“He’s a pirate, Niko. If we go after him, we’ll have the whole goddamned island of Jamaii ready to keelhaul us. They’ll sink a whole ship just to make sure we go down with it, probably chained to the goddamned mast.”
Niko shifted on needles of aggravation. “I don’t care about Carian vran Lea. I want this Admiral, this arrogant, insolent pretender who dares to imagine himself the equal of his betters—”
“Raine’s truth,” Consuevé muttered.
Niko lost his train of thought.
He followed Consuevé’s motion around the room with a narrowed gaze. “What are you talking about?” He knew why he believed this Admiral fellow was so audacious, but why did Consuevé?
“Well, it’s obviously a lie, isn’t it?” Consuevé sat back down with an airy wave. “What they’re saying about him?”
Niko drew back from the edge of what he perceived to be a potentially threatening truth. He dropped his voice. “What are they saying about him?”
Consuevé propped a foot over one knee. “That he’s plus-crossed a node. That he can make double-backs in his sleep. That he has three rings—”
“Three rings?” Niko quivered all over.
“Bloody ridiculous, isn’t it?” Consuevé missed entirely Niko’s sudden riveted stare. “Only the Great Master has three rings. And who’s really going to believe this Admiral bloke got his rings from the Citadel’s High Mage when the woman’s been dead for centuries? They must think the whole strand’s composed of imbeciles and idiots.”
“You never told me the Admiral had three rings.”
“Don’t be a fool and swallow the shite they’re shoveling. It’s just a lot of posturing to position their candidate more strongly beside the Great Master, as if by saying this Admiral’s got three rings it implies he also has the Great Master’s blessing. Everybody sees through that shite.”
Everyone patently didn’t or half the strand wouldn’t be in rebellion.
But three rings. Three rings?
He knew a man who had three rings…
Niko’s eyes narrowed to slits. But Franco Rohre wouldn’t have those rings for much longer. Not once Niko got his hands around his throat. He would feed him those rings and watch him choke on the gold.
Abruptly the doors banged open amid a ruffled protest, “Milord, you cannot—”
Niko spun in his seat to see a tall, dark-haired man wearing a crimson kimono painted with gold birds striding into his drawing room. Two hulking Avatarens with scimitars at their belts followed after him. Last came his butler, looking browbeaten. Niko glared at the butler. “Get out.”
He went.
“Ah, Niko, what a pleasure it is for us to see you again.”
Niko couldn’t stand people who spoke in the royal we, but that was the least of the reasons he despised the Karakurt’s associate, Pearl. He also despised him because he titled himself Speaker of the Karakurt’s Will and strutted about everywhere as if he held all the power of his mistress.
“It’s been too long since our last conversation.” Pearl walked to Niko’s sideboard and helped himself to some of his wine. The brutes meanwhile took up a position behind Niko’s chair. Consuevé, damn him, was just sitting there, useless as always.
“I don’t need you pecking at me, Pearl.” Niko sat back in his chair again, pondering all the reasons he despised Pearl. “Dore’s already said everything there is to be said.”
“Oh, we don’t think he’s said everything.” Pearl came over and stood above Consuevé, smiling his corpse smile until the man got the hint and moved over. The Karakurt’s second-in-command seated himself sinuously and crossed his legs. He wore black silk pants beneath his ornate kimono, and woven sandals over split-toed socks. Something about him always made Niko wonder if he was a eunuch—maybe it was the kohl lining his eyes.
Pearl held up his goblet to Niko. “The Lord Abanachtran sends his regards.”
By regards, Pearl meant the Lord Abanachtran had sent him, which was itself a communication of the Lord’s actual regard for Niko. If he’d had any esteem for Niko at all, he would’ve sent someone else.
Niko summoned a supercilious smile. “What do you want, Pearl?”
“What do any of us want?” Pearl waved vaguely with his goblet. “Peace, prosperity…” He fixed his kohl-ringed eyes on Niko. They were even blacker than the spider tattoo on his forehead. “The ring and the weldmap.”
Niko pushed out of his chair—he couldn’t sit across from the horrid man and not want to choke the life out of him. “I don’t have them yet.”
