The King of Talbos (The Eastern Slave Series Book 6)

by Victor Poole

  "I mean it," Ajalia said. "Learn how to be selfish, and keep all your money to yourself." Leed looked at her.

  "But what if people need my money?" Leed asked. Ajalia shrugged.

  "What would you do if you didn't have any money to give them?" she asked. Leed thought about this.

  "Well, If I didn't have any money, then I wouldn't give them any," he said.

  "Exactly," she replied.

  "So you want me to pretend that I have no money, even if I do have money?" Leed asked.

  "Yes," Ajalia said.

  "But what if I do have money?" Leed asked.

  "Well, if you let other people have money whenever they really want it or need it," Ajalia said, "you will not have any money at all."

  "How do you keep your money?" Leed asked. Ajalia saw that he had put his hand into his pocket, and she heard the gentle clink of coins. She knew that he was fingering the hoard he had taken off of Philas.

  "Do you remember when I gave you that blood chain?" Ajalia asked him. "Do you remember how I told you to hide it?"

  "Yes," Leed said.

  "Does anyone else know that you have it?" she asked.

  "No," Leed said instantly.

  "So can anyone but me ask you about it?" Ajalia asked. Leed's face broke into a wide grin.

  "Okay," Leed said, and Ajalia saw that he was now thinking of making a secret hiding place for his great hoard. Leed looked suddenly very desirous of being elsewhere. "Thank you, I have to go now," Leed said. The boy turned away from her, and ran into the darkness outside the dragon temple.

  On the road to Talbos, Ajalia through about Leed, and about the boy's uncle who had beaten him. Wesley was the man's name, she reflected, and she determined once again to find this man Wesley, and to torment him for injuring her second-favorite boy. Wesley, Ajalia told herself, as her black horse paced steadily along the road in the mountains, would be a shattered vessel of a man, once she had appeared, and enacted vengeance upon him. She smiled with evil satisfaction, and turned to look back at Fashel and Philas, who were sitting astride matching brown mares. Delmar was riding far behind the other two; he had spoken for some time with the witch hunters who guarded the eastern gate of Slavithe.

  Denai had polished Ajalia's saddle even more assiduously than he had ever done before, and saddled the black horse for her. Ajalia suspected that Denai was trying to worm his way back into her good graces, because when he came to the dragon temple leading her horse, the black stallion had had several bright green lengths of cloth tied through his mane, and braided into his tail. Denai had brought a white Eastern mare for Delmar, and had nudged Ajalia slyly when she had gone to meet him.

  "I've gone and tried it," Denai said, looking quite sneaky.

  "Done what?" Ajalia asked, looking at the horses.

  "Your black horse is very calm," Denai said. "He's mated with three mares in the last two days, and I hope we'll have a good cross.

  "Really?" Ajalia asked with interest, looking at Denai. Denai bobbled his head, looking very like a discrete old matchmaker.

  "I could never have managed it if the black stud was not so calm," Denai said, handing the reins of the black horse to Ajalia. "We usually cross our horses out near the farms. Our own horses are quite violent, sometimes," he added regretfully.

  "The black horse is one of your Slavithe horses," Ajalia said with a smile.

  "Well, yes," Denai said, "but he seems different to other stallions, somehow." Ajalia thought of the magic that she had wound through her black horse's legs, and she imagined him at once with great broad wings of blue light stretching out of his shoulders.

  "I heard about Coren, and about Ullar," Ajalia told Denai, as she mounted her horse. Denai had been staying away from his room in the dragon temple for some time; Ajalia suspected that the horse trader had been sleeping in his stables out of a sort of desire for just punishment.

  "It's a pity, about the little boy," Denai said. "There wasn't anything I could have done. Coren just dropped down dead. Everyone that was there saw it happen. There was no question of anyone hurting him; he was standing away from everyone when he fell down."

  "Delmar said that it's just as well," Ajalia said, squelching the discomfort that was roiling in her gut. She still felt responsible for Coren's sudden death. She had thought more than once of going out to the place outside the walls where the scraps of Bain lay in the sand, to see if she could sort out Coren's slice of soul. She had never gotten to it. It had not seemed very important at the time, and she had been busy doing other things.

