The marshals had put the Zhuban in handcuffs like mine so I wasn’t worried about him getting free and killing me, but I still found him daunting. He gazed at me the way the Zhuban like to do—as if they can weigh and measure a person just by staring at them. Maybe he could. But so could I, though what I saw didn’t make me very comfortable. His head was shaved, his sleeveless shirt revealed muscles that ensured I’d be no match for him in a fist fight. His arms bore the scars that marked a soldier, but they were tanned, like the rest of him, all the way to his wrists. His hands, however, were smooth and pale. Harrex had removed his gloves and burned them. The Crimson Elites wear gloves to protect them from having to touch those who are “tainted”, which is to say pretty much everyone who isn’t Zhubanese.
The assassin’s gaze shifted away from me to a point in the air straight in front of him. He curled his bound hands in front as if he were choking a man to death. He stayed like that for several minutes, until every part of him was sweating.
“Dehbru habat,” I whispered without meaning to. The Zhuban’s eyes flickered to me before going back to his imaginary victim. I wondered if the marshals should be feeling anything yet. There are stories told that the Crimson Elites can crush an enemy’s windpipe from a distance. I’d never witnessed it myself, never even seen it tried. Seemed like a lot of effort considering the marshals were right there; if he really wanted to take a chance then he could just as well leap at one of them and get a grip around his neck. Then I realised his hands were too close together and were low down. It wasn’t a man’s neck he was envisioning; it was a child’s.
“Too far,” he said at last. “The little bitch is too far away.”
“Who?” I asked.
He nodded towards the marshals. “The presumptuous child they call a queen. We are too far away and my dehbru habat is too weak.”
“Oh, well, sorry to hear it. Don’t suppose you could take out the marshals? Then we could get free and go our separate ways?”
He shook his head and held out his palms. They were marked with an intricate set of symbols. “The dehbru habat is high magic, granted to us by the angels of the second constellation. The target’s name is imprinted on our flesh by master astronomers. The death sentence I carry will only work on the girl.” Frustration played across his features. “But I must be closer, much closer.”
Most cultures on the continent would consider belief in angels to be a form of religion, but the Zhuban argue that they don’t worship gods and are thus atheists whose worldview is philosophically and scientifically pure. In fact they consider religion—that is, everything different from what they believe in—to be childish superstition. Should you ever encounter a Zhuban Crimson Elite, I recommend you not explain the flaw in their logic. “I suppose you should have skipped trying to kill us and snuck into the capital instead,” I observed.
He shook his head. “Stupid naghram. I would never get within a thousand steps of her. Not unless—”
“Not unless you were brought before her after being condemned to death by the magistrate.” I shook my head. “You wanted to be captured…”
He smiled. “Do you think these two imbeciles could have stopped me if I hadn’t let them?”
“So then everything’s going according to plan?”
“No. I was a fool. I thought he would try to sneak up on me and strike me with his mace. But he used the coward’s way.” The big man’s lips curled into a snarl as he looked down at the bandaged wound the crossbow bolt had left.
“But the aquae sulfex…”
He shook his head. “Their medicine is strong, but something is broken inside me. I will come to my execution too weakened to perform the dehbru habat.”
“Guess you’ll just have to strangle her the old-fashioned way,” I said.
He spat and held up his hands. “I have no gloves,” he said. “An Elite cannot touch the flesh of the profane, not even to kill her.”
“I’m sure if you ask nicely, someone will lend you their gloves. Or maybe just mittens. Can you strangle someone with mittens?”
“You mock me, naghram. The gloves we wear to slay the profane must be blessed by the Celestial Astronomer herself. The business of souls is not a matter for weavers.”
“Seems like a lot of work,” I said.
“The path of destiny is not easy, naghram. But when I die I will climb the hundred thousand steps and take my place upon the great wheel to sit alongside the angels of enlightenment. You? You will burn for a thousand years. You should turn to the path of reason while you still can.”