“The Lord Abanachtran is growing tired of your yets.”
Niko flung him a black glare. “He’s asking for things that can’t be gotten! I can’t conjure a weldmap out of thin air. And Alshiba’s ring is the only one that will safely allow anyone other than a vestal to enter Illume Belliel. She’s not going to simply give it to me.”
“Then take it from her, Niko.”
Consuevé—damn him—grunted to the efficacy of this course of action.
Niko poured some wine, eyeing Pearl the while. The man wasn’t threatening so much as unsettling, the way finding a spot of dark liquid on your silk Veneisean carpet can unsettle you when you don’t know what caused it or how it got there. Pearl was a dark spot of something icky congealed on Niko’s couch.
“I’ll get him what he wants,” Niko groused. “I just need more time.”
Pearl cast his dark gaze around Niko’s drawing room, leaving a coat of slime on everything. Niko was going to have to replace all the furniture now.
“It would be a shame to see all of this crumble—this estate, your life of luxury.” Pearl let his corpse gaze come to rest on Niko and sipped his wine. He had a way of drinking his wine that made you feel like he was drinking something else. “And it will crumble, Niko. If you fail him, he’ll smear your destruction across the Middle Kingdoms and make you watch the while. Or, I suppose…” Pearl paused, and his black eyes became electric with wicked amusement, “he could always give you as a gift to the Fifth Vestal.”
Niko choked on his wine.
Pearl rose and slinked over to Niko, stopping close enough that Niko could see the wrinkles beneath his tattoo. The man was not nearly as youthful as he projected from afar. “What the Lord giveth, the Lord can taketh away, and the Lord has been far more patient with you than any of his other agents, Niko.”
Niko brushed wine from his coat irritably. “Even so, I need more time.”
“You have twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty—” Niko choked on the impossibility. He gaped at Pearl, wanting to rail and protest, but all he managed were embarrassing strangling noises.
“You chose to play with the big boys, Niko.” Pearl’s raccoon smile conveyed just how much he was enjoying watching this game. “Now it’s time to gird up your little boy loins and start running, or they’ll crush you like a too-ripe melon.” He waggled a finger at Niko’s chin. “It would be a shame to ruin that pretty face.”
He handed Niko his empty goblet and strode away, adding without turning, “Excellent wine, by the way. I’ll entreat the Lord Abanachtran to spare your wine cellar when he lays waste to your estate. My mistress appreciates a good vintage.”
The Avatarens slammed the doors behind their exit.
Consuevé blew out his breath. “I hate that effeminate bastard.”
Niko leaned on the sideboard, not trusting to his knees or his stomach.
Twenty-four hours!
Only twenty-four hours to get Franco Rohre and Alshiba strapped to the whipping post of his will?
Thirteen bloody hells. He’d better get to work.
Sixty-five
“Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain.”
–The zanthyr Leyd
Viernan hal’Jaitar paced beneath the colored glass globes hanging from the beams of Prince Radov’s tent, with every step feeling Cephrael’s noose tightening around his neck. His nails dug into the flesh of his palm, curled around the
paper he clenched in his hand. Anger made his eyes burn.
Outside Radov’s compound, the desert wind was scouring their campsite and laying waste to anyone who dared venture forth, but deep inside, beyond a beaded curtain, the Ruling Prince was taking a bath and talking loudly to his absinthe. The Shamshir’im messenger who was awaiting Viernan’s reply pretended not to notice.
Viernan himself noticed hardly at all, for the words of the letter in his hand had become a doleful chant.
‘Dannym’s soldiers found at Nahavand.’
Nahavand. Nahavand, of all confounded places!
What a cunning ploy on Gydryn val Lorian’s part to send his men to Nahavand, knowing Viernan would never seek them there—would never even imagine looking across enemy lines for the missing army of his supposed ally!
Oh, he’d played his hand expertly, had Dannym’s fickle king. How long had he known Viernan was acting against him? How much had he learned of M’Nador’s complicity in the capture and torment of his sons? And how deeply did Gydryn ken the alliance between Radov, Bethamin and Morwyk? These indigestible questions churned acid as they turned endlessly in Viernan’s gut. He spun and paced in the other direction, dragging a whirlwind wake with his thoughts.
