by Carol Berg
“Is that better?”
“Don’t know,” I said, my voice scorched away. It was very good brandy.
“Here, get warm and eat this. I’ll get some water to clean you up.” He crammed a piece of soft bread in one of my hands and a lump of cheese in the other, then hurried away. The first bite of the bread gave me a hint of how long it had been since I’d eaten. Both bread and cheese were gone before Durgan was back. He had a knife in his hand.
I scrambled backward, clumsy, toppling a barrel just behind me, ending up in a quivering heap, my gut hurting so ferociously, I wasn’t sure I would be able to move again.
Durgan squinted at me, then at the knife in his hand. “Awake now are you? Come back here. I said we’re going to clean you up.”
“Clean ...” Slowly I crept back toward the fire. “The food. Thank—”
“Don’t say it. I do only as I’m told.” He thrust the old, dull knife into my hand and set a bucket of water on the fire. “You take care of the hair. I’ll see what I can do about the blood. You’re a mess. The Prince won’t like it.” To my great regret he yanked the blanket off my shoulders.
It must have looked very strange. One very large man, fully dressed, and one skinny man, quite undressed, huddled next to the tiny fire, whispering so as not to wake up a hundred snoring slaves. I hacked off a week’s growth of hair, trying not to cut myself while Durgan ham-handedly dabbed at the broken, bruised skin on my forehead, shoulders, legs, and back. Every mezzit of my skin was mottled black, blue, and sickly green. I was happy I didn’t have to worry about shaving. When we were both done, and I sat shivering, Durgan pointed to his steaming bucket. Not quite believing my good luck, I scooped the delightfully warm water and doused my head, which did wonders for my spirits until my head was clear enough to remember how I’d come to be in such sorry state.
“Enough,” said the slave master, throwing me a white tunic. “You’re to go to the Prince’s chambers ... discreetly.”
“Can you tell me—?”
“I don’t know anything. Just to send you up. You’ll be met.”
I set off through the dark, quiet courtyard, wading ankle deep in snow and trying to settle myself. Don’t think. Don’t wonder. Just go. Just do. What comes, comes, and you will survive it or not. It was much more difficult to follow my own command when every creaking step was a reminder of my last venture into the Prince’s presence. I still saw two of everything, and had so many throbbing bruises that the darkness pulsed red in the same rhythm as my heartbeat. How could I have been such a fool?
Discreetly, Durgan had said. That was difficult in a palace that housed a thousand people, most of whom were there solely to wait upon the very same man I was supposed to meet. It must have been the depths of first watch, or just after the change to second, somewhere about the fourth hour past midnight. It was probably the only quiet hour in the palace. The great stoves in the kitchens stood like tombs in the darkness. The fires would not be relit for another hour. The passageways and staircases were deserted, only a few small lamps left burning to chase away the deepest midnight. Evening revels were being slept off in drunken stupor or languorous exhaustion. Lovers had stolen back to their beds, and slaves were lost in their own particular nightmares. Only the guards outside the Prince’s doors stood awake and alert, though three gold-clad attendants were slumped over on their velvet benches, given up on any more midnight whims of their prince. I hung back behind a pillar at the top of the stair, wondering how I was to get past the guards discreetly, when a hand fell on my shoulder. I almost leaped out of my skin.
“I was set to watch for you,” said a gold-clad Derzhi, removing his hand quickly and doing everything but wiping it on his breeches in disgust. “I’m to take you to a private entrance.”
The young Derzhi—he was no more than fifteen and un-blooded in battle, for his hair was still unbraided—led me along a maze of quiet passages and into a small storage room filled with candles of every shape and size. A single taper burned on a bare table. A door on the far wall of the candle room led us, not to an inner storage room as one might expect, but to a windowless sitting room with several comfortable chairs, a couch, a lamp, and an armed guard who did not look like he was guarding candles. He stood stiffly, looking straight ahead as if he was used to people passing through without really looking at them. I was not at all surprised to emerge in Prince Aleksander’s sleeping chamber.
