My Master laughed.

I lay half-buried in his furs, aching, bruised even, sated down to the marrow of my bones. To belong to him was the greatest joy I had ever known. To hear him laugh again was sheer intoxication.

"And what has happened to the arrogant little barbarian I purchased a year ago for a handful of copper tarsks?" he demanded, with mock sternness in his voice. "The slut who fought her collar, and hated her Master?"

"She is gone, Master," I said.

"Would you go back?" he said unexpectedly. "Back to Earth, back to your old life? You were very successful, from what you have told me, with your picking and pecking mindar- bird insistence on finding the truth. You were much known, even, in your own field of endeavor. You had wealth, power, freedom. Would you go back?"

I did not have to hesitate, even for an instant. "No, Master, I would not go back."

"Why not?"

"Because for all the money and fame and freedom I never knew real happiness, real fulfillment. I never knew such..." Now I hesitated. I was not sure how to put it. "Such an overwhelming sense of being a woman."

He cuffed me lightly across the mouth. "A female animal," he corrected me. "My female animal."

My lips stung. I kissed his hand. "Yes, Master."

The sound of the call-bar at the front door echoed through the house.

He thrust me aside. "Cover yourself," he said. "Return to your tasks." He straightened and picked up his tunic, but before he could put it on the door was flung open. Reena, the Tuchuk slave girl of his friend Titus, the city Guardsman, burst breathlessly into the chamber, her black hair flying.

"Master," she said, flinging herself at my Master's feet. "My Master needs you. He begs you to come immediately."

My Master stood there for a moment in nothing but his smooth tanned skin, while Reena's eyes grew rounder and rounder. Then very casually he drew his tunic over his head and shook out his heavy curling hair.

"Perhaps a few stripes would teach you a bit of discretion, slut," he said. "However much Titus may need me, it hardly necessitates your bursting into my private chamber unannounced."

Reena knelt up, her dark eyes continuing to devour my Master's long-boned, elegantly made body through the green fabric of his tunic. "I am so sorry, Master," she said. She was lying, of course. It was written all over her face. "I will bring you the whip at once if it would please you to whip me."

"Brazen slut," my Master said, with a hint of a smile. "What is it, then, that Titus wishes of me with such precipitance?"

"He has need of your skills," Reena said. "There has been a very strange death."

"Strange in what way?"

Reena took a piece of rence paper out of the strip of binding fiber twisted tightly around her waist and proffered it. My Master took it and unfolded it with a crisp little rustle.

I saw the interest light in his face. My Master was a Physician by caste, and an investigator by avocation. Strange deaths were meat and drink to him.

"Pack up your marking sticks and paper, Minda," he said to me. "And get my medical kit. We are going to the house of Tommaso the Brewer."

Tommaso the Brewer was a name known throughout Ar, even among the slaves. Some months ago, Master Tommaso had stunned the caste of Brewers in Ar by suddenly beginning to sell what he called his Special Brew, a uniquely spiced and flavored variety of paga that was reputed to be more intoxicating than ordinary paga, as well as to render the drinker potent enough to use a dozen different slave girls in a single night. My Master had laughed at those claims, and remarked only that Tommaso was obviously as expert in the art of storytelling as he was in the craft of brewing.

However, the young high-caste roisterers of Ar made Tommaso's new brew all the fashion, and the proprietors of paga dens flocked to purchase it. Sales of ordinary paga fell. Tommaso was approached by a deputation of his caste brothers, proposing that he share his recipe with them. He declined, with predictable results.

He became hated.

He also became very rich.

Because of that, I expected my Master to go to the central part of the city, or perhaps the Avenue of Turia with its rows of well-tended Tur trees, where the rich kept their palatial town houses. But instead he hailed a passing sedan chair and set off for the outskirts of the city, the poorer section, with Reena and me trotting alongside.

My knees were still weak from the shuddering ecstasy he had so casually inflicted upon me. I struggled to keep up.

