Mistress of the Empire

by Raymond E. Feist

  'Nature is often most bountiful before the severest of storms,' he grumbled pessimistically when Mara complained that his restlessness was making her neck ache. Weighed down by her swollen middle, she could hardly walk the floor with him, to follow his rendering of accounts.

  'It's too quiet by far,' said the little hadonra, dropping like an arrow-shot bird to the cushions before the mistress's writing desk. 'I don't like it, and I don't believe that Jiro is sitting by innocently, up to his nose in old scrolls.'

  In fact, Arakasi's agents had sent word. Jiro was not idle, but had been hiring engineers and joiners to build strange-looking machinery in what had been his father's marshaling yard. That the equipment was intended for siege and sapping was probable, and by dint of suggestively placed gossip, old Frasai of the Tonmargu had been convinced by Lord Hoppara of the Xacatecas to spend imperial funds. Workers had been taken on to repair the cracks in the walls of Kentosani, and in the Emperor's inner citadel, caused by the earthquake set loose by the renegade magician Milamber when he had wreaked havoc at the Imperial Games years past.

  As autumn dragged on, and the wet season threatened, Mara found herself as restless as her hadonra, and unable to do so much as pace. Her only respite came upon Justin's eighth birthday, when Hokanu presented him with his first real sword, not a mock weapon used by children. He had received the well-made small blade with solemnity and resisted the impulse to rush around swinging it at everything in sight. If Keyoke had instructed him on the proper behavior, such forbearance was lacking the next morning, when Justin charged with bared blade down the hillside to his lesson from his arms tutor.

  Mara saw her son from the terrace, wishing she could go watch Justin take his instruction. But her healers would not let her stir from her cushions, and her husband, who usually was indulgent when she became stubborn, would not relent. The heir that she carried must not be risked. To ease her confinement, anything she requested was sent for.

  Gifts from other nobles arrived, as her time approached, some lavish, others minor tokens, the minimum tradition demanded. An expensive but undeniably ugly vase was Jiro's gift to the expectant Servant of the Empire. Amused to sardonic humor, she ordered it given to her servants so they might use it to carry out night soils from the house.

  But her most welcome gifts of all were the rare books delivered in chests that smelled of mildew and dust. Isashani had sent them, instead of the more usual lacquered boxes or exotic songbirds. Upon reading the inscription on the gift card, Mara had laughed. Beneath the makeup, and the feminine airs, there was no limit to Isashani's shrewdness. It was her son, Hoppara, who sent a traditional if astonishingly extravagant arrangement of sweet flowers.

  Surrounded by painted vases, Mara breathed in the perfume of cut kekali blossoms and tried not to think of Kevin the barbarian, who had first taught her what it was to be a woman in the dusk of a garden, years past. A frown on her face that had nothing to do with the lighting, she studied a treatise on weapons and campaigns of war. Her frown deepened as she considered the likelihood that Jiro had also studied this very text. From there her thoughts wandered. Arakasi's messages arrived irregularly since she had charged him with his mission to acquire the Hamoi Tong's records. She had not seen him in months, and missed his quick wit and his unfailing appreciation of odd gossip. Closing the book, she tried to imagine his location. Perhaps he sat in some distant inn, disguised as a needra driver, or a sailor. Or he might be lunching late with a merchant in some distant city. She refused to consider that he could very well be dead.

  Arakasi at that moment lay on his side amid a tangle of silk sheets, and ran light, expert fingers down the thigh of a nubile girl. That she was by binding contract another man's property, and that he risked his very life to seduce her, was not at the forefront of his thoughts. He had come in through the window. The absent master's bedchambers in the midafternoon were the last place any servant or guardsman bent on protecting the virtue of a slave concubine would expect to find her with a lover.

  The girl was bored enough to be excited by the adventure, and young enough to believe herself immune to misfortune. Her latest master was old, and fat, and his prowess had flagged with age. Arakasi posed a different sort of challenge. It was she who was jaded, having been trained for pleasure and bed sport since the age of six. Whether or not he could successfully excite her was the sum of the issue at hand.

