The Complete Empire Trilogy

by Raymond E. Feist

  More men exploded from the bedroom. They met the first man, returning. ‘He must have gone over the wall. Patrol the perimeter, quickly, before he gets away!’

  Shouts of inquiry issued from inside the harem. News of the Obajan’s death roused the servants, some of whom gave way to panic. The tong was swift and merciless in retribution, and in a house this well guarded, the members would suspect that whoever killed their master must have an inside accomplice. The entire staff might be put to death to ensure elimination of any traitors. The more intelligent servants understood their best course of action was to flee. Fear alone bound these wretches to service with this murderous brotherhood; most preferred to chance an uncertain future than face dishonorable death.

  Arakasi could only hope that the confusion caused by dozens of terrified servants would lend him opening, for while a saner man might seek escape, his mission was yet incomplete. For Mara’s sake, he must return to the Obajan’s study and steal the record journal of the tong.

  Stillness had fallen over the adjacent bedchamber. Arakasi risked that the guards had left their dead master in the heat of the search. He reentered the screen he had broken earlier and stepped into a scene of carnage.

  Blood splattered everything within ten feet of the bed. Beside the bulk of the slain master, a pair of naked girls remained, starlight limning their forms faintly silver. One of them stared at him, silent. With crazed, repetitive motions, she sought to wipe blood from skin smeared hopelessly scarlet. The other writhed in the sheets, moaning. Struck down by a poisoned dart, she was unable to rise. With grim purpose, Arakasi recovered two metal knives, one from the neck of the Obajan and another from the stomach of a guard who lay sprawled at his master’s feet.

  Arakasi stepped past the foot of the bed, his glance passing over the wounded courtesan. He stopped, his attention unwillingly arrested. The girl’s hair pooled like spilled oil in the moonlight, pale gold and glistening. Her face was upturned, exposed to the flicker of torchlight spilling in from the garden. Like a wound to the heart, he saw that her features were the exact same as her sister’s.

  They were twins.

  Logic could not stay the lurch of Arakasi’s heart. In moonlight, her slim hands worrying at the dart that pierced her breast, she could not be distinguished from the girl he had touched and bedded. Jolted by a pain of the spirit that threatened to choke his breath, Arakasi fought to recapture his icy, analytical nature. He was Acoma Spy Master, on a mission for the Servant of the Empire. He must keep his wits and locate the Obajan’s scrolls.

  But when he most needed steady nerves, his objectivity forsook him. Before one dying courtesan, his own survival suddenly seemed as meaningless as trying to capture sunlight with bare hands.

  Arakasi’s intellect screamed that he must keep faith with Mara, while his heart drove him to his knees beside the stricken girl. Time and circumstance were blurred. He could no longer separate which was the courtesan who had bound him to her, and which the twin sister. In the dark, in the moonlight, in the aching loss of the moment, their identities seemed to merge. Against every instinct of self-preservation, Arakasi gathered her body into his arms. He cradled her, wide-eyed and motionless, until she quivered, gasped and, after what seemed an eternity, finally ceased breathing.

  Arakasi felt as if he had been beaten. His nails had gouged his palms, and his teeth had drawn blood. The salt-rich taste on his tongue and the death stink that pervaded his nostrils pushed him to nausea. He barely noticed the living woman who muttered amid bloodstained sheets. His mind recorded but did not comprehend her babble. Arakasi snatched a tearing breath and forced himself to unlock his rigid limbs. His heart seemed frozen as the dead girl slipped from his grasp. By rote, he reacted to a sound behind him, turned, and whipped out a knife. His throw was almost true. The servant who sought entry was a castrate who served the harem, returned to look after his charges. The knife caught him a glancing slash across the neck. He gagged and slammed into the door post. Fast Arakasi had always been; but tonight his limbs were clumsy as he stumbled across the dropped girl. His feet caught in soggy sheets and hooked upon cushions. He struck the castrate with a wrestler’s move in the middle, and knocked him sideways. The dying man’s strength was uncanny. Arakasi’s hands sought a grip, and slipped. He dug his fingers into the wound and, by the spray of blood on his face, knew he had torn his enemy’s artery. Using his knuckles to stop his victim from crying out, he received a bite to the bone.