"Soft little she-bosk calfling," Reena said to me scornfully. "No wonder he uses you only for scribbling. If you cannot run, how can you dance, or kneel in perfect position for many ahn, or give your Master true pleasure in the furs?

I laughed at her, although my panting somewhat spoiled the effect. "You would not... be able to run... either," I said, "if you had been... used as I have."

She tossed her head angrily. I did not know if my Master had ever bothered to make use of his friend's slut. From the smoldering look in her slanting dark eyes every time she looked at him, I tended to think not. But of course it was none of my affair, one way or the other.

By now the sedan chair was almost to the walls of Ar, in a section where the streets were unpaved and dusty, the buildings unpainted wood. There was a sharp, eye-watering smell, and clouds of steam issuing from metal pipes that thrust up here and there from the low, flat roofs.

The castes of Gor tended to cluster together to perform their crafts and manufacture their goods. This, then, had to be the district of the caste of Brewers, where the paga that was so dear to Gorean hearts and palates was brewed and sealed for distribution.

The sedan chair drew up in front of a complex of buildings, one ordinary weathered round brewhouse surrounded by a dozen newer and larger additions. Reena and I followed my Master into the newest of the brewhouses. Titus, my Master's friend, was waiting at the door.

"Valerus!" he said. "By the balls of the Priest-Kings, I am glad to see you. Come this way."

My Master laughed. Oh, it was wonderful to hear my Master laughing again, after all the months of darkness. Breathless and footsore as I was I felt a shiver of pure happiness.

"How impatient you are, my friend," my Master said. "From what you write, poor Tommaso is going nowhere."

"That he is not," Titus agreed. "Seeing as how he was discovered this morning face down in a vat of his own Special Brew, dead as a drowned urt. But the story has spread like wildfire, and already I have had half a dozen messages from outraged paga connoisseurs, demanding that I do something."

"Do what?"

Titus grinned. "Mostly find out who will now be brewing Special Brew under the seal of Tommaso, and whether the distribution will be interrupted," he said. "I must confess that I myself am interested in that information. But first I must determine if Tommaso fell into the vat by accident, or if he was pushed."

The brewhouse was essentially one large room, filled with vats and cauldrons of varying sizes and all sorts of implements. It was stiflingly hot and humid. In some of the small side rooms what looked like herbs were hung to dry; in others, grain was stored. One of them was obviously used as an office, with a desk and chair and shelves of ledgers and scrolls. I was still conscious enough of my new literacy in Gorean to try to read the titles. Tarsk-Bit Brew. Light Brew. Ale. Stout Brew. Apparently Tommaso did not believe in filing his papers in alphabetical order.

A trestle table had been set up beside the largest of the vats. On it there was a humped shape lay covered by a makeshift repcloth shroud.

"Take a look at him, Valerus," Titus said. "I could not find any wounds or bruises, but I am hardly an expert. As you can see, the vat is such that it would be difficult to fall in by accident, but not impossible. Particularly if Tommaso had been sampling his own wares a bit too indiscriminately."

My Master gestured curtly to me and I handed him his medical kit, then took up my position at his feet, kneeling, a rolled sheet of rence paper on my lap. When he examined patients, or did surgeries, he had taken to describing what he did out loud, for me to take down. The records thus produced were often valuable.

How strange Gor was. On Earth, physicians used automatic recording devices, and even sophisticated voice-activated computers, instead of a kneeling slave girl with a bit of rence paper and a marking stick. And yet on Earth, the stabilization serums of Gor, so much taken for granted by Goreans, would have been a source of envious amazement.

"I would have thought," Titus said, "that a man who drowned in Tommaso's Special Brew would have died with a smile on his face. But as you can see, his expression is one of extreme pain, to say the least."

"Death is death," my Master said. "Although the facial expression is suggestive... but I am theorizing ahead of my facts. Firstly, I would estimate that he has been dead for at least ten ahn, perhaps more. The hypostatic lividity is fully developed, and the rigor is almost complete. Bodies tend to cool more quickly if they are immersed in liquid, of course, and that affects the onset of rigor."