Would that he might’ve washed his hands of every val Lorian once and for all. The fool men just didn’t know when to give up and die! He notched them on his list of most loathed, along with gypsies, zanthyrs and Thrace Weyland.
The discordant notes of a bullfrog’s nighttime melody accosted Viernan’s ears. Radov was singing to his absinthe now. Viernan caught the Shamshir’im wincing and speared him with a venomous stare. By what right did such a man judge his prince?
Perhaps he claims the right in absentia, a voice goaded. Sadly, Viernan couldn’t deny that Radov seemed to have abdicated all claims to reason.
‘If Morwyk needs ships, let him have the damned ships!’ Radov had spoken over the rim of his glass as he once would’ve spoken over the shoulder of his mistress while taking her, his mind obviously elsewhere.
The Ruling Prince’s mind was always elsewhere these days.
Viernan had tried to reason with him. ‘But, my prince—’
‘No, Viernan, what do we need with a fleet of ships? They can’t help us reclaim Raku. I need soldiers, not boats.’
‘But with the bulk of your army moving on Raku, my prince, you’ll be leaving Tal’Shira unprotected.’
‘Who’s going to invade Tal’Shira? No, Viernan. Morwyk’s giving me half his army. Give him as many damned ships as he wants.’
Viernan could feel his hold on events slipping as sand through his fingers, grating in the gaping wound Radov had made of his reign.
Now they were marching all of their men into the very same conflict which had, upon their last engagement, resulted in corpses from the front lines to the horizon. Even Viernan had shuddered as he’d gazed over the ashen dead that had littered the Khalim Plains, the result of a single working of Abdul-Basir’s damnable Mage.
Then had come the dragons…
After which, the two armies had squatted a constipated stalemate while M’Nador’s hopes for reclaiming Raku and the Kutsamak ulcerated. Now their troops were marching back to that no-man’s land with rusted steel and cankered fortitude, their arses still plugged by the ill humours spawned by the dragons’ fell breath.
It troubled Viernan immensely not yet knowing this ‘plan’ for eliminating the Sundragons, upon which M’Nador’s sure victory hinged. It troubled him placing all their eggs in Dore Madden’s crocodilian nest. It troubled him still more having no idea if Gydryn val Lorian was alive.
The world was falling to pieces beneath his feet.
‘…If it was Cephrael returned me to your doorstep, Viernan, you can be certain He had his reasons…’
Trell val Lorian’s words had become a curse that haunted Viernan’s every waking hour. His every sleeping one, too. Would that he might’ve rolled back the hands of time and strangled the impudent prince while he’d sat across a pot of tea from him. Now his own daughter had paid the blood-price for his hubris.
Of course, better Taliah than himself, but he missed her skills.
The sound of flapping canvas mingled with the howl of the wind and the scrape of sand abrading oiled cloth. Viernan didn’t envy the Shamshir’im, who would be riding through that storm with new orders for Viernan’s guild of spies…providing, of course, that Dore’s emissary actually arrived with the recipe for ridding themselves of the malady called Sundragons.
Already Viernan had thrice flipped the hourglass beyond the time when the emissary was meant to appear with his so-called solution.
Pshaw! If anyone else had made such a claim, Viernan would’ve dismissed it outright, but it had been spoken across the withered lips of Dore Madden, a man who’d dared attempt to bring down even the High Mage of the Citadel and would’ve managed the near-impossible feat if not for Arion Tavestra.
Arion Tavestra…bloody Arion Tavestra. Just thinking the dead wielder’s name brought the taste of char to Viernan’s tongue. Tavestra was another one who just couldn’t tell when it was time to lie down and die—
The flaps of Radov’s tent blew open in a blast of stinging sand.
A cloaked figure breezed through the opening.
Viernan spied him with a mordant eye while his Shamshir’im rushed to pin the tent flaps closed again. “You’re late.”
“I don’t mark the hours by your convenience.”
