoughts, Sherlock-Holmes style. Partly this was because she knew me well - from the first moments of my arrival on Trion, in fact. But mostly it was because of her amazing intelligence. In this world, slavery elevated the female mind, and the more a master valued his slavegirls, the smarter they became. In the Kingdom of Cern, slavegirls were highly valued and pampered precisely to take advantage of this magical, alchemical effect.

Unfortunately, it worked the other way as well: A female slave would suffer diminished intelligence if she wasn’t valued as property. Worse, if she ran away or was set free, she’d lose her intelligence completely. She’d become a ‘wild woman’ with the mind of an animal. Which led to Luce’s objection: She’d deduced me thinking about ‘women,’ and that term was an insult when applied to slavegirls. It applied to unintelligent feral women, or to the dull-minded, half-free females of the Ularian Empire. As Luce had told me more than once, she was a girl, a slavegirl, and proud of it.

Not that everyone followed the Harmonizer traditions of pampering their slavegirls and treating them as valuable advisers. Cern and the other Island Kingdoms had been settled by followers of the Harmony of Providence, but in the Four Empires they treated slaves with great harshness and cruelty. The fire poison allowed masters to sell their slaves cheaply, or even give them away without diminishing their minds, but it left the victims maimed, both physically and mentally. A branded Ysbene slave would suffer from both unnatural fear and an unnatural sensitivity to pain, as would a Vedic slave after having the customary piercings and tattoos applied with a hot needle. The Sinonese created ‘chop-footed’ girls, amputating the feet and applying the poison to the cauterized stumps, and the Ularians forced their females to drink a boiling mixture containing the stuff. Adepts in the Island Kingdoms had struggled for centuries to find a way to neutralize the poison, without success, and now I had taken up the challenge.

“You’ll find the antidote, master,” Luce told me in an attempt to bring me out of my brown study. “You’ve almost succeeded now, after only a year.”

The cafe’s arbi came out pushing a cart, and I brightened as I recognized the device on it. It was an ice-maker. My ice-maker, one of only a handful of prototypes in existence. I’d made this one as a gift to the cafe’s proprietors, in return for the unstinting support they’d provided to my research. It was a much appreciated gift: Ice had been rarer than diamonds, in the tropical world of Trion, until I had invented my alchemical ice-maker.

“Can we watch, my lord?” Ife asked with a trace of hesitancy in her tone. The Ysbene discouraged curiosity in their slavegirls, just as Cernians encouraged it.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not as if we were in a lab.” Not even Cernians brought slavegirls to visit alchemical labs. Doing so destroyed the temper of the place, ruining it for white alchemy. This device, however, wasn’t a piece of lab equipment anymore, but rather a prototype being field-tested. It still had problems, chiefly in that it required my own aqua vita to operate, rather than working with any man’s. And, I noticed, the aqua vita bottle was empty.

The cart did have a full beaker of water, however, with the traditional stirring knife lying beside it. I pricked my finger, let one drop of blood fall into the water, and stirred it in to create aqua vita. Lifting the stirrer out, I then let one drop of the aqua vita fall on my finger, healing the cut instantly. I smiled. I had done this hundreds of times before, but it always fascinated me. It was a simple, powerful alchemy that proved that I wasn’t on Earth any more. Nor even in the same universe.

The arbi refilled the bottle and started the icemaker. Aqua vita dripped on the blue vitalizing crystals I had prepared (after some struggle), and crimson flame shot up three feet above the burner. The arbi poured clean water into the funnel on top, which fell through the device and collected as chunks of ice in the bin at the bottom.

In a few minutes we all had tall, ice-cold drinks. The ice was as much as a novelty for my friends as the healing powers of aqua vita was for me. I didn’t mind having cold drinks myself, but I thought the alchemical applications would prove more important in the end. The icemaker was my ‘secret weapon’ in the lab. By cooling solutions in an icebath, I could successfully run reactions that would otherwise be too volatile or unstable. And as a result, I was very close to solving the problem of the fire poison.

If nothing went wrong, of course.

“Here’s to success,” Edmond said, raising a refilled glass. The rest of us joined the toast.

“A lot of people are wishing lord John-Smith success,” Ife said. She ran my name together like everyone else did here, not two words, but not quite one word either.

“But a lot aren’t,” Luce said. “Lord Zheng, the ambassador from the Sinon Empire, for example. ‘I would bribe you to stop, sir, if I thought it would do any good.’ “

“It was a joke, Luce,” I said.

