Servant of the Empire

by Raymond E. Feist

  Evening shadows dimmed the great hall of the Minwanabi in the hour Lord Tasaio returned. Still clad in the armour he had worn on his trip upriver, his only concession to formality the silk officer's cloak he had tossed over his shoulders, he strode through the wide main doorway. The chamber was filled. Every member of the household stood arrayed to meet him, and behind them, every second cousin and vassal that had serviced the years of warfare and conflict. Tasaio strode between their still ranks as though he were totally alone. Only when he reached the dais did he stop, turn, and acknowledge the presence of others.

  Incomo stepped forward to greet him. 'The hearts of the Minwanabi are filled at our Lord's return.'

  Tasaio returned a curt nod. He handed his battle helm to a servant, who bowed and retreated hastily. Never a man to waste words on banalities, the Lord of the Minwanabi turned a flat gaze upon his adviser. 'Are the priests ready?'

  Incomo bowed. 'As you requested, my Lord.'

  New black-and-orange cushions adorned the high dais, along with a rug sewn of sarcat pelts and a table fashioned of intricately etched harulth bones. Tasaio gave the change in furnishings what seemed a passing glance; yet no detail escaped him. Satisfied that nothing left over from Desio's rule remained, he sat and gave no other sign beyond laying the bared steel blade of the Minwanabi ancestral sword across his knees.

  There followed a pause, in which Incomo belatedly realized that he was expected to act without further sign from the master. Where Desio had insisted on control over even the tiniest action, Tasaio expected to be served. The Minwanabi First Adviser waved for the ceremony to commence.

  A pair of priests approached the dais, one wearing the red paint and death mask of Turakamu and die other clad in the full-sleeved white robe of Juran the Just. Each intoned a blessing from the god they served. There followed no offerings, and no grand ceremony in the manner that Desio had orchestrated. The priest of Juran lit a candle, for constancy, and left it burning in a stand woven of the reeds that symbolized the frailties of mortal man before his god. The priest of the Death God did not dance or blow whistles. Neither did he ask his deity to show favour. Instead, he trod up the stairs of the dais and reminded in cold words that a promise of sacrifice remained unfulfilled.

  'A vow sworn upon the blood of House Minwanabi,' the priest reminded. 'The family of the Acoma must die in the name of Turakamu, with Minwanabi lives as surety. Who would accept the lord's mantle must also complete this charge.'

  Tasaio said thinly, 'I acknowledge our debt to the Red God. My hand on this sword confirms it.'

  The red priest traced a sigil in the air. 'Turakamu smile upon your endeavour . . . or seal your death and that of your heirs should you fail.' Bones clacked and rattled as the priest spun around and left the dais; while the draught of his passage guttered the candle of the Just God.

  The new Lord of. the Minwanabi sat silently, without expression, as first one and then another family member or retainer came forward to bow and pledge loyalty. When the last vassal had affirmed fealty, he arose and called to the Strike Leader posted by the side door, 'Send in my concubines.'

  Two young women entered, both wearing rich clothes. One was tall, slender, and fair-haired, her wide-set eyes jade green, and delicately enhanced with paint. The other, robed in gauze lace dyed scarlet, had a dark complexion and a rounded figure. Of different types, both women owned a beauty that stopped men's eyes, and they advanced in tiny steps, in the fashion of those trained since childhood to give pleasure. Both bowed gracefully before the dais, slender legs shown to advantage by short robes, and loose-wrapped gowns revealing an ample glimpse of breast. Although such women were chosen from among the loveliest in the Empire, neither held status above the meanest servant. All who were gathered in the hall stilled in curiosity to see what their Lord wished with his courtesans.

  Before Tasaio's dais, both women fell to their knees, touching foreheads to the floor.

  'Look at me,' commanded Tasaio.

  Frightened, but in all things obedient, the two young women did as instructed. 'Your will, my Lord,' they intoned in voices of practised softness.

  The new Lord of the Minwanabi regarded them with dispassionate eyes. 'Incarna,' he addressed the dark one. 'Are your children close?'

  Incarna nodded, dread draining the colour from her cheeks. She had borne her Lord two illegitimate children, but their father's rise in status might not be to their benefit. It was not uncommon for a man come to the mantle of Ruling Lord to kill such offspring, preventing any claim upon the family.

  'Bring them,' Tasaio commanded.

