The story so far: Valerus, Physician of Ar and sometime investigator into irregular matters, is surprised and delighted to receive a message from his long-lost childhood friend and blood brother, Icarion. He finds Icarion in a squalid empty villa with a stricken woman whose symptoms are clearly those of the dreaded dar-kosis. Reluctantly, at Icarion's impassioned plea, Valerus writes certificates consigning both the woman and Icarion himself -- who swears he does not wish to live without her -- to the dar-kosis pits outside of the city. Two hands later, Valerus is summoned to the Central Cylinder, taken under guard, and confronted with the Administrator of Ar himself, Lycaon. Lycaon displays the body of his sister, Ianthe, a traitress and fugitive who had offered to betray her Cosian confederates and bring her brother priceless political and military information, in exchange for being allowed to return home to Ar. But before she could speak she has been silenced forever! ...

My Master frowned. He said, "Do you wish for me to find the one who killed her?"

Lycaon looked at him expressionlessly for a few ihn, then made a gesture. The guards stepped forward on either side of my Master. My heart stopped.

"Oh," Lycaon said. "I know who killed her."

"Indeed?" my Master said.

"Yes," Lycaon said. "You did."

    The story continues. Valerus speaks...

    I am rarely speechless. This was, however, one of those singular occasions upon which I found myself utterly at a loss for words.

    "I have not even seen the Lady Ianthe since the Sardar Fair of Se'Var," I said at last. "And I assure you she was... very much alive when I left her last."

    As indeed she had been, the bitch. It had taken me a good hour in a public bath tent to feel clean again after a night spent in her voluptuously scented pavilion.

    Fleetingly I thought of Crezia, the poison girl, lovely, gentle, doomed Crezia. Crezia of the apricot hair and the tragic golden eyes. I wondered what had happened to her after she entered the Sardar.*

    No one ever came back from the Sardar, of course, no matter what fantastical tales were sometimes told.

    In the meantime Lycaon had stretched out his hand to the Chief Magistrate, who proffered him a piece of paper.

    "You used a false name, of course," Lycaon said. "'Isabetta Lavinius of Port Kar.' But the palm print is irrefutable. It was my sister, Valerus, whom you consigned to the pit two hands ago. Consigned falsely, to awaken to unspeakable horror and to die defending herself against the... assault of the afflicted ones, all for no reason but to feed your own insane vengeance."**

    For a moment I had no idea of what he was talking about. Then I realized that the paper he was holding was one of the certificates of consignment to the dar-kosis pits that I had written for my brother Icarion two hands ago, and that Lycaon appeared to believe that it referred to his sister. Clearly there had been some sort of administrative muddle.

    "It was only by chance," Lycaon was saying, "that your vile plot came to light. One of the afflicted signaled to a tarnsman who was delivering food. The tarnsman, luckily enough, was a curious fellow, and dropped down to investigate. He reported his findings to the Initiates in charge of the pit, who allowed him to recover my sister's body. It was recognized immediately, of course. Once it was suitably... cleansed, they released it to me."

    I still felt nothing but surprise, and a certain mild annoyance at the carelessness of the Scribes who had confused the certificates.

    "There was no plot, vile or otherwise," I said. "The woman for whom I wrote that certificate was the free companion of... of a brother of mine. She had all the symptoms of dar-kosis... the thickened skin, the discolorations, the contracted hands, the bloating of the nose and lips that precedes their atrophy."

    I gestured to the Lady Ianthe, lying there in her shroud, her elegant hands crossed on her breast. Her profile was white and pure and beautiful as that of a chiselled statue. However she had met her death, her hurts were obviously such that they did not show.

    "As you can clearly see," I said, "the woman described on that certificate could not have been your sister, Lycaon. The Lady Ianthe is untouched by the ravages of dar-kosis. You are mistaken about the palm print."

    "Am I?" Lycaon said. "See for yourself, then."

    He snapped his fingers, and a Scribe stepped forward with paper and a container of ink. I felt a faint frisson of distaste at the thought of touching Ianthe of Ar, even now when she was far beyond any capacity to do harm to anyone, but even so I took the materials without hesitation. I was thinking only of how I might keep Lycaon from looking too much like a fool when it turned out that he had staged this whole ludicrous charade on the strength of a Scribe's error.

