Previously: Amber has been trained at a slave school in the ways of a pleasure slave. Sold into the house of a feudal lord named, Gaius, she has proved useful in enlarging his fortune; but at the cost of enraging the emissaries of the Seven Gods who have promised to chasten her. She disappears suddenly from Gaius' villa in Albion, and awakes in Thamud where she is sold into the royal household. A break in the narrative follows.

Chapter 6 - Old Friends and Enemies . On Serum Girls . I Meet My Master's Family

Dear Reader,

I have finally found Neela; Neela who I loved best from when I first trained as a slave girl. I wept when I received the news, and was determined to meet her myself despite my Master's protestations. I have managed to find almost half of the girls who trained with me and released them all from the slave urges which ruled their lives.

Why it has taken this long I cannot say but she was privately sold to a rich but insignificant marquis, a gift from his long suffering wife who I understand prefers the company of women. With her amiable disposition, humorous anecdotes, and political savvy, she quickly worked her way up the ranks and is now her master's favorite.

I arranged to meet her at a Qin dressmaker's shop which dealt with embroidered silks woven and sewn by the young women apprentices of the Flaming Mountains. Here I posed as a serving girl. Of course, she recognized me the moment she set eyes on me in one of the private suites reserved for the nobility.

We hugged and kissed, and spoke at length as we once did back in the slave school. I asked her if she wished to be free – she did not. She was in love with her mistress who cosseted her; and she could be found between the marquis and his wife on many an evening. To add to this, she had a new role as the primary carer for the marquis' new heir, born to her mistress earlier in the year. It was clear she loved the new babe and her mistress was encouraging her to have one of her own that their children might be friends.

We had far too little time. I offered her the antidote for the slave urges which she quickly accepted. It would take a week for the changes to take effect. She thanked me and told me that I should approach her if I ever wanted for anything. Afterall, she was now the favorite of the Zeeshan Emperor's chief military advisor, a post to which that insignificant marquis had risen to in the intervening years.

I kissed her and told her that the only thing I wanted was the opportunity to meet her again in the not too distant future to rekindle our friendship. I did not ask her to become a spy in my network as is my practice after releasing any slave girls I have encountered and vetted. I could not bear to stain our friendship in this way.

Of more immediate interest is my capture of Anais, the woman who I first met in Aix. A creature of habit, she was easily found and taken. The loss of one Qin spy (myself) dictated the acquisition of another. When a new Qin girl fitting my own background and qualifications came into the possession of the traders, we merely waited patiently for her to turn up.

I did not torture Anais nor did I enslave her. That is the way of this world, not mine. We merely had conversations about her travels between Ki and this world, and her reasons for choosing this line of work.

Her value as a bargaining tool is negligible but we intend to send her to Talos in the Spring as part of a prisoner exchange. A Qin delegation, acting as our intermediaries, intends to revisit diplomacy again at that time as a cure for all our ills.

I return to my original narrative.

When last I wrote, I had become the slave of the Crown Prince Of Thamud. I spent a year with my Master in his house. I had not known such happiness in my previous life as during that time. It was in that year that the seeds were laid for my eventual decision to remain a woman and his bond slave.

You may be wondering how it is a mere serum girl of no distinction could become the favorite of a young prince. Was it simply fate and good fortune? Or did this betray the hand of a certain Talosian spy or the ever watchful Qin? Perhaps your disbelief stems from my softening of the account of my suffering, and the depredations I experienced in the slave school and in the house of Gaius. Whatever your viewpoint, I urge you to remember that the fate of this world is not simply in the hands of the women and men who inhabit it.

The casual reader may wonder as well what exactly the status of serum girls were in the continent of An. To answer this, I will attempt here a potted history of the transformation serum as I have gleaned from conversations with the historians and nobility of Thamud.

The oldest recorded history of the serum is a fragment by the overlord who once held sway over the great continent. Almost all of this was lost during the great scouring of An. These are the words preserved on some burnt parchments found in the tomb of the great conqueror:

“.... [the] serum was an adaptation of this process. It was created by a bio-chemical genius whose pay mistress and director was the slaver Vanora...[...]... She required [the serum] to achieve certain aims, such as allowing transformed men to conceive and bear children and a psychological sexual reorientation to female heterosexuality. But as a slaver she was intrigued by the idea of producing a superior type of slave girl.”

