Slaves of the Mastery Read Online Free PDF Page A

entire city, so long as it was carried out without hesitation, and without mercy. Ortiz had
his victim. Now all he needed was a pretext.
    Mumpo knew nothing of this. All he knew was that the father he had come to love had fallen into an unexplained danger. The horseman with the sword had frightened him, but he had now ridden away,
and Mumpo was angry. He possessed the courage of the uncalculating soul: wishing to save his father, he thought nothing of the risks he might himself face. So marching forward to the cage, he
rattled its blackened bars and shouted,
    ‘Let him go!’
    Ortiz swung round on his horse. He pointed his sword at Mumpo.
    ‘Stand back!’
    ‘He’s my father,’ said Mumpo, saying not what was needed, but what he felt. ‘Let him go!’
    Maslo Inch reached his hand through the bars and stroked Mumpo’s cheek.
    ‘My son,’ he said proudly.
    Ortiz saw with grim satisfaction that his order had been disobeyed.
    ‘You were warned. Now the price will be paid.’
    He gave a sign, and one of his men stepped forward with a burning torch. Beneath the cage there was an iron tray, in which lay a deep bed of firewood topped by oil-soaked kindling. Above the
kindling, the floor of the cage was an open iron grid. As the kindling caught fire, and the smoke began to rise, the people nearest to the cage realised with horror that Maslo Inch had no way of
escaping the flames. He was about to be burned alive.
    ‘You will be silent!’ commanded Ortiz. ‘For each person who speaks, I will take one more from among you, and they will die in the same way.’
    A terrible silence fell over the people of Aramanth. How could they think of disobeying? Even the bravest of them, even those willing to risk death, dared not bring about the death of others. So
they made no noise at all, as the fire spread in the deep tray beneath the cage, and the poor lost man inside tried to climb the bars to escape the heat.
    Ortiz watched, as he had watched before. It was unpleasant, but it was necessary. All new slaves must witness a death in the cage before entering the provinces controlled by the Mastery. It was
the Master’s order.
    Maslo Inch didn’t make much of a monkey for the watching soldiers. After his first desperate efforts, he fell limp, and his white robes caught fire. He then folded noiselessly to the cage
floor, without so much as a scream, which was unusual. But the sound of the burning was sufficient. Ortiz could see from the drawn white faces of his prisoners that the lesson was well learned.
    There came a low cry, and a thud. The young man who had disobeyed him had fallen to the ground. The people around dared not stoop to help him, and so he lay there, apparently in a faint. Ortiz
decided to overlook the incident. It was time to prepare for the long march home.
    ‘People of Aramanth,’ he called to the shocked and silent crowd. ‘Your city is destroyed. Your freedom is at an end. You are now slaves of the Mastery.’
    Bowman stood utterly still, his eyes fixed on the burning city, searching with all his senses for Kestrel. He heard the flames and smelt the smoke. Here and there he found
pockets of buried pain among the ashes, which burst like bubbles against the touch of his mind, releasing the last cries of those who lay there, dead but still warm. So much sadness rose from the
smoking ruins, so much hurt and loss. He flinched as he felt it, but made himself search on. Then a soldier pulled roughly at his sleeve, and turning, no longer searching, he caught a fugitive
touch of her, no more than a flash of a figure seen through scorched pillars, through heat-distorted air: but he knew her. She was there. She was alive. It was enough.
    Already the soldiers were forming the new slaves into lines. He let himself be pulled and commanded. He didn’t care. She was alive, and the future now had a shape. In parting him from his
sister, his half-self, his enemy had drawn taut the cord that linked them, shivering