I scribbled. I had no idea how to spell such words as hypostatic or lividity in Gorean, and so I noted them down phonetically as best I could.

"There does not appear to be any sort of obvious wound," my Master went on. "Naturally a complete examination, for such things as stiletto punctures in body cavities, will take time. As to drowning... observe."

He positioned his strong, finely-made hands on either side of the dead man's chest, over the ribs, and compressed the body sharply. An eerily lifelike sigh issued from Master Tommaso's mouth and nose. Titus stepped back involuntarily. Reena, kneeling behind him craning her neck to see, gave a little scream.

"It is called the 'froth test,'" my Master said. "In wet drowning, pressure on the chest will cause the appearance of froth from the mouth and nostrils."

"But there was no froth," Titus said.

"Exactly. So he did not drown."

Titus frowned. "Then someone moved him, after he was dead," he said. "And the fact that he was chucked into a vat of paga makes it look as if that someone wanted us to think that he had drowned, at least. This is beginning to look like murder, Valerus."

"So it is," my Master said. "And I am most interested in the expression of the face. I am opening the abdomen..."

He broke off with a Gorean expletive. I did not write that down.

"What?" Titus said.

My Master stepped aside. Even I could see that the lining of the stomach had been horribly burned and eroded. Most of the perforations were clotted with blood, but there were some still gaping, and the blood which had filled the stomach now flowed out into the abdominal cavity and onto the floor. I swallowed back my own bile.

"The destruction of the stomach lining," my Master said calmly, "indicates the presence of a powerful corrosive poison, which has eaten into a number of major blood vessels. He has exsanguinated internally."

I sounded out exsanguinated and wrote down the syllables.

"It would have been an appallingly painful death, as the facial expression indicates," my Master said. "No man in his senses would commit suicide in such a fashion."

"And there would be no reason for a suicide's body to be moved," Titus said. "It is murder, then."

"Yes," my Master said. "It is murder indeed."

The body had been discovered early that morning by Tommaso's apprentice, a cherubic adolescent named Alain who was the son of one of the Brewer's caste brothers. At the time Alain had been stunned, and then overcome with grief for his Master, and so he had not been thoroughly questioned. Now Titus had him brought back to the brewhouse for further interrogation, with my Master lounging casually to one side to interject questions of his own as needed, and me on my knees with my marking stick and paper to take down what was said.

The hurried, dusty walk to the brewhouse, and the presence of paga bottles, paga skins, paga vessels everywhere, the vats of paga, the humidity, all combined to make me desperately thirsty. I licked my dry lips and tried not to think of it.

Tommaso's body was just being taken away as Alain came to the door. He paled visibly and scrubbed at his eyes with a none-to-clean hand. He looked to be perhaps sixteen or seventeen, well-grown and handsome, with curling fair hair and the muscular development one might expect in a boy who spent his days rolling heavy barrels about, scrubbing vats, stirring and straining and doing all the other work associated with brewing.

Reena, who was kneeling silently against the wall, looked at him with that Tuchuk smolder in her eyes. I could have smacked her. How dare she lust after this blue-eyed stripling, and my own wonderful Master, with the same indiscriminate appetite?

But of course she was Gorean-born, and enslaved. She could not help herself. And who could say when I might not desire a man, any man, with the same helpless concupiscence? Despite my Earth origins I was only a slave girl as well, an animal, branded and collared. With a tremor of mingled humiliation and excitement I remembered how eagerly I had gone to Master Titus's furs, when he had rescued me from the slave box at the House of Ixion after two hands without my Master's touch.

"Tommaso was murdered," Titus said to the boy bluntly. "Poisoned in the most horrible possible way. He did not fall into the vat by accident, but was put there after his death. What do you have to say to that?"

The boy stared at him. "Murdered?" he repeated, in a husky voice. "Poisoned? Who would o' done such a wicked thing?"

"I thought perhaps you could tell me," Titus said.

"I dunno," Alain said. "He was hale yesterday at the twelfth ahn, when I finished a- cleaning the vats and he sent me off to my cot."

