Declan smiled. “You know, that’s exactly what I said.”
“What’s the connection with Torlenia?”
“Lord Torfail—or as his friends affectionately think of him, Tryan the Devil—sent this spy to look for it.” Declan took another swallow of ale, hoping Aleki wasn’t good at spotting a liar. He’d told the truth up until now, but the rest of this tale was going to be a complete fabrication. “Apparently, this artefact was last heard of in Torlenia, in the keeping of the Lord of Reckoning.”
“That still doesn’t explain what this man of yours was doing in the Herino sewers.”
“From what I gleaned from our Caelishman during the interrogation, Tryan thinks Jaxyn got a hold of it from Brynden and brought it to Glaeba. And I don’t think he was searching the sewers looking for it; he was looking for a way into the palace.”
Aleki nodded, not convinced perhaps that this warranted investigation, but obviously believing Declan’s tale. “I don’t suppose the fate of the Duchess of Lebec has in any way influenced your decision to follow this tenuous lead?”
“Of course I’m worried about Arkady. And if I can help her when I get to Torlenia, I will. You know that, Aleki, and that I’d be lying if I denied it. Tides, your own mother would run me through if I did anything less.”
Aleki nodded. “That’s true enough. But what of Desean?”
“Ah, now that’s where I need your help. I have a plan, you see, about the problem we have in Caelum with the succession.”
Aleki took a deep swallow of Clyden’s ale. “Tides, you worry me when you say things like that, Hawkes.”
Declan smiled. “Just wait ’til you’ve heard the plan . . .”
Several hours later, as the tavern was starting to get busy, Declan walked out to the stables with Aleki. The Lord of Summerton was leaving for Hidden Valley, having agreed to send his men to Maralyce’s Mine to retrieve Stellan and Nyah, to arrange a new identity and disguise for the former Duke of Lebec, and to get him and Nyah back to Cycrane with the news that the crown princess of Caelum was now legally wed. Married, Nyah would be able to take her throne, effectively blocking Tryan’s attempts to do the same thing. It had stopped raining, but low thunder still rumbled in the distance. Declan glanced up at the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the next downpour.
“You know, there’s a good chance the first thing Syrolee will do is order Stellan Desean killed,” Aleki said, as he opened the stall where his horse had been stabled during their meeting. “And not because he’s an impostor, or someone recognises him. It’ll be because regardless of his identity—real or imagined—that’s the fate awaiting any man fool enough to get between the Empress of the Five Realms and her ambitions for her son.”
“Not if you wait until Tryan marries the queen.”
“How do you know Tryan’s going to marry the queen?”
“What else can he do? The longer Nyah is missing, the more people believe she’s dead. The only way to secure the throne after that is to marry the current queen and get a child on her. I give it another month with no sign of Nyah and Tryan will be announcing his engagement to the current Queen of Caelum.”
Aleki didn’t seem nearly as optimistic about Declan’s reading of the situation as he was. “If Tryan marries Jilna and Nyah returns, surely they’ll just kill the queen and Stellan and we’ll be right back where we started.”
Declan shook his head. “That’s too many unexplained murders for even the Emperor and Empress of the Five Realms to explain away.”
“You’ve got to wonder why they bother,” Aleki said, leading his horse out of the stall. “I mean, they command the elements. They control Tide magic, for pity’s sake. Why go to all this trouble? Why not just bend the world to their will with a wave of their arms?”
“Maybe it’s not that simple,” Declan suggested.
“I don’t know,” Aleki said, swinging up into the saddle. “In my experience, most people don’t give a rat’s arse who rules them, provided they’ve got food on the table and a roof over their heads.”
“You see, that’s the problem,” Declan said, stepping back as Aleki gathered up his reins. “It’s only most people who don’t care. But there’s always the people like us—the people who do care. We might be few in number, but we can make an awful lot of trouble for an evil despot who really just yearns for a cooperative world full of malleable minions to lord it over.”