    How credulous I was. How stupidly, childishly, blindly trusting in what my brother had told me. But of course that is hindsight. There is an old Gorean saying: 'The road behind you is always three times clearer than the road ahead of you.'

    I snapped my fingers to my slave Mindar and she was beside me in an ihn, reaching out to take the tablet of rence paper and hold it for me while I applied the ink to the dead woman's right palm. I did not turn to look at my girl, although I could feel her horror and her fear. Quite calmly I lifted Ianthe's right hand from her breast. It was cool and flexible. She had been dead, then, for at least a day, probably more: the rigor of death had entirely passed off.

    I brushed the ink onto her palm. Then I held out the little bottle of ink and Minda, unseen, took the bottle and put the tablet of paper into my hands. Slowly and carefully I pressed the dead woman's palm to the paper. How many times had I taken a palm print, both in life and in death? I wanted this one to be perfect. I wanted there to be no more mistakes.

    I lifted Ianthe's palm from the paper, leaving a clean, unsmudged impression. Such a thing could not be duplicated or forged. I looked up at Lycaon for a moment, then I laid his dead sister's hand gently back on her breast and gave him the tablet of paper without a word.

    He looked at it. He looked at the certificate, with the original palm print affixed. Then he looked up at me again.

    There was no surprise, no embarrassment, no confusion in his eyes. Just cold satisfaction, and a lust for blood that would have done credit to a hunting sleen.

    It was at that moment that I knew, knew at last, that something was terribly wrong.

    The guards standing on either side of me stepped closer.

    Lycaon handed me the certificate and the palm print that I myself had just made. I looked from one to the other.

    I am trained in such matters. I know how to check the salient points of two palm prints against one another, quickly and accurately. The two prints were from the same palm.

    It was impossible.

    And yet it was true.

    There are moments, in nightmares, when one feels as if one cannot speak, cannot move but with unnatural slowness. That is how I felt when I looked at those two palm prints, and my own signature on the certificate of consignment. My mind was benumbed, unbelieving. My body was paralyzed.

    "Take him," Lycaon said.

    Two of the guards stepped forward and took hold of my arms. Two more drew their swords. Minda, foolish slut that she is, made an abortive attempt to defend me. The guard struck her down casually with the back of his hand and she sprawled to the floor, skidded against the wall, and lay still.

    "You will be tried, of course," Lycaon said. "But the verdict is assured with these palm prints as evidence. I will see you one more time, Valerus, when I, as Ianthe's next of kin, take part in your impalement. I assure you that I will not miss that pleasure."

    I felt the prick of a sword at my back. I stepped forward automatically. In the corner, against the wall, Minda stirred and whimpered.

    "Take the slut as well," Lycaon said to the guards. One of them grasped Minda's curling mane of tawny hair and dragged her to her feet. Her face was already swollen, her eye closed, her pale skin beginning to show the livid colors of bruising.

    Stupid. A single girl, a slave, empty-handed, against four armed men. She was fortunate to be alive.

    I was fortunate to own her.

    Lycaon smiled slowly, almost as if he knew what I was thinking. "Enjoy her, Valerus, while you can," he said. "It will be your last pleasure before you go down to the Cities of Dust where you belong."

    Mindar speaks...

    "Bazi plague," my Master said.

    We had been in the cell for several ahn. My Master had said nothing in that time, but had sat silently against the stone wall, his face stark. I might as well not have been there at all, for I do not think he saw me.

    His brother Icarion had betrayed him. He had deliberately arranged the Lady Ianthe's death so that my Master would be implicated, so that he would violate his Physician's Code of doing no harm, so that he would be swiftly and ignominiously executed. I did not know how or why. I only knew that I had felt from the beginning that there was something wrong, wrong, wrong about that unexpected message from my Master's long-lost blood brother, on that languid, sunny afternoon two hands ago.

    Goreans take matters of Codes very seriously. They take matters of brotherhood very seriously. It was almost unheard-of for one brother to deliberately, with premeditation, betray another. But clearly that was what Icarion had done.

    How? Why?

    My Master sat silent, his gaze turned inward.

    The guards had locked a heavy steel cell collar around his neck, with a longish chain that was attached to a metal plate bolted to the wall behind him. I wore a cell collar as well, with a similar length of chain. I wanted only to cling to him, to cry, to sob out my pain and terror and misery. But he did not see me. I knelt in the straw, my head aching, my right eye swollen shut from the guard's blow. My Master had trained me well. I was silent.