“Yes, master. But he was serious underneath. Your progress frightens him.”

“It’s funny, though,” Edmond said. “Right now, you’re the biggest smuggler of Sinon fire-poison in the kingdom. You’d think Ambassador Zheng would support you just for that.”

“Maybe he was trying to mislead the Crown Customs officers,” I said deadpan, “I wouldn’t want them to learn about my smuggling.”

The slavegirls giggled, and Edmond barked a short laugh. He was a Crown Customs officer himself, appointed the same day that I’d started my project. At first I’d thought it was a sinecure, given to him as a reward for his part in thwarting an attempt on King Henri’s life. But later I learned that the Crown had appointed him specifically to smooth the way for any smuggled reagents I might require. ‘People wishing for my success,’ indeed.

Another arbi came to the table. A cruder one, with a seawater-stained frame. It handed me a note, and left. “Speaking of smuggling,” I said after a glance at the note, “The Flying Mallard has a package for me.” The Mallard had been in port for over a day, in fact. I’d wanted to be there to retrieve my package at once, but things weren’t done that way. “So I’m leaving now to pick it up.” I knelt to unlock the cuff on Luce’s ankle.

It was a long walk to the docks, but Luce padded beside me without complaint. I at least had good walking shoes - what Cernians insist on calling “boots” - but she had only her leather foot-wrappings. If I had realized that this long walk across the city was coming, I would have made her wear sandals, despite her protests. She had a fine pair of sandals that she wore when I permitted her to work in the kitchen or working on the jewelry she loved in the workshops. But she resisted wearing them outside, even for a long walk such as this.

Slaves aren’t permitted proper shoes. They might wear sandals if they live out on the plantations, or when, as a special treat, their masters permit them to work. Or when walking outside in the towns and cities, when another fad for sandal-wearing sweeps through. More usually, though, they go barefoot and wear simple foot-wrappings to protect their feet when they venture out onto the streets.

Luce had made this trip with me many times before. She rather enjoyed the exercise - and the foot-rubs I’d give her afterwards. At least she didn’t have to carry any heavy burdens; two arbi tagged along behind us for that. Besides the footwrappings, Luce wore a red sleeveless tunic, a ribbon of matching red tying back her long hair, and a plain silver band locked on her left wrist. I wore slightly more in the tropical climate: The baggy shorts and loose shirt of a Cernian in casual dress, with the inevitable sash wrapped around my waist to hold various items, including my scabbarded sword. The arbi, of course, didn’t wear anything.

We reached the dock where the Flying Mallard waited. “Ahoy the ship!” I called, waving the note I had received. Captain Ente waved back and came down the gangplank. Two of the ship’s arbi set up a table and folding chairs on the dock. The one form of smuggling that the Crown takes seriously is the smuggling of slavegirls out of Cern. Luce would not be allowed aboard the Flying Mallard, even when docked, unless I could produce a writ of transport signed with King Henri’s own hand.

“Welcome John-Smith, Luce,” Captain Ente greeted us when he reached us. “Sit down, please. Your package will be down in a bit.” He handed me another note, this one a sealed envelope addressed to me from Yusef ib Farad, Marlon del Saville’s factor in Brost. I sat down, opening the letter and glancing through it out of habit. It dripped with the usual crocodile tears; the items I had requested were all on the contraband list, and no legal supplies were available. However, my request would be kept on file, in the event of legal supplies coming once again on the market.

“The usual,” I said as I handed the letter to Luce. I always included two copies of my requests to Yusef, one for his files, and the other for his warehouse. The second copy, however, always seemed to get misdirected. Captain Ente would circulate it among his smuggler contacts, and one of them would put a package together. Captain Ente would pay the smuggler, and then I would pay Captain Ente.

Captain Ente had an arbi pour drinks for us as we waited. We made small talk and I watched the smugglers come out of the woodwork. My presence meant that Crown customs officers would make themselves scarce, providing a perfect opportunity to send packages and receive crates without any annoying paperwork or custom duties.

After a time, a ship’s arbi brought down my package, a plain wooden case. The captain took it and set it on the table. “Here ye go, John-Smith.”

I dug out my coinpurse for the golden sceptres to pay him, when Luce frowned. “Master,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Eh?” I couldn’t listen with my Master’s ear, since she wasn’t tied up at the moment, so I couldn’t tell what was bothering her. But I knew better than to ignore her advice.

“The crate’s too light, master. Please. Open it.”