Aleki pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Better to go through channels so everybody thinks you’re legitimate? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
Declan nodded. “A bit more trouble in the short term, but a whole lot less work in the long run. Less of those pesky secret societies devoted to securing your downfall too.”
That made Aleki smile. He leaned down, offering Declan his hand. “Take care, my friend.”
“I will,” Declan promised. “Torlenia’s a strange, barbaric place.”
“I had the road between here and Whitewater in mind, actually. A lone rider is a tempting target to a hungry bandit. And I’m a busy man. I haven’t the time to attend another funeral for you, you know.”
“Don’t worry, Aleki,” Declan said. “You won’t have to attend my funeral again. I promise.” It was as close as Declan could come to admitting the truth.
Aleki didn’t know that, of course. “When you get to Torlenia, make contact with Ryda Tarek,” he suggested. “If there is anything to this artefact story, I’m sure he’ll know of it. At the very least, he can keep the rest of the Cabal informed of your progress.”
“Good idea. I’ll be certain to look him up,” Declan said, making a promise he had no intention of keeping. He didn’t like Ryda Tarek. He definitely wasn’t going to risk the man learning his dreadful secret.
“And if you find Arkady, give her my love.”
“I will.”
Aleki turned his gelding’s head toward the entrance to the stable and walked him outside. Declan watched him leave, relieved beyond words that his meeting had gone so well. Aleki obviously couldn’t tell there was anything different about him. He hadn’t been suspicious at all.
But why would he? Declan thought. In what wild nightmare would you imagine one of your most trusted and highly placed associates in the organisation devoted to destroying the immortals, had become one himself?
There was no answer to that question, and Declan didn’t have the time to find one, anyway. As Aleki rode away, another person entered the stable. This one was a canine Crasii dressed in a tailored tunic, indicating he was probably a manservant. The Crasii was leading two horses, one of them fine enough to belong to a nobleman, the other a much more ordinary beast that was probably his own mount. This was, in fact, the first Crasii Declan had encountered since the night he’d been immolated and made immortal.
Before he could say a word to him, however, the canine’s eyes widened in shock. Letting go of the horses he fell to his knees in front of Declan.
“To serve you is the reason I breathe, my lord.”
Tides, Declan thought in annoyance. Every Crasii I meet is going to act as if I’m a flanking Tide Lord.
To which a small, ominous voice in his head replied . . . That’s because you are.
PART II
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is coming in.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
Chapter 15
Arkady was invited to Cydne Medura’s wedding, along with every other slave, human and Crasii, belonging to the Medura and Pardura clans. The whole of Port Traeker, a city comparable in size to Herino, turned out for the celebrations, wearing either the blue of House Medura or the bottle green of House Pardura.
Cydne’s father even had some slaves brought in from his country estate. Under no circumstances would the Pardura family be allowed to suffer under the misapprehension that they owned more of anything than the Meduras.
From her seat far back in the grand hall of the palace belonging to Olegra’s family—a building so grand
and opulent it made Lebec Palace look like a cosy country cottage—Arkady could barely make out the wedding party, let alone the expressions on the faces of the bride and groom. She could imagine them, though. Cydne would be looking pained, his father relieved and his bride . . . well, it was hard to say. The closest Arkady had come to her was earlier in the day when she passed by as Arkady was lined up along the route from the Pardura Palace to the Town Hall—where all marriages were formalised—along with all the slaves belonging to both families, who were under strict orders to cheer the couple until they were hoarse.
Olegra had seemed a pleasant enough young woman from a distance. Dark-haired, brown-eyed and a little plump, something prized here in Senestra, particularly among the powerful and ridiculously wealthy merchant class, who considered a woman with “a bit of meat on her” to be proof of both her wealth and her ability to appreciate fine food. For Arkady, who was naturally slender, this proved to be an unexpected boon. After a lifetime of being the first woman in a room a man would look at, she was now the last, which meant she was, for the most part, left alone. There were plumper, more desirable slaves to lay with than the strange, skinny Caelishwoman, who didn’t even speak the language properly.