I pointed to the shadowblack around my left eye. “I think my afterlife is already spoken for.”
The Zhuban leaned in to look at me more closely. “Those markings, joined half-circles like the crescent moons, and twisting vines like angry snakes… are you a holy man of your people?”
I shook my head. “Just the opposite. I’m…” How the hell do you explain the shadowblack to a Zhuban zealot? “You might call me an apostate, though an unintentional one.”
He nodded. “It is well then. You will kill the bitch-queen for me.”
“Why in the world would I do that?”
“They have captured you for some crime, yes? You killed someone, perhaps?”
I shook my head. “I mistakenly wiped blood on the Daroman flag so, technically, I declared war on the empire.”
The Zhuban gave a small, churlish laugh. “A vain and superstitious people, these Daroman. It will be their downfall.” He leaned towards me. “Now listen to me, naghram. When they prepare you for death they will take you to her. They will expect you to plead for your life, which will be your instinct. Do not beg. It will make no difference to the outcome. Instead, set your eyes and your mind to finding an opportunity—an instant in which you can strike her down. Perhaps you keep a small blade hidden on your person? Or if that fails, simply use your hands to crush her throat.”
“So you want me to skip a quick death in favour of being tortured for days?”
He smiled even as he shook his head in disgust. “Coward! I cannot imagine how you think. What does pain matter to one who acts in accordance with destiny?”
I shrugged. “The only thing ‘destiny’ ever gave me were these marks around my eye that’ve gotten me hunted by every man, woman and halfwit who has a clue what they are. Other than that, ‘destiny’ hasn’t had much to say to me.”
“It does now. The universe speaks to you through me, naghram. But if your soul is too tainted to hear its words, then know this: within the Daroman court there are those who await the performance of this deed. Strike down the queen and they will protect you. Think, naghram, of the rewards they will grant you!”
I considered his words. Serving some barbarian Zhubanese philosopher’s notion of fate wasn’t my idea of a good time, but staying alive, however unpleasant, was something I’d grown accustomed to. And money? Money meant freedom. It meant more chances to find someone who could cure my shadowblack before my soul was completely eaten by a demon or one of my beloved clan members finally got a good clean shot at me. Money was something I needed badly.
Could I murder a queen? A child, no less. I looked over at Reichis. What would happen to the squirrel cat if they killed me? No matter how merciful the marshals tried to be, the little bugger would keep coming for them until he’d gotten revenge. Harrex would put another bolt in him and this time there’d be no aquae sulfex to save his life.
The Zhuban leaned his head back and looked up at the stars. “The voice of destiny reaches inside you, naghram. It is well. You will be blessed in this life and the next.”
Then he took in a deep breath and suddenly let it out, hard, his stomach clenching as if it was caught in an iron vice. He took in another deep breath and did it again.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He tensed his stomach again, even harder. Blood seeped through the dressing covering his wounds.
“I have fulfilled my service to the angels. You are my arrow
now, guided by my hand to strike down our mutual enemy.”
He continued breathing in this way, tensing his stomach over and over.
Harrex and Parsus noticed the strange convulsions and got up.
“He’s trying to kill himself,” Harrex said.
Parsus reached him first, trying in vain to get him to stop. “We’re out of aquae sulfex! There’s nothing I can do.”
“Knock him out with your mace!” Harrex shouted.
Parsus unbuckled the mace from his belt, but it was too late. Blood was dripping through the bandages onto the ground in front of the Zhuban.
“I go to rest upon the wheel now, little naghram. Fulfil our mission and know that you do so with destiny’s blessing… and with mine.” He leaned into me, and before I could pull away I felt his kiss on my cheek. His head slumped down against my shoulder as the life left his body.
8
The Queen’s Game
Two days of travel, twelve hours in a holding cell and a twenty-minute trial in front of a bored and irritable old magistrate later, I was finally dragged into the queen’s court of justice, duly convicted for my rather sloppy declaration of war against the Daroman empire. There was a certain irony to the fact that while my offences until now had been entirely accidental, there was a decent chance I was about to murder their queen.