I looked at Captain Ente and we both shrugged. The crate had been painted with Ben Gerald’s elixir, the weaker version that only set off an alarm if the wrong person tried to open it. I touched the seal with a drop of aqua vita from my hip flask. Writing appeared, agreeing that yes, I was the John-Smith the package had been addressed to, and revealing Sandpiper’s personal mark as a guarantee that he himself had sealed the crate. The funny business Luce expected to find would have had to be done before then.

“Bring up a handspike, there!” Captain Ente shouted to one of his arbi. The handspike came, and I pried the lid off the crate. Inside I saw the expected number of bottles - but they were all empty.

“Huh,” I said as I took a bottle out to look at it more closely. The label had a POISON warning in large red letters and identified the contents as ‘tainous acid.’ My nose agreed with the label. But the stopper was missing and the contents looked like they had been dumped out somewhere, leaving only a trace residue inside.

“Piss,” the Captain swore as he stared at the bottle. “Forker’s rat piss.”

“It’s not your fault, my lord,” Luce told him.

“Maybe it’s not my fault - the crate was sealed when it came aboard my ship - but it’s still my responsibility. I contracted to bring you a crate of certain reagents, and...” he waved an unhappy hand at the empty bottles.

“Well then,” I said. “What can you tell me about Sandpiper?”

“Not much. Our business is handled in the dark, and I couldn’t recognize Sandpiper if I passed him on the street in Brost. What we have is a recognition signal - I can give you that. I take in most of a cargo at Brost, and then at night off the coast I burn two green flares - that’s the Mallard’s signal. A lighter or two then comes out, and the man on board makes his own sign as Sandpiper.” he nodded at the crate’s seal. “Or Mallet, or one of the others.” I nodded myself. I’d received three previous shipments from Sandpiper, two from Mallet, and one each from two other smugglers.

“The arbi load the special cargo from the lighter,” Captain Ente went on, “I make a suitable payment, and then the man and the lighter disappear back into the night.”

“Nothing really to go on, then,” I said. “We’ll just have to try again with another shipment.”

Luce shook her head. “Master, I don’t think next time will be any different. Unless it’s worse. Whoever did this didn’t completely succeed; they’ll try again next time as well. And,” she added, “they didn’t expect me to notice so soon, so now the ambush they’re setting up against my master will fail.”

“Are you saying,” Captain Ente said slowly, “that you just foiled an attack against your master simply by noticing something funny with this crate?”

“Of course my lord.” Luce smiled sunnily. “It’s obvious.”

“Ha! You’re a saucy one, by the Forker’s rat-bastards. I though my own girls were bad, but they could take lessons from you.”

“She is saucy,” I said. “Remind me to punish you for it, Luce.”

“Yes master.”

“But are you certain of the attack on the way back to the hôtel?”

“I’d expect it master. You didn’t notice lord Chimung pointing you out to those two bravos, when we reached the docks.”

“I didn’t notice the bravos, either. And that’s ‘lord bravos’ to you,” I told her with mock severity.

“Yes master,” she answered with a matching meekness.

Captain Ente frowned in more open concern. Chimung was officially the protocol officer at the Sinon Empire’s embassy, and unofficially the Sinonese spymaster. It was a desperate move for him to act so openly. “I can loan you some arbi to see you safely off the docks.” He frowned some more. “You should of brought more of your own, John-Smith. You just don’t see how valuable your packages are.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” I said. “But they want to steal the crate before we find out it’s empty?”

“Yes master,” Luce said.

“Then...” I dropped a pair of scepters on the table. “I’ll take you up on your offer,” I told Captain Ente. “Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the crate back and keep it safe. Just in case I need it later.”

For the trip back I put Luce in a wrist-leash, her hands cuffed before her and attached to a lead. That drew a few looks. By tradition, a Cernian master will carry the cuffs and lead when he takes his slavegirl out, but he rarely makes use of them. It isn’t inherently cruel, but it is associated with the harsh treatment that Imperial masters inflict on their slaves.

It also sharpened Luce’s wits. Restraints will do that with any slavegirl, and I wanted Luce’s wits as sharp as possible in the face of a possible ambush. Another difference between masters in the Island Kingdoms and those in the Four Empires is that Islander masters listen to their slavegirls while the Imperials refuse to do so.