“Did . . . you . . . want . . . that . . . fish?”
Arkady turned her attention from the wedding party and looked at the man who was speaking to her. He was a large, hirsute man with a thick black beard, a well-muscled body and a brand identical to Arkady’s on his chest. He was sitting on her left and spoke haltingly, almost yelling, as if he could overcome her lack of comprehension with volume.
“Pardon?”
He pointed to the dish in front of her. She’d only eaten half of her meal, finding the battered fish too spicy for her palate. “You want?”
“No,” she said, offering him her plate. “You can have it.”
The man took the leftovers from her and wolfed down the remains of her meal, handed her the empty plate, and without so much as a thank you began looking around for anybody else who’d not finished their dinner.
This feast, Arkady had learned, might go on for days, and because the Parduras were trying to impress the Meduras, the fare—even the meal served to the slaves—was quite spectacular. Arkady might have even enjoyed it had it not been for the fact she was sitting at the slaves’ table and that—like every other slave in the hall, male or female—she was naked from the waist up.
It was clear now, why she’d been branded on the breast. It wasn’t to hide her status as a slave; it was to display it. In Senestra, clothes were the privilege of free men. All slaves, regardless of race or species, wore a short linen loincloth and skirt, the coloured edging on the hem denoting their house and their rank. Arkady’s skirt was banded in blue—the colour of the Medura family—and a single thin band of black, which apparently indicated that she was a makor-di, the lowest of the low, fit only for menial labour in the worst jobs.
She was still uncomfortable walking around in what was—by her standards—pretty much nothing at all, but with everyone else dressed (or undressed) in the same fashion, it was a little less harrowing. She had overcome her initial mortification when the slave-master at Cydne’s palace had taken her shift and handed her a short skirt and nothing else to replace it, but sitting here in a hall crowded with hundreds and hundreds of people with her breasts bared, still left her feeling queasy.
The other slaves, sensing her embarrassment, laughed among themselves at her prudishness. When she glanced down the table, Alkasa, one of her companions on the journey from Torlenia, caught her eye. She cupped her large painted breasts—this was a wedding, after all, and they’d all been daubed in blue and green designs to symbolise the union between the two great houses—with both hands and pointed them at Arkady, waggling the nipples at her. Then she said something Arkady didn’t catch to the women around her, and they all began to do the same.
“Yours are better.”
She realised the man who’d eaten her leftovers was talking to her again.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You got nicer tits than Alkasa.”
“How noble of you to notice,” she replied in Glaeban, certain he wouldn’t understand.
“You’d get laid more often if you were chubbier, though. Men don’t like bangin’ into a sack of bones. You gonna eat that bread?”
“Be my guest,” Arkady said, as she handed him the crust of her bread, deciding starvation might be the go, if putting weight on was going to make her more desirable to these people.
“I’m Geriko,” the man said, smiling at her. “What’s your name?”
“Kady.”
“You don’t speak too good. You stupid or something?”
She smiled in spite of herself. “I’m still learning to speak your language.”
“I could tell you was foreign,” he said. Since learning she wasn’t stupid, but merely foreign, he’d stopped yelling at her to make himself understood. In truth, she could make out most of what he was saying. She just wasn’t that good at speaking Senestran yet.
“Really? What gave it away?” Besides my skin colour, my eye colour, the language difference . . .
“You’re too tall. And you’re too skinny. And you walk like you’re proud of it. And your brand’s still fresh.”
And the only reason you know that is because you’ve been staring at my breasts long enough to establish the age of my brand and that they’re nicer than Alkasa’s. “You’re very . . .” She wanted to say observant but didn’t know the Senestran word for it . . . “You look well.”
He smiled, totally misunderstanding her meaning. “You think so?”
