Chapter 14

I

“Tell me, Vasha the Red, did you think on the subject of loyalty?” I asked my One-eyed assassin while playing with the engraved stone ring on my index finger. Propelled by bubbles of air, the ring had journeyed all night. I’d caught it myself when the sun rose this morning. It’d been floating on the water’s surface though it was stone, kept there by the soul I’d fed it. An air spirit, invisible, relatively weak compared to the other magical constructs I’d used. A simpleton would consider it useless. A fool would stick to his assumption about its use when he was proven young. I was no fool.

He shrugged, a small grin tugging at his lips. The dozen men in the boat with us, ten of them busy rowing, one steering the boat, and the other sitting at the prow, flinched every time I opened my mouth. Talk of my exploits, including the cold-blooded murders of Yayim and Curia, had spread far and wide. And when a boy with less than two decades to his name starts plucking off staples of Karan life as if they were roses on a shrub, rumours start going around. To my horror, there’d been more than a few mentions of Naee, the Lady, among the mutters.

Thugs working for Vasha had no reason at all to think of Naee at my sight.

The One-eyed murderer grunted in response. Chewing on his lower lip as he answered, “I did think about it. And it led me down a rabbit hole. I was so busy thinking about it I forgot to fuck my woman last night.”

“Really?”

“No. What do you think I am? An idiot?”

“No you didn’t think about it, or no you didn’t forget about fucking while thinking about it?”

He grunted.

“Tell me about loyalty.”

He gestured at the labouring men in the boat, “my boys here are loyal for two reasons. I pay them well, and they know if they turn coat, they won’t survive it.”

“So they’re like dogs. Do you remember that conversation?”

“Yes, I do. And this doesn’t have anything to do with dogs. Dogs never turn coat.”

“They don’t?”

He sighed, “no, they don’t.”

I pressed him, “So reward and punishment, that’s how you secure a man’s loyalty?”

“No. That’s the first step, the most simple one. Money and pain only go so far, and by so far I mean they go a pitiful distance. You think I was loyal to Yayim? He blinded me for trying to kill him and then offered me enough money to beggar a lord. I worked for him because it paid well, and he trusted me because I knew enough not to fuck with him. Yet I cared not about his death. A loyal man wouldn’t have bent knee to you.”

“Then how?”

He made a gesture encompassing the horizon in all directions, “Anybody who can figure out the secret to men’s loyalty can own all this. Karanas, the High Seas, the World. Princes and Emperors and Kings lead their entire lifetimes without knowing how it works, without having one trusted servant. I’m a little bit better off, a few hundred men here and there in Braka answer my call. It still doesn’t mean I know shit.”

“Pah. You could’ve just said you don’t know and not wasted my time.”

“You were scaring the boys with your brooding and you wouldn’t have accepted a no.”

“Fair. What’s that over there?” I pointed at a form in the distance, barely visible between the burned wreckage of Braka pitifully trying to stay above water. We were passing through the parts of Braka burnt two days ago. The smoke had cleared, but the charred and destroyed remains of the wooden city were still in the water. The way for our twenty-strong procession of boats was cleared by a small punt at the fore. Two men stood on its prow, clearing the way with long staffs.

Vasha peered into the distance, “It’s a boat, too sleek to be a fisherman’s, too new to be here. Rurik,” he called to the man standing at the prow, “get someone on that boat. No, make that two dozen someones, and be quick about it.”

“Should I be worried?” I asked.

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Good enough.”

I turned around to check on Cat and Hanna, who were sitting on the bench immediately behind mine. Cat was angry, she hadn’t liked my decision to bring Hanna along. The blonde had argued with Cat in return, even though I’d made it clear her complaints wouldn’t change my decision. Now, both of them sat subdued. In fact, I wanted neither one along. But Cat had to come, because she understood Ashkan, and I wanted someone I knew translating the sorceress’s words. Qoura understood Islander Creole, but she never spoke it.

I hadn’t understood why at first. I did now.

Sorcerers are human. The more powerful of them don’t age, true, but they’re as susceptible to arrows and sharp knives as anyone else, which means a single disgruntled peasant can take down the equivalent of a well-equipped, trained army in a moment. To counter their vulnerability, magic users usually flock to the courts of kings, where the monarch protects their puny bodies in return for their services. It’s a win-win arrangement, the king gets to build up a cabal to protect his realm from other sorcerers and their lieges, and the sorcerer is rewarded with relative safety and power, sometimes more power than the man she is supposedly serving.

But there are weapons just as effective as steel that cannot be seen. Qoura, by keeping to herself and never speaking the language of Karanas where others could hear it, was nurturing a reputation as someone above humanity, untouchable by anything mere mortals could throw at her. She had built herself a veneer of invulnerability.

My meeting with her was in a public place, surely observed by many in the Guard and among the nobility. I had plans which didn’t involve me appearing inferior to the woman in any way. I could not ask for an interpreter. I could not let her play her games.

