The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  Up an open wooden stair he found the gallery ranged with codices: books with wooden covers or leather ones, with long sheets of paper folded between them like a fan. Llesho took one down, then another, but the letters ran together, foreign and impenetrable. Another, another. A low shelf in the far corner of the gallery held some dusty books and Llesho went to them with a noise of disgust in his throat for their shabby treatment. When he reached to take one in his hands, his fingers tingled, and when he lifted it from the shelf, he saw the dust clung only to the parts that one could see from the ground. In all other respects, it appeared that someone had treated the codex with great care, oiling the leather-covered boards and cleaning its pages.

  Its pages. Opening the codex, Llesho wept. The writing was Thebin. At first, he could not read it at all, for he had forgotten what he had learned before the raid, and the letters looked different on paper than they did scratched into wet sand on a beach. But gradually, the shapes came into focus on a prayer his mother had taught him when he was a baby, and had recited over him every night before he left her side for bed, until the day his world had ended.

  Mother Goddess watch this child

  Protect his eyes from cruelty

  His fingers from mischief

  His heart from sorrow.

  Let him grow in courage

  Search with wisdom

  Find his destiny.

  The book had many prayers, which he read with his fingers as well as his eyes, touching each page with reverence and love. A few he knew, most he did not, for they concerned matters of an adult nature unsuited for the child who had lived that life of temple and palace. Prayers for a lover, a dying parent, to bring children or the thaw. As he read each one, he heard his mother’s voice, softly just for his ears, or ringing to fill the Temple of the Moon, where the goddess dwelt. And he remembered her in her robes and glory, looking out across the city square to the Palace of the Sun where her husband waited for her to come to him in darkness.

  It hurt too much to remember, but he could not bring himself to return the book to its shelf. Curled over it, his fingers caressing the prayers he found there, he fell asleep. Sometime in the night, he felt hands lift him and arms carry him down the wooden stairs. When he was settled on the thick mattress, those hands covered him in blankets of silk, and went away again. The comfort seemed to leech the last bit of strength from his bones, and he let himself sink back into nothingness. For the first time since Markko had dragged him out of the barracks to spend his nights on the workroom floor, Llesho slept long and deeply, without nightmares.

  When he awoke, the sun was shining in his face and he felt more at peace than he had since the Harn raid. Then he realized that he was no longer alone. Lord Chin-shi slept like the dead on the far side of the bed. More to the point, however, the lord’s consort stood with her face inches from his own. Startled, Llesho jumped to a crouch in the middle of the bed, cursing himself silently for letting his guard down. From that position he could see that Madon, his face completely blank of expression, stood in the center of the room, while Radimus lingered in the hall with a smirk on his face and a small but weighty money pouch swinging from his outstretched fingers.

  The disturbance must have awakened Lord Chin-shi, who rolled over, muzzy-lidded and bumped into Llesho, who leaped again, this time for the foot of the bed and escape.

  “Don’t let him send you back without your tip, Llesho.” Radimus gestured with the swinging purse, and Lady Chin-shi followed this advice with a cackling laugh that set Llesho’s teeth on edge. He looked to Madon for an explanation, but the gladiator turned his head and pretended not to see.

  “Fighting and dying you do for nothing, because they own you,” Radimus explained. “Anything else, they pay for. It’s tradition.”

  A system that paid a slave for eating and sleeping, but not for the hard work he did every day seemed strange to Llesho, but Lord Chin-shi reached over and picked something up from the floor next to the bed.

  “Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Just take it and go.” And he thrust four silver coins into Llesho’s palm.

  Llesho scrambled from the bed, grateful for the permission to leave more than he appreciated the coins. Even as he was heading for the outer hall, however, he yearned to turn and enter the workroom behind the far door instead. Madon was watching him carefully, but said only, “You haven’t had breakfast.”

  Before Llesho could speak, Lord Chin-shi’s voice interrupted from the bed. “Take whatever you want.”

  Madon bowed. “Thank you, my lord,” he said, and filled his hands with pieces of fruit and bread, which he passed to Llesho as they walked. When they were halfway down the hillside, and well away from anyone who might overhear, Madon asked him, “Are you all right?”

  Llesho thought for several minutes before he answered. Finally, he had to admit, “I don’t know. I wish Kwan-ti was here.”

  “The witch?” Radimus asked him, and Llesho shook his head. “Not a witch—” and he was getting tired of saying it—“but she may be the only one who can help us.”

  “Don’t say that around Master Markko, unless you want to take the witch’s place at the stake,” Madon warned, and gave him a sharp smack on the back of his head for emphasis.

  “I know,” Llesho answered. But he still wished for the healer. He was not so blinded by Lord Chin-shi’s kind manner that he put his owner’s interests in the dying pearl beds ahead of his own survival, but he knew that the healer would not allow the sea to die if she knew about it. He kept his mouth shut around the news of the Blood Tide, however, adding it to the well of secrets he carried about with him.

  In the afternoon, as Llesho joined the gladiators in armed contest, training with the trident, word came down from Lady Chin-shi. The school would travel to Farshore on the mainland for the next competition. And at Farshore, the school must be broken up, its competitors and students sold to pay his lordship’s debts. The pearl beds, men whispered to one another, had given up no pearls since the witch, Kwan-ti, had set her curse upon them before disappearing into the wind.

