The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  The overseer was not in his office when Llesho arrived, so he called out, “Master Markko, sir?” as humbly as he could.

  “In here, boy.”

  Llesho followed the answering summons to the back room, where he found Master Markko setting tightly lidded jars on a shelf over the worktable, marking each one off on a list in front of him. Llesho recognized some of the herbs hanging in bunches from the beamed ceiling, but others were foreign to him. He remembered Kwan-ti’s warning about touching the unknown plants in her healer’s pouch—the cure for one person might prove to be a poison to another—so he kept his hands clasped behind his back.

  “You have finally honored us with your presence,” Markko said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

  They spent the day mixing compounds that Llesho did not recognize. While Master Markko had his midday meal, Llesho cleaned the noxious herbs and powders from the worktable with a basin of pure water and a soft cloth. After weapons practice, Llesho took instruction from Master Markko in the storing of the various potions they had prepared that day, and then learned how to bury the cloths they had used in a patch of dead weeds behind the privy. Poisons, then, and likely no use for healing any sickness but that of life itself. When he had carefully cleaned his hands, Llesho returned to the workroom and presented himself to the overseer, his head bent in due humility.

  “I am finished, Master, if there is nothing more?” He sincerely hoped the overseer would find no late tasks for him to do before he left for his dinner and a well earned bed. On this day, however, Master Markko measured Llesho from top to toe with his cold, cold eyes.

  “Your predecessor in the post was born of slaves, and knows nothing but Pearl Island,” Markko said. “And, of course, he does not consort with witches. He valued the small freedoms his work with me afforded, and his gratitude made us friends as well as slave and master.”

  The overseer gestured at the shelves crowded with jars full of potions and herbs. “I had hoped that if I revealed to you our mutual interest, we would likewise become friends. But that hasn’t happened, has it?”

  Llesho said nothing, but he had begun to tremble, fine tremors that shook him from his heart to his fingertips. He knew the identity of Lord Chin-shi’s witch now: Master Markko could kill him for that knowledge at any time.

  “I am sorry, but if you are going to be of any use to my real work, I will have to be more cautious with you.” As he said this, Markko set an iron collar around Llesho’s neck, and clipped a chain to a link at the throat. Then he took the other end of the chain and snapped it into a ring newly set into the floor in the corner of his workroom.

  “I have informed Master Jaks that I will need more of your time than I found necessary when Bixei worked for me. I did not accuse you of malingering at your tasks, of course. But it must be understood that one so new to my needs would not work as quickly or as efficiently as another more experienced in the ways of this compound. You will, therefore, make your bed here.”

  Llesho felt the protest well up in his throat, but he clamped his jaw and refused to let the words escape. He was, after all, in the power of a master poisoner and a witch. And so he waited to see what Master Markko had in store for him.

  “Good.” The overseer noted the wary question in his eyes and smiled. “You are learning already.

  “I have sent word to the washerman that you have withdrawn from unarmed combat training to spend more time learning your duties.” He sneered when he mentioned Master Den. “You may, of course, continue weapons training for the arena, provided you keep silent about all that passes in this house. If you say a single word that does not relate to the weapon in your hand, however, you will remain here, tethered like a dog the day and night together, until you have given me what I want from you.”

  Llesho didn’t have what Markko wanted—the whereabouts of Kwan-ti and the secrets of her witchcraft—but he could die of Markko’s efforts to extract them, and he had truths of his own he could not share with this man. So he obediently dropped his gaze, letting none of his terror show. The overseer gave him a cold, cold smile, and abandoned him to his chains and the darkness that would become his whole existence.

  As days passed into weeks, Llesho’s silence deepened. When Markko grew tired of his stubborn refusal to speak, he would beat Llesho with the chains that bound him to the workroom. The beatings grew less insistent as he learned to perform each task to the overseer’s satisfaction, however, and Llesho began to hope that Markko was tiring of him. Then he woke drenched in sweat from a terrifying dream he could not remember, his muscles in knots and his guts heaving.