The stranger pushed back his hood. Emerald green eyes pierced into Viernan’s from between strands of oily raven hair. The zanthyr shifted his gaze around Radov’s tent and sprouted a supercilious smile. “Ooh, I feel so clandestine.” He pushed past a wordless Viernan, obviously making for a chest sporting a collection of crystal decanters.
Viernan finally summoned his voice back from the canyon of disgust where it had been retching. “You’re Dore’s emissary?” He would’ve welcomed a rotting corpse over the zanthyr Leyd.
The creature turned with a full glass of Radov’s most expensive bourbon in hand—not that the Ruling Prince would notice; he hadn’t imbibed anything but absinthe for months—but the effrontery raised Viernan’s hackles.
“Viernan hal’Jaitar.” The zanthyr sipped his bourbon—the prince’s bourbon—and eyed him over the rim with a malicious humor dancing in his emerald eyes. “Fancy finding you still wandering around upright.”
“As opposed to slithering, as is your wont?” Of all the creatures with which to forge an unlikely alliance, Dore would’ve picked the most vile to ever disgrace the realm. The zanthyr Leyd accounted for more than half the reason Viernan despised zanthyrs, and the man himself knew it and blatantly gloried in it.
Of all the capricious stories told about zanthyrs—pledging allegiance to each of two feuding dukes and then selling their secrets to the other; wooing the princess-heir of a dynasty away from her betrothed and tumbling two kingdoms into chaos; inserting himself as an advisor to a merchant prince and destroying his dynasty—if it would result in catastrophe and cause irreparable harm, Leyd was sure to be behind it.
The creature had caused so much trouble in his long history that Viernan couldn’t understand why his brethren hadn’t gotten rid of him. Even if it was true that a zanthyr’s immortality was tied to the life of the realm…there had to be some way to eliminate the malevolent man—like sinking him to the bottom of a volcano and encouraging it to cool. Surely it would take a creature like Leyd at least a few decades to dig himself out again.
“This is quite the little soiree you’re spinning together out here in the dust, Viernan.” Leyd peeked through the beaded curtain between the two Talien Knights standing guard and arched an amused brow at the drunken prince now snoring in the bathtub. He turned a knowing grin back to him, full of goading.
Viernan’s skin tried to crawl off his bones.
Leyd continued his stroll of the room. “Two score eidola plus the gathering thousands…perhaps your army will act
ually make it to the walls of Raku this time.”
Viernan stared blackly at him. “Do you ask so you can inform the Emir of our plans?”
“Now why would I do that…” he waved airily with his glass, though his green eyes held a daggered perspicacity, “when I’ve brought you the means to eliminate their best defense?”
“As if that would give you pause.” Viernan crossed the room to his map table. “Let’s see it then, this windfall you claim to offer us.”
Leyd cast him a smile that was all fangs. He pulled something from inside his cloak and tossed it on the table.
Viernan’s brows shoved upwards almost to the line of his keffiyeh. He lifted his eyes from the rectangular glass lying on the wood and fixed them once more on Leyd. “I haven’t seen a simulacra outside of the Sormitáge in…”
“Centuries?” A corner of Leyd’s mouth curled patronizingly. “Some of us still recall how to make them.”
A simulacra enabled a fourth strand flow of elae to waken an illusion of the patterns forged within its glass confines. Viernan touched the glass and summoned the fourth, whereupon a three-dimensional pattern shimmered into being a handspan above the table.
Viernan’s eyes widened considerably.
Leyd smirked. “The drachwyr rendezvous near Raku every third phase of the moon. It’s the only time they’re all together here in Alorin. You have to work this matrix when they’re all together—are you hearing me, Viernan?”
Viernan tore his eyes away from the illusion to spear Leyd with his gaze. “Like a caterwauling grimalkin in rut.”
Leyd’s grin broadened. “You really are a vicious old bastard, aren’t you?” He took Viernan by the shoulder with his iron fingers. “You’ll need more than bravado to carry this through though.”
Viernan recalled several other reasons why he despised zanthyrs. He jerked free of Leyd’s hold. “Spare me your condescension.” He returned his attention to the pattern—nay, the matrix of patterns. It was as ingeniously terrifying as one of Dore Madden’s contrivances. Some of the patterns were so complex that Viernan had no idea what they were meant to do.
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