Chapter 11 - The Tome Strikes

The door slammed open and hit the wall.

I craned my neck as far as the shackles let me, which wasn’t far.

It was Malkor, and he had run. He was huffing and puffing in those red robes of his, white hair half-loose, sweat beading on his forehead. The dead heart at the top of his staff was swinging. He did not look happy.

He went for the girl, staff up and moving fast, all of it aimed at her. “You stupid girl,” he hissed. “You let him—”

I was still on the board. I yanked at the shackles and they held, so I yanked again and was about to try something creative when every shackle snapped at once, wrists and ankles, with a crack of breaking iron. Across the room, the little faces on the Tome’s fittings stopped grinning. Whatever that cost it, it didn’t ask me first.

I had one second, and I used it.

Malkor was six feet away, back to me, full attention on the girl. He was old and gaunt and probably had centuries of horrible magic in those bones, but none of that was going to matter once I got behind him, with nothing to lose and no clothes to slow me down.

I got behind him and wrapped my arms around his chest, throwing my full weight to the side. He was heavier than he looked. We hit the curved wall together and he got the staff around at my ribs, but I got inside it before he could do anything useful with it. He snarled something, cold fire cracked across my shoulder, and I ignored it. I grabbed him by the back of his robe and pivoted, aiming us both at the hole.

There was an open dark hole set into the floor, with the same smell coming up from it as the pit they’d thrown me in. I’d smelled it on the way in. It was Ripple’s pit, and honestly, I’d been dropped in worse places recently.

I shoved him in.

His eyes went wide and his mouth opened on a word he never finished, and I’d rather forget that face.

Something crunched below, then crunched again, and a faint pink glow flickered up briefly before it went dark again. I decided that was Ripple saying thank you, and I tried hard not to think about the crunching.

I stood at the edge of the hole, naked, with a cut on my chest and the blood circle smeared around my feet. My shoulder ached where Malkor’s spell had half-worked.

The girl was pressed against the far wall. She’d moved there at some point during all of that, but I hadn’t noticed when.

You let him. That was what had brought the old bastard running. That collar must have told him the moment his last virgin stopped being one. She’d picked tonight, and me. I was starting to think she’d planned all of it.

Her collar went dull. Whatever enchantment had been powering the metal just died, right in front of me. She touched it with one hand and felt around the edge. Malkor was gone, and his magic had gone with him.

While I stood there, my chest went warm below the sternum, a steady heat separate from the sting of the cut, and it stayed put.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I waited for the collar to wake up again, for its hold on her to snap back to Malkor or dissolve or do something useful. It didn’t.

We both looked at the Tome.

The eye was barely open. It looked like it needed a week in bed. The whole book sagged against the lectern.

“Ah,” it said.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“And yet,” said the Tome.

I turned to the girl.

“The bond was supposed to dissolve,” she explained as she tugged at her collar. “When the master died. That’s what the ritual does. That’s what the illustrations showed.”

“I tried,” the Tome croaked. “Twice I tried to correct you.”

“You knew what it would do,” she told it.

The Tome visibly exhaled.

Her jaw set. She looked at me.

I held up my hands, still naked, still bleeding a little from her cut. “I don’t own people,” I said.

She looked at me, then at the braces on her wrists and the cuffs on her ankles. Her hand went to her throat and she tugged the collar, hard, fingers hooked under the metal. It didn’t move. She tugged again, and it held. Her shoulders dropped, just for a second, before she squared them again and looked at the hole in the floor where her master had gone, then back at me. I couldn’t tell if she was about to cry or laugh.

“And yet,” she said.

The Tome made a very smug sort of sound, probably the smuggest sound a book has ever made.

I looked at it.

It looked back at me without blinking.

“You used the last of yourself to break those shackles,” I said.

“I spent energy. I am not without resources,” it said, barely above a croak. “I have been chained to one lectern or another for years. Spending what I had to be rid of him was not difficult.”

“That’s not an answer.”

The eye held mine. “No. It isn’t.”