I did a bit of mental arithmetic. There are twenty ahn in the Gorean day, and so the twelfth ahn would be about the middle of the afternoon.

"But o' course..." Alain went on. Then he stopped.

"But of course what?" Titus said sharply.

"There was the three men," Alain said.

"What three men?"

"The three men from the Caste Council, who come to see Master Tommaso last night," Alain said reluctantly. "There wasn't nothing underhanded about it, sir. Master Tommaso was expecting them."

"Did he say why," my Master put in suddenly, "the three men wished to see him?"

Alain turned and looked at my Master. "Yes, sir," he said. "He laughed about it, yesterday forenoon. He said they all made arrangements, they did, separate-like, to come and beg him to give the recipe for his Special Brew into the keeping of the Caste Council. They wasn't the only ones, see. The whole council has been traipsing in and out of here, regular-like, ever since Master Tommaso starting making the Special Brew."

"Do you know the recipe?" my Master asked.

Alain blinked. His face turned even whiter, and his mouth twisted, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry again. "No, sir," he said slowly. "Master Tommaso, he didn't hold with nobody knowing but him. He didn't even write it down nowhere."

Titus swore. "That means there'll be no more Special Brew," he said. "Those caste brothers of his should be happy about that."

"Indeed," my Master said. "I wonder if one of them, or all of them, knew that the recipe was not written down."

"I intend to find out," Titus said grimly. "Alain. Who were these three men?"

"It were Master Paulus, he who lives over on Brak Bush Street," Alain said. "And then Master Donato, who's my mother's cousin on her father's side. And lastly Master Johan, who's the one was most anxious to get the recipe. He's come around more times than you could shake a stick at, has Master Johan."

"Take them a message," Titus said. "Give him some paper and a marking stick, Minda. Write to them that..."

"Can't write," Alain said, a little sullenly. "Can't read neither."

"Minda will do it, then," Titus said. "Write that Titus of the City Guardsmen expects them to be here in half an ahn, girl."

"Yes, Master Titus," I said. I took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote as he commanded. He took the paper and the marking stick, signed the paper with a flourish, and gave it to Alain.

"Off with you," he said. "And in the meantime, Valerus my friend..." He turned to my Master with a smile. "Let us crack open one of these bottles and enjoy a last taste of Tommaso's Special Brew. I'm as dry as the Cities of Dust."

I was, too, although I did not dare speak up and say so. The gurgle of the paga as Titus poured it out into bowls was torture. I put my head down and tried not to listen.

Once the three master Brewers had arrived, much disgruntled at the peremptoriness of the summons, Titus sorted them out so as to interview them in the order in which they saw Tommaso the night before. He did not tell them how Tommaso had died, only that the Brewer had been murdered.

My Master had put his bowl of paga down on a low table after taking only a sip or two, and as I knelt there the scent of it curled into my nostrils. It was not as pungent as ordinary paga; it had a lighter, somewhat sweeter smell, almost as if some sort of spices or blossoms had been used in its brewing. I had never seen paga brewed, of course, but if the process was at all similar to the brewing of Earth-style ale, it involved grain -- on Gor, the ubiquitous sa-tarna -- soaked, dried and roughly crushed; some sort of gruit or flavoring; and yeast to produce the alcohol. Variations in the gruit produced differently-flavored ales and beers on Earth; presumably Tommaso's Special Brew was made with a unique Gorean gruit.

I had never tasted full-strength paga. Once, the very first time my Master had solved a murder, he had commanded me to drink much-diluted paga, the washings from a bota that was suspected to contain poisoned brew. When I did not fall over dead, he was able to conclude that the paga in the bota had not been poisoned.

I never knew if he was certain that the poison was not in the bota, and only wished to demonstrate the fact, or if he was genuinely making the experiment. I did not wish to know.

The paga in the bowl was full-strength. And Tommaso's Special Brew was said to be more intoxicating than ordinary paga. But I was dry-mouthed with thirst, my tongue was thick, my lips were cracking... and both my Master and Titus were occupied in conciliating the three Brewers.