  Had the dead Obajan’s guards not been sweeping the outer grounds for an assassin who by rights should be fleeing for his life, the struggle would have brought notice. As it was, hanging onto a dying man who careened into wall hangings and crashed against chests and tables, Arakasi felt a sense of the unreal. The castrate took a long time to bleed to death. When he at last fell limp, Arakasi reeled out of the room.

  He had never seen the inside of the house. What sense of direction he had garnered during his wait under the rooftree now deserted him as he sought the journal that was the heart of the tong. Such a book recorded each contract and its disposition, in a cipher known only to the Obajan. Intermediaries were told nothing beyond the name of the victims directed to die.

  The tong’s records were the inheritance of the Tiranjan, who must take over rulership for the leader just assassinated. The journal would not be unprotected, and even before the commotion of the search died down, the Obajan’s flower-robed adviser would be sending the Tiranjan to collect it.

  Arakasi heard distant voices and a scream. His time in the house was now limited to less than a handful of minutes, and his mind remained muddled by the memory of a girl’s tormented death. He whipped himself to review his past surmises, made through the hot hours of waiting under the rooftree. This was the pleasure palace. The Obajan was on sabbatical. The record book that was never beyond his reach would be here, in a place set aside for it. The door screen with the stoutest construction must be the strong room where the tong’s scrolls would be kept.

  Arakasi flitted down the corridor, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. He doused lanterns where he dared, shivering and starting at every distant noise. He rounded a corner and all but collided with a man whose back was turned. The chink of steel as he drew his last knife caused the man to whirl. He was a warrior, assigned to guard a locked door. Arakasi launched himself forward and sliced the tendons in the man’s wrist, even as his foe reached down to draw his sword. The Spy Master felt no pain himself as he chopped bitten, bleeding fingers into the guard’s windpipe, and rammed him with a crash against the wood.

  Someone shouted at the noise.

  Out of time, Arakasi bashed his enemy through the panel. The guard resisted, eyes widened in soul-deep terror. As he overbalanced backward into the confines of the strong room, the hand that still functioned scrabbled in desperation at the wall.

  Then he went down. Tripwires mired his ankles, and darts were released from the walls. The floor where he struck dropped down with a grinding sound, and stakes of sharpened, resin-hardened wood erupted through pierced patterns in the tiles, impaling his twitching remains.

  Arakasi paid his victim’s death throes no mind. Clued by the man’s last living act, he surveyed the wall, and found a niche between the murals. He recognised the hole for what it was, an opening for a locking pin that would disable the mechanical traps inside the room. He jammed his knife into the gap and rushed ahead.

  Chills chased across his skin. He could hear running feet in the corridors, converging upon his position. Ahead of him, lit by a single lamp, stood a tall desk-like structure with a heavy book resting on the top. He leaped over the corpse of the guard, his thoughts racing.

  If the door had been trapped, so the desk must be also. It followed that a thief who survived the defenses to get this far must be gifted, and a master of intricate mechanisms. Therefore, Arakasi chose the unpredictable tactic: he would make his attempt by force.

  He swallowed the metallic taste of panic. He grasped the heavy c
eramic lamp stand, bent down, and bashed through the inlaid paneling at the bottom of the desk. He looked up to locate and disarm the maze of fine threads and levers that would set off the snare were the book to be lifted, and beneath them found something else.

  A tightly rolled scroll lay beneath the trip mechanism. He pulled it from its resting place and glanced at it. The outer parchment was written over in cipher and tied off with ribbons marked with the flower of the Hamoi Tong. The book on the desktop was a fake, set up in plain view as a trap. In his hand he held the true accounts of the tong.

  The cries of alarm were now closer. Arakasi thrust the scroll into his robe and hurried to the doorway. He yanked his knife from the hole and ran, away from the voices that converged around the corner from behind.

