by Terah Edun
“We have long sensed a disturbance in the way the land had interacted with the bloodline.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” a man snapped.
Before the kith could respond, if he intended to at all, another person, this one at the very back of the room next to the doors Ciardis had slipped through so inconspicuously, said, “Typical shadow creatures! You hide in your hovels and wait for the empire to take care of you lot.”
Ciardis’s skin prickled as her stomach roiled at the hatred simmering in the room, like a pot ready to boil over. She knew that the kith were reviled in Algardis. Even she had grown up with horrible tales about them, but to see this hatred from the people who were supposed to be the most learned, if not the most enlightened individuals, in the land was telling.
“Dirty animals,” said another voice. But this time she didn’t see who it was who had spoken out of turn. They were hidden behind the mass of bodies teeming in the room.
Sebastian shouted over the group, “We came here to discuss our alliance and even form a ritual pace, not to fight among ourselves.”
But no one was listening. Instead the malcontent in the room only grew.
Ciardis wanted to say something to curb this swelling darkness. Even when she had said nothing before to defend herself, she couldn’t stand by and let fellow citizens of her empire be denigrated in front of her. She wouldn’t.
But apparently the kith needed no defenders.
A roar sounded from behind the foxlike creature, and a person she’d best describe as half-woman, half-weapon leapt onto the table and lunged for one of the detractors. Ciardis wasn’t sure if she was going for the man hidden in the crowd or the one at the back of the room, but whichever the case, she couldn’t be allowed to reach him.
Ciardis knew that the moment blood spilled in this chamber, all would be lost. They’d never get the conclave to cleave to their cause if they couldn’t stop them from tearing each other apart first.
Sebastian snapped orders and two soldiers leapt into action. With careful movements they wielded their swords. Not to attack the female kith but to cut her off.
As they leapt onto the table to confront her, Ciardis got her first good glimpse of the woman’s appendages. Instead of hands, she had…blades.
The guards forcing her back couldn’t seem to keep her from scaring half the room, but she didn’t advance any farther toward her intended victim.
It was a standoff; the kith seemed as reluctant to harm the guards as they were to harm her. She just wanted justice for the garbage-spewing nobleman hiding at the back of the room, who was now whimpering and pleading for his compatriots not to let the beast kill him. That it wasn’t right.
The word beast only seemed to enrage the female further, as she bared her teeth and shouted in an ever-louder volume. The language was foreign, but the tone was unmistakable. She would rip him to shreds if she got near him and could easily do so.
Ciardis gasped, and half the room squealed as the woman wielded her deadly arms in even wider arcs. It was beautiful to watch. Like a deadly dance. It was even more wondrous to realize that even though she flailed like a madwoman, she somehow managed to avoid decapitating the soldiers who danced around her like partners.
When she turned in a certain manner, Ciardis finally saw that the blades were in fact not metal at all. They were bone.
At the base of the female’s elbow, her flesh disappeared. No muscle was present. Only sharpened bone that fashioned a weapon on both arms the likes of which Ciardis had never seen.
“By the gods,” Ciardis said with some surprise.
She felt Thanar lean forward and whisper into her ear, “I’m surprised they let her in here.”
“What is she?” Ciardis whispered back.
“A living weapon,” Thanar said in an ominous tone as he straightened up and, to her surprise, released his grip on her.
Ciardis understood why he’d released her, then stepped forward, either to restrain the living weapon or help her. However that didn’t mean she accepted it. The living weapon could just as easily gut Thanar as she could the guards she was weaving around. Ciardis didn’t trust that the restraint the female atop the table was currently showing would last a second longer than it had to.
And right now Ciardis knew it was very much dependent on a thin line that could readily break with one word. As her fingers twitched to grab the daemoni prince and pull him back, she ran through their options. Nothing looked like a good way to avoid bloodshed.
As Ciardis watched, Sebastian put a forestalling hand on the daemoni prince’s forearm, not her.
The princes’ eyes met and a sort of understanding flowed between them.
Thanar didn’t step back as the living warrior’s taunts grew more vicious, but neither did he step forward.
Sebastian turned his gaze to look across the room at the burly man as the rumble of shouts in the room grew louder, this time from nobles cheered by the prince heir.
They think he’s ordering the soldiers to protect them, Ciardis realized.
Of course, he was only trying to keep the entire room from descending into madness. But as long as the soldiers were up there, a tense detente followed with the living warrior unwilling or unable to plow through them to get to her target.
As she eyed the foxlike kith in the corner, Ciardis got the feeling he wasn’t displeased with the warrior’s outburst.
In fact, he and his kin seemed to be the only calm ones in the room.
Ciardis hummed to herself as she looked around with a more practiced political eye.
Perhaps the nobles and the merchants have lived apart from the kith for too long, she surmised. What had once been nightmares that caused human children to wet their beds were obviously very real, and these powerful humans were seeing this for themselves potentially for the first time in their lives.
As the female continued her dance with the soldiers atop the table, Sebastian gave a smooth nod.