A roomful of arrogant nobles gave me dirty looks as they arrayed themselves around the throne of their eleven-year-old ruler in eager anticipation of seeing me hang. It wasn’t doing much to improve my outlook on Daroman society.
The queen’s court of justice was beautiful in the way that only a lie—well told and delivered with the soft flick of a seductive tongue in your ear—can be. The whole place looked as if it had been carved from a single slab of polished marble. Ornate columns rose from the floor to a magnificently domed ceiling above without revealing seams or joints. Delicate gold and silver inlays entwined like lovers with cherry-wood engravings along the walls, telling the story of the Daroman people’s journey from a loose collection of pastoral herders to the mightiest empire on the continent, all of it leading to where the world’s youngest (or perhaps oldest, if you believed the stories) monarch sat waiting for me.
Her throne was made of oak, small and almost preposterously modest. The Daroman people fancied these touches of humility differentiated them from the more brutal empires of old. They were a sophisticated people, learned in philosophy, agriculture and, of course, warfare. These represented the Daroman way of doing business: first, try to convince your small country to join the empire, through well-intentioned and civilised debate on the benefits of territorial partnership; then bribe you with assurances of a better food supply than you’ve ever had before; if neither of those work, kick the crap out of you with the biggest and best-trained army the continent has ever seen.
But if the Daroman empire had absorbed the resources and citizenry of other nations, they had also absorbed a lot of their culture. Daily life in the Daroman capital looked nothing like that of those pastoral herders with their tall, brown horses and short, fierce tempers. Oh, some of those folk still existed—hundreds of thousands of them lived in the small towns that littered the countryside of Darome. But they were relics now. Cute anachronisms long abandoned by their great-great-great-grandchildren. Other than making the “heartland pilgrimage”—a kind of rite of passage for Daroman teenagers—the average noble hadn’t seen any of their coarser kin in generations. I suppose that’s why the queen could be forgiven for asking the question she did.
“Are you one of our heart-folk?” Her voice was small but dignified, a pleasant, if not quite reassuring, contrast to the coarse hands of the marshals who forced me to my knees before the throne.
The queen was a lovely-looking girl. Darker skinned than most of her subjects, thanks to a bridal choice made several hundred years ago by her great-grandfather dozens of times removed that seems to have stuck. She wore a simple headdress over black hair that fell in tight ringlets around her young face. The first hints of cheekbones had emerged to complement a small, flat nose and an eleven-year-old’s soft jawline. A gold lace dress with rose-coloured trim covered her from the tops of her feet to the base of her neck and back down again to her wrists. She wore no jewellery other than a simple silver circlet over her headdress with a single black gemstone at its centre.
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “I’m nobody’s ‘heart-folk’.”
Someone slapped me across the head from behind. I suspected it was Marshal Harrex. He’d been friendly enough up until now, all things considered, but here in the queen’s court I guess he had to show he wasn’t soft on men headed for the noose. He leaned over and whispered in my ear. “You’ll call her ‘Majesty’, or they’ll make me gut you right here.”
“No, Your Majesty,” I amended.
“Forgive my assumption,” the queen said, tilting her head as she examined me, “but you have a kind face, unlike those normally brought before me. I was… reminded of our heart-folk.”
I had to laugh at that. I suspect the marshal did too since he didn’t hit me again. “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but I don’t think anyone’s ever said that about my face.” I winked my left eye.
She leaned down a bit to see under the brim of my hat. “Ah, of course, the black markings.” She had an oddly wistful tone to her voice. “Like the flowing letters of a language we’ve all forgotten. They hold a kind of magic, do they not?”
“He’s got the shadowblack, Your Majesty,” Marshal Harrex said.
Her Majesty leaned forward some more and peered at me even more closely. “Yes,” she said, “I do note it, and yet still I find you have a kind face, for all the devilishness of your tattoos.” Then she looked at my hat. “And you wear a frontier hat, much like our beloved shepherds do!” she observed with delight.