  For Mara's Spy Master, the stakes that he dallied to win were a great deal higher.

  In the half-light shed by closed screens, the air smelled heavy with incense and the girl's perfume. The sheets had been treated with herbs that in some circles were considered aphrodisiacs. Arakasi, who had read texts on medicine, knew the belief was a myth. The elderly master had wealth enough not to care if his money had been wasted. The miasma of scents was powerfully cloying, causing Arakasi to regret that the screens must stay closed. Almost, he would rather have endured the stinking loincloth and apron he had bought from the dyers in Sulan-Qu, which he used for disguise when he did not want well-bred passersby examining his face too closely. The reek at least would have kept him alert. As it was, he had to fight not to fall fatally asleep.

  The girl shifted. Sheets slid away from her body with a hiss of silk on skin. She was magnificent, outlined in afternoon light, her hair in heavy honey-colored curls on the pillows. Slant eyes the color of jade fixed on Arakasi. 'I never said I had a sister.'

  She referred to a comment some minutes old. The Spy Master's fingers slipped past her hip, dipped down, and continued stroking. Her magnificent eyes drooped half closed, and her hands spasmed on the silk like a cat's paws, kneading.

  The velvet-soft voice of Arakasi said, 'I know from the merchant who sold your contract.'

  She stiffened under his touch, spoiling ten minutes of his careful ministrations. She had had men enough that she did not care. 'That was not a prudent remark.'

  Insult did not enter into the question; that she was in truth little better than a very expensive prostitute was not the issue. Who had been the sister's buyer: that was dangerous knowledge, and the dealer who had made the transaction would hardly be so free, or so foolhardy, that he would tell. Arakasi stroked aside honey-gold locks, and cradled the back of the girl's neck. 'I am not a prudent man, Kamlio.'

  Her eyes widened and her lips shaped a wicked smile. 'You are not.' Then her expression turned thoughtful. 'You are a strange man.' Breathing deeply, she feigned a pout. 'Sometimes I think you are a noble, playing the part of a poor merchant.' She fixed him with a steady gaze. 'Your eyes are older than your appearance.' When a lingering moment passed, and he gave no answer, she said, 'You are not very forthcoming.' Then she licked her lips suggestively. 'Neither are you amusing. So. Amuse me. I am someone else's toy. Why should I risk disgrace to become yours?'

  As Arakasi drew breath to reply, Kamlio raised a finger and stopped his lips. Her nails were dusted with gilt, costliest of cosmetics. 'Don't say you'll buy me my freedom for love. That would be trite.'

  Arakasi blessed the rosy flesh of her fingertips with a kiss. Then, very gently, he removed her hand, so he could speak. His expression was faintly offended. 'It would not be trite. It would be true.' Mara had set no limits on his expenses, ever, and for stakes so high as access to the tong's most guarded chieftain, she would hardly stint his needs.

  The girl in his arms went icy with distrust. To free her from the seven-year contract signed and sold to her aged master would be worth the cost of a town house; but to buy out her worth, and the expense of her training and upbringing, from the merchant of the pleasure house who had invested in her - that would be as much as a small estate. Her contracts would be sold, and sold again, until she was faded to the point where even her skills between the sheets would be spurned. 'You were never so rich.' Even her voice was contemptuous. 'And if the master who employs you is so wealthy, then I risk my very life to be speaking to you.'

  Arakasi bent his head and kissed her neck. His hands did not tighten against
her tenseness; she could at any moment draw away, a nuance she understood, and in appreciation of the subtlety, she kept still. Few men treated her as though she had a will of her own, or feelings. This one was rare. And his hands were very schooled. She heard the note of sincerity in his voice as he added, 'But I work for no master.'

  His tone conveyed the nuance. His mistress, then, would have little use for an expensive courtesan. The offer of freedom might be genuine, if he had access to the money.

  Arakasi's hands recovered lost ground, and Kamlio quivered. He was more than rare: he was gifted. She settled a little, her flank melting into the curve of his body.