Someone was nestled among the furs and pillows on the gigantic bed, but it was not Aleksander unless his hair had changed color from red to pale gold and his legs had become decidedly more slender and smooth. Perhaps the Prince had found amusement to ease his malady.
The attendant motioned me through the curtained doorway that opened into the more familiar part of Aleksander’s apartments. Only a few candles lit the room, and a small, bright fire in the marble hearth. The Prince wore a loose robe of blue silk trimmed in gold, open at the front, and he was lounging on a couch and talking with a man who wore the gold-crested pendant of a royal messenger. Just inside the curtained door I knelt and put my head to the carpet, a matter of extraordinary difficulty. My back was one solid bruise, at least two ribs were cracked, and I had to hold onto my belly to dissuade it from ripping apart. I hoped it wasn’t going to hurt as much to get up as it had to get down and bend over.
“You’ll be ready to leave before dawn?”
“I’ve already informed the stable to have a fresh mount ready,” said the messenger.
“Wait outside in the passage. Shove my lazy wretches off their bench and sleep if you can.”
“I will await your call, Highness.”
“And tell those outside that I do not wish to be disturbed again.”
I heard the door open and close. From the corner of my eye I saw bare feet walk past me, through the shimmering curtain into the bedchamber. Surely he had seen me. His head had moved when I walked in. The blood was pounding furiously in my battered head, and I began counting the threads in the carpet, willing myself not to pass out.
Be easy. Ignore it. What comes, comes.
I heard murmuring voices from the bedchamber behind me, a quiet laugh, a door closing. Soft steps, and the feet stopped beside me. I did not move. I would not flinch or shrink away. At least he had no boots on.
Of all the things I might have expected, if I had allowed myself the indulgence of speculation, it never would have occurred to me that a strong hand would reach under my arm and slowly, gently, help me to my feet. He let go as soon as I was standing upright, only slightly bent over from the ache in my gut. I kept my eyes on the carpet, even while wishing I could twist them in their sockets to catch a glimpse of his face.
“Have you serious injury?” Cool. Even. No hints as to reasons or intentions. Yet he was asking. It was very odd.
“No, my lord. I don’t think so.” Ribs would heal, and I assumed the hot knife embedded somewhere at the base of my spine would stop twisting some day. If I could just be still for a while....
He motioned me to a pile of cushions on the floor beside the hearth. “No, no. Sit. For the gods’ sake, sit,” he said as I creaked back down on my knees beside the cushions, wobbling dizzily and wrapping my arms tight about my ribs. He sat on a similar pile of pillows opposite me, leaning back and propping his long arms on his knees. I was not easy enough to lean back, but I basked in the heat from his fire while I waited for him to speak.
“Why did you do it?”
His quiet question answered my own. He had destroyed the enchantment. Good enough. Now I just needed to get out of his sight without any more damage. Yet the question was unexpected. It sounded as if he really wanted to know the truth. I shifted on my pillows, and my gut screamed a harsh reminder of truth.
I fixed my eyes on the tiles of the hearth. “My life is to serve you, my lord.”
My words hung in the air, of no more substance than smoke from the hearth. He did not deign to comment, but sat quiet. Unmoving. Waiting. The fire snapped and a chunk
of wood dropped into the ashes, shooting a stream of sparks upward.
I tried again. “I know of enchantments. Your other servants do not. Life is ... better ... when my lord is well.” It was a bold statement for a slave, implying imperfection on the part of the master. But the moment was extraordinary, and it seemed he expected something beyond common phrases.
“And what reward do you expect? Is there no favor you would ask me for this service?”
“Nothing, my lord.” A spark jumped onto the white tiles, flared bright orange, and went out, leaving a black speck on the polished tile.
“Yet you would do it again, if there was something else like, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.” I scolded myself after saying it. It was too quick a response, as if I were interested. Better to stay dull. “My life is to serve you.”
I felt him lean forward. The sheer intensity of his posture forced me to glance up at him. His eyes, burning with curiosity, were fixed on my face. “Let’s start again. Why did you do it?” There was no menace in his quiet questioning. He was waiting for truth. He was listening as if he expected to hear it amidst the obsequious mouthings of a slave.