  Ajalia was not used to feeling quite so squirmy inside over death. She had felt flushing and uncomfortable about death, and about being responsible for killing people before, but she could not remember feeling like this. She had made a whole picture of Coren, grown up. She had hoped that he would turn out to be a decent man someday, and now he was dead. Ajalia told herself that Coren's parents had been responsible for the state of the boy's soul. It had been his mother, Ajalia told herself, who had split off Coren's soul, and blended it with Bain's.

  Ajalia sighed, and stroked the black horse's neck. Denai was chattering about the mares he had chosen, out of the Eastern horses, and of how he predicted that their housing and pregnancies would go. The idea of selling the Eastern horses had been put on hold, but Ajalia was glad that many of the Eastern mounts had now been broken to ride with a metal bit. The white mare that Denai had brought for Delmar wore a blue metal bit in her mouth.

  When Delmar came out, wearing the new clothes that Calles had fashioned for him, and got on the white mare, Ajalia thought that he looked utterly glorious, and people in the streets stared openly at the white and the black horses, and at their riders, as Ajalia and Delmar passed through the city. Leed had elected to stay behind, but had given Philas a stern talking-to before the slave had followed Fashel out of the house. Ajalia had seen Philas and Leed huddled just inside the dragon temple. Philas had stood with his arms folded, looking attentively down at Leed as the boy spoke to him. Ajalia could not hear what they said, but she saw that Philas looked very serious, and he was quiet as he followed Delmar and Ajalia out of the city. Fashel did not know much about riding, and her horse followed along beside Philas's mount.

  The streets of Slavithe, Ajalia thought, were nearly unrecognizable. There were still many people in the streets, but they were quieter, and calmer than Ajalia had ever seen them before. They still talked to each other, and greeted their neighbors when they passed, but there was a quiet joy, and a grim satisfaction in the faces of the people who remained in the city, as though they had been under the strain of unpleasant company for many years, and were just now able to relax, and to be themselves.

  Leed and Daniel had compiled a list of casualties from the people in Slavithe, and presented a written report to Delmar, which Ajalia suspected Delmar wanted to take to his grandfather in Talbos, as a proof of his determination to wholly purge the city of corruption. There were not as many dead witches as Ajalia had feared there would be; once Chad had taken the first family containing a witch to the doors of a temple, many other families with disabled witches had followed suit, and within a day, long lines of families stretched from the entrances of the several temples in the city, waiting with their incapacitated female relatives for their turn to walk them through the powerful blue barriers. Once the boys had cut through the necks of the witches, and once the word of what had been done spread like wildfire through the city, people knew at once that their own suddenly-dull and silent female relatives were witches.

  The witches who had been sliced through the neck, and cut off from their awful black cords of power, looked now like mindless children. They had gone slack in the face, much as Lilleth and Beryl had done, when Ajalia had cut through their souls. The men with brands in the families walked with their slack-jawed women through the barrier; many of the witches, particularly the old ones, fell down dead, but most of the younger women let out a smelly bang, and stumbled, stunned, through the wall of ma
gic. Their hearts bled out dark shadows, and their faces turned slick with sweat, but they lived, and their brothers and husbands and fathers assisted them silently home. When one of these witches lived, their families brought them to Leed, and waited for hours outside the dragon temple, to petition the boy to reconnect their loved ones' bodies to the earth and sky.

  The deaths of the witches, for the most part, were met with stoic anger and disgust by their families. A few family members, here and there, seemed to have known of their women's secrets, but most Slavithe people seemed totally disgusted with their corrupted relatives, and bore their bodies grimly to the poison tree. Delmar had made a proclamation throughout the city, that during the purge, all people were allowed to take the bodies of their deceased relatives to the poison tree in the forest, which was usually reserved for state funerals.