Luce spotted the ambush, such as it was, well in advance. “They’re improvising, master,” she muttered in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. “Lord Chimung is too competent to have planned this.” Luce knew about my preternaturally keen hearing, part of the idealized body-image I’d received when the Black Druid summoned me here, along with my lean height and great strength. I could have wished for my subconscious to give me keen sight as well, or instead. But at least I didn’t need glasses anymore.

“I see them,” I answered. The two young men ahead were obviously Imperials, newly arrived in Cern. Their clothing and bearing gave them away, rather than their complexions and coloring, even though one had the dark, narrow-faced features of a Vedic, while the other was a pale subject of the Ularian Empire. Cern, even more than the other Island Kingdoms, had a mad mixture of ethnic types, with both masters and slavegirls ranging from ivory-blonde to ebony-black. Change the clothing of these two, drop the Imperial stiffness from their posture, and give them a pair of slavegirls to listen to, and they would pass without notice.

But not as they stood, obviously waiting and obviously uncertain. I pulled Luce close to me by the wrist-leash and quietly asked “Suggestions? Should we avoid or confront?”

“Let’s confront them, master. They really don’t have any backing, not even arbi,” she answered. My Master’s ear also heard her curiosity about them. She wanted a closer look. ‘Curiosity is becoming in a slavegirl’ is a common saying in the Island Kingdoms, passed down from the Harmonizers who originally settled the islands.

“Gentlemen,” I greeted the two, walking boldly up to them. They looked us over, taking in the extra arbi Captain Ente had loaned us and also the lack of a crate. The Vedic covered his uncertain expression with an oily smile, and the Ularian’s hands twitched to make a brief gesture against witchcraft. “Gentlemen,” I repeated. “If you’re looking for the slave auctions, they just opened yesterday.” I gave them the directions to get there.

“Thank you, sir,” the Vedic said. He spoke good Cernian, with oily tones that matched his smile. He started to say more, but his companion interrupted him.

“Let’s go. I want to see the slavegirls,” he said. His hands twitched again, and he dragged the other away. Retreating.

“You were right. Again,” I told Luce.

“It helped that Ambassador Zheng’s bad luck forced him to improvise, master. His next move won’t be so easy to counter.” Her face turned smug. “But this time it was trivial.”

I shook my head. “Captain Ente was right: You’re much too saucy, and I am going to punish you for it.”

“Yes master,” she agreed, grinning. She knew just what sort of ‘punishments’ I applied for sauciness, and she looked forward to them.

A few minutes later, Luce and I arrived at Belzac del Boise’s hôtel, a large residential building of the sort that most city-dwelling Cernians live in. Cernian cities don’t have children, since children can only be conceived at the nexus points, and families only exist in the communes located there. Elsewhere, men live with their slavegirls, in groups rather than trying to set up tiny individual households. A Cernian master will typically have a suite of rooms in a hôtel, sharing it with a slavegirl or two. Each hôtel, will have up to a score of such suites, along with common areas: Kitchens, workshops, libraries, and the like. The hôtel’s residents, masters and slavegirls both, can thus socialize with each other without having to go out onto the oft-muddy streets.

In the foyer just inside the door, I unlocked the wrist-cuffs from Luce so that she could remove her foot-wrappings and step barefoot onto the carpet. Most of the hôtel was covered with a fine carpet, treated with an elixir of Belzac’s own invention so that it ‘ate’ dirt and kept itself magically clean. Slavegirls in the hôtel could wander wherever they wanted on the carpeted areas - unless their masters bound them to prevent this. Or a master could simply lock bells on his slavegirl so that her passage was marked by a pretty jingling. I could hear several sets of such bells in the hôtel.

I selected two lengths from the slavers’ rope hanging on the pegs. Slavers’ rope was not only strong, but also elixired to hold knots well and to resist chaffing the skin. When Luce stepped onto the carpet I used one length to tie her wrists behind her and the other to hobble her ankles. I would make her walk slowly to my suite, her mincing steps emphasizing her helplessness Then I would hold her and tease her body, making her squirm with pleasure. That was one way to punish a slavegirl’s sauciness.

As I replaced my own shoes with the slippers that Cernian men wore indoors, I heard a pair of bells approach. Orane appeared, reminding me as usual of a fairy-tale princess - slim and delicate, with long honey-gold hair and sapphire blue eyes. If such a princess were enslaved and barefoot. She was Belzac’s own slavegirl and one of the most beautiful females in Cern. In addition to the silver bells locked on her ankle, she wore a sleeveless slave tunic similar to Luce’s but subtly more elegant. Belzac followed a moment later, a short, dapper, grey-haired man, Captain of the city Watchguard, intimate of King Henri of Cern, alchemical Adept, and my mentor.

