“You’re a slave trader, then?” Althalus shrugged deprecatingly. “It’s a living, your Highness. Slaves are a… — David Eddings
“You’re a slave trader, then?”
Althalus shrugged deprecatingly. “It’s a living, your Highness. Slaves are a valuable commodity. I buy them in places where they’re an inconvenience and take them to places where they can be put to work to pay for their keep. Everybody benefits, really. The one who sells them to me gets gold, and the one who buys them gets laborers.”
“What do the slaves get?”
“They get fed, your Highness. A slave doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. He gets fed even when the crops fail or the fish aren’t biting.”
"Our philosophers tell us that slavery’s an evil.”
“I don’t concern myself with philosophy, your Highness. I take the world as I find it. I’m prepared to offer ten Perquaine gold wheats for every able-bodied young captive you’d care to sell.”
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More from this book
“Sick, isn’t it?” Dhakan replied. “Our glorious, but slightly warped, leader hasn’t let him out of her sight since the day he was captured.”
“Surely you don’t agree with that apostate!”
“I was talking about his skill, not his message, Aleikon ... He’s good. There’s no question about that.”
“I’m pretty good at that. There were a lot of things I did when I was just a boy that I didn’t tell her about. I didn’t come right out and lie to her, of course. A boy should never lie to his mother, but now and then things sort of slipped my mind. You know how that can happen.”
“Oh, yes.” Althalus laughed. “Things have been slipping my mind for as long as I can remember.”