Her apparent innocence was getting on my nerves. “Keeps the sun out of my face, that’s all.”
She nodded silently but kept her attention on the hat. “Those symbols…”
“This is superstitious ignorance, Your Majesty,” came a voice from behind the throne.
I looked up at one of the women standing behind the queen. She had chestnut hair and wore long white robes with a rose-lace band across the top, covering her shoulders. A taller man and a blonde woman in similar garb stood next to her, he with a gold-lace band and she with a pale blue one.
“Forgive my tutor, Master Kellen,” the queen said, an odd mixture of remorse and anxiety in her voice.
I shook my head. “Mister Kellen,” I said, “not Master.”
The queen’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not a mage? But those symbols around your hat, and the tattoos around your forearms… I assumed you were Jan’Tep.”
“Disowned, Your Majesty. A minor disagreement with my father.”
“Might I inquire as to the nature of this disagreement?” There was a cough somewhere and the queen’s eyes glanced quickly around the room, as if she knew what the dozens of assembled nobles must be thinking: that this interview was supposed to only be a formality that preceded my beheading which preceded lunch.
“It was a small question of mystical theology, Your Majesty. We disagreed over whether I was, in fact, a demon child left by the shadowblacks in place of his true son.” That wasn’t strictly speaking what had happened, but it was slightly less humiliating than the truth.
“Very well,” she said, ignoring what I thought was some fine gallows humour. “Have you been informed, and do you fully understand why you are here, Mister Kellen?”
“Because I broke the law, Your Majesty. Oh, and because today is my eighteenth birthday, which makes me eligible for the death penalty here in your fine, civilised nation.”
She looked just a little bit surprised. “You are rather young to be facing death for treason, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“You’re a little young to be sending me to my death, if you don’t mind me saying,” I replied.
There was a smattering of lau
ghter in the room and the queen’s face twitched with uncertainty. She was wondering if I was making fun of her. Queen or not, she was an eleven-year-old girl in a roomful of adults—well, an eleven-year-old girl unless you buy all the Daroman claptrap about the monarch being the reincarnated soul of the entire line of previous rulers, which would make her somewhere around two thousand years old.
Harrex struck me in the back of the head again. “Marshal,” I said without turning, “if you keep stroking my hair like that, people are going to think you fancy me.”
I heard something sharp come out of its sheath.
“Marshal,” the queen warned, her voice calm and soft, “would you draw a blade in front of your queen?” It was barely a question. She was re-establishing her primacy in the room without stamping her feet or raising her voice. A good tactic, I thought.
Whatever blade Harrex had pulled was quickly hidden away again. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. I sought only to ensure your safety.”
A dozen logical replies hung in the air, ranging from, “I know you only have my best interests at heart” to “The guy’s on his knees in unbreakable handcuffs surrounded by over a hundred people; are you thick?” The queen used none of these. In fact, she said nothing at all for a long while.
“Mister Kellen, we will proceed now,” she said finally. “I ask again, have you been informed, and do you fully understand, why you are before me today?”
This was Daroman justice at work. They considered the death penalty so abhorrent and so demeaning of the general good that even once a magistrate’s court had heard your case, even when that same magistrate, in conjunction with his esteemed Council of Nine has rendered judgment, the death penalty can’t be administered until the queen herself has interviewed the defendant and validated the verdict. Again, like all things Daroman, it sounded very civilised until you figured out that these interviews took, on average, two minutes and no monarch had ever, not once in the last two hundred years, overturned the verdict of a magistrate.
“I have been informed, and I do understand,” I said, confounding expectations. The room went silent. Usually the defendant said he either hadn’t been told, or didn’t understand, the verdict. But that made no difference at all because all that would happen is one of the marshals would simply repeat the verdict and then you’d be killed anyway. My plan didn’t have much better odds, but it did have the virtue of being original.
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