  He made blind haste, shaken to fresh fear by his success. As much as he had planned, as carefully as he had arranged his safeguards, he had never anticipated surviving beyond the moment of the Obajan’s death. Now the stakes were redoubled; for without the journal scroll, the Tiranjan could not assume leadership of the clan. Contracts would go unfulfilled, and the Hamoi assassins would lose honor. In effect, Arakasi held the murderous brotherhood’s natami in his hands. Without it, the tong would lose credibility and eventually drift away like smoke.

  Shouting erupted in the corridor Arakasi had just vacated. The broken doorway was discovered, and screams followed, as guards rushed inside and fell to the traps reset when he had removed the dagger used as locking pin. Pursuit was immediate, as the survivors scattered searching through the house. Arakasi barely slipped out the window ahead of one hard on his trail.

  A stinging in his shoulder marked a hit by an assassin’s dart. It would be poisoned, surely, yet he had no choice but to ignore it. The antidotes he had brought on the chance he might get hit lay with his stores, hidden outside the perimeter. He rushed across the garden, leaped into a tree, and flung himself over the first wall. Poised for a moment, he heard darts and the heavier rattle of arrows flying through the branches above his head.

  He looked frantically for opportunity. A panicked party of servants hurried past. Attempting to steal from the estate, they hugged the wall in silence as they sought a clear avenue to freedom.

  Arakasi insinuated himself into their midst, causing one woman to scream and a man to throw himself on his knees and beg mercy. The Spy Master’s black clothing had caused them to mistake him for an assassin, he realised with near-hysterical glee. Drawing a deep breath, Arakasi screamed, ‘The servants have murdered the Obajan! Kill them all!’ His ragged shout sent the menials scattering in all directions, and he sprinted as they did, toward the outer wall. Let the tong trackers pick out his spoor from this confusion, he thought as he skinned his palms leaping over.

  At the edge of physical and mental exhaustion, he made his way to a sheltered place he had selected against the faint chance he would complete his mission. There he had hidden his antidotes, and a cache of drugs that would force him to continued alertness and energy, until safety or death greeted him. He would pay a terrible price for their use, and weeks of rest would be needed, but survival would be worth the price. He dosed himself quickly and stripped off his bloodied clothing. He left them under a large rock. From another of his vials, he poured a pungent liquid that caused his eyes to water. It was the essence of a slu-leeth, a large swamp creature that other beasts found repellent. No dog known would track one, and indeed, exposure to its musk would ruin the animals’ sense of smell for days. As he rubbed the stinking ointment on his skin, the sting in his shoulder reminded him he still had a dart in his flesh. He drew the barbed shaft out and slipped on a fresh shirt. The bitten knuckles he could do nothing for, and he cursed at the certainty that the hand would swell and infect.

  He could do nothing more but trust that the antidote he had swallowed would counteract the poison. He had made a fair guess at those required, a legacy of the knowledge gained from his inspection of Korbargh’s shelves.

  Arakasi began to lope through the night, sandal-clad feet slapping steadily over the rocky trail that led to safety. Now as he coursed through dew drenched grasses, memories of Korbargh’s end, and another death, made him acknowledge the changes in himself. Never again could he take such measures against a man, not for Mara, not for duty, not for honor. Not since he had held a dying courtesan and confused her, for a moment, with another girl. Irrevocably, he had perceived his own heart. If Korbargh’s antidotes, and the poison in his body were not a match … Arakasi was fatalistic – until another memory surfaced: the mad girl in the Obajan’s chamber. Her tearful hysterics replayed in his mind, her mumbling resolved with frightening clarity. She had said, ‘He knows Kamini!’

  Kamini who was but one half of a pair of twins, one belonging to an impotent old man, and the other dead with the Obajan. Arakasi began to run then, out of breath and hurting before he started. For the first time ever, he prayed with fervor to the gods of Kelewan, begging Sibi, who was Death, not to call him to her brother Turakamu’s halls. He needed luck, or a miracle, most likely both. For his lapse into distraction back in the Obajan’s chamber was sending death to Kamlio’s door. He had left the mad girl, alive, and still babbling, and a search was on for an assassin. The Obajan’s guards who remained alive might not cover every cranny of the estate grounds in the dark. But come daylight, when the Tiranjan arrived to direct the aftermath, a more methodical hunt would begin. The courtesan would be questioned.