I dipped my head swiftly and lapped up a mouthful of the paga, like a thirsty animal. Special Brew or no Special Brew, it burned my mouth and made my eyes water. But it was wet, blessedly wet. I swallowed it. Oh, God, it was heaven.

"Paulus," Titus said. "You visited Tommaso last night at... when?"

"It was about the sixteenth ahn," Paulus said. He was a man of medium height, stocky and pleasant-looking, with the calm presence of a fellow who knows what he is about.

"And what passed between you?"

"Surely you know already that the Caste Council was anxious to reach some sort of arrangement in the matter of Tommaso's Special Brew," Paulus said. "Tempers had been running high, and many Brewers of Ar felt that Tommaso was taking unfair advantage. Tommaso and I had been friends for some time, and I hoped that perhaps I could persuade him to see reason."

"Did you succeed?"

I frowned at my paper. The letters I was writing seemed to be straggling a bit. And my mouth was drier than ever. Perhaps the stories about Tommaso's Special Brew were true. In any case, I did not seem to be able to help myself. I dipped my head again and lapped up another mouthful or two of the paga. No one paid me the slightest attention.

"Unfortunately, no," Paulus said. "I begged him to offer the recipe to the Caste Council, for the good of us all. He laughed at me."

"How did you expect him to share the recipe?" my Master said mildly. "By demonstrating his process?"

Paulus looked somewhat taken aback. "That would be one way," he said. "Although a scroll would have been much simpler. Tommaso keeps... kept... a library of his recipes, each one marked and cataloged by the unique seal he used for that variety of paga. He was very neat and particular about his library."

"Did you drink together?" Titus demanded.

Paulus frowned. "He offered me a cup of his Special Brew," he said. "A new batch had just passed its third straining, and he had obviously been sampling it. I did not accept."

"And when you left, he was alive?"

"He certainly was," Paulus said. "Alive, and laughing most unpleasantly."

My Master and Titus exchanged glances. I scratched out an illegible scrawl and wrote again, slowly and carefully, "...laughing most unpleasantly."

"Very well," Titus said. "Donato, you were next. Did you see Paulus leaving?"

"No," Donato said brusquely. He was a beefy, choleric man, red-faced and balding. "I had no idea he had been here."

"But when you arrived, Tommaso was alive and well?"

"Alive and drunk," Donato said. "And entirely unwilling to listen to reason. You might as well know that I threatened to wring his neck for him if he did not share his discoveries with the Caste."

And so that eliminates Paulus as a suspect, I thought a bit dizzily. Unless Paulus and Donato were in it together...

"And did you?" Titus asked calmly.

"No," Donato said again. "He had the gall to offer me a cup of that swill he was brewing, and I threw it back in his face. Then I left. He was sputtering and swearing at me every step of the way, and lapping the paga off his face like a wet urt."

It was almost as if it were a command. I lapped some more paga myself. It no longer burned my mouth, and I nodded knowingly to myself. The customers in the paga dens were right. Tommaso's Special Brew was an unusually tasty beverage.

My marking stick flew over the paper. I was getting very good at this writing business.

"So when you left, Tommaso was still alive," Titus said.

"He bloody well was," Donato said.

All eyes turned to Johan, the third of the Brewers. He was a slight, fair man, and the flush that rose under his skin was visible to all. "I did not kill him," he said. "If anyone did, it was you, Donato. For when I arrived at the brewhouse, Tommaso was nowhere to be seen."

Titus raised his eyebrows. "You did not see him at all?"

"Not a trace. I was annoyed, as it was between the eighteenth and the nineteenth ahn and I had had to cancel another engagement to come."

"Did you look everywhere?" Titus said. "In each of the side rooms? In the vats?"

"In the vats? Of course not. I assure you..."

His voice trailed off.

"The vats!" Donato burst in. "So that it what happened! He drowned in one of the vats! I hope it was a vat of that double-damned Special Brew. Would have served him right."

"No," my Master said. "He did not drown. So you, Paulus, and you, Donato, both swear that he was alive when you left him. And you, Johan, swear that you never saw him at all."

