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  ‘I was a miner, working sixteen hours a day in a pit that would have killed me in ten years. I’m now … favored at the High Court of Eagles. What else would I want?’

  ‘But you see, you have just moved from the next-to-highest level of play to the very highest. You come into a party to which you—and your protectoress—were specifically not invited, dressed like a barbarian; and in five minutes you won a word from the Empress herself. Do you know that by fifteen minutes’ proper conversation with the proper people, who are here tonight, you could parley that into a governorship of a fairly valuable, if outlying, province—more, if you were skillful. I do not intend to introduce you to those people, because just as easily you could win your death from someone both desperate for, and deserving of, the same position who merely lacked that all-important credential: a word from Her Majesty. The Empress knows all this. So does Krodar. That indeed may be why he frowned.’

  ‘But you spoke with—’

  ‘Friend, I may speak with the Empress any time I wish. She is my second cousin once removed. When she was nine and I was twenty-three we spent eight months together in the same dungeon cell, while our execution was put off day by day by day—but that was when she was still a princess. The Empress may not speak to me any time she wishes, or she risks endangering the subtle balance of power between my forces at Yenla’h and hers at Vinelet—should the wrong thane or princeling misconstrue her friendliness as a sign of military weakness and move his forces accordingly. My approaches to her, you see, are only considered nepotistic fawning. Hers to me are considered something else again. Gorgik, you have amused me. You have even tolerated my enthusiasm for botany. I don’t want to hear that your corpse was pulled out of a sewage trough or, worse, was found floating somewhere in the Khora down at the port. And the excuse for such an outrage need easily be no more than Krodar’s frown—if not the Empress’s smile.’

  Gorgik stepped back, because his gut suddenly knotted. He began to sweat. But the Baron’s thin fingers dug his shoulder, pulling him forward:

  ‘Do you understand? Do you understand that, minutes ago, you had nothing anyone here could have wanted? Do you understand that now you have what a third of us in this room have at least once committed murder for and the other two-thirds done far worse to obtain—an unsolicited word from the Empress?’

  Gorgik swayed. ‘Curly, I’m sick. I want a loaf of bread and a bottle of—’

  ‘There is a decanter.’ The Baron frowned. ‘There is a loaf.’ He looked around. They were standing by the table end. ‘And there is the door.’ The Baron shrugged. ‘Take the first two and use the last.’

  Gorgik took a breath which made the cloth of his tunic slide on his wet back. With a lurching motion, he picked up a loaf in one hand and a decanter in the other and lumbered through the arch.

  A young duchess, who had been standing only a few feet away, turned to Inige. ‘Do you know, if I’m not mistaken, I believe I just saw your inelegantly dressed companion, who, only a moment ago, was conferring with Her Highness, do the strangest thing—’

  ‘And do you know,’ said the Baron, taking her arm, ‘that two months by, when I was in the Zenari provinces, I saw the most remarkable species of schist moss with a most uncharacteristic blossom. Let me tell you …’ and he led her across the room.

  Gorgik lurched through the drear vestibule, once more unhindered by the guard; once he stopped to grasp the hangings, which released dust dragons to coil down about the decanter hooked to his thumb and his dribbling arm; he plunged into the stairwell.

  He climbed.

  Each time he came around the narrow circle, a sharp breeze caught him on the right side. Suddenly he stopped, dropped his head, and, still holding the decanter by his thumb, leaned his forearm high on the wall (the decanter clicked the stone) and vomited. And vomited again. And once again. Then, while his belly clamped once more, suddenly and surprisingly, his gut gave up its runny freight, which slid down both legs to puddle under his heels. Splattered and befouled, his inner thighs wet, his chin dripping, he began to shiver; the breeze scoured his right flank. Bread and bottle away from his sides, he climbed, pausing now and again to scrape off his sandal soles on the bowed steps’ edges, his skin crinkling with gooseflesh, teeth clattering.

