The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  In spite of his unsatisfied curiosity, Llesho found that he actually enjoyed the three months he spent in the laundry. His lessons in combat kept his mind as well as his body sharp, and during their time in the steaming washroom, Master Den was starting to fill the great gaping hole in Llesho’s defenses where Minister Lleck used to stand. Llesho didn’t fool himself that his teacher felt the same devotion to Thebin and its prince that old Lleck had. If it hadn’t been for hand-to-hand practice, Llesho would have believed Master Den liked him.

  Standing in the shade of a billowing length of cloth on the drying lines with Bixei and the other novices, however, Llesho concluded that the teacher must surely hate him, and simply hid it well during laundry duty. If he could have figured out the problem Master Den had with him, Llesho would have changed it. But the harder he tried, and the better his skills became, the more he met with the sharp side of Den’s tongue.

  “Don’t think, boy! Move! A decent opponent will have you on your arse before you decide to hit him at all.” A shift of his weight, a flip of one wrist, and Master Den had demonstrated the fault by dropping Llesho to his knees. Then he moved on to Bixei, and his tone softened; Master Den played out the same move, but slowed many times so that the students could see how the wrist twisted and how a nudge with the side of one foot brought the man down. “Good,” Den said, and slapped Bixei on the back while Llesho seethed.

  He had thought that his swift improvement would win him the praise of his teacher, but in fact Master Den ignored him much of the time, except to correct him for imperceptible flaws in his technique, while calling upon Bixei to partner him when the master wished to demonstrate a new combination. Llesho had stopped trying to impress his teacher weeks ago, and found that the forms came even more easily now, when he didn’t think. If Master Den had shown some appreciation of his skill, the students might have shaped their attitude toward him around their teacher’s good opinion. But as Master Den became more disapproving, his classmates became more distant. Llesho could have ignored the others, except for Bixei.

  Bixei had two things which Llesho did not: Stipes, and his work assignment as Markko’s messenger and servant. He protected both against the newcomer, and Llesho could not convince him, no matter what he said or did, that he wanted neither Stipes’ attentions nor the favorable eye of the overseer. The laundry suited him just fine, and he preferred girls.

  His move to the laundry had come to him with deceptive casualness, just a word at the end of a practice session as if nothing important had happened at all. Llesho was therefore unprepared for the way his whole life seemed to shudder and tilt on its axis when Bixei arrived late for instruction with the announcement, “His Honor the overseer wishes to summon the novice Llesho to serve him for the coming cycle,”

  Expressionlessly, Den bowed to acknowledge the command, which Llesho himself heard with dread. Llesho would take Bixei’s position with the overseer, while Bixei himself would rotate to weapons. With one announcement, Llesho made two enemies: Bixei, who had already passed through weapons repair, resented his loss of position. And Radimus, who should have rotated to the overseer’s office, likewise resented his return to mop duty.

  “I am content to work in the laundry,” Llesho said with a humble bow, his eyes downcast to hide his very real fear at the change. Since his first days in the compound he had avoided the overseer’s cottage, which had terrified him from the start with its vague sense of watchful evil. Since he had seen the witch-finder skulking around it, he’d put a face and a reason to his dread. And it was Bixei’s task assignment, or had been. The other boy was not pleased.

  However much of this Master Den understood, he said nothing, but pointed out with an arched eyebrow, “Lord Chin-shi is not in the habit of giving slaves their choice of assignments. One does, however, have the option of taking up one’s task with a beating or without one.”

  “Without, Master. I apologize for my pride.” Llesho fell to his knees and knocked his head into the sawdust of the practice area. Master Den accepted the apology with a small bow and broke the class into partners to practice the most recent lesson, Llesho found himself alone and staring into the face of the golden boy, Bixei, who glared back with a cold glitter in his eye. It was worse even than Llesho had guessed.

  “Are you going to strike me down with your witchcraft, pearl diver, or will you pretend to use the arts Master Den teaches?” Bixei asked, his arms folded across his chest. So much for the overseer’s opinion of him.

  “I am no witch,” Llesho stood up to face his accuser.