“Good day, John-Smith,” Belzac said. “I hope you remember the engagement we have for this evening, at the Bergmark Embassy.”

“Thank you for reminding me, sir,” I said, flushing. I hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but I had misplaced the day. I still had trouble with the calendar here, with its 11-day weeks and the 33-day ‘triweeks’ that weren’t months because they had nothing to do with the world’s two moons. Not to mention the 20-hour days, with each hour a little longer than the ones I knew in my Past, growing up in California.

“You have been laboring hard,” Belzac said. “Impossibly hard, I would say, if I had not witnessed it myself. You need to spend more time sampling the possibilities of life. It will do you good to dress well and enjoy fine company.”

My Master’s ear heard Luce agreeing with Belzac, and she was right. As usual. I did need to get out of the lab for a time, for something other than just fencing practice. “I’m sure it will,” I said. “I won’t be able to work for a while, anyway.” I told him about my latest shipment of reagents.

“It could be simply an example of the unreliability of smugglers,” Belzac said. “However, this is not the time to hold a council of war, and the Bergmark embassy is not the appropriate place. Tomorrow will be soon enough to decide our course of action.”

“Master,” Orane said. “I’m sure there is more behind this.” She exchanged a nod with Luce, and her expression suddenly grew impish. “And so are you. ‘Unreliability of smugglers.’“

“Not even an Imperial would believe that, my lord,” Luce put in. Belzac gave both slavegirls a look.

“Although as you said, master, this isn’t the time for a council of war. I would only beg that lord John-Smith be cautious tonight. Everyone at the party will be sifting the rumors, and they may try to sift you. Watch for verbal traps, my lord.”

As Orane said this, I caught the look of deep wisdom in her eyes, the one she usually managed to keep well-hidden. It reminded me of her age: She was as old as Belzac - several centuries at least - and much more intelligent. I sketched her a bow. The deep look in her eyes disappeared and the impish expression returned. “I’m not advising you to be drab and dull, my lord,” she said. “It’s a time to make merry. Instead of chasing rumors you could set nets for them.”

“Or catch them in glue-traps,” Luce said.

“Or lure them with a sugar-bait,” Orane said.

“Then you can dip them in batter and fry them,” Luce said.

“Or grill them over a fire, in the fashion of Nissle.”

“Not the green ones, though - they’re not ripe.”

“I thought the blue and fuzzy ones were the ones that had an off taste.”

“Orane,” Belzac said with a twinkle in his own eyes. “Did I give you permission to tease John-Smith like that?”

Orane looked down at her bare feet. “No, master,” she said, smiling.

“Come along then,” he said, pulling his own wrist-leash from his sash. He locked her wrists in front of her body with the fur-lined cuffs and embraced her, the better to listen with his Master’s ear. More than that, they looked like two people very much in love: I could almost see the cloud of pink hearts popping in the air around the two of them as he led her away.

I turned to Luce. “And did I give you permission to tease Belzac like that?”

“No, master,” she looked down at her bare feet, imitating Orane.

“Well then,” I broke my own imitation of Belzac to sling Luce over my shoulder and carry her off.

In my suite, I splashed some aqua vita on the crystals set into the side of the bathtub. The cool water in the tub warmed instantly to a comfortable bath temperature. Luce stood naked beside the tub, her ankles already locked into the bronze bath shackles. I lifted her up and set her in the water before joining her.

“May I scrub you, master?” she asked, as she always did.

“Not this time,” I told her. “You’re being punished for your sauciness, remember?”

“Yes master,” she sighed. But she then smiled slightly as she held out her hands for the bronze wrist shackles. I locked them in place, and then let my fingers wander up her arms. She smiled some more as she whimpered.

By listening with my Master’s ear as I washed Luce, I was able to touch her in just the right way to make her skin tingle. Listening with the Master’s ear gave a master great power over his slavegirl, but also inhibited him from inflicting any real cruelty on her. Instead, we inflicted pleasure on our slavegirls. The Imperials called us Harmonizers for doing so, and claimed that we were the thralls of our females, but the first insult is only slightly true, and the second completely misses the mark. The Island Kingdoms were settled by Harmonizers, true, and their descendants mostly follow the old Harmonizer customs with regard to how they treat their slavegirls, but in a relaxed way, without adhering to the old Harmonizer rituals. As for the second insult, I could hear very clearly Luce’s feeling that she belonged to me, and not the other way around.