  The wide brass basin clattered and clinked in its ring. He finished washing himself, let the rag drop on the basin edge (weighted on one side, it ceased its tinny rocking), turned on the wet stones, stepped to his pallet, and stretched out naked. The fur throw dampened beneath his hair, his cheek, his heavy legs, his shoulders. Each knob of bone on each other knob felt awash at his body’s joints. Belly and gut were still liquefactious. Any movement might restart the shivering and the teeth chattering for ten, twenty seconds, a minute, or more. He turned on his back.

  And shivered awhile.

  From time to time he reached from the bed to tear off a small piece from the loaf on the floor, sometimes dipping its edge in the chased silver beaker that, with every third dip, threatened to overturn on the tiles. While he lay, listening to the nighthawks cooing beyond the hangings at his narrow window, he thought: about where he’d first learned what happened to the body during days without food. After the fight that had gained him his scar, he’d been put in the solitary cell, foodless, for three days. Afterward, an old slave whose name for the life of him he could not remember had taken him back to the barracks, told him the symptoms to expect, and snored by his side for three nights. Only a rich man who’d had no experience of prison at all could have seriously considered his current situation at the palace its equal. Still, minutes at a time, Gorgik could entertain the notion that the only difference between then and now was that—now—he was a little sicker, a little lonelier, and was in a situation where he had been forced, for reasons that baffled him, to pretend to be well and happy. Also, for five years he had done ten to eighteen hours a day hard labor. For almost five months now he had done nothing. In some ways his present illness merely seemed an extension of a feeling he’d had frequently of late: that his entire body was in a singular state of confusion about how to react to anything and that this confusion had nothing to do with his mind. And yet his mind found the situation confusing enough. For a while Gorgik thought about his parents. His father was dead—he’d watched that murder happen. His mother was … dead. He had heard enough to know any other assumption was as improbable as his arrival here at the High Court. These crimes had been committed at the ascent of the Child Empress, and her entourage, including the Vizerine, Curly, the princesses Elyne and Grutn, and Jahor. That was why he, Gorgik, had been taken a slave. Perhaps, here at court, he had even met the person who had given the order that, in the carrying out, had caused Gorgik’s own life to veer as sharply from waterfront dock rat as it had recently veered away from pit slave.

  Gorgik—he had not shivered for the last few minutes now—smiled wryly in the dark. Curly? The Vizerine? Krodar? It was not a new thought. Had he been insensitive enough never to have entertained it before, it might have infused him, in his weakness, with a new sense of power or purpose. He might even have experienced in his sickness an urge to revenge. But months ago he had, for good or bad, dismissed it as a useless one. Now, when it might, in its awkward way, have been some bitter solace, he found he could not keep it in the foreground of consciousness. It simply coiled away till it fragmented, the fragments dissolving into myriad flickers. But he was, for all his unfocused thought, learning—still learning. He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away; only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. He lay on damp fur and remembered walking through such a foggy field in a line with other slaves, chains heavy from his neck before
and behind. Wet grass had whipped his legs. Twigs and pebbles had bitten through the mud caking his feet. Then the vision flickered, fragmented, drifted. Lord Aldamir …? Surfacing among all the names and titles with which his last months had been filled, this one now: was this phenomenon he had noted the reason why such men, who were truly concerned with the workings of power, chose to stay away from its center, so that they might never lose sight of power’s contours? Then that thought fragmented in a sudden bout of chills.

  Toward dawn, footsteps in the corridor outside woke him. There, people were grunting with heavy trunks. People were passing, were talking less quietly than they might. He lay, feeling much better than when he had drifted to sleep, listening to the return of the Vizerine’s suite. To date Gorgik had not violated the Vizerine’s stricture on their intercourse. But shortly he rose, dressed, and went to Jahor’s rooms to request an audience. Why? the eunuch asked, looking stern.

  Gorgik told him, and told him also his plan.

  The large-nosed eunuch nodded. Yes, that was probably very wise. But why didn’t Gorgik go first to the Vizerine’s kitchen and take a reasonable breakfast?

  Gorgik was sitting on the corner of a large wood table, eating a bowl of gruel from the fat cook, whose hairy belly pushed over the top of his stained apron (already sweatblotched at the thighs from stoking the week-cold hearth), and joking with the sleepy kitchen girl, when Jahor stepped through the door: ‘The Vizerine will see you now.’