The burly man took it as his cue. He moved through the crowds as swiftly as a shark through blood-scented waters, found the man who had hidden in the crowd, and knocked his own head against the noble in the back with a smashing sound that brought to mind crystal shattering on the floor. The rude and hate-filled noble dropped like a lumpy bag of rocks.
Heavy silence echoed.
The conclave members took in the imperial-men-at-arms symbols sewn into the burly man’s clothes.
They looked furtively at his hardened eyes.
And they closed their mouths as they quickly calculated their own odds at surviving such a blow.
The nobility and merchants turned from the burly gentleman and back to the prince heir. Eyes flicked back and forth like they were watching a tennis match on the courts. Ciardis could tell that they realized that this gentleman had had the prince heir’s approval when setting out to accost their fellow human and that they were alone in their unsettlement—well...outrage would have been a kind word for their reaction.
They began squawking and yelling and flailing like outraged two-year-olds denied a toy.
In contrast, the living warrior smiled and lowered her very menacing bone arms. With a flick of her head, she slipped between the two soldiers as smoothly as a snake gliding through the grass and was back among her people within seconds.
Ciardis wished she could say her human people were acting with as much grace. They continued to grouse at the treatment of their fellow man. As long as they could do so as a group and not be singled out, she knew they would continue to do so.
Ciardis also noticed that not one individual stepped forward to help or treat the man dealt the devastating blow. He was stumbling up on his own with blood pouring down his face, but his outraged compatriots payed him not a single minute’s mind as he made his way out of the room on unsteady feet.
Outrage for outrage’s sake, Thanar said to her softly in a slightly amused tone. Outward, his eyes were still hard and his hands crossed in irritation, though.
<
br /> For her part, Ciardis stared around at the squawking conclave with bemusement.
This is the group of people destined to fend off a god? she thought. They’d be lucky if they made it out of this room in single file.
It’s going to be a long day, Sebastian told her and Thanar caustically.
Meanwhile Ciardis was trying to decipher some of the contested points being flung at their heads, though none of the nobles really seemed to have any method to their madness. She wasn’t sure what they had expected: for the prince heir to let the two men continue to fling hateful words at the kith, or to allow the crowd to rile itself into a frenzy?
Whatever the case was, Sebastian had had enough. He turned to another gentleman. This one was the polar opposite of the sergeant-at-arms Sebastian had sent to get rid of the detractors.
While the sergeant-at-arms had stepped forward to help with clear physical intentions, the mousy man Sebastian had chosen shook his head vigorously and shouted, “Order!” in a tone Ciardis hadn’t thought could possibly come from deep within such a small man.
The human cacophony died down. To her surprise, even the sergeant-at-arms, who she could now see was also a noble although one with a warrior’s bearing, straightened in attention. When a woman continued to complain in a viperous tone, he locked eyes on the speaker and spit to the side—directly onto her cheek.
Silence descended like a cloak.
An insult among any class of people, but at least he didn’t head-butt her like he did her fellow nobles, Ciardis thought with some relief.
From the hardness in his eyes, she got the feeling the man wouldn’t have been above doing so.
Apparently, the slighted noblewoman’s husband thought the same as he seemed more concerned with keeping his head than defending his wife’s honor. He hastily wiped his irate wife’s cheek with a handkerchief pulled from his sleeve and backed away with assurances. “No harm was done, my lord. No harm.”
Ciardis had to wonder who was this man who inspired such fear in others, but would back down in front of a squeaky-voiced little lord with dreams of being a majordomo.
She almost asked. But she sensed that Sebastian highly approved of the way the man was handling things and so she kept her peace.
And so she settled back. To wait and see how this new development would affect the conclave that had gotten off to quite the rocky start.
The small man with the deep voice spoke again. “The rules of the conclave demand a civil tongue and presence from all in the chambers. Be ye human, kith, noble, or merchant, you will be dismissed from these proceedings and a tithing from your holdings stripped if you cannot act like intelligent beings.”
No one said a word.
Ciardis looked around at the gathering of elite nobles and merchants. The people who comprised the most powerful families and Merchant Guilds in the land looked as cowed as she had ever seen them.
That was a nice change.
The small man spoke up, looking directly at the head of the table. “That is, if the prince heir, the Lady Companion, and, uh, the daemoni prince have no objections, I will take my place as the new majordomo of these proceedings and keep order.”
No one spoke. Sebastian stirred, but Ciardis replied before the prince heir could. “What happened to the old one?”
“He died in the fire,” answered the squirrel-like noble with a squeak of a voice.
“Right,” she said faintly.
Sebastian waved an impatient hand. “The office is yours, Ramual. You know the court procedures better than anyone, and with my…uncle…gone, we need stability, whatever kind of stability we can manage, more than ever.”
Ciardis didn’t miss the clear hesitation in Sebastian’s voice just before he named the man they all knew as his uncle the imposter publicly.
It will take getting used to, she decided.
But so far most of the nobles surrounding the table seemed to accept the news that their ruler had actually been the maniacal brother of the rightful Emperor in disguise surprisingly well. What they weren’t taking well, however, was any semblance of cross-coordination.