Oh, Tides . . . “You see things well,” she said, and then on the slim chance of directing his thoughts away from her breasts, she added, “Where do you work?”
“In Doctor Cydne’s clinic. I keep the Crasii scum under control.”
“Crasii scum?”
He nodded. “They get all snarly and snappy when they’re sick. I’m there to make sure they behave themselves.”
Arkady glanced down the hall at the tables even further from the wedding party than her own. That’s where the Crasii sat. She was wrong to think the makor-di were the lowest of the low. The Crasii, the celum-di, ranked even lower in Senestra’s complicated caste system than batch-bought human slaves.
“That’s where I’ll be working too.” At least, Arkady hoped that’s what she said. She might have said the table leg has three eyes for all she knew. Senestran wasn’t an easy language to master.
Geriko smiled. “Then we’ll be working together. Did you want to bunk with me too?”
Clearly tact, delicacy or any pretence of seduction weren’t skills considered necessary among the slave caste. “Er, no . . .”
“You have another mate?”
“No.”
He nodded in understanding. “Ah! You are the master’s wii-ah.”
“The master’s what?” Arkady wasn’t familiar with the word.
“His wii-ah,” Geriko said. “It means . . . his . . . toy . . . plaything.” He grinned broadly and leaned a little closer. “We heard the young master spent the entire voyage to Torlenia locked in his cabin with a foreign slave. Quite a few people lost money on that voyage.”
“I thought the whole trip was quite successful.”
“Oh, it was a commercial success, sure enough,” Geriko agreed. “People lost money betting on Cydne locking himself in his cabin with a sailor, is what I meant.”
Poor Cydne, Arkady thought, still a little amazed that she pitied the man who now effectively owned her. They really do have it in for you, don’t they?
But there was an opportunity here, both to protect herself and do the young doctor a favour. And she owed him something, she supposed. She wasn’t due to be shipped off to a mining camp as soon as the wedding celebrations were done, and that was entirely due to Cydne’s intervention.
“It was quite a voyage,” she told Geriko. “He was . . .” she hesita
ted, not knowing the Senestran word for insatiable, “. . . very hungry. At it all the time. Like a rutting stallion.”
Geriko’s eyes lit up to hear such valuable gossip. “Like a stallion?”
Arkady nodded, warming to the subterfuge. She leaned a little closer and added in a low voice, “He’s built like one too. Damn near wore me out with it.”
The slave stared at her in amazement and then looked toward the wedding table with new respect. “Really? Cydne? Who’d have thought?”
Arkady smiled, wondering how long it would take for the rumour to spread that Cydne Medura was not only well-endowed but an insatiable lover, to boot.
I think that makes us even, Cydne, she told him silently.
And then she turned and smiled at Geriko. If she was going to find a way out of here, if she was ever going to escape Senestra and her fate as a slave, she needed friends.
The big bearded slave who’d be working in the clinic with her, who didn’t mind that she was skinny and who liked her breasts, was as good a place as any to start.
Chapter 16
“The city welcomes you.”
Declan turned to the sailor who’d spoken to him. “How do you figure that?”
“The Crystal City has turned on her light show for you.”
Declan squinted in the glare of the crystalline cliffs of Ramahn as his ship made its way through the heads. The cliffs and the city walls above them—assaulted by eons of crashing waves—were encrusted with salt which had been baked by the harsh sun into a glistening wall of crystal. As it usually did at this time of year, the rising sun illuminated the encrusted cliffs, setting the whole city alight, making it almost too bright to look upon.
“The Crystal City’s a whore. She turns it on for every man.”
The sailor laughed, revealing a row of unevenly coloured teeth. “You’ve been to Ramahn before, I see, if you know her well enough to call her the Whore.”
“Once or twice.”
“Then you’ll not need to be warned about the Whore’s habit of devouring strangers.”
The Palace of Impossible Dreams Page 11