  As though the footsteps of servants did not come and go in the corridor, separated by only a screen, Arakasi's touch drifted down the girl's golden flesh. She leaned into him. Pleasure came rarely enough to her, who was a thing bought and sold to meet the needs of others. Discovery might earn her a beating; her partner would wind up dishonorably dead on a rope end. He was either exceptionally brave, or else careless unto insanity. Through skin that had been caressed and cajoled into unwonted sensitivity, the girl could feel the unhurried beat of his heart.

  'This mistress,' Kamlio murmured languidly. 'She means so very much to you?'

  'Just at this moment I was not thinking of her,' Arakasi said, but it was not his words that convinced as his lips met hers with a tenderness akin to worship. The kiss blurred all doubts and soon after, all thoughts. The filtered sunlight through the windows blended with a red-golden haze behind her eyes, as passion was drawn out of her and savored like fine wine.

  At last, gasping and drenched with the fine sweat of lovemaking, Kamlio forgot herself and clung to the lean form of the man as she exploded into relief. She laughed and she wept, and somewhere between amazement and exhaustion, she whispered the location of the sister sold away in far Ontoset.

  Despite his mysterious background, it did not occur to Kamlio that her partner might be no more than a consummate actor until she rolled over. The light touch that cradled her body was no more than the fold of warm sheets. She flung back damp hair, her beautiful eyes narrowed and furious to find the window opened, and himself gone, even to the clothes he had worn.

  She opened her lips to call out, in a pique that would see him caught and executed, never mind his clever hands and lying promises. But on the moment the air filled her lungs, the latch on the screen tripped up.

  Arakasi must have heard the heavy tread of her elderly master, returned early from his meeting with his hadonra. Stoop-shouldered, palsied, grey-haired, he shuffled into her chamber. His milky eyes blinked at the twisted sheets, and his dry, chill hands reached out and stroked her skin, heated still, and damp from a surfeit of passion.

  'My dear, are you ill?' he said in his old man's voice.

  'Bad dreams,' she said, sulky, but trained by instinct to use the mood to increase her allure, ‘I dozed in the afternoon heat, and had nightmares, nothing more.' Grateful that her deft, dark-haired lover had made clean his escape, Kamlio sighed and bent her skills upon her decrepit master, who was harder, it sometimes seemed, to please than she was.

  Outside the window, screened from sight by a veiling of vines and unkempt akasi, Arakasi listened intently to the sounds that issued from the bedchamber. In relief, and an uncharacteristic anger, he silently donned his clothing. He had lied only once: never had he ceased thinking of his mistress. Over the years since he had sworn to Acoma service, Mara had become the linchpin of his life.

  But the girl, half spoiled, fully hardened to the resentment of a whore brought up to the Reed Life, had touched him. His care for her had been real, and that by itself was disturbing. Arakasi shook off the memory of Kamlio's long, fine hair and her jewel-clear eyes. He had work to do, before her freedom from usage could be arranged. For the information she had delivered in the naive belief that she had disclosed only a family secret was the possible location of the harem of the Hamoi Tong's Obajan. The tenuous link she had managed to retain with her sister, used to exchange spurious and widely erratic communication, held far more peril than she knew.

  It had taken months for Arakasi to trace a rumor that a girl of unusual beauty, a sister to another, had been purchased by a certain trader, one whom Arakasi had suspected as a Hamoi Tong agent. He was now dead, a necessary by-product of Arakasi's identifying him, but his purchase of so expensive a courtesan led Arakasi to the near certainty that she must belong to the Obajan, or one of his closest lieutenants.

  And the fact she had been sent to Ontoset made peculiar sense; it was safer for the tong to have its seat so distant from where it was contacted, a minor shrine outside the Temple of Turakamu. Arakasi himself had many agents who suspected he was based in Jamar or Yankora, because that was where all their messages originated.

  Arakasi had resisted the temptation to leave at once for Ontoset and had spent valuable weeks in Kentosani seeking out the girl's sister.

  The Spy Master had studied his prey for weeks before making himself known to her. Turning away Kamlio's questions with vague references he led her to believe him the son of some powerful noble, fallen to low estate because of a romantic adventure.

  As he repeatedly risked shameful death to see her, then at last Kamlio had welcomed him to her bed.