  ‘So,’ said Myrgot, one elbow on the parchment-strewn desk, running a thumb, on which she had already replaced the heavy rings of court, over her forehead—a gesture Gorgik knew meant she was tired, ‘you had a word last night with our most grave and gracious Empress.’

  Which took Gorgik aback. He had not even mentioned that to Jahor. ‘Curly left a message that greeted me at the door,’ the Vizerine explained. ‘Tell me what she said: everything. If you can remember it word for word, so much the better.’

  ‘She said she had heard of me. And that she would not have me put out of the party because my clothes were poor—’

  Myrgot grunted. ‘Well, it’s true. I have not been as munificent with you of late as I might have been—’

  ‘My Lady, I make no accusation. I only tell you what she—’

  The Vizerine reached across the desk, took Gorgik’s great wrist. ‘I know you don’t.’ She stood, still holding his arm, and came around to the side, where, as he had done in the kitchen a little while before, she sat down on the desk’s corner. ‘Though any six of my former lovers—not to mention the present one—would have meant it as an accusation in the same situation. No, the accusation comes from our just and generous ruler herself.’ She patted his hand, then dropped it. ‘Go on.’

  ‘She nodded Curly—the Baron Inige, I mean—away. She spoke of religion. Then she said that the most beautiful and distressing section of Nevèrÿon’s empire is the province of Garth, especially the forests around some monastery—’

  ‘The Vygernangx.’

  ‘Yes. She said she was kept there as a girl before she was Empress. Curly told me later about when the two of them were in prison—’

  ‘I know all about that time. I was in a cell only two away from theirs. Go on with what she said.’

  ‘She said that the elder gods dwell there, and that they are even older than the monastery. She spoke of our nameless gods. She said that the lands were lush and lovely and that she longed to revisit them. But that even today there was more trouble from that little bit of land than from any other place in Nevèrÿon.’

  ‘And while she spoke with you thus, Krodar cast you a dark look …?’ The Vizerine dropped both hands to the desk. She sighed. ‘Do you know the Garth Peninsula?’

  Gorgik shook his head.

  ‘A brutish, uncivilized place—though the scenery is pretty enough. Every other old hovel one comes across houses a witch or a wizard; not to mention the occasional mad priest. And then, a few miles to the south, it is no longer forest but jungle; and there are nothing but barbarian tribes. And the amount of worry it causes is absolutely staggering!’ She sighed again. ‘Of course, you know, Gorgik, that the Empress associates you with me. So any word spoken to you—or even a look cast your way—may be read in some way as a message intended for Myrgot.’

  ‘Then I hope I have not brought Myrgot an unhappy one.’

  ‘It’s not a good one.’ The Vizerine sighed, leaned back a little on the desk, placing one fingertip on the shale of parchment. ‘For the Empress to declare the elder gods are older than the monastery is to concede me a theological point that I support and that, till now, she has opposed. Over this point, many people have died. For her to say she wishes to go there is tantamount to declaring war on Lord Aldamir, in whose circle you and I both move, and who keeps his center of power there. For her to choose you to deliver this message is … But I shouldn’t trouble you with the details of that meaning.’

  ‘Yes, My Lady. There is no need. My Lady—?’

  The Vizerine raised her eyebrow.

  ‘I asked to come and speak to you. Because I cannot stay here at Court any longer. What can I do to help you in the outside world? Can I be a messenger for you? Can I work some bit of your land? Within the castle here there is nothing for me.’

  The Vizerine was silent long enough for Gorgik to suspect she disapproved of his request. ‘Of course you’re right,’ she said at last, so that he was surprised and relieved. ‘No, you can’t stay on here. Especially after last night. I suppose I could always return you to the mines … no, that is a tasteless joke. Forgive me.’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive, My Lady,’ though Gorgik’s heart had suddenly started. While it slowed, he ventured: ‘Any post you can put me to, I would happily fill.’

  After another few moments, the Vizerine said: ‘Go now. I will send for you in an hour. By then we shall have decided what to do with you.’

