Fire by Robin McKinley & Peter Dickinson

Author:Robin McKinley & Peter Dickinson [McKinley, Robin & Dickinson, Peter]
Format: epub
Tags: Demonoid Upload 2
ISBN: 9780399252891
Publisher: Lisa's E-Book Collection
Published: 2009-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

P E T E R DIC K I N S ON

Long before the man reached Aunt Ellila’s stall, Tib recognised

him as a magician. Though many people practised cottage magic,

the high magic practised by professional magicians was illegal

throughout the country. But the town of Haballun chose to be different, in this and many other ways.

Slavery, for instance. This was also illegal, yet Tib himself was a

slave, bought by Aunt Ellila direct from the school, with an enforceable guarantee from the Guild that if he escaped and was free for

more than a month, the purchaser would be compensated by a payment twenty times his purchase price. To make the guarantee effective, the Guild had hired a magician to design a system whereby

each slave was branded on his left shoulder-blade and the brand

then tattooed with an individual mark, linked to a scrying stone in

the Guild head offi ce. If Tib went missing, a clerk would dig out his

sale-parchment and lay the stone on the copy of his mark, and an

image would appear in the crystal showing exactly where he was

hiding. Once recaptured, he would be punished for as long as he had

been free in a manner that caused intense pain but did no physical

damage, and then returned to his owner. As part of his schooling

Tib had been made to watch would-be escapers undergoing this torment. Since he had been brought to the school almost newborn, he

had sometimes wondered what freedom might be like, but if he’d

S A L A M A N D E R M A N ◆ 1 5 9

ever felt tempted to try it he had only to reach over his left shoulder

and feel the ridges and hollows of the brand to abandon the idea.

Aunt Ellila wasn’t in fact a bad owner compared to some that Tib

had heard of. “Aunt” was a purely formal title, dating back to the

early days of the system, when owners needed to pretend to be blood

relatives of their slaves in order to have an apparent right to keep

them as servants. If Tib had had an actual aunt or uncle he would

have called them “Gada This” or “Gado That.”

Tib was Aunt Ellila’s only slave. He cleaned the house and ran

errands, but his main job was to help stack the heavy hand-cart

and then haul it down to the market in the morning, with Aunt

Ellila walking beside it and carrying the basket of her more fragile

stock on her head. He then unstacked the cart, set it up as a stall,

rigged the awnings and the screened area behind it, assembled the

shelves and showcases, and fi nally unpacked the crates and brought

the goods to Aunt Ellila to arrange as she wanted them. During the

long, hot day he ran errands, parcelled up items sold, and so on, and

minded the stall in the slack period at midday while Aunt Ellila

went off to Defri’s bar to dice and drink bhang soda with her

cronies.

At other times he sat in the shade of the awning, apparently

asleep but in fact on the look-out for sneak-thieves, the market

police, and other trouble-makers.

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