  A shimmer that might have been tears brightened Incarna's almond eyes. Yet she jumped to her feet and hurried out of the Minwanabi great hall. Tasaio's regard shifted to the fair woman who remained on her knees before the dais. 'Sanjana, you've told my First Adviser you are with child?'

  Sanjana held her hands clasped, but the beadwork on her robe shimmered in the light as she trembled. 'Yes, Lord,' she replied, the huskiness in her voice no ploy to seem seductive.

  Tasaio said nothing. His face and manner did not change even when Incarna reappeared, half dragging a small boy behind her. He had Tasaio's auburn hair and his mother's rosy complexion, and though he did not cry, his mother's nervousness frightened him. Carried in the concubine's arms was a second child, a girl not yet old enough to walk such a distance on her own. Too young to understand, she rode with her fingers in her mouth, her pale amber eyes on the gathering of people in the hall.

  From his place on the dais, Tasaio looked the children over as a man might inspect merchandise for flaws. Then, almost absently, he motioned to Force Commander Irrilandi. Pointing at Sanjana, he said, 'Take this woman outside. I will see her die.'

  Sanjana's fist came to her mouth. Her magnificent jade-coloured eyes filled with tears of terror, and her poise failed her. Unable to rise, she remained trembling on her knees until two warriors stepped in and gripped her by the arms. Her efforts to choke back painful sobs echoed over the stillness of the gathering as the men half led, half carried her from the hall.

  Alone before the dais, Incarna stood shivering, her hands clenched to her children, and her face sweating with fear. Tasaio regarded her without pity or tenderness and said, 'I take this woman for my wife, and name these children -what are their names?'

  Incarna blinked, then hastily managed to whisper, 'Dasari and Hani, my Lord.'

  'Dasari is my heir.' Tasaio's voice rang out over the gathering and echoed off the vaulted ceiling. 'Hani is my first daughter.'

  Then the stillness broke before a rustle of movement as all in the room bowed to the new Lady of the Minwanabi. Tasaio instructed Incomo, 'Have servants prepare suitable quarters for the Lady of the Minwanabi and her children.' To Incarna he said, 'Wife, retire to your quarters and await my call. Teachers will be sent for the children tomorrow. I would have them begin instruction in their duties to their family. Dasari will someday rule this house.'

  The former concubine bowed, her movements still tense with terror. She took no joy from her sudden rise in station, but hurried her son and carried her daughter from the dais, past hundreds of staring strangers.

  To his guests, relations, and vassals, Tasaio said, 'We shall have the wedding ceremony tomorrow. You are all welcome to share the feast.'

  At this, Incomo's long face froze against showing alarm.

  A wedding required careful planning, to ensure the most favourable auspices. The timing, the food, the ritual marriage hut - all required the blessings of priests and meticulous attention to tradition. Unions of great Lords were seldom undertaken at short notice, lest details be overlooked and ill luck visit the new couple and carry through the next generation.

  Yet Tasaio gave the matter short shrift. With the silvery steel of his ancestral sword set at rest on his shoulder, he said, 'See to the arrangements, First Adviser.'

  Then, the bared blade flashing under the skylight as he turned, he motioned for Incomo to follow and strode from the
hall without further speech. Tasaio moved toward the outer door, certain that the two soldiers who were stationed on either side would have it open in time for him to pass through.

  As their Lord emerged from the house and stepped into the courtyard, two warriors snapped to attention, the terrified Sanjana between them. She had shaken her hair from its pins, and the length of it fell in waves down her back, rare gold enhanced by the sun. She held her eyes downcast, but at Tasaio's appearance she looked up entreatingly. The soft white skin over her breasts showed her quick breathing, but her courtesan's skills did not fail her. Even frightened, even driven by desperation, she still managed to husband the only advantage she possessed. Sanjana parted red lips and arranged her slim body so that no man who beheld her could mistake her for what she was: a magnificent ornament whose sole purpose was pleasure.

  The effect was not lost upon Tasaio. His eyes brightened as he followed all of her curves and hollows and drank in the promise of lust that her provocative pose implied. He licked his lips, bent down, and kissed her fully and long. With one hand he caressed her breasts. Then he stepped back and said, 'I have found you a satisfactory bedmate.' As hope filled her magnificent eyes, he smiled at her. He savoured the moment, and the sparkle of relief in her expression, as he added, 'Kill her. Now.'