Would he recognize truth if I gave it to him? I paused for a moment, not moving, lest my bruises demand their say in the exchange. “What do you know of rai-kirah?” I said at last.
And because the moment was so far out of the ordinary, he did not rant about mindless superstitions, laugh at my barbarian parentage, or damn me for my insolence in avoiding his real question with a question of my own. “Demons? I’ve heard stories ... warriors’ tales told around battle-eve campfires. ‘The rai-kirah gather on the night before a battle, ready to eat the souls of the dying.’ Soldiers say they hear the sighing of the demons’ lust and see them peering out of the eyes of other men, as the creatures seek out the ones who are most afraid. Rai-kirah are legends born of war and cowardice.”
I expected nothing else from a Derzhi. But he wanted truth, and so in a fey recklessness likely caused by blows to my head—or perhaps by my desire to sit unmoving before his fire for just a bit longer before being thrown back into my cold cell—I decided I would give it. “My answer to your question will make no sense unless you suspend that belief for a moment, my lord. I warned you of the enchantment that was stealing your sleep because it was demon-wrought, and if I can say any word or do any deed that will hinder the purposes of a demon, then my life has meaning. For a slave that is an end worth any risk.”
“Even to invading the chamber of a mad Derzhi prince voluntarily?”
I glanced up at his face again and recognized the flash of wry self-knowledge I had observed in him as I wrote letters in his map room. And so I answered a simple truth. “Even that.”
I expected that to be the end of it. He would either have me beaten for insolence, or dismiss me as a mad barbarian who claimed that soldiers’ legends were real. But instead, he reached for a bottle on a low table and poured himself a glass of wine, then leaned back on his cushions as if it were not three hours past midnight. “So you’re saying that the rai-kirah are more than legend? Next thing you’ll be telling me that I have a guardian spirit who rides at my side to protect me from dishonor.”
Now I had begun, I couldn’t figure out how to retreat. “I know nothing of guardian spirits. But demons are quite real.”
“Go on.”
“They come from the frozen lands of the farthest north, seeking a warm haven ... a vessel ... a human who will satisfy their hunger. Often they just devour the vessel and move on, but their power and intelligence grow when they find a welcoming host, one who’ll feed them more of what they desire. They are as real as you are, my lord.”
“But I can be seen and touched. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see.”
This needed no answer. It would have been a logical place to end the strange conversation. Yet it came to me that there could be value in telling a little more. If the Khelid was set on tormenting a Derzhi prince, there was little I could do about it. I was no longer capable of facing a demon. But if I could make Aleksander wary, then perhaps his mistrust and his innate strength would tire the demon or its host and make them go elsewhere ... away from me. I could not afford to be taken by a rai-kirah. I knew too much ... a great deal too much ... that they must never learn. And so I continued.
“They are as real as the sunlight, which you cannot hold in your hand, yet changes the very aspect of the land, making it lush and fertile or a desolate wasteland. They are as real as truth and honor, which you cannot see yet alter the very essence of a man. They are like moths, drawn, not to light, but to power and fear and unholy death.”
He listened carefully as I spoke, but shook his head after. “So some invisible demon has sent me an enchanted seal by the hand of a Khelid emissary? I think your head is more injured than you believe.”
I could feel the distance between us, bridged so unexpectedly by the touch of his hand and his probing questions, grow vast once again, and his thoughts settle into the usual Derzhi views of “Ezzarian superstition.” We called it melydda—greater power; true sorcery as opposed to the illusion and trickery practiced by Derzhi magicians. But it was not only skepticism I felt from the Prince. He was disappointed. He had wanted more from me than fanciful tales he could not believe. The event had frightened him, though I was sure that particular word had never come to his mind, and he needed some kind of reassurance. I sighed. As long as I had come so far, I might as well tell him the meat of it.
“No, my lord. The Khelid carries the demon.”
He burst out laughing. “Now you’ve done it. I have no love for this Korelyi. He is sly and ambitious and oversteps his welcome, which is not a long step, since I had no wish for him to come. But he is no supernatural soul-eater. Tell me a better story.”
