The Complete Empire Trilogy

by Raymond E. Feist

  The First Adviser advanced another pawn, setting two of his master’s pieces under threat. ‘I’d like to take the infiltrators quietly.’ He spoke as he did when contented, low-pitched, as a cat might purr. ‘Not kill them. They may have useful information for us. I’d like to know just how Mara’s toy maker planned to sabotage our siege equipment, for one thing; I’m sure the modifications would be very clever to elude the notice of those overseeing construction. That’s more idle curiosity than anything else.

  ‘But far more important, if we can force one man to talk, and learn their method for passing information as well, we can send back false signals through the Acoma spy net. The Lady will not know her plot has been spoiled until the actual day we take the field against the Emperor. When our engines assault the walls of the Imperial Precinct, she will expect them to fail and cause us chaos, and she will have her forces arrayed to take advantage of that situation.’ With an almost sensual glee at the possibility of reversing Mara’s plot, Chumaka said, ‘Instead, our new equipment will function flawlessly, and the Acoma will find themselves upon the field, outside the walls, while we are already securing our position within.’

  Jiro sacrificed his fortress, and tipped his head to concede his First Adviser his argument. ‘I will leave you to oversee the arrangements.’ Extracting information by force from a captive was not a detail he relished thinking about. He did not have a weak stomach; torture simply did not interest him. The treatises he had read told as much as he cared to know on the topic. ‘And as far as Ichindar is concerned, I thought we’d agreed I should goad a traditionalist fanatic into assassinating him rather than take him head on with an army.’ Almost spitefully, Jiro finished, ‘The Black Robes seem to dislike the idea of a civil war.’

  ‘Of course; nothing is more destructive to any society.’ Chumaka advanced another piece and looked up to accept the satchel of new correspondence brought in by his assistant. ‘But as we discussed, even a dead Emperor will have supporters. They will hole up behind walls with his heir. If you, as the nations’ savior, step in and divert chaos by restoring the office of Warlord, you must also seize Jehilia as your power base. Even without Mara and Hokanu’s resistance, you will need to break the city’s defenses to get to the Imperial First Daughter … before someone else does.’

  But for the gleam that wakened in his eyes from review of future hopes, Jiro seemed absorbed in the shah game. Chumaka turned from the board and riffled through the rolled dispatches. He selected one, squinted to be sure it had not been tampered with, then split the seal. He scanned the lines, not needing to pause to interpret the cipher. ‘Interesting,’ he mused to himself. Idly, he wondered how irritated his master was likely to become when he learned of the ex-Minwanabi warriors that Chumaka maintained in secrecy in a remote northern province.

  If they became useful in arranging Mara’s downfall, Chumaka decided, he would receive a citation for them. His lips quirked. How he wished he belonged to a household that did not have touchy internal politics! Or a master of such heated pride. As Jiro completed his next move, Chumaka flicked his empress to a new square. He speculated whether a woman’s rule would follow the same fashion as a man’s; was Chumaka’s Spy Master counterpart in the Acoma household permitted a free hand with his work? Only exceptional brilliance could keep such a network intact past the fall of House Tuscai. And Mara’s willingness to take masterless men into service had shown the falsehood of counting such without honor. Certainly those who had labored as spies for the Lord of the Tuscai seemed even more diligent on behalf of the Acoma.

  Or had the creature who directed them been Lord Sezu’s man all along? Chumaka judged not, since Mara’s father had dealt straightforwardly in council and on the battlefield. The Anasati First Adviser stroked his chin, peripherally aware of his master’s expletives over the shah board as he saw his attack plan threatened. He set aside the dispatch and reached for the next, the contents of which caused him to snap off his cushions with a thoroughly uncharacteristic oath.

  Diverted from his straits on the shah board, Jiro raised his eyes in languid inquiry. ‘What passes?’

  ‘The devil!’ Chumaka gestured with the parchment scroll, which appeared to contain random squiggles. ‘I’ve miscalculated, maybe; underestimated him, almost certainly.’

  ‘Who?’ Piqued, Jiro pushed the board out of harm’s way as his adviser began pacing. ‘Do we have a problem? A setback?’

  Chumaka looked askance, his eyes deep as still pools. ‘Maybe. The Obajan of the Hamoi Tong has been assassinated. In his pleasure harem.’

  Jiro gave a small shrug. ‘So what?’

  ‘So what!’ Chumaka curbed his agitated movement. Seeing Jiro’s darkening expression at his sharp tone, he said, ‘Master, the Obajan was one of the best-guarded men under heaven, and he has been stabbed to death. What’s more, his killer escaped. Clean. Very professional work.’ Chumaka consulted his scroll more closely. In dawning astonishment, he added, ‘It says here that the tong brotherhood have disbanded. They are now masterless men: grey warriors.’