  “Witch,” Bixei repeated. “Everyone knows you consorted with a witch who now stands accused, and that you use the magical powers she taught you to conquer your opponents rather than fight fairly.” Bixei meant more than the training exercises: he was furious to have lost his position in the overseer’s office. Llesho thought he might even believe the charge, which frightened him more than his opponent’s jealous fury.

  Witchcraft had an evil reputation in the camp. Llesho had attempted to warn a hunted witch and had spoken to spirits. But his own present danger meant nothing: Llesho reacted to the taunt with all the rage and the pain of a lifetime of losses knotting his hands into fists. His home was gone, his brothers scattered, his sister murdered. And Lleck was dead, nothing left of him but his demanding spirit. Kwan-ti was gone, disappeared just ahead of the witch-finder, though only the gods knew how she had escaped. Without realizing it, Llesho had reached out to Master Den for the kindness he had lost, but his teacher watched him as if he was one of Master Markko’s experiments, and said nothing in his defense.

  “Lord Chin-shi has put a bounty on her head, and you will be next. You will burn in her place.”

  “No!”

  Technique fled in the face of Bixei’s shattering denouncement. Looking into the eyes of his opponent, Llesho felt in his blood that it had come to a killing moment between them. He reached for his accuser with his fists, not to knock Bixei down or control him or even kill him with one clean blow. He wanted to tear the golden boy apart with tooth and claw, to stomp his flesh into a pulpy stew in the sawdust and rip the pieces into shreds when he was done. But his rage made him clumsy; Bixei deflected his blows, though he had to struggle to match the insane speed with which Llesho attacked.

  “She’s not a witch,” he growled, and landed a blow that knocked the wind out of his opponent.

  Bixei had been waiting for the moment, luring him in, and even while Llesho was glorying in the feel of his fist impacting on the body of his foe, Bixei grabbed the extended hand and twisted his arm, flipping him on his back with an elbow in his throat.

  Llesho thrashed on the ground, ignoring the pressure on his throat and trying to get a purchase on his enemy.

  “What is she, then—your lover?” Bixei taunted while the students, and Master Den himself, looked on. Llesho shook his head, though the motion ground sawdust into his hair and brought Bixei’s elbow closer to strangling him. “Teacher,” he gasped, and Bixei smiled as though his teeth were a trap that was about to close on its prey. “Are you her sorcerer’s apprentice, then?”

  “She was good,” Llesho insisted. He knew Bixei would consider him a fool if he said any more, and probably the other boy would be right, but he had to try and make him understand. More important, he had to make Master Den understand. “She taught me that goodness could still exist in a world I thought the gods had abandoned.” He looked into Bixei’s eyes when he said it, willing the other to understand something he didn’t quite understand himself.

  “It’s a shame she didn’t teach you how to fight.” Bixei pressed his elbow tighter against Llesho’s throat, so that he stopped his opponent’s breathing altogether. Then, having won his point, he released Llesho and offered him a hand up. “She tricked you. Evil rules the world now, and she is part of it.”

  It was hard not to believe, with Thebin under the power of the Harn and everyone he had ever loved dead or lost to him. But the spirit of his mentor had g
iven him hope. So he took the hand Bixei offered, and kept hold of it when he was on his feet again.

  “First we take the world back,” he said, “and then we see who helps us and who tries to stop us.” It felt like a pledge, and Bixei met his level gaze uneasily. But he offered his other hand, and they clasped, their wrists crossed in the age-old symbol of allegiance. Neither knew exactly where it would take them, nor how soon the unspoken pact would be tested. They both knew in their hearts, however, that this was something slaves did not do. Llesho expected Master Den to stop them with a lecture on humility, but their teacher watched them with the look of a merchant toting up a trade in his eyes.

