Dark Empress

by S. J. A. Turney

  Dark Empress

  S.J.A.Turney

  I would like to dedicate this work to Lilian, without whose support the book would not have happened.

  Also, to my father-in law and mother-in-law, who not only gave me the love of my life, but who also keep me grounded and realistic.

  This book is available in print at most online retailers

  Published in this format 2011

  Copyright - S.J.A.Turney

  First Edition

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  By the same author:

  Tales of the Empire Series books 1 & 2:

  Interregnum (2009)

  For twenty years civil war has torn the Empire apart; the Imperial line extinguished as the mad Emperor Quintus burned in his palace, betrayed by his greatest general. Against a background of war, decay, poverty and violence, men who once served in the proud Imperial army now fight as mercenaries, hiring themselves to the greediest lords.

  On a hopeless battlefield that same general, now a mercenary captain tortured by the events of his past, stumbles across hope in the form of a young man begging for help. Kiva is forced to face more than his dark past as he struggles to put his life and the very Empire back together. The last scion of the Imperial line will change Kiva forever.

  Ironroot (2010)

  Captain Varro of the Fourth army is about to have the worst day of his life. Wounded in battle and fearing for his life and his future, he stumbles upon a plot that reaches deep into the past and into the roots of everything in which he believes.

  Accompanied by a young engineer from his unit and the daughter of his commander in chief, he begins to unpeel layers of treachery and murder that threaten not only himself, but the people that he loves.

  Ironroot is a tale of treason and revenge set in the world of the Interregnum, some twenty years after the events of that book.

  The Marius’ Mules Series, books 1 - 3:

  Marius’ Mules: The Invasion of Gaul (2009)

  It is 58 BC and the mighty Tenth Legion, camped in Northern Italy, prepare for the arrival of the most notorious general in Roman history: Julius Caesar.

  Marcus Falerius Fronto, commander of the Tenth is a career soldier and long-time companion of Caesar's. Despite his desire for the simplicity of the military life, he cannot help but be drawn into intrigue and politics as Caesar engineers a motive to invade the lands of Gaul.

  Fronto is about to discover that politics can be as dangerous as battle, that old enemies can be trusted more than new friends, and that standing close to such a shining figure as Caesar, even the most ethical of men risk being burned.

  Marius’ Mules II: The Belgae (2010)

  57BC. The fearsome Belgae have gathered a great army to oppose Rome and Fronto and the legions assemble once more to take Caesar’s war against the most dangerous tribes in the northern world.

  While the legions battle the Celts in the fiercest war of Caesar’s career, the plots and conspiracies against him, both at Rome and among his own army, become ever deeper and more dangerous.

  Marius’ Mules III: Gallia Invicta (2011)

  It is 56bc. As Fronto and his friends winter in Rome and Caesar in Illyricum, trouble is brewing in the north. The tribes of Armorica, driven to desperate action by the harsh rule of Crassus, raise their standards in defiance of the Roman eagle, causing a chain reaction that threatens everything the legions of Caesar have achieved. Can the general's commanders stamp out the fires of rebellion before the whole of Gaul is ablaze?

  Meanwhile, in Rome, the conspiracies against Caesar take an unexpected turn, plunging Fronto and his friends into a world of crime, violence and intrigue that threaten everything the legate cares about. The city is in turmoil and the republic is teetering on the brink of disaster.

  In a year that takes the legions and their commanders to the heaving Atlantic Ocean, the treacherous valleys of the Pyrenees, and the seething underbelly of the greatest city in the world, everything is about to change for Marcus Falerius Fronto.

  All books available from all good online stores.

  For more information visit www.sjaturney.co.uk

  Prologue

  If, in her later years, Asima described to someone the town where she grew up, which of course she wouldn’t, she would have been spoiled for adjectives. M’Dahz was the last Imperial town before the Pelasian border and, as such, shared more of the characteristics of their swarthy mysterious people than of the great culture of the Empire. It was a border garrison, a mercantile port, trading post, and caravanserai.

  It smelled of spice and of sweat; of work animals and of sweet meats; of the sea and of the desert. It was a meeting of every world and a clash of mouth and eye-watering noises, sights and aromas. It was a maze of narrow streets and alleys, the ramshackle adobe houses often kept from toppling outwards by the heavy wooden struts that were jammed from side to side above head height throughout most of the town. To ward off the worst heat of the day and the periodic cloying sandstorms from the south, the people hung rugs over the beams, turning the alleyways into stygian tunnels and creating a labyrinth.

  With the exception of the main thoroughfare that ran from the port to the Bab Ashra, the Desert Gate, the only part of M’Dahz that felt open and fresh was the palace compound, forbidden to all bar nobles, dignitaries and the military. A small and well-tended garden surrounded by elegant balconied residences, the compound presented a solid wall, free of windows, to the outside, shunning the dirty, smelly, noisy town that teemed with life.

