by Grace Draven
She crossed her legs, idly tapping the air with one foot as she pinned her best henchman with a flat stare. “If I thought you might be anything other than bored with it all, I’d invite you to the entertainment I have planned for later.”
As Dalvila’s favorite go-to minion for everything from a pie delivery to an assassination, Gharek had learned long ago not to show emotion to his liege and give her the opportunity to use it against him. She already had him by the balls as it was. The gods only knew what that “entertainment” entailed. Sex, torture, a combination of the two. He hadn’t heard any screaming when the guards escorted him into the receiving chamber to wait, but it only meant Dalvila hadn’t yet left a victim on her bedroom floor, insensate, insane, or in pieces.
“How may I serve you, Your Greatness?” The right voice modulation, that sweet-spot combination of interest and willingness without overt fawning, took practice and years for him to get it just right. And it had saved his life more than once when dealing with the Spider.
She motioned to a slave kneeling on the lowest step of the dais on which her throne sat. The man knee-walked up the remaining treads, carrying a large tome in his arms, which he carefully deposited on the small table next to the empress. A brief touch of his forehead to the marble floor, and he knee-walked backward down the steps to resume his former place. Gharek was impressed with the man’s dexterity in keeping his balance. Had he fallen, Dalvila likely would have punished him for the offense.
Dalvila casually flipped the book open, turning pages as if time stopped to await her pleasure. She finally closed the book and returned her attention to Gharek. “This book was taken out of Midrigar by a pair of thieves. Or one thief at least. The other didn’t survive the race to the gates.” Gharek quashed the urge to roll his eyes. Only the stupid and the greedy braved haunted Midrigar to steal artifacts. Even the desperate knew better. There were worse things to suffer than death, and they lurked in the ruined city, waiting for foolish prey that always, always fell into their trap. “The book must be of great value for someone to risk so much in obtaining it.”
“That, or there are those who’ll filch anything not nailed down.”
She tapped the book with the tip of one brightly painted nail. “This is an alchemist’s grimoire from the age of Emperor Vorhesian. Within it, recipes for an elixir and a salve I intend to have. The elixir grants long life and youth. The salve heals all wounds and even restores missing limbs. Both are made of gold and draga blood.”
Were this anyone except the empress telling Gharek such a thing, he’d scoff at them, advise they toss such nonsense into the nearest fire and stop wasting his time. This was not just anyone, so he waited, holding his tongue.
Dalvila searched his features with a serpent’s gaze, looking for any mockery there. Finding none, she relaxed in her seat and continued. “I have plenty of gold. I need a draga, and I want you to get one for me.”
You must be fucking joking, he wanted to snap at her. Whatever bizarre game she’d chosen to play with him this warm summer afternoon, she was the only one to find it amusing. Gharek, on receiving her summons, had assumed she had an assignment for him. Kill and get rid of a general who dared to question her, drown a woman she perceived as a rival for the terrified affections of a lover she’d probably hang in a fortnight once she tired of him. She’d once sent Gharek on a journey halfway across the Empire to bring back a culinary delicacy whose name he still couldn’t pronounce and which she declared disgusting after taking one bite. He’d dispatched her rivals, garroted her rebellious commanders, and delivered sugarcoated sweets to her without complaint and with alacrity and efficiency, earning her admiration if not her trust. Dalvila trusted no one. It was why she still held the throne in an iron grip, even after her husband, the emperor, was reduced to an ash heap in Kraelag’s god-fire conflagration.
Unfortunately for Gharek, she’d just set him up to fail. The only question was how long he could stave off the foregone conclusion of his execution with false promises and lies. “My understanding is the dragas were hunted to extinction in the Empire long ago, though I know your spies to be skilled in uncovering information. Have they found one hiding in your territories?”