  Llesho was going to the mainland. He would win his freedom there, and find his brothers, and free Thebin, as Minister Lleck had bid him. He did not know how he would do all this, nor how he would reach Thebin, at the end of the thousand-li road, but here, today, he had silver in his pocket, and he took his first step.

  PART TWO

  FARSHORE

  Chapter Ten

  LLESHO watched the shoreline grow closer as Lord Chin-shi’s yacht cut through the Blood Tide. When he began his training, he had thought only of what would come after, reaching the mainland and searching for his brothers as a lowly freelance. He hadn’t known how terrified and proud he would be to don his own first set of leathers: tunic and leg wraps and cuffs to protect his wrists. This was his first step on the road to freedom and to the salvation of his people and his country. And all he had to do was kill other men, slaves like himself, for the pleasure of their masters.

  Someday soon it would come to that, he knew; he would kill or die for the money in his purse. As a novice with but the rudiments of his training, however, Llesho would not fight in this, his first competition, but would participate in a demonstration of armed combat forms with the trident. But he knew he was saying good-bye to the only life he had known since his seventh summer, when the Harn had sold him in the marketplace. Until he had come under Overseer Markko’s scrutiny, he’d had a hard life, but not a bad one. He’d had friends, and work, and the security of a guiding hand, first in Minister Lleck and Kwan-ti the healer, and later in Master Den, and even Master Jaks.

  Now all of that was changing. Lleck was dead, Kwan-ti vanished. The pearl fishers had gone to market weeks before, unable to earn their keep in the dying oyster beds. He could smell the rot rising from the dead fish and the bodies of larger creatures floating on the surface of the sea, and he prayed the Flowing Water form in memory of the water dragon that had saved his life so long ago it seemed,
though it had been less than a full turn of the seasons.

  Alone on the polished aft deck, he moved into the prayer forms that evoked the earth to calm him. Today, Lord Chin-shi would offer his gladiators for sale in the arena. They would compete, and Lord Chin-shi would take home purses or lose them on the contests, but he would return to Pearl Island without his gladiators. Some of the men he thought of as friends would die today, and others would find themselves traded far away. Llesho wondered who would waste their money on an untrained boy with no prospects of height or weight ahead of him. He remembered the lady in servant’s clothing, who had watched while he revealed too much of himself with the short spear and the knife, and shivered. Whatever her interest in him, he hoped it did not include his performance in the arena.

  “You will do fine, you know.” Master Jaks wandered up from belowdecks and braced himself with both hands on the guardrail. Looking out toward the land, so that Llesho didn’t have to meet his eyes, he added. “Lord Chin-shi will make sure of that.”

  “I don’t understand him,” Llesho acknowledged. “He did not bed with me, although he wanted the others to think it.”

  He stole a glance at Master Jaks, who did not look surprised at this revelation.

  “He was kind to me.” Which had confused him, after weeks as the overseer’s prisoner.

  Master Jaks nodded sagely, but did not turn his head to look at Llesho. “As kind as a man can be who would burn a witch, and who sets his slaves to fight and die in the arena for his pleasure.”

  “I thought that was Lady Chin-shi’s doing,” Llesho admitted. The Lord of Pearl Island had fed him gentle foods, and put him to bed when he had fallen asleep on the floor among the books. His workroom had none of the smell of death that soaked into the very walls of the overseer’s cottage. He could not reconcile in his head the man who had shown him such mercy with the buyer and seller of children in the marketplace.

  But Jaks shook his head. “Lady Chin-shi certainly takes an interest in the gladiators,” he said, “but she is less interested in the arena of combat. Lord Chin-shi would not, perhaps, wish to see his people come to harm, but like many good men he has a weakness for the display of martial skill, and too much liking for a wager.”

  “Is he really afraid of witches?” Llesho wondered what had drawn the lord’s attention to him, he who had little skill as a warrior and none at all for magic.

  Jaks’s answer didn’t help. “I think his lordship knows that there are wicked practitioners of the dark arts in the world, and would protect his home and lands from them. But if you mean, did he believe Kwan-ti to be a witch, I think not.”

  “Then why did he summon me?” Llesho knew why Lady Chin-shi had wanted Madon and Radimus delivered to her quarters, and he figured most of the servants in the lord’s house thought his lordship had the same kind of interest in him. Except he hadn’t—he’d asked some questions, and then left Llesho to his own devices while he worked.

  Master Jaks turned away from the sea to study Llesho’s puzzled features. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps he has learned that you are more than you appear. But if that is so, I don’t know why he didn’t sell you to your enemies, or kill you for the threat you pose.”