    Ahn passed. The cell was dark, but for a single flickering lamp high on a ledge, out of our reach.

    And then my Master said, "Bazi plague."

I looked up, fearful that he had gone mad. But his brown-gold eyes were perfectly steady and lucid. His expression was one I recognized: the look he wore when he had solved a puzzle, or discovered a particularly interesting piece of information.

    "Master?" I whispered.

    He frowned at me for a moment, as if he were surprised to see me there. Then all of a sudden he smiled, as only my Master could smile, and held out his arms to me. I scrambled to him and flung myself against him, choking with sobs.

    "Shhh," he said.

    No one but my Master could make a half-whispered shhh a command to be obeyed. I struggled to calm myself, to lie quietly against him as he wished.

    "That is how it was done," he said, continuing whatever strange thought he had begun with the words Bazi plague. "It is possible, my Minda, to reproduce the symptoms of Bazi plague with a combination of two substances. One of them, called gieron, is a drug, an allergen, that causes the whites of the eyes to take on the characteristic yellow cast of Bazi plague. The other, sajel, causes the body to erupt in pustules which are alarming-looking but quite harmless."

    I wondered if he had gone mad after all, despite his clear eyes and his reasonable tone. "But Master," I whispered. "Did not the Lady Ianthe... the Lady Isabetta... did she not...?"

    He smiled again. "Suffer from dar-kosis?" he said. "Or appear to? Yes. But suppose that..."

    He hesitated for just an ihn. His eyes looked inward again, very briefly, and then refocused.

    "... suppose that Icarion," he went on, speaking his treacherous brother's name with steady calmness, "who is after all a Physician himself, has discovered a substance or combination of substances that simulate the symptoms of dar-kosis, just as gieron and sajel mimic the symptoms of Bazi plague? I can think of... perhaps a paralytic of some kind to make the hands and limbs contract, a wash of salts from Thassa to retain water in the skin and produce the thickened appearance, allergens or irritants to cause the mottled coloring... even the swelling and misshapen look of the facial features could be brought about by drugs. Oh, yes, it could be done."

    He paused. Something in his face told me that he was thinking of the Lady Ianthe, awakening in the dar-kosis pit, all her spurious symptoms gone, her skin silky and fair again, her face lovely, her body provocative. Yes, the afflicted ones, as the sufferers from dar-kosis were called, would have swarmed over her for a taste of all that perfect beauty. I wondered briefly if she had died fighting them off, as Lycaon had intimated, or if she had found some means to take her own life.

    I wondered if even my Master, who hated her, would have deliberately wreaked such a ghastly vengeance upon her.

    "I should have known the difference," my Master said. "If it had been anyone but Icarion, I would have examined the woman more closely. Now I have betrayed my Codes and forfeited my honor."

    "It was a plot!" I cried out. "Icarion arranged it all deliberately! It was not your fault, Master. You could not have known that he..."

    He put one hand over my mouth. It was not a gentle touch. "Be silent," he said. "You are a woman, a slave. You know nothing of honor."

    I pressed my mouth against his hand and wept. The cell collar was heavy around my neck. When would they come for him? In the morning, in two mornings? My heart would die when they took him away. What would become of the husk of my body, Masterless?

    "Minda," he said softly.

    I clung to him. I managed to swallow back my sobs.

    "Minda," he said again. "Do you know what a lure girl is?"

    I shook my head.

    "A lure girl," he said, "is just what she sounds as if she would be. She is bait to lure an unsuspecting man into a trap. You, my Minda, are going to be my lure girl tonight."

    I looked up at him. Suddenly a tiny flame of hope flared in me. He had a plan.

    "A trap?" I said hopefully. "Bait? For whom, Master?"

    "For the guard, of course," my Master said. He took me by the shoulders and held me back a bit from him, examining me. "You are certainly not going to lure anyone with the beauty of your face at the moment, slut," he said critically. "But your hair... and your body... yes, I think you will do. Barely."

    He hooked his beautiful, steel-strong surgeon's fingers in the neckline of my crumpled and dirty green silk, and ripped it away from my body. He smiled.

    "Yes," he said. "Barely."