Her thin smile warned him he trod dangerously close to the bootlicking she found so annoying and which had gotten more than one courtier’s head removed from his shoulders. “Not yet, but I expect we will soon.” The sweet chime of her laughter at his raised eyebrows didn’t fool Gharek. She sounded the same when she laughed at someone’s disemboweling. “And you’re right about my spies. I hire the best, and I send them even farther afield than I send you on occasion.” She glanced at the book, the flare of some emotion enlivening her empty blue eyes for just a moment before dying. “The Empire might not have dragas, but some of the kingdoms across the Raglun Sea do. They hide there in plain sight, disguised as humans most of the time, but dragas will be dragas, and some people have witnessed them transform and fly, raid farms to take cattle and sheep or steal treasure.”
He could believe that, though he wondered just how truthful these witnesses were and how much was simply storytelling twaddle more entertaining than accurate. Surely the empress’s spies didn’t believe every font of nonsense that reached their ears? Surely the empress didn’t believe everything her spies told her.
Something in his expression must have given away his doubt, for Dalvila’s gaze once more turned serpentine. “You believe me a fool, Gharek?”
The fact that his stomach made no sound as it plummeted to the floor at her words surprised him, but not enough to make him speechless. “Not at all, Your Greatness,” he replied smoothly. “If you say there are dragas in the kingdoms across the Raglun Sea, I believe you. Wholeheartedly. I need only to understand what you wish for me to do with this information.”
If Dalvila told him the moon was blue and covered in fish scales, Gharek would find a way to believe that, too. His life depended on it. His daughter’s life depended on it.
Satisfied with his answer, she settled back in her lofty chair once more. “Draga bones, at least fake ones, show up in the markets as regularly as lice infestations. I think even one of my handmaidens had a set of teeth made for her husband from bits of draga bone. But it’s dead bone, of no real value except to a collector.” Her sublime features took on a demonic avarice that almost made Gharek take a step back. “I have a spy planted in the Maesor market, one who’s heard rumors that someone has arrived on our shores in possession of a mother-bond to sell. A real mother-bond with the glow mark of a living offspring still on it.” The old draga tales had mostly faded over time, with the exception of the tale of the Sun Maiden, and even that one expounded more on the exploits of the hero Kansi Yuv than on the draga he fought and slew. Dalvila was right that draga bones were popular trade items, even the fake ones, but the Maesor market wasn’t an average market, and nothing sold there was fake, nor was it cheap. He’d never heard of a mother-bond, but if someone believed they could sell it on the Maesor, it was both highly valuable and highly outlawed in the Empire.
Dalvila smiled her venomous smile. “I forget sometimes that you come from gutter-rat stock instead of nobility so probably never had access to the libraries.” Gharek didn’t flinch at her offhand insult. She spoke the truth. He’d earned his current place in Empire society; he hadn’t been born to it. “Dragas,” she said, “are creatures of magic. Not only were they said to have wielded sorcery; it was in their very nature. Woven into their veins, their blood, and their bones. A mother-bond was a draga offspring’s birthright bequeathed to it by its dam. The dam bit off a piece of her body, bespelled it, and used it to force her hatchling into the guise of a human child to protect it from being hunted and killed while it matured. Once it reached adulthood, it used the mother-bond to reclaim its true state and all the power that belongs to a draga, including the sorcery that makes its blood so valuable.”
“The long life and wound h
ealing you mentioned,” he said. Gharek dared not refer directly to Dalvila’s own maiming injury or even glance at it. To do so courted death.
The empress’s features froze, and his heartbeat froze with it. “Thanks to those Savatar mongrels, I don’t even have Golnar’s bones to display any longer. I want that mother-bond, and I want the draga it belongs to.” Rage seethed in her voice, still burning as hot as the old capital where she’d lost her husband, her arm, and her dignity.