  Without her, Arakasi might have searched a lifetime and never obtained a clue to what he sought by Mara's command. As he sat, still as stone, awaiting the dusk and the chance to steal away, he pondered how much he owed to a girl who had been raised up to be no more than a bed toy. He knew he should leave this woman and never see her again, but something in him had been touched. Now he confronted a new fear: that he might entreat Mara to intercede and buy the girl's contract, and that, once free, Kamlio might laugh at his genuine care for her.

  For a man brought up by women of the Reed Life, understanding of her contempt came all too easily. Veiled by the bushes, suffering insect bites and muscle cramps from his pose of forced stillness, Arakasi sighed. He closed his eyes, but could not escape the sounds of Kamlio's marathon efforts in the bedchamber to gratify the lechery of a man too old to perform. Arakasi endured a wait that passed painfully slowly. Once he was sure the old master was asleep, he silently made his departure. But with him came vivid memories and the uncomfortable, unwanted awareness that he had come to care for Kamlio. His feelings for her were folly; any emotional ties to those not of the Acoma made him vulnerable. And he knew that if he was vulnerable, so then was Lady Mara.

  The messenger hesitated after he made his bow. Breathless still from his run through the hills bordering the estate, he might have been taking an ordinary pause to recover his wind; except that his hands were tense, and the eyes he raised to Hokanu were dark with pity.

  The Shinzawai heir was not a man to shy from misfortune. Campaigns in the field had taught him that setbacks must be faced at once, and overcome, lest enemies gain opening and triumph. 'The news is bad,' he said quickly. 'Tell me.'

  Still mute, and with a second bow made out of sympathy, the messenger drew a scroll out of a carry tube fashioned of bone strips laced together with cord. The instant Hokanu saw the red dye that edged the parchment, he knew: the word was a death, and even as he accepted the document and cracked the seal, he guessed the name inside would be his father's.

  The timing could not be worse, he thought in that stunned, disbelieving interval before grief struck his mind like a fist. His father, gone. The man who had understood him as no other; who had adopted him when his blood sire had been called into the Assembly of Magicians, and who had raised him with all the love any son could require.

  There would be no more midnight talks over hwaet beer, or jokes about hangovers in the mornings. There would be no more scholarly arguments, or reprimands, or shared elation over victories. The grandchild soon to be born to Mara would never meet his grandfather.

  Fighting sudden tears, Hokanu found himself mechanically dismissing the messenger. Jican appeared, as if spell-called, and quietly dealt with the matt
er of refreshments and disposition of the bone token that couriers received in acknowledgment of completion of their missions. The hadonra finished with necessities, and turned back to his mistress's husband, expectant. Hokanu had not moved, except to crush the red-bordered scroll between his fist.

  'The news was bad,' Jican surmised in commiseration.

  'My father,' Hokanu said tightly. 'He died in his sleep, in no pain, of natural causes.' He shut his eyes a moment, opened them, and added, 'Our enemies will be gloating, nonetheless.'

  Jican fingered the tassels on his sash, diffident, careworn, and silent. He had met Kamatsu of the Shinzawai; he knew the Lord's hadonra well. The most enduring tribute he could think to mention was not the usual one, or the most elegant. He spoke anyway, 'He is a man who will be missed by his servants, young master. He was well loved.'

  Hokanu raised eyes dark with hurt. 'My father was like that.' He sighed. 'He abused no man and no beast. His heart was great. Like Mara, he was able to see past tradition with fairness. Because of him, I am all that I am.'

  Jican allowed the silence to stretch unbroken, while outside the window, the footsteps of a sentry passed by. Then he suggested, very gently, 'Mara is in the work shed with the toy maker.'

  The new-made Lord of Shinzawai nodded. He went to seek his wife with a weight on his elegant shoulders that the news he carried made fearful. More than ever, the heir his Lady carried was important. For while Hokanu had cousins aplenty, and even a bastard nephew or three, none of them had grown up schooled to his foster father's breadth of vision. Not a one of them had the perception and the clarity of thought to fill the shoes of the man who had been the Emperor Ichindar's right hand.