  Where success had earned him fear and envy, Llesho’s failed attack on Bixei had created a wedge of sympathy that Llesho was quick enough to foster with occasional well-timed lapses in his performance. Master Den no longer watched him with faint disapproval, and even pulled him out of the class on occasion to demonstrate a new move or an improvement on an old one for his classmates. Llesho hated his new assignment in the overseer’s service, but even that worked to his advantage. If Bixei was still jealous, at least he didn’t blame Llesho for his lost status. They might never be friends, but Bixei seemed to have abandoned the feud he’d waged since Llesho arrived at the compound. He could imagine their uneasy alliance more easily in moments like this, however, when Bixei was not present.

  Llesho was sitting on the covered porch with Radimus and Stipes and others from his bachelor group and dinner bench. His chair was tilted on two legs so that the narrow, slatted back rested against the coral blocks of the barracks wall. Bixei was still at work in the weapons room, so Llesho had relaxed more than usual, listening to the others trade stories when Radimus, who leaned against the railing to watch him, asked, “Why a trident? That’s a tall man’s weapon, like the pike.” Radimus, who preferred the pike, pulled himself away from the railing and straightened to his full height as a demonstration.

  He’d let his guard down too soon, Llesho realized, setting his chair down on its four legs with a thump. He knew, without being told, that the story of his choice of arms in the weapons room must remain secret. Llesho had never again seen the woman who watched him there, nor, since that day, had he seen a knife like the one she had slipped up her sleeve. But he remembered the tension that had clenched in his stomach, and it was doing a return appearance under the curious eyes of his companions. Better to offer a lesser truth, he decided.

  “The food the pearls like best tends to settle to the bottom. You use a long-handled rake to stir it up.” He twitched a shoulder to acknowledge that they would surely find his story foolish.

  “My quarter-shift mates and I would imagine our rakes were tridents, and would wage mock battles in the water. We stirred up the bottom enough with our scrabbling feet, and had more fun than applying the rake head to the muck. When Master Jaks told me to choose my weapon, I felt awkward with a sword, but the weight of the trident isn’t much different from a muck rake, and it didn’t feel all that different to my hand, after I got used to being on dry land.”

  “I’m sure Master Jaks can find you a muck rake if you really want one,” Stipes suggested.

  The gladiators laughed companionably at the story and Llesho wondered if they each had an equally harmless tale to tell—a sword that reminded one of a cooking knife, or a stave that felt to the hand like a drover’s prod. Llesho’s explanation quickly turned into the story of how his friends saved his life, though he didn’t mention the spirit of his old mentor—

  “And I came out of the water dangling from my ankles like a pig on its way to slaughter. Foreman Shen-shu took one look at me and said, ‘Where’s your rake, boy?’ and down I went again, sputtering with water up my nose to look for the damned rake.”

  “I’d think after that you would avoid the trident like it had a pox on it,” Stipes remarked.

  Radimus laughed. “Master Jaks probably assigned him the trident because he knew it was the one weapon that Llesho wouldn’t ever lose.”

  Llesho expected the joke when he told the story, but this was close enough to the truth that Llesho flushed when he heard it—not because the rake was the reason he chose the trident, but because Jaks had directed him to the weapon and away from the knife that went to his hand like an extension of his body. He laughed quickly enough that his companions took the blush for embarrassment, except for Stipes, whose sharp gaze seemed to be looking for a chink in the face Llesho wore. He wouldn’t find one, Llesho determined. The trick to keeping secrets, he had learned from Master Den himself, was in not appearing to have secrets at all. So Llesho smiled blandly at the gladiator and greeted Bixei when he joined them on the porch.

  “ ’Lo, Bixei,” he said. “You just missed the story of my heroic rescue from the briny deep.”

  Stipes kicked a chair over to where his partner stood, but Bixei rejected the offer, while giving Llesho a warning about his tale: “Don’t tell Master Den, or he will start having practice in the bay,” he said, rubbing at a bruise the size of a coconut on his backside. Finding a support post to lean on, he grumbled his complaint, “That would make as much sense as hand-to-hand combat practice.”

  Madon, who still worked with the novices at weapons exercises, heard the complaint as he passed on his way to a group of senior gladiators spending their rest time with similar stories on the other side of the porch. “We can all see that you have a deep-seated aversion to unarmed combat, Bixei,” he drawled. “Something Master Den really should get to the bottom of, before it interferes with your training.”

