Page 43 of The Omega Slave

Tsaria was desperate. He had no idea how many days he had been here, but knew if he didn’t get to Kamir and somehow help him find his dragon, Kamir would die, and he couldn’t let that happen. No one from the pleasure house he trusted at all still lived. No one at the palace. And his brother had already proven how trustworthy he was.

The fact was, he had no one.

And the one person he desperately wanted, Tsaria had betrayed.

In the end, Moxie spent most of her day by his side simply to keep the rats off him. The fact was, she couldn’t even show her face where it might be recognized, so the palace was out. If he had been fully conscious, he might have felt the urge to survive, but between the head injury and the cold, she knew he’d succumbed to a fever. He would die.

Anger that had been her constant companion for thirty summers threatened to boil over. What a waste. How manychildren had she sat with until they too died? Only the strongest survived down here, and this one didn’t have the will to live.

“Moxie?”

She turned and smiled at Pip. They’d been with her the longest, and at twenty-three, could easily go and find themselves a wife or a husband, but Pip said they’d be bored. Pip ran their own crew and mostly worked the festivals and the markets. They had a crew of five and excelled in everything from simple purse-lifting to seduction and then blackmail.

Pip’s dark-brown eyes ran over the slave’s body. It was obvious from his shivers and the sweat pouring off him that he had a fever. Moxie had kept him dry best she could. “I was in the Duchess, just listening.”

Two evenings a week, Pip sat in the tavern—The Grand Duchess—and listened to gossip. It was a hive of information, from which visiting lords ordered local tack repair for their horses to which large house was all aflutter with some celebration and may be taking on extra maids. That could be a very lucrative play. Maids were often invisible and got into all the chambers.

“And?” Moxie prompted, trying to dribble a little water between the slave’s cracked lips.

“There was a Cadmeeran traveler there.”

Moxie looked up at Pip right away. “Cadmeeran?”

“His accent slipped a couple of times, but he was trying to get people talking about the dead soldiers.” Pip said. “Made out like it was just gossip but speculated about one of the missing servants.”

Moxie stilled. “The palace never said that anyone was still alive or missing.” They’d all kept their ears open in case of a reward, but there’d been nothing.

“And he specified servant,” Pip said.

Moxie sat back on her heels and looked at the lad. He hadn’t been conscious since yesterday and she’d even had some of them get more straw from the inn’s stables in return for mucking out the guest’s horses so he wasn’t lying on the cold floor. But she knew if he didn’t get some sort of medicine soon, he would die. It might already be too late.

“Your decision. If you can find him, blindfold him and bring him here if you think he can be trusted.”

Tam sat and nursed an ale for the third night running. He’d gone around all the inns on the edge of the city because the poor were likely to talk for coin. He’d had no luck, and they were running out of time. Kamir had to leave for Rajpur tonight to stop the slaughter of the innocents promised by that evil bastard Gabar.

He’d even found Tsaria’s brother, or what was left of him with his throat slit, behind a pleasure house. Not that he was sorry. The bastard had betrayed them. They’d heard about the farm, riddled with debt because of poor management. Apparently, his wife had run off with a peddler the previous summer and there were no children. The problem was they had no idea if Tsaria was alive. Kamir was insistent he was, but Attiker had confided when Kamir had gone in to see to the children that he doubted it.

And Jael had gone missing. Flynn and Candy had with great reluctance admitted that they’d shown Jael the secret passage in the palace that apparently led to the kitchen because Cookie deliberately left treats out for them, but neither knew where Jael had gone. Ash had undertaken a sweep of the passages himself, as they had to remain secret, but there was no sign of him. Whenthey got Tsaria back he would be gutted. Attiker was a mess, and convinced he’d failed the child as well as Tsaria.

Tam had been given two of the swiftest horses and there had been a third waiting for him to ride the last leg. He was currently tucked in a corner relatively close to the hearth, even though the fire had burned down, and he didn’t know what to do next. He’d tried all the pleasure houses and burned through the cash his highness had given him to no avail. This was his last chance, and he was sitting here praying for a miracle.

He dropped his gaze as he sensed it, and sure enough, a rat poked its head out through a missing brick. Rats were such misunderstood creatures. Sure, they could carry the plague, but how was that any different from the pestilence some humans thought they had the right to wreak on others?

As he watched, the rat sniffed the air, then simply stilled and seemed to look at him. Taking a chance, Tam bent and extended his hand and the rat ran right onto it. He automatically tucked it into his pocket, as they liked dark corners.

Animals talked in images. Hard to understand sometimes, but he watched in his mind as Tsaria was carried by what looked like youngsters into what was clearly the sewer system. Then more images of a woman holding a blade. Then another that made Tam draw in a sharp breath. Tsaria looked dead, but then he drew a rattling looking breath.

“Mind if I sit?”

Tam cursed because he’d been so taken up with the fact that Tsaria could soon be dead, he’d let his guard down and allowed someone to approach him unaware. Rookie mistake and he knew better.

The rat jumped out of his pocket and scuttled away. “Help yourself,” Tam said and picked up his glass to drain it. It might be worth trying the other inns.

“I understand you’ve been asking a lot of questions.”

Which was a lie. He never asked direct questions. He steered conversations so other people asked them. But this time he hadn’t had time to go slow and careful and had been reckless. From what he’d seen, Tsaria was near death, if not already gone.

“Look,” Tam said. “I don’t have time to be all cagey and dance around the subject. If you can help me, good. If not, I’m going to try to find someone who can.”

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