The Chernagor Pirates (The Scepter of Mercy Book 2) by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504027472
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For a long time, thralls had fascinated King Lanius. They were men robbed of much of their humanity, forced down to the dusky, shadow-filled borderland between mankind and the animal world. The existence of thralls made whole men think about what being human really meant.

Then a thrall tried to kill Lanius.

It wasn’t just a fit of bestial passion, of course. It was the Banished One reaching out through the thrall, controlling him as a merely human puppeteer controlled a marionette. From that moment on, thralls hadn’t seemed the same to Lanius. They didn’t strike him as just being half man and half animal. Instead, he also saw them as the Banished One’s tools, as so many hammers and saws and knives (oh yes, knives!) to be picked up whenever the exiled god needed them.

And tools weren’t so fascinating.

Since the thralls tried to murder Lanius and Estrilda, the king had paid much less attention to them, except for making sure the ones still in the palace couldn’t get out and try anything like that again. He didn’t know what sudden spasm of curiosity had brought him to the room above the one in which they were imprisoned. Whatever it was, though, he peered down at them through the peephole in their ceiling.

He started to, anyhow. As soon as he drew back the tile that covered the peephole, he drew back himself, in dismay. A thick, heavy stench wafted up through the opening. The thralls cared not a bit about keeping clean.

By all appearances, they didn’t care much about anything else, either. Two sprawled on mattresses on the floor. A third tore a chunk off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into his mouth with filthy hands. He filled a cup with water and drank it to go with the snack. Then he walked over to a corner of the room and eased himself. The thralls were in the habit of doing that. They had chamber pots in the room, but seldom used them. That added to the stench.

The thrall started to lie down with his comrades, but checked himself. Instead, he stared up at the peephole. Lanius didn’t think he’d made any noise uncovering it, but that didn’t always matter. The thralls seemed able to sense when someone was looking at them. Or maybe it wasn’t the thralls themselves. Maybe it was the Banished One looking out through them.

That suspicion always filled Lanius whenever he had to endure a thrall’s gaze. This thrall’s face showed nothing but idiocy. Who could guess what lay behind it? Maybe nothing did. Maybe the man (no, the not-quite-man) was as empty, as emptied, as any other thrall laboring on a little plot of land down south of the Stura. Maybe. Lanius had trouble believing it.

Did something glint in the thrall’s eyes? His face didn’t change. His expression stayed as vacant as ever. But that didn’t feel like a beast’s stare to Lanius. Nervously, the king shook his head. It might have been the stare of a beast of sorts—a beast of prey eyeing an intended victim.

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