  Llesho said nothing. He knew what lay in wait for him if the enemies of Thebin knew he was alive and planning to take back his homeland. If Lord Chin-shi meant him harm, or even wished to squeeze the greatest profit out of him, there were simpler ways than putting him in the arena. Jaks might be able to tell him, but in all the summers since the Harn had invaded Thebin, he had never spoken aloud his identity. Whatever his masters knew or guessed of his origins, he could not relax the habits of caution to confide in them. So he looked out across the water, where his future drew nearer with each surge of tide and wind. A hundred questions bubbled up behind his tongue: How did you come here? What do you know about me, about Thebin? What am I to you, and to the lady who watched too closely in the weapons room? And who is she, and what is she to me? But he could not ask. With no choice that he could see, he kept his silence and waited for a moment when the questions might be taken out and examined in safety.

  “The city is called Farshore,” Jaks told him, accepting that their personal conversation had ended. “Shan, the capital province of the Shan Empire, is almost as far inland as Thebin. Generations ago, when the first emperor reached out across the land, his grasp ended here, at the place they called Farshore. It was thought then that the world ended at the sea, which must go on forever, since no eyes could see a farther shore. The sight so terrified the emperor’s armies that the generals had to stand behind them with spears and swords, and cut down their own men who tried to flee. Later, of course, the empire learned to build boats that could dare the ocean crossings. But the city still carries the legacy of those old times in its name.

  “How far is it to Thebin from Farshore?” Llesho asked him, and Jaks gave him a warning glower.

  “Too far. Don’t even think of escaping.”

  Llesho didn’t tell him that he thought of nothing else, and had since the ghost of Minister Lleck had appeared to him in the pearl beds. Everything since that day seemed to conspire to move Llesho farther along the path to Lleck’s goal. He had no doubt that he would go home, and felt the presence of the gods at his back, like the wind in the ship’s sails, with each step toward his objective. But he still wondered how long the journey would be.

  “It’s like a dream,” he noted, looking out toward the many-tiered city. The sharply steeped roofs and elaborately curled eaves grew more solid as they approached.

  “Shan is bigger,” Jaks said, and Llesho wondered if he realized that he was revealing himself in his words. “The palace there is one of the great wonders of the world. But Farshore has the courage of its contradictions. The tallest buildings you can see are its temples—see the roofs, rising like umbrellas over the city to protect it from the might of the sea, while to the west, the city huddles beneath the walls that protect it from the invasions that invaders always fear. In all the years of the empire, Farshore has never relaxed its vigilant watch on the West.”

  Thebin lay to the south while Shan, the jewel at the heart of the empire, lay to the north. Both were west of the easternmost city of the imperial expansion, and between them lay the Harn. Llesho wondered if the Farshore walls were meant to beat back an invasion from the Harn, or were a reminder to the conquerors who had come out of the north. Who did Farshore fear most?

  The yacht nudged its way into its berth at the bustling docks, and Llesho found himself suddenly surrounded by the gladiators come above decks to watch the boat reach shore. Jaks was nowhere to be seen, but Master Den moved among the gladiators, dressed, for a change, in loose breeches that came to his calves and an equally loose white shirt crossed over his ample stomach and held in place by a wide cloth belt woven in the colors of Lord Chin-shi’s house. Master Markko, in the long robes of his rank, commanded the forward deck to sort out his gladiators and begin the procession to the arena, setting the cymbal players and the drummers at the front, and ranking the fighters from foremost to least, where Llesho found himself paired with Bixei.

  “Good luck,” Llesho said as they stepped onto dry land. Bixei nodded his acknowledgment, but said nothing.

  He, too, was wearing his first set of leathers, but today Bixei would participate in his first true fight in the arena, an equal match, and specified to first blood rather than to the death. Both boys knew that accidents happened in the heat of battle, and sometimes not accidents but old scores found themselves settled on the bodies of the fighters. Llesho did not speak anymore, busy trying to maintain the stern features and fierce demeanor that the marching gladiators affected to draw the poorer audience to the upper decks. As they paraded, they left the warehouses and docks behind them, and wound their way through narrow streets with ramshackle houses pressing over them, lined with cheering and jeering mainlanders. Finally, they came to a wide thoroughfare that crossed the city like an arrow, s
mooth and straight, and lined with trees laden with fragrant blossoms. Bixei jabbed him in the ribs when his eyes grew too wide, but Llesho could not tear his gaze from the riches spread out before them on the thoroughfare. On each side, set back as if the road were not worthy to touch the hem of the rich garments on either side, tall iron gates barred high walls. Inside the private barricades, the wealthy of Farshore waited out the heat of the day and defended themselves from their own poor at night.

  At the city limits farthest from the sea, the thoroughfare ended at the arena, an open area of sand and sawdust, with tiers of benches rising on both sides, and boxes for the owners and wealthy patrons ranked at each end. The Governor’s box, and the Mayor’s box, at the center of the long north axis were covered with bunting of red and yellow and the whole was ranked around with banners on poles like soldiers standing at attention. Jaks led the procession of Lord Chin-shi’s house to the eastern rank of benches, where a wooden door both tall and wide lay open to admit them. Under the seats, Llesho discovered, were benches for the fighters, and barrels of water, and heaps of bandages. Against the wall next to the open door rested a stack of leather slings stretched on long poles, to carry the wounded and the dead of their house off the field. Llesho’s stomach clenched at these reminders that the arena was a game only to the spectators: to the men who fought, it meant life or death.