Kraelag, once the Empire’s capital and crown jewel, still burned in places, months after the steppe savages laid siege to its gates and summoned their equally savage goddess to destroy it with holy fire. Even the famous bones of the draga Golnar hadn’t withstood the tidal wave of flame that reduced the capital to charred rubble and scattered heaps of molten rock and metal. The emperor had died while his empress had survived, though not unscathed. A Savatar archer, under the command of a Savatar general who had once been the Empire’s most famous slave gladiator, had fired an arrow from an impossible distance and struck the empress. Not a kill shot, at least not an immediate one.
Dalvila had barely survived. The wound to her shoulder had poisoned, turning putrid. Each lancing performed by the court leeches only made it worse. As the infection spread and the empress sickened, her closest advisers turned to other measures.
All within the summer palace and half of Domora, the Empire’s new capital, heard Dalvila’s shrieks as her surgeons sawed off the rotting limb and cauterized the mutilated flesh and exposed bone left behind. In the days that followed, court nobles who had escaped the destruction of Kraelag maneuvered for positions of power while the empress hovered at death’s threshold.
To the relief of some and the disappointment of many more, Dalvila survived. Her surgeons’ brutal actions had saved her, and she repaid their efforts in kind. Gharek had witnessed that repayment firsthand. Dalvila had ordered the three men brought before her, all in a show of pomp and praise. Still pale and drawn, she thanked each man with flowery plaudits uttered in the sweetest voice, before ordering them bound and forced to their knees before her.
The court held its collective breath, no one daring to come to the surgeons’ defense as they questioned the reason for their punishment and begged for mercy. The empress only smiled.
Sometimes Gharek still dreamed of her reply, syrupy and completely devoid of any humanity, any compassion.
“You enjoyed the sound of my agony. Now I will enjoy the sound of yours.”
The court torturers in her employ knew how to entertain the cruel and prolong the victims’ suffering. They cut off the surgeons’ hands first, then their forearms to the elbow, and finally the rest of their arms at the shoulder. And they didn’t stop with one arm. The three men lost both arms, their screams echoing throughout the receiving chamber over and over until they could only squeak their agony.
The entire room reeked from the tide of blood mingled with vomit that spilled across the marble floor. The odor of burned flesh joined the stench as the torturers cauterized the wounds, dealing out even more torment to the poor wretches.
Once Dalvila had her fill of their suffering, she ordered the men removed from the room and released her captive courtiers to go about their business. Gharek had strode away from the shaking, gagging crowd filing out the doors, wondering what monstrous creature had birthed the empress from its grotesque womb, because it surely wasn’t a human woman.
If the stories about the draga blood’s benefits were true, and they actually managed to get their hands on and kill a draga, then the Empire faced a long and brutal future under Dalvila’s reign. Gharek briefly pondered the logistics of taking his daughter and fleeing the Empire for a ship that sailed to those faraway kingdoms where dragas might rule the skies but this twisted creature held no sway over the land. He shoved the thought aside. Dalvila’s quest for draga blood revived a dead hope inside him. If draga blood gave Dalvila her arm back, could it not also help his daughter?
“Do you know where the mother-bond is now so I can use it to lure this draga?”
She growled low in her throat. “No, unfortunately. My spies tracked two mercenaries arriving from Winosia who first boasted about what they had; then they went to ground somewhere near a market that sprang up around one of my garrisons.” Her blue eyes burned with a cold fire. “It’s possible they thought it too dangerous to keep and pawned it for next to nothing. That market is full of free trader bands. My spies thought it might be easy to find the mother-bond, or even the mercenaries themselves, among the free trader camps, but so far, nothing.” Gharek wasn’t surprised by the failure to glean information. Free traders were notoriously closemouthed outside their own groups, an insular people who offered hospitality willingly enough but very little information. And it was a sure bet that if a free trader in possession of this mother-bond knew about the Maesor and how to get to it, he also knew not to share his real name with anyone interested in buying what he was offering to sell.
“An item like that won’t sell in the regular marketplace, not even under the table and not for the price whoever has it will want for it. It’s a guarantee they’ll try to get into the Maesor to sell it. If they do, I can track them down, coax them to give up the mother-bond, and find a way to lure this draga to Domora,” he told her. He wasn’t one of her spies. Their value depended on their anonymity. Everyone knew Gharek as the empress’s cat’s-paw and feared him because of it.
