The Palace of Impossible Dreams (5 page)

Arkady struggled to regain her balance on the moving floor and looked around. The cabin was larger than the hole she and the other slaves occupied, and much cleaner. There was a bunk under the porthole, a desk beside it, a small table laid out with a series of achingly familiar instruments Arkady remembered from her father's surgery and an examination bed (which she supposed doubled as an operating table) against the other wall.

In the middle of it all stood an effeminate-looking young man no older than Arkady, with long dark hair, an immaculate waistcoat and white silk shirt, and the most impressive black eye and bruised jaw Arkady had ever seen—even after watching her father patch up countless street ruffians in the slums of Lebec.

Perhaps
, she thought,
the noises we've been hearing at night weren't some hapless cabin boy, but the ship's doctor being tormented and beaten.

Of all the things she'd been expecting about the ship's doctor, to find that he looked even more damaged than her was not among them. It beggared belief, and for a moment she forgot herself.

“I'll bet
that
hurts,” she muttered in Glaeban, wincing in sympathy for the beating this young man must have endured.

The young man looked up sharply. “You're Glaeban.”

“You
speak
Glaeban,” she replied, equally surprised and unable to think of anything more intelligent to say. Her plan had been to look ill and on the verge of collapse, but she'd been expecting a drunkard with no hope of a future or much care for his patients. For all that the ship's doctor looked as if he'd just been chewed up and spat out by a Jelidian snow bear, Arkady doubted her gruel-covered wound would pass even the most distracted glance by this sharp young man.

Time for my back-up plan
, she thought.

Pity there
is
no back-up plan.

“I studied in Glaeba for a time,” the doctor said.

“Ah . . . that would explain it . . .”

“I would not have expected to find a Glaeban noblewoman in the holds of one of my father's slavers,” he said, studying her with interest. “What happened? Debtor slave?”

“I suppose you could say that,” she said. It wasn't really a lie. She'd been sold into slavery, after all, to settle the debt between two immortals. “What makes you think I'm a Glaeban noblewoman?”

“You speak too well to be a poor man's wife. Do you have a name?”

“Kady.”

“Is that your real name?”

“It's near enough.”

“And what can I do for you, Kady Near Enough? You appear healthy, given your circumstances. Yet you'd not have been sent to me unless they feared you were mortally ill.”

“I . . . my brand . . . the burn . . .” she said. “I think it's infected.”

He indicated she should take a seat on the examination table. “Where is the brand?”

Arkady sat on the table and then hesitated, certain now that her ruse, far from giving her an opportunity to end her life painlessly, was about to plunge her into far deeper trouble. Gingerly, she pulled the loose shift aside, exposing her breast.

In a business-like fashion the young man leaned forward to examine the wound. He studied it for an inordinately long time, touching her breast with hesitant fingers, before standing up and turning to the wash bowl on the table beside the instruments, where he began to wash his hands, the water sloshing around with the motion of the ship.

“Your wound seems to be suffering from indigestion rather than infection,” he remarked, speaking Glaeban so she could understand him.

“Sorry?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “That's porridge, not pus. And the smell? That's either deliberate or the result of poor personal hygiene.”

Arkady covered her breast in annoyance. There would be no scalpel to snatch from this young man's distracted hand. No quick end. No easy death from loss of blood . . .

“I . . . I wanted to see you,” she said, for want of a better reason for her deception.
I wanted to steal a scalpel and kill myself
, might not be a wise confession to make at this point.

“Why?” He turned back to her, this time with a washcloth in his hand. Arkady turned her head as he cautiously exposed her breast again and began to wash away the muck.

“It got me out of the slave cabin,” she said.

Arkady risked a closer look. The young man was concentrating on his work. As she suspected, in the better light of the doctor's cabin it was obvious that her burn was clean and healing well. But the doctor was blushing
crimson as he worked, making Arkady wonder how many naked breasts this young man had actually handled before.

Not many, she decided, as he stepped away from the table to rinse out the washcloth. There was a noticeable swelling in the front of his trousers that she was fairly certain wasn't the result of anything other than good old-fashioned lust.

“Tides,” she said, pulling her shift up. “How long have
you
been at sea?”

He glanced down and managed to blush an even deeper shade of vermillion, if that were possible. “I'm . . . I'm so sorry . . . I didn't mean to . . .”

Arkady stared at him in shock. “Why are
you
apologising? I'm the slave here.”

“I'm not . . .” He stopped and then shrugged helplessly. “I'm not very good at dealing with women, I'm afraid. Slave or freeborn.” He tossed the washcloth into the bowl and turned to look at her. “Actually, I'm not very good at dealing with my own gender, either, as evidenced by my many impressive cuts and bruises.”

“Why did they beat you up?” she asked, partly out of curiosity and partly out of the need to stall her return to the slave cabin for as long as possible. On that beautifully neat tray just out of arm's reach lay the means for her escape. If feigning interest in this young doctor's woes meant a chance at getting her hands on a scalpel, Arkady was prepared to sit here and listen sympathetically while he poured out his entire life story.

“I think they're under orders to toughen me up.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “My name is Cydne Medura.”

She waited, assuming there was more to the statement, but apparently not. “I'm sorry, is that supposed to mean something to me?”

He smiled. “If you were Senestran you would have heard of me. My family is very important.”

Medura. She remembered where she'd heard it before and nodded in comprehension. “So when you said you were surprised to find a Glaeban noblewoman on your father's slaver you meant . . . what's-his-name . . . Filimon Medura?”

“Fili
mar
,” he corrected.

“I would have thought being the owner's son would have protected you from the crew's excesses,” she said. “Not made you a target.”