As you might imagine, the disruption to the communal and political life of this new invention was extreme with the serum used for punishment, deception, and assassination. The efficacy and ease of its administration ensured that all men were vulnerable, there were no agreed strictures placed on its use. If not for the limited supplies of the serum, one could imagine entire families or towns transformed into submissive slaves.
Yet if the users of the serum had constrained themselves to the dregs of society or at most the lesser nobility, no one would have lifted a finger to curtail its use. Its liberal use in the decimation of the highest houses in the land, however, spelled the beginning of the end.

Soon registries documenting the features of all potential serum girls were disseminated through all the nine kingdoms - that any attempt at espionage could be thwarted and social division quelled. Then through various alchemical tests, the royal houses began to push back on the moles hidden in their midst – transformed nobles without a trace of royal blood in their veins were taken and extinguished.

The discovery of an “antidote” to the original serum led to one of the darkest times in living memory. This was the Great Scouring where all traces of the serum was hunted down and destroyed; and decades of genetic and biochemical knowledge burnt on pyres in all the “civilized” kingdoms of the known world. What followed was a kind of chemical genocide. Serums girls were rounded up and forcibly returned to their original forms. Many chose death over this return to unwanted former lives as men. Only the intervention of the Seven Gods through their emissaries prevented a more devastating conflagration. What serum girls remained migrated to the desert basin which lies to the far West of our great continent.

The world I was transported to had emerged from this age of moral decay; a world where the serum was seen as punishment and not as reward or cure - to inflict the curse of womanhood on malcontents and social deviants.

The serum still exists in limited and dwindling quantities at the peripheries of society. The rest are controlled by the nine great families of An, under the watchful eye of the gods themselves. They were forbidden on pain of death from using it beyond their borders or as instruments of war, but they were still deployed against their political enemies within the confines of their own kingdoms. Yet on rare occasions, the serum presented itself as the perfect solution to longstanding dilemmas.

When my Master had claimed me in his bedchambers over several nights, his family requested that I be brought before them that they might know me better.

His father, the High King of Thamud, was bedridden and frail and I was simply brought to kneel beside his bed to pay my respects. The Queen on the other hand was hale and healthy and determined to know everything about me.

I was brought before Her Majesty and my lord's three sisters dressed in the robes of a royal concubine to pay my respects following a morning ritual honoring the Goddess of Water. I surmised that as a Qin girl and a slave, I was not ideal material as a consort; yet even then I knew that I was expected to produce an heir for the kingdom.

With only the chancellor by their side, they told me to reveal my entire history without omission. This I did save for my meeting with the Talosian spy mistresses – I had not earned enough of their trust to do that just yet. Nor did I go into any details regarding my life as a slave girl, for they all considered it an ignominious but necessary evil.

Even as I sat there reciting my history, I did pause to wonder why I felt so nervous and so anxious to please. Was it simply my eagerness to be a pampered woman in this court or was it fueled as much by my desire to be by my Master's side? Why did these four women seem so composed as they listened to a former male warrior express his wish to accept a future of feminine subservience at the feet of the prince.

“Do you love my brother?” asked my lord's eldest sister, the Princess Farah.

“Yes,” I answered truthfully. But I wondered why love was even an issue; how could she even believe my statement? I was overcome with emotion as I said this and my eyes brimmed with tears.

Then the Queen said, “I sense some hesitation on your part to tell us about your former existence as a man; that you feel that this will prejudice us against you. You are not wrong to be so concerned. But I also sense something else, that you wonder why we should act so calmly when you state so boldly that you would gladly remain a woman for the sake of my son. Perhaps you have forgotten that we are women just as you are, and have all known what it means to be in love. But could it be more than that? Is it perhaps because you consider the status of women in this world so abhorrent that you feel that no one would knowingly choose to be one?

“Yes, I admit that this is the case.” I was downcast.

“I am glad that you have spoken the truth, and it is easy to understand why your experiences have led you to think as such. But you will find in years to come that there are many compensations for this new life you have chosen. You have already foregone the joys of growing up a young girl, you now have the rest of your life to understand what a pleasure it is to be a woman.”

Then pointing to her left with her outstretched hand, she said, “Perhaps you have taken note of the portrait which hangs on the wall to your right.”

I had not (as was my usual practice) for I had been consumed by an unfamiliar restlessness throughout the interview. I turned my head to inspect it. It was a life-sized family portrait of the royal family done in a style similar to what was known as [tenebrism] back on Ki. I saw the king and queen at the center surrounded by their devoted daughters on each side. The eldest daughter stood as tall as her father and wore plate armor with the royal crest emblazoned; but it was not Farah who I saw.

I knew then that the gods had truly sifted me like wheat.