    I strained as close to the barred door as my chain would allow, naked, my hair spilling forward to cover the bruised and swollen side of my face. I was trembling, aroused, my nipples taut, my skin quivering. I could feel silky swollen wetness between my thighs every time I moved. Oh, yes, my Master had made quite sure that I would be a suitable lure for any unwary guard who happened by.

    My Master himself sat against the wall, staring into nothingness, just as he had done since we had been put in the cell. What guard, confronted with a motionless, apparently mindless prisoner, and a naked slave, aroused and unsatisfied, would notice that my Master's chain was not coiled on the floor beside him, but hidden in his lap, looped and ready between his hands?

    I clawed at the bars. I could not quite reach them. I sobbed and cried out in need. It was only partly acting.

    I heard one of the guards coming down the dank stone passageway. I redoubled my crying, my begging.

    "Wot's all this racket?" the guard demanded. He was a brawny young fellow with dark hair and eyes and an open, not unattractive face. He had a five-bladed slave whip in one hand. "Pipe down, slut, or I'll give yer something to squawk about."

    "Master!" I quavered. "Master, I beg you... oh, please, please. I have done nothing wrong. Please have mercy on me. Oh, Master..."

    I stretched out my arms. I could almost touch the bars. I looked at the guard's hands and remembered my Master's hands on my body and shuddered like a high-strung, excited animal.

    The guard grinned. "Yer a tasty bit, yer are," he said. "Guess mebbe I might give yer something to squawk about."

    He unlocked the door with a large iron key, one of dozens on his ring. He stepped inside the cell and closed the door behind him. I stepped back, drawing him further away from the door, and he followed.

    My Master moved.

    I saw it all as if in slow motion, jerky, disconnected, one image at a time.

    My Master's body surging up out of the straw. His arms straightening, the chain drawn tight between his hands. The guard's eyes, wide and surprised and indignant. The little grunting sound the guard made when the chain struck his throat. The smell of the guard's fear. The metallic grating sound the chain made as it tightened around his neck.

    The guard's limp weight, then, dragging at the chain. The rustle of the whip falling to the straw. The clink of the keys at his belt as my Master lowered him to the floor.

    My Master knelt and pressed his fingers into the side of the guard's throat. Then he sat back on his heels and smiled, a short tight baring of his teeth. I found that my knees were too weak to hold me, and I staggered against the wall.

    My Master retrieved the keys from the straw, unlocked his cell collar, and threw it aside. He took the guard's knife from its sheath and rose to his feet. And then suddenly we both heard more keys clinking, outside the cell door.

    He turned. I turned.

    The door opened.

    "Guard," said a cool, matter-of-fact voice. "I am looking for a man called Valerus of the Physicians. I was told that he..."

    The man at the door stopped. He looked at my Master. He looked at the guard, unconscious on the floor. There was no expression at all on his vital dark face.

    It was my Master's friend Titus, a chief guardsman of the city of Ar.

    "Valerus," he said.

    "Titus," my Master said. "Stand aside. I do not wish to do you any harm."

    Titus did not move. "The guard?" he said.

    "He is not dead," my Master said. "Stand aside."

    "Valerus," Titus said. "Don't be a fool. You cannot escape from the prisons of the Central Cylinder."

    "Stand aside," my Master said.

    "I have spoken to the Chief Magistrate. I have convinced him to delay your trial. I will find evidence that you did not..."

    My Master laughed. It was a bitter sound. "There is no such evidence," he said. "I did exactly what Lycaon says I did, my friend. I consigned the Lady Ianthe to the dar-kosis pits, although she was free from the disease."

    Titus frowned. "I don't believe it," he said.

    "It is true, nevertheless."

    "Then you had a good reason. I cannot allow you to do this, Valerus. You are throwing away whatever chance that you might have."

    My Master brought up his hand. The knife was in it. Physician or not, my Master was very good with knives.

    "Stand aside," he said. "I will not say it again."

    Titus looked at him steadily. Then he tossed back his cloak and quite calmly drew his own short sword. It was a deadly weapon, honed and balanced, and it made the wicked little knife in my Master's hand look like a child's toy.

    "You are an escaping prisoner," Titus said softly. "I am a guardsman of this city, duly sworn. Put the knife down."

    My Master took a step toward him. Titus shifted his stance and lifted the sword. The light from the tiny tharlarion-oil lamp on the ledge glinted off the perfect edge.