  Llesho tried to keep a straight face, but even Stipes was snickering, and Bixei’s face turned so red it seemed to glow of its own light.

  “I don’t mind taking an injury in practice if it teaches me something useful,” he complained heatedly, and Llesho wondered which injury angered Bixei more: the one to his fundament, or the one to his pride. Since he was the only person on the porch who was smaller in build than Bixei, and had also been present when Master Den dumped Bixei in the dust, he decided not to ask. Bixei wasn’t giving anyone a chance to interrupt him, however.

  “Weapons practice makes sense, even equipment I don’t plan to compete with. A gladiator has to understand his opposition and use that experience to devise a counterattack. If a fighter should lose his own weapon during a battle, he has to be able to pick up his enemy’s and take the day with it. But an unarmed man cannot compete against a trident or a pike, or a sword. So why does he waste our time with something that will never serve us in the arena?”

  “You think you cannot save your life with your own hands?” Madon rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt to reveal a jagged scar that tore across his biceps. “The shaft of my pike had a flaw in the wood and broke with the first thrust of my opponent’s sword. His second thrust did this.”

  “See—” Bixei tried to interrupt, but Madon silenced him with a look.

  “I lured him inside my guard, and when he was committed to the strike, I did this—” with his left hand Madon lashed out in the “striking snake” move, stopping with the curved knuckles a whisper of air away from Bixei’s throat—“I suffered a wound, but the swordsman died.”

  Llesho stared at the man in wonder. Madon looked like a hero out of legend, so he didn’t know why it surprised him to discover that the gladiator was a hero in fact. Bixei, however,had turned deathly pale in contrast to the recent angry blush.

  “Of course, that was pure luck.” Madon relaxed his striking hand and examined his knuckles as a warrior checks his weapons for nicks or damage from the damp. “Master Den teaches hand-to-hand as an exercise in concentration and control; I wouldn’t depend on it to save my life against a trident. Unless, of course—” he gave the younger group a sly smirk—“Llesho here was holding the trident!” Laughing, he left them to return to his own bench where more laughter soon rippled out from the senior warriors.

  Bixei was seething, but Llesho gave him a smug grin. “We’ll get him,” he said. �
�Just give it time.”

  Bixei didn’t want to listen, but with Stipes to tease him out of his brooding, he soon entered into the outrageous plans for taking down the hero. Mud featured in many of their plans, as did pig slop. The night ended in laughter. Llesho would not hear that sound again for a very long time.

  Chapter Eight

  THE new assignment worried Llesho. Bixei had run errands to Lord Chin-shi’s house, fetched and carried about the compound, and he’d even been sent to bring Llesho himself from the pearl fishery, all tasks for someone who had earned Master Markko’s trust. In the first week of his new service, the overseer hadn’t said anything about Kwan-ti, or witchcraft, but he hadn’t sent Llesho out of the compound with messages either. Instead, Llesho swept out the workroom and the front office, then, up the narrow staircase, he scrubbed the loft room under the steeply sloping roof where Master Markko slept.

  The sleeping chamber held a single bed and two chests. The larger held the robes and breeches that Llesho was forbidden to touch; a servant came daily to tend Master Markko’s personal needs, and disappeared again to whence he came before the minor sun had joined its fellow in the sky. The second, smaller chest, was covered in a thick layer of grime and stuffed in a dark corner under the slanted eaves, as if forgotten. But when Llesho had tried to explore it, he found the chest bound with straps and locked with a complex mechanism he had never seen before and could not open.

  Llesho brought his master breakfast and a midday meal from the cookhouse, and sat in a corner when he wasn’t needed, trying to fight the boredom that pulled at his eyelids. With an occasional bland smile that didn’t help at all to hide the calculation in his eyes, Master Markko watched for Llesho to slip up and reveal himself as a witch. Since he knew nothing of magic, he couldn’t very well slip up there, which was almost a relief after his trial in the weapons room. So he wasn’t prepared for the day when everything changed.