  Arakasi recognised a second ugly truth: because of Kamlio he could be made to talk should he be taken. He choked back anguish. The only way to save the twin that he loved was through Mara; and the only way to protect his Lady was through the girl, who knew he had worked for a powerful mistress with great wealth. There were few such Ruling Ladies in the Empire. The tong would redouble their attacks upon Mara. Where once the tong struck for honor, now they would attack for survival. Arakasi would be only minutes ahead of the assassins in his race to reach Kamlio. If he could find one of his new operatives in Ontoset he might pass along his precious burden, but he had no moment to delay. From the instant the fact came to light that the Obajan’s murderer had recognised Kamini, the brotherhood would investigate, working back along the trail from the estate to the slave broker, to the surviving twin. They would leave corpses after their inquiries. If their agents in Kentosani received word before he could recover Kamlio …

  Sweating, Arakasi increased his pace, through fields and gardens, and over the beaten earth of a game trail that led in the direction of the main thoroughfare. Ah, if he could have one of Hokanu’s accursed horses, now …

  Even in his affirmation of service to Lady Mara, he also moved as he must, to meet his own need. Arakasi became filled by a strange exhilaration, as if only now had it registered that he was alive. His insane assault upon the Obajan had succeeded, and he held the tong’s records in his possession. That victory made him giddy. The jarring of the road under his feet, the sting of splinters in his skin, the burning of each labored breath, were all sensations to be cherished. Part of his mind recognised the effects of the drugs he had taken, but he also knew this preternatural awareness arose from his discovery of the true stakes at risk for him.

  As he hurried through the night, he analytically examined this epiphany. As son of a woman of the Reed Life, he had never regarded love between man and woman as any sort of mystery. He had lived, always, by his wits, his perception, and his skills derived from level-headed study of his fellow human beings. He had seen Mara’s involvement with the barbarian, Kevin, and been intrigued. He had attributed the fire in his mistress’s eyes when the man had been present to a female’s need to romanticise relationships. Why else go through the encumbrance and the bother of childbearing, he had coldly rationalised.

  Now, running as if his heart would burst, his throat congested with unshed tears, he thought of a honey-haired girl, still living, and her dead identical twin sister. He saw, as he bashed through dew-drenched branches and stumbled with startling carel
essness into the open moonlight on the road, that he had been wrong. Stupidly, pitifully wrong.

  Half a lifetime he had lived, and almost missed the significance of the magic that poets called love. He skidded to a stop, and glanced in both directions to locate the litter pre-arranged to wait for him.

  He pondered, as he gasped for breath, whether if he survived to spare the other, living girl from the tong’s vengeance as this night’s work was traced back to her – he wondered if the cynical nature, born of crushed dreams, would ever permit her to teach him what he now most wished to know. He ached to see whether the emptiness he had discovered within himself could ever be fulfilled.

  He spun around and, in the empty road, realised a second thing, as fearful as any other in this night of reckoning: this was the last mission he could undertake in the belief there would not be personal consequences. For, irrevocably, he had lost the detachment that had set him apart from his fellows, and had given rise to the ice-clear objective vision that had made him a genius in his craft.

  A need had wakened in him that changed him from what he was; no longer could he look upon others through his lens of unfeeling indifference. No longer could he mimic their ways, and assume any identity at will. The pale-haired courtesan had forever changed that.

  A night bird sang, somewhere off in the wood. The foliage overhung the thoroughfare, dimming moonlight, and the fine-grained scattering of stars. Left in drifting mist, with an empty roadway and no clue, not even a flag of dust to determine which way the litter might be waiting, Arakasi chose a direction at random. Tortured to wry observation, he considered whether his opponent at the game of intrigue, Chumaka of the Anasati, had also possessed that flaw of human nature, and lived in the absence of love. Or if he had not, would Arakasi’s newfound vulnerabilities leave him open to attack by a man that already had an uncanny penchant for spycraft, and who was Mara’s implacable enemy?