All three of them nodded. I wrote down, Three all nodded them and frowned at it. It did not look quite right.

My Master turned to the boy, Alain. "And you, Alain," he went on, "swear that no one else entered the brewhouse? Did you watch through the night?"

"Yes, sir," Alain said. "That's part o' my job, that is, to stand guard. That's why I sleeps in the afternoon, so I can stand guard in the night."

My Master smiled. "An interesting puzzle," he said.

My head was spinning. I tried to work out the possibilities... Paulus could have killed him, and Donato could be lying to protect his caste brother. Donato could have killed him. Johan could be lying about not seeing him, and could have killed him. All three of them could have been in a conspiracy together. Donato seemed to me to be the most likely suspect. He had admitted to threatening Tommaso...

I blinked. The small room that Tommaso had apparently used as an office swam into focus. A desk and a chair and shelves... shelves of ledgers and scrolls... Tarsk-Bit Brew. Light Brew. Ale. Stout Brew. Apparently Tommaso did not believe in filing his papers in alphabetical order...

Paulus had said, Tommaso keeps... kept... a library of his recipes, each one marked and cataloged by the unique seal he used for that variety of paga. He was very neat and particular about his library.

It didn't look to me as if Tommaso had been very neat and particular about his library.

I squinted. I could not see straight. I could not think. Someone had said, He didn't even write it down nowhere.

Alain.

How did Alain know that the recipe for the Special Brew was not written down, when Tommaso customarily wrote down and cataloged all his recipes?

Alain, who could not read or write, would not have been able to put the scrolls back in alphabetical order. But he would have been able to recognize the seals. And he would have been able to see that there was no scroll bearing the seal of the Special Brew.

He had turned so white when my Master asked him if he knew the recipe. But I had mistaken his expression. It had not been grief. It had been anger, the anger of an apprentice shut out of a priceless trade secret that should have been -- in his own eyes at least -- his due.

I struggled to speak, but my tongue did not seem to want to cooperate. I dropped my marking stick with a small clatter and it rolled away toward the office. I crawled after it.

"There is no need, Minda," my Master said, "to go to such lengths to call my attention to the state of Tommaso's library."

I stopped. I had lost track of the marking stick, but it didn't really matter, because I couldn't write any more, anyway. I knelt up and smiled blindingly at my Master.

"Alain did it," I said clearly.

"I know," my Master said.

The floor came up and struck me in the face.

I remember only flashes of what happened next. Alain suddenly blundering for the door. One of the Brewers, Paulus I think, tackling him. Accusations and counter-accusations. Alain's hoarse cries that his Master had been unfair, and that the secret should rightfully have been his.

Then everything went black. It seemed as if it had been a few million years before I could feel the floor under me again, and hear voices.

"...had been cleaning the vats." It was Titus's voice. "The jug of corrosive cleaner is there in the cupboard for anyone to see. There is even a burn on the matting, there beside the vat, where Tommaso must have dropped the cup. The poor sod was so drunk on his own Special Brew that he apparently did not even realize what it was that his trusted apprentice had given him."

"The boy thought that the recipe would be among the scrolls," my Master said. "Even if he could not read it himself, he could find someone to read it to him. Everyone would have assumed that Tommaso had taught it to him in the course of his apprenticeship."

"The three Brewers," Titus said. "He watched them come and go, and realized that they would give him the perfect alibi. Three men, all at odds with his Master, all calling on him alone in the dark of the night. All he had to do was to swear that no one else had entered the brewhouse that night, and leave us to pick a scapegoat."

"It must have been a shock to him to find that the recipe was not written down," my Master said. "That he had killed his Master for nothing. Avarice, as the old saying goes, is the root from which much evil flowers."

"So it is," Titus said. "Although I think paga is the root of evil for that foolish slut of yours, Valerus. What are you going to do with her?"

"Give her a sound thrashing as soon as she is conscious enough to appreciate it," my Master said. "Although I should have watered her, after that long walk in the dust. I would have done as much for my tharlarion, after all."