5
She could tell that the nobles, merchant, and kith weren’t letting up anytime soon.
Ciardis watched the individuals arraying around them carefully. Looking for signs of compatriotism, of kindness, anything she could play on for leverage, because the heavens knew they needed all they could get.
Instead she saw avarice and greed. Hatred when their eyes alit on the kith in the room, and resignation when they looked at the three people at the head of the table.
The nobles were either too tired or too fed up to mask more than a surface courtesy of their emotions, so their eyes said what their faces did not.
That they had been fine with the way things were with the courts up until now. In fact, their lives had been just dandy as the Emperor had looked away from their nasty predilections.
She wanted to crucify them so badly. For the fear in their eyes and the hate in their voices, but most of all for being lazy sods who had played along with the Emperor’s games. What kind of people were so immoral that they let an entire section of their empire be locked away for fear of the spread of disease? Or let an entire race of individuals who were the very definition of inter-community cooperation be so maligned?
“People who are fat and happy, that’s who,” she muttered to herself with a sigh and a tight-lipped smile that was more grimace than anything else. It was the best she could do.
And honestly, even though Ciardis had only been a member of the imperial courts for not quite two years now, she felt a sense of responsibility still. Not just for these ungrateful, spoiled elites’ actions, but also because until this most recent and turbulent arc of her life, she too had been guilty of the same.
Of self-advancement at the expense of others. Of being caught up in her own trivial affairs when greater schemes were at work. Of not caring when all it took was one individual to open the eyes of others.
She was learning. Slowly.
But sometimes she wondered if it was a scenario of too little, too late. A scenario that she would lose without a very substantial change in the attitudes of the haute elite who silently ran the empire from their shadow fiefdoms.
As if reading her mind, Sebastian leaned over and whispered into her ear, “We don’t have time to wage a social rights campaign at court. Not now.”
Ciardis’s lip curled into a sneer that she didn’t bother to hide from one particularly vile countess who had a slaver’s chain on her wrist—marking her as one of the most prominent families in the trader’s bay that marked the Windswept Isles, the home of Ciardis’s now dead best friend. Ciardis could smile and preen with the best of them now, but some time between last month and this one, she’d lost her ability to just look blandly out at the world while her mind was alight with emotions. She’d seen too many people left behind. Like the denizens of the city of Kifar. Bodiless and mindless souls who deserved far more than they’d been given by the very empire which had sought to abandon them.
So for Ciardis, to stand in the room as equals with a woman who practiced her own form of evil and smile was just a bit too much.
Oh, if Terris was here she would rip her a new one, Ciardis fumed.
As her emotions caught up with her line of thinking, Ciardis felt pain twist in her gut. Pain that she would never see Terris again but that she had to stand at the front of this room and look this woman in the eye, knowing that the noble woman with the chain hanging about her wrist like a prize couldn’t care less about the hurt and anguish she was putting countless enslaved individuals through.
As Ciardis’s golden irises caught the dark brown swirl of the slaver, the woman parted sultry dark lips with a chestnut gloss that Ciardis suspected was as deadly as it was beautiful, and licked her pointed teeth.
Ciardis flinched back. Not in fear. In disgust.
How could this still be legal? She wondered helplessly. The Windswept Isles
were often heralded as islands that were laws unto themselves but whether they liked it or not they were subject to the edict of the imperial courts. Edicts that guarantee freedom to anyone of human background. Yet still the woman who stood before her, one of those fat and happy cats that Ciardis so despised, clearly benefited from a long-ago outlawed trade.
Makes sense, Thanar cautioned in her head. Time has passed but pastimes remain the same. There were resistors then and they remain to this day. The only ones powerful enough to resist that edict were the four families of Soong…and when they did, they made a pact with something far darker than a daemoni to withstand the backlash of the empire’s rage.
Ciardis settled back and said with a cold smile, “They brought it on themselves.”
Sebastian cleared his throat beside the two of them. “Nevertheless, the Soong now represent some of our most formidable allies. Their magic is powerful; not for nothing were they able to escape the vengeful wrath of my ancestor for quite a long time. Even now, we don’t know how they did it. We could use secrets like those.”
He gave the head of one of the four families in question a nod and a tight smile of his own.
The female slaver redolently looked back at them without a change of expression.
Evil through and through, but at least she didn’t leave the room.
Which said just how desperate for allies they were, that she was considered a prominent prospect. That she was even in the room.
“Why are we here? By who’s bidding?” the merchant finally testily asked the noble who was puffed up with importance.
“At the prince heir’s request,” the noble admitted. “The Emperor-to-be.”
Words were said. Unkind words, but Ciardis saw Sebastian deliberately ignore them. Slanders against his family or even praise for a former despot were low on the list of priorities of things to get upset about. As long as they could keep everyone corralled in this room for a few more hours and get solutions, then anything was worth it for the moment.
“Why?” said the woman who snapped the band of the chain about her wrist with impatience.
