Mistress of the Empire

by Raymond E. Feist

  Arakasi had been hard pressed to find a student initiate whose loyalty was not already compromised. In the end, he had needed to call in a favor from the acolytes of the Red God, who felt they owed Lady Mara their favor. As the Spy Master raked, and darted surreptitious glances at the carved doorways across the thoroughfare from the garden gate, he felt disquiet over how useless his established operation had become. He dared not try calling upon his resident agents in the palace, since by now, Arakasi assumed, they were all under Chumaka's surveillance. Enough signs had arisen to indicate that the palace branch of his network was compromised. So Arakasi had sent in an otherwise harmless student, to lead Chumaka's agents off the trail. The Acoma Spy Master knew the enemy could not be misled for long.

  Two priests of Turakamu, and a student acolyte bearing sealed requests from the High Temple, had all recovered texts on the subjects Arakasi had requested. His nights had been spent by candlelight, reading lines in faded ink. Each dawn he had sent coded messages to Mara at the old Acoma estate, narrowing down the possibilities: the time of the conflict that had resulted in the secret treaty with the cho-ja could have been tied to a civil disruption eighteen hundred years earlier, two centuries after the founding of the Empire, or to another period four hundred years afterward, when no war was mentioned, but a review of family pedigrees showed inheritances passing to first and second cousins, and an inordinate number of underage heirs. If a plague was responsible for such breaks in otherwise established dynasties, the texts of the time held no reference to such.

  The tax rolls of those times had also shown increases in levied funds; treasury ledgers held strange gaps, blank lines, for entries showing how such wealth had been spent. Now Arakasi waited to receive the list of imperial commissions for the two periods under examination. If the Emperor's seneschal had paid sums to guild artists to paint battle scenes, or sculptors to design commemorative victory arches, surely there would have been a war. Temple records could then be followed up for prayer-gate donations sent in by wealthy widows who wished the spirits of husbands departed on the battlefield to be kindly judged by the gods. Arakasi frowned over his raking. If he could establish proof of a war, he could root through family records, and perhaps in the private sector ferret out facts, or entries in the diaries of dead rulers, telling of a conflict that might have been excised from the public record.

  Mara had been circumspect in her instructions, most likely out of deference to her Spy Master's misgivings over continued pursuit of his trade. She had no illusions: she knew, as he did, that his tie to Kamlio left him vulnerable. But spare his heart and his talents, and the Acoma would fall to the greater, more sinister design of the Assembly of Magicians. For more and more, the fact emerged: the Black Robes prevented change. They had allowed Ichindar's ascension because it suited them to balk Tasaio of the Minwanabi; but sooner or later they were going to support the traditionalist view and a resurgence of the Warlord's office, forcing Ichindar once more to a role of religious ceremony.

  Resisting an urge to wipe his sweating forehead, Arakasi scraped his rake through the earth in an inward storm of resentment. His studies of the records showed by omission, in subtle twists and turns, just how the Great Ones had directed the Empire to stagnation. It did not take a historian to ferret out the unexplained holes in the fabric of Tsurani history.

  Like a weaver worrying a tangle of threads, picking apart one knot at a time, Arakasi followed from one cryptic reference to another to map out a report conspicuous by its absence. His pulse quickened as it never had, throughout his hunt for the Obajan of the Hamoi Tong. All objectivity was displaced by recognition that he was involved in the greatest match of his life; for while he ached to restore the feelings of the girl who had captured his affection, he must aid his mistress to challenge the mightiest body the Empire had ever known: the Assembly of Magicians.

  Arakasi shied away from contemplation of the future. He saw each day as risk. He knew, as Mara did, that he could no longer continue as her Spy Master, in the unlikely event that her house could stand against the Assembly's will and survive. Adjusting the sash that bound his smock, and brushing the weapon belt beneath that held his hidden knives, he regarded the swept walkways and the rows of fragrant flower beds. If fate should destroy the Acoma, or if when he resigned his post Mara should have no honorable position to offer him within her household, he had his laborer's skills to fall back on, he thought on a note of black humor. Inspecting his hands, thick with dark soil that hid the calluses of a dozen trades, he considered there were less worthy pursuits than tending growing things.