Titus laughed. "There is nothing like a fine complicated murder to take your mind off anything else, Valerus," he said. "I myself might find other ways to impress her error upon her, while she is in such a helpless state. An intoxicated kajira is a rather rare occurrence."

"Indeed," my Master said. "Although first I have to get her home. Be well, my friend. Come on, Minda, get up."

I sat up. My head was pounding. My stomach was roiling.

"Master," I said. "Oh, Master, I am sorry."

He grinned suddenly. "You sound like the foolish kajira in the fabula," he said. "Come along, get up. Walking will do you good. A few strokes of the quirt will keep you on your feet if you begin to flag."

I staggered to my feet. The room swirled.

"Fabula," I said. "What is a fabula, Master?"

"The fabulae are old, old tales, each with a moral. Some people say they originated on Earth, although they are so old that it is impossible to tell. The fabula I was thinking of is called 'The Clever Sleen and the Foolish Kajira.'"

He slapped me on my backside and I jumped for the door. Outside the sun pounded into my eyes.

"Walk," he said. He had his leather quirt in his hand.

I walked.

"A clever sleen," he recounted, "who was kept in a sleen pit behind a paga tavern, watched the Tavern Owner's ten luscious paga sluts pass to and fro. But as all of the girls strove hard to be pleasing, the sleen remained lean and hungry. At last the sleen called to each of the girls as they passed, 'Come closer and I will whisper a secret.' Nine of the girls quite rightly ignored him, but the tenth, who was a very curious kajira, could not bear to think that there was a secret she did not know."

"I am not that curious, Master," I protested.

"Yes, you are," he said. "Be silent. I am telling you a story."

"Yes, Master."

"The girl said, 'I am afraid to come close enough to the pit for you to whisper. Please tell me the secret while I am standing over here, where it is safe.' The sleen thought for a moment, and then he said, 'Your Master's fortune is hidden in his paga botas.'"

I said, "It was only a little paga, Master."

He struck me across the backs of my thighs with the quirt. I yelped and bit my tongue.

"The girl said, 'His fortune! Is it gold? Jewels? Enough to buy my freedom, and set me up as a rich free woman?' The sleen said guilefully, 'You will have to drink the paga to find out.'"

"The curious kajira had to know what fortune it was that her Master had secreted in the bottoms of his botas of paga, and so she stole a bota from the hearth and drank it all. She shook the empty bota thoroughly but no gold or jewels fell out. Feeling quite giddy, she made her unsteady way back to the sleen pit."

"'You did not tell the truth,' she accused the sleen. 'There is no fortune hidden in the bota.'"

"Muchly indignant, and thoroughly intoxicated with the paga, she stepped right up to the edge of the sleen pit to shake the empty bota in front of the sleen. But she stepped too far and toppled in."

"'Foolish girl,' the sleen said. 'Your Master's fortune *is* his paga, which he naturally keeps in his paga botas.' And he smiled, showing all his teeth.

"'Woe is me,' the kajira cried, as the sleen gobbled her up. 'If only I had not been so curious, or so greedy, or drunk so much paga.'"

He stopped. I stumbled along. My head was clearing a little.

"There would have been a lesson there for Alain, if he had been clever enough to see it," my Master said. "Are you clever enough to learn from the fabula, Minda?"

"Yes, Master," I said. "I will never, never, never touch paga again, not as long as I live. I will never take anything, not even a mouthful of water, that rightly belongs to a free person. I will never be greedy or curious ever again."

He struck me with the quirt again. My thighs stung. Despite my sorry state I felt a tiny shudder of pleasure at being so completely at his mercy.

"Do not make promises that you cannot keep, slut, no matter how intoxicated you may be," he said. I could hear a trace of a smile in his voice. "You will be curious again by the time the moons rise, and you know it."

He knew me so well. He owned me so completely. The intoxication of Tommaso's lost Special Brew was nothing compared to the intoxication of belonging to Valerus of Ar.

I said humbly, "Yes, Master."