  Before he left the city, Delmar had gathered the boys together in front of the long row house, which Leed had been using as a headquarters, and had gotten an accounting from the children on the numbers of men who had been tested at the doors of the temples, to try them as priests or corrupt witch-followers. The ranks of boys, which had swelled from Ajalia's original servants to number nearly one hundred and seventy boys, had combed through the city in the previous days, and could account for almost all the mature men in the city. The houses had been combed through twice by gangs of mixed house and crew boys, who knew how to check for and disable the witches inside, and a few of the boys had gone into each temple to flush out the corners of the now-permanently glowing buildings, and to check for the bodies of priests who had hidden inside, and perished for lack of water. These boys only found a few bodies, and they dragged them out into the streets, and surrendered them to the guards, who took them away to the poison tree.

  The lands outside the walls had yet to be cleaned out, and the guards had been renewed, and supplemented with a whole host of boys at either entrance to the city. The boys formed a kind of double and triple barrier to check any entering persons from the farmlands or the dark valley and quarries. Leed had, himself, built great walls of ocean-blue magic in the openings of both gates into the city, and he had sent Chad to do the same at the northern pass. Delmar told Ajalia that he had seen to the secret passages within the city walls himself, and had built deep blockades of magic through the openings on either side, and added strong meshes of magic through the inside of the wall itself, so that any person who got into the wall would be forced to pass through at least three barriers of magic before reaching the city itself.

  "I thought the wall was going to explode, when I put the magic in," Delmar had told Ajalia, after he had done it. "Something awful happened in there. Smoke was coming out for almost an hour. It smelled awful."

  "I knew there was something wrong about those secret passages," Ajalia said triumphantly. "They felt very nasty to me, when we went into them. I bet your ancestors did horrible things in there."

  "Well, they should be safe now," Delmar said. He was looking at her fondly when he said this.

  Before Delmar left the city, he appointed Card and Chad as second-in-commands to Ocher, who was taking over the management of Slavithe, and the continued purges of the farmlands to the west and east walls of the city, and of the quarries, while Delmar was gone.

  "Are you going to take Talbos?" Ocher asked Delmar, as Ajalia stood nearby, the night before they left. Delmar glanced at Ajalia and then nodded.

  "She thinks so," Delmar said softly, and Ocher smiled.

  "We'll have the whole place cleaned up when you come back," Ocher said. He and Card had put a temporary halt to the construction of huts in the quarries; Card had brought his workmen to meet with Leed for an afternoon, and the boy had taught the workmen how to check for witches, and how to build the stone huts with magic.

  "I have only taught them a few basic things," Leed confided in Ajalia later on. "They won't be able to do much harm with what I have taught, but their buildings will last nearly forever now. I showed them how to get into the heart of the stone, and how to bond it against itself. Their huts will go up like wildfire when they get back to work."

  Now Ajalia was riding her black horse along the road to Talbos, and looking at the mountains to either side of the road. Delmar was riding in the very back on his white mare, and Fashel and Philas were in between Ajalia and Delmar, talking to each other in low voices. Ajalia did not think that Philas was moving very quickly in his attempt to win Fashel, which, she thought, was wise of him. Fashel had turned a little suspicious after Ajalia had warned her of Philas's intentions, and Ajalia had brought the young woman along to Talbos mostly because she wanted to eat her cooking, but also because she wanted to observe Fashel and Philas together in a more political setting. Ajalia told herself that she should stop meddling in other people's romantic affairs, but, she told herself, she was not exactly meddling, and she had no intention of obstructing Philas unless he proved to be turning back into an abusive heel. Fashel, Ajalia thought, would never have met Philas if Ajalia hadn't sent for her, and Ajalia had no intention of having a vague shudder of guilt in her heart every time she thought of the girl.

  A clatter of hooves sounded against the road behind Ajalia, and in a moment, Delmar appeared beside her.

  "They're getting along well," Delmar said, jerking his head backwards to where Philas and Fashel were still riding side by side.

  "He likes her," Ajalia said.

  "Well, obviously," Delmar said, rolling his eyes. He had been growing quite used to the sight of Clare going along with Ocher, and after the first time or two, had stopped seeing the pair of them as anything out of the ordinary.