  “How does that feel?” Markko crouched down beside him, tapping with a stylus a muscle in his thigh that lifted in a rigid band at the touch. Llesho could not answer, could not breathe, could not catalog the ways and places that he hurt.

  “Good.” Markko tapped the stylus on Llesho’s belly, triggering a spasm that twisted the body beneath it in wrenching knots of agony. “We’ll just see how this goes.”

  He sent word to the practice yard that Llesho had fallen too ill for prayer forms or weapons practice. When the worst of the pain had subsided, he ordered delicate food from the cookhouse which he fed to Llesho by hand, all the while asking, “Was it undetectable, boy? Did you taste the bitterness in the brew?”

  His voice a rusty whisper, Llesho broke his silence to confirm what he already suspected: “What did you do to me?”

  Master Markko shrugged a mock apology. “You were never in danger. I gave you a small dose, so that I might judge the efficacy of the intended measure. On the whole, I think our client will be well pleased with our work.”

  No less than he had imagined, the overseer worked a side business as a poisoner. It made no sense to Llesho that a man who feared a simple healer, as Lord Chin-shi seemed to do, would keep a man of Master Markko’s trade in his service. He suspected that as a poisoner’s test subject, he would not live long enough to puzzle out an answer to the question.

  Markko let him recover before trying out any new compounds on him, but Llesho grew wary of eating any food from the overseer’s hand. He weakened, but feared murder if he told anyone the dark secrets of the overseer’s back room. Weapons practice might have tested his resolve, but the apprentices now worked with the general population. Llesho often found himself matched with men he did not know, who were not inclined to talk if he had wanted to.

  Most of his day he spent bound to the workroom, tending to his master while he mixed the potions for which strangers called at the back window after the suns had fallen. When the day’s work was done, Llesho lay in silence, waiting to discover if another poison from Markko’s bench had found its way into his food. Exhaustion warred with fear of the vaporous creatures of twisted evil that had come to inhabit his dreams, but his body could not long endure the strain, and he slept despite his fervent desire to remain on guard for his own sleepless rest.

  The dream began with the memory of white light: the sun rising through the gates of heaven, pierced the eye of the needle atop the Temple of the Moon and shed its light on the gleaming mud walls of the Palace of the Sun. Along the path of light walked the goddess with the face of his mother, her smile as warm as the sunbeams she trod upon. Llesho reached for her, and fell into a garden rich with fruits and flowers.

  “What are you doing on your bum, little brother?” Shokar strode between rows of plum trees, a rake over one shoulder, and stopped to lend him a hand to rise.

  “I thought you were dead,” Llesho told him.

  The dream Shokar dropped his shaggy head so that his chin almost rested on his broad chest. “I thought the same of you.”

  “The rest of our brothers—are they here with you?”

  “Where is here?” Shokar’s voice remained, but his thick farmer’s body faded like a mist, and behind him Adar and Balar, Lluka and Ghrisz, and Menar, who was a poet, stood together, straining their eyes, as if they were searching, but couldn’t see him.

  “Adar!” h
e called out in his sleep; and, “Menar! I’m here!” But his brothers broke into a mist and tangled milky strands among the plum trees.

  “Adar!” He woke with a start, tugging on the chain that ran from the collar around his neck to the ring in the floor. His brothers were gone, and Llesho was alone again with the terrors of the night and the worse nightmare of the waking world.

  Llesho’s body shook all the time now, and waking to another day in Master Markko’s clutches, he wished that he had died beneath the bay, following old Lleck to a new life in the great cycles of creation. When he thought of the spirit that had come to him in the bay, the black pearl in Llesho’s mouth throbbed like an aching tooth. Lleck and his gift both had been real, though neither offered much in the way of comfort. Llesho might buy his way free with that pearl, but Markko would doubtless take it from him if he knew about it. If he reported Llesho for theft, Lord Chin-shi would have Llesho’s hands cut off. Or the overseer might use it for proof of witchcraft; Llesho would find himself burning on the pyre the overseer had planned for Kwan-ti.