  Her face blanched in stark terror, but she had no chance to cry out. One warrior caught both of her wrists and yanked them high, forcing her to look at Tasaio, while the other, stiff-faced, pulled out his sword and drove the blade home in her stomach.

  She jerked and gave one thin, high scream of abject agony. Then blood fountained from her mouth, pattering in drops on the courtyard path. Her legs crumpled. Held pinioned by the warrior's grip, she hung through the throes of her dying. Bright blood darkened brighter hair. Then her muscles sagged, and her head rolled forward, and the lovely long white thighs went limp.

  'Take her away,' Tasaio said on a wild, ragged breath. His eyes were round and his colour high. Then he inhaled deeply as if to calm himself and said to Incomo, 'I shall bathe. Send two slave girls to attend me, and see that they are young and beautiful, preferably untouched.'

  Faintly sick, and distressed that it might show, Incomo bowed. 'As my Lord wishes.' He began to leave.

  'I am not done with my instructions,' Tasaio chided. He walked on down the garden path, his mouth curled at the corners in the faintest beginning of a smile, as he signalled Incomo to follow. 'I have given some thought to the matter of the Acoma spies. The time has come to turn our knowledge into advantage. Come, I will instruct you before I retire.'

  Incomo forced his mind away from the memory of the dying courtesan; he must pay attention. Tasaio was not a man who took kindly to incompetence; he would give orders once, and expect them to be followed to the letter. Yet the avid gleam in the master's eye left the First Adviser deeply discomforted. He held up a hand that shook despite his best efforts. 'Perhaps,' he suggested tactfully, 'my Lord would prefer to discuss such matters of business after the comforts of his bath?'

  Tasaio stopped. He turned amber eyes to his First Adviser and studied the older man intently. His smile deepened. 'You have served my family well,' he said finally, his tone like unmarked velvet. 'I will humour you.'

  Then he continued down the path, saying, 'Consider yourself dismissed, until I call.'

  The old adviser remained, his heart pounding as if he had finished a hard run. His knees shook. He sensed with uncanny certainty that the master had perceived his weakness, then let the matter pass, as if he knew the First Adviser's imagination would torment him with abuses far worse than the sport Tasaio planned in his bath with his slave girls. Too shaken yet to feel sadness, Incomo faced facts — against his deepest hopes, Lord Tasaio had inherited the family predilection for viciousness and appetite for pain.

  The Lord of the Minwanabi rested in his bathing tub while a servant poured hot water over his shoulders. He watched his First Adviser bow through hazy, half-closed eyes, but Incomo did not deceive himself. Languid though Tasaio might seem, the hands left poised on the rim of the tub were neither slack nor relaxed.

  'I came as my Lord required.' Incomo straightened, his nostrils flaring as he caught a pungent, sweet odour on the air, explained a moment later as Tasaio reached over and lifted a long pipe of tateesha from a side table. He set the stem between his lips and sucked deeply. The First Adviser of the Minwanabi buried his surprise. The sap of the tateen bush contained a substance that induced euphoria - the nuts were often chewed by slaves in the field to lessen the drudgery of their lives - but the silks, at bloom, contained a powerful narcotic. The smoke brought first an enhancement and then a distortion of perception; prolonged use brought the mind to a trancelike stupor. The First Adviser considered the lure of such a drug to a man who enjoyed inflicting pain on others, then thought better of such musing. It was not his place to question the practices of his master.

  'Incomo,' said Tasaio with sharp and incisive clarity, 'I have decided that we must move forward with our plan to destroy the Acoma.'

  'As my Lord commands,' Incomo said.

  Tasaio's fingers tapped arrhythmically on the tub rim, as if he ticked off points. 'Once that is accomplished, I shall then destroy that preening calley bird Axantucar.' His eyes abruptly flicked open. He gazed at the First Adviser, every fibre of him angry. 'If that buffoon of a cousin of mine had done his duty and destroyed Mara, I would wear the white and gold today.'

  Incomo thought it politic not to remind his Lord that it had been Tasaio who had devised the plan to destroy Mara, not Desio. He returned a stiff nod.

  Tasaio waved away the bath servant. 'Leave us.' Alone with his adviser, and wrapped in rising curls of steam, he drew again on his pipe. Physically, he seemed to relax, and his eyes grew drowsy once more. 'I want one of those two Acoma spies promoted.'