I went to the lectern. The chains were slack. I got both hands under the Tome and lifted it, which took more effort than I expected. It was heavy and cold against my bare skin, the cover against my chest, the eye looking up at me from an awkward angle. “You’re going to have to tell me your name at some point,” I said.

“I have a name. It’s quite long. We’ll work up to it.”

“Right.”

I tucked it under my arm and turned around. She’d crossed the room while I was busy with the book and was standing right behind me.

I’d expected something complicated, relief maybe, or the resigned face people make when a plan goes sideways. What I got was a smile, wide and bright, bigger than any she’d given me all night, and then she dropped to one knee and pressed her forehead to my thigh.

She stayed there and let out a long, slow breath.

“Master,” she said, and added more quietly, “Finally.”

She tilted her face up and breathed in deep, right at my hip, eyes half-closed, like she wanted to remember the smell of me. She wasn’t subtle about it.

I stared at her, and my cock, which has no sense of timing at all, noticed exactly how close her face was.

The Tome made a long, deeply satisfied sound.

“I’m not—” I started.

“I know what you’re going to say.” She stood, still smiling, and looked up at me with those dark eyes, steady and sure, same as all evening. “Eight months in this fortress,” she said. “Eleven people in that pit.” She tilted her head. “And you’re cute. And you’re nice. And I have plans.”

“Plans,” I said.

“For you.” She ran one finger down my sternum, slow, from the collarbone to the cut. The same way she had on the board, except now her eyes were lit up instead of sad. “I want to kneel at your feet every night. I want you to lock this collar tighter so I feel you even when you’re gone. I want to wake up knowing exactly where I belong.”

She raised her wrists, the braces still on and the metal dull in the low light.

“These feel wrong now,” she said. “Without your hands on them.” Her fingers traced the edge of one brace. “When you have something to tie them with, I’d ask for that. It keeps the bad dreams away.”

I opened my mouth, closed it, and filed all of that under things to think about when I had clothes on and wasn’t actively bleeding.

The Tome said, quietly: “I like her.”

I turned back to her. “I don’t own people,” I said.

“And yet,” she said.

The Tome laughed loudly, its eye crinkling. I thought seriously about throwing it in after Malkor.

I’m a good person. I have opinions about slavery, correct ones, held sincerely.

The problem was that she’d pressed her forehead to my thigh and said “finally” like she’d been waiting for me specifically. She’d told me she wanted to wake up knowing where she belonged. She’d asked me to tie her wrists. And she was looking at me right now, licking her lips, with her chin up, pleased with herself.

I was supposed to be horrified. I’d been raised around enough decent people to understand that owning a person is wrong, full stop. And I believed that, the same as I believed fire was hot and you don’t steal from friends.

But the part of my brain I wasn’t proud of had noticed the collar on her neck and the way she said “master,” and it liked both more than it should have. I was going to need a long, honest talk with myself about what kind of person I actually was, and I was pretty sure I’d hate the answers.

But not tonight. Tonight I was a good person having a deeply complicated evening, and I had women to rescue.

“The brooch,” I said.

Her hand went into the front of that little linen thing and produced it. She turned it over in her fingers, watching the light catch the metal, then set it in my palm and kissed my knuckles.

“Yours,” she said. “So mine too, now.”

I decided not to examine that logic very closely.

“Kaniz,” she said. “Kaniz Delight. The warlock called me that.”

“Samuel. But you knew that.”

She looked up at me and licked her lips. “Yes, master.”

She fell into step behind me, half a step back and to one side, ankle cuffs making their small sound on the stone, and I kept wanting to turn around and check she was still there.

I stopped at the ritual dish. The blade was still there, blood-sticky, short and sharp. I picked it up. It was a lousy fighting weapon, but I wasn’t planning on fighting. “The women,” I said. “Where are their cells? Which way?”

“Up,” she said. “Two levels. Then the main corridor, east.” She watched the blade in my hand. “There are guards between here and there.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. A few.”

I looked at the corridor. It was dark stone with no torches past the chamber door, and there was shadow in every direction, plenty to hide in.

I set the Tome against the wall. The eye looked up at me, half-lidded, barely tracking.

“Stay with the book,” I said. “I’ll come back for you.”