“One would think,” Cydne agreed, wiping his hands. “But I suspect my shipmates are acting on orders from the captain.”

When Arkady didn't react to that, he added, “I'm on this cruise because my father believes a few months at sea will make a man of me, you see. He's a very efficient sort of fellow, so if I'm here and the aim is to
toughen
me up, he'll have taken steps to make damn certain that's the inevitable outcome of my journey.”

She studied his bloodied eye and bruised jaw for a moment. “Not enjoying the process much, I'd say.”

“Not much, no.”

“I'm sorry.”

That made Cydne smile even wider, which had the unfortunate effect of making him seem younger than he was. Given his profession, and that he had studied in both Senestra and Glaeba, it was likely he was closer to thirty than twenty, but he didn't look it, which would have done little, Arkady guessed, to help his cause.

“Pity from a slave,” he sighed. “Now I am truly depressed.”

“I'd be happier dead than in
my
current predicament,” Arkady said. “So any time you want to swap places, doctor . . .”

“You should be getting back,” he said, looking away uncomfortably. “Is there anything else you need?”

Rescuing
, she replied silently, but there didn't seem much point. Arkady slipped off the edge of the examination table, which had the unfortunate effect of placing Cydne between her and the tray of instruments. Her chance—if it had ever really been a chance—was gone. There wouldn't be a second trip back to the doctor's cabin for her infected burn—or for any other reason.

He stepped past her, put his hand on the latch, ready to open it and call back her guard . . .

“Wait!”

“Was there something else?”

“Take me,” she blurted out, unable to frame a more delicate suggestion in the split second she had to turn this around. She would never,
ever
, get another opportunity like this.

“I
beg
your pardon?”

“You're being picked on by the crew because your shipmates think you're . . . you're . . .” She fished around for the right word, not sure how to frame it, gambling her life on the fact that she had only a moment
to convince this man to help her. “Because they think you're not a real man . . .”

Cydne was blushing crimson again.

“The captain has ordered the female slaves may be used by the crew as soon as we clear Torlenian waters,” she added in a rush. “That's about an hour from now, isn't it?”

“I suppose . . .”

“Well, you don't want to keep getting beaten up and I don't fancy being repeatedly raped. Please, doctor. Tell the captain
you
want me for your bed; that you want me to stay here with you.”

Cydne looked horrified by her suggestion. “Why, in the name of the Tides, would I do something like that?”

“Because if you have a woman of your own, the crew will be satisfied, your father will think you're a real man and I won't have to find another way to kill myself.”

The blood drained from the young doctor's face. “Is
that
why you came here? Why you pretended your wound was septic? Were you hoping I would give you something for the pain? Enough to kill yourself?”

Arkady shook her head. “Actually, I was planning to steal a scalpel and open my carotid with it.”

“How do you even know where your carotid artery is?” he asked with a bewildered frown.

“My father was a physician.”

Cydne looked too confused, too dazed to make a decision about anything, let alone make the unheard of leap of faith required to help this strange Glaeban slave he'd known for all of five minutes.

Significantly, though, he hadn't yet opened the door or called for the guard.

“You know nothing about me,” the young man said, after a moment. “For all you know,
I
might be your worst nightmare.”

“My worst nightmare is spending the next few weeks being handed around the crew for their entertainment,” she said. “I doubt, even at your most perverse, you could do worse than that.”

“Do you also assume I'm not interested in women?” he asked, more than a little defensively. “Is that why you're throwing yourself on my mercy? Because you think I have no lustful interest in you?”

Arkady wanted to scream at him. Instead, she took a deep breath and hoped she sounded rational, not desperate. “I've seen the evidence of your
‘lustful interest,' doctor. It scares me a whole lot less than being pack raped.”

“But I know nothing about you . . .”

“And the only thing I know about
you
is that you know I faked an injury to get here and you haven't reported me yet. I'm taking it on trust that your silence means you're a decent human being. You're going to have to take it on trust that I'm one too.”

He stared at her indecisively for a moment and then pointed to the instrument tray. “There. That long piece with the grip in the middle and the flattened hooks at the end, next to the scalpels. What is it?”

“A bone lever,” she said with reasonable confidence. “It's used for levering broken bones back into place; sometimes for extracting teeth that have rotted and broken off in the gum.”

“And the thing next to it? With the flat head?”

“It's a cautery. It's used to seal wounds; sometimes for destroying skin tumours and warts.”

“And the hooks next to that? What are they used for?”

“The blunt one is for raising blood-vessels; the sharp ones are for seizing and raising small pieces of tissue for excision and for holding the edges of wounds open. Please, doctor, I'm not lying. I can help you. I just need you to help me.”

He didn't respond immediately, but when he did, Arkady's heart sank. The doctor opened the door and called for the guard before turning back to watch her suspiciously, but not without doing a quick visual check of the instrument table first, to be certain that all the scalpels were still there.

The sailor appeared in the doorway a few tense moments later and said something to the doctor. The young man squared his shoulders and rattled off something else that made no sense to Arkady. Once he was finished speaking the sailor glared at Arkady for a moment, and then slapped the doctor on the shoulder and burst out laughing. He said something else Arkady didn't understand and left, laughing all the way down the corridor.

“What did you say to him?”
Did you report my fake wound? My attempt to escape my fate by throwing myself at you? The fact that I was planning suicide?

Any one of those explanations might have evoked the laughter of the sailor the doctor had sent away without her. Even now, the guard could be on his way to report her crimes to the captain . . .

“I told him I wasn't sending you back,” Cydne replied, turning to face her. Arkady almost fainted with relief as he added, “I told him I'd heard
the captain has made the female slaves available for the use of the crew and I wanted this one for myself.”