  It seemed that, with the pearl, Lleck had given him one more torment and Llesho wondered how much he was supposed to endure. He did not want to imagine a greater need from which the pearl was sent to rescue him, when the overseer was killing him hourly and by inches. Surrounded by Markko’s poisons and the tools of his loathsome trade, he knew only that he could not reach any one of them to end his misery.

  Markko had seen to that and Lleck, in his own way, had bound Llesho to this wretched life with the hope of an impossible quest. He wasn’t alone in the world. He would find his brothers, if Markko didn’t kill him first. Llesho wept until the tears had wrung out his heart, and when he slept again, the monsters came and pulled him down with them into the darkness.

  Morning began like all the others since he had come to Markko’s service. The overseer rattled his chain as he unlocked the collar. “Go,” Markko said, the only word they shared before noon, and Llesho bowed deeply as he had been taught. When the overseer left the workroom, Llesho slipped into his shirt and pants to fetch his master’s breakfast, a few dry rolls and a pot of green tea, which he placed on the desk where Markko was working.

  Prayer forms had been his one comfort, leaving his mind blank and his body free among men he had come to count as friends and under the bright sun. As he weakened, however, his technique faltered. Llesho stumbled on the simple Flowing water form; in the weeks he had served the overseer his forms had become increasingly clumsy, as if the burden on his soul tripped him up at each move. Frustration brought him close to tears again, but no one laughed now. Radimus pulled him up from where he had fallen and brushed the sawdust off his back with reassuring pressure, but said nothing as his eyes slid away from the iron collar around Llesho’s throat. Bixei, who had resented his own rotation out of the overseer’s service, watched him with confusion, and even guilt in his eyes.

  Llesho turned away; almost, he would rather remain chained in Markko’s workroom than suffer the public exhibition of his humiliation. But Lleck was counting on him to find his brothers and win back his country from its conquerors, so he struggled to regain his sense of balance, and pushed through to the end, grateful when Master Den let his arms drift to his side in completion of the final form.

  “Llesho—” Master Den called as Llesho turned toward the overseer’s cottage. Llesho stopped, but did not turn around, and finally, with a deep sigh, Master Den released him, “Go, boy. Don’t let me keep you.”

  “I wish I could,” Llesho thought to himself. He risked a deep breath, thick with the smells of sawdust and sweat and sunshine, and a tension that grew more pungent each day, like monsoon weather crackling in the air. Bad times were coming for all of them, he figured, and he longed for the storm when everything would be overturned. For him at least, any change had to be better than what he had.

  With a last gaze into the sky soft with morning haze, he ducked back into the stone cottage. Markko awaited him in the workroom, where he crushed some noxious element that released a sickening smell of rot into the air.

  “I have to go out,” he said, never stopping his slow, patient grinding. “But I will return before weapons practice is over, and I will want to speak to you.”

  A tremor passed through Llesho’s body at that—more questions he could not answer, more threats. Markko would beat him, as he had in the past. But Llesho would tell him nothing.

  Markko cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think you won’t talk now, but you will.” With a brush prepared for the purpose, he scraped the yellow powder into a shallow cup that rested on a tripod over a brazier filled with hot coals. Then he stirred the mixture gently with a silver wand for a moment before putting a lid on the cup. “Pour for me,” he said, and Llesho picked up the pitcher of clear water and poured it over Markko’s hands. The water ran into a basin that discolored in pinpricks of corrosion as the few stray grains of powder sank to the bottom. As Markko dried his hands carefully on a clean white cloth, Llesho noticed that the skin had mottled patches where the powder had found it, but the overseer ignored the tainted spots. “Dispose of these in the dead garden,” he said, tossing the cloth over Llesho’s arm.