  'My Lord?'

  Tasaio leaned over the edge of the tub and rested his chin upon it. 'Need I repeat myself?'

  'No, my Lord,' Incomo murmured quickly, warned by the spark of fire under the master's lashes. 'I am just not sure what you mean.'

  'I wish to have one of the Acoma spies close at hand.' Tasaio considered a rising ribbon of smoke as if it told him secrets. He went on, 'I would observe this servant. Let him believe that he can eavesdrop upon critical conversations. You and I shall be certain that nothing he overhears is inherently false; no. Never false. But we'll also remember anything we say will also be heard by Mara. The deep plans we keep to ourselves, discussed only when we are alone. The little things we say before the spy will be offered as a gambit. I want this servant observed, and followed, until this network of Acoma spies is infiltrated.'

  Incomo bowed. 'Anything else, my Lord?'

  Tasaio set the pipe to his lips and drew another lungful of the intoxicating smoke. 'No. I am tired. I will sleep. Tomorrow at dawn I will hunt. Then I will dine with you and the other advisers. At midday I will marry, and throughout the afternoon we shall celebrate the wedding festival. Send to the nearby villages for entertainers.' Nothing if not concise, Tasaio summed up. 'Now leave.'

  The Minwanabi First Adviser retired from his master's presence. Upon return to his quarters, he determined the time was appropriate to begin composition of his death prayer. A careful man addressed this task when he got on in years, that his final appeal to the gods be read by someone who survived him. To name the Lady of the Acoma for destruction seemed a perilous enough course, but to mark the new Warlord, who had just come to power over the bodies of five other claimants, as a target was suicide.

  As he shed his formal robe of office, Incomo wasted no time wondering whether Tasaio's planning was a dream that would disperse with the tateesha smoke - the eyes beneath their heavy lids had been all too dangerously aware. Sighing at the discomfort of stiff knees, Incomo knelt before his writing table. Three Minwanabi Lords before Tasaio he had called master, and while they were not men he admired, they were Lords he was pledged to serve with his mind and will and if need be, his
life. Taking a deep breath, he took up his pen and began to write.

  The festivities were modest, but those in attendance seemed to enjoy themselves. The food was ample, the wine abundant, and the Lord of the Minwanabi sat atop his dais in the great hall of his ancestors, looking every inch the quintessential Tsurani warrior. If he was not overly solicitous to his wife, he was polite and observed all the forms. Incarna's skimpy courtesan's garb had been replaced by a robe of stunning richness, black silk embroidered with orange threads at sleeves, neck and hem, and studded down the front with matching pearls of incalculable worth.

  The two children sat quietly at their father's feet, the boy slightly higher and closer than the girl. Occasionally Tasaio would speak to Dasari, instructing him in some point of trivia or another. From the moment he named his son legitimate, Tasaio was determined to groom him for rulership. The boy's robe was a clear imitation of his father's, down to the embroidery upon the sleeve, the outline of a snarling sarcat. The little girl, Hani, was content to sit below her father's feet, chewing upon a sweet fruit while a juggler entertained.

  Behind the Lord of the Minwanabi stood a servant, one recently promoted to the personal service of the master of the estate. While only the least of four men assigned responsibility for attending to their Lord's needs, this one listened with a little more attention to the nuances of conversation.

  Throughout the evening the festivities continued, until Tasaio rose and bid his guests good evening. Motioning for Incomo to accompany him, the Lord of the Minwanabi moved toward his private quarters. Incomo quietly requested the servant to follow and station himself at the door to the master's chamber, against Tasaio's needs. The servant did as he was bid with a patience that concealed the fact that he avidly consigned to memory every word that passed between the Lord and his First Adviser.

  An ancient ulo tree clutched the soil with gnarled roots, and its branches threw the site of the Acoma natami into deep, cool shade. Mara bowed before the stone that was sacred to her ancestors and the embodiment of Acoma honour. She spoke a few ritual phrases and placed a tied cluster of flowers before the monument, blossoms in seven colours that represented each of the good gods. On this, the first day of summer, she gave thanks for the well-being of all under her protection. For a moment after the brief ceremony she lingered. The sacred contemplation glade held unique peace, for here none but the head gardener, an invited priest, or those born of Acoma blood might tread. Here she could truly be alone with her thoughts and emotions.