  ‘You know, Jahor—’ The Vizerine stood by the window, looking between the bars at the rain, at further battlements beyond the veils of water, the dripping mansards and streaming crenellations—‘he really is an exceptional man. After five months, he wishes to leave the castle. Think how many of the finest sons and daughters of provincial noblemen who, once presented here, become parasites and hangers-on for five years or more—before they finally reach such a propitious decision as he has.’ Rain gathered on the bars and dripped, wetting inches of the beveled sill.

  Jahor sat in the Vizerine’s great curved-back chair, rather slump-shouldered and, for all his greater bulk, filling it noticeably less well than she. ‘He was wasted in the mines, My Lady. He is wasted at the castle. Only consider, My Lady, what is such a man fit for? First, childhood as a portside ragamuffin, then his youth as a mine slave, followed by a few months skulking in the shadows at the Court of Eagles—where, apparently, he still has not been able to keep out of sight. That is an erratic education to say the least. I can think of no place where he could put it to use. Return him to the mines now, My Lady. Not as a slave, if that troubles you. Free him and make him a guard. That’s still more than he might ever have hoped for six months back.’

  The bars dripped.

  Myrgot pondered.

  Jahor picked up a carefully crafted astrolabe from the desk, ran a long forenail over its calibrations, then rubbed his thumb across the curlicues of the rhet.

  The Vizerine said: ‘No. I do not think that I will do that, Jahor. It is too close to slavery.’ She turned from the window and thought about her cook. ‘I shall do something else with him.’

  ‘I would put him back in the mines without his freedom,’ Jahor said sullenly. ‘But then, My Lady is almost as generous as the Empress herself. And as just.’

  The Vizerine raised an eyebrow at what she considered an ill-put compliment. But then, of course, Jahor did not know the Empress’s most recent message that Gorgik had so dutifully delivered. ‘No. I have another idea for him …’

  ‘To the mines with him, My Lady, and y
ou will save yourself much trouble, if not grief.’

  Had Gorgik known of the argument that was progressing in the Vizerine’s chamber, he would most probably have misassigned the positions of the respective advocates—perhaps the strongest sign of his unfitness for court life.

  Though it does not explain the actual assignment of the positions themselves, there was a simple reason for the tones of voice in which the respective positions were argued: for the last three weeks the Vizerine’s lover had been a lithe seventeen-year-old barbarian with bitten nails and mad blue eyes, who would, someday, inherit the title of Suzeraine of Strethi—though the land his parents owned, near the marshy Avila, was little more than a sizable farm. And the youth, for all his coming title, was—in his manners and bearing—little more than a barbarian farmer’s son. His passion was for horses, which he rode superbly. Indeed, he had careered, naked, on a black mount, about the Vizerine’s caravan for an hour one moonlit night when, two months before, she had been to visit the Avila province to meet with its reigning families anent taxes. She had sent Jahor to ascertain how she might meet this yellow-haired youth. A guest of his parents one evening, she discovered that they were quite anxious for him to go to court and that for one so young he had an impressive list of illegitimate children throughout the surrounding neighborhoods and was something of a bane to his kin. She had agreed to take him with her; and had kept her agreement. But the relationship was of a volatile and explosive sort that made her, from time to time, look back with fondness on the weeks with Gorgik. Four times now the suzeraine-apparent had run up atrocious debts gambling with the servants; twice he had tried to blackmail her; and he had been unfaithful to her with at least three palace serving women, and what’s more they were not of Lord Aldamir’s circle. The night before the Vizerine had departed on this her most recent mission—to get away from the child? but no—they had gotten into an incredible argument over a white gold chain which had ended with his declaring he would never let her withered lips and wrinkled paws defile his strong, bronzed body again. But just last night, however, hours before her return, he had ridden out to meet her caravan, charged into her tent, and declared he could not live without her caress another moment. In short, that small sector of Myrgot’s life she set aside for personal involvement was currently full to overflowing. (Jahor, currently, had no lover at all, nor was he overfond of the Vizerine’s.)