  "So, when are we going to get married?" Ajalia asked. She looked sideways at Delmar, whose hands had clutched suddenly around the reins.

  "I haven't told you much about my grandfather yet," Delmar said. "Maybe we should go home, and talk some more before we go to Talbos." Ajalia turned in her saddle, and stared at Delmar.

  "What?" she asked. Delmar looked irritated and determined.

  "I said, maybe we should talk more about the king of Talbos," Delmar said clearly, his skin flushing beneath his tidy beard. "We haven't talked a lot about him yet."

  "We don't need to talk about your grandfather," Ajalia said, turning her eyes back to the road. She did not know what to say about Delmar suggesting they turn around and go back to Slavithe. She suspected that he was hoping she would not question him, and his face was quite red now.

  "Yes, we do," Delmar said anxiously.

  "Then I guess we aren't getting married after all," Ajalia said. Delmar made a slight choking noise.

  "Why would you say something like that?" he asked. He looked swiftly around at Philas and Fashel, who were some distance behind. "But I already married you," Delmar whispered.

  "Not like Clare and Ocher got married," Ajalia said. Delmar started to blush.

  "But I don't want to marry you like that," Delmar said. He looked overcome with confusion. Ajalia looked at Delmar, and then she looked at her horse's ears.

  "Oh," she said. Delmar studied her face. "Do you seriously want to turn around and go back to Slavithe?" she asked calmly.

  "Are you mad now?" Delmar said. "Of course I don't want to go back. I didn't mean to say that out loud. Are you mad at me?"

  "No," Ajalia said, and she found, to her surprise, that she wasn't. She touched a cord of magic beneath the road, and began to rifle through her insides, looking for the piece of gold light that Delmar had put into her back when he had said he married her.

  "I thought that you would be angry," Delmar said cautiously.

  "No," Ajalia said. "I don't care." She had thought, when the excitement of the Thief Lord transition was utterly fresh, that Delmar was going to swoop in and be romantic; she had thought that once his parents were out of his system, he would show that he cared and thought about her in a way that led into a future together. Oh well, Ajalia told herself firmly, and she peeled away the band of Delmar's gold that had twisted, like a cozy
snake, around her spine. While she was winding away the golden piece, she found several other pieces, and she remembered what Delmar had done, when he had tried to heal her arms for her. An irritated smile tugged at Ajalia's cheeks, and she began to gather together all the pieces of Delmar into a lump.

  "I really thought you would mind," Delmar said, as though he were hinting at something. Ajalia made no reply. She told herself that it was just as well that Delmar was only interested in kissing. She told herself that she had been pretty foolish, to think that he would think of marrying her, just because she had wanted to marry him. I'm a fool, Ajalia told herself, and the first pinpricks of angry tears began to tickle behind her eyes. She felt irritated with herself.

  "It's just as well," Ajalia said. "You'll be too busy for a wife." Delmar was studying Ajalia carefully; he looked flushed, and nervous.

  "You're taking this awfully well," he said carefully. Ajalia, who wanted to throw something at Delmar's face, smiled.

  "Thank you," she said. "Now, tell me about your grandfather." She found the piece of Delmar's soul that he had pressed against her temple, when he had sponsored her, and she began to peel it away, and to jam it into the ball of golden light that she was collecting within herself.

  "We don't actually have to talk about him," Delmar said. "I only said that because you scared me."

  "I scared you?" Ajalia asked calmly. She tore the last strips of the sponsorship from her temple, and squished them into the ball of golden light. Ajalia had a strong suspicion that Delmar would kick and protest howlingly if she presented the ball of golden soul-substance to him in a straightforward manner, and she was sure that he would try to keep her own bits of soul away from her, tucked safely away inside of his back. Ajalia began to think of how she would trick Delmar into giving up her light again. She wanted no bond with him at all. She knew, from past experience, that he would stare at her soulfully, with tears in his eyes, and plead for her forgiveness, if he knew that she was going to give up on him now.