  Killing was certainly one of them. His decoding of the tong's record scrolls had nearly made him ill at their dispassionate listing of generation after generation of death and cruelties. Mara had been right to use him as her own, ruthless instrument, to destroy the Hamoi Brotherhood at their root.

  But her Tightness did not make Arakasi any more able to forgive himself for such usage. Where Tsurani ways admitted only honor won for his mistress, his interaction with Kevin the barbarian had tainted his thoughts; Mara's own forgiveness of his very human failure in the bleached heat of a kekali garden had shocked the first cracks in his outlook. The bastions of his isolation had crumbled since, until now, naked of self-deceit, he saw.

  He had trained himself to be set as a weapon against others of his own kind. Kevin was right; the cho-ja were right; Mara and Hokanu were right to desire change in the stagnation of old ways. Although unconditional consent had been the way between master and servant for all of the Empire's long history, Arakasi had seen the evils of such thinking mirrored in Kamlio's hardened eyes. His awakened vision showed him guilt.

  'I am not what I was,' he had said to his mistress in their meeting after his successful assassination of the Obajan. It had been less a statement than a baring of his spirit to her view. He sighed, profoundly saddened that, through the hours he had spent gardening in the past, he had never paused to appreciate the results of his labors. Now he saw the neat rows of young blossoms with changed perspective. Feeling a strange tightness in his chest, the Spy Master considered that the lowly gardener might be closer to finding balance upon the Wheel of Life; certainly it was pleasant to imagine a life in constant harmony with the universe.

  Arakasi rubbed his hands and returned to work. His awakened awareness, here, became a liability. Despite the apparent tranquillity surrounding him, destruction was very close.

  The day waned. Reddened sunlight fell through the pillared entrance to the garden. An elderly hawker pushed his cart along the street outside, his singsong patois offering bundled tanzi bark to the wives of the free workers headed homeward from the temples to the dockside quarter. Shabby, just one step higher than slaves, such families burned tanzi to sweeten the air and mask the stinks of the fisheries on the river front side of town. Incense wafted from the Square of the Twenty Gods, where the priests threw open the massive doors of the temples. Sundown rites drew the aristocracy out to worship, when the streets were cooler and the merchants departed; the first lacquered litters of the nobles swept by, interspersed with the rumble of the empty costermongers' wagons, returning to the farmlands after the day's market.

  The hour just before sundown was a time when all classes of people mingled in the streets; when couriers removed their headbands and guild badges and walked home to their wives and supper, whistling. Arakasi fetched his wheeled barrow and began to gather up his hoe, rake, and trowels. He watched the arched doorway of the library keenly, anticipating the distractions of the hour to cover the emergence of his errand boy; workers were wearied from their labors and thinking of the evening meal, while the curtains of the nobles' litters would be drawn closed, to sequester them from the gaping of commoners.

  The moment the youth appeared, Arakasi would leave the garden, pushing his barrow, and the scribe would pass him but for a brief moment, close enough to deposit his report among the tools.

  Arakasi heard the sound first as a distortion upon the air
, almost dismissed amid the rumble of a wine broker's dray that ground over the cobbles beyond the gate. Then instinct had him ducking down behind his wheelbarrow before the vehicle passed, and his ears identified the disturbance for what it was: the bone-aching, arcane buzzing that preceded the appearance of a Great One.

  An icy sweat drenched the back of his neck. Had they come for him? Traced his presence to a ploy of Lady Mara's? Habit alone held Arakasi to his cover, that of a sunburned gardener putting up his tools at the end of his day's labor. His heart raced and his hands shook like those of a man with the palsy. He had known fear in his life, many times; but never before had it held any power over him. It had never, until Kamlio, breached the guarded inner core of his heart.