“You won’t have to lure it,” Dalvila assured him. “The mother-bond is a lodestone for the offspring, one it’s compelled to find if it wants to live. Find the mother-bond, and you’ll have the draga in your lap soon enough.”
“And once we do?” Gharek had faced and defeated numerous dangerous adversaries in his role as the empress’s chief henchman. This would be a first of its kind, and an unknown that made him uneasy.
“We kill it and butcher it. I’ll have the blood I need to heal and live long and a brand-new draga skeleton to replace the one I lost in Kraelag.”
Either she’d purposefully misunderstood his question or assumed that such a massacre would be an easy thing to accomplish without much thought or planning. He dared not push for more information. Dalvila expected him to figure out the logistics of many of the tasks she wanted him to accomplish without much guidance from her. This was just another, albeit much more difficult, task.
He bowed. “As you wish, Your Greatness. I’ll begin my search for this mother-bond immediately and report back to you as soon as I have something useful.”
She shrugged a lopsided shrug. “Useful will be the mother-bond, Gharek.” A darkness flitted through her eyes, spun up from the abyss where her soul should have been. Gharek stiffened. “How is your daughter? What is her name again?”
“Estred,” he said, forcing the name through stiff lips.
He’d expected it, waited for it, and still her questions ripped the breath out of his chest. She twisted the knife, reminding him that for all his menace and sinister reputation, he had one vulnerability that made him as powerless and as weak as the lowliest street beggar.
“That’s right,” she nearly purred. “Estred. Who knew I might one day have something in common with a gutter rat’s spawn?” The faint smirk hovering around her mouth disappeared, replaced by a scowl that nearly made her attending slave faint in terror. “I don’t like the comparison, Gharek,” she said in a voice that could have frosted the south-facing windows. “Bring me that mother-bond and the draga it belongs to. Don’t fail me. If you do, it won’t be just me you fail, and not only you who pays the price for it.”
At her gesture of dismissal, Gharek bowed once more before strolling out of the throne room as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Outside, the summer sun blazed down on his head. He felt none of it, only the cold grip of terror mixed with fury. Dalvila had given him a task and a warning. If he had to tear down all of Domora stone by stone, he’d find the free
trader and the mysterious mother-bond, haul the draga by its tail back to the throne room single-handedly, and cheerfully butcher the thing himself in front of the empress. There would be no failure.
CHAPTER FOUR
The woman with the rain-cloud eyes was prettier in person than in the vision the lightning had shown to Malachus. She possessed a soft, round face framed by wisps of curly brown hair that had escaped her braid, and long dark lashes that almost hid the flash of alarm in her gaze as it swept over him.
He hadn’t expected to find her this soon and certainly not by chance. Malachus had rubbed his eyes just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things when he first spotted her standing in front of a fruit stall purchasing a bag of plums. He’d followed her after that, keeping enough distance away that she didn’t sense his scrutiny.
There was a sense of purpose about her. The people who eddied around her meandered from one stall to another as if carried by the thinning river of humanity surrounding them. She, on the other hand, didn’t waste time browsing, stopping at certain stalls only long enough to ask the vendors a question, inspect an item, then moving on without lingering. He might not have caught up with her had she not stopped long enough to buy the fruit.
She’d nimbly avoided the stream of spittle a man dressed in rich robes spat at her as he passed, neither pausing to confront him nor speeding up to avoid another possible spraying. And while she exhibited no anger at the act, Malachus’s own temper flared at the unprovoked harassment.
He approached her as she stepped away from one of the market’s higher-end stalls, one that sold blank journals bound in embossed leather and filled with lower-quality parchment instead of vellum. Her slender hand had stroked the book she held under the merchant’s hawkish gaze before she put it down as if it were made of finely spun glass.