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rudiments of writing to put down names and record workloads, they eventually secured the slave a work-gang foremanship: which meant that, with only a little stealing, he could get enough food so that instead of the wiry muscles that tightened along the bony frames of most miners, his arms and thighs and neck and chest swelled, high-veined and heavy, on his already heavy bones. At twenty-one he was a towering, black-haired gorilla of a youth, eyes permanently reddened from rockdust, a scar from a pickax flung in a barracks brawl spilling one brown cheekbone. His hands were huge and rough-palmed, his foot soles like cracked leather.
    He did not look a day more than fifteen years above his actual age.

2
     
    The caravan of the Handmaid and Vizerine Myrgot, of the tan skin and tawny eyes, returning from the mountain hold of fabled Ellamon to the High Court of Eagles at Kolhari, made camp half a mile from the mines, beneath the Falthas’ ragged and piney escarpments. In her youth, Myrgot had been called ‘an interesting-looking girl’; today she was known as a bottomless well of cunning and vice.
    It was spring and the Vizerine was bored.
    She had volunteered for the Ellamon mission because life at the High Court, under the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign was peaceful and productive, had of late also been damnably dull. The journey itself had refreshed her. But within Ellamon’s fabled walls, once she had spent the obligatory afternoon out at the dragon corrals in the mountain sun, squinting up to watch the swoopings and turnings of the great, winged creatures (about which had gathered all the fables), she found herself, in the midst of her politicking with the mountain lairds and burghers, having to suffer the attentions of provincial bores – who were worse, she decided after a week, than their cosmopolitan counterparts.
    But the mission was done. She sighed.
    Myrgot stood in her tent door; she looked up at the black Falthas clawing through evening clouds and wondered if she might see any of the dark and fabled beasts arch the sunset. But no, for when all the fables were done, dragons were pretty well restricted to a few hundred yards of soaring and at a loss for launching from anywhere otherthan their craggy ledges. She watched the women in red scarves go off among other tents. ‘Jahor …?’
    The eunuch with the large nose stepped from behind her, turbaned and breeched in blue wool.
    ‘I have dismissed my maids for the night. The mines are not far from here …’ The Vizerine, known for her highhanded manners and low-minded pleasures, put her forearm across her breasts and kneaded her bare, bony elbow. ‘Go to the mines, Jahor. Bring me back the foulest, filthiest, wretchedest pit slave from the deepest darkest hole. I wish to slake my passion in some vile, low way.’ Her tongue, only a pink bud, moved along the tight line of her lips.
    The eunuch touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded, bowed, backed away the three required steps, turned, and departed.
    An hour later, the Vizerine was looking out through the seam in the canvas at the tent’s corner.
    The boy whom Jahor guided before him into the clearing limped a few steps forward, then turned his face up in the light drizzle which had begun minutes ago, opening and closing his mouth as if around a recently forgotten word. The pit slave’s name was Noyeed. He was fourteen. He had lost an eye three months ago: the wound had never been dressed and had not really healed. He had a fever. He was shivering. Bleeding gums had left his mouth scabby. Dirt had made his flesh scaly. He had been at the mines one month and was not expected to last another. Seeing this as a reasonable excuse, seven men at the mines two nights back had abused the boy cruelly and repeatedly – hence his limp.
    Jahor let him stand there, mouthing tiny drops that glittered on his crusted lips, and went into the tent. ‘Madame, I –’
    The Vizerine turned in the tent corner. ‘I