  The whole town sloped downwards from the desert to the sea, and it was said that a man could walk the streets of M’Dahz for a week without finding a road free of steps. It wasn’t true, of course, but such streets were indeed rare, and every town has to have its little foibles after all. The town was self-styled as the ‘Southern Bastion of the Empire’ though in truth as much Pelasian or desert nomad blood pumped in the veins of its people as that of the Empire. And as for ‘bastion’? Well the town had its walls, along with three grand gates, but the walls had long been abandoned as a defensive perimeter and more often served as the rear wall of a house than a barrier to potential attackers. In fact, for almost a third of their length the walls were now buried deep inside the town itself, invisible without requesting entrance to peoples’ houses.

  Space was at a premium in M’Dahz. Everything clustered together as close to the centre as possible, like a pile of broken pots, as the people tried to distance themselves from the outskirts where the dust piled up at the foot of walls and the sand had to be swept daily from the streets. There was certainly no park or garden; no green space; no fields or orchards. But then everything the people needed came from trade: dates and fruit and meat brought by caravan from the oases inland, or grains and meats by ship from Pelasia and the great Imperial cities.

  People who visited asked merchants how anyone could live in the conditions they encountered at M’Dahz. But then the merchants would arch their eyebrow and ask in a concerned voice how anyone could consider living anywhere else. M’Dahz was dirty, noisy, smelly, at constant risk of sandstorm, barren and dry. But M’Dahz was life in its rawest form.

  Asima would never speak of these things, or how she began as the daughter of a humble seller of animal feeds before her rise to courtesan, concubine, and finally Empress.

  Part
One: Childhood’s End

  In which journeys are started

  They were seven years old when Asima first began to notice a change in the way the boys looked at her. It was not the lust, desire or hunger she would so often encounter later in life, but rather an indefinable need to be near her and to seek out her attention and approval. She would find in the coming days that she enjoyed their attention, but on that first day it surprised her, particularly given the strange timing that exhibited a subtle shift in the attitude of both boys, apparently independently.

  It was a summer afternoon in M’Dahz, though only a local would have noticed much difference between the seasons in this arid, searing land. The heat was already unbearable to most folk and only children, slaves and the duty-bound were in evidence beneath the fiery orb of the sun. The noise of the town was muffled as it rose from the stifled and shady alleyways beneath their coverings of rugs and blankets. A distant gong announced the call to temple for the faithful of the Pelasian divinity, but the subsequent clangs were lost among the noise of a town where life continued apace beneath the shady covers.

  Asima turned to Samir, shading her eyes from the worst of the glare. The smaller of the two boys, Samir held the attention of girls older than he. There was something about that face, the way his mouth turned up slightly at the corners as though he wore a permanent knowing smile. There was a delightful, if wicked, twinkle in his eye at all times, and his bronzed skin and short, straight black hair were smooth, neat and perfectly complemented his fine oval face. His clothes, for some reason, looked stylish and carefully chosen, despite the fact that Asima knew that they were little more than rags; hand-me-downs from distant friends of his mother, washed so many times they had lost all shape and colour. And yet something about the way he wore them made them look princely.

  Samir smiled and winked as he dropped into a crouched position, his muscles bunched and his tendons twanging. Asima nodded and turned to her other side. Ghassan was already is position as he turned to smile at her. Samir’s brother was, while officially a twin, nothing like his smaller sibling. This was good according to the traditions of the desert people from whom the boys’ paternal line had sprung. Twins who were too similar were bad luck; bad magic. It was not unknown for the nomads to leave children to die in the sands because of their tragic similarity; but Ghassan was different, for sure.

  Already a head taller, Ghassan had a slight curl to his hair and some parts of it jutted out in random directions. No matter how much their mother flattened, brushed, waxed or washed it, parts of Ghassan’s hair were untameable. His skin was marked from an illness as a baby and yet the marks did not make him ugly or ruin his appearance; somehow, the imperfections added to the rugged power of his appearance and lent him a gravity he would otherwise have lacked. Where Samir’s mouth turned up to a smile, Ghassan’s was straight and flat, his expression serious. He was handsome in a way that appealed to some of the girls of M’Dahz, and mothers nodded sagely as they foresaw an eminently marriageable boy there. And yet, somehow, while Ghassan’s clothes were almost identical to Samir’s, on the taller boy they hung like badly sewn bags. Asima almost laughed as she nodded and faced forward, dropping to a crouch herself.