Ahead, the shore came into view. It was more crowded than I expected, with a formation of Guardsmen at least thirty across and ten deep standing behind two dozen richly dressed men and women on horses. Nearest to the water, there stood, I kid you not, a pavilion, underneath which rested a heavy, wooden table. A table with two plush, straight-backed chairs on each side of it, placed among the ashes of a half-burnt burnt city. The display was amazing in its sheer, unadulterated decadence in contrast to the stench of misery and desperation in the air.

I smiled at the horsemen. The agreed meeting time had been at noon; I’d expected the sorceress would want me to wait for her arrival, and acted accordingly, arriving more than an hour late. Her presence at the meeting before me meant that she didn’t know when I’d left, and that she hadn’t dared to make me wait too long. She lacked the proper intelligence on the goings on in Braka, and she was afraid. It boded well for the rest of the afternoon.

Mine was the last boat in the procession. Placed there so there would be enough men on land to protect my person against a Guard charge before I set foot off the boat. My rear position also provided convenient camouflage while two men helped me off the wobbling thing. I didn’t want to seem incompetent, but getting off the small boat unaided ran the risk of falling face first into the water, and that was unacceptable.

Getting to relatively dry land without soiling my new, clean clothing was another challenge. Hanna had acquired the pristine white formal robes. Wearing white was a statement of wealth. Karanas was an unclean city, and any who could appear in public wearing unsoiled white was sure to have a massive wardrobe and more than a few slaves tasked solely with washing clothes. I was of the opinion that the robes were as restricting as women’s dresses, that those responsible for spreading their use among the wealthy should be punished, and that their inconvenience was not worth their effect. However, I kept silent. Appearances mattered.

Vasha, Cat, Hanna, and Levi accompanied me to the pavilion. The swirling mass of bodies to our backs was a stark contrast to the ordered lines of the Guard, but I was certain Levi’s reliability as a shock trooper would break any assault by the soldiers before they broke Vasha’s thugs. The ring on my finger, its faint representation distinct from Levi’s within my mind, would take care of the sorcerer if my traditional method of killing her was to be neutralized, as I believed it would be.

Qoura would never place herself in my mercy. She knew something of my abilities, or she wouldn’t meet me after my effortless murder of her apprentice. From the slaughter afterwards, she must know of my Ashkan artifact, the behemoth Levi. If the blue-robed woman standing ahead of all but one other member of the riding party was indeed Qoura, she would not be here without certainty of her safety.

I strode to the chairs on my side of the table, pulling back the right-most one and sinking into it. I dragged Cat with me. The chair was large enough to fit both of us easily, but Cat placed herself sideways in my lap, nestled against the plush armrest. The cloth covering the chair’s cushions was soft silk, the wood an aromatic brown engraved in fine, spiraling patterns.

Decadent indeed. While a hundred thousand souls in Braka suffered, this simple chair placed so thoughtlessly in the dirty ash of the shore must have taken weeks to build.

Hanna sat in the left chair. Vasha stood farther back, a hand on his long knife, his stance relaxed, as if the circumstances were an everyday occurrence for him. Levi crouched at my side, almost folding in two. Its hunched form was almost as tall as Vasha.

I addressed the redheaded man, “I trust my life to you now, comrade. Pray you do not fail me.”

He didn’t respond, so I turned my attention to the opposing party, baring my teeth at their self-satisfied, smirking faces. All but four of the riders were dressed as Guardsmen – though their clothing was too well-made for them to be anything but noble-born officers.

The remaining four, waiting ahead of everyone else, were already closing on us. Two, riding abreast, led. Another pair, clearly inferiors, followed. The blue-robed woman was one of the leaders, and as her form crept closer I discovered her face was hidden behind a heavy, black veil. The other, elegantly dressed, was wearing the red and blue of the guard. By the half crown resting on his brow, I assumed he was the Prince. I recognized one of the two followers, the fat Farim.

I’d been trying to remember an ancient execution rite, practiced in the mountains north of Domaine, since last night. It was an excruciating way of murdering a man reserved for the most despised traitors. The name, and the details were fuzzy, though on the tip of my tongue. I would recall them in time, and the insolent steward, half his face swollen from Vasha’s punch, would get his just reward.

The other follower was a frail old man. I dismissed him out of hand.

Qoura dismounted ten yards from the pavilion, holding the hem of her robes off the moist ash as she walked the short distance to her seat. The steward, dismounting behind her and hurrying ahead with his thick, ungainly legs, managed the pull back a chair before she arrived at the table. Cat stiffened at his proximity.

I snapped my teeth him, the clicking sound loud in the silent afternoon. The man jumped back. Qoura, two steps away from her seat, glanced at him, returned her gaze to me. Her perfectly black eyebrows, visible above the veil, contracted into a frown. I returned her heavy stare. My jailer’s disapproval wouldn’t cow me. The cunt, the pernicious, malicious, ignorant bitch. I’d tear her hair-