I ended by massaging Luce’s feet, spending some time working the soreness from them. Luce squirmed in her chains, grinning hugely by this time as she pulled at her shackles. They held her fast, of course, but they did not bruise her. Cernian masters generally used bronze or brass chains and shackles - never iron - and they polished the inside surfaces so as to almost feel soft. In addition, those surfaces were alchemically cerated to keep them from damaging the captive’s skin. Luce could struggle as hard as she liked, without any chance of either getting free or of hurting herself.

I quickly scrubbed myself, then helped Luce to her feet so that the arbi could pour water over us both, rinsing away the soap. I unlocked the bath-shackles. Luce suddenly hugged me, hard, and I embraced her in return, carefully moderating my strength. I could no longer listen with my Master’s ear and I was much stronger than her. I suspected that slavegirls were physically tougher than their masters, as well as being smarter, but we masters had an advantage in both size and raw strength. And I had a bigger advantage than most men.

When the Black Druid summoned me here, he could not bring my physical body. He had intended to summon half my spirt, or a shadow of my spirit and put it into an alchemical mass that he could control. Through a miscalculation, doubled my spirit and brought half of that over, and I had unconsciously shaped the mass into my idealized body-image: Strong, tall, and lean. I had taken command of my own body from my first breath in this world, and that had allowed me to defy the Black Druid’s wishes.

I picked Luce up and stepped carefully out of the tub. The arbi, towels in their wooden hands, began to dry us. Luce nibbled my ear, and I was tempted, but I whispered to her, “Not now, we don’t have time for that.”

“Yes, master,” she whispered back, not bothering to hide her disappointment. Like most slavegirls, she had a greater appetite for sex than her master. In a way, I had found that harder to adjust to than her insistence on being bound for sex. Like most Cernians, both masters and slaves, she found unbound sex to be horribly perverse. Luce’s recent hug of me would have been considered kinky at the least, if any other Cernian had learned of it.

I let Luce run a brush over my head before settling in to comb and brush her long dark hair. It went fairly quickly. Like many objects in Cern, the comb and brush were both made of alchemically-treated materials. The comb removed tangles like magic - or rather by magic. The brush sucked up the water clinging to the hair, like a blow-dryer, only faster and without heat. A bit of flower-perfumed water, the only cosmetics Luce used, left her hair smelling nice as well.

Then it was time to dress, in clothes selected by Belzac’s slavegirl Orane. She had a better sense of such things than Luce - and a far better one than myself. I pulled on the tight pocketless pants of a Cernian gentleman, this pair dyed a dark blue - almost the same color as new bluejeans from my Past, I noted with faint amusement. With the pants went a white lace-trimmed shirt, and a turquoise-colored sash of woolyback silk. Finally, I added my protective amulet, set with some of the red crystals I had made as my first alchemical project in Cern. I also slipped on a silver ring, one of Luce’s projects, cast with intricate leaf-designs and set with a bit of milky-white glass.

Luce pulled on a sleeveless slave-tunic. Slave tunics tended to look alike to me; I could tell them apart by their color, and to a limited extent by their fabric and their length. But Luce could explain the differences in great detail, and mostly I indulged her when she begged for a new tunic of a different style or cut.

This tunic was made of the same turquoise cloth as my sash. It extended to her knees, and came with a belt set with gilt scallop-shells. I fastened the belt around her waist myself, then added five slave-bands in the old-fashioned style, locking the narrow gold circles on her wrists and ankles, and around her throat. Luce smiled at me and handed me a white flower made of pearls and silver to set in her hair.

After placing the flower, and fussing to get it just so, I stepped back to admire my Luce. I found myself grinning at her like a fool. She didn’t look like Venus rising from the waves, but rather like Venus’s little sister, playing dress-up: Devastatingly cute, rather than strikingly beautiful. Then a gleam came into her eyes, and she danced a couple of steps. Her breasts jiggled, under her tunic, reminding me that she was no child, even though she was my girl.

“You should be stripped naked, to dance like that,” I told her.

“Yes, master,” she said. “Anything to distract you from your troubles.”

“Am I being that obvious?” I asked.

“Only to slavegirls, master.”

I laughed and dug out a belled anklet. It was a cheap design that clashed horribly with Luce’s formal slave-outfit. I locked it on her left ankle anyway, just above the gold band, and she jingled as I led her from the room.

(On to Chapter 2)