  The girl was already pretty and was coming to realise it even at this young age. She had perfect skin, with a creamy texture that required surprisingly little upkeep, though her father chided her anyway for the amount of time she spent primping. Her almond eyes were beautiful, dark and warm, her lips a perfect bow. Her hair was long and carefully combed and pinned back, never cut more than a shaping trim as was the tradition of the Pelasians, for Asima had Pelasian blood on her mother’s side. The only fault that marred her appearance in any way was her fingernails. Her mother, before she had passed last winter, had disciplined her repeatedly for the damage she was doing biting her nails down to the quick, though it had never stopped her. She was dressed, in a manner that would cause her father’s heart to skip a beat, in just a white cotton vest and knee length trousers of the same thin material, her feet bare and her sparse jewellery removed and lying on the pile of more acceptable clothing by her feet.

  She had jested time and again with the boys that her father would marry their mother one day and so she could never kiss them since they would end up being her brothers. But it was friendly banter and they all knew it. While the boys’ mother was a handsome woman still in the bloom of late youth, she was poor almost to the point of slavery, eking out a living as a washer woman for the mercantile classes. Indeed, it was at their mother’s work where Asima had met the boys, her father being a factor for a Pelasian trader of fruit and having paid their mother a little extra to keep his daughter busy while he sorted problems with deliveries. Her father was far from a rich man, but his business kept him well enough that Asima really should not have been socialising with the likes of Samir and Ghassan.

  But in that timeless fashion, the universe over, such boundaries of class meant nothing to the children, and forbidding them to play together merely drove them closer and closer. For the last year the three had become inseparable and even their parents had thrown their hands in the air in defeat and allowed the friends to continue their association, albeit restricted to times that neither adult was in sight.

  And so here they were. The boys’ mother worked her fingers raw in the cleaning vats beneath the blanket roof of the cloth market, despite the heat of the day, while Asima’s father, busy as always, met with the captain of a ship newly arrived from Germalla across the sea to the north.

  And the three unsupervised children?

  “Go!”

  As Asima shouted, the three figures, crouched and tense on the flat roof of the copperware shop in the street of a hundred martyrs, raced off across the dusty and hot surface, their bare feet hardened to the extreme heat radiating from the roof. Each week the route of the race changed, chosen by a different competitor, the three making sure that each of them had a fair say, though it was becoming clear that Samir was playing with them in designing his routes. The last two occasions that Samir had laid out the plan, both his companions had drawn a worried and surprised breath at some of his decisions.

  The first jump was simple: across the three roofs to the next street, the street of the northern dunes. Northern dunes was a narrow alley and the carpet covering was only four feet below the rooftops here as a safety net. Ghassan was first over, his long and powerful legs giving him the thrust needed to easily clear the gap, coming down with a light thud and hardly breaking his pace before he sped up and was off again toward the tower of the Pelasian temple. Asima was next across, her small frame light and lithe. She landed awkwardly and stumbled for a moment, but was quickly up and off again. Behind her she heard the telltale thud and rumble of Samir landing and smoothly rolling to his feet once more without a halt in pace.

  Across the rooftops they ran, gradually increasing in altitude as per Samir’s route. The temple tower passed by on their right as they leapt across the nine sisters stairway, one of the few jumps with no carpet safety net and one of very few places on their run that could conceivably cause serious injury. By now Samir was at her heel like a terrier, while Ghassan maintained a short but convincing lead. Asima was trying to picture the path ahead, to identify any place where she could use her intimate knowledge of the town to gain the lead. Where would…

  She was so surprised when Ghassan lost his footing and tumbled to a heap on the flat roof that she almost fell over him, leaping into the air at the last moment and performing a graceful manoeuvre as she skipped twice and then used her new momentum to clear the next street. She laughed as she landed on the other side and turned to see her lead over Samir had widened and that Ghassan, having pulled himself to his feet was now clearly at the rear of the group.

  Turning her attention back to the terrain ahead, she drew a deep breath. She was in the lead now and had to maintain her advantage. She had only won two races this year and they had both been on routes she herself had set. To mainta
in face, she had to win one of Samir’s routes. Asima could hear the laboured breathing of the smaller brother close behind her; so close.

  Biting the inside of her cheek, she ducked sharply to the right, around the upper storey of the temple-hospital of Belapraxis, with its roof herb garden full of plants with bitter-sweet smells and healing properties. It was oh so tempting to stop for a moment in the blessed shade cast by the extra level of plaster wall, but there was too much at stake today.

  Asima slowed as she neared the edge of the roof. Between this wall of the hospital and the grocer’s at the other side of the street, a single beam ran across carrying the water pipe that fed the hospital from a cistern at the highest point of the town. With the increased altitude of the buildings here, the carpet ceiling was a good fifteen feet below and the fall would hurt even if she landed well; a bad landing on one of the supporting struts would be crippling if not deadly. Really, Samir’s routes were getting crazy. Taking a deep breath and offering up her prayers to the four Gods whose names leapt easily to mind, she stepped out onto the beam and began to slowly inch across, placing her bare feet close in front of each other.