Enough was enough. I would not dredge up the past for the Prince of the Derzhi. I would not tell him how I knew what I knew, or how I could recognize a demon, or anything else he might consider a “better story.” I would not trust him with any more of myself than he already owned.
“I cannot prove this to you, my lord, nor can I guess why the Khelid sought to afflict you with the enchantment. The demon has no purpose of its own save to satisfy its lust. It is the vessel that gives direction to its evil. I can only tell you what I see and what I know to be true.” I fixed my eyes to the hearth tiles again.
The Prince had been idly kneading a small cushion. Abruptly he threw it back into the pile of them. “You take a long time to come up with your answers. How am I to believe anything you say? Perhaps it’s you. That’s the easiest explanation. What if you weren’t properly cleansed in the Rites of Balthar? Perhaps we should do them again to be sure.”
“I am at your mercy, Your Highness. As always.” I wasn’t going to waste words answering those charges. I didn’t think he truly believed what he was saying or this nighttime visit would have started off quite differently. I hoped I didn’t need to tell him that if I was put through the Rites a second time, I would have no mind with which to serve him.
“Have you nothing more to say on the matter?”
Sense, strategy, self-protection ... I refused to say too much, yet dared not say too little. “Only this, my lord. He will try again. A demon does not like being challenged, and you have done so. First, because you fought his enchantment with some success. I watched him grow frustrated with you at the Dar Heged. Second, because you destroyed the enchantment. He won’t know why or how ... unless you tell him, which would be imprudent ... most imprudent. And he will certainly try to find out.”
“You have a bold tongue for a slave, Seyonne.”
“Only in the matter of demons, my lord.”
“Well. Enough for tonight. I will find out who’s behind this, be it warrior, slave, or demon.”
I eased to my feet, taking his words for dismissal.
“Hold up for a moment. There’s another matter.” The Prince waved his hand at the couch where he had been sitting when
I arrived. “Get that and read it. The messenger awaits my reply.”
I broke the white wax seal of the letter and knelt close to the fire so I could see. This time I remained kneeling. We were back in a more usual context, and I did not want to try his forbearance.
Aleksander,
News of your little escapade reached Zhagad a few hours after I did. Now it is clear why you had to get me out of the way so quickly. You have acted the fool.
Ivan was ready to disown you when he heard your insolent letter, and I would have stood at his right hand as he did so were it a jackal he anointed in your place. But now, as it has turned out well, he laughs at your solution, and he is too distracted with Lord Kastavan’s proposal for a new capital city to worry about what you’ve done with our northern bulwarks. By Derzhi tradition, the House of Mezzrah is as staunch an ally as it ever was. Yet if I were not bound by my brother’s hand, I would already be back in Capharna, giving you such a thrashing as I’ve not done since you were a child. A soldier fights with his heart more than his arm. It is a lesson you must learn or you will forfeit the greatest heritage any prince was ever given. The arms of Mezzrah will fight for you, but their hearts never will.
I return to Capharna ten days hence. Until then I urge you to use every caution and pay sober attention to your proper business. The Dar Heged may seem trivial—yes, I can hear your childish complaining even at this distance—but it is the foundation of your power. Do not fritter it away as you have done with the Mezzrahn alliance. I believe a time is coming soon when you will need all the strength that is yours to command. There are ill deeds afoot in the Empire. We have a great deal to discuss.
Dmitri
The Prince leaped to his feet after the first sentence of Dmitri’s letter, and when I was done, he snatched it away and crushed it in his fist.
“By the gods was there ever a man so everlastingly pompous as Dmitri? I’ll send him to the frontiers again. Ten days. Damn all, I can’t bear the thought of his preaching.” The Prince flung himself on the blue couch and kicked at least ten cushions onto the floor. “I can see him sitting at my shoulder at the Dar Heged, disapproving of every decision. Not deigning to speak in front of the supplicants, but saving it all to dump on my head after, as if I could read his mind to choose as he would. And for this I was dragged from my bed?”