    "Valerus," Titus said. "I owe you a debt, the debt of my own life. I will do whatever I can to help you. Do not make me do this."

    "I have debased my Codes," my Master said. "I am honorless, outcast. The only thing I have left is to find the man who betrayed me. If I must cut my way through you to do it, I will."

    He took another step forward. Titus's fingers tightened on the hilt of his blade. And then all of a sudden Titus reversed the sword in his hand, thrust it back into the scabbard, and tossed it, scabbard and all, across the room. My Master brought up his left hand with unthinking precision and caught it.

    "Take it," Titus said, "and go. I will take Mindar, and do what I can to protect her. Your house has already been sealed, your other slaves taken and put to the question."

    For an ihn the two men stared at each other in silence. I ached for old Sofia the cook, for Chispa and Lita the kettle girls. I wondered if I would ever see them again.

    "No," my Master said. "The slut is known. I will not let you take that risk."

    "If you leave her here," Titus said, "they will take her, too. They know how she writes notes of everything you do."

    I sank to my knees in horror. I had been there indeed, that afternoon in the Anbar district. I had taken notes as my Master had examined the woman his brother had called Isabetta Lavinius of Port Kar. I had written down every word as he diagnosed her as being afflicted with dar-kosis.

    Slaves were questioned under torture. Would I have the courage to withstand them? Or would I babble everything in my agony, where the notes were kept, what I had seen and heard? Would I speak words that would help send my Master to his death?

    "I will not let you risk yourself," my Master said again.

    Titus shrugged. "So be it," he said. He stepped back into the doorway.

    "I wish you well, my friend," my Master said. "Your debt is paid."

    "Such debts are never paid," Titus said. "If you win free of the Central Cylinder, go to the Camerian Gate. I will do what I can to gain you freedom of passage there."

    He turned and left the cell. He did not wish my Master well. He did not look back.

    My Master thrust the scabbarded sword into his belt and turned to me, the guard's knife still in his hand. I could not read his face at all.

    "Come here, Mindar," he said.

     I could not stand. I crawled to his feet. My belly was liquid with terror, and I could hardly see for tears.

    He twisted his left hand in my hair and dragged me up to kneel upright before him. "Did you think," he said in a strange harsh voice, "that I would allow you to be used against me?"

    I could not answer. The knife glinted in his right hand. He twisted my hair further, into a thick rope, stretching my head back. I closed my eyes. I stopped breathing.

    I belonged to him. I would die willingly, if it was by his hand.

    With one vicious sweep he hacked off my hair. I cried out and collapsed at his feet.

     "The hair would have given you away," he said. "How often have you been called 'Valerus' blonde barbarian'? I cannot send you with Titus, it seems, as your very presence would be a danger to him. And I cannot leave you here for the guardsmen to question. So it appears that I have no choice but to take you with me."

    I lay sobbing in the straw. He crouched down and began methodically cutting off the rest of my hair, stuffing it all into his tunic so that there would be no stray wisps to reveal to pursuers that they were looking for a man with a short-haired blonde slave instead of a long-haired one.

    "And it does not please me," he went on thoughtfully as he worked, "to think of you being... damaged. You are, after all, my property."

    "Yes, Master," I whispered.

    "Perhaps you will be useful. I may have need of a lure girl again. And I can always tie a coin box around your neck when I need the price of a meal."

    "Yes, Master."

    "If you fall behind, I will abandon you."

    "Yes, Master."

    He unlocked the cell collar from my neck and tossed it casually into the straw. Then he straightened. "Heel," he said.

    He walked out of the cell.

    I scrambled to my feet and followed him. I did not know where he was going. I did not know if he would make good his escape from the Central Cylinder, from Ar itself, or if he would ever return to the city of his home stone. I did not know if he would ever find his brother, or feel that he had recollected his honor.

    Perhaps he would end, as Lycaon had said, in the Cities of Dust.

    To the Cities of Dust, then, I would follow.

To be continued...

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* For the story of the Sardar Fair of Se'Var, and Crezia the poison girl, see "The Gift of a Kajira," The Gorean Voice, December 1998.

** For the story of Valerus' first meeting with Ianthe of Ar, and of his desire for vengeance against her, see "The Confession of a Kajira," The Gorean Voice, October 1998.