  The pair of Black Robes appeared an eyeblink later. The unnerving buzz died away, leaving a silence no longer filled with the drone of foraging bees. The sounds of the street seemed strangely removed, as if the world began and ended at the marble pillars that flanked the garden gates.

  Arakasi did not have to feign awe as he threw himself down behind the wheelbarrow, his face pressed against the dusty furrows his own rake had scribed in the earth.

  The Great Ones took no heed of him. As though he were no more alive than a carved statue, they moved down the garden path toward the gateway and stopped under the shadow of the arch. Their eyes stayed trained intently on the library's front stair across the street. Their backs were turned; from Arakasi's vantage, their feet were shod incongruously in velvet shoes better suited for carpeted indoor floors. They ignored the common gardener crouched behind them as if he were but another feature of the surroundings, not a person able to overhear them.

  One dark, hooded head bent close to that of his comrade. 'He should be along any moment now. The scrying showed he would cross the street and head in this direction.'

  The magician so addressed returned a barely perceptible nod.

  Arakasi felt little relief when he realised that the Black Robes had not come for him. Still trembling, nearly paralysed with fear, he dared a peek outward. Above the tines of the rake, framed between the enigmatic black forms of the magicians standing under the arch, he saw his messenger at last emerge from the library, a laden satchel slung from a strap across his shoulder.

  'There!' The Great One who had spoken pointed at the young figure of the scribe as he moved at a normal pace down the steps. 'There he is.'

  A nod of the second hooded head answered, and in an unusually deep voice. 'As you guessed, his satchel carries scrolls.'

  'Subject?' The first magician's voice was curt.

  His fellow closed his eyes, placed one hand against his forehead, and gestured in the air with the other. His passes perhaps described a spell, or a symbol, or some incomprehensible ritual of power. The Spy Master felt his flesh prickle, as the tingle of magic visited him.

  The low voice rumbled as the magician said, 'It's a list. The imperial requisitions for funds for the arts. Victory arches, commemorative statues, memorials . . .' A pause while the two Black Robes seemed to ponder this. Then the cold-voiced one said, 'The time period of these lists is sensitive to our interests. Very.'

  Arakasi clenched his hands in his plain worker's smock, fearful that the drum roll of his heartbeat could be heard over the stillness of the garden.

  A lady's litter passed, hurried along by bearer slaves adorned with silk headcloths. Delayed by the traffic, the scribe paused on the other side of the street. Traces of a woman's perfume twined over the scents of blooming flowers, and the earthier odor of needra soil left by animal-drawn conveyances. The Black Robes whispered, craning their necks to regain sight of Arakasi's messenger, who, all unsuspecting, now crossed the teeming main thoroughfare with the jaunty stride of a boy who anticipates a reward in centis to spend at the taverns.

  'Certainly he should be questioned,' said the magician with the cold voice. 'It's unlikely the boy is conducting such research on his own. We must detain him and find out whether anyone might have hired or forced him to ferret out such facts.'

  The other Great One murmured agreement.

  Arakasi felt a jolt of near panic. If the scribe were forced to talk, his cover would instantly become forfeit. And, even before Kamlio, even without his awakened sense of vulnerability, the Spy Master understood he would have no chance of keeping secrets through an interrogation by those able to read thoughts. Mara's hand would be revealed, instantly and inescapably, and the continuance of the Acoma be put in jeopardy.

  He must act.

  Cold under his worker's smock, Arakasi felt the metal of his throwing knives. Propped up on one forearm, he groped to loosen his sash. His hands felt sweat-slick and numb as he reached under his robe and grasped the ebony handles of two blades: one for the hapless scribe, the second for himself. He must kill an innocent man in cold blood, and immediately cut his own throat. After that he must hope the Red God would take him before the magicians could bind his wal to his body and force him to speak in betrayal.

  The Black Robes had stepped together, obscuring Arakasi's view of the street. Fear bound his chest like a rope. The blade in his trembling hand, poised to throw, felt like a dead thing, a splinter. His belly was on fire with nausea. Almost, he hoped the worst might happen: that the magicians would not move, and that the scribe would step in through the arches to his garden rendezvous, unknowing.