  It pointed to one possible conclusion. ‘That can only mean their records were lost?’ Jiro’s voice was forced and level. The contents of the tong’s accounts could dishonor his house several times over, not least for the latest cash outlay, to buy an attempt on old Frasai of the Tonmargu, who lent his ear to Hoppara of the Xacatecas too often when he wanted advice on policy decisions. As long as Frasai remained alive, Kamatsu’s death would serve traditionalist causes very little. Hokanu would stand in his father’s post soon enough, but his tie to Mara and the Acoma would hamper him against any move made by Jiro’s allies only when Frasai’s vote of support was eradicated. If the Imperial Overlord fell, the Imperial Chancellor would find his powers in the Emperor’s council crippled at a stroke. But Jiro needed Frasai’s death to be caused in discreet fashion; killing one’s own clansman, especially one’s own Clan Warchief, was an extreme act even by Tsurani standards.

  Chumaka responded, bemused with thought. ‘The secret accounts were stolen, or so every rumormonger in the Holy City now reports. I wonder if Mara has the tong’s records?’ She must, he deduced. If an ally had access to such sensitive secrets, Anasati agents would have been informed; a foe would simply turn the information to immediate advantage, unless … the only enemy the Anasati had that was under constraints not to initiate conflict was the Acoma/Shinzawai faction that centered on Mara. Chumaka stroked his chin, the shah game utterly forgotten. What if he had miscalculated? What if the Acoma Spy Master was a better player than he? What if a trap yawned under Anasati affairs, just waiting for a misstep to snap shut?

  ‘You’re worried,’ Jiro observed, in his best tone of false boredom.

  Observing that his master was hiding extreme displeasure, Chumaka did his best to wave the matter away. ‘I am careful,’ he allowed, self-aware enough to know that his worst nightmares seldom resolved in daily life. His active imagination helped make him master of his job. In his eagerness to close with his Acoma opponent, he could easily have been drawn into carelessness. He must pull back, wait, and watch, like a patient hunter. The trainees of Mara’s toy maker must be taken with utmost caution.

  Then, as if a sixth sense reminded him that he had been still too long, and that his master’s restless intellect was on the verge of expressing annoyance, Chumaka smiled brightly. ‘Shall we eat? Or shall we finish our game, which you are very close to losing?’

  Jiro glared at the arrangement of the players on the game board. He made a deprecating gesture that turned into a clap to summon servants. ‘Two defeats on an empty stomach are more than any master should face before daybreak.’ He must have followed that observation with thought of the dead Obajan, for he looked nettled enough to eat floor pegs. ‘Damn her,’ he murmured in a voice he thought too quiet for his First Adviser to overhear. ‘If not for the Assembly’s protection, I’d see her shamed and begging.’

  The gardener blotted his brow. Leaning in apparent idleness on his
rake handle, he surveyed the surrounding flower beds under the afternoon sunlight. The blooms were the brilliance of rainbows, no dried seedpods or wilted petals left shriveling in the heat to mar their freshness. The soil was level, and weed-free as it had been since the hour the worker had started. Each shrub was trimmed to provide beauty at an economy of space. The retired imperial officer assigned to this household used his apartment infrequently. Since he valued peace and silence, his gardens had been arranged to set the bustle of the Holy City at a distance. Half blind from cataracts, he tended to forget the faces of his gardeners. Hence his lovely, private little garden across from the city library offered the perfect rendezvous point for a Spy Master who desired clandestine exchanges of information bought through a bribe to one of the archivist’s copyists.

  Arakasi spat on his palms as any diligent gardener might do, and again took up his rake. His sun-browned hands looked as if he had practiced such labors life-long as he scratched parallel rows in dry soil. Except for his eyes, which kept covert surveillance on the entrance to the archives across the thoroughfare, he assumed his role to perfection.

  In this he was even more meticulous in his caution than usual. After the change in outlook triggered by Kamlio, he distrusted his reactions. He no longer held confidence in his ability to act with his former speed. As he raked, he worried; would emotion make him hesitate? He no longer saw people, even enemies, as ciphers on a game board. His personal conscience, as opposed to his duty as a servant, posed a conflict he feared to put to the test.

  Since his thwarted attempts to infiltrate an agent into the City of the Magicians, he understood that any inquiry into old texts on arcane subject matter, or probing into proscribed eras of history, might draw notice. Also, the libraries were Jiro’s passion, and Anasati spies comprised half the staff. Since the Imperial Archives were rarely visited except by students of history, most of them initiates at one temple or another, any stranger sent in as agent would cause inquiry. Since Ichindar’s ascension to absolute rule, the Day of Appeals had become the place to air disputes over obscure points of law. The High Council no longer sent couriers to peruse the stacks of fading parchments for clarification on the fine points of tradition under debate by merchants or guilds.

  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 rightness 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.