  Llesho cringed away from the cloth. The dead garden. Only the most perilous of Markko’s elixirs went to the dead garden. Llesho took a second cloth and carefully wiped off the mortar and pestle that Markko had used to grind his ingredients, and set them aside to purify. He took both cloths and the bowl into a patch of garden where even the rankest weeds wilted in deathlike colors. A short-handled shovel set with its point in the ground marked the most recent burial place. Llesho took the shovel in hand and moved two paces, and then he dug a deep hole. First the cloths went in, and then the water. Then he scrubbed out the bowl using the freshly turned earth to absorb the corrosives that pitted the glazed surface already. When all of the poisoned materials had disappeared into the hole, Llesho rubbed his hands thoroughly with the dirt before shoveling it back into the hole again. When he was finished, he stamped on the ground to level it.

  His work in the dead garden meant that Llesho was running late. He had a choice—food or weapons practice—that he’d had to make too often since Markko had called him into his service. As usual, he chose practice. Llesho ran as fast as he could and reached the weapons room just as the last group of gladiators filed through to select their weapons. Llesho knew them all. It surprised him a bit until Stipes passed him a small loaf of bread instead of his trident. No words passed between them; they might not know why, but his fellows had come to understand that Llesho’s safety depended upon his terrible silence. Stipes’ anger was clear, however, and tears that Llesho feared to shed choked him as he tried to swallow the bread.

  Jaks watched him with eyes of stone, but a decision had been made; the master looked down at the small arms table, and Llesho followed the glance. For the first time since that day when the masters had tested him in the presence of the mysterious woman, Llesho saw the strangely shaped knife lying among the swords. He picked it up, feeling his body settle around the weapon, become a part of the weapon. Jaks nodded with a satisfaction so grim that Llesho shuddered.

  Bixei looked at him with surprise. “You should have picked the knife before,” he said, but Stipes put a hand on his partner’s shoulder, his eyes wide with a question turning to certainty.

  “You never saw the knife,” Stipes told him. “Come on, Madon will be waiting. I’ll spar with you today.”

  “Madon?” Bixei started to ask the question, but stopped, frowning, when Stipes increased the pressure on his shoulder. “Everybody else knows what is going on. Why not me?” he grumbled.

  Llesho sighed, letting some of the tension go with the breath. “Not everybody,” he said. “I don’t understand it either.”

  Bixei seemed to accept that for the moment. He shook his head and muttered something halfhearted about favorites that brought a blush to his face when he looked at Llesho. Then he took up his own weapon and follow
ed Stipes into the practice yard.

  “Sit down.” Jaks pushed a three-legged stool toward him, and Llesho absently tucked the knife into the cloth belt that tied his shirt. The belt split and fell at his feet along with the knife.

  “Sorry.” He flopped down on the stool and put his free hand over his eyes. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  “I can.” Jaks didn’t smile. “A long time ago, you carried a knife like that in a scabbard at your belt.”

  “I did?” Llesho took a bite of his bread and chewed without thinking about it, giving his teacher his full attention. When he had swallowed, he asked, “So why don’t I remember it?”

  “I don’t know.” Jaks kicked another stool over and sat so that he faced Llesho, locking gazes with the youth. “It might hurt too much to remember.”

  Llesho gave him the snort that deserved. He remembered the Harn soldiers coming for him, his bodyguard dying, the weeping of women in the corridors as his captor carried him out of the palace. He remembered his father, dead with a crossbow bolt in his throat. How could the knowledge that he once carried a knife hurt more than that?

  “You were very young when you were taken to the slave markets, weren’t you?” Jaks asked him.

  “Seven summers.” He’d used the Thebin measure—trading seasons rather than the cycles of the lesser sun. Master Jaks seemed to understand anyway.

  “And yet, you wore a knife—not just any knife but the ceremonial knife of Thebin. Someone trained you well in its use, too.”

  That scared Llesho more than Markko had managed to do. He wouldn’t ask the question that terrified him—do you know who, what, I am?—but he thought maybe Jaks knew the answer to that better than he did himself.