  'He comes,' murmured the first magician. The pair moved apart, deeper into the shadows. Like still, hooded statues, on either side of the gateway arch, they waited for the man who wove across the busy thoroughfare.

  The press momentarily thinned. A cake seller walked by, trailing the scent of cinnamon. Two boys ran, chasing each other and shouting, while a puppy gamboled in and out between their legs. The scribe dodged around a portly water seller, his expression preoccupied, and his ink-stained fingers taut on the flap of his satchel.

  He stepped into the shaded walkway before the garden gate.

  Arakasi fought back revulsion. He had killed, many times. Never had he reacted like this. Mortality had held no meaning to his stone-hard heart, and he had felt no weakening rush of empathy for his victim. His will faltered, even as he cocked his arm to throw.

  Sunlight flashed silver on the knife blade, drawing the scribe's notice. His eyes widened, even as the Great Ones stepped into view, clearly intending to intercept him.

  Arakasi bit his lip. He must act! He measured distance, aimed, and battled to banish his inner sickness.

  'Halt,' the leftmost magician commanded in his ringing, metallic voice.

  The scribe did as bidden, paralysed with terror.

  'We would question you,' said the second magician, his voice a gritty bass.

  In a state of trembling pallor, the scribe said, 'Your will, Great Ones.'

  Gripping the wheelbarrow as though his fingers might punch through weathered wood, Arakasi forced his clamor of feelings to stillness. Murder must have shown in his eyes as he rose to one knee to throw, for the scribe staggered back, panic written plain on his face. He saw certain death in Arakasi's hand, and in a knife blade flashing downward into the beginning of a throw.

  He broke and spun. His satchel banged against his hip as he dodged in desperation back into the crowded street, running as though his heart might burst.

  The deep-voiced magician stiffened in surprise. The other shouted, outraged, 'He defies us!'

  The Black Robe nearest the gate raised his hands. A crash like thunder shocked the air, rattling the tools in the wheelbarrow, and flattening the flowers in a suddenly scything breeze. Arakasi was thrown flat against the earth.

  He shoved his blades under his prostrate body and hid his face behind his hands, while blast after blast shook the garden, accompanied by flashes like lightning. Screams erupted in the street, and sounds of fleeing footsteps and the bawl of terrified needra. A carter snapped his goad to whip up a laden wagon, and the puppy that had been frolicking with the beggar boys began yelping. Shivering uncontrollably, Arakasi peered between
his fingers.

  Except for the passersby who ran helter-skelter away from the garden entry, the street looked little different; the setting sun still cast red light across the library stair, and temple incense wafted upon the air. Except that its sweet odor now mingled with a scent of charred meat, and a pitiful smoking lump lay on the cobbles, unrecognisable as anything human. Nearby, untouched by the blast, rested a spilled satchel of scrolls that turned and rolled, their ends flapping in the dying eddies of wind.

  'Why would the fool have run?' ruminated the magician with the low voice. To his companion, he added, 'You should have not been so quick to burn him to a cinder, Tapek. Now we have no idea who employed him. This time you've indulged your temper at the cost of information.'

  The other Great One defended his act in disgust. 'There are only two possible suspects, the Acoma or the Anasati. No one else has a motive to send for inquiry into the archives. And it is unthinkable that any lesser man should defy us, and be allowed to disobey.' He turned from the gate, his downturned mouth clearly visible beneath his hood. His gaze flicked over the wheelbarrow, and the gardener's tools, and settled, ice-hard, upon the prostrate figure of Arakasi.

  Mara's Spy Master felt the touch of that stare like a spear thrust in the back. He could not stop trembling, nor did he dare to move. With the breath stopped in his throat, he held his pose of submission.

  The magician stepped closer. Velvet-shod feet stopped bare inches from his face. Mingled with the dust and the wet green scent of broken flowers, Arakasi could smell the pungency of ozone.

  'Did you know that man?' demanded the Great One.

  Incapable of speech, Arakasi shook his head.